Are you even reading this thread?
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This is then followed by adducing Doenitz's eulogy for Hitler as an inveterate crusader against Bolshevism, which is stupendously irrelevant in that first of all we have here a German officer corps person purporting to speak for Naziism--actually he was spinning it to be what he thought it ought to have been about, very largely with an eye toward winning over some kind of concession from the Western Allies. Clearly after the exposure of the Shoah and the general ill will the Reich had earned it behooved the man picked to handle the Reich's final surrender to try to put the most laudable face on the thing he could. It is hardly a magisterial unbiased judgement!
They keep building the damn things.
There have been plenty of people, yourself included, who have magisterially asserted that without the Bolsheviks taking control of Russia, Hitler
cannot possibly rise to power.
You, and Johnrankins, like to lean heavily on Strong Butterfly Theory, which is an artistic criterion favored by a certain school of AH writers and applies to a specific timeline. It has no place at all in WI, as others have explained more succinctly than I can, because it is basically saying "Shit Happens, Dude!" If you appeal to Hitler being a "long shot" and therefore just about certain to be butterflied away by anything that happens differently before 1919, the whole world is gone to total chaos.
Whereas we happen to know that if the WI stipulation is "February Revolution happens on time, on schedule" the world is pretty much locked to OTL at that point, then sometime in the next half year something has to diverge in Russia, in Petrograd to be exact. It so happens that corporal Adolf Hitler is guaranteed to be around on the day of the February revolution and alive exactly as OTL until the POD, whenever that is, sometime before Gregorian calendar November of the same year. There is therefore an excellent chance we can have a whole sheaf of TLs where Hitler gets bumped off, dead; he was in a quite nasty shooting war after all.
But if Hitler is not bumped off, he is essentially the same guy, that is established. It may be that his experience of being gassed and temporarily blinded was crucial to making him quite the same monster we all know of OTL, and that was another roll of the dice whether he survived, took a worse injury that might have made his career impossible, or was killed by that incident.
But granting that given that he did survive OTL, he is probably going to survive, with the same mentality, in much of these ATLs branching off the Bolsheviks dropping the ball however they do, or being preempted somehow, then you guys are all drastically overstressing the crucial nature of the Bolshevik threat specifically in German domestic politics. And thereby discounting how deep and wide German social democracy including a revolutionary radical Marxist wing of it was rooted in Germany itself. The officers and Junkers and cartel industrialists and Freikorps street fighters and religious reactionaries and so on found "Bolshevism" a very convenient label for what they feared and hated, but the reality they had most to worry about was made in Germany, not a foreign import.
And they did not just hate Marxist advocates of the proletarian revolution. They hated reformist Kautskyite Social Democrats. They killed Rosa Luxemburg, but they also killed Ebert who obligingly sent soldiers to shoot down the radical Reds. They hated Jews, whether they were Reds or converted to Lutheranism and wrote novels. They hated a whole lot of stuff, including mere liberals, and despised democracy on principle. That was not their idea of order or decency, rabble telling their betters what to do--even many of the rabble were self-haters who justified themselves by their diligent service to the nation and their racist concept of the Volk.
Leaning on the idea that only the Leninist threat in particular would pull this brown coalition together is ludicrous. It was Weimar's republicanism and liberalism they hated as much as Reds, and a whole lot of establishment, connected, influential Germans either agreed or were ambiguous about it, and susceptible to the notion some strong hand, be it a restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty or some new German Bonaparte and a good hard military fight was what their country needed.
The argument has centered on Hitler, and you and others handwave it by selective invocation of butterflies, which you can't do consistently without making a complete hash of everything. You assume all the people you like--which seems to include every right wing figure in history except Hitler, because he has become embarrassingly toxic to embrace while others who are toxic in the same general manner remain somehow admirable, so the butterflies don't get them--sail on showing their imagined better natures, and pretending that every deplorable thing they ever did was just because of the bad old Bolsheviks. How is that not deterministic?
And it is not just Hitler. The left wing people a lot of the commentators assuming Hitler's regime cannot possibly exist in all fail and implode, never mind that their motivations remain and indeed would be exacerbated further in a world with all the imagined knock-on "benefits" of no Soviet Communism. But the famous right wing figures and institutions sail on stronger and somehow purified of their own infamous deeds. Butterflies cannot explain that unless butterflies have a political agenda--when butterflies are in the business of granting wishes, they are no longer butterflies. '
It is rather a world view, a Manichaean notion that human beings are clay to be shaped by ideas dreamed up by a handful of great men, and thus if you go about exterminating the bad great men, you have left over a wondrous utopia.
I see the world pretty differently. People, common salt of the Earth people, are each complex and intelligent, each reacting to their world in diverse ways, but their diversity is shaped, in outcome, in sorting how probable a given mindset and how much traction exponents of each point of view have in persuading others to join with them on some project or other, by realities on the ground.
I don't think the world capitalist system is some kind of mental spell cast on people, nor is it an expression of eternal nature; it is a system, a method of proceeding calling for a certain outlook and set of habits participation in it cultivates and reinforces, replicating itself, that has certain strengths in empowering people to accomplish certain things, and certain blind spots and failure modes that predictably and inevitably inflict certain forms of general misery in its operation. Out of its success comes a global order setting general conditions, out of its failures come discontents and well taken objections that in turn point to actions people will consider taking, and try to take, to remedy its failures--or junk it in favor of some alternative they seek to realize in its place.
The 20th century was entirely dominated by the triumphant global establishment of a certain social and political and economic order, and the ongoing reaction of human beings to this system, in its strengths drawing certain diverse categories of adherents to various inspiring aspects of its working, and in its weaknesses calling forth organized opposition in various degrees. To say the failure of the Bolsheviks would sweep away the entire mass of all opposition--would nerf anti-colonialism for instance, and guarantee that not only the various Leninist figures you all deplore so unambiguously, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong and so forth, would fail and per your "butterflies will do in Hitler" theory also be unknown to history, but that no alternative movements essentially in the same causes they fought for OTL, perhaps with results more frightening and disastrous, or perhaps from their point of view more sweepingly successful--and therefore more frightening and disastrous!--is to hold to an essentially conspiracy theory notion of how human history works. I believe in persistent, underlying causes arising from the distributed nature of human enterprise. One person cannot manufacture history single handed. What they can do is seize opportunities given them by the interaction of millions or billions of others, to take stage as the visible face of some movement whose power lies spread around them in the conjunction of intents of those millions.
You seem incapable of noting that I have plainly stated the latter thing many times, and that it is absurd to attribute to me the idea that Adolf Hitler
caused a rightwards shift of power. If any of us have ever looked into Hitler's biography and the history of the Nazi Party, we would know that both the Leader and his little Gideon's Army of followers stood for the most part on the periphery of power in Germany, until the Depression crisis caused some large numbers to conclude they must be on to something. In the earlier crises of the immediate post-Armistice period they also had a brief moment of partial ascendency, appearing at that point to be merely part of general wave of Freikorps gangs. There were a lot of those Freikorps, composed of men who were disbanded from the German Army but self-selected to be self appointed guardians of what they conceived Germany to properly be.
A lot of specifically anti-Hitler coming to power argument here leans on the idea that without the inspiration of the Bolshevik coup in Russia and surge toward consolidation of power (much checked for a time by the Russian civil war, but not robbed of all its inspiration by the threat it would be extinguished by White action) the general wave of radical left actions--Bela Kun in Hungary, the various Soviets great and small attempted in Germany, the Italian countryside communes the Fascists organized to attack and break by what are essentially what we called death squads in the later 20th century when US taxpayers funded and even trained and indoctrinate them in many nations in Latin America and elsewhere, and most relevant to Hitler and the eventual form of the German right, mutinies of German troops and sailors which were probably crucial to Ludendorff and Hindenburg throwing in the towel and quietly, discreetly turning to set up the SD party to be the fall guy of German surrender so they could avoid accountability in the popular mind for the disaster their leadership choices had led Germany into.
But note, while the absence of a Bolshevik inspiration might well have changed the style of left wing response to the collapsing situation in Germany---that situation was
in fact collapsing! It was not the Social Democrats, still less its wildcat radicals who OTL became Spartacists and briefly appeared poised to bring about a second Bolshevik revolution in Germany itself, who caused the ability of Germany to sustain its war effort to implode. Among other things, the tendency of some people here to insist on the effective certainty that no Lenin means no Hitler is an endorsement of the mendacious and toxic "stab in the back" myth quite deliberately invented and pushed by such figures as Ludendorff. If we were to name the one individual most effectively responsible for Germany's bad situation in 1918, it would be him, not Lenin and not any of radical SD, and certainly not the majority of SD loyalists who also proved to be German Empire loyalists, much to the disgust of the revolutionary radicals, and diligently served with intelligence and discipline their national cause. But he, on his own behalf and on behalf of his entire Junker-General Staff clique, and on behalf of the "great and good" of Germany who had the "reins of power" going in to the war in 1914, and holding them all the more firmly during it, deflected all criticism and accountability from the people who actually were responsible, and toward a bunch of people who were responsible only to the extent they obeyed. Heads the ruling class wins, tails the people they rule lose.
But however cleverly the blame flag was pinned on others, the fact of failure remained, Germany was ruined by years of general home front deprivation, by the massacre and maiming of many of a whole generation, by failure of all this ruinous effort to accomplish any gains for Germany, by destroying the foundations of society as the Germans, some more pleased with it than others, had always known and creating much uncertainty as well as immediate privation. Absolutely none of this objective discontent can be blamed on Bolsheviks by people who are both sane and fair minded. Ludendorff and the German right in general lacked one or the other of those attributes however. Whereas the kind of people they were able to conveniently group together in their surly minds as "Bolsheviks" OTL were in fact in the same sorry situation with or without the name of Lenin to inspire them. And a great many of them were already fans of the name of Karl Marx, who had said all along the bourgeoisie would lead them to misery and ruin--now that that was plain before them, whereas the powerful institutions of the state they had been persuaded to tiptoe around and be very cautious, those among them who hoped for open revolution someday, in setting up their ducks in a row before challenging, was falling to ruins. Why the hell not attempt the Revolution here and now? The distant tale of the failure of the Bolsheviks in Russia would have only limited power to dismay them--those were Russians after all; a combination of nationalist bigotry and orthodox Marxist dogma would hardly lead German Marxists to expect poor benighted and peripheral Russians to succeed first.
I am absolutely not arguing that the German left must have attempted the exact same kind of Spartacist uprisings they did OTL. Not even that the degree of insurgency would be the same. BUT I am asserting that the people who did rise up OTL
will still be there in the ATL, still with the same motives and inclinations, and if the lack of Lenin calling for united world revolution at this critical moment does nerf German insurgency, it will leave a lot of fuel for the flame unignited and lying around, quite liable, by virtue of not having been identified as known radicals and neutralized in their defeat, to lend a stronger drive to future left wing initiatives.
That might sound like a formula for a left-center victory, but this also ignores the agency and interest and dispositions of these radical left inclined Germans. If they remain or return to the SD party, they will demand its platform be radicalized to some degree and if that will not happen, they won't join with it. If the KPD could exist and legally contest for elections OTL, surely some other far left German party could here. If instead SD leadership is changed and agrees to shift the main party left, I suppose they will lose some support on the right flank, individuals will drift off to expand some centrist-liberal party--Catholics going to the Center for instance, some of them--note the DDR, the German Democrats, was a party quite small in size but illustrious in membership, denounced by its right wing and bigoted foes as "the party of scientists and Jews." But its first major candidate put forth was actually a Catholic, presumably a fairly liberal-progressive one-the more intellectual of SD's right wing defectors might well wind up there.
It all can seem pretty idyllic (if one is not a hard right wing figure who despises the center-left quite as much as the radical left, as so many Germans were) but the crisis of the Depression is coming. That would break the back of all moderate, temporizing, trust in the inevitable progress of the markets circle-squaring centrist leaders might have managed to limp by on in the 1920s. Germany, lacking the colonial empires Britain and France fell back on, lacking the deep inherent potential for wealth and strategic security the USA had, as well as lacking the latter's relative conservatism of domestic mainstream dialog (assuming that is, that the implosion of the Bolsheviks before Red October does not as a knock on weaken reactionary repression in the USA--if in fact the absence of an organized Third International preempts the OTL Red Scare, by 1932 the US Socialist Party inheriting Eugene Debs's mantle, perhaps as OTL with Norman Thomas taking the lead, perhaps someone unknown to our history--the USA might be a lot more open to far left ideas on the eve of the Depression than OTL maybe--and therefore might have inflicted even more stringent right wing repression on itself in reaction!)--Germany's crisis would be as OTL, pretty much, with or without a Bolshevik Russia.
Meanwhile, the early crisis of the formation of Weimar will remain turbulent and violent, to some degree--and to the degree a mitigation of violence relative to OTL robs the German right of its opportunities to simply massacre its foes and reinforce the Freikorps and the stab-in-the-back mythology, the ongoing irritation of those leftists killed off OTL but here standing around chattering about the proletariat seizing the means of production and the obsolescence of old nationalist notions, the German right is going to be quite as horrified and disgusted by that as they were by Sparticists declaring communes OTL.
In this mess, Hitler has opportunities. I believe we will find if we look that the NSADP he was sent in to clean up and purify of its dangerous leftist tendencies would exist just the same, and the German officers would be just as likely to identify Corporal Hitler as a suitable figure to sic on them. But if there is no NSADP, Hitler will eventually find another party as suitable for him to take over and reorganize his way, or if necessary eventually invent one. He will be one of the several faces of the German far right.
And his unique personal characteristics which enabled him to position himself as the most effective far right leader for the likes of Hindenburg and the other evil geniuses of the steering committee of elite far right interests to choose as their instrument again in 1933. Just as they underestimated him in the immediate post war situation, figuring a lowly fellow such as him could be easily manipulated and then reined in, they would be blind as OTL to his ability to turn the tables on his "creators" and use his sanctioned authority to wipe out all organized opposition and put himself firmly on top.
Now suppose you discount and deplore this notion I have that Hitler is unique--not because he created the powerful tide of German far right absolutism you grant, indeed insist in the mistaken notion it disproves something I have been saying, but because he was uniquely able to span a great many social divides that fragmented the German rightists into mutually suspicious idiosyncratic factions, due very largely to his psychotic conviction he was essentially Germany's anointed monarch--then that seems to be saying either that the German right, without Hitler, cannot get its act together at all, or that some other figure, presumably someone preempted and displaced by Hitler OTL, will step into his role instead. In the latter scenario, we have renamed Hitler and renamed his party, but we have in fact affirmed that the Third Reich under some name or other, with essentially the same characteristics, must exist--deterministically!
I myself have gone out on the limb of a particular instance of Great Man theory and argued here and elsewhere that perhaps indeed, the German right was so split into mutually warring factions that unity could be achieved, without a convenient Hitler to bunch them all together, only under submission to pre-war dominant class leaders like Hindenburg, and this would cost the right wing regime much traction on the ground, and limit their ability to smash and suppress the left and center opposition. Bypass them in policy yes; impose an unquestioning orthodoxy of obedience to a single Leader--probably not, I have said. The annoying Social Democrats and even in a world where the Bolsheviks do not fail, Communists, are still around, along with fairly independent moderates in the Center and other small liberal parties, to gainsay and criticize the leadership, and throw sand in the gears of total mobilization of sweeping scapegoating. Germany cannot then mobilize the great machinery of conquest, in the face of some resistance from the Versailles Great Powers. This is what I think happens with no Hitler, and it could well mean the Great War was the last such afflicting Europe. Colonial conflict still festers, east Asia remains liable to massive war, though without the brewing World War II in Europe Japan is quite constricted in the face of Great Power rival interests in China and jealous defense of its colonial rule in southeast Asia.
And this stalemated, peace through balance of more or less satisfied and constrained Great Powers facing the backlash of their colonialist imperialism, world can exist just the same with a Bolshevik Soviet Union as without one. The Bolsheviks are bloody irrelevant to the main line of development in Germany, is what I have been consistently saying.
The reverse assertion, that removing the Bolsheviks is removing the driver of all evil in the world, is clearly nothing but right wing wish fulfillment, which hardly confines itself to claiming Lenin creates the Third Reich, but also assumes all manner of other major problems in the world including the Great Depression itself were all somehow knock ons of the October Revolution, in defiance of all cause and effect logic.
And I am not strawmanning a nonexistent challenger in calling bullshit on that, it has been asserted by many in this thread, including yourself.