 I'm willing to bet a lot of you have never heard of this series, and those who have probably don't have many friends that are familiar with it. Honestly, I'm shocked the Patreon poll requested this, but here I go. Southern Victory, otherwise known as Timeline191, is an alternate history franchise written by Harry Turtledove. I say franchise because it's not just one series, it's multiple series which all tie in together, but you don't need to read one to enjoy the others. The four series are How Few Remain, The Great War, American Empire, and Settling Accounts. They each cover a different historical period taking place after the American Civil War, or the War of Secession, as it's called in universe. I did a worldbuilding analysis on these a long time ago. They aren't great videos, but feel free to check them out to get some more info if you're curious. The point of divergence here is very small. In real life, a rebel officer accidentally left behind a copy of his orders which then fell into the hands of Union troops, which allowed them to respond to an attempted invasion. In this timeline, that never happens. Rebel soldiers smash through the army form to stop them, occupy Philadelphia, and win the war. Because of this, they gain independence, and from there, history takes some mighty weird turns. To put it in brief, the CSA quickly builds up an industrial base while also keeping slavery for around 20 years until the United Kingdom strong arms them into getting rid of it. They purchase the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua to gain a Pacific port, leading to a second war with the United States in which the US loses to a coalition of the CSA, United Kingdom, and France. This leads to a massive upsurge in American nationalism and they later join the central powers before World War I begins. When that epic quagmire kicks off, the fighting in North America is just as vicious as in Europe, complete with the massive trench networks that the western front is known for. Only in Virginia, though. Black socialist revolutionaries try to overthrow the Confederate government without much luck, but it does contribute to their loss in the war. The Entente powers all lose for that matter, leaving Germany and the other central powers victorious. In fact, the four great empires, which all cease to exist at the end of the war in real life, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans, all survive here. After this, fascism takes hold in the losing countries, leading to a Confederate government that invades the United States again in 1941 while also trying to exterminate their black population in a manner very similar to the Holocaust. They lose the war, partially because they get hit with several nuclear weapons and are occupied while the worst war criminals are put on trial. The future is uncertain and everyone is afraid of being hit with a nuclear bomb as the Cold War begins. So the series starts off very different from real history. By the end, it's just World War II with different names. And if you're upset that it left so much out, that's because there are eleven books worth of content here. I can't spend all day going over it. However, I'll say one thing up front. I've never seen any franchise that's more critical of American exceptionalism before outside of full-on propaganda. The entire world and story are just there to show how we're a country just like any other, not special beyond what history and geography have gifted us with. I've said before that I find the idea of alternate history focusing on the various possibilities if the American slaveholder rebellion was successful to be unbelievably dull since it's been done so many times. However, I read Southern Victory before I got tired of the cliché. It's part of what made me tired of it since it goes into far more detail than any other example I've ever found. This isn't just a map with some basic lore behind it. This is an exploration of societal, political, economic and military trends over nearly a hundred years. If I could describe these books simply, I'd say that they're not a story so much as an exploration of this world and the events that happen therein. Most of the characters are just lenses we view this world through rather than complex people with fully developed inner lives. That said, it's very good at showing how different those lenses are. Someone from the CSA has a much different perspective on things than an American does, while a black person has a different perspective than a white person, a rich person has a different perspective than a poor person, and so on. Whenever we look at things in the real world, we're looking through a complex series of biases based on our life so far, many of which we're unaware of. Income, place of upbringing, propaganda we've been hit with, sexuality, personal experiences, and many more. Because of this, the books take a realistic look at things like gender relations and racism. At the time, racism and misogyny were much worse than they are today, and most books would cheat by having a protagonist who holds modern day views on those sorts of things. They'd be someone who had a black friend as a child and therefore changes the way they view all of society. It's a cheap, if effective, way of getting the audience to like the main character while also sweeping unsavory aspects of the past under the rug. A fantasy version of this would be the way Kip finds slavery distasteful in the Lightbringer series, despite slavery being a massive part of daily life there. The series has to stretch a bit to explain how no one in its home village had slaves, to explain why he dislikes the practice, but at the same time, he just goes along with it most of the time. Southern victory shows the past as it really was, warts and all. It must hold some sort of record for the highest number of n-bombs dropped. I'm not joking when I say that. By refusing to whitewash things, Turtledove gives a raw account of what life would have been like back then. War sucks for everyone who's involved in any way. It wrecks the economy, it leaves scars in society, and often it doesn't lead to much good. Black Confederates start off not caring about the war since they don't care about the country, then they see it as an opportunity to rise up and overthrow apartheid, then they join in the war effort when things get desperate enough for the whites to allow it, and it makes no difference. They aren't treated any better for it. Jake Featherston, this timeline's XP of Adolf Hitler, hates Black people to a ludicrous extent, even compared to his contemporaries. He hates them before their attempted revolution, he hates them during it, and he hates the Black soldiers that fight on his side. This is an honest depiction of how American racism has worked for hundreds of years. Minorities such as Black people, Japanese people, Irish people, and many others have fought in the armed forces, whether out of cynical attempts to make a decent wage or genuine patriotic devotion, they put their lives on the line when they were needed before being cast aside. Almost like the government doesn't care about you beyond your usefulness. And it's not like the American people are much better than the Confederates in that regard. They have plenty of animosity towards not just Black folks, but towards Catholics, Italians, Jews, the Irish, and Mormons. The Mormons stage multiple insurrections against the government, which the government responds to with increasingly brutal repression. The whole thing turns into a cycle of violence with no easy way out. It parallels the relationship between Americans and Confederates. Neither side wants to give anything up for peace, and neither side is willing to try and coexist with the other. They both see themselves as victims and the other as aggressors. I'm sure many of you are currently thinking of real-life parallels to this. From the Balkans, to the Caucasus, to Israel and Palestine, the world is full of groups of people pointing the finger at each other for starting their current conflict. But after a certain point, everyone is to blame. The cycle of violence exists because humans are incapable of not being dicks to each other for long enough to fix anything. The only time the violence stops is when everyone has seen its effects and are appropriately horrified, leading to a brief period of peace, in certain Naruto reference here. And when the fighting starts, well, the average soldier spends more time fighting his commanding officers than the enemy. Those on the front lines know what's going on and how things work, those above them know less, and those above them know even less than that. This goes until you reach the political command of the military who are so detached from the situation that they'll do blatantly stupid things, like try to attack Pittsburgh in the winter and refuse to retreat when an American force moves to encircle them. It's a shit show all around, and frankly, that's what war is like. Ask anyone who was deployed to Afghanistan in the past 20 years how things were going and they would have told you it was a shit show. Then the Taliban took over again and the average American was shocked. Politics is also a disappointing slog for everyone in the series. At the start of World War I, U.S. politics is dominated by the Democratic Party on the right and the Socialist Party on the left. Confederate politics are dominated by the Whigs on the right and the Radical Liberals also on the right. After the war, they're joined by the Freedom Party, a fascist organization on the far right. Most of the political shenanigans, at least at first, are followed by socialist characters. They are not in power, and those in power are actively working to keep it that way. Not that the socialists are perfect, they and their ideology get plenty of criticism here. This just gets across the frustration with being unable to change the direction that the world is headed. When the U.S. annexes new lands from the CSA in Canada, the government allows places like Kentucky to become full states with voting rights because Congress and the President know they'll vote for right-wing parties. Canadian territory just gets to be under military occupation because they probably won't vote for right-wing parties. It's blatantly corrupt and unfair and there's no recourse for it. No matter how smart one person is, they can't beat the system. However, no system can withstand social and economic trends. When labor unrest sweeps the country, the Socialist Party manages to take control of the government for the first time. The American Socialist Party, once in power, act more like social democrats. Their legislation isn't all that radical, they just improve on social programs rather than nationalize industry and lynch landlords. Pity. But hey, that's politics. It's all about compromise. You're always going to be disappointed. That's why you shouldn't be a fan of politicians or parties, just ideas and movements. Obviously, the rise of the Freedom Party in the South is meant to parallel the way the Nazi Party came to power. Complete with all the destruction of democratic ideals, propaganda networks, violence against minorities, and anyone who disagrees with them, loud proclamations of victimhood, all the classic fascist shit. Both classic fascist groups and modern ones use the same tactics, because privileged middle-class men with an inferiority complex have always been the same. History isn't a line, it's a circle. The most notable thing about this series is, like I said, how it takes the idea of American exceptionalism and wipes its ass with it. We aren't immune to the ultra-nationalism that infects other places, we aren't immune to losing wars, and our government system is not anywhere close to perfect. I think of various media that shows the US in dire straits and how, in the end, the Americans pull themselves out of the hole they dug. Alternate history, like 1920 America's Great War, or Red Dawn, delights in showing how things go wrong for America, usually in a military sense. But no matter what, the war will be won, the country will be in one piece, the government will still stand for freedom, some terms and conditions may apply, and it'll still be a dominant world power. It's like that old trope where the status quo can never change in sitcoms. No matter who loses their house, gets a cancer scare, or fails out of school, they'll be back to their zani antics next week. No matter what, nothing ever really changes. Actions have no consequences. Southern victory starts with the American military losing one war, then they lose another. Then they get dragged into a new bigger war where they manage to win at a cost so high many think it wasn't worth it. By the end, the government, while still democratic, has taken on a more authoritarian personality than it has in real life. By the end, it's also holding onto huge territories full of people who want them dead in Utah, the former Confederate States, Canada, and Baja. It's far from the most powerful nation on earth. It's former ally Germany is turning into a rival, everything is primed to explode. This is meant to parallel the beginning of the Cold War, but the US is in a much more precarious position than it was in real life. There won't be a post-war boom where they conquer the world here. We can lose wars just like everybody else. A lot of Americans like to throw around the claim that the country has never lost a war, which is true if you don't count Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War of 1812, or whatever other quagmire we get pulled into next. Where will it be? Iran, China, Venezuela, Cuba? Guess we'll find out within the next 10 years. And if you don't count conflicts that resulted in more of a stalemate like Korea, but as long as you don't count those, we are invincible. I don't think people appreciate how impossibly rare this sort of depiction is. I straight up can't think of any other book series, video games, movies, or anything else that do this. The only major works I've ever seen where the US has ceased to exist are post-apocalyptic scenarios where every other country has gone to. And even then, the loss of governments is shown as an awful thing, because they're the only thing preventing all our neighbors from instantly murdering us, I guess. For some people, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of America. Harry Turtledove shoves their faces into an unpleasant reality. If the United States was broken apart, the rest of the world would change, but it would keep turning. We are not the center of the universe. We are not a cosmic cornerstone. We are not special. If you'll allow me to add in my own theory, the US only came to its current state in the real world because it's never had any neighbors that truly threatened it. All the great powers have been oceans away and dealing with their own issues. If we had a truly hostile neighbor, we'd be in trouble, much like in this series. It goes even further than that, showing that republicanism isn't the ultimate final form of all enlightened societies. Several monarchies that dissolved in real life stay around here. Not ceremonial ones, either. Places like Russia and Japan keep their despotic regimes in place up until after World War II. Other places have monarchies that, while they aren't absolute, have an inordinate amount of power in their own countries. Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Romania, Germany, Italy, and some others all fall into this category. I'm not saying that Southern victory is claiming that monarchy or fascism are better than representative democracy. If anything, it's the opposite. What it does seem to be saying is that societies don't inevitably reach a stage where they decide that this is the best way to run things. Democracies fall. Middle-class losers long for a daddy to tell them what to do. Those in power want to seize more power, and so on. There's a current in America that just straight-up hates democracy. That's why it took over a century for women and racial minorities to get the right to vote, and why things like the Electoral College were created. The upper and upper middle classes hate when those they view as lesser are allowed to oppose them. It threatens their wealth and privilege. All people having power, rather than a single class of them having power, isn't something that happens naturally. You have to work for it. In the end, this has to be one of the most cynical pieces of media ever created. There's not a single idea or theme or character meant to show anything happy or positive. There's no ideology that is supposed to fix all the world's problems. They're all deeply flawed. There's no country with an innocent history. They're all built and maintained on a foundation of violence. Despite that, it never comes across as edgy or stupid. It's a brutal, uncomfortable look at how the world works. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this series is secretly about how awesome the American fighting spirit is. How it never gives in no matter what. That's one of the neat parts about discussing themes. There's always room for argument. Unless you just completely miss the point and say something stupid, like this series was all about how much of a hose Mark Twain was lugging around in his pants. Why did he get a sex scene again? Special thanks to everyone who watched this far, including and especially my patrons and channel members. My $10 up patrons include Oppo Savalainen, Olivia Rand, Brother Santotis, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Christopher Quinten, Dan Echo, Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Microphone, Sad Mardigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, Vaivictus, and of course, all the other names listed here. You guys are great. Without you, I wouldn't be able to do this. If you want to get your name put up here, then consider becoming a patron. You get stuff like early access to my videos. And if you don't want that, then how about maybe just becoming a channel member or dropping me a tip over on PayPal or just sharing this video. Yeah, you get the picture. Goodbye. Bye.