AH - "The League of Nations Triumphant" (2001, 2012) by Jordan S. Bassior

"The League of Nations Triumphant!"

An Alternate History

(c) 2001, 2012

by

Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction:

This timeline is taken to 1964, and it details a world in which the League of Nations was an effective organization and, as a result, there was no global Second World War. The League of Nations dominates the world of 1964, though it is challenged by the Japanese and by colonized nations yearning for independence.  This version of the history incorporates valuable comments by Joseph Major, Logan Ferree and Johnny 1A.

I. The 1920's -- Global Recovery

In this timeline, Woodrow Wilson accepted better political advice than in OTL in handling both other nations and the US Congress. As a result, both the Versailles Treaty and the Charter of the League of Nations were better composed; Wilson paid greater attention to securing Congressional support for his policy, and in 1920 he succeeded in getting the US Senate to ratify American membership in the League of Nations.  Among his efforts included the formation of a League Council able to authorize actions on a two-thirds supermajority rather than requiring unanimous consent as in OTL.

Wilson died in 1921, worn out by the efforts of the hard shuttle diplomacy and politicking needed to secure passage of the treaty. He was mourned by a grateful nation as the man who had given his life in the service of victory and peace. His vice-president, Thomas Marshall, served out the remainder of Wilson's term, but was unable to win the 1924 Presidential election.

Under first the corrupt Harding and the competent but laissez-faire Coolidge Administrations, American financial interests saw the opportunities for investment in Germany, and lobbied to further reduce the harsher strictures of the Versailles Treaty. This accorded well with Britsh interests, and the British supported the amendment of the treaty terms. The French did not like this, but went along with it, since their security depended in part on Anglo-American support.

Treated well by the West, the Weimar Republic gained the respect of all but the most extreme German factions. Germany, like the rest of the West, enjoyed an economic boom during the decade, and both the extreme right and left were politically marginalized. Even the French fears began to fade as it became obvious that this happy and prosperous Germany was not about to attempt another invasion. The lights, all over Europe, were plainly coming back on.

By the mid-1920's, however, it could be plainly seen  that the Communists were going to be able to hold onto power in Russia. With Germany growing more cooperative, the fears of the free world became fixed upon the Communist menace. American and British diplomats saw Germany as the obvious Eastern bulwark of the League's world order.

During the late 1920's, a series of treaties were signed committing the Western Great Powers (America, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy) to guarantee the collective security of all Europe against a possible Russian attack. Restrictions on the German military were relaxed, and ultimately lifted. Mutual extradition treaties eased multi-national cooperation against agents of the Comintern. Finally, in 1928, the Alliance of Democratic States was formally created, its headquarters in the Hague, to cement the containment of Communism in Europe.

The Panic of 1928, which began in the New York Stock Market, momentarily raised fears that the good times were over. But J. P. Morgan, Jr. successfully engineered large international loans, especially from the Bank of London and the Deutschebank, to prevent any serious financial collapse. The crisis never got beyond a short American recession. By 1930, American economic growth had resumed, fuelled by the free trade common throughout the world.

II. The Early 1930's -- Fall of Communism

During the early 1930's, reports filtering out from the Soviet Union made it apparent that the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, was a psychopathic mass murderer on a scale dwarfing Genghis Khan. World opinion was outraged by the revelation of engineered mass famines and deportations which had resulted in the deaths of millions of people in the Ukraine alone.

These revelations, coupled with the growth of an increasingly prosperous middle class in virtually all the democracies, destroyed what remained of the reputation of Soviet Communism, even among democratic socialists. Intellectuals repudiated Communism en masse, and those who did not were marginalized. George Bernard Shaw spoke for a whole disillusioned class when he said: "I have been to the Soviet Union, and I have seen a nightmarish past reborn."

The crucial conceptual step was a speech by Winston Churchill in 1935. "An Iron Curtain must descend across the eastern boundary of Europe," he said, "to starve out Stalin and his foul Bolshevik order. The free world must shun the monster, and cast him out into the darkness." The League, answering his call, imposed a total embargo upon Russia, already suffering grievously from the engineered famine. And, covertly, the Alliance began contacting key elements among both the Red Army leadership, and among the ethnic minorites.

In the winter of 1934-35, with the Russian economy collapsing and famine threatening Moscow itself, Stalin ordered the Red Army to strip all the outer provinces of food and fuel, to sustain the center. Furthermore, he began preparations to purge the Army leadership itself, intending to use this command as a test to determine who was truly loyal.

Pressed by the embargo, Stalin had moved too fast. With the officers in fear for their lives, and the ethnic minorites among the enlisted men aware that Stalin's orders would mean the deaths of many of their relatives, the Red Army mutinied.

It began on a small scale, as enlisted men rose in protest, and officers joining them partially because if they didn't they would be shot on the spot by their own men. Commissars who tried to quell the mutiny were shot; sometimes hung; occasionally torn to bits.

Since any disloyalty meant death, units which even expressed dissent quickly moved to open rebellion. The mutiny began in Leningrad, and spread like wildfire. NKVD attempts to suppress knowledge of the revolt failed miserably, as individual agitators carried the word by train, motorcar, and aeroplane. The Alliance-financed "Voice of Democracy," broadcasting from Poland, made it impossible to keep the secret in Byelorussia or the Ukraine. As border units
joined the revolt, the "Iron Curtain" was lifted to allow copious quantities of Alliance-supplied munitions, food, fuel, and other supplies to flow to the rebel forces.

Russians, though crushed by over a decade of Communism, everywhere rediscovered their courage and turned on the tyrant (In Kiev, a local Party official named Nikita Krushchev attracted wide admiration, and assumed a leading role in the revolt, when he subverted a loyalist column by climbing on the leading armored car, banging on its hatch with his boot until the confused commander opened it to hear what was going on, and then haranguing the troops until they cheered him, joining the rebels whom they had previously been prepared to gun down!)
The "Russian Federation" was declared, and the Federal forces marched on Moscow from all sides.

By the spring of 1935, the forces loyal to Stalin (mostly secret police) were being mopped up, and Stalin cowered in a bunker beneath the Kremlin as the Federal armies battled his last forces in the streets of Moscow. Stalin's fate is uncertain; the legend is that Molotov shot him with his sidearm and then burned the corpse with a petrol bomb improvised from a vodka bottle and a scarf (1). A badly charred corpse was later discovered, but it was so damaged that it was difficult to discern its identity. Fanciful rumors persist that his head is being kept alive in a jar somewhere -- perhaps in Japan.

The disastrous 16 1/2 year episode of Communism was over, and Russia breathed a sigh of relief. A surviving Romanov was found to serve as a figurehead for the Russian Federation. At last, Russia could begin to recover from the disaster that had befallen her over 20 years ago when she first marched off to war.

Fortunately, Communism had not lasted long enough to completely demoralize the society, and by 1940, Russia was definitely on the path to the same prosperity enjoyed by the rest of the democratic world.

The one good thing that came out of the Russian ordeal was the concept of "crimes against humanity." When the archives of the NKVD and the gates of the gulags were opened, the world was horrified to realize the magnitude of the Communist atrocities. The peoples of the League, including many in the new Russian Federation, demanded that the Bolshevik leaders be punished for their actions.

The St. Petersberg Trials, held from 1936 to 1937, saw many of the top Communists called before a special tribunal sanctioned by the World Court. Some were sentenced to long prison terms; others (such as the loathsome Yekov and sadistic Beria) were hung. Many have since complained that others (including some not in Russia at the time, such as Trotsky) also deserved punishment, and that the sentences of many were later commuted to help build support in the
subsequent crisis, but it was a start towards a recognition of the principle that justice is superior to sovereignty.

This, of course, completed the ruin of the reputation of Communism. On the college campuses, this was the "White Decade," in which even legitimate criticism of the Romanovs tended to be ignored amidst the hagiography, and capitalism enjoyed the highest reputation ever (2). "Commie" became a standard imprecation, sometimes used against even non-Communists with whom a speaker disagreed.

With Russia now a member both of the League and the Alliance, the balance had tipped decisively in favor of League global dominion. The Italian conquest of Ethiopia, which had occurred while the League was preoccupied with the liberation and reconstruction of Russia, did not seriously disturb this dominion, especially as the League customarily sided with the colonial powers -- unpopular in America, but a necessary compromise to secure Anglo-Franco-Italian support on more important issues.

III. Late 1930's -- The Gathering Storm

The great fly in the ointment was Japan, which had used the same period of distraction to invade Eastern Siberia, seizing Vladivostok; then marched from Korea to secure Manchuria, under the pretexed of putting down warlord attacks on Japanese and their properties. The League protested these aggressions, but the Japanese insisted that control of these areas was vital to their national security.

In 1937, the League compromised: Japanese "protectorship" of "Manchuko" and Korea would be acknowledged as a League Mandate, if the Japanese withdrew their "Army of Assistance" from Russian territory. Eastern Siberia was returned to the Russian Federation, and only China (and to some extent America) was concerned by the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. The Japanese might have continued to enjoy their territorial gains, if their easy success hadn't rendered them overconfident.

Basically, the Japanese didn't believe that the League could -- or even would -- fight.

They had observed the Russian Crisis with interest, and had noticed that League interference had been limited to the embargo, propaganda, and arms shipments. They were certain that an embargo could not prevent a Japanese conquest of China, because they had adequate coal to move their troop trains, plenty of metals and timber in Manchuria, and could get food by stripping China bare to feed their own population. They knew that Japan did not pose the sort of ideological threat to the democracies that the Soviet Union had, and were skeptical of the ability of any embargo to last very long. America and Russia were hostile to Japan, but American leadership was resented by the French and Italians, and Russia was still weak from her sufferings under Stalin.

The Japanese began pushing China further and further. In 1939, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, provoked by the Japanese, was used as the excuse to launch a massive invasion of China proper. When League mediation was spurned by Japan, the League imposed a global embargo on the Japanese Empire. The stage was now set for a wider war.

IV. Early 1940's -- The Chinese War

Everything, for Japan, depended upon a rapid victory. American and other Western business interests were deeply opposed to the loss of trade which the embargo entailed; if China's ports could be secured, Japan would effectively control the China trade as well, adding to the financial pressures on the Alliance governments. The key would be a Chinese surrender on terms: as long as the war continued, a lifting of the embargo would be perceived as "defeat" in the eyes of the populations, and hence be too politically unpopular to contemplate, no matter how much corporate money poured into dovish coffers.

Unfortunately for the Japanese, the Chinese did not submit so easily. The Nationalist regime had been receiving considerable aid from the League even before the Japanese attack, owing to the persistence of unregenerate Communist rebels, led by the murderous Mao Tse-Tung. With outright Japanese defiance of the League, this assistance was increased.  Encouraged by League support, the Chinese refused to surrender. Though forced to retreat from the coastal provinces time and time again by better-organized and better-led Japanese forces, they continued the fight from the interior. It became a war of attrition -- and while the Japanese were killing many Chinese for every Japanese soldier who fell, the Chinese could afford the casualties, while the Japanese could not.

Clearly, decisive victory would require the ability to achieve rapid and sudden penetrations, to shatter the Chinese headquarters, and disrupt the supply lines from the rest of the League. It had been demonstrated by the Russian Crisis and was being demonstrated again on the battlefields of China that the only way to do this was with massed air and motorized forces. The Japanese began building more trucks, tanks, and aircraft.

But these vehicles needed oil, not coal, to operate. Now, the limitations of Japanese pretension to autarky were laid bare: their Empire did not contain any oil wells, and the many Western corporate-backed tankers which secretly supplied them -- in defiance of the League embargo -- were inadequate to support the thirsty Japanese spearhead forces.

In 1941, the use of new raiden-go  ("lightning-victory") tactics enabled the Japanese to knock the Chinese back onto the ropes, but most of the new-style forces were now obliged to go over to the defensive, as army oil stockpiles dipped dangerously low. It became mathematically certain that, if the Empire could not find any new oil supplies within a year, the Japanese would have no
choice but to withdraw from China by 1943 at the latest.

This realization led the Japanese to a desperate act. The oil they needed was available in Dutch Indonesia, but (as the embargo tightened) the Dutch were now effectively closing the tap on those reserves.

The Japanese decided that a swift, decisive naval strike on Indonesia could seize the oil wells, and secure the supplies they needed to win the war with China.

The Netherlands were weak: their navy had no chance against the Japanese (even given the oil shortage). But Holland was not only a League member, but the seat of the Alliance. And America, the most powerful member of the League, had bases in the Philippines, directly athwart the Japanese supply lines.

Would the League intervene? Would America?

The Japanese thought not. The "Alliance of Democratic Nations" had never actually fought a war. America, in particular, was known for her pacifism. The decision was made to attack Indonesia without first knocking out the powerful American Pacific Fleet.

It was a decision the Japanese would regret.

V. Early to Mid 1940's -- The Pacific War

The Japanese invasion of Indonesia commenced on June 6th, 1942. Consternation reigned in the League Council chamber. The League had already embargoed Japan, and supported China. What else was there to do? But, no matter how many weapons they gave the Dutch, there was no way that the tiny Netherlands could hope to defeat Japan, given their small population and distance from the theater of conflict.

It was then that the Russian Ambassador -- that same Nikita Krushchev who had performed so bravely in the streets of Kiev, changed history. Removing his shoe, he pounded it on the table, rivetting the attention of all the representatives.

"What are we afraid of?" he snorted contemptuously. "We are the whole world: Japan is but a few islands. Japan, we will bury you!!!"

The cheers resounded deafeningly.

On July 18th, the League declared its sanction for "a war to preserve the peace in the Pacific." American, British, Dutch, French, and Russian fleets launched a coordinated series of attacks against the Japanese naval and transport forces. In a daring raid, American carrier-based aircraft caught the main fleet of Admiral Nagumo in port at Okinawa, sinking many battleships before they could fire a shot.

Japanese Admiral Isoruko Yamamoto called this a "day of infamy," but it was clear that the Japanese war plan had gone very wrong. Though the IJN fought well in some night actions, the Alliance forces defeated them in battle after battle, gaining mastery in, above, and under the Western Pacific waters. The IJN was hamstrung at every point by its lack of oil reserves.

In December 1942, Operation Torch -- the Allied amphibious landings in Southern China -- began. Though defects in doctrine were revealed, the Allies were everywhere able to secure their beachheads and march inland, linking-up with Chinese forces. The Japanese motorized forces, thirsty for oil, could only sluggishly react to these moves, and in most cases the Japanese forces were fixed and defeated in detail.

In the spring of 1943, Russian forces drove down into Manchuria, severing the land supply routes from Korea to China. Meanwhile, the Allies advanced up the Chinese coasts, using submarines and light craft to raid as far as Japanese itself. Heavy bombers, operating from Chinese and Manchurian bases, attacked targets in Korea and Kyushu. By August 1943, China and Korea were both liberated, and the way was now clear for the final Japan against Japan herself.

Amazingly, Japan did not sue for peace. Faced with the hostility of the whole world, any other nation would have done so, but the Japanese were lost in a dream-world of propaganda and Shinto-inspired fanaticism. Japanese forces, even when surrounded, fought to the last man. And the Japanese people placed their faith that bushido spirit and the ancient gods of their homeland would somehow save them from an enemy whom they believed utterly merciless.

In the spring of 1944, the final campaigns of the war began. A pan-Allied force comprising largely of American, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, and French elements invaded Kyushu, while a Russian force staged a diversionary invasion of Hokkaido. The fighting was extremely fierce; suicide planes and boats attacked the Allied fleets, while civilian militia and guerilla forces
launched desperate attacks on the well-armed Allied troops and tanks.

But the Japanese resistance was hopeless -- all it did was to further anger the Allies, leading to a relaxation of all the rules of war. The new giant Boeing and Tupolev strategic bombers launched mass incendiary bombardments of Japanese cities, triggering terrible firestorms, killing tens of thousands of civilians. More Allied forces mobilized, and by the summer of 1944 Kyushu was firmly in Allied hands, as was most of Hokkaido.

Honshu, the main Japanese homeland, was now endangered from two directions. If the Japanese resisted on Honshu as they had on the lesser islands, the carnage among Japanese civilians would truly be terrible.

At this point, a coup toppled the Japanese junta. The Emperor himself took the unprecedented stop of appealing personally to his people on the radio, declaring that he desired that his Ministers sue for peace. They did so.

The League gladly consented. The civilian death toll on Kyushu had horrified public opinion; it was already being whispered that to do what would be needed to take Honshu would "make us as bad as the Commies." An Armistice was declared on August 14th, 1944.

The Pacific War was over, though the treaty negotiations would stretch into 1945, and some of the subordinate clauses would take a decade to hammer out. The Japanese turned certain of the generals most obviously responsible for war crimes over to the League Tribunal, though many simply committed suicide. And the world returned to peace.

The war had proven beyond any doubt that the League was willing to fight, if need be, to keep the peace. The power of the democracies had been demonstrated, and without wrecking the world on the scale of the Great War. The peoples of the Earth could now proceed, as Winston Churchill exultantly declared, "into the bright sunny uplands of a new dawning."

VI. Late 1940's to the Present - The League Mandate

These new "uplands," however, were tainted by colonialism.

The Great War, the Russian Crisis, and the Pacific War had all bred a distaste for ruthless measures on the part of the democracies. It had not escaped the attention of the more progressive Western thinkers that what the Europeans had done to each other on the Western Front; what the Communists had done to the Russians; and what the Japanese had done to the East Asians; were simply special cases of a more general evil which the democracies of the League, even now, were not entirely innocent.

The Britrish ruled India and much of Africa essentially through the threat of force. The French rule over Indochina and North Africa was nakedly brutal. Even America, anti-colonialist and proudly pointing to her recent grant of independence to the Philippines, oppressed her own Negro population.

Agitation was growing for reform. India asked for independence, pointing to Britain's own democratic traditions and the loyal service of Indians in the Pacific War. Rebel movements grew against the French in Indochina and Algeria. In America, liberal lawyers pointed to elements in both the League's resolutions and the American Constitution to support their demands for Negro
civil rights.

Right after the Great War, the League had dealt with the question of captured Turkish territories by issuing "mandates" to govern their disposal. Now, a movement grew to govern the colonial issue in much the same fashion.

America, which possessed no colonies, was of course in the forefront of this movement, both out of idealism and in order to take the moral high ground from her diplomatic competitors. Of the colonial powers, Britain was divided: the Tories (led by Churchill and Halifax) vehemently opposing such mandates, and the Liberals (and tiny Labour Party) (3) strongly supporting them. The French didn't want to disgorge their colonies: they had a powerful nationalist wing
which outright insisted on maintaining the French mission civilatrice. Russia insisted that with the coming of the Federation, the "nationalities" were no longer "colonies," but rather, inherent parts of "Greater Russia."

The debate over this issue continues to this very day (1964), though the liberals seem to be slowly but surely winning. Britain led the way, by embarking upon a phased program of decolonialization, starting with the granting of Dominion status to India in 1948, and full independence in 1956 (4). The former colonies, such as India, Egypt, and Korea, as they attained
League Membership status, have gradually shifted the weight of the Council to support the Decolonization Mandates.

VII. Early 1950's -- A New Peril Emerges

In 1936, German scientists had split the uranium atom (5). In 1942, the first experimental uranium fission reactor was turned on in an East Prussian research facility; the resultant meltdown killed half the research team, and rendered the facility unusable. Undaunted, the Germans persevered, and in 1944 – too late to affect the Pacific War -- they succeeded in creating a stable, self-sustatining uranium fission reaction.

Atomic power offers great prospects for Mankind: a new source of energy, requiring very little fuel and producing very little pollution. The most daring thinkers even hope that it can be harnessed to rocketry, someday enabling us to fly into orbit!

However, from the start, it was realized that the Einsteinian equation also implies the possibility of tremendously destructive weapons. An atomic explosion could concentrate the force of a whole air force's high-explosive payload into a single package, producing a bomb theoretically capable of destroying a whole city in a single detonation.

The League had no interest in developing such weapons. Their members already dominated the world, and a war between the democracies was deemed unthinkable. Nobody wanted to see a replay of the Great War, let alone one employing such frightful engines of destruction.

Thus, it was an unpleasant surprise to the world when, on May 15th, 1953, the Japanese announced to the world that they had succeeded in detonating a 20-kiloton atomic explosive device, in northern Hokkaido. Stunned populations watched the films. Several League scientists were taken on a (carefully supervised) tour of the test site, and verified that the detonation had indeed taken place.

What was worse, the Japanese admitted that this had been but one of three identical weapons they had constructed. Japanese science had stolen a march upon the world, they stated with smiles, and henceforth Japan would expect greater respect from the League Council, or there would be "fearful consequences."

On May 29th, however, the Japanese ambassador to Germany found himself invited, along with some other prominent Japanese nationals, to a bunker in the wilds east of Koningsberg. There, they donned tinted glasses, and were given the privilege of witnessing the detonation of the first German atomic bomb, a 40-kiloton device, and a more portable one at that. They were then informed that the plans to build such weapons were, even now, being revealed to the other Great Powers of the League, and that Germany, in cooperation with the Alliance, could easily outproduce the Japanese in both such devices and the aircraft needed to deliver them.  There were some suicides in Tokyo, a wholly unjustified persecution of the Ainu, and the brief Japanese atomic monopoly was over.

Notes

(1) - Which is why this weapon became known as a "Molotov Cocktail."

(2) - This was true even in popular culture, where the first full-length animated movie, Disney's Anastasia (1939) represented Lenin as a Satanist vampire.

(3) - Labour had once looked as if it would replace the Liberals as the major British party of the Left, but a quarter-century of prosperity coupled with the disgrace of Communism sapped its support.

(4) - The independence of India is widely considered proof of the superiority of the British decolonialization program, as it was accomplished virtually without loss of life despite intense religious hostilities, thanks to the British retaining operational control over Indian army and police forces well into the 1950's.

(5) - German scientific dominance has been profound through the century, and Germany has also led in many other cultural areas. One undoubted reason for this is her large and highly talented Jewish minority, which amounted by 1964 to some one and a half millions. They included some of the world's greatest physicists, chemists, psychologists, writers, and artists.

Retro Review - Novel - Advise and Consent (1959) by Allen Drury

"Retro Review - Novel -

Advise and Consent (1959)

by Alan Drury"

(c) 2012

by

Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction

Many will no doubt protest that Advise and Consent, begun sometime in 1951, finished in 1958 and published in 1959, does not really qualify as "science fiction."  Yet it takes place in the future from the point of writing, examines and makes predictions regarding the development of both society and technology, and a major element of its plot hinges upon these developments.  What makes it unusual is that its author was a Congressional journalist, and hence the aspect of the future he examined was the future of politics.

Synopsis

Around 1967, a Democratic (1) President nominates Robert Leffingwell, a prominent liberal, to be his new Secretary of State.  Leffingwell favors a soft approach to the Soviets, and many conservatives fear that he will attempt a disastrous policy of appeasement.  This is especially worrisome as America has been falling behind in the Cold War:  in particular the Soviets may be about to make the first manned Lunar landing, demonstrating their technological superiority to the United States of America.

A popular movement begins to coalesce around Leffingwell, assisted by a press corps all too willing to think the best of him.  Leffingwell is not yet Secretary of State, however, because in the American Constitutional system, the US Senate must first "advise and consent" to the nomination.

The main Senatorial support for Leffingwell comes from Robert Munson, the Senate Majority Leader from Michigan, a decent man who has his doubts about Leffingwell but is willing to stick by the President.  The main opposition comes from Seabright Cooley, the septugenarian senior Senator from South Carolina; and Brigham Anderson of Utah, a rising star in the Senate.  Both sides manever to bring about or block the nomination.

A minor bureaucrat, Gelman, comes before the committee and claims that Leffingwell was a Communist (2):  Gelman belonged to his cell decades ago, along with two other people, one of whom is now dead.  Leffingwell and his supporters -- particularly the unscrupulous Senator Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, a leftist demagogue -- attack the credibility of Gelman, who is in fact mentally-unstable and has spent time in a psychiatric institution.  The counterattack proves successful and it looks as if Leffingwell will indeed be nominated.

Then, Senator Cooley discovers Morton, the third survivor of the cell, and pressures him into contacting Brigham Anderson, the Senator who is openly leading the movement to block Leffingwell.  Senator Anderson meets with the President and warns him that he now has proof positive of Leffingwell's Communist past.  Anderson urges the President to withdraw the nomination.  The President promises to do so and asks for time to consider alternative candidates.

But Brigham Anderson also has a secret in his past.  While serving in the Pacific during World War II, Anderson had a homosexual affair (3).  And proof of this affair has fallen into the hands of Senator Van Ackerman, who is quite willing to use it to bring Anderson down -- unless Anderson allows the nomination of Leffingwell.

However, Senator Anderson has now become completely convinced that Leffingwell's policies would bring ruin to America.  He refuses to back down.  Van Ackerman prepares to release the information to the public -- and Anderson commits suicide.

Senator Anderson's death -- and the general knowledge among the Senators of Van Ackerman's responsibility for it -- turn the Senate against Van Ackerman and Leffingwell.  Senator Munson leads a unanimous vote of censure against Van Ackerman, and Leffingwell's nomination is defeated.  The President nominates the popular Senator Orrin Knox of Illinois for Secretary of State, and Knox is confirmed.

The Soviets land on Luna and claim the whole Moon for themselves.  America calls their bluff and launches her own Moon mission.  The President dies of a heart attack, and his Vice-President, Harley Hudson, succeeds to the office.  President Hudson leaves for Switzerland for an international conference to determine, among other things, the status of the Moon.

Analysis

The main plot is purely political and the main speculations purely political.  Drury argues here that the old American political system, intended to allow a free people to rule itself freely in relative isolation, has been put under serious stress by the demands of defending a global confederation against global threats to freedom, and that much depends on whether or not we can endure the strain. 

What would normally have been a mere political squabble is elevated to tragic proportions by the threat of international Communism both within (Leffingwell's seduction by Marxism) and without (the reason why it's so important that Leffingwell not be Secretary of State is the Soviet menace).  Leffingwell's nomination would not have meant merely a defeat for the conservative Democrats, but also a risk of war brought about by appeasement -- and remember that Drury's audience, in 1959, was mostly made of people who all too well remembered what had happened in Europe a mere two decades previously.

We also see that under this strain the former civility of our legislative institutions is breaking down.  Senator Fred Van Ackerman, a demagogue leading mass rallies against American interests (because doing the right thing is harder and more frightening than simply engaging in wishful thinking) uses not only irrational group-think in public but also outright blackmail in private to attain his ends.  He is depicted as an obvious sociopath, but his followers fail to notice this because they are willing to forgive him the most dastardly conduct in the pursuit of what they imagine to be the right ends.  (Indeed, they believe that only a Leffingwell nomination can avert the very same war which Anderson and Cooley believe it is likely to cause).

There is a theme in the novel of the young, rising, cocksure and dangerously wrong Young Turks against the wiser but weakening Old Guard here.  Seabright Cooley is a veteran of the whole prior 20th century, and it is actually his maneuvering that saves America, but he's also 75 years old -- he obviously won't be able to serve in the Senate very much longer.  Fred Van Ackerman has been defeated -- for now (4) -- but both the man and the movement he represents is rising.

This indeed is one of the most strongly-predictive elements of Advise and Consent.  In the appearance of members of America's own poltiical elite willing to subvert and destroy the American Constitutional system in their own pursuit of personal power, justifying their actions as "progressive," Drury basically predicted what would happen to the Democratic Party in the 1960's.  Leffingwell was of course modeled on real traitors such as Alger Hiss (5); Van Ackerman seems to have been conceived as a left-wing Joseph McCarthy turned (later) Vidkun Quisling, but all too many real ones emerged in the mid-1960's to mid-1970's, the most obvious being Ted Kennedy.

By contrast with this "if this goes on" speculation about the growth of disloyalty among a significant element of our own leadership, and its appeal to wishful thinking amongst the larger loyal populace, the overtly science-fictional element of Advise and Consent -- the Lunar Crisis -- is a peripheral plot element, and in many respects appears tacked on as an afterthought.  In particular, there are no characters who are directly involved with either the American or Soviet space programs (though Drury would later write a whole novel, The Throne of Saturn, about the political aspects of a manned Mars landing project).

This puzzled me -- even for a mostly-political novelist this lack of focus on the very event which sharpens the conflict between America and the Soviets which is why the Leffingwell nomination is so important is odd.  Then I read that Drury had been creating this novel since 1951 and that it was finished in 1958, and the reason became obvious.

Drury had conceived of the novel as almost purely internal to the US Senate, with the cause of the specific crisis with the Soviets purely a MacGuffin into which any conflict might be plugged.  In the early 1950's, this might have been a widening of the Korean War; in the mid-1950's, perhaps a shooting war threatening to break out over revolts in the Warsaw Pact.  But by the late 1950's, the issue on the minds of any Americans who took the Soviet threat seriously was the Soviet lead in the space program (6), and so Drury simply postulated that the Soviets maintained this lead and achieved the first manned lunar landing.  However, because the space race element came into the story so late, there was no way to integrate it into the main plot of this book -- Drury's thoughts on the matter probably became elements of The Throne of Saturn.

But Is This Really "Science Fiction?"

I would say "yes," though it is a very unusual sort of science fiction, and specifically along the line of "political thrillers" (which I would argue are often also science fiction).

My reason for classifying the main Druryverse (Advise and Consent, A Shade of Difference, Capable of Honor, Preserve and Protect, Come Nineveh Come Tyre, and The Promise of Joy being the five books unarguably in the series) as "science fiction" is that it is very much an alternate history -- not merely from the perspective of 2012 but even from the perspective of the times in which it was written.  Not only that, it incorporates an alternate history into its own plot structure -- Come Nineveh Come Tyre shows what happens if Ted Jason succeeds Harley Hudson, and The Promise of Joy if Orrin Knox does instead.

All fiction is to some extent speculative and "alternate history," because it contains elements which are untrue in reality.  For instance, if I claim that a character named Jeff Marlstein lived in Apartment 1H at 3726 Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx in the year 1985, I am postulating a divergence from reality:  did such an apartment actually exist in 1985?  If so, did not some other person live there?  This is a minor divergence because we cannot readily perceive how such a difference might affect the larger world.

Political fiction, however, is about the lives and fortunes of prominent people, and as such the more prominent the person the greater the divergence from reality.  If I postulate that in the year 1988 my fictitious Jeff Marlstein won the Presidency of the United States of America, serving the term which in Our Time Line was served by George H. W. Bush, then this is obviously going to have effects on history.

Did President Marlstein cut or raise taxes?  Did he end the Cold War and if so on what terms?  How did he deal with Saddam Hussein?  All these questions are ones strongly dependent upon Marlstein's personality, political beliefs, and personal and political allegiences, and we cannot simply assume that he would have done everything exactly the same way as did George H. W. Bush. 

If he made different decisions, then our alternate history science fiction explores the effects of these diffefrent decisions.  Maybe in this timeline by 1992 America has gone to war with the Soviet Union, or perhaps we let the Russians join NATO.  Maybe Saddam Hussein was overthrown, maybe he now dominates the whole Gulf region.  The world President Marlstein sees in 1992 will probably not be identical to that which President Bush saw that same year in OTL.

This is even more the case when one is writing in what was originally the "future," which is the case in MANY political novels.  The implicit backstory of Advise and Consent is that the unnamed President ran for and won the White House in 1960:  in other words, Drury predicted a Democratic Presidential victory in 1960 (which is exactly what happened).  But the President of Advise and Consent is not John F. Kennedy, he was not assassinated in 1963 but instead won a second term in 1964, and he dies of a heart attack in 1967 to be succeeded not by Lyndon Baines Johnson but by Harley Hudson.  There also does not seem to have been a large-scale Vietnam War.

This actually goes a long way to explain why the society depicted in Advise and Consent's 1967 seems not to have experienced the birth of a Counterculture.  Historically, the murder of JFK shocked the teenagers who would become the Counterculture, and the fear of being drafted to fight in Vietnam gave them a strong impetus to rebel against The Establishment (because they felt psychologically better seeing themselves as Noble Rebels rather than Trembling Cowards).  With greater political and cultural continuity, the birth of the Counterculture would have been a slower and gentler thing.

One should also be aware that almost every character depicted in the novel comes from the American political elite.  This is also true of the few young people.  This means that their view on the world and on society is that of a privileged mniorty, not that of the people as a whole.  (Though note that most of the Senators probably didn't come from great wealth at birth:  Seabright Cooley, for instance, was born into a fairly normal middle-class rural South Carolina family).

One should further be aware that the Counterculture even in Our Time Line did not sweep across the country and instantly transform everyone's perceptions.  In the real world of 1967 there were plenty of well-brought-up young women who, like Crystal Danta Knox, would have been proud of the fact that they had waited to have sex until their wedding nights, for instance.  Heck, there are still many who feel that way today, just not as many as in 1957 or even 1967.

Regarding the social point I'm sure everyone would be most focused upon today, there was very little social tolerance for homosexuals in Our Time Line's 1967; there might be less in the more sedate 1967 of Advise and Consent.  The Stonewall Riots didn't take place until 1969, and even then the general reaction was disgust at the misbehaving homosexuals.  It was not until well into the 1980's and 1990's that the popular mood shifted toward acceptance of homosexuality. 

Brigham Anderson really would have felt alone and damned, and been consumed with self-loathing in addition to the practical-political aspects of the situation.  And, ironically, Anderson wasn't even all that much of a homosexual.

Happily (?) (7), Drury's major technological speculation did not come to pass.  American aerospace technology pulled ahead of that of the Soviets, and the Soviets never even got close to launching manned Lunar missions.  America carried out the first manned Lunar landing in 1969.

Conclusion

Advise and Consent is a rare and well-executed form of science fiction:  the predictive political science fiction novel.  It is unusually successful at prediction for this genre, and -- unlike most of its kind -- it is not a military technothiller.

It is also notable as the last book to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction (awarded 1960) and also be the top bestseller of the same year.  After this, "literary" fiction would wander off into its own strange little world, too pure and rarefied to concern itself with trivialities such as "audience."

It is both great mainstream and great science fiction, and deserves attention as both.

Notes
=====

(1) - Drury refuses to directly identify the party affiliations of his characters:  he gets away with this by calling the parties "Majority" and "Minority" (which of course refers simply to their strength in the Senate).  However, Seabright Cooley, the senior Senator from South Carolina, is "majority" and would have to be a Democrat to have spent so long in the Senate from a Southern state; Munson is of the same party as Cooley, and of the same party as the President.  Therefore, the Democrats hold the White House.

(2) - Though he doesn't seem to have been a very serious one:  he belonged to some sort of tiny splinter cell  decades ago (the Soviets don't have him in their files of Communist Party membership) and it is far from obvious that he has any loyalty to the Soviet Union).  On the other hand, he does lie about his previous affiliation, and from the little he says specifically about his proposed foreign policy, it would indeed have constituted disastrous appeasement, probably leading to future wars.

(3) - It is perhaps difficult to explain to a modern audience just how much this would ruin Anderson's career, even though it was only a brief affair and Anderson is rather obviously at most weakly bisexual:  he is strongly attracted to women and has a wife and daughter.  It says something for Drury's own tolerance (by 1950's standards) that the sympathetic characters in the novel do not condemn Anderson for this, at most being a bit squicked.  (Senator Cooley doesn't want to hear the details, but then again he has his own secret Great Regret, discussed in his backstory).

(4) - In Come Nineveh, Come Tyre (1973)-- the darker of the two Alternate Histories springing from the cliffhanger-ending of Preserve and Protect, Fred Van Ackerman is one of the main architects of the Soviet-backed coup-from-above that leads to the effective covert conquest of the United States by the Soviet Union.  One of the glories of a free society is that the losers live to fight another day:  the same fact is also one of the weaknesses.

(5) - Hiss, of course, was an active and knowing agent of the Soviet Union, and hence much more of a traitor than the fictitious Leffingwell, who honestly believed that he was trying to bring about world peace and thus protect his country.  But Drury made an important point here, which bears repetition:  the active traitor may actually be less of a threat than the smug appeaser, because the traitor once revealed is de-fanged, while the appeaser is more likely to arouse sympathy.

(6) - Not just a matter of short-term prestige gains either:  there was also the military applications of superior rocket technology in the design of nuclear missiles, and the long-term implications of dominating the future colonization of the Solar System.

(7) - One could make a major case that the scope of the American victory in the Lunar race was bad for humanity as a whole, and even for America in the long run.  Because the Soviets never even managed to land anyone on the Moon, we faced no challenge and ultimately abandoned manned Lunar exploration.  Furthermore, Soviet sympathizers in the Western media then spun Lunar landings as an irrelevant achievement, in an obvious example of Sour Grapes.  It has only been in the last couple of decades that we have seriously returned to planning Lunar missions, and we are still far from launching a renewed manned Lunar program.

How Wilful Ignorance of Inconvenient History Ruins Kristine Kathryn Rusch's 'G-Men' (2008)"

Introduction

I recently read Kristine Kathryn Rusch's short story "G-Men," which is an alternate history murder mystery set in October 1964 -- an important month indeed, when I personally entered the world, and also some minor stuff started happening in Southeast Asia.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, his personal assistant and possible lover Clyde Tolson, and three other FBI agents have been murdered outside a seedy gay hangout in New York City, and the question is:  "Whodunit?"

The story was interesting and engaging, and a fascinating examination of how attitudes toward crime and law enforcement were different almost a half-century ago.  But it seriously collapsed in its climax, because the author was forced to bend her interpretation of the history of LBJ and the Kennedys to fit the received wisdom as to the JFK assassination, as understood by the modern Left.

Dialogue and Monologue From the Climax

In the climactic scene, RFK (Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's competent younger brother, the Attorney-General) and LBJ (President Lyndon Baines Johnson), are facing-off over the secret political files of the deceased FBI Director.  Historically, J. Edgar Hoover had the dirt on virtually every politician and even celebrity in the country, and used these files both for occasional political blackmail and even more to prevent overreaching Presidents from using these files for systematic political blackmail).  LBJ can fire RFK, whom he hates, and seize the files, but RFK points out that LBJ can't do this without either taking a lot of time to go through procedures or creating a huge political scandal.

Here, LBJ and RFK talk, and RFK muses, about his brother's assassination.  LBJ says:

"... There's a lot of shit running around here that says your brother's shooting was a mob hit, and I know personally that J. Edgar was doing his best to make it seem like that Oswald character acted alone.  But now Edgar is dead and Jack is dead and the only tie they have is the way they kowtowed to your stupid prosecution of the men that got your brother elected."

Kennedy felt lightheaded.  He hadn't even thought that the deaths of his brother and J. Edgar were connected.  But LBJ had a point.  Maybe there was a conspiracy to kill government officials.  Maybe the mob was showing its power.  He'd had warning.

Hell, he'd had suspicions.  He hadn't let himself look at any of the evidence in his brother's assassination, not after he secured the body and prevented a disastrous autopsy in Texas.  If those doctors at Parkland had done their job, they would've seen just how advanced Jack's Addison's disease was.  The best kept secret of the Kennedy Administration -- an administration full of secrets -- was how close Jack was to incapacitation and death.

Analysis

Now, this exchange and interior monologue makes literally no logical sense -- and worse, it makes LBJ out to be a virtual traitor and RFK out to be a coward, which is probably not what the author intended.  Note that LBJ is saying that he thinks the Mafia has decided to kill Presidents and FBI Directors of which it disapproves and he isn't going to do anything to stop them from continuing to do this (a blatant violation of his Oath of Office) and RFK is thinking that he had to acquiesce to letting go the people who had not merely killed a sitting US President  but also HIS OWN BROTHER because he is afraid that otherwise people would have learned the JFK was seriously ill (which is a fact that would have become entirely irrelevant the moment JFK died).  At a minimum, one would have to assume that both LBJ and RFK were imbeciles incapable of logical planning -- for instance, wouldn't it occur to LBJ that his number-one priority should be to take down this dangerous conspiracy which might target him next?

This makes no sense on the face of it.  If this were a story set in an entirely fictional world, one would accuse Ms. Rusch of an incapablity of handling basic reasoning as it applies to political maneuvering, conspiracies and even common sense.

But of course this isn't set in an entirely fictional world, and that's the reason why Rusch's logic here stumbles.

Two Assassinations

It is part of the received wisdom of the modern Left that JFK was secretly an enlightened Leftist who if allowed to remain President would have avoided the Vietnam War, ended racism in America, and accomplished all sorts of great Leftist things such as would have pleased the hippies of 5-10 years after his death -- and that for this reason he was murdered by a Right-wing conspiracy, probably including the CIA, Mafia, and (depending who you ask) everyone else from the Dixiecrats to the Boy Scouts.  It is also part of the received wisdom of the modern Left that RFK was also such a Lightworker who would have made the hippies happy, etc. etc., and was bumped off by the same people.

This is called "retconning" when applied to fiction.  JFK was a hardline anti-Communist -- he was in short on the right wing of the Democrats on every issue other than race (the real right-wing Democrats on race were the Southern Democrats aka "Dixiecrats," who then and for the past century had worked hard to keep blacks down).  He didn't merely talk an anti-Communist line, he practiced it -- he invaded Cuba, upon the failure of this invasion repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, and ramped-up American intervention against Communists everywhere from Central America to Southeast Asia.  He was one of the architects of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

When he was murdered in 1963 -- based on overwhleming evidence, by a Castro-sympathizing Communist ex-US Marine by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, who if he did not act alone was probably taking orders from Fidel Castro (who actually had a very good motive, means and opportunity) -- his Presidency was aborted.  And the kids who grew up admiring JFK, who then went to college and became the proto-Counterculture -- were free to imagine that their childhood hero believed and would have done any old thing that they wished he believed and would have done -- and those mean old Establishment types killed him to prevent him from doing so.

And so began and proliferated the conspiracy theories.

Amusingly, Rusch misses the most obvious conspiracy theory, the one which RFK if he had decided his brother was killed by conspirators including US Government officials and/or the Mafia helped by a US Government coverup, would likely have believed.

Who profited the most by JFK's death?  Why, his Vice-President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.  JFK hated LBJ and the hatred was cordially returned.  LBJ was going to be dropped from the ticket in 1968, but JFK's assassination instead catapulted LBJ into the Presidency.  And LBJ was the one man whom, if any other conspiracy was plotting to kill JFK, had to be brought on board in at least passive acceptance of the plot, because otherwise he would have been in a position to punish the conspirators for the murder of an American President -- a crime which his own power and safety demanded he not permit.

Yet in the confrontation, RFK does not even show a hint of suspecting that LBJ may have had his brother murdered.  Why?

Because LBJ is also a hero to the Left because of his Great Society program (they tend to forgive him the Vietnam War, because after all it was just a lot of redneck Americans and swarthy foreigners who got killed in that little fracas).  They can't have one hero of the Left getting mad at another hero of the Left for murdering yet another hero of the Left -- why, that might imply a certain degree of insane violence on the American Left, and we can't have that.  Better to blame the Mafia -- who really expects any better of the Mafia, anyway?  And as for the CIA ...

As for RFK, he was murdered in 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, who was the prototype and first American example of the Angry Arab whom we all have to sympathize with because George W. Bush was such a meanie to them.  Even worse, Sirhan was a Palestinian, who killed RFK because RFK was sympathetic to the Israel (as was the whole Left, before the PLO started hitting Western targets and this scaring the Western Left into croaking "how high?" when the PLO asked froggie to jump).  This makes Sirhan Sirhan doubly sacrosanct and hence obviously the stooge of some Evil Conspiracy involving, um, the Mafia, the CIA, the Phone Company, and the Boy Scouts.  Or something like that.

RFK, of course, had decided to "get out front and lead" the New Left, much to the dismay of the actual New Left leaders, who were especially upset that their followers were forgetting that they were supposed to be rebelling against society, not joining the bandwagon of a rich Democrat who was very likely to become the next President of the United States of Amerikkka.  One could concoct a conspiracy theory involving the American New Leftists, except that those bozos clearly couldn't have organized a group of horny sailors on an outing to a whorehouse (as the Weathermen were shortly to begin demonstrating).

The Actual Denounement

I won't spoil the story, save to mention that the Mafia didn't kill J. Edgar Hoover -- and that the author sets up the real culprit quite professionally.  Which is to say, all that stuff in which LBJ and RFK are made to look like fools, cowards and traitors was just a red herring -- but of course Rusch didn't realize she was making LBJ and RFK look like fools, cowards and traitors.

She thought she was telling real history, the way she imagined those people actually thought.  They come off as imbecilic because she is resolutely avoiding confronting any historical truths which might blow the lid off just how imbecilic is the modern Left's version of the history surrounding the LBJ and RFK assassinations.

Conclusion

When one corrupts data, one corrupts the information one can construct from the data.  A lie or severe mistake regarding history will corrupt historical fiction derived from that history.  (Imagine if I believed that Europeans had possessed good maps and sailing instructions to the New World from AD 750 on, and then tried to comprehend the strategy of expansion of European polities under that belief!)

Here, the lies and mistakes which are required to keep JFK, LBJ, RFK and simultaneously Communists and the Palestinians as sympathetic historical actors, when it was a Communist (Oswald) and a Palestinian (Sirhan) who murdered JFK and RFK respectively, and LBJ who did nothing to avenge either death.

Truth will out.  Sometimes, by corrupting the conclusions of the liars.

END

How To Make a Family Conspiracy Theory

How To Make a Family Conspiracy Theory

by Jordan S. Bassior

(c) 2006, 2011

Introduction

I knew someone at work who was convinced that the Rockerfellers and Rothschilds are the Root of All Evil in History. This has led me to consider the basic method of constructing a "family" centered Conspiracy Theory. Here are my conclusions.


Pick A Family

You can't have a good family conspiracy theory without a family to make the conspiracy. So pick a family, any family.

Well, it works best if they are a rich and influential family. This is because a rich and influential family actually will be near the levers of power and hence they make more plausible scapegoats on which to blame bad events. Besides, there's more of a cachet in speculating about the, say, Adams' (the family that gave America two Presidents and several notable intellectuals) or Talbots (the family that produced Prime Ministers Salisbury and Balfour) than about the, say, Bassiors (the family that produced me).

Call them the Family Of Evil (FOE for short). Now that you've decided who the FOE is, you are ready to construct your conspiracy theory.


Degrees of Connection

Now play "degrees of connection" between the FOE and various historical events. If you read any decent biographies of any notable members of the FOE (or even better a biography of the FOE as a whole) you should be able to discover numerous major historical events that members of the FOE actually were directly responsible for. This usually won't be anything openly evil, at least not by the standards of the day (you may get lucky and find a Nazi-trading Prescott Bush or someone like that), but keep track of them. They are the grist for the mill of your Conspiracy Theory.

But go a step farther. Try to determine who the friends, associates, close acquaintance, in short the connections of the FOE are. If you've picked a prominent family to be the FOE, you should be able to find rather a large number of historically important individuals with whom they had some contact. (For instance, with John Adams and John Quincy Adams, your list would include many international figures, every American statesman and virtually every political or literary individual in the state of Massachusetts).

Now, what did these people do? You will probably find that, without going beyond one degree of connection / separation, a good chunk of the elite of the human race is connected to the FOE; take it to two or three degrees and you will have the whole elite. Write down some of the important things that these people did.


The Family Rules

If we were writing real history, we would simply note that the family was connected to these important historical persons and events. But this is a Conspiracy Theory and they are the FOE, so you must keep in mind that in fact any important historical event that any member of the FOE or anyone they knew was connected with was in fact done at the command of the Family of Evil.

Did Arthur Balfour help out Winston Churchill at some stage of his political career? Obviously this was not some mere alliance such as is common in politics. Obviously, the Talbots, FOE, was pulling the strings and Churchill was their mere puppet. In fact, this means that every single thing that Churchill did was actually at the behest of the Talbots! And if we add in all the people who Churchill knew ... it's easy to see that the Talbots secretly manipulated the whole history of the 20th century!!!

One nice thing about this mode of causative "reasoning" is that it is reversible. If we have decided to make the Churchills the FOE, we can decide that it was the Churchills who were callling the tune and the Talbots who were dancing to the music.


The Family Is United

In any real family, there will be disputes. Even in fairly patriarchal cultures, like medieval Europe, members of the family will disagree with the nominal patriarch and insist on doing their own things; perhaps rebelling against the family. (Look at the history of the Norman Kings of England). In less patriarchal cultures, like Victorian England, members may straight out ignore the wishes of their family. Today, family members will often act in complete disregard of family wishes.

Well, not in the FOE.

You must understand that in a FOE, the normal state of affairs is that anything that any member of the family (by blood, adoption or marriage) does is all part of the FOE's gigantic Evil Conspiracy. Choices of college, spouses, and friends are all elements of the Master Plan. No one in the FOE simply hangs out with someone because they are roomies in college and become lifelong friends. It's always a calculated component of the Conspiracy.

Unless they are Rebels, of course. You can tell when someone is a rebel from the FOE because something bad happens to them or their friends. If the bad thing happens to them and is fatal, end of story, and chalk up a remarkable lesson of the FOE's malign power. If the bad thing happens to a friend or is not fatal, either they continue to Rebel (turning away from their Family Evil) or they are chastened and return to the fold.

The merits of this approach is that it makes the personal political. Everything that any member of the FOE does can now be connected to the FOE's overarching design. Bonus points for a family that actually does do something nasty to a troublesome family member, such as the way that Joe and Rose Kennedy handled their horny retarded daughter. For triple bonus points, imply that the nasty thing was somehow directly connected to the evil plan (maybe the Kennedys were experimenting with unholy antediluvian genetic biomancy and it went wrong on the girl?).


Oh, they KNEW

In real life, many of our actions have consequences which are not predictable to us at the time we do them. This is how we get into a lot of trouble, or at least embarassing situations.

But we are not the FOE. The FOE knows the exact consequences of anything they do, generations into the future. Thus if any bad consequences flow from anything they do, they must have been part of the Evil Conspiracy.

To take the Talbots, one thing that Arthur Balfour is famous for is his partition of Palestine and the Transjordan after World War One, which formed the basis of the later UN plan that created the states of Israel and Jordan, and which (thanks to Palestinian diplomatic incompetence) failed to create the state of Palestine. Now, one might reasonably wonder whether a statesman acting around 1920 could have been aware that this would result in a permanent and contested division which would in turn lead to six wars and be used as an excuse for Islamic sociopaths almost a century in the future, right?

Shame on you! This is a Conspiracy Theory! Of COURSE the Talbots knew exactly what they were doing! It was all a cunning ruse to ... [insert goal here] ... and the whole history of the 20th century has been a protracted working-out of their Sinister Design.

The usual rationalization for this sort of thing is that, because the FOE either is part of or is connected to the Secret Masters of the World and of All History, they have special knowledge regarding long-term trends. For instance, the Talbots, being a FOE, would have been well-aware by (say) 1919 of the fact that there was going to be a Second World War, which side would win, and what the rough shape of the world would have looked like in 1948 ... since, of course, the Secret Masters were already planning to make things turn out that way.


History All Happened at Around the Same Time

This is really a more general case of "They KNEW." If we were writing real history, we would watch out to make sure that we were keeping our events in the proper chronological relationship, and in particular avoiding anachronistic motives. For instance in reality it is very unlikely that Prescott Bush, when he was drilling for oil in the 1930's, had the goal of dominating Lunar tri-helium reserves anywhere in his mind, given that flights to the Moon were deemed impossible and both nuclear fusion and tri-helium's importance as a fuel for same were unknown in that era.

But when it comes to the FOE, toss those rules aside! The Talbots probably had some idea of fomenting the Arab-Israeli Wars back when they were serving Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century! How? Um, John Dee (mumble-mumble) Necronomicon (mumble-mumble) Knights Templar. FOE's have truly amazing resources


Pick a Goal

You might be surprised that I'm putting this last, when logically it should be first. But remember, you are uncovering part of the Secret History of the World. You don't know what the goal of the FOE is when you set out -- it's not as if they print it up in little brochures and give it away at free seminars, now is it?

What you do is you look at the most important historical events that you can blame on ... heh, I mean connect to the machinations of the FOE, and then decide what their effects on the world were. And then this was obviously the goal of the FOE from the very start, from the moment that Sam Adams began brewing beer or Prescott Bush drilling for oil or Joe Kennedy running rum, or whatever it is that the FOE did to first become rich enough that you noticed them.

There is bound to be some goal that makes sense, once one remembers that History All Happened At The Same Time, and when one considers just how much history a family prominent for even a few generations is likely to be directly connected to.

Conclusion

I hope I've shown just how easy and fun it can be to construct a Family Conspiracy Theory. I also hope I've shown people just how silly the whole idea actually is.

One last note: I've assumed a Family of Evil because most people choose to imagine Conspiracies seeking Evil ends. But actually the logic works basically the same for a Family of Good (FOG), or simply a Family of Influence (FOI). You can even have multiple families, playing something like the Steve Jackson Illuminati card game with the whole world!

I'd tell you more, but the agents of the Rockefellers are coming to take me away ...

END.