"Our Struggle": What If Hitler Had Been a Communist?
- Thread starter The Red
- Start date
True enough but still, Hitler being say, a power hungry monarchist maniac would also be a little out of character.
I imagine Fascist Italy may succeed in making Libya a majority-Italian “Fourth Shore” after the discovery of oil.
Very important to remember before people get a bit carried away.
If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times, all TLs should have an incredibly costly invasion of at least one island nation.
They may. The success or failure of such an attempt does not only depend on the Italians. Several hundred thousand Libyans will have something to say about that.
Whilst they do have a mutual enemy there will be more than a few teething problems when it comes to building an actual alliance, the TL is going back to Italy very shortly.
If French Algeria falls I imagine Italy would settle most of the refugees into Libya. That in itself would lead to something for the Libyan natives.
Out of curiosity, what is this TL's hitlers opinion on Jews? I can't help but think he might have his attentions more to the upper class than jews specifically, (though I think that senegalese soldier is a bad sign for hitlers opinion on africans in this TL.)
Hitler still holds anti-semitic views ITTL although they've never really developed out of the "parochial" form of his youth, as you say his attention is more on the upper class and the "international financier plot" to enslave the world and particularly Germany. Kennan expands on Hitler's views on Africans when describing German Ideology.
I didn't notice the first time, but Kennan OTL wasn't a published writer until the late 40s. That could hint to the war either lasting very long, or more likely, ending in stalemate.
Redcoat
Banned
Bit o' an understatement pal. Oh man the far right backlash from this is gonna...At best I guess we're going to see all of Europe end up like the former Warsaw Pact. I don't even know if socialist policies would escape this shadow. Hope they do
An earlier post (made about a year ago on the subject of the Communist air force) set in 1947 describes the war as lasting for "eleven years" by that point and still not being resolved. A whole generation will be defined by this struggle, and who knows-- maybe the war never even ends, and the world is stuck in Armistice Hell for decades after that.
Assuming that I read the earlier post correctly and the war still begins in 1936... the most recent post on KPD-SPD rapprochement was set in 1930. Hitler has 6 years to gain power and whip the Germans into war-readiness, so he's on a much faster schedule than OTL Hitler.
As the author has reminded us, Hitler remains viscerally racist, but so far the major canon evidence is his reaction to Senegalese French troops. And however slimy and treacherous the leadership and all too many acolytes of the Third International have been, and however crude and ugly anti-African racism in the Soviet Union could get in grubby personal practice, on paper Leninism was always anti-racist in its core ideology, and this was basis of recruiting such core figures as Ho Chi Minh. To the dark annals of sordid practice of half-reconstructed bigots I could add the attitudes of Russian "comrades" to the Chinese Communists, and no doubt a mirror bigotry of the Chinese against their Russian one time patrons. And there is always Pol Pot to muddy the waters further.
Marx then is not an infallible inoculation against the fevers of racism. But it is a fact that the Marxist wings of radical progressivism have always, if not accomplishing a total and sweeping immunity to these delusions, nor as fully nurtured compassion as one might hope, applied a certain withering scorn to this school of ideological thought. The basic concept of the unity of the world working class is indeed a powerful solvent against the grosser as well as more subtle forms of racist thought.
Frankly I am not sure the author has done an ATL Hitler full justice in how much the astringent effect of Marxist and Leninist thought might flense away Hitler's preconceptions and resentments of his younger days. Neither do I dare presume it should have been as thorough as I could hope; benefit of doubt goes to author canon then. We have a Hitler who definitely does not see non-Europeans through the same eyes as Europeans; it would be interesting to see how he handles Chinese and other Asian Communists.
I'd have to go back through the canon posts myself to remind me how he does relate to Jewish people, comrades, potential recruits, and those whose choices lend themselves to demonization from a revolutionary perspective--will he/has he fallen into the trap of taking for granted bigoted crap in generating cheap Red claptrap, or will he/would he take a higher road of focusing on the actual sins of capitalism as such?
This is not your grandfather's Hitler of OTL. How improved he is is the question, but I see him as definitely having enjoyed some benefit of a mental cleansing.
It frankly troubles me that between author prophecy and the presumption that Hitler deleneda est that carries over from his racist legacy of OTL, we assume his revolutionary Germany will have the uglier aspects of the OTL Reich and that it must fail as well. This is established for this TL, I suppose. But must it be for any Red Hitler TL? Do we assume Hitler had some magical level of twisted evil distinct from that of other mere humans installed in him somehow, or are we demanding retribution for his vile sins committed OTL across the multiverses?
Can Hitler in fact be saved?
But what about a successful invasion aided by a successful revolution?
As you say, class consciousness and Marxism can be remedies to the diseases of antisemitism and racism, but for them to work as a cure relies on many other factors. Hitler was twenty three when the PoD occurs, an age where most people are open to new ideas but also where prejudices instilled from a infancy have been allowed to fester inside a mind warped by an abusive father and the death of a mother he adored. Here he hasn't come into contact with people like Eckhart and Streicher to fuel his antisemitism into a fanatical and all encompassing ideology but at the same time there hasn't been any earnest effort on the part of anyone to clear his prejudices away entirely. There have been a few factors leading him away from antisemitism; his left-wing friends in the Vienna Futurist scene, the injustice faced by Lieutenant Gutmann at the hands of the Deutsches Heer, the martyrdom of Kurt Eisner from the bullet of a rabid antisemite, etc, but nothing to remove it entirely.
These are very big questions and maybe it would be better if they were left to a later date. For what it's worth, I strongly believe in nurture over nature and I think that ascribing a supernatural level of evil to Hitler is unhelpful if not actively counter-productive but I would say that I'd find the idea of an unambiguously good and heroic Hitler to be a bit distasteful, even if the writer went to great lengths to show how different their path had been from OTL. This is not the Hitler of OTL but I don't think he should be unrecognisable as a character in AH either. This is partially why the first line of the TL is the lament that 'the civilised human spirit, whether one calls it bourgeois or merely leaves it at civilised, cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny.'
Have you seen the climax of the late Soviet Belarussian film Run Come See? (That's how my Soviet studies professor translated this late 1980s production anyway)?
I personally have little desire to "save Hitler" even in the abstract, though it certainly would be a major winning goal to anyone trying to write a story of human redemption, as Niven and Pournelle sought to redeem
Mussolini
So it is that a lot of people's assumptions they seem to be carrying over from OTL turn out to be fairly well justified in the text.
For what it is worth though, while I agree that Hitler's racist bigotry is one pillar of the unforgivableness and monstrosity of the Third Reich of OTL, there was another one that logically is independent of it, though correlation is not entirely accidental in the real world...authoritarianism. Here too I would think a Marxist tradition is less hopeless for perhaps detangling the mind on this point, but even less than racism is it likely to guarantee such a result. I was writing a whole different reply on this subject, on the paradox of the Enlightenment mentality between the virtues of the free contention of rival ideas and thoughts, versus the tendency to go all Whiggish jumping to the definitive answers at the back of the book, claiming the moral authority to cut through the fog of debate to lay down the settled resolution and move on from the din of the free market of ideas. To indeed declare, in the name of enlightenment and truth itself, that argument and ambiguity are inherently bad in themselves, and to situate oneself, by the amazing good fortune of historic destiny, at the very cusp of all authority and demand, in the name of sweet reason and common sense order, the abject obedience of others.
Even an ATL Hitler I can imagine somehow completely purged of all racism whatsoever seems pretty likely to cling to this aspect of personality, and to find the most academically enthusiastic absorption of the most erudite and lucid forms of Marxist philosophy to do darn little to challenge him on this point. In my view, the Marxist tradition is much more firmly and legitimately ensconced in the basic Enlightenment mentality of Modern Europe than most of its ideological rivals, particularly the far right forms developed in the early 20th century largely in specific rejection of Enlightenment itself. A deep value in the Marxist mentality is the notion of dispassionate and sincere debate, the dialectic itself being as it were incarnated in such forms of thought. But in practical life, many a Marxist has let true and fair criticism go by the board in the service of morale in the Cause proving to seem a more important overall value, at least in the heat of the struggle--and what Marxist Politburo ever comes to power without going through such an existential narrow passage, when the demands of Party solidarity impose the seductive logic of "Democratic Centralism?"
"Dear Comrades, we never rely on anything but the most tested logic, but rest assured minds more flexible and enlightened than you can aspire to, at least in the short time we have while under fire in the current crisis, have already turned this issue over and over, we have considered everything, so for the sake of the victory of the working class cease all your questions and take this definitive ruling we hand down to you for reliable truth, and let us move on to more pressing concerns. A true child of the Proletariat understands our conclusions instinctively--if you keep showing doubt and confusion we must conclude you are of questionable class allegiance and need to be purged for the sake of our necessary victory!"
It has a very different tone in many ways than a screed from Mein Kampf of OTL, but in its basic conclusion-follow your leader, he knows better than you do--the effect is exactly the same.
And it is clear that in this TL, Hitler will always uphold the wisdom arrived at by Democratic Centralism, as long as he himself is among the sages to vet each gem of logic so canonized. This is what democracy means to Hitler--superior wisdom through the properly honed collective.
Philip Jose Farmer does an interesting redemption of Herman Göring in his River World series, in the first book he's still the despicable asshole we all know and loathe but by the fourth book he's a totally different person.
All the characters in the River World books are historical and I recommend them to all history/sci-fi fans.