Everyone’s heard it before. From literary legend Philip K. Dick, to the developers at Muse Software, to the writers and artists behind the Justice League cartoon show, it’s a question that’s hard to get off your mind:
What if the Nazis won World War II?
The question itself seems simple enough. Slap a bunch of swastikas on familiar landmarks, scrub the streets of minorities, and throw in some jack-booted police for good measure, and hey presto, you’ve got a premise.
But it comes with a slew of implicit assumptions. First, that such a result was even materially possible. Any decent historian could tell you that the German economic model was so hopelessly dysfunctional, its industrial manufacturing power so deficient and its political leadership so disconnected from reality that their defeat was practically guaranteed the moment the Wehrmacht set foot in Poland. Any reasonable exploration of this alternative reality must first explain what changed inside Germany to fix these massive organizational flaws.
It also assumes that the Nazis would have led the post-war world order. Even if Germany emerged victorious from the fire of the war, how many of the so-called “ubermensch” would have been left to secure the ashes? What role would the United States play, and how would the spoils be split between Italy and Japan? Once Hitler died, who would replace him, and how would they do so?
Like a clown’s handkerchief, an intelligent writer can pull an endless string of questions out of the initial one, each with their own cascading series of questions and theoretical answers. Maybe that’s the appeal; it opens an infinite number of doors into an infinite number of new worlds to explore, depending on how you answer. You could sit around wondering about different variations and their implications, what effect this battle or that technology would have had on the outcome, until the sun swallows the earth.
Which makes the apparent absence of a very similar alt-history scenario in American fiction all the more curious — what if the Soviet Union won the Cold War?
Now there’s a good one. For decades, the two superpowers left standing after the war at the center of those Nazi realities actually did duke it out, albeit indirectly, and the imagined confrontations between a victorious Germany and its rivals draw heavily from the real history of the 20th century global ideological struggle. So if we can wonder what the present would look like if Hitler had his way, why not Stalin or Khruschev?
At first glance it seems just as simple as the fascist scenario. Replace swastikas with hammers and sickles, minorities with rich people, and give the goons ushankas instead of trench coats (but keep the big bad stand-in dictator) and now you can milk a new idea for four seasons on Amazon Prime.
So why hasn’t anyone done that yet? I think the answer lies deep in the American subconscious. Most people (unfortunately, and worryingly, not all) agree that the NSDAP was ontologically evil; not just misguided or incorrect, but fundamentally opposed to humanity, even the very concept of morality. As a result, a world run by the Nazis would be an unprecedented dystopia where there is a clear, indisputable ethical imperative to fight against the state, against explicit and obvious systems of control. It doesn’t question the righteousness of liberal democracy. In fact, it reinforces it. These fantasies are part of Fukuyama’s end of history; the only other world-system we are allowed to imagine is a nightmare where the ‘good guys’ (the United States and liberal Europe) lost to the ‘bad guys’.
But even in fiction that defeat is only temporary; without fail, the rebels win, the dictator falls, and democracy is restored. The idea that fascism might actually prevail in the end, that naked force could win outright against the supposedly indefatigable human spirit is a non-starter. Liberalism takes not just its rightful place as the leading global ideology, but its inevitable place. Fascism is seen as merely a detour, a historical aberration, and not a genuine challenge to the liberal order.
Communism, on the other hand, posed a very real threat to the capitalist world-system. As flawed as the Soviet Union was, it accomplished feats of positive social engineering and industrial development unrivaled until the rise of China (with its own complicated relationship to communism) in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. Here is a real socio-economic structure that shook the liberal world on a fundamental level, one that drove them mad with its success, however limited and ephemeral it was.
(On a side note, I want to acknowledge the irony that imagining a world where communism wins violates its own ideology. One must ignore the material reality that communism failed to live up to its own aspirations; the communist nations and peoples of the world were defeated by reactionary capitalism in the first great conflict between the two. I think that ultimately it will prevail, but it will take many generations of experimentation and failure by the workers of the world to defeat the incredible social power of the Western bourgeoisie and its global accomplices.)
First of all, communism’s materialist approach to history and politics is far more difficult for liberal artists to make into a caricature than fascist traditionalism or esotericism because they either cannot or will not understand it. Liberals tend to see the world in moral and ethical terms; this nation failed because its leaders were evil, this one succeeded because its people were righteous, et cetera, and fascism, even in its own terms, lends itself to this perception. Hitler and Mussolini are the Sauron to liberals’ Aragorn, Voldemort to their Harry Potter — dark villains who want nothing but destruction (a not-entirely-false appreciation of fascist philosophy).
Communists do not fit neatly into this picture. Look no further than the decisive conflict itself, World War II, where liberalism and communism fought fascism together (and communism struck the killing blow), yet went on to compete for the rest of the century.
But there is a real ideological conflict here. Historical materialism tells us that the history of human development is not an eternal conflict between ontologically good and evil forces, as the liberals think, but a war between social classes. The social classes involved have changed radically over time (clergy, nobility and peasantry became bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie and proletariat and so on), but the perpetual struggle to control the levers of social power between distinct groups of people, defined by their relation to the means of material production and distribution, remains. The epithet of “godless” communism reflects this. Materialism undermines an understanding of the world that springs ultimately out of a religious ideology, a secular veneer on ancient theology. The Fascists are Angra Mainyu, Tiamat, Satan, Dictatorship; the Liberals are Ahura Mazda, Marduk, Jehovah, Democracy. Communists are atheists; the disillusioned critics of these god-lies. The Devil must be destroyed because he is Evil and we are Good. The Communists must be destroyed because they question Goodness, and therefore God.
That is why media cannot even toy with the idea of the communists winning. It’s easy for liberals to imagine a life under fascism as a life under pure evil, where, by some stroke of bad luck or historical mix-up, the good guys were defeated. But for them to imagine a life under communism is to imagine a life where they not only lost, but were fundamentally wrong about how the world works.
They refuse to seriously engage with the implications of that reality because it forces them to question their most precious beliefs. But let’s say for a moment that I’m underestimating the intellectual capacity of liberal artists. Let’s say liberals really are capable of that level of ideological and philosophical abstraction, that level of self-awareness. I think they still would never do it. Communist parties around the world made life materially better for their people than liberalism (especially neoliberalism) is capable of; mass vaccinations, universal education, healthcare, and housing, a reliable, affordable food supply, the list goes on. If they controlled the world, they would have the opportunity (though no guarantee) to extend those rights to the whole rest of the world, to the starving masses in the periphery, whose suffering is the basis of global capitalism. To portray such a world, even in fiction, is an even greater sin than merely questioning the Best Possible Economic System. In other words:
To imagine a world where communism won risks imagining a world better off than our own.
Irony Poison 