WI: Real life Eighty-Six?

[Neoteros]

In the anime/light novel Eighty-Six, the authoritarian government of the Republic of Saint Magnolia forces the racially impure to fight numerically and technologically superior enemy forces, with the aim of winning their war while eliminating said people, that have been deported to the front to the last man (and woman); most of the public doesn't know about this, even as propaganda and schoolbooks depict the Eighty-Six (so called because they reside in the 86th district of the republic, a military district no one is supposed to enter or exit) as literally subhuman.

The parallels with real life authoritarian regimes are quite obvious here, but none of them went as far as sending only the undesirable to the front, even as the "right" kind of people were readily available. The in-universe justification here, is that the people of Saint Magnolia wouldn't have approved of the war otherwise, so the government has to keep up appearances and feed them the lie of "automated" combat drones that result in no casualties whatsoever (this is, of course, bullshit), while civilians live their usual lives. Is there any IRL regime that could've done something similar?

 

[Arkenfolm]

Aside from the fact the backstory of the 86 doesn't make any sense in that LN/anime (half-baked parallel to obvious OTL events), the closest thing would be penal battalions or Mamluke-type slave soldiers. The latter seems pretty thoroughly discredited in the region they were most used (Islamic world) given their tendency to involve themselves in politics and intrigue and the Islamic world's weakness by the time the 20th century started. Penal units of disliked ethnic groups existed (Armenians/Greeks in Turkey during WWII), but were solely support units used for logistics via forced labor.

The "martial races" concept in British India might be close too given some ethnic groups/castes were barely recruited from while others were massively over represented. Although they were led by white officers, it would be interesting if Britain used the Indians as their main global fighting force instead of just in colonial conflicts and kept their OTL army at home.

Or for an ATL, the CSA. Using slaves as soldiers was a minority position, but existed. Maybe in some TL where they win, slavery is dying out under international pressure and domestic challenges by 1900, and the CSA gets involved in a European war. As the US is still neutral but a deadly threat, all CSA soldiers sent to Europe consist of black freedmen and slaves "donated" from slavemasters (the slaves themselves are promised freedom at the end). This would appeal to populists in the CSA who would want to weaken slaveowner power and make the country more white and perhaps the slaveowners themselves know they won't own their labor as slaves for much longer so this is a "patriotic" solution. Presumably the appeal for the CSA in joining the war is loans plus a seat at the peace conference where they hope to pick up a Caribbean colony or two. Unfortunately, the CSA is very unlikely to let blacks (including anyone deemed mixed race) be officers unlike the OTL colored units in the USA, but this still means the force is about 90%+ "undesirables." The only thing holding back commanders from ordering them on suicidal missions is politically connected leaders who don't want the labor force killed (I'd assume they'd expect the freed slaves to end up working the same fields as de facto serfs/peons) and the fact the white officers might die alongside their soldiers.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

Ironically, a mere 5 years ago we would have pointed to an "OTL example" of exactly that. For a while the dominant explanation for the decline of the Afro-Argentine population was that, by design, they were over represented in the armed forces and that their units suffered disproportionately high casualties in wars during the 1800s. Recent scholarship has debunked this theory (blacks were not over represented in the army, nor were they intentionally given dangerous postings, even if it were true it would not actually kill enough people to effect noticeable intergenerational demographic change) and it's now understood that miscegenation with the growing white majority lead to a "blanqueamiento".

Interesting how shifts in historiography can (fortunately) boot an idea back to the realm of dystopian sci-fi/fantasy.

 

[Nivek]

In the anime/light novel Eighty-Six, the authoritarian government of the Republic of Saint Magnolia forces the racially impure to fight numerically and technologically superior enemy forces, with the aim of winning their war while eliminating said people, that have been deported to the front to the last man (and woman); most of the public doesn't know about this, even as propaganda and schoolbooks depict the Eighty-Six (so called because they reside in the 86th district of the republic, a military district no one is supposed to enter or exit) as literally subhuman.

The parallels with real life authoritarian regimes are quite obvious here, but none of them went as far as sending only the undesirable to the front, even as the "right" kind of people were readily available. The in-universe justification here, is that the people of Saint Magnolia wouldn't have approved of the war otherwise, so the government has to keep up appearances and feed them the lie of "automated" combat drones that result in no casualties whatsoever (this is, of course, bullshit), while civilians live their usual lives. Is there any IRL regime that could've done something similar?

tHE WHOLE premise fell flat in the face when those people can turn their oppressors in a violent revolution,

 

[Beatriz]

Why would they want slave/minority populations to gain military experience?

 

[Nivek]

Why would they want slave/minority populations to gain military experience?

to force the loser get the waifu :v

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

One thing about 86's premise worth note is what the RSM is fighting. The Legion (being haywire robots just trying to wipe out mankind) can't be reasoned with or defected to. If the Colorata turn their weapons on the Alba it just means everyone dies. Whatever they feel towards their oppressors, day to day necessity is that they fight the Legion if they want to see tomorrow.

Now, there are no haywire killer robots in our world waging a war of annihilation against a criminally despotic state. So let's go with the next closest thing: Stalin has his anti-Semitic phase earlier and creates some Yiddish Rifle Corps to be fed into the Rzhev Meat Grinder. Intentionally putting "Jewish Shock Armies" at the head of attacks on German strong points could do a number on the adult male Jewish population of the USSR, and could be easily propagandized away (they are the least likely to surrender making them the best shock troops/we are helping them seek vengeance against the Nazis) when questions about the practice emerge.

 

[Workable Goblin]

tHE WHOLE premise fell flat in the face when those people can turn their oppressors in a violent revolution,

That assumes that the oppressors don't have a much larger military the shock troops are only a small portion of, or don't have large internal security forces, or don't carefully limit the shock troops to roles and equipment that aren't much threat to the state. An extreme example of the latter would be using them to clear minefields, which doesn't provide much scope for rebelling.

 

[kholieken]

the closest RL example is probably Russia's Jewish Cantonist and Ottoman's Janissaries.

 

[Remitonov]

That assumes that the oppressors don't have a much larger military the shock troops are only a small portion of, or don't have large internal security forces, or don't carefully limit the shock troops to roles and equipment that aren't much threat to the state. An extreme example of the latter would be using them to clear minefields, which doesn't provide much scope for rebelling.

The only reason the Eighty-Six aren't rebelling is because they're all targeted by a Terminator-esque horde. Won't matter if they succeed in topping San Magnolia, which would be frighteningly easy with virtually all military members from the ruling ethnicity reduced to lazy pigs entirely in the officer class. The Legion would still savage them all regardless. Muv Luv Schwarzesmarken is a pretty good comparison to a hypothetical Eighty-Six revolution, where toppling the East German dictatorship and reunifying with the West meant practically nothing in a few years, when a similar zerg-esque alien enemy simply overran everything. And that revolution took place well after the alien invasion already started.

Attempting to apply that in real life though... I don't think that's even possible without a truly existential threat. The Mongols came closest, but even they weren't the omnicidal type. History had already shown multiple times that having a clique of armed slaves just leads to a point where said slaves simply seize control of power in some way.

 

[Lord High Executioner]

the closest thing would be penal battalions or Mamluke-type slave soldiers.

There was Project 100,000 of the Vietnam War, but they were, if memory serves, not separate units.
It also wasn't intended to eliminate undesirables, but neither were the mamluks and janissaries.

 

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

In the anime/light novel Eighty-Six, the authoritarian government of the Republic of Saint Magnolia forces the racially impure to fight numerically and technologically superior enemy forces, with the aim of winning their war while eliminating said people, that have been deported to the front to the last man (and woman); most of the public doesn't know about this, even as propaganda and schoolbooks depict the Eighty-Six (so called because they reside in the 86th district of the republic, a military district no one is supposed to enter or exit) as literally subhuman.

In C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength, World War II is explained as one of several wars planned by Earth's secret rulers (evil spirits called "macrobes" and their corrupt human henchmen) to eliminate Earth's "surplus" population.

"It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers."

 

[GuildedAgeNostalgia]

- How often did the English use Irish as meat shields in their wars?

- What about Saddam with Shia Muslims? Weren't the Republican Guard divisions entirely Sunni and the rest were Shia?

- Japan did use Korean units in World War Two.

 

[Lord High Executioner]

- How often did the English use Irish as meat shields in their wars?

Good question. Did they ever?
If memory serves something like a third of the British Army was Irish in/by Victorian times,
with plenty of Irishmen serving in a lot or even most of non-Irish regiments.

The large number of Shiites in Saddam's army would presumably be explained by them being
the majority population.