It is
not for nothing that they call Harry Turtledove the master of alternative
history. His wildly famous 1992 book Guns
of the South was just one of his many works that explored how history might
have been had a few small things changed its course—or maybe a few large
things.
In Guns of the South, Turtledove imagines
what might have happened if the Confederacy had had superior weaponry over the
Union. And not just a little bit superior: what if the Confederacy had AK-47s
and grenade launchers? This is what happened in the novel when, in 1864, some
mysterious men showed up, wearing what we call camouflage but for which the
confederates had no name, and making AK-47s, which could be used either in
semi- or fully-automatic mode, and an unlimited amount of ammunition available
for very little money—and for nearly worthless confederate money, at that. The
men revealed to General Robert E. Lee and other top confederates that they were
from the future—they had a time machine that brought them from 2014 back
exactly 150 years. The result is gory and unsurprising, though its details are
exciting: Confederate troops storm Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln
concedes defeat. The Confederacy just wants to be left alone, and the Union leaves
them alone.
But
there is a price to be paid. The mysterious camouflaged men told Lee that, if
the Union had won the war, black people would eventually have enslaved white
people. But what Lee and others eventually discover is that these men were
lying about the future. They were a South African militia of white separatists
who hated the very existence of black people. They were using a Confederate
victory as a means of ensuring white supremacy in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Emancipation was already beginning in the Confederacy,
and it was a great benefit to the economy. But the racists hated it any
way—they wanted to have dominion over blacks, even if it bankrupted their confederacy.
The
author portrays many Confederates as evil racists, but others, including the
sergeant through whose eyes much of the action is seen, and including Lee, were
moderates who admitted to themselves that even a Confederate victory would not
ensure the indefinite continuation of slavery, which was despised by literally
every other nation in the world. After Lee became a civilian, and ran for
Confederate president, he campaigned for gradual emancipation of the slaves.
The South African supremacists, of course, hated this, and they turned their
weapons against the Confederacy for which they had just a couple of years
earlier fought. They had overwhelming firepower advantage, but there were only
a few hundred of them—racist splinter groups are always small, even in apartheid
South Africa. The moderate confederates, principal among them Robert E. Lee,
prevail over them and ease their way into racial equality.
Turtledove’s
writing is clear and beautiful, sometimes formulaic but never poor. The twists
of plot and the delightful characters even by themselves make the book good.
Why am I
reviewing this old book? In 1992, neither Turtledove nor anyone else could
imagine that the kind of fierce hatred of blacks that fueled South African
apartheid could possibly exist in America. But it does. It is impossible to
make an accurate count of how many racists there are in America. But when you
consider how widespread and common the white power protests are, and, what is
more, the sheer number of assault weapons they have built up, it is easy to
believe that somewhere around a half million Americans are ready to take up
arms against the rest of us in order to establish a White Supremacist Nation. And
I believe that they would be willing to stage an act of terrorism every bit as
bloody and violent as that of the Afrikaner racists in this novel. In 1992,
Turtledove had to imagine a foreign
source for a few hundred such racists; today, right here in America, there
are perhaps hundreds of thousands.
That is,
real history has turned out thousands of times worse than a novelist could have
imagined it a little over a quarter century ago. It seems impossible to avoid
the inevitable firestorm that will result from white hatred of blacks in
America. Evolution has given us both good and bad instincts, and the
intelligence to choose the good; sadly, I see no way in which intelligence and
goodness can possibly prevail in this selfish and hostile nation that we have
become.
