I think the biggest difference between the Nazis and Confederates on one side, and the likes of the USSR, the US, and Turkey is that the latter’s myth of creation wasn’t based on a deeply reactionary and hateful ideology. The US, Turkey and the USSR all committed genocide (or in the case of the latter politicide) during the revolution that created those nations, and said genocides were fundamental for creating those nations as they are/were, but unlike the Nazis and Confederates, their case for fighting the war was not at heart to commit such atrocious acts out of a reactionary belief.Thanks for this thoughtful piece, and too @Stikfigur for yours also.
I think that comparisons between genocides is rarely helpful, as while for example Mozambiquans would doubtless agree that yes, the Nazis killed more people in the Holocaust than the Portuguese did at Wiriyamu, that doesn't really change anything for those who lost their families at Wiriyamu. Perhaps an exception to that is where a scholarly approach is taken to genocides by the same state, such as Prof Lushaba's analysis of the Herero genocide in Namibia and the holocaust?
I think the matter of history and geography is interesting, but there is still much to be said where the current nation is the same state that committed the genocide, or is legally the successor nation or sees itself as such. To me it is not only time, but the view the nation takes of the genocide event - denial, obfuscation, apology, denunciation, or something else. So to me Gorbachev is different from the moral culpability of Stalin, not only due to the passage of time but because of the denunciation of (some of) Stalin's actions in Khruschev's Secret Speech*. I think the nature of Putin's embrace of Stalin places him in a different position morally than Gorbachev was.
Similarly, I see a moral difference in the position of the UK with respect to Kenya since the 2013 apology and acceptance of guilt vs the position prior to that vs an alternative UK government that maintained that British atrocities during the counter-insurgency were the work of a few "bad apples", or one that argued it was justified by the nature of the war.
However where the only connection is ideology, I don't see a moral relationship between a modern-day Italian communist and Stalin's actions, just because the person is a communist - no more than I would expect a moral relationship between an Italian capitalist and the actions of Union Carbide at Bhopal, just because the person is a capitalist.
As for the Nazis, even without reference to historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, an alternate history of a surviving Nazi state would more or less cease to be a Nazi state if it denounced or apologised for the Holocaust. They simply wouldn't be Nazis - so a surviving Nazi state in alternate history would ipso facto be one that still supports / accepts / justifies the Holocaust.
*I am not sure this applies to the Holodomor, though?
It’s also why I think a Nazi Germany cannot fully liberalize, it will always be Nazi Germany, electing a moderate chancellor that apologizes for the Holocaust won’t stop that. You need some form of revolution to create a national myth that isn’t based around a fundamentally hateful and reactionary ideology like Nazism.
The closest equivalent of OTL is South Africa. The Boer-dominated regime of 1948 onwards was created with the intention to take away people’s freedoms on the basis of their skin color. It adopted a new flag, and broke away from the more moderate British Empire (more moderate in the sense that white supremacy wasn’t as central of a piece of its national myth). The only way that South Africa ceased to be the reactionary Afrikaner nation, and became the rainbow nation as it is known OTL is through a revolution that created a new national myth.