"Hitler" and Historical Evil of ATLs

Whether or not there's a "boogeyman" or not depends on who's the most dangerous to The Free World (TM).

It also depends on the kind of danger. If the danger can be dealt with fairly and squarely, that's different than say, Nazism, where the only answer was force and lots of it.

Both of these strike me as true, but I can't help but think there's a third element -- that regimes feel all the more evil when they come to power in less than expected places. Somehow, the idea of an deka-democidal (to say nothing of a genocidal) rising in Germany feels heavier than similarly deadly regimes cropping up in Russia and China...
 

Morty Vicar

Banned
There are a lot of reasons why the Nazis are histories bad guys; for a start, they were mainly responisble for ww2 which resulted in the deaths of millions of people, from all over the globe. During that war national feeling was of course very high, so as well as people feeling more patriotic towards their own nations (as happens during any war) they also focused hatred on the enemy. Even though we are a few generations on many are still personally affected in some way.

Added to this the Nazis came at a time when communications were improving, literacy was at an all time high and most people read newspapers, many people even had televisions or saw newsreels in the cinemas and saw the horrors of the war, and after the war ended they saw pictures of the concentration camps and mass graves. Perhaps our sense of national grief (and possibly guilt) was somehow sated by the idea that we did the right thing, that the Nazis were, to a man, inhuman and needed to be killed for our own safety and that of others.

But when you look at it subjectively, disgusting, evil, brutal as the Nazis were, it is hard to view Britain and the USA and USSR are the good guys to any great degree. Britain was responsible for a fair amount of slavery and genocide, the USA had almost wiped out the entire population of the land they took over, and were at the time heavily influenced by the KKK who in many ways were similar to the Nazis (and supported them too) and the USSR was holding its own pogroms against the jews, although their reasons were religious rather than ethnic cleansing.. But in short, history is written by the winners, so Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito are the triumvirate of evil, and Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin the Holy Trinity. Well, almost..
 

Morty Vicar

Banned
In my Afrikaner TL, I'm thinking the Afrikaners will be this world's ultimate evil, since there was no Nazism, Communism was fairly limited geographically, and there's a Cold War (ending with a nuclear WWIII) that the Afrikaner Confederation starts. There's no Holocaust or Nazi-campaign-in-the-USSR (which killed more than the camps)--instead, there's a global nuclear war. :eek:

I don't know much about this OTL, but in the ATL if the Nazis didn't actually target the jews, ironically someone like Albert Einstein may have worked for them, and the Nazis may have won the war with Nuclear weapons, is that possible? Although it doesn't really fit with the idea of him not then being seen as the ultimate evil, although saying that America wasn't even after Hiroshima.. Sorry I digress!
 
In AWOLAWOT, it's probably still Hitler, but for anybody black, there's a few others to choose from.

I like how "Awolawot" sounds when I say it, tho I don't know what it stands for?? Its real classy as far as acronyms go!

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Stalin and communism. Without Nazis in Germany communism will be seen as the biggest threat to Western civilization and considering that Stalin is pretty reviled OTL in a world where he won't be needed as an ally against a common foe there is no need to look the other way. In the 1920s and 1930s communism was regarded as the great danger OTL, and in fact, the Nazis only got to power, because many believed they were the only ones able to stop the inevitable rise of communism.
 
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