Satinavian said:
Yes. "What if Nazis would have won ?" could be interesting. But most often it is just a cheap excuse to have your underdog protagonist fight Nazis i whatever environment.
But how a winning Nazi Germani might have changed in 70+ years and how the rest of the international order might have evolved could be very interesting.
No it's not. Because the Third Reich would still have fallen. For starters you actually have to point out
where the structuralist divergence point is ... and it has to be pretty fucking important. One of the things I Liked about Fallout is precisely how overblown its own alternate history is by basically creating a purposely kitsch situation of humanity never discovering the transistor. It literally just takes its paint job, goes silly with its ramifications... but then again the paint job was never what was important in Fallout.
The thing is we already live in a world of
alternate histories.
We already live in a world of alternate histories, with alternate historical outlooks, and all it simply requires is people to
just ignore something that happened to create two wildly different historical 'accounts'. Like, say,
Japan.
Here's an interesting alternate history outcome ... rather than an Axis power actually losing or winning, what would Japan look like
if it was forced to publicly accept defeat in every aspect of life? What if Prince Asaka was (rightfully) publicly executed by firing squad for war crimes, and no 'loose interpretations' of Japanese history was allowed in Japanese schools? And I guarantee you the world would look different simply because of that. For starters you wouldn't have had what is probably the most longest running propaganda campaign of Western consumption of Japanese media. How 'cute culture' basiclly started as a propaganda campaign to dealing with the harshness of defeat and helping diminish anti-Japanese sentiments in the West.
Basically Fallout's 'kitschness' of no transistors to channel a garish, uncultivated 50s polemic into its visual detail is no different from Japan's postwar 'kawaii culture' origins.
It really is kind of fucking absurd how the likenesses are... with the added, scary effect that
one of them is real...
Alternate histories are boring because we already live in a world with them.
And it turns out it has less to do with physical activities and some naturalistic idea of cause and effect, andmore so to do simply with how humans construct their relationship to history itself.
This is the problem of treating history as merely an abstracted idea of human currency on time, labour, and resources. It makes an argument to structuralism while trying to have its cake and eat it, too. And it will always,
always, be glaring and
feel wrong because of that artificiality.
The only time it works is if it gets the overblown treatment of something like Fallout or Star Trek.
If Japan had to forcibly confront its own history, the Imperial line was
forcibly disbanded at the gun barrel, the biggest slice of Japanese culture we'd be consuming ona daily basis out of Japan probably would have been
arthouse Beat Takeshi films.
Same way 'the West' treat German media, now. And Germany almost fell into a Japanese style postwar cultural scene situation with the Historikerstreit, and the philosophical and historiographical designs by which an examination of the Third Reich in comparison to the rest of German history should be analyzed from.
Hell, even Takeshi Kitano makes this argument in a movie of his own namesake, in a flashback sequence of him as one of his family members playing possum, and a U.S. Marine shooting him in the back on the ground... It's a biarre fucking scene, but I''m guessing its message wasn't directed at us but other Japanese viewers and their relationship to media. Which forms the central point surrounding the film specifically.
Once again, we already live in a world of 'alternate histories' ... historiography alone guarantees that, and more often than not the human evaluations will arise from that historiographical ideal more so than the actual events ... The whole idea of narratives within narratives leading to a flawed human perception of the ever-present and how we came to be.
Truth is relative, history is mutable, and lessons are
inexorably lost... Turns out a soldier actually deciding to wear their helmet that
one day correctly is just as important as a Hitler, but ultimately just isn't that functional an entity or an action to base history around because it's still just another life in a world where life is largely meaningless in comparison to the masses that drove it relentlessly on into its graves.
If you're going to have narratives of; "The Nazis would have won if [insert battle here] had gone their way..." in the end you're talking about a multitude of relationships and ixnaying their relevance to
why that wasn't so.
And hell, sometimes wars are won or lost on the simple basis of their commander's idea of what a victory or defeat may even look like. For example, the Australian actions on one brigade's worth of soldiers against a combined North Korean and Chinese division at Kapyong.
At the ADFA, Kapyong is taught as the definitive example of why psychology, true grit[ and cool leadership and direction of maneuvers alone can win battles against overwhelming enemy opposition. In China, Kapyong is taught as a victory of communist forces .. just that the Australian and Canadian actions there delayed them from securing North Korea and making a hard division of the 38th parallel and establishing guns in sight of Seoul.
And both are accurate accounts.
