10-11-2021, 02:44 PM
(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).
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.
Most historical figures have some complexity attached. They take time in which to develop into their starring roles. Churchill bungled Gallipoli during World War I, which was the only chance in which to relieve Imperial Russia before we-all-know-what happened, yet he masterfully parried the Nazi assault upon Britain in World War II. Confederate figures who declared that slavery was over, that the Union side had won fair and square, and that white people would need to accept blacks as free men able to start paid careers, own land. and form businesses, are very different from the refractory types who tried to retain some of the vile characteristics of the old way of life because such were profitable. There's a huge difference between Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And, yes, Adolf Hitler was once an innocent babe. But this said, Nazism brought out the absolute worst in human nature and fostered the rise of horrible people. The KKK was much like that, too. Some people recognized early that the Klan was moral poison; others found it a vehicle for their agendas and could numb themselves to its evil.
I can imagine the success of Reconstruction, and it might have taken a few more ex-Confederate figures (former Confederate General James Longstreet was among them) to recognize the validity of the Union victory. Longstreet was a rarity. But that too is alternative history.
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.