discuss alternative courses available to the actors in the story on the assumption that the option was open, [but] go on quite correctly to explain why one course was eventually chosen rather than the other.One could always suppose that another course was taken, which may in many cases be "theoretically conceivable," but imagining that history actually did take them is "a parlour game with the might-have-beens of history" which does not "have . . . anything to do with history" as such, or with the historian's job.
If the devotion to counterfactuals was parlor game rather than serious historiography, then what did it mean that so many devoted so much time to it? Reading Carr's book one can see a political game being played on two levels. One was the broadly philosophical—namely, right-wing hostility to those who see rationally discernible tendencies within history, or even simply argue for cause-and-effect, above all the Marxists to whom they were so bitterly hostile, and conservative historians have championed counterfactuals precisely for that reason. (Indeed, it seems worth noting that their most prominent advocate of recent years has been neoconservative Niall Ferguson, who explicitly stated in a self-declared "manifesto"--to be found in his introduction to the Virtual History anthology devoted to the theme--that he regards counterfactuals as valuable because they are an "antidote" to "determinist" views of history, and associated political ideologies of which he disapproves, in his list of which he pointedly includes "the class struggle" and "socialism.")
The other is the shallower level of specific events, with the counterfactual tending to be a wish-fulfillment, a tendency that, again, was heavily political, and reflected in the propensity to choose certain subjects over and over again, rather than others that, from the more standpoint of thought-experiment, seem equally worthy. Carr in particular noted the tendency of such writers to choose the Russian Revolution rather than, for example, the Norman conquest of England or the American Revolution, no one wishing to "reverse the results" or "express a passionate protest against" the latter, while the anti-Communist certainly wished to do so against the former. As a result, "when they read history" they let "their imagination run riot on all the more agreeable things that might have happened," and become "indignant with the historian who goes on quietly with his job of explaining what did happen and why their agreeable wish-dreams remain unfulfilled," driving them to come up with their preferred version.
It is equally hard to argue with Carr on this point, with the tendency to treat the Russian Revolution in this way hardly less strong a half century on, historians who otherwise show more restraint unable to help themselves when writing of that subject, lamenting the "might-have-beens." (To cite one telling, recent example, Adam Tooze does so repeatedly in The Deluge where the Russian Revolution is concerned, but never anything else.)
It seems to me that what can be said of the historian's counterfactual can still more be said of the science fiction writer's alternate history, less bound by the demands of historiography, more susceptible to being mere wish-fulfillment. Considering what Carr has said of the counterfactual's intellectual roots it does not seem implausible that the genre developed and flourished in a context of anti-Communism, or that it coalesced into a genre in a period when such sentiment was at its height, were mere coincidences.
Still more than that, Carr's remarks have me wondering about that most popular topic of that genre, an Axis victory in World War II. Previously considering the matter I thought there was a mix of reasons, namely the combination of the conflict's familiarity, the way its scale and complexity afford numerous possibilities for it playing out differently in ways of significant consequence, and the fact that despite the diversity of understanding and interpretation of the conflict, a broad gamut of opinions accepts to a certain, crucial extent, the Nazis as villains, and the fight against them a "good war." However, given the strong case for alternate history as wish-fulfillment it seems that one must ask—has this genre been catering to closet, or perhaps not so closet, Nazis all this time?
This may seem an appalling charge to make. By and large the genre's major works have, naturally, been deeply anti-Nazi, from C.M. Kornbluth's "Two Dooms" and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle forward. Still, if the Nazi victory is presented by the authors with distaste, seeing it presented at all may still afford a certain satisfaction to those who would be sympathetic to the outcome (especially when such presentation can scarcely take other forms); while the distaste of such "liberals" and "lefties" for the scenario may add to their enjoyment. It seems all the worth considering given that, as Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies have argued in The Myth of the Eastern Front, a considerable subculture exists within the U.S which romanticizes if not the Nazi cause, then the Wehrmacht which was its military instrument—partly as a result of the extent to which senior German generals from that conflict were allowed to write the record in English of the conflict, and the post-war desire to rehabilitate a conservative West German Establishment for the sake of the anti-Communist crusade.
Considering this issue one might also consider the second most common subject in alternate history (or at least, in American writing about it), namely a Confederate victory in the U.S. Civil War. There would seem to be more, not less, sympathy for such an outcome in the U.S., more openly expressed; and one might guess, a larger number of people who would similarly take pleasure in its presentation.
Both these tastes would seem to be reflected in the way a good many readers have taken S.M. Stirling's Draka novels. The books, which picture the emergence of an extremely militarist, racist culture (one with considerable Southern input, and which out-Nazis the Nazis) in southern Africa that goes on to conquer the world, appeal to both pro-Nazi and pro-Confederate fantasy. Stirling insists that his books are a dystopia, but even if one grants that he means what he says, Stirling himself has remarked in interviews that many a fan has expressed the wish to "move there."
It seems quite possible that the "Dominion of the Draka" is not the only dystopia of which that can be said.
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