OpenGeofiction
Does anyone have any ideas concerning the origins of Communism and/or Fascism? How did it come about? Were there any alliances between these countries, like the Axis or the Warsaw Pact? Were there any countries ‘central’ to the ideology, like Nazi Germany or the USSR? How and why did the ideologies fall? Are there still some fascist/communist states around?
I’m leaving this as an open-ended discussion as this is a broad topic. It would be great to hear different ideas on this topic. I’m especially curious to find out whether this follows a path similar to the modern world, i.e. powerblocs, or whether it arose differently.
Discussion
Comment from alb120 on 30 March 2016 at 22:40
Well, in Lallemand, the northern part of the island(about 1/4 of the country), is communist, ruled by one party and all land and industry being controlled by the state.
Comment from Myrcia on 31 March 2016 at 10:13
I don’t know if you’ve seen these wiki articles but there are relevant bits here:
http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/Talk:Portal:World_History
http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/OGF:Global_collaboration
Comment from Yuanls on 31 March 2016 at 20:38
@Myrcia I was wondering where the table on Global Collaboration was! Thanks for finding it. The first table looks like a handful to edit though. I’m leaving it as it is for now in case I mess it up. It appears that the general dates for communism roughly concur with dates in the modern world-rising in the 1910s and falling in the 1980s (And 1990s). But details on things like where it started and how it fell are absent, so perhaps someone could work on those. However I didn’t see any parts in the world history section that are relatable to the topic. To be fair, it is a very long page.
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 1 April 2016 at 08:44
Hello Yuanls. The Portal:World_History page is really still a talk page, and at some point it needs to be consolidated into summarised histories for those countries where it is still relevant. But I have a feeling that some of that information has evolved over time or has become redundant.
At the same time those two tables in OGF:Global_collaboration have expanded a lot - and perhaps now is the time to separate them. When I have some time I’ll go back to them and work out how best to do that, and how to incorporate some more information, perhaps extending isleños table (1) into the 20th century.
We could now go back to the powerblocs table and try and work out possible/likely alliances.
What I would suggest though is that ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ in OGF are not the same as in the real world, given that there are not the same links with specific ideologies and personalities as in nazi Germany and the USSR. That means that their origins and historical development are also different. But although the countries ‘central to their development’ may not yet exist, that doesn’t mean that the ideologies themselves can’t start to be developed.
The tables are quite intimidating. But just add information about your country on the OGF:Global collaboration talk page and we can work out how to incorporate it into the tables.
Comment from Luciano on 2 April 2016 at 23:08
I agree with Udi that we should maybe develop different names than “fascism” or “communisim” (or “marxism”) for our world.
I developed one “character” for this alternative history in the form of the Ardispherian named Luciano Doon d’Orange - he’s meant to be a cross between Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass (if you can imagine that). Because of him and his work (especially: In political theory, he wrote the three-volume study that provides some of the foundations of modern political economy, Los Laberintos del Poder (The Labyrinths of Power), 1884.), leftism in the Ardisphere is called “doonism”. I would be pleased to see this extended to other world leftist movements, in both their positive and negative aspects.
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 5 April 2016 at 07:38
I think it would be a good idea to adopt a different name than ‘Marxism’ for class-based socio-economic theory. I don’t know if ‘Doonism’ fulfils this, but I would be more than happy if it could be adapted to encompass it.
For right wing authoritarian nationalism - fascism - I have been thinking of the term ‘Sharakism’, but there is no underlying basis for this and I haven’t yet written it into any wiki. I just think ‘fascism’ and ‘falangism’ are real world historical terms that it might be better to avoid.
Comment from Yuanls on 5 April 2016 at 10:29
I agree, I think different names would be fitting for OGF. A problem I see would be getting their names changed on the wiki, from ‘communism’ and ‘fascism’ changed to ‘xxxx’ and ‘yyyy’. Does anyone have any methods regarding this?
Comment from isleño on 6 April 2016 at 20:14
I share the desire for alternate names for capitalized terms like ‘Marxism,’ ‘Nazism,’ ‘English,’ or ‘Catholicism’ — which are explicitly linked to a specific real-life person, party, place, institution, etc.
But I don’t feel like we need alternates for lowercase concepts that could occur anywhere, like ‘fascism’ or ‘communism.’ I understand that certain parts of history come to mind when these terms are used, but that’s not the same as an explicit link. These terms can easily be defined without reference to specific history (see a basic dictionary definition of fascism or communism). Unlike ‘Nazism’ or ‘Catholicism’ for example, words like ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ could be used to describe an alien society that lacks any connection to earth history… same for ‘capitalism,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘colonialism,’ etc.
To be clear, I’m not opposed to alternate names (especially when it comes to describing ideologies that don’t exactly match concepts from real history) but I feel like the original terms should be usable as well, when people want to describe ideologies that do have parallels in real history.
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 7 April 2016 at 10:13
@ isleño - I agree wih most of your points - for example that ‘democracy’, ‘colonialism’ etc are terms that don’t have a specific reference point in real world history, any more than other terms in English have. I suppose the question is where you draw the line - and for me, having thought about it for a while - ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ may be a bit too closely linked to real world people, places and ideologies. At the same time, I have no real problem with those terms being used. But bear in mind that those linked definitions over-simplify the situation - and they are subtly different from the wikipedia definitions, which refer to the historical context of the ideology. Could you have an alien society that was ‘fascist’? I can see it would be possible - but it would have very obvious parallels with real world ideologies, perhaps even personalities.
The main drawback of using real world terminology is that they have a specific derivation that is historically linked. For example (from wikipedia) the etymology of the term ‘fascism’:
“The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning a bundle of rods, ultimately from the Latin word fasces. This was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci, groups similar to guilds or syndicates and at first applied mainly to organisations on the political Left.”
For ‘fascism’ to be properly explored in OGF we might need to develop a parallel etymology, incorporating the origin of the word ‘fasces’ (assuming that the derivation is the same), the Latin (OGF = Romantian) language, the Italian (OGF = ??) language, and perhaps the transition from ‘fascismo’ being a left wing movement to a right wing ideology. In some ways that could be very interesting, but I think it is a fairly complex -and collaborative - project. There is an obvious alternative way to go about it, by giving it a fictional derivation (for example, by saying there was a right-wing dictator called General Fasci), but to me this looks very artificial.
So this is my reasoning behind creating OGF ideologies - like ‘Doonism’ - which have real world parallels but don’t carry the burden of real world history.