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

I kind of share Mitrovich's take on this, and not just because we both hashed it out in the "All The Myriad Ways" roundtable. Yes, it definitely exists. But like him, I'd say it's more an issue of historiography and historical fiction than AH per se. You can definitely see similar distortions in actual history and historical fiction about those eras. Like "Look at all those kitty-super tanks and jet fighters and not the poor fellows in mismatched uniforms staggering around in horse-drawn wagons who made up the real bulk of the resource-starved German army" or "Let's talk about Robert E. Lee without mentioning how his northern campaigns featured mass kidnappings of African Americans to force back into slavery"."
 
A very insightful article. I find this passage especially important:

[W]hat do their versions of 'High Castle' tell us? That Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan could have been triumphant over democracy and that the Reich would have built bullet trains and flown concords and colonised our solar system by early 1960s etcetera. The average viewer departs from these interpretations, even when discounting the more fantastical elements, under the impression that there is ‘efficiency’ in fascism, that the trains run on time.
In order to depict Nazi and/or fascist victories, you need to wank them beyond plausibility and take their propaganda at face value. That's a dangerous thing in a world where way too many people are already tempted by authoritarian solutions to their problems. Rather, alternate history writers, whatever they do with Nazism/fascism, should take pains to depict those regimes as they were historically, dysfunctional by design.
 
I have a problem with the 'portrayal ennobles' argument and that is that right now, Talking Pictures has almost finished their Secret Army/Kessler repeats, depicting actual Nazi conquest and then an SS man and his fellow war criminals still around in the modern day, written when the National Front was on the up and there would be real ex-Nazis getting away with it as fat happy industrialists in West Germany. We'd have to say it showing the Nazis in charge and victorious and rounding up kids for camps is ennoblement and not a threat, or war criminals escaping justice is ennoblement and not a bitter remark.
 
@Gary Oswald I’m having a problem trying to read the article as on my phone it just keeps zooming in on the poster of Man In A High Castle that is causing my phone to cack out. Even reader mode has been corrupted by it.
 
I figured this one would get a lively discussion going. I don't agree with it entirely myself (as a long time reader of romance books, I have problems with the idea that a negative reputation by outsiders actually means anything about your genre rather than just stereotyping) but Monroe is an engaging writer who can muster their arguments well and I always like receiving their articles as a result.

@Gary Oswald I’m having a problem trying to read the article as on my phone it just keeps zooming in on the poster of Man In A High Castle that is causing my phone to cack out. Even reader mode has been corrupted by it.

Huh, not sure why that is happening. I'm not seeing the same problem on my phone.
 
Honestly I'd go further.

There's a real problem even in this thread of trying to pass the buck on this. It doesn't really matter if there are flaws in mainline historical fiction. We do put the Nazis on the moon and have the Confederacy survive into the 20th century. The occasional, far less prominent counterpoint doesn't really change that.

I've talked about it repeatedly on Twitter including the Discourse mentioned in the article but there's a real knee-jerk reaction to even the most basic critique here. The number of people who won't even consider there's a real problem at all and stick their heads in the sand is wild.
 
I agree with @Japhy; the counter examples represent a tiny minority of the genre. Is it getting better? Yes. But the outside perspective that it’s all Nazis and General Lee isn’t far off.

I also think part of the problem is people who try and do versions of those scenarios to focus on the horror. That can be done well- @SpanishSpy’s recent vignette, for instance.

But too often you end up with something like The New Order. The outright whitewashing and romanticisation of people like Heydrich seems to be subsiding there, but the problem is that even though the new team is trying to take out that content, the attempt to describe the full horrors of the Axis victory isn’t that much better. The tone of the mod is a general luxuriating in atrocity that verges into holocaust pornography. Making the whole thing interactive- forcing the player to empathise with and imagine themselves as the perpetrators of genocide is even worse.

The relentless militarism and map painting of the genre doesn’t help either.
 
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I agree with @Japhy; the counter examples represent a tiny minority of the genre. Is it getting better? Yes. But the outside perspective that it’s all Nazis and General Lee isn’t far off.

One only has to look at AH discussions on various AH discussion forums (fora?).

One is inundated with discussion threads that start with the premise that summarises as: "Real historians and military analysts hate this one simple trick which would let Nazi Germany win WW2". The discussion generally follows a formulaic pattern, and the uneasy feeling one often gets is that a significant proportion of those arguing it would have been possible and argue strenuously for that point of view hold the unstated opinion: "And it would have been a good thing."

You also get the discussions that focus around the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht", with everything Bad blamed on the nasty SS and that the vast majority didn't realise a single bad thing was going on and were horrified when they found out. Yeah, right. But it's something that too many people in the genre strenuously put forward.

It might be a perception problem from people outside the genre dipping in, but it's a perception problem that has some basis in truth.
 
I mean to some extent 'but this is focusing on what the genre was like' somewhat misses the point considering that when you're trying to grow into the media big leagues they are, naturally, going to focus on the stuff that's 'guaranteed' to be a success.

So obviously things like Fatherland and SS-GB and Man in the High Castle were going to get big adaptations first because they're works which have been in publication for decades and still sell and so they look less risky to the likes of Amazon and the Beeb. And to some extent we in the community just took that at face value and shrugged (even when High Castle clearly just took the setting and went even further down that route than the book ever did).

And... well maybe the pushback from the community is starting early enough to mean that it's only the second generation of works that move beyond that narrow focus, and maybe it was impossible to go straight to other areas right from the off.

But at the same time if the next big budget AH works on TV just end up being adaptations of the Draka and Guns of the South then we should really see that as a failure of the community to demonstrate that the mood music has shifted at all from that mindset.

(And for anyone out there going 'yeah but we can't leave Turtledove out of the adaptations', just do a feature length treatment on Vilcabamba- it'll be far more interesting even as an 'inspired by' than most of the rest.)
 
If the problem is not what the stories are like but that stories exist at all where Nazis or Confederates won, then I don't think there's a problem. I'd have to lump Kevin Wilmott's CSA, a vicious satire on US history and race relations, with Lost Cause apologetica.
So, did you read the essay?
 
If the problem is not what the stories are like but that stories exist at all where Nazis or Confederates won, then I don't think there's a problem. I'd have to lump Kevin Wilmott's CSA, a vicious satire on US history and race relations, with Lost Cause apologetica.

I agree - I think that the assumption that depiction is always glorification really weakens the argument here. Truffaut's Law is more of a guideline or reminder than an ironclad rule of storytelling. There are plenty of effective anti-war movies; Jarhead comes to mind (because it's built on deliberate anti-climax) as do any number of films that follow civilians surviving atrocities.
 
The tone of the mod is a general luxuriating in atrocity that verges into holocaust pornography. Making the whole thing interactive- forcing the player to empathise with and imagine themselves as the perpetrators of genocide is even worse.
I think that - with all due respect to those here who've worked on mods like this and/or enjoy them, because I don't think this is any one person's fault, really - that's sort of inherently a problem with AH video games like The New Order. Because they're set up so that players can choose between which country they'll play, and within each country which path to lead them down. Which is fine in and of itself, but I think the fact that it allows players to choose fascist countries and fascist paths for their countries as options that are equally technically valid sort of leads a lot of players to, on some level, think of those paths as equally valid choices, differing only in aesthetic content. And while I'm given to understand that TNO does make an effort to force players to confront the consequences of their decisions, in the end, it is just a video game and there's not much it can do to really confront the gravity of the Holocaust, even for players who would be receptive.

(Note: I haven't played any Paradox mods - not for ideological reasons, it's just that I tried to play HoI4 once and my computer couldn't handle it.)

I agree - I think that the assumption that depiction is always glorification really weakens the argument here. Truffaut's Law is more of a guideline or reminder than an ironclad rule of storytelling. There are plenty of effective anti-war movies; Jarhead comes to mind (because it's built on deliberate anti-climax) as do any number of films that follow civilians surviving atrocities.
I don't think you need to assume that depiction is always glorification to hold that it is easy for depiction to shade into glorification without a deliberate effort not to make it so, and most popular published AH just doesn't make that effort.
 
I've talked about it repeatedly on Twitter including the Discourse mentioned in the article but there's a real knee-jerk reaction to even the most basic critique here. The number of people who won't even consider there's a real problem at all and stick their heads in the sand is wild.

I think Monroe is entirely right about the problem and that its serious. Like I said, I differ slightly on some stuff but it's well written and persuasive and addresses a genuine problem. But the weakness of the essay is essentially the 'call to action' at the end is 'keep doing what you're doing', which is not the most dynamic demand.

Like I can't write less Nazi victory pieces, because I started with 0. We at SLP could publish less Nazi victory books in that we've published 3 out of 136 but not by much. I think there's maybe 5 vignettes about Nazi victories that made it to the blog compared to 50 about other areas and maybe 3 essays that cover the same compared to 860 that aren't about that. We're not the ones putting a swastika on every book cover so we can't stop doing that.

And, tbf Monroe recognises that. They were very kind about both me and Tom in their essay and that is part of the reason, I suspect, they used this site as a bully pulpit.

But well, it's kind of easy to stick your head in the sand and view it as someone else's problem when the call to action 'is other people need to do what you're already doing'.
 
I think Monroe is entirely right about the problem and that its serious. Like I said, I differ slightly on some stuff but it's well written and persuasive and addresses a genuine problem. But the weakness of the essay is essentially the 'call to action' at the end is 'keep doing what you're doing', which is not the most dynamic demand.

Like I can't write less Nazi victory pieces, because I started with 0. We at SLP could publish less Nazi victory books in that we've published 3 out of 136 but not by much. I think there's maybe 5 vignettes about Nazi victories that made it to the blog compared to 50 about other areas and maybe 3 essays that cover the same compared to 860 that aren't about that. We're not the ones putting a swastika on every book cover so we can't stop doing that.

And, tbf Monroe recognises that. They were very kind about both me and Tom in their essay and that is part of the reason, I suspect, they used this site as a bully pulpit.

But well, it's kind of easy to stick your head in the sand and view it as someone else's problem when the call to action 'is other people need to do what you're already doing'.
I think another part of the problem is that, well, there's a reason Nazi victories are so popular, isn't there? A lot of people want to read them. Part of that is that people want to read AH about stuff they already more or less know about, or think they do, part of it is that people seem to actively like dystopian fiction, part of it is that people don't really price the horrors of the Holocaust or slavery into the settings of those books - but there is a genuine demand for these things in a way that there just isn't, for now, for our more specialist stuff - I'm not trying to be a snob about this, but I do think most SLP content is very much for people who already like alternate history in a way that The Man In The High Castle or TL-191 isn't.
 
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