Imagine if the Western Bloc lost the Cold War and we were responsible for mainstream WWII history. How would that look?
I have a few suggestions:
- Almost everybody would know about Britain’s history of profascism, be it from the press or Winston Churchill. Nobody would get tired of mentioning how the Third Reich wanted to ally with the British Empire, how British banks extended credits to the Third Reich, how the British Empire marketed scrap and other raw materials to it, Britain’s eugenic influences thereupon, and more. Nobody would forget that Queen Elizabeth once gave a Fascist salute.
- Nearly everybody would know about how corporate America was crucial to the Fascist war machine. Everyone would remember names like Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford, IBM, ITT, DuPont, General Electric, and elsewhat only with scorn. No-one would forget how French and Norwegian capitalists willingly cooperated with the Third Reich.
- The ‘clean Wehrmacht’ and ‘brava gente’ lies would be gone forever. The Regio Esercito’s massacres of hundreds of thousands of Africans would be well known, as would Fascist Italy’s influences on the Third Reich’s own colonialism. Memorials for Fascist Italy’s violence against Ethiopians and Libyans would be popular. Likewise, most adults would be familiar with how Ukrainian anticommunists, Polish anticommunists, Baltic anticommunists, and other antisocialists willingly collaborated with the Third Reich.
- Zionism would be completely discredited: Jews and other people would be well aware of Haʻavara, Haʻavara’s preference for certain Jews, the Third Reich’s funding of Herzlian settlings in Palestine, Adolf Eichmann’s supplies to the Haganah, how the Herzlians distributed Fascist products all over the Middle East and North Africa, how the Third Reich trained Herzlians to settle them in Palestine, and so much more.
- Almost everybody would be well aware of the Greco-Italian Treaty, the Franco-Italian Declaration, Fascist Italy’s and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s agreement, Warsaw’s nonagression pact with the Third Reich, the Anglo-German Naval Pact, Copenhagen’s nonaggression pact with the Third Reich, the Franco-German Declaration, Estonia and Latvia signing nonaggression pacts with the Third Reich, the partitioning of Czechoslovakia, and so much more.
- Nearly everyone would be very familiar with the proletariat’s opposition to Fascism, like how the Axis lost 280,000 tons of coal as a result of fifty thousand French miners striking, how thousands of Belgian & French workers held strikes in response to the Axis drafting them, how thousands of Belgians under Fascism went on strike for food, and so on.
- The Third Reich and the Slovak Republic would have been blamed for either starting or aggravating the war. If 1939 were not the commonly agreed upon start of World War II, then it would be either the upper classes’ partitioning of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937, the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, or maybe even the Imperial bourgeoisie colonising Manchuria in 1931. In relation to these, almost everyone would be familiar with the Spanish Civil War.
- Almost everyone would be familiar with how the Western Allies fought the Axis primarily to reinforce the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, and we would be well aware that the Western Allies bailed out Axis capitalists, failed to prosecute most of the Axis’s war criminals, hesitated to release concentration camp prisoners, did nothing to prosecute the Fascists for their crimes in Africa, reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution, reused surviving Axis employés for anticommunism, and so forth.
- Finally, schools’ coverage of the German–Soviet Pact of 1939 would be brief, especially in comparison with the events leading up to it and the Western Axis’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Schools would teach that the Fascists were responsible for the Katyń massacre, yet even this would receive less coverage than how the Fascists exterminated at least 30,000 Polish civilians in the Pomeranian province from October to November in 1939 alone. Similarly, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni’s meetings with Adolf Schicklgruber would be of interest only to specialists, and hardly anyone else would care about Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, much less blame him for the Shoah. By comparison, Walter Rauff would be far more infamous.
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Tbf growing up in the UK I learned about appeasement. But it’s framed as like “puny chamberlain couldn’t get it done so strong cool Churchill had to come and be a really cool leader with no problematic aspects at all”
I remember listening to a Swedish history podcast for about a year, it had problematic bits but also kind of interesting tidbits of minutiae (like personal details of historical figures and small bits of folklore. I tend to go for more materialist history if I’m reading books myself). I had to drop it after one of the hosts went off about how the british people were incredibly ungrateful to Churchill by not re-electing him since he was such a brilliant leader. Just him getting to go off on such a misinformed rant with no pushback from the slightly better co-host was a bridge too far. He would go off on how trying to use history to analyse anything was bunk every now and then, reducing the field of history to merely knowing names and dates, so I was already on the verge of dropping it as he also has one of the most punchable voices I have heard while being so weirdly self-important for someone who is actually a geography teacher.
Now, I am no expert by any stretch, but if you scratch under the pop history veneer you find that the “blitz spirit” was a sham and the government wanted the common people to stay in their houses and wouldn’t let them shelter in the subways until they started rioting. Churchill was also a disastrous military leader and his only real campaign was Gallipoli, so during WW2 the military brass had to find things for Churchill to waste time on (like the invasion of Madagascar) so he wouldn’t ruin anything important as he was mostly a drunken buffoon.
He was great at sending in fascist paramilitaries to kill civilians tho, so there is that as a feather in his cap I guess.
All these amateur historian closet wehraboos are sus. Geography teachers are probably not initiated and high ranking enough in the cabal to properly read some fucking books because among actual historians of WWII it’s pretty well known that Churchill was gung ho to an unhinged degree and openly wanted to start WWIII so that they’d be over with the Soviet Union while there was momentum. He started the Cold War proxy conflict era by lowkey invading Greece in 1944 (operation manna) and eventually attacked the dominant communist guerrilla army (battle of Athens) that had complete control after the Germans retreated. That “allied” anticommunist alliance even included Nazi collaborators that had functioned as paramilitary death squads before the German retreat. I vaguely remember that Churchill was excited about the atom bomb and really wanted it to be used against the USSR. He was an aristocratic racist nutjob who was a danger to all humanity.
Wouldn’t say Daniel Hermansson is a wehraboo, but he was very pop-history and great man theory brained. Churchill has a lot of pop-history hagiographies, so he has to be good. The kind of guy that is aghast that we no longer have to learn the dates of the battle of Cannae or rattle off the lineage of Swedish kings in history class. Predictably he released a pop-history book that was about ‘the generals of antiquity’ which was regurgitating stuff from Edward Gibbon.
Also doubly annoying that he now is percieved as an actual serious historian in Sweden and regularly trotted out as a history “expert” on national TV (I don’t usually watch tv, but I was gobsmacked to see him turning up as an expert). Now that Herman Lindqvist is tailing off, he is being replaced by a much more annoying and worse read alternative (Lindqvist would at least read primary sources, Hermansson barely reads tertiary sources). Long gone are the days of Hans Villius being the face of history, now it is all unserious people.
I’m not familiar with either of these and you’re right about the wehraboo thing, I just call them that because its part of the archetype I’ve noticed for pophistory types. They usually do the most superficial “just the facts” sort of pop history, remove all the parts that would bore mainstream audiences even though they’re usually very important e.g. statistical data, cliometrics, active scholarly debate happening about various things that is supposedly too academic for normies and instead focus on juicy trivia like Churchill wearing onesies, being alcoholic and possibly suffering from untreated bipolar disorder etc. They usually make sure to “give credit where credit is due” about the technological superiority of the axis, Nazi soldiers being just innocent Bavarian farm boys who didn’t have any choice what a shame etc. It softly feeds the literal wehraboos, like a gateway drug.
Pop history is kind of a huge scam in general. It focuses on completely nerdy pointless things like dates, names etc, gives people some supposedly coherent narrative with heroes and villains that feels like a story that makes sense and seems like everything happens for a known reason, generally gives a completely misleading idea about what academic history as a discipline actually does so when someone encounters academic history they’ll find it boring in comparison. Historians would dismiss all this as tidy narratives, usually nationalist ones that obscure how much debate and doubt surrounds all these “facts” and why it’s important to be aware of that and accepting historical uncertainties. After pophistory exhausts this when and what thing and tries to get to actual history that deals more with why and how and why not, it gives you the most normie, status quo “common sense” conclusions because it doesn’t bother giving the reader any analytical tools first. It’s also really bad at explaining context and that different eras and people could have completely alien worldviews that wouldn’t fit with their descendants at all.
On top of that it often tends to be just war and battle macho shit porn about all that is epic and glorious and the great leaders of the nation. It’s kinda weird because Hobsbawm who was a well known actual historian wrote popular works that aren’t boring at all for example but they’re still not Hollywood scripts I guess.
Didn’t expect you to know them, just wanted to rant a bit about the people in question. Villius is also very bourgeois liberal slanted, but he at least did his work before drawing the wrong conclusions.
I think there is a place for pop-history, but it is often the domain of unserious people. There are decent examples of even non-historians producing decent pop-history, like “The Jakarta Method” for example. I’d put actual historians making pop-history books into a slightly different tier, like Mary Beard or Hobsbawm.
I get what you mean about a place for pophistory but I’d rather see history history becoming more popular instead of having a category of dumbed down, simplified, entertainment oriented and ultimately completely misleading “history”. There’s too much focus on making things comfortable and accessible and I don’t believe this truly helps. With history in particular as soon as you start thinking that the world is basically relatively simple, that current concepts and ideas have always been the same, that it’s individual people who make all the difference etc you’re entirely on track to either buy into nationalist mythologies (public school type of history) or conspiracy theories (simple, “common sense” explanations of literally everything that happens). I compare this sort of thing to the same dopamine spike drain scheme that social media use. Causes a gradually greater intolerance to things that aren’t over the top captivating and interesting.
went off about how the british people were incredibly ungrateful to Churchill by not re-electing him since he was such a brilliant leader.
These motherfuckers conveniently forget Operation Unthinkable was called “Operation Unthinkable” for a reason. Even with nukes, what would become NATO would have still struggled to fight a fully mobilized USSR with way more experience than the British.
In such a scenario, for some of the Soviet troops and officers, it would have been their fifth war. They had more combat experience than anyone else in the world. Nuking a few cities wouldn’t be enough to stop them from overrunning the rest of Europe.
Everyone who was not Winston Churchill understood this. The British people were already exhausted after WWI and WWII. They didn’t want to enter a third war against an enemy who was at that point used to fighting wars of annihilation.
I also think that the Finnish Civil War would be a more well known event and the White Terror not just discreetly swept under the rug. The prison camps had worse mortality rates after the whites were victorious than the Soviet ones had during operation Barbarossa. Yet the gulags are held up as a world historic crime.
Edit: Also, as a fun extra, everybody who carried out the terror was unilaterally pardoned and it wouldn’t even be officially acknowledged until 1973.
“If the Eastern Bloc won the Cold War” is my favourite alt history. I love it. We definitely got the bad ending there.
The way you took that concept, ran with it, and made a good effortpost about the Great Patriotic War and the true motives of the Western Allies… I really like you, comrade.
Sexual assault perpetrated by yankis, fr*nch and britshit soldiers on Italian, French and German populations would be way more known to the public. Nowadays in any pop history documentary they never forget to talk about Soviet SA crimes but conveniently have no mention about the other Allied countries crimes because it fits into the narrative about barbarian “asiatic hordes” plundering through Europe.
Very good post
GOOD post comrade, saved
I’m pretty sure we are living in the shit timeline.
Thanks for this great post
Whats that first (top left) photo with the yanks and the nazis?
wrong answer
I think it’s about the Battle of Casttle Itter (Austria, May 1945): “… Americans and Germans fought side by side …”Ty comrade
Oops! It’s dated on June 27, 1944: An Axis prisoner shakes hands with his U.S. captor as he and his fellows smile happily at their surrender in Cherbourg (France).
It has been used to illustrate the battle of Castle Itter in diverse web pages in Spanish about that battle, but it’s unrelated.
Thanks @AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml to advise me.
so true bestie
