What REALLY Would Have Happened If Germany Won WWII, And Why Israel Is A Mortal Threat To Judaism's Survival

Dark alternate realities about a Nazi victory are amongst the most eye-rolling cliche. Typically they feature a senescent Hitler, the swastika flying over the US and UK. Very little critical thought goes into such productions. Then there are those holdouts who like to make frighteningly unrealistic YouTube videos about a Nazi utopia. But the truth - what REALLY would happened if the Axis won WWII - is interesting in its own right.

Germany winning WWII and uniting Europe by force of arms would not, in fact, have been an unprecedented development. Charlemagne, Alexander, Genghis Khan, and Theodosius all built mighty empires encompassing, if not continental Europe, at least as great a land area and diversity of populations.

Legend has it that Alexander the Great was asked upon his deathbed, "To whom shall your empire be bequeathed?" Alexander, characteristically, replied, "To the strongest."

Empires founded by conquest in a short space of time by a single great leader pretty invariably follow a clearly defined pattern. The great leader conquers, then upon his death (often precipitated by the end of the conquering), his lieutenants carve up his empire into little fiefdoms. To secure their positions, the lieutenants pander to the native populations; the garrisons gradually "go native" and become assimilated into the localities. The localities become more powerful than their erstwhile conquerors, and within a century, the initial conquest simply becomes another chapter in the establishment of a common history. Obvious examples of this pattern of conquest, dissolution and synthesis include the processes of Hellenization & Romanization, and the spread of Christianity and Islam.

Ironically, if Hitler hadn't committed suicide, he probably would have lived a longer life than he would have if he had won the war. Hitler was insane, and he was the man of the hour for the reason that no sane man could be. As soon as any stability set in, his days would have been numbered; even during the war, different factions jockeyed for power under his neurotic rule; most obviously the Wehrmacht (led by the Prussian clique), the bureaucracy (led by Albert Speer), and the SS/SA (led by Hermann Goering).

Beneath all the propaganda and lip service, none of the three groups really had any loyalty to Hitler. The Prussians hated Hitler (and tried to kill him) because he was "an Austrian corporal"; Speer was a morally flexible technocrat who nodded his head through Hitler's rants over tea; and Goering was already plotting his unrealistic contingency plan of making peace with the Allies and ruling over at least some of the ill-gotten gains (like the Prussians, Goering completely failed to grasp that the Allies would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender until it was too late).

So, if the Germans won, Hitler would have been knocked off in short order, the empire would have fragmented, the SS/SA and Wehrmacht probably laying claim to different regions (the former most likely taking Eastern Europe, where they found easy recruitment amongst sadly deluded Poles and Ukrainians), native populations would have reasserted themselves, and within a century, the result would have been...the EU.

There are at least two lessons to be learned here. One is that war is deceptively irrelevant to the overall flow of history. Another is that political consolidation is one of the great overall long-term trends of history. Great empires come and go, but the gradual amalgamation of local communities and princedoms has been a "two steps forward, one step back" trend over the last five thousand years of human history. In that sense, the EU is best understood as a historical inevitability.

Nor is the process over. The long-term impact of the current economic crisis - which has yet to hit its climax, not by a long shot (***prediction: something very, very bad is going to happen to the global economy this Christmas***) will probably be a big international consolidation. Now, this won't come about by all of the peoples of this world realizing they're in it together. Quite the contrary, what will happen is, the rich will continue to collaborate to screw everyone else over; their efforts will be rendered futile by the inexorable march of history, and the people of the world will "inherit the wind".

A case study is how the American and Chinese people share the same enemy, although they do not realize it - the unholy alliance between the American Capitalist and Chinese Communist oligarchy. China - less stable than the US, although it is not obvious - will eventually become a democracy, and when it does it will be the US's natural ally, probably within the next 40 years. In the long run, we may actually see a positive iteration of Orwell's dystopian vision of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia - the US/NAFTA, PRC/ASEAN, and the EU. History will eventually guide them all into being moderate socialist democracies, because no other option will prove historically valid. Political history, like natural evolution, is a process of elimination - guess-and-check.

For the same reasons - and many will find this a hard pill to swallow -  I don't believe the Holocaust was actually a mortal threat to the Jews, for the same reason that none of their other historical adversaries were.

The Jews' great strength is that they have never sought national greatness and the inevitable polarization and degeneration it brings. The Jewish way has always been to focus solely on keeping the traditions alive for another generation, embellishing them through literary and philosophical elaboration. This is a supremely wise approach: it is far easier to commit mass murder, bring down a civilization, destroy an empire, than to extinguish a way of thinking, a way of life, certainly not one that has produced so many tangible benefits. Western civilization as we know it is really nothing more than a hybridization of Jewish and Roman ideology.

If the Holocaust had continued unopposed, claiming the lives of those in the camps, the not insignificant number of Jews outside Europe would have just keep digging themselves further into their new homes - India, Japan, South America - just as they had when they were previously forced out of Spain or Judaea itself.

The Nazi regime was always an organized hypocrisy that appealed to human stupidity by claiming that all complex political, social & economic problems could be solved through the doctrine of racial superiority and the dictator's infallible judgement. A Nazi victory would have inevitably resulted in decadence and degeneration, as Germany would have become a country reliant on plunder and incapable of exporting anything but violence - just like every other great conquering power - born with the seeds of its own destruction.

And when that would have inevitably happened - in no more than a few decades - the Jews would have simply come back to Europe, or come out of the woodwork, just like the Spanish "crypto-Jews" who survived the Inquisition by writing really clever cookbooks of kosher recipes designed to appear Gentile. There is a book, which I haven't read (and don't know how good it is) entitled, "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers".

That's not to say that if the Holocaust had proceeded without Allied interruption the final death count and human suffering wouldn't have been far, far greater. The truth of the matter is, though, in war or peace all the same, Nazism would have destroyed itself in the end - and Judaism would have endured. The old cliche that compassion ultimately prevails over hatred is in fact an empirical truth.

Which brings me to my views on Israel.

I perceive Israel itself as the most mortal threat the Jews have ever faced, because the nature of what Israel is - a Jewish state - threatens to vacillate the conditions that have made the Jews a great people.

Christians, Jews and Muslims do not realize it, but they have a symbiosis - all the horrible wars and petty feuding aside, the three major religions have achieved much more together than they could have apart. For all the horrors of anti-Semitism, bitter Christian persecution of the Jews coerced them to take on their singular role in European history, as niche-finders and agents of change. The Jews' role as unfortunate effigies kept Christianity alive (which, as hard as it may be to believe, was a good thing - any dogma is better than a society with no rules at all - if you doubt this, compare the Sistine Chapel to Wal-Mart). And Islam served as a reservoir for Classical wisdom during the dark days of the Early Middle Ages. The historical fact is, any one of those groups alone, would have inevitably sunk into barbarism. We are beginning to see that today, with the advent and failure of secularism as a way of life.

My view is that just as the EU has redefined the European dynamic to capture most of the strengths of a Balkanized Europe without all the killing, religious differences must be expressed in a vocal and peaceful way to ensure that different cultures remain discrete and clearly defined, continue to feel external pressure to maintain their respective traditions and ways of life.

Therefore, I believe it is actually to Israel's long-term advantage to allow the Palestinians to become an enfranchised majority and for Israel to join the EU, while continuing to allow the yeshivas and Mosaic law their special privileges in Israel. Ensuring that the Jews become a minority in a state run by Jewish law and guarantees the Jews protection, becoming a small member of a much larger organization, will ensure that the Jewish people continue to enjoy the external pressure necessary to continue to push themselves to greatness, without the downsides of the previous iterations of the symbiosis.

Their partners - the rest of the EU, and Palestinians - would enjoy the same benefits. After all, I think it was Golda Meir who bitterly remarked that there was no Palestine before Israel. If Palestine could gradually become another Lebanon or Netherlands - a munificent sub-group of a larger culture borne of contentious history -  that would be nothing but good for the world at large. Being a majority population in a Mosaic law country could provide the cultural definition to push Palestinian culture to novel definition as well...

Comments?