The Borders of Genre: The Glorification of Fascism Within Alternate History

[Charles EP M.]

I think we will get a lot of Russia / Ukraine WIs and Covid related WIs in the next decade or so. It won't displace ww2, but it might help a little bit.

Ukraine War WIs feel like they'll be a DLC for WW2 WIs rather than a substitute - "what if Russia won" stories where we had Germany Won

 

[Japhy]

Yes, as I said, I didn't want to divert from the subject of the thread.
Returning the thread to this original subject, in the thread about @moth's previous review about Guns of the South, @Geordie said at https://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/in...t-cause-and-harry-turtledove.3743/post-757105 that only the most egregious alternate history writers tried to whitewash the Nazis.

I wouldn't agree with that. There's plenty of apologetica. It's just that with fascist and other authoritarian regimes it's a matter of the degree. If you write a Nazi TL that talks about the horror but also likes tossing in gushing discussions about Speerist Architecture and Rail Systems you're still trying to ignore the odor.

It may not be a white wash, the intent might not be to create a whitewash but the need of a lot of people here to ignore the moral implications even while working with the best intentions opens the genre up to the problem that many want to brush off here.

 

[Von Callay]

I think we will get a lot of Russia / Ukraine WIs and Covid related WIs in the next decade or so. It won't displace ww2, but it might help a little bit.

I think there is always a bias against AH of more recent history because there is, in some ways, less information about it. Obviously we are being absolutely deluged in information about the war in Ukraine, but which parts of it are true, which parts are lies, and which parts are something in between isn't clear right now. There's a wealth of information, but which parts are historical valuable and which ones aren't isn't clear yet. Even when events are known, they aren't understood the way an event from 50 years ago can be, when there's been time for people to write histories and memoirs, for the archives to be sifted and witnesses interviewed.

Contemporary, lived history kind of also feels less changeable to me, because I see it day in and day out. Everything forms a logical progression of event a to consequence b to reaction c, and it's harder to see the might-have-beens except when they're really dramatic. The tiny little things that could have changed history much further back have had time to be found, even when more of them are surely happening right now.

 

[Coiler]

I think it's worth noting that Harry Turtledove's In The Presence of Mine Enemies, his most prominent and longest Axis victory take, manages to dodge most of these pitfalls. The only supertech is the barely mentioned wunderrockets used to blast the US into submission long ago (which are not dwelled on or fetishized in the least), and the main characters are people who would be instantly killed if the regime knew their true nature. The setting is a deliberately unromantic and drab[1] late-Soviet parallel, and even the reformists are still racist (limiting free elections to "proper Aryans" and the "August Coup" failing not by romantic dreams but because of anti-Semitism).

[1]For the sake of the actual book, too much so.

 

[SpanishSpy]

I think it's worth noting that Harry Turtledove's In The Presence of Mine Enemies, his most prominent and longest Axis victory take, manages to dodge most of these pitfalls. The only supertech is the barely mentioned wunderrockets used to blast the US into submission long ago (which are not dwelled on or fetishized in the least), and the main characters are people who would be instantly killed if the regime knew their true nature. The setting is a deliberately unromantic and drab[1] late-Soviet parallel, and even the reformists are still racist (limiting free elections to "proper Aryans" and the "August Coup" failing not by romantic dreams but because of anti-Semitism).

[1]For the sake of the actual book, too much so.

Likewise I think it's worth noting that Turtledove, the number one exponent of alternate history for a long time including several Nazi victory stories, is himself Jewish.

 

[Lemon flavoured]

I wouldn't agree with that. There's plenty of apologetica. It's just that with fascist and other authoritarian regimes it's a matter of the degree. If you write a Nazi TL that talks about the horror but also likes tossing in gushing discussions about Speerist Architecture and Rail Systems you're still trying to ignore the odor.

It may not be a white wash, the intent might not be to create a whitewash but the need of a lot of people here to ignore the moral implications even while working with the best intentions opens the genre up to the problem that many want to brush off here.

The question, I suppose, is what do we want to "allow" in stories about Nazi Germany? It should be *possible* to tell stories where Germany does better in ww2 without actually being a Nazi or an apologist. Is it worth the risk? Maybe not in most cases.

I do wonder if something like Das Boot was written now, would you get some people saying it was apologism, because it doesn't portray the crew as evil enough or similar?

 

[SpanishSpy]

Agreed, and also for those of us whose families fought for independence.

I have those in my family - my great-grandfather fought the Japanese and an old picture suggests my great-great-grandfather fought the Americans.

 

[Warthog]

I do wonder if something like Das Boot was written now, would you get some people saying it was apologism, because it doesn't portray the crew as evil enough or similar?

Well it doesn't portray Nazis particularly sympathetically at all. The issue would probably more be the sympathetic portrayal of men attacking civilian ships? The kind of protest a biopic of Bomber Harris might get?

 

[David Flin]

Well it doesn't portray Nazis particularly sympathetically at all. The issue would probably more be the sympathetic portrayal of men attacking civilian ships? The kind of protest a biopic of Bomber Harris might get?

The trouble with that line of argument is that it easily elides into the "clean Wehrmacht" myth. Where all the Bad Things was the fault of the SS and the Nazi Party, and ordinary people didn't have a clue what was going on.

That line is pushed even for those who unquestionably committed war crimes.

That's not so much a factor in Das Boot; I do, however, get twitchy over lines of argument that put forth the argument that the Nazi Party was the source of all that was bad, and that ordinary people simply didn't know.

 

[Warthog]

The trouble with that line of argument is that it easily elides into the "clean Wehrmacht" myth. Where all the Bad Things was the fault of the SS and the Nazi Party, and ordinary people didn't have a clue what was going on.

Indeed, and one sees rather too many sympathetic portrayals of men such as van Manstein, Paulus, or Doenitz.

But as you point out, this goes beyond the generals, or indeed the military

 

[Lemon flavoured]

The trouble with that line of argument is that it easily elides into the "clean Wehrmacht" myth. Where all the Bad Things was the fault of the SS and the Nazi Party, and ordinary people didn't have a clue what was going on.

That line is pushed even for those who unquestionably committed war crimes.

That's not so much a factor in Das Boot; I do, however, get twitchy over lines of argument that put forth the argument that the Nazi Party was the source of all that was bad, and that ordinary people simply didn't know.

Clean Kriegsmarine seems to be a relatively common thing as well, which is what I was getting at with Das Boot. So, effectively "the navy weren't *really* Nazis, you see".

Rommel is the other general who gets a lot of whitewashing. Hess and Canaris get it too.

 

[David Flin]

Rommel is the other general who gets a lot of whitewashing.

Oh yes. So very much Rommel stan goes on.

 

[Pete U]

Oh yes. So very much Rommel stan goes on.

But you see Rommel was competent and tried to blow up Hitler and therefore cannot have been a bad person.

See also Guderian, Heinz (without the July 20 plot)

 

[Charles EP M.]

The Clean Wermacht is an awkward trope we've had for decades and understandable in the past when suddenly half of Germany were our chums against the USSR and any interaction with German men of a certain age meant they could've been a soldier. Got to agree it was mostly These Guys and they're Gone Now. And after that, in a world of war stories everywhere and when a bit more public cynicism can come in about the Allied side, you get the interest in writing stories from the enemy's POV but you don't want to write a Nazi hero so you write the Honourable Clean Officer.

Though you never got the Honourable Clean Japanese Officer. Pat Mills tried in Battle because the German leads were popular but kids didn't take to it, and I don't know how much was racism and how much was the fact the Japanese had invaded British colonies & this meant rape, butchery, torture, and slavery were being done to British people. You might know your dad, granddad, or uncle had met some German veterans at a reunion (Spike Milligan has a funny story about him and a German slowly realising they were shooting at each other back in '42) but if they'd been in the Pacific, you might know they were captured and starved and brutalised.

 

[David Flin]

Interestingly (or perhaps not), I have had the experience of meeting an Argentine artillery officer who fought in the Falklands. After some discussion, it turned out he had shelled Mt Harriet after we had taken it.

I'll never know for sure, but it's possible he was directly responsible for my meeting Alison.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

I think many of us are fascinated by history. We love analysing the twists and turns of OTL and working out how things might have changed, if something were different, both as grand sweeping changes to the timeline that couldn’t have worked out in the real world (such as a German army sweeping through the Balkans, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, India, and somehow linking up with the Japanese in Indochina) or using it as a setting for a story. It is very easy to start thinking that our grand ‘real historians hate this simple trick’ concept is perfect and it would have worked if someone tried it in OTL – or to get so attached to it that we lose sight of the reality behind the timeline, even come across as thinking this really should have happened even though any rational mind would be glad it didn’t. I’ve seen people pushed into making fools of themselves because their timelines were criticized in a manner that came across, fairly or not, as personal attacks.

A more serious problem is that it is very easy to accuse someone lost in that trap, or even someone playing fair with their characters, of being pro-Nazi/CSA/whatever and it is impossible to disprove it even though it is rarely true. We have wound up with a situation in which reasonable criticisms trigger a defensive reaction and immediate push-back, because of a multitude of unreasonable criticisms that really were personal attacks. We feel as if we are being challenged because we like reading books like The Guns of the South, that there is something wrong with us because we think it’s a good book … a lot of which, I think, ties into how many of us geeks and nerds were treated during our formative years.

But then, most of us want exciting settings for stories and it is easy to also lose track of the cold reality behind a timeline. A Nazi Victory means mass genocide and suffering. A CSA victory means slavery will persist for years, before the CSA collapses because of economic weaknesses. A German victory in 1914 means a major shift in the European balance of power. Etc, etc.

Thoughts?

Chris

 

[Elektronaut]

Hmm. I think the article gets into a muddle in the Airstrip One-Gilead-Man in the High Castle paragraph. Or at least, it's imprecise.

The notion that Nazi ATLs get us inevitably and inherently tied up into Nazi ideology is clearly overegging it. People have already noted Fatherland which is clearly a story of relative political success for the Nazis but I think it would be strange reading to argue that it's a novel which validates the Nazis.

But Fatherland isn't a global success story for Nazism and definitely not for the Axis, and I think the writer may be differentiating that from "triumph" success stories, which yes, do very much open the way to validating the Nazis by their very premises. If you're gifting them vast, globe-spanning victories, giving them the power to drain the Med and conquer America, then you're basically delivering a backhanded compliment. And yes, I think we should be very wary of those scenarios.

That said, yes, Gilead and Airstrip One are fictionalised scenarios. But with real-world forces in the shape of religious fundamentalism and totalitarian Socialism behind them. 1984 is fiction but Orwell draws on a lot of archetypes he's experienced within Socialism for a lot of the characters and a lot of the currents within the regime. The Junior Anti-Sex League is very clearly drawn from his gripes with the, what was it, "vegetarian and nature-cure" side of things. It's a fictional regime, but also something of a Roman a clef. You have Trotsky and Stalin and the Old Bolsheviks.

But nobody would argue that Orwell's totalitarian world is a triumph scenario, because he makes it clear there's mass shortages of everything, everything smells of cabbage, the buildings are falling down and the booze tastes like piss. Oh and it's a commonplace for people to get killed on the streets by V2s. There's no hyper-efficiency and in fact no material success in the regime at all.

I think it would be odd, or at least navel-gazing, to locate the issue of mass market AH's attitude to the Nazis as some kind of internal problem purely for AH. It's clearly a very, very long-running thing in western pop culture as a whole. Making the Nazis sexy and/or cool, is clearly a deep-running strain within pop culture and I'm not sure we've seen the worst of it yet. It's fairly hard to imagine Man in the High Castle TV as really being much of a goer back when I was little. As time puts distance between us and WW2, this stuff may be more marketable.

I think the default popular cultural view about 'modern' authoritarianism outside the Nazis, of whatever stripe, tends towards the cabbage smell stereotype, (Though Mussolini and Fascism had their contemporary admirers, I think the cabbage smell view predominates today about Fascist Italy) but the opposite, 'cool' view does linger in western pop culture about the bad guys farther back - Napoleon to a degree, the Romans absolutely - there's certainly a view of the Romans as hyper-macho, hyper-efficient, hyper-militarised, and hyper-cool. And which does often have admirers on the far-right. Which depressingly suggests the equivalent Nazi mythologising may be something we have to contend with for, well, quite a while putting it mildly.

Ultimately I think we are talking about the battle between power-worship and moral clearsightedness, and that is probably an eternal concern.

 

[Warthog]

A more serious problem is that it is very easy to accuse someone lost in that trap, or even someone playing fair with their characters, of being pro-Nazi/CSA/whatever and it is impossible to disprove it even though it is rarely true.

The issue is less often whether the author is a wehrmacht-stan a Rhodiebooi or a Mussolifan, but more often whether the narrative brushes over, trivialises or sanitises the horror their timeline (or underlying assumptions) create, which is objectionable, irrespective of the actual views if the author.

I've had discussions with authors where I ask how they will achieve their assumption (majority white Namibia for example) who respond with it's an Axis victory timeline so that's alright

It is easy to also lose track of the cold reality behind a timeline. A Nazi Victory means mass genocide and suffering. A CSA victory means slavery will persist for years, before the CSA collapses because of economic weaknesses

Indeed it is, and the warning from many of us in this discussion is that if someone wants to write a fascism victorious timeline then they should be alive to this problem.

 

[Coiler]

The issue is less often whether the author is a wehrmacht-stan a Rhodiebooi or a Mussolifan, but more often whether the narrative brushes over, trivialises or sanitises the horror their timeline (or underlying assumptions) create, which is objectionable, irrespective of the actual views if the author.

I can understand and forgive Turtledove for writing Guns of the South the way he did, but that doesn't change the icky pro-Confederateness of the book itself.

I've had discussions with authors where I ask how they will achieve their assumption (majority white Namibia for example) who respond with it's an Axis victory timeline so that's alright

I'll ask the people who know a lot more about Africa than me (ie you and @Gary Oswald for one): Would an "African Argentina" (ie, state with a majority descended from European immigrants that got that way almost completely through voluntary immigration) even be slightly plausible? From my limited perspective, it doesn't seem like there were that many Europeans willing to go there compared to the Americas, and you'd have to have them all settle an implausibly limited area, and other objections I haven't even thought of...

(Plus in that context it just sounds like layering on the edgy dystopia even if it wasn't trying to laud such a thing. I can almost picture it: "Oh, and here's a snapshot of southern Africa, which I haven't even talked about before this post. Ok, Helmut von Evilmann created a white-majority Namibia by exterminating the natives and forcibly deporting millions of southern Europeans there [without really much explanation as to why he did that]".

 

[Warthog]

Would an "African Argentina" (ie, state with a majority descended from European immigrants that got that way almost completely through voluntary immigration) even be slightly plausible?

The issue is more you don't get there without genocide. The only really scarcely populated parts of Africa in the late 19th centuries, such as southwestern Namibia, Somaliland, Mauritania, were nonetheless not exactly terra nullius