Soc.history.what-if

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The correct title of this article is soc.history.what-if. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

soc.history.what-if (or SHWI) is the name of a historical discussion group and community on the Usenet newsgroup system. The newsgroup focuses its discussion on the three closely related genres of history of counterfactual history, alternate history and uchronia. While these genres are not widely respected in academic history, the SHWI community regularly produces written works which meet or exceed the standard of virtual histories published by academic historians. The average quality of written work produced by contributors tends to meet the standards of published popular alternate history fiction.[citation needed]

Counterfactual history, and its less academic companions, are speculative fiction. In an academic context historians often ask, "If a factor varied, what would have resulted?" This is used for rhetorical or argumentative purposes, and also to assert what factors were significant in causing events to occur as they did. For instance, the question, "What if Napoleon had been successful at Waterloo?" could be answered "He would have been defeated by a European alliance of armies slightly later in 1815 at a different location in the Low Countries." This would assert that Waterloo itself was not significant in the downfall of Napoleon in 1815. The habit of beginning virtual histories with the question "What if...?" led directly to the name of the newsgroup.

Contents

[edit] A community

soc.history.what-if has been functioning for over ten years, and has a remarkably stable small population and a remarkably high signal to noise ratio when compared to other newsgroups. Based on these two factors a functioning community has grown in the newsgroup. Regular contributors to soc.history.what-if post from the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Italy, Russia, Japan, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Australia and New Zealand.

A large amount of community focus is dedicated to the history of the American Civil War (usually fascinated with Southern victory) and World War II. Due to the work of Alison Brooks, who died of cancer in 2002, in debunking the fascination of a possible success of "Operation Sealion" (the planned German invasion of England in 1940), SHWI is often cited as an argument against the plausibility of "Operation Sealion". Other topics demonstrate a similar fascination with speculative modern European and American military history or diplomatic history. Newer posters to SHWI often rely on historiographies based on the Great Man theory of history. More seasoned community members contribute speculations regarding the history of early modern, medieval, late antiquity, Africa or Asia. These more varied contributions are considered to be of great interest. Contributors are also esteemed for posts dealing with the minutiae of US history. This brings us to a problem that the group comes from very diverse backgrounds. So generally only American contributors know much about this subject. Similarly if you write a post based on Australian history, generally only Australians will be able to contribute. However WW2 appears to be the section of history most contributors know well. However many subjects in this topic have been done so often, that regular contributors tend to feel been there and done that too often.

The community of SHWI sees itself as a history community obeying all the demands of other history forums. It demands the same standards of plausibility and historical accuracy as any other soc.historical groups on the usenet. So ironically the counter-fiction here, has to make sense whereas history does not as the community of SHWI highly values a concept called "plausibility", which is taken to mean that the events described would have happened following on from the reasonable single change initially depicted (called a "point of divergence" or "POD"). Contributions which are well written, about topics which are not commonly described, or are highly plausible are often well received and earn their author a great deal of respect.Since plausibility is important, what-ifs based on changes on physical laws are not plausible and so are not highly regarded. Speculation based on iffy science e.g. time travel, tend to divert into complex scientific questions of whether such things are even possible.

To make a POD more plausible make as few changes to the timeline as possible. Good form is considered one small believable change e.g. Churchill almost died in a car accident before WW2, now a believable plausible POD might be what-if he did die what would have happened.

However more important to the group then "plausibility" is the concept of "interesting". What particularly fascinates the people involved is the consequences of change in history.

[edit] Writing style in soc.history.what-if

One early style of writing was based around single speculative posts. One person suggested a situation, and the group would debate.

The current standard is long multi-part posts, adequately footnoted to indicate evidence for particular views. Authoring long multi-post footnoted contributions has become a "status" symbol on SHWI. The earliest known multi-part time lines was Doug Hoff's German Military Regime: from the Thirties onward which began on 26 December 1997. Following Hoff's post more and more posters began expanding their speculations in episodic segments.

In 2005, in a deliberate attempt to overcome a troll problem by weight of numbers, many posters have been posting one line speculations. This is a partial return to the style commonly used before May 2000. The problem with this is that anyone using this style will quickly find that he has given up any direction for what he wants to find out. Therefore it is strongly suggested that you do add an indication of what you want to get out of the discussion in the initial post.


Another important element of shared writing style is the constant use of irony.

[edit] Irony as a community watchword

The primary aspect of community life involves the systemic use of irony to achieve effect. This irony is often multifaceted, as the core community members of soc.history.what-if are dedicated to providing academically rigorous histories of things which never occurred. This irony takes additional forms. Many U.S. posters use terse and cryptic references which are immediately picked up by other U.S. posters to refer to events in history or U.S. culture; this style is often parodied by Australian and Finnish contributors in their own contributions about Australian or Finnish history.

Poor writing is often criticized for its lack of plausibility. These attacks are usually phrased in terms of the need for "Alien Space Bats" or ASBs as the motive force behind the change. For example, "Well, Alien Space Bats could land the German army in Wales." The use of the term Alien Space Bats has been expanded to include handwaving difficulties in order to get to an interesting discussion.

An additional layer of irony is developed in the institution of the "double blind what-if" or DBWI. These contributions are usually a description of how real history is unbelievable, described by a narrator who comes from a time where things happened differently. An example: "As we all know, the First World War ended with the Second French Revolution in 1917, but what if the French army had managed to control the mutinies in the trenches?" Often double blind contributions are particularly subtle, and are usually marked as DBWI contributions to avoid causing offence or confusion.

Finally, the community has developed a conscientious ironic denial of certain things. For instance, speculation about the role of fascism in inter-war Britain resulted in the formulation of a term "unFascism" to describe a society which mimicked every aspect of continental European fascism, but staunchly denied any relationship between the speculated British system and European fascism. This ironic denial of the patently obvious extends to real world meetings of community members.

[edit] Social gatherings in the real world

Face to face meetings between members of soc.history.what-if are advertised by a contributor who insists that the proposed event will not occur at a specific time and place. This references the system of plausible deniability used regularly by states since the 1950s to hide occurrences from the public. These meetings are described as Cabals, a reference both to the Cabal Ministry, and community members take great pleasure in announcing that "There is No Cabal" or "TINC" when reporting on their meetings, playing on an old Usenet joke.

[edit] Social taboos

Social taboos include holocaust denial, arguing that "Operation Sealion" was possible, arguing about contemporary politics (this is considered to be in breach of a community standard known as the "Ban on Politics" (BoP), a norm originally created on alt.folklore.urban), and religious activism (which is considered in breach of an analogous "Ban on Religion" (BoR)). The existence of the Ban on Politics supports a strong dislike of recent points of divergence, as these often skirt close to contemporary political debate.

[edit] Trolls and sockets on SHWI

A variety of trolls inhabit SHWI, typically different members have different views on who are the trolls. Some do have highly unpopular political and/or historical opinions.

Many contributors believe that many people here are sockets. These are often setup to annoy others or just give credibility with the socket creator views. Every now and then a discussion breaks out as to is such a socket.

The greatest crisis that faced the community was in late 2001 and early 2002 when someone sent thousands of nonsense messages to this group and soc.history.ancient nearly every day, making reading the group nearly impossible.

[edit] Regular contributors

This is a non-moderated group without any rating system as such what is good or not becomes a matter of individual choice. Some contributions that some consider esteemed contributor would be. Some that were mentioned were

SHWI has also produced a number of collective timelines, including:

  • For All Nails moderated by Noel Maurer, a continuation of Robert N. Sobel's novel For Want of a Nail.
  • Submission moderated by Anthony Mayer, describing a world where Islam was a minor religion, and a similar religion, Submission, arose among the Scandinavians in the 8th century.
  • Bronze Age New World moderated by Douglas Muir, describing a world where the pre-Columbian Indians of Mesoamerica discover metallurgy.
  • UnFascist Britain describing an interwar Great Britain which succumbs to fascism.
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