Adding to this, the Holodomor, the Great Purge, and the Gulag Archipelago, as heinous as they were, were not reasons the Communist Party of the Soviet Union existed but were rather side-effects of Soviet Communism. For that matter, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were not reasons the Communist Party of China existed. Communism's crimes were bugs/side-effects of the ideology while Nazism's crimes were features of said ideology and reasons the Nazi Party existed.
The Anglo/American - Nazi War
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Bookmark1995
Banned
Let's not kid ourselves: Stalin under the USSR was still terrible. And little better then Hitler in many, many ways.
Stalin indulged in a bit of the ol'ethnic cleansing: his starvation of Ukrainians, the deportation of the Caucasus peoples, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, persecution of the Volga Germans, persecution of the Poles.
His secret police man was a vile serial killer and rapist.
He butchered his own military, his associates, and many others who helped put the Bolsheviks in power in the first place.
He had zero tolerance for other competing left-wing ideologies. He screwed the Spanish anarchists, calling them "fascist fellow" travelers, and tried to murder Tito for being the one communist leader not under his thumb.
And, had he not died, he would have unleashed his own purge on the Jewish population.
The fact that Stalin could be a lesser evil speaks tojust how vile Nazism really was. That so many who despised Stalin willingly fought for him despite how utterly horrible he was is itself one of the tragedies of modern history.
To me, human agency is one of the things that really drives history. The individual choices one makes does influence the outcome of events.
It wasn't evitable that the 20th century communist experience turned out so rotten. It wasn't inevitable that socialist came to be associated with famines and gulags.
But Nazism was, at its core, an ideology that brooked no human decency whatsoever. As soon as Hitler died TTL, one of his acolytes would not only continue his wretched war, but unleash new horrors, like the destruction of Paris.
Nazism, had it lasted long, would've be the worst scourge since Genghis Kahn.
Reading this makes me thank God that Nazism died out over 70 years ago.
I'm not in any way saying Stalin wasn't awful. He was. I'm saying that his awfulness wasn't the result of ideological commitments inherent to Marxism (now, Leninism, we could probably have a whole agreement-fest on how much Leninism sucked ass and the violence baked into its underlying assumptions). Nazism saw mass murder and indiscriminate industrial war as a core of its ideological program. Marxism, even Marxism-Leninism, didn't.
When FleetMac and I say the Soviets were rational, we mean that in the international-relations sense. You could deal fairly with them. You couldn't deal fairly with the Nazis and by 1941 everyone knew it.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Well, Leninism in many ways was the foundation of Stalinist terror. To quote Whittaker Chambers and his words on the Kronstadt rebellion:
By crushing the workers that he claimed to protect, Lenin laid the groundwork for an oppression that, after his untimely death, would spell doom for his closest associates.
Perhaps, but they still willingly treated the nations of Eastern Europe like colonies.
I'm not quite sure about that. The Soviets and Chinese communists actively stated their desire to wipe out entire classes and used language making it clear that a good portion of this "wiping out" would not happen in a figurative, but very literal sense. The Soviets destroyed the kulaks with a vengeance nearly as cruel as the Nazi extermination of Jews, and the Chinese did a similar thing with landlords and "rich peasants."
The Nazis merely appear scarier because they didn't mask their intentions as much, there's something more viscerally disgusting about killing someone because of their ethnicity/race as opposed to because of their making more money, and because Nazi killing happened at a very quick rate during an epic war. But in the end both ideologies came from similar mental depths and ended up with similar tragedies, though vastly different in scale.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Both were horrible movements that caused massive human suffering. Let's leave it at that.
Bookmark1995
Banned
I'm guessing that a moral guardian could make an argument like this:"Nazi media glorified and celebrated violence, creating a generation of violent hoodlums. All these action movies, with their violence and mayhem, are indoctrinating our children into it."
Now obviously, you can't compare your time in a Hitler youth to an ultra-violent Hollywood movie. But ITTL, there will be lots of discussions over the kinds of messages you put in your movies and cartoons, and how they shape the mindset of youth.
Madga Goebbels murdered their OWN children OTL because she thought it was more merciful then letting them live in a shattered Germany. If you have people like that running your country, the well-being of youth is certainly not a priority. In a world where "service to the state" is the primary goal of a society, how parents treat their family will be less important than services to the "Party."
While the American right promotes the ideal of a nuclear family as its motto, the Nazi state promotes nothing more that "absolute obedience." As a result, child abuse and mistreatment are going to be off the charts.
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I think this may be my first time posting on this timeline - I recently rediscovered it years after (I think) it made me join this forum as a lurker and occasional commenter. Over the past month I have gotten precisely halfway to this page but I felt I had to post now - though not to comment on update 48 from 2011 but to comment on the fact that I discovered a series of YT map videos that show the events of this timeline without crediting Calbear.
I brought it up to the maker of the video but they didn't admit to it - even more so, they updated the description of the first video after the fact and then claimed that they actually had credited Calbear.
PS. I hope I'm not pointing out what may have already been discussed and thus wasting everyone's time. If so, I apologize.
Edit: link to the video:
I brought it up to the maker of the video but they didn't admit to it - even more so, they updated the description of the first video after the fact and then claimed that they actually had credited Calbear.
PS. I hope I'm not pointing out what may have already been discussed and thus wasting everyone's time. If so, I apologize.
Edit: link to the video:
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I think it would be opposite: the Nazi censorship and book burning was done in order to install blind obediance to state and censor out anti-government ideas, which eventually escalated into massive vandalism that we saw in paris ITTL. So moral guardians would be discredited.
That's beside the point (and this whole discussion is you willfully not understanding the distinction between 'system that led to Very Bad Things' and 'system that openly glorified Very Bad Things as core ideological tenets'). Those were choices that individual people made. They were not inevitable given the ethical precepts of the system they were made under, like the Final Solution was under Nazism. The choices were bad, but within the ideological framework their makers held, it was possible to make other ones without abandoning Communism. The Soviet state was a rational actor, even if its precepts were screwy, and it could be trusted, up to a point.
(I would have used the gas attacks on Tambov as my point of comparison if I were trying to draw the parallel you are. If you want to get your forceful anticommunism on, feel free to PM me. But it's historically dishonest to pretend that Communism and Nazism are morally equivalent.)
You will probably find this article revealing: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704872?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
You might also want to look at some of Dagmar Herzog's work.
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Bookmark1995
Banned
Well, I do agree that the decisions of the Soviets, while terrible, were...somewhat understandable.
The use of poison gas WAS meant to put down a revolt. The Russian Civil War was a conflict where EVERYONE was some kind of awful, so you needed to be strict during such a war.
Turning Eastern Europe into a bunch of client states was a strategic decision made because of Russia's poor natural defenses. Which, after in invasion that led to 27 million deaths, is quite necessary for survival.
Their mistreatment of German civilians, while terrible, can be attributed to the fact that the Soviets had suffered even worse from the Germans.
Nazism, however, went well beyond the understandable.
Putting down a revolt is an "understandable" act of a repression. Murdering entire groups of people like insects was horrifying to those who came across Auschwitz, even to the already hardened Soviet army,
I'm not prepared to pay for the article.
But from what I've read, Nazis dispensed with traditional puritanical values in favor of promoting promiscuity, if only to promote the raising of more Aryans to populate the lebensraum.
So I'm guessing that teenagers were instilled with the idea of "hooking up" in order to produce proper human stock.
Well...
People like Tipper Gore don't see any real connection between their calls for censorship and the more visceral image of book-burnings.
While America has proclaimed itself as "the land of the free" and spoken out against other oppressive regimes, that has not stopped the rise of moral guardians who want to censor media to "promote" family values.
I think in the coming generations the A4 will begin to decline to an extent, though decline may be more of a strong word.
The issue is, while their actions can at best be described as "well intentioned" the younger generation will slowly begin to lose interest in their philosphy.
The war will become more distant, and the young people will question whether the tinpot dictators they frequently overthrow will really be the next hitler, and in general a key weakness of the A4 is India.
Eventually China may reform further and also get nuclear capacity, throwing the balance off further. The newer A4 generation will not be in mood for what is seen as a pointless war. At least without OPEN aggression.
I think African countries will begin aligning further with India/China due to resentment of what may be seen as colonialism 2.0.
The A4 will maintain their military and economic power, but NOT monopoly.
I mean India especially... a very populace and rich nation. (said by the one and only calbear to be around in terms of wealth in between modern china and south korea.) And likely with further, albiet slowed growth ahead. China will also catch up soon.
I don't think A4 power will collapse, but nations will co exist further, with maybe China slowly reforming.
As much as I hate to say this, I still think for a *long* time Germany will be kept under the boot. It is just such a traumatic memory to all. I think they might eventually grow economically slowly (as in slowly lift out of poverty like the asian nations) by playing civil with the A4 and co, and maybe a sort of "moderated" pan german movement in a century unifying the German states, forming a developing germany closely under the watch of not only the A4 but India and China. The mistrust for Germany will likely global.
Africa will likely be in a less shitty situation in general than otl, and I think will resemble in many ways modern Latin America. Eventually, Africa will become developed, I will put, later, around 2050-2100, and I say first world standards.
The long run this world might get better, cool place living during 2100.
The issue is, while their actions can at best be described as "well intentioned" the younger generation will slowly begin to lose interest in their philosphy.
The war will become more distant, and the young people will question whether the tinpot dictators they frequently overthrow will really be the next hitler, and in general a key weakness of the A4 is India.
Eventually China may reform further and also get nuclear capacity, throwing the balance off further. The newer A4 generation will not be in mood for what is seen as a pointless war. At least without OPEN aggression.
I think African countries will begin aligning further with India/China due to resentment of what may be seen as colonialism 2.0.
The A4 will maintain their military and economic power, but NOT monopoly.
I mean India especially... a very populace and rich nation. (said by the one and only calbear to be around in terms of wealth in between modern china and south korea.) And likely with further, albiet slowed growth ahead. China will also catch up soon.
I don't think A4 power will collapse, but nations will co exist further, with maybe China slowly reforming.
As much as I hate to say this, I still think for a *long* time Germany will be kept under the boot. It is just such a traumatic memory to all. I think they might eventually grow economically slowly (as in slowly lift out of poverty like the asian nations) by playing civil with the A4 and co, and maybe a sort of "moderated" pan german movement in a century unifying the German states, forming a developing germany closely under the watch of not only the A4 but India and China. The mistrust for Germany will likely global.
Africa will likely be in a less shitty situation in general than otl, and I think will resemble in many ways modern Latin America. Eventually, Africa will become developed, I will put, later, around 2050-2100, and I say first world standards.
The long run this world might get better, cool place living during 2100.
Bookmark1995
Banned
OTL, in recent years, there has been a treasure-trove of literature in which many writers question the supposed-superiority of civilized societies. From historians and anthropologists who argue that the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture was in many ways a downgrade for humanity, to those who celebrate the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer bands, to those who promote the paleo-diet.
Now obviously, the life of a hunter-gatherer was not all gumdrops and smiley faces. Bands of hunter-gatherers were pretty...vicious to one another. But it does seem to me that those claiming to bring "enlightenment" always end up causing even more harm then the "backward" culture or people they claimed to be "uplifting."
Richard Evans, one of the most influential OTL historians of the Third Reich, made a very insightful observation about this:
Nazism sold itself as "racially and morally superior" while turning the most advanced nation in Europe into a bloodthirsty horde. The people who called themselves "the Master Race" and enjoyed Wagner committed the most evil crimes ever and destroyed the artistic relics that demonstrated European "progress".
Will people ITTL be wary of not only racism, but any attempt to portray a culture or society as "savage" or inferior? ITTL, will there be far more people who mock the notion of civility, @CalBear ?
Now obviously, the life of a hunter-gatherer was not all gumdrops and smiley faces. Bands of hunter-gatherers were pretty...vicious to one another. But it does seem to me that those claiming to bring "enlightenment" always end up causing even more harm then the "backward" culture or people they claimed to be "uplifting."
Richard Evans, one of the most influential OTL historians of the Third Reich, made a very insightful observation about this:
Nazism sold itself as "racially and morally superior" while turning the most advanced nation in Europe into a bloodthirsty horde. The people who called themselves "the Master Race" and enjoyed Wagner committed the most evil crimes ever and destroyed the artistic relics that demonstrated European "progress".
Will people ITTL be wary of not only racism, but any attempt to portray a culture or society as "savage" or inferior?
Uh...please look at how they treat germany and view its culture... Im fairly sure they take that lesson and apply it to china and possibly to a minor degree India as well.
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they basically said that Germany cannot reunite because they are too Savage and will ovbuiously go on a rampage across Europe. Im sure they also take this attitude to other nations which begin to rival them or are blatantly evil like China, to a lesser extent, but still there
Bookmark1995
Banned
Yeah, actually, that is a very...scary observation.
Granted, unlike OTL America, the A4 is actually competent with regime change and nation building. They've managed to only defeat the Nazis, but build a successful world order. So, in a sense, their arrogance can be justified.
One day, however, their hyper-Wilsonian beliefs could lead them down a dark path.
But my point is that the concept of civilization itself could come under serious scrutiny. The Nazis prove that being "civilized" does not make you any better then the so-called "savages."
"One day?" Stuttgart would argue they're already dangerous close.
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