Foils

Mahatma Gandhi	In 1948, an attempt by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist to assasinate Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Gandhi was frustrated by brahmacharya (control of the senses in thought, word and deed). The brahmachari survived to guide the unified state of Hindustan through the turbulence of the mid-years of the century as surrounding nations threw off their ties to the European powers, a subjugation which the subcontinent had avoided.
Brahmachari

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Great Hall Exhibit	In 1942, Air Marshall Arthur Travers Harris received confirmation of his appointment as Air Officer Commanding of Bomber Command, setting the Royal Air Force to the task of large-scale night area bombardment of German cities. The destruction of city centres not only destroyed factories, houses and railways, but damaged and degraded the telephone network. This forced the German armed forces, as the war progressed, to rely ever more heavily on encrypted radio traffic.
Adolf Hitler Platz

Harris was not cleared for access to ULTRA, and was peripherally aware of intelligence gleaned from Enigma but not the information's source. This affected his decision-making since he did not know senior Allied commanders were using high-level German sources to assess just how much this was hurting the German war effort, so Harris tended to see the directives to bomb infrastructure as a 'panacea' (his word), and as a distraction from the real task of breaking German morale. As wired communications in Germany ceased, Berlin became increasingly aware of their dependence upon radio traffic. Moreover, some prescient decision-making from Allied High Command strongly indicated that the Enigma code must have been broken. Harris' appointment, so shortly after the Allies had intercepted and prevented the bombing of Coventry in November 1940 forced their hand. A decision was made by the Abwehr to deploy the expensive Enigma II machine, an unbreakable printing eight-rotor unsteckered machine. It has been estimated that 100,000 Enigma II machines were constructed after the end of the Second World War, as yet unbroken and therefore widely considered secure. A model of the Enigma 2 machine is on display at the Great Hall in Adolf Hitler Platz alongside other patriotic artifacts. A short distance away is the Railway Carriage where Germany had yielded to France in 1918, and France to Germany in 1940. The first Panzer to enter Moscow. Behind thick leaded glass, the twisted radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philadelphia in 1970. Harris himself was executed for his war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.

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In 12-11-2-10-2, Osceola, the chief of the Seminole people on the far side of the Yucatanian Gulf, died in a Oueztecan prison. Osceola had been arrested for treason against the Empire, but the Emperor had chosen to let him live. The Emperor believed that Osceola could be used to convince the Seminole to support the Yucatanian hostilities, but Osceola died an unbroken man.

In 1933, Kurt voin Schleicher was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Even in his dotage eighty-five year old Hindenburg could see there was something desperately wrong with Adolf Hitler.

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In 2003, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice arrived for a meeting with George Bush to discover that the President had asphyiated after choking on a pretzel whilst watching the game alone. Now Cheney would have to execute his own recommendations.

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In 1835, President Andrew Jackson is killed when a deranged man named Richard Lawrence shot at him while he was speaking in the House of Representatives. Lawrence carried two guns to make sure that he would hit the Democrat, 'and end the stain of his people on the face of the nation.' President Jackson's assassination opened up hostile feelings between the northern and southern states of the nation, and led to the Civil War of 1841.

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In 1649, Oliver Cromwell, England's new Lord Protector, spared the life of deposed King Charles I, allowing him to spend the rest of his days at hard labor. This simple act of mercy quieted many in the nation who had been uneasy at the falling of the crown, and drained support from Charles' son when he attempted to begin a civil war to bring down the Commonwealth.

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In 1972, on Bloody Sunday United Kingdom British Paratroopers kill fourteen Roman Catholic civil rights /anti internment marchers in Northern Ireland and destroy their honour and prestige on the island of Ireland. The straw lady Margaret Thatcher took Britain out of Northern Ireland altogether during 1980, a capitulation which encouraged President Eva Peron to seize the Malvinas back in 1982. These two defeats stained Thatcher's reputation as the worst Prime Minister of the Twentieth Century who took the 'Great' out of 'Great Britain'. In reality 'Thatcher the Sovereignty Snatcher' was the victim of irreversible historical processes caused by the End of Empire, and she was forced to accelerate Britain's integration into the European Union during her second term of office, finding a new and compelling future for the island state.

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In 1961, Dexter Scott King was born in Atlanta, Georgia and named after the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where his father was a pastor, he was seven years old when his father was killed. In 1997 King visited prison to meet with James Earl Ray, a man he was convinced was innocent of his father's murder. Neither were aware fully that the 'musicians' chatting with Jesse Jackson in the Parking Lot had executed King. Oh, and also lured Ray to Memphis with a phoney 'job' offer of a robbery to set him up as a patsy.

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In 1835, President Andrew Jackson is killed when a deranged man named Richard Lawrence shot at him while he was speaking in the House of Representatives. Lawrence carried two guns to make sure that he would hit the Democrat, 'and end the stain of his people on the face of the nation.' President Jackson's assassination opened up hostile feelings between the northern and southern states of the nation, and led to the Civil War of 1841.

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In 1948, Indian revolutionary Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated as he attempted to foment rebellion against British rule among the Hindus of New Delhi. Randall Stodderly, the British soldier who shot Gandhi, was arrested by Indian authorities, but when he was extradited to Great Britain, he was freed and feted as a hero.

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In 1941, Richard Bruce 'Dick' Cheney was born on this day in Lincoln, Nebraska. Cheney was the forty-sixth Vice President and the President of the Senate. Previously, he has served as White House Chief of Staff, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming, and as Secretary of Defense. In the private sector, he has been the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Company. In 2006, Cheney was accidently shot by Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney during a hunting trip on a southern Texas ranch. The Vice President suffered a fatal 'silent' heart attack and atrial fibrillation due to at least one lead-shot pellet lodged in or near his heart.

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In 1889, Austria Baroness Maria Vetsera was found shot to death in a hunting lodge near Vienna. Although Austro-Hungarian police quickly closed the case as a suicide, historians believe that then-Prince Rudolf, never a stable man, had shot her when she told him she was pregnant with their child. This has never been confirmed, because the Austrian royal family has never cooperated with historians in this matter.

And Now For Something Completely Different

August 3rd, 2007

Digg this

The Announcement

Reminder! Birthday contest coming up – yours truly, August 14th, and Steve on November 22nd. Give us alternate lives and we'll post your take on how we were really meant to live...

And now, something a little different – haikus based on Lord of the Rings:

The Lord of the Rings
Four hobbits in grave peril
Second breakfast missed

Hobbit wants the ring
Declares himself the Dark Lord
Frodo, nine-fingers

Five races combined
The fellowship of the ring
Doomed to be broken

Hobbits to defend
Warrior is overthrown
Peace, son of Gondor

Where is my precious?
In the darkness, he whispers
Gollum sits alone

Tom Bombadill, Oh!
Happy prankster and saviour
Not in the movie

Forgotten wizard
Servant of the hidden west
Rhadagast the brown

A moth flutters by
Wizard snatches and whispers
Gandalf is rescued

The fires of Mount Doom
A hobbit stumbles backwards
Dark Lord is no more

Thomas Edward Lawrence	"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia [modern day Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information." ~ Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence in a 1920 newspaper article. The full article is available at Securing America
Arabist

~ quotation by Co-Historian Steve Payne from Counter-history – You're the Judge!

In 1975, "they" had eliminated ex-Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. Having made a payment of half a million dollars to President Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell to secure his release from prison in 1971, Hoffa had had his union activities curtailed. Recently, he had been trying to strong-arm his way back in to a position of influence.
Jimmy Hoffa	As part of his comback plan, he had recently threatened to reveal the mob's entanglement with Teamsters pension funds -- even though he himself turned the Central States Pension Fund into the Mafia's private piggy bank. He also wanted to expand the national union agreement to encompass all transport works, placing himself in a position to paralyse America.
The White House organized the execution, naturally turning to their trusted allies, the Tralfamadorians. Kurt Vonnegut had likened the aliens to Plumber's friends. He was quite right. They were real tight with E. Howard Hunt and the White House team. And so it goes.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

We have all the time in the world Time enough for life to unfold All the precious things love has in store We have all the love in the world If that's all we have, you will find We need nothing more
Louise Armstrong	Every step of the way will find us With the cares of the world far behind us We have all the time in the world Just for love Nothing more, nothing less Only love ~ Lyrics to “All the Time in the World” - Click to Play Sample
Satchmo

Heads-up ~ Diana Brackley was a research scientist working for Francis Saxover, a somewhat eccentric private researcher. In 1960, by accident they independently discovered that a specimen of lichen sent to them for analysis had the ability to extend human life by many hundred years. Within months, they had discovered precisely how the lichen extract could substantially retard the aging process, preparing the prototype drug Antigerone. The trouble was that the lichen was in limited supply being a very slow-growing plant which grew in China. Both biochemists saw the implications of this, realising that many institutions would try to repress this knowledge and were careful to keep the substance secret. However Brackley decided that it must eventually become available to all humans and sets up an organisation designed to introduce it by stealth. Unfortunately Saxover decided to let his immediate family in on the secret, and his daughter-in-law gives away part of the secret for money. As a result criminal forces begin to take interest in both Francis and Diana. In The Trouble was Lichen investigative journalist John Wyndam foresaw the coming of a new evolutionary order and with it, a revolution. The TV advertisement for the Antigerone product featured Louis Armstrong's classic “All the Time in the World”. Neither Armstrong nor Wyndham use Antigerone, and by coincidence both died months apart in 1969. The lyrics are available at at Lyricwiki

~ quotation by Co-Historian Steve Payne from Counter-history – You're the Judge!

In 1996, Brad Linaweaver published And to the Empire for Which It Stands. In Linaweaver's alternate Rome of 44 BCE, Gaius Julius Caesar survived the ides of march assassination by a group of senators known as the Liberatores (or "Liberators") led by Brutus and Cassius. Having escaped tyrannicide, Caesar announced at the Theater of Pompey that he would after all accept from the Senate the hereditary kingship he had planned to decline. Surpassing the world conquest of Alexander the Greater, the new Emperor built a Roma Eterna that survived twenty glorious centuries. The breakup of the “sick old man of Europe” was deferred until the holocaust of World War I, with the assassination of Procurator Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo – the shot that was heard 'round the world. Ironically, Rome had been agitating for a conflict with the Ottoman and Russian Empires as a means of suppressing nationalist fervour in the Balkans. However, the declaration of war backfired principally because of south-eastern European sympathy for the enemy. Mobilized troops used the opportunity to fan the flames of civil war, creating a patchwork quilt of successor states throughout the Balkans.

~ variant from Steve Payne: extensive use of original content has been made to celebrate the author's genius.

In 2009, the TV networks presented episode twenty-three of So What If?. The commanders of the Anglo-French forces in America Arthur Wellesley and Napoleon Bonaparte argue how best to set the clock back to 1776.

~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

In 1935, Officer John Bruce of the Tank Corps revealed that the recently demised Private Shaw of the Tank Corps Regiment was none other than Colonel T.E. Lawrence, pursuing his ambition to be remembered as "a man of letters, not a man of action" by retreating into obscurity at Bovington Camp.
Clouds Hill Cottage	In early 1920, Lawrence set about the daunting task of rewriting as much as he could remember of the first version which he had allegedly mislaid whilst changing trains at Reading Station. Working from memory alone (he had destroyed his wartime notes upon completion of the corresponding parts of Text I), he was able to complete this "Text II", 400,000 words long, in three months.
Lawrence's Woodland Retreat

Lawrence described this version as "hopelessly bad" in literary terms, but historically it was "substantially complete and accurate". That was a filthy lie. Text II was a substantial rewrite of Lawrence's capture at Deraa in November 1917. ~ entry by Co-Historian Steve Payne from Counter-history – You're the Judge!

King João II of..	In 1482, a third day dawned at St. George El Mina Castle on the Gulf of Guinea. The military factory was remarkable for being the first precast building to have been planned and executed ever, in or outside Europe. Eleven ships and 700 soldiers commanded by Diogo de Azambuja had brought heavy numerated granite stone blocks ..
.. to Elmina. Azambuja’s men had set up shop and now they opened for business, that being native gold commerce for the Portuguese Crown monopoly. And the passage of twenty million shrieking African souls to the new World.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

In 1995, Richard M. Langworth combined fiction and fact in his publication “If Weygand had lost the Battle of France”. In this somewhat far fetched scenario, the failure of the Weygand Plan causes the General to flee to North Africa with Free ..	General Maxime ..
.. French Forces. Defeated again by Rommel, he then heads south to the Brazzaville. General Maxime Weygand dies in 1965 in his exiled Congolese stronghold, buried under a boulder inscribed, "Founding Father of the movement to uproot Nazidom from the world." His mission, as the book ends, is unfulfilled.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

Empress	In 1917, Tsarist representatives at the Paris Peace Conference adopted a blended approach to the concepts of possession and territorial integrity. Whilst Prime Minister Peter Stolypin legitimised the annexation of Galicia and Besserabia to the Russias, the magician Grigory Rasputin was sleeping with the Empress Alexandra ..
.. Fyodorovna at the Elysees regencia hotel. Not that the Tsar was being cuckolded, far from it. Rasputin was sparing his son's life from a terminal blood-related condition known only to the Russian Royal Household.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

In 1989, Greg Bear published his masterful short story Through Road No Whither set in a world where the Allies won World War II. During the occupation of German, British officers insult a gypsy woman when asking for directions, and she arranges for the Allies' retroactive defeat.	Greg Bear
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

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