YMMV? Your mileage may vary on whether the apartheid system was evil or not? Are you shitting me?
As for the original question—it was useful to the ruling class of South Africa to maintain this system for two reasons: first, it created an enormous laboring lower class consisting of the...
Assuming a successful German or Chinese or American communist revolution is also excluded: decolonization takes longer (if it takes place at all, with the most important source of aid for anti-colonial revolutions gone, and the ideology behind them much less prominent), meaning that the...
To be fair, Murakami does not have right-wing or nationalistic sensibilities at all in real life (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle condemns exactly the kind of festering nationalism that drove this TL's Japanese into annihilation), so the chance of him pulling a Mishima or something is like less than...
I don't think it's particularly possible short of a drastic shift in Nazi ideology and war aims. The idea of lebensraum that formed the crux of the German expansion's motives intrinsically demanded the conquest, subjugation, and genocide of Slavic peoples. There was no possibility on the...
[OOC] Why would the US collapse at the same time as the Soviet Union? The US was prospering as the USSR fell, and there weren't really any big devolutionary movements here like those that the USSR had in the 1980s.