Which Scenario is the Worst of All...?

Which scenario is the worst of all?

  • Central Powers won the WWI

    Votes: 6 1.9%
  • The Axis won the WWII

    Votes: 239 75.2%
  • Soviet Union "won" the Cold War

    Votes: 30 9.4%
  • All of them are pretty bad

    Votes: 43 13.5%

  • Total voters
    318
Hey, we agree on something. The insane, brutal, bloody-minded bastards are definitely worse than sane (if also a bit bloody-minded) ones.

I'm glad. :)

Everything I said just there, about what Nazism was like for Germans though, would actually apply to the Stalinist USSR for Soviets as well (I thought I should say that, since I can't seem to get away from accusations of Stalin-fancying...). The big difference is that the Nazis treated the Master Race even more shittily than most of humanity has been treated for most of history (and that's saying something) and then set off to wipe other peoples off the face of the globe. Stalin just set out to treat other people like just as much shit.
 

loughery111

Banned
I think we've pretty much reached an impasse; nothing you've said is in danger of convincing me that the Central Powers post-WWI were actually going to be worse than anything the Soviets were likely to come up with if they win the Cold War. Equally clearly, nothing I've said is likely to convince you that the CP are, overwhelmingly probably, going to be better in the short and long run, both.

Luckily, we agree on the fundamental premise that the Nazis were insane bastards and shouldn't have been placed in control of the family dairy farm, let alone a country or a planet.
 
In fairness, another 15% are saying they all suck. Which I disagree with, but at least only about 10% are actually saying someone else would be worse than the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Nazis. They make even the Soviets look good, though this is something like saying you're better-looking than the ugliest person in the room.


Recalls a comment I read somewhere long ago. "It's a bit like trying to choose between vulgarity and obscenity".
 

Xanth

Banned
Meanwhile, a Germany that happens to own, fairly benevolently, Eastern Europe, is not going to cause anywhere near the damage.
German rule in Eastern Europe during WW1 was very very far fom benevolent.
the epidemic of public beatings by officers continued. There was casual violence in the streets. In the spring of 1917, an officer in Rosieny district reportedly made this a speciality of his, beating men and women, including old people, in severla villages. This spontaneous, ordinary violence was possible because the larger program of control was itself build
on systemized, rationalized coercion and violence.Symbolic of the regime's systemized brutality in thes prisons was a contraption which native sources claimed was essentialy a beating machine, a wooden scaffolding for stretchning out victims and conducting rationalized violence with scientific precision. It was another grid of control in miniature.
Violence also mainted distance between occupiers and subject populations, as public beatings in the streets were usually occasioned by a perceived infraction of the duty to yield way, failure to salute, or some other imagined sign of disrespect.

War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I by Vejas G. Liulevicius


A "memorandum on the most important abuses in Lithuania" that the presidium of the Lithuanian Landrat sent to the German chancellor on 20 October 1917 closed by saying, "There are many proven facts that show there are beatings at work, beatings at the police station, beatings during investigations, beatings when one has caught escaped prisoners, beatings during requisitions, beatings in prisons, beatings of children at schools, beatings because people fail to doff their hats, beatings because they come too late, etc".
(...)In the east, as in Belgium, exorrbitant requisitions, expropriation, and forced labor were how the military tried to overcome Germany's material and manpower deficiences.
Absolute Destruction: Military Culture And the Practices of War in Imperial Germany by Isabel V. Hull


Just physical violence, there are numerous other examples of Ober Ost rule, in Lithuania, Ukraine, Romania, parts of Poland the confiscation of food left sometimes nothing to eat for the locals. Mass executions also happened, as well as bombing of whole cities in reprisals for real or imaginary resistance. People were being hunted down for labour camps and so on.

So there is a good potential for German rule to look much like colonial exploitation of Africa with apartheid status. You can also expect incidents resembling the crushing down of Herero uprising.

While Soviet rule had mix of good and bad, there were be nothing good included for the locals from German rule.

Thus Soviet>Keisereich>Nazi rule in this order from good to bad.
 
German rule in Eastern Europe during WW1 was very very far fom benevolent.


Military occupation in wartime rarely is. Plenty of Boers and Philipinos could have told ugly tales about the British and US Armies. I'm a bit vaguer about French misdeeds, but don't doubt that they happened.

I don't doubt for a minute that Ukrainians et al had a good deal to be miserable about under German occupation - but a decade or so later they had even more to be miserable about under Stalin.
 

Xanth

Banned
Military occupation in wartime rarely is.
And neither was the rule of German Empire during peace time.
As Martin Kitchen writes
In areas where Germans and Poles lived side by side a virtual apartheid existed.

The German ideas about their rule in Eastern Europe would ensure constant guerilla warfare anyway.
Basically nations in Eastern Europe under German Empire's rule would be subject to all the horrors that encountered colonial Africa. This means famine, mass murder,racist segregation, while being Germanised.

At least Soviet Union wasn't racist.
 
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loughery111

Banned
And neither was the rule of German Empire during peace time.
As Martin Kitchen writes
In areas where Germans and Poles lived side by side a virtual apartheid existed.

The German ideas about their rule in Eastern Europe would ensure constant guerilla warfare anyway.
Basically nations in Eastern Europe under German Empire's rule would be subject to all the horrors that encountered colonial Africa. This means famine, mass murder,racist segregation, while being Germanised.

At least Soviet Union wasn't racist.


You make it sound like racism is a larger evil than mass murder. Repeated mass murder of your own civilians, at that. I don't give a good goddamn if the Second Reich discriminated against non-Germans; stupid though it would be, they're still going to do better by everyone else (and probably by those poor bastards too) than the USSR did or could have. The USSR wasn't racist, sort of... but it was an equal opportunity mass murder machine and no POD within this OP is going to change that.
 

Xanth

Banned
You make it sound like racism is a larger evil than mass murder. Repeated mass murder of your own civilians, at that. .
So, the 300.000 or so Africans mass murdered through organised famine and atrocities by German troops in two rebellions(Herero and Maji revolt)count or not? And why distinguish between citizens of own country and others? The second ones certainly can't be murdered.
Come to think of it the genocide of Herero(up to 65-80% of population) reached levels that it is hard to find in USSR record:medical experiments on children, infecting prisoners with diseases, giving prisoners animals who died of sickness to eat, forcing women to scrap human meat of victims of medical experiments so that skulls and bones could be kept, poisoning water wells and shooting thirsty women and children.

Since German Empire viewed its desired Mitteleuropa as replica of German colonial possesions, that doesn't bode well for any CP victory scenario and the face of conquered Europe.

What's this, a Stalin Lives Forever timeline?

Exactly. Post-Stalin(and I would even argue that even Stalin) Central and Eastern Europe under Soviet control had more freedom, self-development, and ability to pursue self-determination than German Mitteleuropa would even dream about.
 
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I believe that the OP would more accurately be summarized as "the US and the West lose the Cold War" rather than "the USSR wins the Cold War." And the possibility of a Social Democratic state emerging from the USSR is so slim that it isn't even funny. Social democracy requires three things; a society (preferably that isn't based on murdering its own people in job lots), a democracy (a real one, not a puppet government run by a "political party"), and money (insert suitably cutting statement here). The USSR has none of these, though the Russian Empire may, in time, come to have at least two of them. Probably all three.

My contention Is that there is no realistic way for the USA to lose the Cold War without a far more economically successful and much more attractive form of socialism in power in the U.S.S.R. The one cant be neatly divided from he other as far the Cold War is concerned.

You about the U.S.S.R society, it’s possible developments and it’s wealth are utter uninformed claptrap based on stereotypes not facts. Post-Stalin there was plenty of scope for a more liberal regime to take power. Just because that didnt dosnt it couldnt.
 
And neither was the rule of German Empire during peace time.
As Martin Kitchen writes
In areas where Germans and Poles lived side by side a virtual apartheid existed.

The German ideas about their rule in Eastern Europe would ensure constant guerilla warfare anyway.
Basically nations in Eastern Europe under German Empire's rule would be subject to all the horrors that encountered colonial Africa. This means famine, mass murder,racist segregation, while being Germanised.

At least Soviet Union wasn't racist.



Er when exactly were there any famines or mass murders in the Prussian Polish provinces in peacetime?

If none, why expect any in the eastern satellite states once peacetime returned?
 
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