I know I'm a few months late, but this is a great post. A world without Hitler and the Nazis would look very foreign to us.
No Hitler = far right wank?
- Thread starter Fatt Shea
- Start date
That may be the case in the US, I'm pretty sure in Europe red has always been the color of the left. If you search for posters of the dutch SDAP, the dutch social-democratic party before WW2, you'll see that red is the main color used.
Here's my contribution:
To be quite honest.....in short, I know this may end up being controversial, but even if Hitler's rise to power had been butterflied, it ultimately would not have been able to sidestep the rise of liberal democracy in Europe-maybe delay it by a few decades in the worst-case plausible scenarios, but you wouldn't have been able to prevent it altogether-the seeds for what some call the "liberal world order" were laid long before the 1950s, and in some cases, even a bit before the year 1800.
And for all the talk about how World War II massively affected Western perception of various things(racism, xenophobia, etc.).....well, it certainly did somewhat, no question about that. But honestly, not as much as many may have thought.....or, more importantly, as much as it could have. Which seems counterintuitive, but just in the U.S. alone, we had things like the decline in eugenics beginning around 1930, or the fact that the Civil Rights Movement predated the end of WWII by nearly 80 years. But also, sadly, on the other hand.....I know some folks out there genuinely don't realize this, but there were a lot of things that really did go quite wrong, or at least didn't go nearly as well as they could have(and at least in some cases, should have) after the war, too.
(Yes, I am, in effect, saying that the state of affairs of IOTL was not at all inevitable, mainly in the way that there was quite a bit more room for potential societal progress after the war.)
Not entirely wrong, but "quasi-religious" is hardly the term I'd use to describe all this(and honestly, seems a little problematic to call it that, considering the current cultural circumstances we find ourselves in right now, not to mention it's even an oversimplification, too).
Erm, not quite, though. Yes, it would probably be at least somewhat different, but not necessarily radically so, depending on the circumstances. In fact, a world with a POD in, say, 1907 or 1908 would very likely be rather more similar to OTL than, say, one that diverged in the early 1800s, or the early 1700s, and so on and so forth, differences aside, and yes, very similar values probably would have emerged even with a POD a little before 1800, let alone one just before WWI(and if anything, a good number of universes might have just been more progressive than our own, considering how much still went wrong after WWII IOTL).
🙄🙄 You really wanna go there? Really? There is nothing "unnatural" or "pathological" even about recognizing how bad slavery was in the U.S., let alone white supremacy(which historically was, and continues to be, a problem). And for fuck's sakes, this isn't even really an accurate reading of the modern understanding of history to begin with.
Yeah, agreed. I get why some folks are feeling pessimistic considering how poorly some things have turned out lately, IOTL, but for goodness sakes, though, you'd think
No, I'm afraid CountDVB very likely would be right, and in fact, there'd be a real possibility of Europe ending up with multiple guys like Hitler, or Ante Pavelic, etc. running these countries-even if it didn't spark a new global conflict, it could still potentially lead to the devastation of Europe and quite possibly even a nuclear/biological/chemical exchange.....or maybe a whole shitload of them.
True, and the same was also true with Apartheid in SA and Jim Crow in the American South.
It almost certainly would have happened, though. Maybe delayed by about a decade or so relative to OTL but even that might be stretching plausibility a bit-the most pessimistic plausible scenario I can think of is that it starts in the 1960s and maybe takes until the 1980s to implement in full, for Western Europe. (And maybe moving that timetable forward by a decade or two in Central/Eastern Europe.)
Decolonization might have been delayed, yes, but probably not for more than maybe a few decades at the very latest, if that(even if the USSR is completely butterflied, which might be really hard to do plausibly with a POD of, oh, say, anywhere later than 4-5 years prior to the beginning of WWI, short of the Reds just being outright destroyed in TTL's Russian Civil War).
Can't quite speak as much for OTL's Europe, but here in the U.S., at least, mass migration happened because this country was seen as a promising destination, and big business elites were by no means universally in favor of immigration-or the working class strongly opposed to it-even IOTL.
The sanctions helped, yes, no doubt about that, but the problem is, the system itself simply wasn't tenable and could have only lasted through increasing amounts of force and/or corruption(much like with Jim Crow in the Southern U.S.)
Again, though.....even if there had been no WWII, it's pretty much a given that there would have been something else that shocked people awake. Maybe someone tries to commit a mass genocide of the Romani in the 1950s. Or, in one of the absolute worst case scenarios, some extreme-right wing general military guy in the U.S. decides he might want to drop a nuke or two on civil rights protesters in like, Birmingham or Atlanta or something, sometime in the '60s, or maybe the '70s(or, barring that, maybe several thousand people are murdered in terrorist attacks or something).
I understand, but the truth is, though, way too many people seem to take the post-WWII historical developments of OTL for granted, as in, there couldn't really have been anything much better than what we got; even the historical record itself indicates otherwise, at least if one knows where to look(exactly how much better? That's a valid question, and certainly there is some room for debate on this-but still.....).
To be quite honest.....in short, I know this may end up being controversial, but even if Hitler's rise to power had been butterflied, it ultimately would not have been able to sidestep the rise of liberal democracy in Europe-maybe delay it by a few decades in the worst-case plausible scenarios, but you wouldn't have been able to prevent it altogether-the seeds for what some call the "liberal world order" were laid long before the 1950s, and in some cases, even a bit before the year 1800.
And for all the talk about how World War II massively affected Western perception of various things(racism, xenophobia, etc.).....well, it certainly did somewhat, no question about that. But honestly, not as much as many may have thought.....or, more importantly, as much as it could have. Which seems counterintuitive, but just in the U.S. alone, we had things like the decline in eugenics beginning around 1930, or the fact that the Civil Rights Movement predated the end of WWII by nearly 80 years. But also, sadly, on the other hand.....I know some folks out there genuinely don't realize this, but there were a lot of things that really did go quite wrong, or at least didn't go nearly as well as they could have(and at least in some cases, should have) after the war, too.
(Yes, I am, in effect, saying that the state of affairs of IOTL was not at all inevitable, mainly in the way that there was quite a bit more room for potential societal progress after the war.)
Not entirely wrong, but "quasi-religious" is hardly the term I'd use to describe all this(and honestly, seems a little problematic to call it that, considering the current cultural circumstances we find ourselves in right now, not to mention it's even an oversimplification, too).
Erm, not quite, though. Yes, it would probably be at least somewhat different, but not necessarily radically so, depending on the circumstances. In fact, a world with a POD in, say, 1907 or 1908 would very likely be rather more similar to OTL than, say, one that diverged in the early 1800s, or the early 1700s, and so on and so forth, differences aside, and yes, very similar values probably would have emerged even with a POD a little before 1800, let alone one just before WWI(and if anything, a good number of universes might have just been more progressive than our own, considering how much still went wrong after WWII IOTL).
🙄🙄 You really wanna go there? Really? There is nothing "unnatural" or "pathological" even about recognizing how bad slavery was in the U.S., let alone white supremacy(which historically was, and continues to be, a problem). And for fuck's sakes, this isn't even really an accurate reading of the modern understanding of history to begin with.
Yeah, agreed. I get why some folks are feeling pessimistic considering how poorly some things have turned out lately, IOTL, but for goodness sakes, though, you'd think
No, I'm afraid CountDVB very likely would be right, and in fact, there'd be a real possibility of Europe ending up with multiple guys like Hitler, or Ante Pavelic, etc. running these countries-even if it didn't spark a new global conflict, it could still potentially lead to the devastation of Europe and quite possibly even a nuclear/biological/chemical exchange.....or maybe a whole shitload of them.
True, and the same was also true with Apartheid in SA and Jim Crow in the American South.
It almost certainly would have happened, though. Maybe delayed by about a decade or so relative to OTL but even that might be stretching plausibility a bit-the most pessimistic plausible scenario I can think of is that it starts in the 1960s and maybe takes until the 1980s to implement in full, for Western Europe. (And maybe moving that timetable forward by a decade or two in Central/Eastern Europe.)
Decolonization might have been delayed, yes, but probably not for more than maybe a few decades at the very latest, if that(even if the USSR is completely butterflied, which might be really hard to do plausibly with a POD of, oh, say, anywhere later than 4-5 years prior to the beginning of WWI, short of the Reds just being outright destroyed in TTL's Russian Civil War).
Can't quite speak as much for OTL's Europe, but here in the U.S., at least, mass migration happened because this country was seen as a promising destination, and big business elites were by no means universally in favor of immigration-or the working class strongly opposed to it-even IOTL.
The sanctions helped, yes, no doubt about that, but the problem is, the system itself simply wasn't tenable and could have only lasted through increasing amounts of force and/or corruption(much like with Jim Crow in the Southern U.S.)
Again, though.....even if there had been no WWII, it's pretty much a given that there would have been something else that shocked people awake. Maybe someone tries to commit a mass genocide of the Romani in the 1950s. Or, in one of the absolute worst case scenarios, some extreme-right wing general military guy in the U.S. decides he might want to drop a nuke or two on civil rights protesters in like, Birmingham or Atlanta or something, sometime in the '60s, or maybe the '70s(or, barring that, maybe several thousand people are murdered in terrorist attacks or something).
I understand, but the truth is, though, way too many people seem to take the post-WWII historical developments of OTL for granted, as in, there couldn't really have been anything much better than what we got; even the historical record itself indicates otherwise, at least if one knows where to look(exactly how much better? That's a valid question, and certainly there is some room for debate on this-but still.....).
There is no reason to believe that the end of things like Apartheid, Jim Crow or colonialism was inevitable, or that the victory of liberal values is a foregone conclusion. In fact, this belief is exactly the kind of quasi-religious attitude I brought up in my post from a few months back. I’ve also never seen an explanation why it’s supposedly inevitable that European countries will eventually just give up their colonies, or that the US or South Africa will abolish racial segregation. It seems to always come down to something like “the people will eventually see the error of their ways and accept universal equality for everyone, because reasons.”
But if we look at the second half of the 20th century, and look at the actual facts on the ground, not just the feel-good stories we’ve all been told in school or seen on TV, then it becomes quite clear that anti-racism and other egalitarian projects of this kind had to be imposed on society literally at gunpoint. The US military had to literally march white and black students into the same school at the point of a bayonet to make it clear to the country that integration was happening whether people liked it or not. And make no mistake, the majority of people back then very much did not like racial integration. At all. When white neighborhoods in Boston protested federal busing policies, they were literally put under military occupation by the FBI and the National Guard, who imposed curfews and bans on public assemblies. The reality is, liberal values were only victorious because the ruling classes of the west were willing to impose them through illiberal means.
And that is nothing new, all ruling classes across history have imposed their values onto society in one way or the other. Scandinavian countries didn’t adopt protestantism because ‘the people’ decided that the catholic church’s corruption was no longer tolerable; they adopted protestantism because that’s what their upper classes decided for them. The same is true for those countries that remained catholic. In short, radical changes in social and cultural values only happen when the ruling classes (or at least significant parts of them) want those changes to happen. The American revolution for example was led by some of the richest and most powerful men in north America, and the French revolution would’ve never gone beyond a few violent riots if it wasn’t for the enthusiastic support of parts of the French clergy and aristocracy. The Russian czar was toppled because the Russian elites had lost faith in the monarchy, and even the Bolsheviks couldn’t have won the civil war without formerly high ranking czarist officers in the Red Army (not to mention that they were financed by the German government).
The real question then is: what makes a society’s ruling class change its mind? One explanation is economic incentives. That certainly explains why colonialism died out after WW2; it simply wasn’t profitable anymore (or not as profitable as free trade with independent countries). Another explanation is geopolitical considerations; when your main rival is the USSR, a global superpower whose ostensible ideology emphasizes racial equality, then it might be prudent to make some concessions to not prove that rival right. But I think there’s a third explanation, which is often a result of the first two: lack of moral confidence. When the ruling classes doubt themselves, and are no longer convinced that their religion/ideology/way of life is superior to that of others, then it’s usually only a matter of time before they abandon it entirely and adopt a new religion/ideology/way of life (which is then subsequently imposed on the rest of society).
But if we look at the second half of the 20th century, and look at the actual facts on the ground, not just the feel-good stories we’ve all been told in school or seen on TV, then it becomes quite clear that anti-racism and other egalitarian projects of this kind had to be imposed on society literally at gunpoint. The US military had to literally march white and black students into the same school at the point of a bayonet to make it clear to the country that integration was happening whether people liked it or not. And make no mistake, the majority of people back then very much did not like racial integration. At all. When white neighborhoods in Boston protested federal busing policies, they were literally put under military occupation by the FBI and the National Guard, who imposed curfews and bans on public assemblies. The reality is, liberal values were only victorious because the ruling classes of the west were willing to impose them through illiberal means.
And that is nothing new, all ruling classes across history have imposed their values onto society in one way or the other. Scandinavian countries didn’t adopt protestantism because ‘the people’ decided that the catholic church’s corruption was no longer tolerable; they adopted protestantism because that’s what their upper classes decided for them. The same is true for those countries that remained catholic. In short, radical changes in social and cultural values only happen when the ruling classes (or at least significant parts of them) want those changes to happen. The American revolution for example was led by some of the richest and most powerful men in north America, and the French revolution would’ve never gone beyond a few violent riots if it wasn’t for the enthusiastic support of parts of the French clergy and aristocracy. The Russian czar was toppled because the Russian elites had lost faith in the monarchy, and even the Bolsheviks couldn’t have won the civil war without formerly high ranking czarist officers in the Red Army (not to mention that they were financed by the German government).
The real question then is: what makes a society’s ruling class change its mind? One explanation is economic incentives. That certainly explains why colonialism died out after WW2; it simply wasn’t profitable anymore (or not as profitable as free trade with independent countries). Another explanation is geopolitical considerations; when your main rival is the USSR, a global superpower whose ostensible ideology emphasizes racial equality, then it might be prudent to make some concessions to not prove that rival right. But I think there’s a third explanation, which is often a result of the first two: lack of moral confidence. When the ruling classes doubt themselves, and are no longer convinced that their religion/ideology/way of life is superior to that of others, then it’s usually only a matter of time before they abandon it entirely and adopt a new religion/ideology/way of life (which is then subsequently imposed on the rest of society).
Maybe that is true in the US, but in Europe we were seeing anti semitism, anti democratic ideologies and radical nationalism on the rise, we also saw influence of Bolsehvik communism being important (which made the far right more powerful and gave them a reason to shut down democracy). Also, the civil rights movement existing since then doesn't mean it would have grown at a similar rate, it could have stayed the same size as it was in the 30s.
RuneGloves
Banned
It probably wouldn't. Would be just like what our great-grandparents lived through.
RuneGloves
Banned
Ethnocentrism still exists in Eastern Europe to this day, for that matter everywhere on the planet except western countries. Western countries aversion to ethnonationalism is a global minority.
Working class were generally opposed to cheap labourers diminishing their wages. It was mostly a policy by big businesses.i
Very unlikely. WW2 represented a war against an ultranationalist foreign ideology, and scorned anything domestically similar in the following decades.
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Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
Can we create a separate thread about xenophobia/American anti-immigration sentiment among the working class?
General literacy: commands and decisions can be moved through the national body.
Bureaucratic generalisation: local bodies can respond to command.
Postal service: the movement of the above.
Imperialist language: the unification of a body of people.
Demand for high volumes of labour: bodies.
The bolt action rifle, the air cooled machine gun, the 81 mm mortar, the 75 mm gun/howitzer, and the bicycle.
Decolonisation is over determined by imperialist capitalisation of the colonies. Or to quote a great poet, “AK47 is the rule, don’t make me act the —— fool.”
There actually was, though.
*Sigh*. I'm sorry, but.....do you not realize how problematic this framing is?
There are plenty of explanations that have been offered, Rufus; I dunno if they're explanations that will satisfy you yourself, per se, but explanations nonetheless. I myself, on this very thread, have already mentioned other things that could have happened in place of World War II-hell, to add, there could have been other equivalents of the Holocaust if there hadn't been the Nazis, which would have been horrifying to people as well. And furthermore, you also seem to make the assumption that everything, or at least certain things, that happened after, and even before, WWII IOTL was essentially the best we could have ever had. And what I, and certain other people are trying to say is no, that isn't the case. (Not at all, in fact, and if anything we may well have ended up in one of the more pessimistic possible worlds-at least in certain aspects)
I'll just skip down below.
That was true in Little Rock.....but that was mainly because the segregationists had been so deeply entrenched in power-which, btw, was not necessarily inevitable(avoiding *Jim Crow altogether, admittedly, is very hard to do, but at least somewhat decreasing its hold on the rest of society, not so much).
This may have been true in the South(especially in the deep South). Outside of the South, however, it was a rather more complicated story and even in the late '50s, early '60s, there was growing support for integration pretty much everywhere else(much of the elite, admittedly, was not so keen on it), and even the unrest in '67/'68 didn't produce a mass reversal in that.
Yes, there were a few more significant problems in Boston for a time in the '70s-but that was a particularly weird case and much of the controversy over busing in general wasn't really inevitable by any means, even IOTL. (That's not to say issues wouldn't have occurred, but probably on a rather lesser scale in many other scenarios.)
This is simply untrue. There was nothing "illiberal" about government intervention to defend civil rights, Rufus, and in fact, if anything was "illiberal" it was the opposition to such.
That's not entirely wrong.....but history really is more complicated than that, and in this regard, this would be especially true in the modern era. (After all, the successful revolution in Haiti was arguably an example of a conflict of not just cooperation between classes, but one of a few in which the downtrodden actually dominated the event, even if not the discourse surrounding it afterwards)
Again, though, it's more complicated. And sometimes, you can even see situations in which changes happen, or get rolled back even when even a majority of the elite doesn't necessarily desire it. In fact, for an example of the latter you can go look at the modern day U.S.-even in recent years some 70% of people support both protecting the rights of LGBT+ people and abortion rights, but we all know of a certain situation that happened in the U.S. recently in which the latter were just severely rolled back; only a minority of either the public or the ruling class wanted this, but it happened anyway. And going back to the the Russian Revolution, the vast majority of the Russian elite absolutely did not support the Communists at all(hence, why there was a civil war.). But considering much of the public did by late 1917/early 1918, it really didn't matter much, and the fact that they succeeded despite only a small portion of the Russian elite defecting ought to tell us something.
And then, at least here in the U.S, even IOTL you've had situations in which the ordinary citizen effectively had at least a roughly equal, if not even dominant, say in certain developments-the New Deal was possibly the best example, post-1900, of the latter, along with Civil Rights(that's not to say there weren't upper class people who sympathized-certainly there were at least a few-but they were by no means dominant), and arguably, much the same held true of suffrage(more of the former than the latter), and perhaps even Prohibition may have fit into this as well.
At least you acknowledge this. But the thing is, colonialism would have struggled to remain profitable with, or without WWII, and it's pretty much a given that colonialism also would have run into opposition on ethical grounds at some point as well. Could the lack of OTL's *WWII have delayed that somewhat? Yes, it could have, but it would arisen at some point. All that was needed for the latter was a major incident(like what happened in the Belgian Congp prior to 1910-horrifying enough even some people back then were disquieted by it-and it's worth noting that enough public outcry did allow for the worst atrocities to be stopped(yes, it took 20+ years to be effective in full, but it did eventually happen, even if other problems continued).
Lack of moral confidence is a very real thing, no dispute there. But you seem to forget that this also applies to society at large, and that there have been many cases were such crises were evident in large portions of society long before the upper class, etc. really got on board.
At least if you'd been talking about the pre-modern era that would have made more sense, especially as far fewer people had education, etc. than today. But the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, especially, changed all that at least where the West was concerned.
Honestly, if you'd at least tried to argue that (at least positive) societal change would be most optimally committed with the assistance of the elite, and that change can and sometimes does come mostly/entirely from the top down(which has also been true at times), I believe you would have had a rather more solid argument-and largely, I wouldn't have disagreed(though with certain caveats). But I have to be honest about that: the argument you put forward, instead, despite being verbose, just happened to be simplistic enough that it overlooked a number of critical nuances-this isn't meant to be a personal attack(and I hope nobody takes it that way), but I felt that critique was necessary.
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RuneGloves
Banned
Anti-immigration sentiment among working class is a class thing, rather than just American. So a thread on that specific region would miss the point.
Kraut recently did a video (32 minutes) making this exact point.
No Hitler would first do a progressive wank. The only way for the German economy not to collapse in 1923 is for WW1 to be shorter and end differently, without the punishing impacts of Versailles. I mentioned the items in an earlier post. At the end of OTL WW2, the WALLIES collaborated to rebuild Japan and Europe, bring a postwar prosperity in the sixties. Suppose a similar mood developed in the twenties and thirties. A prosperous Weimar Germany could start selling and applying technology, prototype transistors and tape recorders might be examples.
In OTL, television is credited with helping the civil rights movement by bringing images into the home. Since the Farnsworth picture tube was patented in 1929, perhaps progressive progress is accelerated. As I also said, you have a whole new century.
In OTL, television is credited with helping the civil rights movement by bringing images into the home. Since the Farnsworth picture tube was patented in 1929, perhaps progressive progress is accelerated. As I also said, you have a whole new century.
Liberalism winning out over other ideologies wasn’t inevitable. Before the holocaust, fascism or something similar was on the rise across the world. The defeat of the main fascistic powers along with the atrocities committed by Germany and Japan tanked its momentum.in a world without Hitler, the ideological struggle is likely to be much more competitive.
I do feel in the absence of Hitler a global conflict was inevitable until nuclear weapons were invented. History until 1945 was great powers going to war every so often m till fat man and little boy prematurely ended ww2. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as large scale as ww2 but these conflicts were inevitable. We like to think we’re more moral then our ancestors but now we just have a physical check on war between great powers.
Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
How would Fascistic nations respond to well, “the rise of the Colored Empires” and decolonization?
*excluding Japan and maybe the ROC
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It depends. There were efforts by the Egyptians to help the Germans and Italians during the North African campaign, because liberal democracies were the ones oppressing them specifically. In some places, it’s likely to be bloody. In others, there’s probably going to be an assimilation policy (Germanization, Italianization and Japanization). The scenario removes Hitler, so it’s possible that Germany will be under a less extreme nationalist (although racism is still going to be a feature). The Italians and the Japanese in certain parts of their Empires extended limited rights to subject people’s, albeit as second class citizens. We might see something similar to South Africa or Israel arise.
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Beatriz
Gone Fishin'
the possibility of *Revisionist "Hebrewization" of "Hebrewized Arabs" is intriguing, something like the Japanization of Taiwan.
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