Worst Cliche AH Topics for after 1900

Talking about which: today I log onto the forum and what do I see?

Axis Victory galore: THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS and THIS. And related topics like THIS.

And then there's the whole Germanophile exercise is whitewash and excuses, like THIS and THIS.

And that's just the first two pages (at the time I was logged in this morning).

Clearly there's a trend, and that trend says that this is by far the greatest chiche topic ever. I shall not speculate on the reasons why.

As well as backing up what has been said about the importance of WW2 and the dark fascination of Naziism, let me also point that a completely disproportionate number of those threads were made by one poster, which I think qualifies as an "uncontrolled variable".

Now, as an avid fan of HOFAH, how exactly is it an exercise in Germanophilic whitewash? Germanophile is hardly a title of shame, of course, and its one I certainly don't mind, but I wouldn't even say HOFAH is Germanophile, let alone Germanowank. It's a detailed, balanced portrayal of a world which is undeniably better and in which Germany is undeniably a much happier place and likely to stay that way. That's just what happens when you don't let Hitler get his filthy hands on power.

But what, pray, does it whitewash? Gustav Stresemann's well know desire to exterminate the Jews? Oh please. When you consider Germany not descending into nihilistic barbarism to be "whitewash", there is clearly only one person who has a problematic obsession with Germany.
 
@RGB: Not every WW2 Axis victory scenario is made to glorify the Nazis. Some people might want to explore how other countries faired in such a world (for example the first topic you picked is essentially about China). It just makes for a great dystopia. Although I am not a fan of such scenarios.

But what really annoys me is the mentioning of "Holding out for a hero" as "Germanophile whitewashing". It is a thoroughly researched plausible TL centred around a great statesman. And views a somewhat better world there with a chance for a much earlier EU (which I as a dieheart European federalist really would like to see in action). It is my alltime favorite here and I really do not see any "whitewashing" (of what actually?) and no German wank either.

Kind regards,
G.
 
It's not articularly that so many threads see the Germans doing better that bothers me: Its that so many (almost all) have the USSR do much worse than IRL. It implies that it was all luck, that if any of the millions of variables had changed, the USSR would have lost. the USSr made more scarifices than anyone else, they also made lots of mistakes, but very little of it was luck, good or bad.
 
@RGB: Not every WW2 Axis victory scenario is made to glorify the Nazis.

I didn't say that. I merely said that WW2 Germans seem to be the most fascinating and ergo the most cliche'd topic on the forums at this time.

As for "Holding out for a Hero" - perhaps I was a little harsh. It's got its questionable underpinnings but it's very well done otherwise. Which doesn't change the fact that it's firmly in the "Germany does better in WW2" camp as far as discussion of cliche topics goes.
 
@RedRalph: I concur with you there. Actually I have never seen a convincing that is at least possible (if not likely) Axis victory scenario.

@RGB: Then I have misunderstood the following lines of your posting: "Clearly there's a trend, and that trend says that this is by far the greatest chiche topic ever. I shall not speculate on the reasons why." In conjunction with this "And then there's the whole Germanophile exercise is whitewash and excuses, [...]" it gave the impression to me that you thought of Axis win scenarios as although a kind of "whitewashing". I apologize for that.

But I still do not understand what these "questionable underpinnings" should be regarding HofaH. And it has nothing to do with the "Germany does better in WW2" cliche. Perhaps if there was a "the Weimar Republic survives" cliche, but I do not see this topic done often here for calling that a cliche. There is Weimar World but it is a comperatively old one.

Kind regards,
G.
 
I didn't say that. I merely said that WW2 Germans seem to be the most fascinating and ergo the most cliche'd topic on the forums at this time.

As for "Holding out for a Hero" - perhaps I was a little harsh. It's got its questionable underpinnings but it's very well done otherwise. Which doesn't change the fact that it's firmly in the "Germany does better in WW2" camp as far as discussion of cliche topics goes.

How?

There is no WWII in Hero. The Nazis never achieve power in Germany, and get booted out of Austria. To take an equivalent of your claim, a "Trotsky's Union" thread is glorification of Stalin's conduct in WWII. :confused:
 
I didn't say that. I merely said that WW2 Germans seem to be the most fascinating and ergo the most cliche'd topic on the forums at this time.

As for "Holding out for a Hero" - perhaps I was a little harsh. It's got its questionable underpinnings but it's very well done otherwise. Which doesn't change the fact that it's firmly in the "Germany does better in WW2" camp as far as discussion of cliche topics goes.

Of course others have already observed that its rather hard for this to be a "Germany does better in WW2 scenario" when WW2 hasn't happened and never will in a form remotely similar to OTLs.

What interests me is your "underpinnings". This seems a strange term. I suppose a timeline is "underpinned" by its points of divergance, since by saying that they could have changed the world had they changed, it draws attention to the event or person in question. HOFAH has two PoDs: a slightly more battered French economy and a considerably less dead Stresemann. Economies, of course, are fickle things. And as for the suggestion that Gustav Stresemann couldn't have saved Germany?

DO! NOT! BLASPHEME!

:D
 
British Neutrality in WW1 leads to eternal British Empire.

Successful Operation Sealion

Al Gore wins 2000 elections and America is a Utopia
 
For me, maximum cliche puke value resides with the 'CSA-wins' theory.
The South LOST. Get over it!
[Yeah, its pre-1900, but carrying it over to the 20th Century makes me nauseous anyway.]

The 'Axis-wins' crowd is nearly up there too. I haven't seen anything original come out of there either.

I'm suprised that nobody's touched the 'Mao gets offed' or 'some other despot's stuff goes golden' yet.
Always a chance out there.....:rolleyes:
 
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The Sandman

Banned
The Pinniped Who Must Not Be Named, of course.

And in general, the over-reliance on WWII as a source of PODs. WWI seems to get surprisingly little love, as does the interwar period, the pre-WWI part of the 20th century, the Cold War, the 1990s, or indeed any part of the past 110 years that doesn't involve the three-way fracas between the Dirty Commies, Those Wacky Nazis, and the Forces of All That is Good and Pure.
 
The Pinniped Who Must Not Be Named, of course.

And in general, the over-reliance on WWII as a source of PODs. WWI seems to get surprisingly little love, as does the interwar period, the pre-WWI part of the 20th century, the Cold War, the 1990s, or indeed any part of the past 110 years that doesn't involve the three-way fracas between the Dirty Commies, Those Wacky Nazis, and the Forces of All That is Good and Pure.

I'd love to see more WWI TLs. Could the Schlieffen Plan have worked? What if one or more nations joined the clusterfuck that was the war on the other side? Questions like that.
 
Russia that becomes extreme right (as a restored absolute monarchy, a military dictatorship, a fascist corporate state, whatever) after the WWI and/or the Civil war and then attacks her former Entente allies. No matter whether does Russia kick their butts or gets her own one kicked, it's one of the most disappointing clichés I can think of.
 
And then there's the whole Germanophile exercise is whitewash and excuses, like THIS and THIS.

Yes, the German people were nothing but evil monsters whose dreams of revanchism were unjustified and typical of a people who were nourished from birth on tales of Drag Noch Osten.

I'm also curious how it's in the "Germany does better in WW2" area, of course. Since there is no war.

Hrmm. I suppose that not fighting WW2 does leave you with a Germany still around, and immeasurably better than the OTL outcome...
 
edit: Of course, there is the long history of WW2 alt histories where the Japanese (and the Germans) are capable of military success that would be beyond the historical abilities of the Allies. I've noticed that Italy never gets that kind of consideration though. Wonder why that is?
there is an alternate history fiction trilogy by an author named: Mario Farneti about Italy staying neutral in WWII then entering in time to defeat the USSR and conquer a massive part of the world and exists as a superpower well into the 21st century. Sounds like an italiawank to me.

I think WWII is such a popular topic for alternate history because the Nazis for lack of a better culprit are the quinticential bad guys of history, they are the Galactic Empire from Star Wars transplanted to real life. No regime in history combined as much diabolical planning and sheer unadulterated evil as the Nazis did, in fact they were so evil it was actually a detriment to them. I mean Hitler is very much like the bad guy from a saturday morning cartoon or a comic book, he rules a nation with an iron fist, he tried to use super-sciencey super weapons to accomplish his goals, he destroyed all that opposed him in his own country, and he tried to dominate the world through force. Hell, much like the biggest baddies from cartoons Hitler fought an alliance of nations much like superheroes and even supervillians sometimes ally together to defeat certain super-duper-villains. In essence alt-historians want to see who would win in a fight between superman and batman so to speak, but historically instead. Also WWII was the ultimate war of modern time, it was the ultimate showdown between superpowers and there hasn't been a war quite like it before or since.

edit: oh yeah, not so much in here but in fiction I see a tad too often the US government surrendering to a foreign invasion almost the second foreign troops set foot on US soil, I can think of at least 3 works of fiction and one TL off the top of my head that have this very outcome(albiet against two different powers), also alt histories that either ignore or completely antiwant the USN in order to allow foreign invasion of the continental US.
 
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Talking about which: today I log onto the forum and what do I see?

Axis Victory galore: THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS and THIS. And related topics like THIS.

And then there's the whole Germanophile exercise is whitewash and excuses, like THIS and THIS.

And that's just the first two pages (at the time I was logged in this morning).

Clearly there's a trend, and that trend says that this is by far the greatest chiche topic ever. I shall not speculate on the reasons why.

I can deal with people underestimating the capabilities of the Red Army as late as 1945.

I can also deal with people overestimating the willingness of the Western Allies to make a conditional peace (especially after 1943).

What I can not deal with is the idea that the "average" German citizen knew extremely little to nothing about what was happening to the holocaust. I put average in sneer quotes because I have seen this claim (sometimes here, sometimes elsewhere) extend to such an incredible length as to include high-ranking officers of the German General Staff.

This, I will say, is complete, apologetic, revisionistic, bullshit!

Churches and bureaucrats supplied birth records to show who was Jewish or slavic. The post office delivered notices for the victims to report to those trains that would take them to the camps. Transport bureaucrats arranged for the cattle trains that would take those souls to their death. Pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on prisoners. The Dehomag punch card machine was used (with the companies full permission) to catalog the camp inmates. Hell, companies bid on contracts to build the ovens that they would use in the death camps!

All of this would create a vast amount of paperwork, all of this would also involve the work of vast numbers of upper, middle, and even some lower-class Germans. And that's not even getting to the fact that humongous numbers of Soviet Prisoners of War were shot out of hand by not just the SS, but the Wehrmacht too! And plenty of German generals had the massive amounts of POW's they did take walk back to Germany... the majority of whom were still in Western Russia when winter struck. It's not as simple as it sounds, as those prisoners would, you know, have to be supervised, and such large amounts ment the need for lots of supervisors.

The German people had all the evidence they needed to work it through, but did not... because they knew they would not like the answer. After all, they were being offered the quite horrible choice of being guilty of complicity in the murder of millions... or standing up to the State that cheerfully commited those murders.

Thus, largely, they didn't think it through so they would not have to make that choice. But by not doing so, the choice was made for them.

I once heard a great saying, which goes like this.

Ignorance is bliss... until the bombs start falling.

And one can easily be wilfully ignorant, not just on a individual level, but also on a collective level. Stalin wilfully fooled himself into thinking that Hitler would not attack him in 1941, the leaders of Britain and France wilfully fooled themselves that Hitler did not have or want any further territorial ambitions after Munich, 1938. Hitler himself wilfully chose to believe that the war was going well up until April, 1945.

All of these self-applied delusions were broken, one way or the other. For Stalin, it was the German troops invading his nation on June 22nd, for the leaders of Britain and France it was the annexation of the rest of Czechslovakia in early 1939, for Hitler, it was Red Army shells and rockets exploding in central Berlin that finally broke that delusion (and even then, not completely).

The German people wilfully fooled themselves into thinking that the murder of up to eleven million people (not to mention the millions more who died in the rest of the war) was not happening. That delusion was broken by Germans being marched through those concentration camps by the Western Allies. Yet, it still is not broken fully, if the rash of post-war Holocaust denial and apologism that continues today is any indication.

The 70-or-so million the Germans who lived, fought-in, and survived the Second World War were complicit in the grimmest genocide in history. That is the historical fact, that is what happened.
 
I can deal with people underestimating the capabilities of the Red Army as late as 1945.

I can also deal with people overestimating the willingness of the Western Allies to make a conditional peace (especially after 1943).

What I can not deal with is the idea that the "average" German citizen knew extremely little to nothing about what was happening to the holocaust. I put average in sneer quotes because I have seen this claim (sometimes here, sometimes elsewhere) extend to such an incredible length as to include high-ranking officers of the German General Staff.

This, I will say, is complete, apologetic, revisionistic, bullshit!

Churches and bureaucrats supplied birth records to show who was Jewish or slavic. The post office delivered notices for the victims to report to those trains that would take them to the camps. Transport bureaucrats arranged for the cattle trains that would take those souls to their death. Pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on prisoners. The Dehomag punch card machine was used (with the companies full permission) to catalog the camp inmates. Hell, companies bid on contracts to build the ovens that they would use in the death camps!

All of this would create a vast amount of paperwork, all of this would also involve the work of vast numbers of upper, middle, and even some lower-class Germans. And that's not even getting to the fact that humongous numbers of Soviet Prisoners of War were shot out of hand by not just the SS, but the Wehrmacht too! And plenty of German generals had the massive amounts of POW's they did take walk back to Germany... the majority of whom were still in Western Russia when winter struck. It's not as simple as it sounds, as those prisoners would, you know, have to be supervised, and such large amounts ment the need for lots of supervisors.

The German people had all the evidence they needed to work it through, but did not... because they knew they would not like the answer. After all, they were being offered the quite horrible choice of being guilty of complicity in the murder of millions... or standing up to the State that cheerfully commited those murders.

Thus, largely, they didn't think it through so they would not have to make that choice. But by not doing so, the choice was made for them.

I once heard a great saying, which goes like this.

Ignorance is bliss... until the bombs start falling.

And one can easily be wilfully ignorant, not just on a individual level, but also on a collective level. Stalin wilfully fooled himself into thinking that Hitler would not attack him in 1941, the leaders of Britain and France wilfully fooled themselves that Hitler did not have or want any further territorial ambitions after Munich, 1938. Hitler himself wilfully chose to believe that the war was going well up until April, 1945.

All of these self-applied delusions were broken, one way or the other. For Stalin, it was the German troops invading his nation on June 22nd, for the leaders of Britain and France it was the annexation of the rest of Czechslovakia in early 1939, for Hitler, it was Red Army shells and rockets exploding in central Berlin that finally broke that delusion (and even then, not completely).

The German people wilfully fooled themselves into thinking that the murder of up to eleven million people (not to mention the millions more who died in the rest of the war) was not happening. That delusion was broken by Germans being marched through those concentration camps by the Western Allies. Yet, it still is not broken fully, if the rash of post-war Holocaust denial and apologism that continues today is any indication.

The 70-or-so million the Germans who lived, fought-in, and survived the Second World War were complicit in the grimmest genocide in history. That is the historical fact, that is what happened.

A lot of this is convincing and harrowing, but you seem to be drastically overestimating the influence of denialism without any evidence for your case. Also, I'm no lawyer and I don't know how complicity works, but I highly doubt that every German could be held cimplicit. What about the few who were involved in actively obstructing the regime, or about young children?
 
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