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Yankee Counterfactuals (II)

If this alternate history teaches us anything about our own timeline, it is that the Union victory was a heaven-sent blessing. The timeline Turtledove constructed on the basis of a CSA victory is a much darker and nastier place, but it is a very plausible and convincing counterfactual. ~Prof. Bainbridge The first rule of counterfactuals […]

If this alternate history teaches us anything about our own timeline, it is that the Union victory was a heaven-sent blessing. The timeline Turtledove constructed on the basis of a CSA victory is a much darker and nastier place, but it is a very plausible and convincing counterfactual. ~Prof. Bainbridge

The first rule of counterfactuals is that the assumptions of the historian writing the counterfactual effectively become a sort of iron law of history that shapes everything else that ‘happens’.  This is a case not just of bias shaping interpretation, but bias becoming the very logic of the new history itself.  Further, in writing counterfactuals Turtledove seems to start with the effect he wants to have happen, and then contrives the causes that will get him there.  If Turtledove already believed that the CSA was perfidious and nasty, he would set up his counterfactual timeline in such a way as to make the most out of this belief, and then, surprise, the alternate timeline he creates is also dark and nasty.  Not pulling any punches, he tells us that if the CSA won it would have, within a couple generations, been on the verge of racial genocide.  This is not the product of a carefully balanced consideration of probabilities and a weighing of possible consequences–this is a denunciation of the South, pure and simple, that forces the conclusions the author wants because he started from the assumption that the Confederacy was simply evil or something very close to it.  That Prof. Bainbridge swallows this and deems it “plausible” is most unfortunate.

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