still blows my mind to see pro-Soviet propaganda made in the U.S. by an NGO
looking into that extremely brief moment in which the soviets were considered allies and a stalin-fdr rapprochement was a distant but possible outcome rather than the cold war we got is a trip. But then again it wouldn’t have lasted, capitalism would not tolerate an alternative economic system let alone befriend it
If FDR had lived a couple more years, or if Henry Wallace had remained the VP, he could have at least kicked the Cold War can down the road a decade or so. At the very least the Korean War might not have happened with a less belligerent president at the helm through the late 40s.
i basically educated my mom on blowback and what could have been (she’s an FDR stan because of our family history with the New Deal)
i think best case scenerio with Wallace is the U.S. goes firmly socdem for a generation or two and the USSR becomes market socialist and basically does a China but far earlier
after that who knows butterfly effects likely the crisis comes later but maybe the socialist/communist bloc is far stronger and more economically integrated and neoliberalism never happens
especially if there’s a socialist economic zone that combines Europe with the Soviets. there was so much goodwill in the aftermath of WW2 and Wallace could have severely disrupted the CIA’s creation (since FDR fucking hated the OSS)
imagine buying the global south like 15 to 20 years of decolonization and political development without interference or only the good kind (material and intellectual aid no strings attached)
watch the US-government films on it from the war, the narrative completely 180’d during WW2
oh i’ve seen some. also recently went through a contemporary american art exhibit that ran from the 20s to the 60s. norman rockwell, etc.
my partner and I had fun with the sudden, screeching tone shift that occurred starting around '48
This is why I tell people to watch movies like “The North Star (1943)”.
It really gets downplayed in American history classes the amount of postwar rebuilding the ussr had to do. One of my favorite scenes in The Americans is when it flashes back to the main characters’ childhood years (born during WW2) and a group of boys are banging on the back door of a cafeteria, so the cook let’s them scrape the dried food bits off the cookware before washing it. I would love to learn more about what interpersonal/societal impacts having your population not just survive, but triumph over a war of extermination has on the people
Even the Nazis were like “yeah we’re not touching Florida”
I wonder if somebody’s written this book yet. The Siege of St Louis, an alt history novel where America was the target of the Nazi invasion instead of the Soviets. Could be an airport best seller.
Isn’t that basically “the man in the high castle”?
not exactly. the man in high castle supposes an assassination attempt of FDR was, in the alternate history of the novel, successful and the US sunk further into the great depression. the policy of non-intervention in ww2 was extended for several more years. this allowed the nazis an eventual victory in the east and widespread extermination of peoples considered “subhuman” across europe. the nazis then turned to africa and integrated it into the reich. the US joined what remained of the allies later. i believe the victories and unchallenged conquests allowed the the nazis to get to the A bomb first, along with advanced rocket technology. i don’t remember much being said about what happened to the soviets, except that stalin was assassinated at some point in the war. the maps seem to imply Generalplan Ost was a success.
[the axis are still in joint coalition to conquer south america at the time the novel takes place (early 1960s), and have basically conquered the world and partitioned it among themselves.]
but anyway, DC got nuked, decapitating the government and that was the end of the US’ will to fight. the nazis created a rump state of the eastern US based out of NY with all the eager collaborating capitalists, the japanese did the same to the west coast under a partition agreement.
the novel takes place 15 years after all this, into the world that formed after the allies lose, where the Nazis and the Japanese empires now control huge parts of the world, spy on each other’s military technologies and generally only pay lip service to their alliance, squabbling over the boundaries of their spheres of influence and looking desperately for ways to tip the balance in their favor.
i think it was mostly envisioned as a mirror world where the US was the partitioned loser of ww2 and a new “cold war” would emerge between the war’s victors with the implied battleground of two superpowers’ secret police being in the partitioned north american continent instead of europe, and the events of the novel are well after the war with events of the war only being painted in the sort of ideologically framed broad strokes that a conquered people would be allowed to know.
plot background: the Soviet union doesn’t exist and is knocked out of the scenerio, and have a Britian-German alliance invade the U.S. using the British navy combined with a built up German navy
Rochestergrad
Loving the concept of St. Louis as an alt history parallel of Stalingrad.
The gate unentered, the threshold uncrossed, the bloody Mississippi
Comparing the NE states to the Baltics is incredibly amusing to me for some reason
I’ve always said New York is the Kaunas of America
New York—> Kaunas OUCH
Tashkent —> Phoenix
Boise is Novosibirsk tho
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