One popular storyline that keeps on giving is the ‘What if the Nazis had won' narrative. Robert Harris’ Fatherland, Philip K Dick’s Man in the High Castle, and Len Deighton’s SS-GB are three examples that pop into my mind. It makes for an interesting, if unsettling, gedankenexperiment, contemplating what day-to-day life would have been like in this alternative timeline. File the results alongside time-travel to kill Hitler as a baby stories, if there’s still room in that drawer.
I’ve made my own small contribution to the oeuvre with The King of China’s Mirror, published in Shoreline of Infinity 34. My setting was a vague pre-internet post-war, when Greyhound buses still had corrugated aluminium sides. There’s no obvious resistance movement, and no sense of an army of occupation. They’ve integrated and assimilated, them into America as much as American into them. My Nazis are already more about getting your bins collected than book-burnings and pogroms.
In building my world, I may have been channelling a bit of British history, in that whilst there was resistance following the Norman Conquest, within fifty years we hadn't become part of France - rather, the Normans had become English and we'd started seven hundred years of fighting the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. I've found that aspect of history both fascinating and rarely discussed.
And, although it’s never said in my story, they’re probably distancing themselves from their recent history, how they got to where they are. That was then, this is nineteen-fifty, sixty, seventy-something. In the real world, we commemorate the Holocaust, but allied acts - which you could call either war crimes or justified military actions with disproportionate civilian casualties - such as Dresden, or the fire-bombing of Tokyo, are rarely thought of as being in the same category, even if they're of an utterly different scale (to quote Marlon Brando, 'it's not an ouch contest'). However, had the Axis powers won, I suspect Dresden, Tokyo and the like would have shuffled up the queue as warnings from history.
History is, after all, written by the winners.
Then, walking around the magnificent Palma Cathedral last autumn, I realised we had an actual example of this in action. The gold, the art, the finery - all built on the rape of continents, the massacre of people, in the name of a credo that sets itself up and right, noble, and justified but, and was prepared to impose its vision through superior firepower. If you weren't with them, you weren't even human. Their actions in South America in particular, but elsewhere too, are a matter of record. The Pope has openly spoken of and apologised for genocide.
I’ve struggled to put figures on how many indigenous people were killed in the New World in the name of the Catholic Church, but online discussion suggests it makes the Holocaust look like small beer. Let's say it as it is: the Catholic Church was as morally repugnant as the Nazis.
But we have nothing like the same visceral reaction to those actions. Is it because of the passage of time? (In my story You Will Know us by our Trail of Dead. That and T-Shirt Sales, a PR executive tries to reposition the Waffen-SS alongside pirates as a children’s fancy dress staple given both are now aspects of history and those guys raped and murdered too.) Or is it as simple the effect of history being written by the winning team, and what doesn't get actively written into history slides from our collective memory?
I appreciate the counter arguments. Why shouldn’t the passage of time - and change in morals - make a difference? What's the difference between not allowing history to erode a wrong and bearing a grudge against people long dead? How do you unpick history, anyway? Tribes have fought each other since time immemorial, and Catholic Spain in the New World, or the East India Company in South Asia, are just more recent chapters in an epic tome about one bloke punching another for a piece of land or a cow. We’re still at it, just now oil or economic influence is more important than lebensraum, and methods have evolved from lining your troops up on the border, recent Ukrainian throwbacks notwithstanding.
But, as with the real Norman example, and my imagined Nazis, Catholic invader and Latin invaded have become one. The descendants of the survivors of Catholic horrors are now proud Catholic themselves, crucifixes around their necks, just as we British rapidly became one with our Norman overlords. To me, this is possibly the most fascinating aspect: how quickly the vanquished make the best of a bad situation and join the winning team.
Of course, the Catholic Church has rebranded; it's not all about coming over to the dark side. I like Pope Frank a lot and wish him well. But it would have been the same with the victorious Nazis - in time. It took the Catholics centuries in South America to be the good guys. 2025 may still have been too early if the Nazis won (the children of those who fought, like me, are now dying out, so that link with history is weakening). But, I suggest, eventually, this alternate history would have added up to a swastika in the logo of the municipal bin lorries and a cheery, unthinking Heil to your neighbours each morning.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
