Fiat Lux

When I was still in high school and didn't have much else to do in my senior year, I checked a copy of Mein Kampf out and read it. First, even allowing for translation, the original language must have been the German version of Engrish. Taking it from Adolf Hitler's mastery of German, one would not have expected this to be the magnum opus of the leader of a large First-World country, one would have seen it instead as the type of literature one encounters among the various extremist movements today, overlong, meandering in a lot of points, and with a lot of grotesque metaphors even for the time (and not surprisingly der Fuhrer was a big porn connoisseur).

The idea seemed like a mirror version of What Is To Be Done, namely a view of the group to be killed in bloody red slaughter (pun half-intended) as various peoples Hitler didn't like, as opposed to parasitical imperialistic big business. The idea of the Ubermensch was to create by means of pre-Watson and Crick science a group of people who would be superior and establish a New Fascist Man. This, naturally, in the vein of Manifest Destiny, meant that the inferior Slavs would fade away and a German state would expand on a house of Slavic corpses. Oh, and let's not forget that in Hitlerland the Jews are all-powerful people out of a Dan Brown novel as opposed to the traditional whipping boy of Eurochristian culture. Half the book is his autobiography, in which he comes across as a self-adulating large ham like his predecessor the Kaiser (who said when told he had a small cold "No, no, it must be a big cold. Everything about me must be big.') , and a ham who hated the society he was born in but also hated Vienna, his one experience with big cities. The second half was this large-scale vision of his version of the Nazi Party, which didn't become final until the Night of the Long Knives. Even taking into account that for a few years Hitler ran a fairly large European Empire, I would rank this book and its author as a 3.5 on a 10-point scale.

My take on what would happen if the Atomic Bomb didn't go off for whatever reason it did IOTL (likely a delayed start to the Manhattan Project):

First, Operation Starvation would have seen an increasingly desperate situation in Japan. Allied POWs might become scapegoats here as the IJA raises them as the reason for desperate straits. Either way, Japanese are already dying like flies before the invasion goes in. This leads to an increasing number of volunteers for Kamikaze and Bakka Bombs, because Hell, they're already starving why not take Allied forces with them?

At the same time the Soviet August Storm Operation starts rolling up Imperial Japanese forces in Mainland Asia, the result in terms of the first wave of Downfall is a bloody Anzio-on-the-Kanto. Japanese resistance is so fanatical that Allied casualties are already atrocious. For bonus shits and giggles we'll say a few OTL people of signficance die in the battle and thus certain aspects of post-war culture will be very different. The Soviets begin to gather fleets for a land invasion of Hokkaido, which takes a bit more time because this POD doesn't change the basic inadequacy of the Soviet groundwater fleet.

The American invasion steadily pushes inland, meeting fierce invasion, and purple hearts are given out by the dozen. Use of biological warfare happens, and then the first atomic bombing (because the Bomb is only delayed by a few months, not never happening) precedes US landings followed by still more atomic bombings in preparation of a US landing. The battle continues and the Soviet occupation of Hokkaido sees some revenges exacted for how the battles prior to the beginning of the War in Europe were fought, by Marshal Zhukov.

By the end of the Battle, the Ainu are completely extinct as a people between Japanese repression and scapegoating and Soviet brutality. The Japanese themselves are reduced to a tiny proportion of what they once were, and the liberal use of atomic bombings has left entire parts of the country as future death traps. Good chunks of the USA are suffering the result of biological warfare, while in the future radiation poisoning is going to have a dramatic effect on American lives. The Soviet Union occupies Hokkaido and this is the world at the end of World War II at the beginning of 1947.

The butterfly effects that are obvious are: 1) Less swift and easy victory for Israel and possibly no Israel at all due to a greater World War II and less eyes on the Soviets. Massive butterflies, including a larger number of Christians in Palestine and very likely more Jews in the Arabic-speaking countries.

2) Japan as we know it is not a US ally. Presuming the ROC still goes down to defeat (which given Sovietist views of Maoists is not entirely likely), possible locations of Nationalists on the islands of Japan are quite possible indeed.

3) The Mushroom cloud lingers much heavier in US national consciousness due to the rate of radiation poisoning in American soldiers (which was actually the plan, at the time of the design of nuclear weapons none of the lingering effects of fission bombs were known).

4) A very different Cold War. The Soviets might well have a part of Tokyo, which gives the West its own Berlin to squeeze the balls of the Soviets like Berlin squeezed the balls of the West. The possiblity of no PRC has radically different effects on the shape of de-colonization, without a single great leading movement as such. Alt-McCarthyism will take a very different form.

5) Korea is a single nation, under a Soviet stooge, who may or may not be Kim Il-Sung.

6) World War II lasting longer would itself change the post-war landscape to a degree, the 1948 elections that saw men like Nixon, JFK, and LBJ get elected will, if those men survive Downfall, not see them elected as soon as OTL.

7) Post-War politics will also differ as the potential fate of Japanese in Hawaii and the Mainland USA might have some impact on Post-War Japanese demographics, which if even a smaller number exit would see Native Hawaiians as a greater voice in Hawaiian affairs.

8) A radically different popular culture Post-War. Imagine, for just a brief moment, popular culture without the influence of anime, Godzilla (who has been influential to a degree), the influence of manga and other Japanese ideas.

9) I likely would not be here, but my aunt would still be living as she was born in World War II itself, which would be the minor and more personal effect. Effectively my father is never born if my grandfather dies in Operation Downfall, and if he is born, it's later, which has likely an impact of its own. I likely owe my very existence to Fat Man and Little Boy.

And last but not least..10) Japanese culture and Nihonjin are extinct. While Japanese would still be spoken, it would likely not receive the official sanction of the government, it would be at the most benevolent scenario like Bai in the PRC, and at the least benevolent like Breton in France.

So...yeah. Happy thoughts, eh?

A bunch of political extremists are brawling in the 1930s in Europe. Commies, anarchists, and fascies. An alien ship comes by and scoops them up. They wake up in a starship traveling the Galaxy, and learn their captor is an interstellar explorer that has been disgraced on her homeworld. She listens to them screaming about what their definitions of evil are, and then responds to them by explaining that the race of Man can barely yet tap the fires of the Atom, but her society could rip entire planets asunder without a second thought. She smiles, takes out a vibroblade, and then walks up to the biggest character, a Russian anarchist that had the misfortune to survive until the purges, and kills him without even seeming to make an effort. The rest of the humans attempt to fight her, but she simply slays all except one last survivor, a Communist of the Luxembourgist variety. She walks up to him, and then informs him that as many as the Soviets have killed, that her society can easily kill far more. Her starship disembarks suddenly over a world that is a smoldering ruin, and he asks what happened here. She calmly informs him that prior to her disgrace, she was part of a military detachment that reduced this world, once a powerful starfaring society, to Oldowan-level pebble-chipping technology. The man turns to her in shock, and he suddenly finds himself dropped from the starship, falling...falling...

The moral of this story: just because we think we're the most bad-ass, cruel, vicious monsters in the Galaxy does not make that so.

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