Convictions

The state of TIAH

November 10th, 2006

Alternate Historian's Note: November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. In 2004, we produced our novel Warp, and last year we got a start on The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion during this annual event. Both of these novels were based on timelines from TIAH – Warp was based on the Mlosh timeline, and Protocols on the Greater Zionist Resistance timeline. Although we posted numerous links to these novels on Lulu, TIAH didn't post any excerpts from them. We're going to do it a little differently this year. This year, the November posts on TIAH will be excerpts from the novel that is being written by us for NaNoWriMo. We will still have Guest Historian entries – Stephen Payne (who has compiled several and made them available on Lulu for free – just go through the Add to Cart system to get it) has some already written and waiting – so, if you want to make a Guest Post this month, go ahead and send it to us, and it will appear along with our novel post.

in 1872, on board the Mary Celeste Captain Benjamin Briggs plans a positive distraction for his frightened wife, Sarah Briggs, who is musical and has insisted on shipping her piano. The Captain instructs 2nd Mate Andrew Gilling to retrieve the instrument from storage and have it lashed fore and aft for his wife's indulgence. It's a bad mistake but the Captain does not know that yet. -entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!-

in 2124, the Peace and Reconciliation Committee of the Reconstructed United Nations finds the arch-criminal James Cook, more commonly known to twentieth century European History as “Captain Cook”, guilty as charged. He was pre-selected for the trial due to the uproar created by the infamy of the 2121 movie “James Cook and the thousand thieves”. Cook is presented to the court as a murderer, pirate and brigand who brought to an end the 48,000 year old aboriginal civilization known as the Dreamtime. In so doing he had acted as the master thief in the criminal European possession of south-east Asia from 1779 to 2086. On this occasion, even Mullah Elijah Rafsanjani confesses that a post-historic revision is unnecessary. The former republic of Australia dissolved, Cook killed by indigenes and the Dreamtime re-established in the late twenty-first century – pre-jihad history had already taken care of this housekeeping action. -entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!-

Before(cont.)
Marco was pretty good – he had Janice's car running again in twenty minutes. She handed him a fifty and said, “Thanks, Marco. You're a lifesaver.”
The mechanic was still a little dazed by the news that Janice had dropped on him, and was stumbling around the garage as if he were drunk. He took the bill she gave him and stuffed it into his pocket. “I'll go get you a receipt,” he mumbled, walking off to his truck.
Janice got into her car and fired it up. The nice roar of the engine made her feel better. She pulled out of the garage and hit the remote to close the garage door. She jumped a bit when Marco knocked on her window, then recovered herself and rolled it down.
He handed her a yellow slip and said, “What do I do, now?”
“You go help the next person, Marco,” she said. “That's what you do.”
He nodded and shuffled, zombie-like, back to his truck. She cut off the engine and went back into her house. She grabbed her laptop, a bag of energy bars and a gallon-jug of water, then locked up the place and returned to her car. She started the car up again and pulled her recorder out of the glove compartment. The tape was still about three quarters empty, so she hit the record button and said, “Personal journal, Janice Carbonari. It looks like the more pessimistic among us were right. Rather than allow a peaceful transition of power, the fascist military-industrialists have staged a coup. It is uncertain whether this is a civilian or military-led operation, at the moment, but a verification of the most obvious part of their cover story should be possible.” She clicked the recorder off. That was a good start. She didn't know whether she was going to make this a full video entry or just a podcast, but that'd be the kind of opening that would jump out and grab her audience.
She pulled out of her driveway and headed away from the jammed highway to the little country road that very few people knew of. Traffic was still pretty bad, but she was able to make some headway. She munched on an energy bar as she drove, and occasionally recorded more observations. “There's a preponderance of thought on the net that this is a propaganda job – that there was no bomb at Crawford. The lack of the usual suspects calling it an 'Islamofascist' attack makes me think there might be some reality behind this particular fantasy. While I have every reason to think that I will be stopped long before I get there, I intend to verify the existence – or lack thereof – of the president's ranch at Crawford, Texas.”
She turned her attention away from the recorder long enough to slip down the tiny dirt country road that led away from Pflugerville and towards the southeast. It was going to be a maze of back roads, but she had her route planned all the way to Crawford. She was going to test the defenses of The Man.

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Love and Hatred

Bombing	In 1945, BBC News reported: Thousands of bombs destroy Dresden: 'British and US bombers have dropped hundreds of thousands of explosives on the German city of Dresden. The city is reported to be a vital command centre for the German defence against Soviet forces approaching from the east. Last night, 800 RAF Bomber Command planes let loose 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000lb of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000lb bombs in two waves of attack. They faced very little anti-aircraft fire. As soon as one part of the city was alight, the bombers went for another until the whole of Dresden was ablaze.'
Dresden

Amongst the dead was a twenty-two year old American GI, Kurt Vonnegut. A man of German descent, he had been transferred to Slaughterhouse-Five, a nearby prisoner of war camp. Vonnegut and his colleagues had been hiding below ground, but were killed when the ceiling collapsed from the shock waves of the bombing. And so it goes.

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In 1968, astronomer Paul Oswald Ahnert deciphered an extraterrestrial broadcast indicating that our quadrant of the Galaxy was under quarantine from a lethal space leprosy. At first his warnings were ignored, however reconsideration was duly given when returning Lunar Module Pilot Colonel Buzz Eugene Aldrin lifted his visor at the splashdown point, east of Wake Island on July 24 1969.

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In 1779, during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific Captain James Cook narrowly escaped death at the hand of natives of the Sandwich Islands. He had mistakenly returned to Hawaii in the season dedicated to Ku, god of war, inadvertently upset the equilibrium and fostered an atmosphere of resentment and aggression from the local population.

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In 1956, Malcolm Little received parole and was released from Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown. A dangerous criminal, Little had avoided the draft by telling the examining officer that he could not wait to organize with other black soldiers so he could 'kill some crackers.' Incarcerated for a decade, there was a lot of catch-up to be done.

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In 1956, at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khruschev revealed than Lenin was a shape-shifting Vampire. A number of strokes in the 1920s forced the undead nosferatu to possess the body of Comrade Stalin to permit him to continue his misrule. He had even maintained his corpse in a Kremlin mausoleum just in case a Dracula style exit was necessary.

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In 269, Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men, in order to make them a better pool to draft soldiers from. The Christian cleric Valentius was known for his defiance of Rome, and many young couples came to him in order to wed. Valentius performed the ceremonies gladly until the local centurion told him that he would be executed after the next one. Valentius relented, but the decree was rescinded in 271 after Claudius' death, anyway, so nothing ever really came of it.

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In, 47421 BCE, Telka the Speaker is wooed by and mated with the father of her first children, the man she names Komar. She learns to count the days in a year by the anniversary of this day each year that she was with him. His love for her led him to throw himself in front of a boar that was charging her; although he saved her and killed the boar, he died from injuries he received. Telka made sure that each of her descendants celebrated this day out of her love for him.

In 498, Pope Gelasius names this day the Feast of Saint Valentine. In his honor, prisoners across the land were given a meal of ox-hearts and red wine, to signify the blood that the saint had shed while a prisoner of the pagan Romans. The traditional feast of hearts and wine continues to this day across Christendom, although the practice has spread from the jailhouse to all those who might need a prayer for more freedom.

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In 2021, a rare form of cosmic radiation enters Earth's atmosphere, concentrated in and around Chicago. 99.9% of the city only feels a slight tingling, but one man, Eddie Valens, finds his reflexes and running speed amplified tenfold - plus, he is now able to evoke feelings of love and peace in nearly anyone with but a word. Putting these two together, and donning a pink costume, Eddie takes the name Saint Valentine and proceeds to fight crime in Chicago for nearly a decade as one of the only real superheroes in the 21st century.

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On February 14, 2003, a group of high ranking Iraqi generals, fearing the disastrous effects of U:S. invasion stage a coup. They know that Sadam as a sentimental guy would be distracted at big party for his family. The succeed in killing their President and his sons. The new junta is composed of Sunni Baathists, but they extend the hand of friendship to the world community and invite weapons inspectors. What would the last half of a decade have brought to Iraq ?

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In 1965, the Soviet States of America bans the unofficial Valentines Day holiday. Comrade Representative O'Hare of Chicago, in her statement calling for the ban, said, 'No other holiday so cheapens the idea of romantic love, or saps the will to fight of our comrades in the street, as this so-called Valentines Day.'

In 1167 AUC, the Lupercalia Festival is finally made a separate holiday from the festival celebrating the founding of Rome. This festival of ritual matchmaking, popular for hundreds of years, was certainly the highlight of the 2-day celebration at the ides of February, and most Romans felt that it deserved separation from the more staid founding ceremony.

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Alexander	In 1974, Soviet authorities executed Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Two days before, Mr Solzhenitsyn was arrested in his wife's Moscow flat and taken away for questioning by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. His charge, under Article 64 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, was punishable with death by firing squad or a minimum of ten years in prison along with confiscation of property.
Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn had been under investigation for six weeks after his novel Gulag Archipelago depicting life in the labour camps was published in the West. He had already spent a total of ten years in prison under Stalin for his dissident writings.

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Botany Bay

The state of TIAH

April 9th, 2007

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Alternate Historian's Note: Dropping out of the Alternate Historian persona here for a minute. Today, I start my first new job in 11 years. I need to be rested and ready to make a good impression and let them know they did well by hiring me, so naturally, my lovely daughter decides that last night is the worst night ever in the history of any world. She let me sleep for maybe 2 ½ hours – maybe – and since about 12:30 has been up and down every 30 minutes. I think she's finally given up and succumbed to the Sandman's magic dust, but I am utterly exhausted, and very grateful to Guest Historian Stephen that he has content for me today. I should just go ahead and call him the Co-Historian, since he provides so much of our work here these days.

Anyway, I will get back to the regular stuff tomorrow, after I've had some sleep. Till then, here's Stephen's excellent material...

Captain Cook	In 1770 Captain James Cook discovered Botany Bay in the Dream time (Australia) but the Mesh prevented him from approaching land. First world explorers and navigators had by now accepted that the melancholy of exclusion emanating from the group consciousness of First Nations rendered armed incursion impossible. Some other ..
.. tactic was required to gain access to the abundant resources outside the Eurasian continent.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 1983 lacking agreement from fellow historians Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, Hugh Trevor-Roper followed his training. He would investigate the primary sources.  Especially  the murders.	Martin Bormann
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

Washington Loca..	In 1867 blocked by a single vote, the United States Senate failed to ratifies a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska. The significance of this fateful decision became apparent in 1945 with the deterioration in US-Soviet relations that led to the outbreak of the Cold War. In particular, Truman's inclination to drop ..
.. the bomb on Hiroshima was driven by an urge to 'fire a shot across Stalin's bows'. However it was pointed out that an escalation could end in such super-weapons being based on the North American continent in Alaska, and consequently he was forced to take a conventional path and proceed with Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan. With Soviet forces taking Hokkaidō and partitioning Japan, the US and Soviet Union faced each other across numerous potential flashpoints on all continents.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 1992 John Major's Conservative Party narrowly fail in their attempt to win an unprecedented fourth general election victory in the United Kingdom. Six months later, they were no longer worried, the election result was to prove a pyrrhic victory for the Labour Party. Neil Kinnock's government was in desperate trouble over ..	John Major
.. the ejection from the ERM and the economic competence of the labour party was ruined. Honest John won the 2007 election and continued the Conservative Century, blaming the short interregnum of labour rule on the poll tax and other late 80s mistakes, a sidewise reference to his former boss Lady Thatcher.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

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