Guilty Secrets
Mar. 2nd, 2012 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skull_bearerThose of you who aren't familiar with Ferretbrain (if you aren't, check it out, it's awesome) might have missed this post on the topic of The Dog King, an Alternate History novel founded on the premise that the sponateous fit of stupid that hit Germany in 1933-45 migrated to America after the war, resulting in the Morganthau plan being implemented.
This post is not going to be about the book: I haven't read it. Frankly, I think everyone has a right to draw a line when things become too depressing and this is mine. Anyhow, a bit about the Morganthau plan for those who don't know. All I can say about it is that the first time I heard about it, I thought it was some Neo-Nazi delusion a-la Holocaust denialism. The idea that there was an American plan after WW2 and the Holocaust to completely dismantly Germany as a modern country, forcibly booting it back to the stone age, was so phenomenally STUPID I just went 'Lol, no' and ignored it.
Probably a mistake is retrorespect. I mean, seriously, who could think genocidal stupidity (and it would have been, I can't see this being undertaken without millions of deaths) be confined to just Germany and the USSR? The Americans were totally in their rights to get in on it. Anyway, the fact that the guy who thought it up, Morganthau, was Jewish himself just cemeted the idea in my head that some bored neo-nazi made it up, like the real nazis said that random guy who wrote a Jewish version of the Turner Diaries abotu German extermination was totally in cahoots with Roosevelt, when he was really ... just a random guy. Who couldn't find a publisher.
It was only when I read a book on the historiography of Alternate History (The World Hitler Never Made. It's brilliant) and came across a reference to it (referencing The Dog King, in fact). That I realised it might not be entirely crackpot. I finally decided to ask one of my tutors, admitting that yeah, it wasn't an entirely reliable source, but it wasn't a neo-nazi pamphlet.
Yeah, it was true. WTF?
Anyway, thankfully unlike The Dog King, IRL the stupidity only went so far before someone with some sense went 'Uh... hell NO' and stomped on the idea. But yeah, wow. No wonder this is still kinda hushed up. No one likes to admit that the USA's reaction to the Holocaust could have been to try and top the nazis in deathtoll and sheer idiocy.
This post is not going to be about the book: I haven't read it. Frankly, I think everyone has a right to draw a line when things become too depressing and this is mine. Anyhow, a bit about the Morganthau plan for those who don't know. All I can say about it is that the first time I heard about it, I thought it was some Neo-Nazi delusion a-la Holocaust denialism. The idea that there was an American plan after WW2 and the Holocaust to completely dismantly Germany as a modern country, forcibly booting it back to the stone age, was so phenomenally STUPID I just went 'Lol, no' and ignored it.
Probably a mistake is retrorespect. I mean, seriously, who could think genocidal stupidity (and it would have been, I can't see this being undertaken without millions of deaths) be confined to just Germany and the USSR? The Americans were totally in their rights to get in on it. Anyway, the fact that the guy who thought it up, Morganthau, was Jewish himself just cemeted the idea in my head that some bored neo-nazi made it up, like the real nazis said that random guy who wrote a Jewish version of the Turner Diaries abotu German extermination was totally in cahoots with Roosevelt, when he was really ... just a random guy. Who couldn't find a publisher.
It was only when I read a book on the historiography of Alternate History (The World Hitler Never Made. It's brilliant) and came across a reference to it (referencing The Dog King, in fact). That I realised it might not be entirely crackpot. I finally decided to ask one of my tutors, admitting that yeah, it wasn't an entirely reliable source, but it wasn't a neo-nazi pamphlet.
Yeah, it was true. WTF?
Anyway, thankfully unlike The Dog King, IRL the stupidity only went so far before someone with some sense went 'Uh... hell NO' and stomped on the idea. But yeah, wow. No wonder this is still kinda hushed up. No one likes to admit that the USA's reaction to the Holocaust could have been to try and top the nazis in deathtoll and sheer idiocy.
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Date: 2012-03-02 10:30 pm (UTC)