10-06-2021, 08:56 AM
(10-04-2021, 08:59 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(03-16-2020, 02:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(11-08-2019, 07:53 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: And Adenauer would have been nothing without the Allies winning the war. During the nazi time, he was busy enough hiding himself, no time for resistance.
I have my idea for a novel in which America becomes a bad guy (rule by the KKK) and the Weimar Republic survives the extremist threat of the early 1930's, and with the democratic trends overpowering the militaristic trends in Japanese life, Germany and Japan become the Good Guys. Note that with a leader like Adenauer Germany has no Holocaust, and Germany's Model Minority makes the sorts of contributions to German society that they do in reality in America. Many American Jews flee to Germany and its partners rather than risk KKK pogroms.
While Britain is fascist under Moseley, India becomes a haven for the British Royal Family and gains independence (analogy: Brazil becoming independent of Portugal). Stalin's Soviet Union can be nothing other than evil.
It would be very different from many of the alternative-history novels not in an Axis victory... I see Adenauer as remarkably similar to Churchill. (The thug powers of the real Axis lost because as gangsters they could never win the peace. Real victory comes when the defeated side loses all cause for resistance or uprisings). Churchill and Adenauer basically trade places in history as do their countries, except that Churchill takes the role in history that the plotters of July 20 had for Goerdeler. The British plotters succeed, and one of the first deeds of the new Queen (guess who!) is to ask forgiveness of the British people that the British Union of Fascists had started to persecute. The yellow badges that read "JEW" become objects of pride in Britain -- and, in view of the swift German victory in France in 1940 -- France, those that read "JUIF" or "JUIVE" . (Laval is also a Bad Guy) suddenly get a similar treatment .
Oh, what of the fearsome Soviet Union? Let's put it this way -- at some point Stalin flees for Klan America in an aircraft that disappears over the Arctic Ocean in one of the great mysteries of history.
I even have an idea for cover art designed by an otherwise-obscure commercial artist who went back to art after his Beer Hall Putsch failed showing a "THIS IS THE ENEMY" poster showing a Klansman as an arsonist, rapist, and torturer.
And Robert E. Lee encouraged unity once the issues of the Civil War were decided. And yet statues of him were defaced and destroyed. Not too long ago I was talking with someone who is of the opinion that statues like this along with, say, Columbus, should not be destroyed because they are part and parcel of history, regardless of whether you believed what they stood for. When two popular music groups along with one sports team changed their names due to such political correct pressure, that is going a bit too far, IMO.
One of the ironies about the Atlanta Braves is that they were originally the Boston Braves. Participants in the Boston Tea Party dressed up like Indian warriors down to the war paint and cast the tea in British ships into Boston Harbor in the original Tea Party (1773). That may have been the original allusion. They did find "Hammers", which will be an allusion to the Great late "Hammerin' Hank" Aaron.
The Chicago Blackhawks refer to a great warrior and not to a tribe. Cleveland Indians? They will rename themselves the "Guardians". Kansas City Chiefs and Washington Redskins? Clearly good causes for name changes. "Redskin" is derogatory. American Indians have red skins only if they sunburn, which is eminently possible for people who identify as tribal members even if they have only one grandparent who was a "full-blooded Indian" and ancestors who were otherwise European.
I wouldn't ask the Chippewas of Central Michigan University to change their name. Mount Pleasant, Michigan is close to an existing Reservation -- the Chippewa Reservation.
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By winning the peace, the victors may end up with use for the clean members of the defeated side, as was so for Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, who surrendered at Stalingrad as food and munitions gave out. von Paulus seems to have been clean of Nazi atrocities unlike many other Wehrmacht generals. Hans Speidel, one of the few plotters against Satan Incarnate to survive the war, played an inestimable role in founding the new Bundeswehr that repudiated everything Nazi. The would-be heroes of January 20 are heroes of the Bundeswehr. Going back to antiquity, Alexander sought to rule Iran through the defeated Emperor of Persia. A lasting peace is a more definitive victory than is an order of oppression that can end only in an uprising against weakened and dissolute overlords.
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.