I Blame Communism
Banned
Well, as far as women's rights go, communism was moderately better, but in the end, fascist support for mysogyny IMO was much more talk than fact. The real notorious historical offenders in this field are the religious zealots (one reason I hate them even more than totalitarianism-lite).
Well, Spanish (Romanian, Croat...) fascism and religious zealotry were intimate chums. Though German fascism was anti-clerical, it replaced the church with the Hitler cult. They're the same kind of movement: anti-rational, based on extreme faith and a commonwealth of interest, accepting inequality within it as natural.
In Francoist Spain, girls didn't go to school. Misogyny doesn't just mean systematic rape (all though the nazis have lots of that on their hands): legal barriers, enforced attitudes, denial of education and other rights, all these turn half the population into second-class citizens. Stalinist Russia was pretty social-conservative, but it educated girls properly. Mao, for all that he was a lunatic, abolished foot-binding.
Some reasons why I may prefer fascism to communism if given a strict choice and the death camps are kept shut by both: the former typically tends to leave the common person a bit more alone as totalitarian control goes if you aren't a dedicated dissident, for all its cronyism and corruption it screws the standard of living rather less, and I fancy heroism as a recognizable "good" ideal more than equality.
The first two vary between every specific case. The Soviets, for example, brought Russia from wooden ploughs to space-rockets. Queuing for eggs is not the same as starving to death. And the Nazis, as I say, presided over a standard-of-living decline. My position is "I'd rather live in Yugoslavia than Spain, but I'd rather live in Greece than Romania" kinda jazz.
As for heroism vs equality, well, its all lip-service from the both of them. "Equality" is useless unless it's general, and everybody is free (the slaves on the plantation can all be equal, after all); "heroism", extreme courage in a selfless cause, is only allowed if it's one particular sefless cause, and any hero with the wrong cause is a race-traitor.
I'm an olde-fashionede the-chain-will-be-broken-and-all-men-will-have-their-reward socialist, so I think that a considerable degree of equality is necessary for freedom to mean anything, and that heroism is something ordinary people can do every day.
Well, it may be an issue of how many butterflies to "tone down the damage" we may apply to an ever quite popular AH polity (for the foreseeable future of the genre, Nazi victory is going to stay much more popular as a subject than say its domestic overthrow in 1938-39, as I may prefer, or Entente victory in the same timeframe, as you may prefer) to make it less dystopic, and keep it plausible and recognizable. Of course the more can be spared before the whole thing turns utterly unplausible, the better.
I see no reason why. There's no rule that says we're obligated to save people. If we're exploring a scenario in which a great many people probably die, I see no reason that we "should" try and save them even if it makes things less plausible.
As long as Nazi victory is popular, I'll be there to point outs its exact consequences. I consider it something in the nature of a public service.
I don't root for them, I all too often end up playing devil's advocate for them kinda like you do for the Soviets, unpleasant task as it may be. Frankly, to make me deem them a barely acceptable outcome, you'd have to apply them so many truckloads of whitewash that the Austrian Caporal becomes a German Napoleon in ideas and deeds.
Poor phrasing, but I'm saying that if we have a particular interest in saving jews rather than Poles, why not play devil's advocate for the murderous tyranny that preferred to murder Poles first, ie, Stalin's Russia?
"Root for" only in terms of the eastern front.
As you may be aware, I'm just rather generous with deeming the unavoidable human suffering caused by conquests excusable, if it seems the resulting greater polity somehow looks like an house that is built to last and doesn't make its citizens too miserable, since I'm utterly convinced that otherwise the overall outcome typically turns in a greater good. But I'm quite downright convinced that the brown-shirt guys are among the poster boys for not fulfilling that standard. And of course their racist atrocities are an utilitarian black hole and the epitome of stupid, gratuitous evil.
Quite; but I try not to take any sides in war. I sympathise with people who fight for independence, or against slavery, but by and large I'm sympathising with people and not governments.
I'm no WW2 is something of an exception to my not-taking-sides rule (I don't take any sides in WW1, for example). I still just address the relevant facts as I see them and try to guess the outcome, but I make clear enough that one of those outcomes is horribly horrible. WW2 is the biggest, bloodiest, most ideological of conflicts, and remains well within our collective memory, so I think it's excusable.
Well, I am also so favourably impressed by OTL Zionist accomplishments that I often tend to think fondly of how much better it could have been if most of the pre-Holocaust European Jew population had surived and been brought into its ATL equivalent, whereever it ends up on the map.
Achievements? They're up with the top league when it comes to ethnic cleansing, selective democracy, and belligerant foreign policy.
Well, they were sometimes quick to revise their racial standards when it suited their strategic/diplomatic objectives, the Japanese being a typical example. Anyway, I remain a downright moderate functionalist on the origins of Holocaust issue, and believe that the right circumstances can cause those policies to change, and arrest the slide to genocide, more or less up to when the "industrial" killings start.
As I say, I believe that the moment it was physically possible, they were doing it. It wasn't a response to circumstances in any rational sense, because it was an entirely irrational thing to do. It was an end in itself.
Well, it depends on how much antisemitism played a pivotal role in making the Western public loathe Nazi Germany. You get conflicting views here, and it is sometimes dfficult to tell how much Holocaust-driven retconning influences them.![]()
The left-wing in Britain tended to condemn anti-semitism, but a squashy, reflexive anti-semitism was endemic on much of the right. There was a sort of "you can't do that!" horror at the prospect of Kristallnacht, but that passed, and viciously anti-Jewish stuff continued to be written who were supposedly pro-war throughout.
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