(08-28-2018, 07:20 AM)TheNomad Wrote: I am fascinated by your American/Japanese ideas. The movie Cloud Atlas really introduced me to that concept. Everyone (in that vignette) is trying to get cosmetic surgery to look Asian, Asian culture dominates everything, etc.
And your mention of the America v Germany thing. Good stuff
Idea for a science-fiction novel. I'm tired of the ones in which the fascists win and murder millions and enslave far more. I'm thinking of having Stalin crash and die, wreckage not to be found for decades or even centuries, into the Arctic Ocean and such enforcers as Beria, Kaganovich, and Vishinsky die with ropes around their necks. The difference between the KKK and the Nazis is that the Klan never got to commit the genocide that its bigotry and tyranny would have made inevitable.
People recognize that Germany and Japan were defeated and attribute such to the inferiority of their armed forces. No, their armed forces were excellent. The problem for them was that the upper leadership so badly mistreated defeated peoples that nobody could ever concede defeat. The nation is not the problem; the ideology is. I'm starting Britain with Oswald Moseley and France with Pierre Laval, and I am giving the Germans a quick victory in France as in the real World War II... and an unqualified defeat of Britain at Dunkirk. Britain's wartime leadership is not at all Churchillian until after Britain surrenders. Stalin's regime dies because the Germans decollectivize Soviet agriculture, literally giving land to the farmers. Do you want a new and strong Ukraine? You have it! For a parallel to the Portuguese monarchy situating itself in Brazil during the Napoleonic threat, I have a British near-royal establishing himself as Emperor Louis I of India. That is an India containing all lands of the Subcontinent, including what became Pakistan (and later Bangladesh), Sri Lanka, and Burma.
The problem with the Japanese is that they try to force their culture on people not Japanese... and it does not work.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.