AHC: Make Nazis win WW2

Marc

Donor
Assumptions, like idle curiosity, can be dangerously impressionable things.
You might ask yourself, why are there tons of timelines where evil does well, brutal evil doing well.
I wasn't suggesting censorship, just more honesty about the 10,000th thread on Deutschland über alles.
I learned long ago that topics that bother you, are the ones to be dealt with, not ignored.
But then, I'm old school about a lot of stuff.
 
Assumptions, like idle curiosity, can be dangerously impressionable things.
You might ask yourself, why are there tons of timelines where evil does well, brutal evil doing well.
I wasn't suggesting censorship, just more honesty about the 10,000th thread on Deutschland über alles.
I learned long ago that topics that bother you, are the ones to be dealt with, not ignored.
But then, I'm old school about a lot of stuff.

Well, no, I don't ask myself that, because it's obvious: there's tons of timelines on damn near everything imaginable here, and the bigger the change the more interesting the analysis. In the post-1900s forum, there's not much to change that's bigger than a Central Powers / Axis Powers victory in one of the World Wars, and so both are massively popular topics. That the Axis Powers winning means Team Evil wins results in the timelines you abhor.

Further, asking "You might ask yourself..." is passive-aggressively implying something unkind about the people who post in such topics and unworthy of discussion.
 

Anchises

Banned
Assumptions, like idle curiosity, can be dangerously impressionable things.
You might ask yourself, why are there tons of timelines where evil does well, brutal evil doing well.
I wasn't suggesting censorship, just more honesty about the 10,000th thread on Deutschland über alles.
I learned long ago that topics that bother you, are the ones to be dealt with, not ignored.
But then, I'm old school about a lot of stuff.

I don't like what you are implying here. This sort of generalized suspicion is not cool.

There are a lot of armchair generals and wargaming grognards here, who like talking about logistics, strategy and tactics and that is ok. Saying you have to "deal with that" seems intrusive.

This forum has a very strict moderation and CalBear and co. are keeping their house clean. Nazis are probably going to different corners of the internet to engage in their fantasies.

Accusing everyone of dog whistling, if a certain disclaimer isn't repeated ad infinitum seems meaningless. And I think it is pretty silly to question why there are a ton of dystopian TLs on this board. Thats the nature of alternate history, there are just as much positive/just different TLs.
 
(^^^)

Command dislocations, gross economic inefficiency and strategic incompetence
are three hallmarks of a "modern" industrial / bureaucratic totalitarian regime if the RTL histories are a realistic guide to the problems an ATL needs to overcome to promote a "victory" for such generic regimes. Whichever recent totalitarian regime proposed, whichever recent historic era, the usual outcome is a short unhappy era of war followed by either quick defeat or a long period of chaos until new political and social systems become established.

The reasons are straightforward:
a. attempts to consolidate power around one leader means effective economic and political decision making becomes corrupted as "natural" (as in scientifically proven to exist) corrective feedback mechanisms are either ignored, subverted or corrupted to force unrealistic outcomes. Democracies generally do better because stupid decisions provoke corrective behavior earlier and such corrective behavior comes quicker because leaders are replaced under a system of collective responsibility.
b. attempts to retain power around one leader means competing talent, instead of being embraced, appropriated or invited into the system, becomes excluded, executed, gulaged, or is isolated into meaningless competing fiefdoms frittering away economic effort and political potential. In a certain case example, over 200 million people were organized into a ramshackle continental empire that deployed a bewildering array of weapons on land and in the air (20 different kinds of battle rifles for example with 4 different lines of conflicting and confusingly similar ammunition) that logistically hobbled their ability to prevent a coalition of medium sized seapowers from invading that continental empire and participating in subduing the would be empire in a surprisingly short four years. Granted another inefficient incompetent continental one man rule terrorist regime was an ally to the seapowers, but the point is that even that madman ruled empire for a short period of time relaxed the "rules" of power concentration long enough to win a war against its mirror image competitor and yet in the end reverted to the same characteristics of a totalitarian bureaucratic state that doomed it, too, to the waste-bin of history.

But that is just my opinion. YMMV and it should because whatever I "think" (^^^) is certainly not gospel in the face of a better argument (and there must be one, somewhere.).
 
A proposal: that any thread that starts with the question/proposition of how to get Nazi's to win is de facto considered dog whistling, unless the conversation explicitly and regularly includes the notion that it about having unadulterated evil prevail
I'd throw in the additional stipulation of prefacing with an explanation as to why one really wants to explore this scenario, and the thin excuse of "war gaming" that's all, doesn't cut it.
But heck, that's me - someone who knew people that had their identification tattoos...

Nah. Nazi victories are one of the most common alternate history questions. The fact that it's history's most unambiguously evil empire is a lot of the appeal for the question, I think.

Either way, meta posting about why someone might be interested in a Nazi victory doesn't really do much for the thread, so let's all chill with it.
 

Marc

Donor
Nah. Nazi victories are one of the most common alternate history questions. The fact that it's history's most unambiguously evil empire is a lot of the appeal for the question, I think.

Either way, meta posting about why someone might be interested in a Nazi victory doesn't really do much for the thread, so let's all chill with it.

Agreed.
 
Nah. Nazi victories are one of the most common alternate history questions. The fact that it's history's most unambiguously evil empire is a lot of the appeal for the question, I think.

Either way, meta posting about why someone might be interested in a Nazi victory doesn't really do much for the thread, so let's all chill with it.

I think its also the fact that said empire made so many, in hindsight, obvious super blunders it makes people wonder if things would be different without them.

If Germany still got defeated without invading the USSR and declaring war on the US. Or after successfully taking Moscow, I think such a topic would not be brought up so much.

It also has a special appeal because it is THE war that lead to today's world.

All these "If Germany did X could it win?" are the non geek real life equivalent of "Would the Galactic Empire had won if Palpatine survived the Death Star?" threads. They are brought up because it is interesting to theorize.
 
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I get frustrated with posters who are excellent grognards in terms of leaders and technology; TOE; and high politics and operations; but, avoid doctrine & training; logistics; and low politics and occupations. My frustration isn't just with clean Wehrmacht myths, but with the lower quality of speculation compared to grogs who do logistics. There is a big difference between Heer fan boys who've never read Christopher Browning and dog whistling nazis. The allohistoriographical problem tends to be towards reduced quality speculation due to Notzies, rather than denialism.
 
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