Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!

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Thande

Donor
Look to the West


A Timeline

by Dr Thomas W. Anderson MSci MA (Cantab) AMRSC







VOLUME FOUR:
COMETH THE HOUR...












“Imagine there's no countries


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it isn’t hard to do


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nothing to kill or die for


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and no religion too


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imagine all the people, living life in peace, yoo hoo


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you may say I’m a dreamer


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but I’m not the only one


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I hope some day you’ll join us


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and the world will live as one.”


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.
 
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Thande

Donor
Yes, it's that time again. But Thande, I hear you cry, what about that thing you were going on about about getting LTTW published? Well I am still doing that, and going through Volume I at the moment making revisions and improvements, but my head is still full of ideas for Volume IV and I haven't been doing enough writing lately, so here we go!

For new readers: um...I hope you like reading. Lots. Or I suppose you could go to this Wiki page where there's a (relatively) short laconic style ("Date: Thing happened") version of the TL, which is actually up to date now.
 

Thande

Donor
And here we go with our old friends the Crosstime Exploration team, you know, the framing device that some people are fascinated by and others hate the gimmick of. Well for the latter group, don't worry, they won't be intruding too much.


Interlogue: Perfidious Albion

Crosstime Update Report by Captain Ben MacCaulay: 18/10/2015 (OTL Calendar)

The material contained herein is classified as THANDE MOST SECRET.

Confirm that Portal is operating. All codes check out. You’re absolutely certain there’s no visible light or sound from it leaving this room, Doc? Good.

Update report. Captain Ben MacCaulay, leading Team Beta assigned to TimeLine L, Thande Institute. Our primary mission: to ascertain what happened to Team Alpha led by Captain Christopher Nuttall and if possible to retrieve them. Our secondary mission: to continue Team Alpha’s study of the history and general status of this timeline, both for the Thande Institute’s pure exploratory objective and also to better inform our primary mission and consider the potential for the powers of TimeLine L to pose a thread to Our TimeLine.

As you will doubtless recall, gentlemen, after the disappearance of Captain Nuttall’s team in London, for the sake of safety a new Portal was created in OTL Belfast, allowing we in Team Beta to arrive in its ATL counterpart in the Kingdom of Ireland. From Team Alpha’s reports, the oversight board concluded that Ireland was likely to be a less hazardous place for a team and would allow us to get our bearings before mounting a rescue mission.

That was two months ago. In that time, we have successfully infiltrated the population—or so we hope—and today we made the ferry journey across the Irish Sea to Liverpool, a city as large and vibrant in this timeline as it is in our own...yes, Doc, you’ll be able to talk in a minute.

The important point is that we have successfully established ourselves here in the Kingdom of England and opened a new Portal through to the Institute’s temporary site in OTL Liverpool, allowing the Portal in Belfast to be closed. We will continue both our objectives. As you know, we now believe Captain Nuttall’s team to have been arrested by English security forces, the exact reasons being unclear but, based on past experience, probably being suspected as spies or terrorists. Given the time delays we necessarily faced, it would seem likely that whatever the English planned to do with them, they’ve done it. Fortunately though Dr Wostyn’s research indicates they are unlikely to resort to pure torture. Still, we must continue on the assumption that the English authorities may have obtained sufficient information from Team Alpha to know what crosstime travel is, what the Thande Institute is, and that there may be another team out there. At least we can be sure that Team Alpha could not give them verbal descriptions, as they would not know the composition of our team, they could scarcely describe every member of the Thande Institute, and we know for certain that none of them ever met Lieutenant McConnell, who has largely been our front man due to being able to fake this timeline’s version of an Irish accent.

At present then our immediate objectives are to establish ourselves here in Liverpool and look at the possibility of infiltrating a government facility to find information on where Team Alpha are being held. This is a daunting task and will take time, but as I said, at least we can assume that after two months, another two should not make any difference to what information the locals have got out of Nuttall’s boys. Given the only alternatives are to go in with guns blazing and potentially make enemies out of men only scared by the unknown, and to try and negotiate from a position of ignorance, I fear we have no choice.

Of course we will also continue with our secondary mission objective of attempting to uncover information about what history shaped this world in order to better understand it, and Dr Wostyn is currently jumping up and down to give you his updates on that matter, so I will sign off. MacCaulay out.

END REPORT

*

Crosstime Update Report by Dr David Wostyn: 18/10/2015 (OTL Calendar)

The material contained herein is classified as THANDE MOST SECRET.

Connard américain...ah, it is on. Dr David Wostyn reporting, Team Beta (apparently that’s what we’re called now).

As the Captain reported, we have arrived in this timeline’s version of Liverpool, and I must confess I am rather surprised. As you know, for the past two months I have been obtaining history and related books from libraries in Belfast and digitising and transmitting them to the Institute. From them I gained the strong impression that the Kingdom of England was a more repressive and more fanatically Diversitarian country than Ireland. This assumption informed our preparations for this part of our mission. Yet the true picture seems distinctly more complex.

Certainly, part of this seems due to the fact that I did not truly understand what Diversitarianism is. In truth it seems hard to define precisely because it simply arose in opposition to Societism, and claims to be the ‘natural state of humanity before the Bad Idea came’ to use the words of one writer, but that ignores the fact that in reality it encompasses everything from a loosely small-c conservative approach to nationalism, truly ‘leave everything the way it has always been’, and a far more radical reactionary approach that can become as fanatical as Societism itself—or at least how these writers paint Societism. In some ways there is a comparison to capitalism and communism in OTL: the first writer to coin the word capitalism was Karl Marx—until someone proposes a different system, you do not need a word to describe what the existing status quo is. And then when such a word arises, ‘capitalism’ can mean a multitude of different things depending on context. So, then, with Diversitarianism.

I digress. I should not really consider this subject until I have more information. Yet in some ways I did manage to miss what in retrospect seems like the most important and indeed definitive aspect of Diversitarianism. It is right there in the name: diversity. Diversity not just of colour or language or creed, but of thought. An ideology that specifically denies and combats the idea that humanity can be treated as one must extend that starting assumption to every level. Diversitarianism denies the very idea of there being one objective truth. The coverage of the ‘Heritage Points of Controversy’ I described before is, in retrospect, clear on this: when describing an event like a massacre, there can be no neutral position—official reports state the truth as it is seen by those accused of committing the massacre and then the truth as it is seen by those who suffered it, and both can be considered equally truthful. Understand though that Diversitarianism does not endorse Orwellian doublethink by any individual believing them to be equally truthful: it states that each individual must choose which to believe exclusively, and in so doing be a member of one bloc or its opposing bloc. And to do this for every possible question of this type, questions which the ideology’s adherents are keen to promote and even create across the world. On the way to scouting out this building, I was handed a pamphlet in the street which argues that only when each individual human being holds a unique set of beliefs—for example, only one person in the whole world is a French-speaking Alawite Muslim who believes the Flemings were justified in the Route des Larmes but the Poles were right to say the Saxons deliberately starved them in the potato famine and the English were justified in killing Colquhoun’s band in 1834...you get the idea...only then will the mission of Diversitarianism be truly complete and Societism will be completely destroyed.

It is clear there is much still to learn. Yet I had made the further mistake of assuming that the heavy-handed, intolerant approach the Irish painted the English with would look anything like one pictures for a regime of this type in our world. Of course now I realise I was wrong to take what the Irish books said at face value anyway: the Irish would deliberately paint a black picture of the English and indeed the English government would encourage that, and vice versa: anything to emphasise the difference between the two nations’ identities, even if in geopolitical terms they are firm allies. Still, it seems possibly justified to say the English are a bit more fanatical than the Irish about Diversitarianism, yet as I say, this is manifested in a very different way to what I thought I would see.

Liverpool is a diverse city, more perhaps than in our timeline! I have seen Chinese and Indians and Koreans (or ‘Coreans’ as it is still spelled in this timeline), I have seen Africans and Arabs and more, many more. Besides the healthy crop of English and Irish it started with. They are not spat on in the streets or treated as second-class citizens. Indeed, they are honoured. Judging by the local civic propaganda I have seen, cities here glory in their diversity in a manner that few in our world convincingly do. It is framed in different ways, though. The minorities seem to be required to live in specifically assigned districts and return to them at night after a curfew, though calling these areas ‘ghettoes’ would be a misnomer: they are at least as high-class as the best-class districts inhabited by the natives. Indeed I might guess that they are made so specifically to try and attract such minorities as immigrants. The minorities are not considered English citizens, and indeed it seems Diversitarianism—or at least the interpretation of it favoured by the English government—denies the idea that one can have an ethnic identity different to one’s national identity. They are treated as foreign residents, but with a slate of rights that are at least as comprehensive as those of the citizens themselves. Indeed I wonder if there is any resentment from the local populace: it is too early to say.

England is also less oppressive than I expected it to be. To be sure, OTL Englishmen might disagree—there are things here which they would be horrified at, such as armed gendarmerie and ID cards, which I of course would not consider in any way to be a sign of an authoritarian government. In many ways this England is more ‘European’ from an OTL perspective—of course we should not let such preconceptions potentially lead us astray. To come back to my point, the censorship manifests itself in different ways to what I expected. I previously recorded that books published in Ireland contained blank passages for when they were shipped to England and Scotland, allowing printers there to add propaganda addendums. Yet now I suspect that was at least in part a lie on the part of the Irish as part of them painting a black picture of the English: I have seen several of the same books in a library here we briefly checked out, with the passages still left blank. I wonder if there are editions published here that say they are left blank for the evil oppressive Irish to fill in with propaganda...

Far more surprisingly, the writings of Pablo Sanchez are freely available here. I had assumed that obtaining them would be the most difficult and dangerous part of our mission given how Diversitarianism paints Sanchez as a cross between Hitler and the Antichrist. Yet not only can his books be bought, they are practically pushed on you in the streets. I was remarkably confused until I read the introduction to one of these cheap copies of one of his books, the relevant part of which I quote here:

‘...it was not until the 1969 Conference that it was upheld by all parties that the old ‘Russian’ heavyhanded approach to censorship, simply trying to destroy all traces of banned works, was doomed to failure and indeed often counterproductive, making a work a forbidden fruit and attracting hordes of rebellious youth to it...the Iverson Proposal, adopted in 1978 under the name Propagation Protocol A, instead sees endless copies of the work published and readily available, sometimes forcing children to read it in schools...while the work is always published with co-commentary demolishing each of the author’s points in turn, the real power of the Protocol is to turn what could be a dangerous book into something repellently boring, whether it be dull schoolwork or the lunatic on the corner forcing a tract into your hand...something you would never want your conscious mind to touch. And so the virus of Societism is contained and the will of Sanchez frustrated...’

It is a curious point they make, and yet I wonder if I can really trust even this. There can be few timelines out there where it is not only that the government deliberately lies to its citizens, but that they are fully aware of this and for the most part seem to approve of it. The result is that we never quite know where to turn, and yet by pretending to be ‘foreigners’, any level of ignorance of English ways of doing things is not only expected but approved of. It proves the system is working, I suppose.

Anyway. My point is that I have been able to obtain copies of most of Pablo Sanchez’s works, with the co-commentary mentioned above but not (so I believe, at least) any editing of his original text. As this turned out to be much easier than I expected, I will therefore be preceding every digitised excerpt of the current session with a quote from one of Sanchez’s books. And the transmission of these excerpts will begin again as soon as possible, as the rest of the team looks to our primary objective of rescuing Captain Nuttall, Dr Lombardi and the others. Firstly, as Dr Pataki requested a short time ago, I will be looking to the history of those regions unfairly neglected by my focus on the Popular Wars, such as India...

END REPORT
 
Can I ask one thing ?

How is the TL structured ?

Does the "Definite Version" include all these separate volumes/installments or are they completely separate from it ?

It has always baffled me. Partly because I want to get into LTTW once I finish reading LORAG and FABR. Hopefully I'll be able to finish reading LTTW within a timeframe of a few months - it looks incredibly expansive and detailed.
 

Thande

Donor
Interesting... Looking forward to more. Which years will Cometh the Hour cover?
Don't know yet. Let's guess up to 1860 or so for now (and watch me be totally wrong when we finish this volume).

I have certainly missed a lot:(:(
Not as much as you should, I fear; I've been away from it for too long. One good thing is that you're now back though and I can consult you about some Indian stuff (American, I mean).

Can I ask one thing ?

How is the TL structured ?

Does the "Definite Version" include all these separate volumes/installments or are they completely separate from it ?

It has always baffled me. Partly because I want to get into LTTW once I finish reading LORAG and FABR. Hopefully I'll be able to finish reading LTTW within a timeframe of a few months - it looks incredibly expansive and detailed.
The Definitive Version does include all that, yes. Although the name Definitive is a misnomer because I'm now going through the earlier volumes and editing them again anyway. I hope I don't turn into Tolkien...well I could take it in terms of quality, but not the perpetually unsatisfied perfectionism!
 
Not as much as you should, I fear; I've been away from it for too long. One good thing is that you're now back though and I can consult you about some Indian stuff (American, I mean).

No problemo. I still have that story I wrote, half done, floating around on my computer's files:eek:.

I'll look back at the older volumes and get caught up over the next week. Though the construction season will be ending here in another month or two so then I'll have plenty of time.
 
Very nice to see this back. The Diversitarian view is very strange from an OTL perspective. Will we be seeing how a Societist nation works?
 
Oh holy fuck yes it's back, my night has been made. :D

Very interesting already to see the English kingdom is nowhere near as repressive as one might expect. I'm also pleasantly surprised that the minorities aren't (so far one can see) repressed nor that subliminal works are banned.

This is....

Fascinating.
 
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