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Comment by rKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

> (this is one of the premises of The Man in the High Castle, which is likely to age better than most sci fi TV series)

The Hugo award winning book it's based on is much better.

> FDR’s New Deal saved the entire planet from a descent into Nazism and Japanese imperial rule

The 'New Deal' saved the US from internal revolution; Huey Long. Nazism was doomed when Hitler invaded Russia, declaring war on America was just the nail in the coffin.

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A different us president could've blamed Russia for starting that war, could've stopped supplying Russia...

The first Red Scare already did that and trade unionism and communism were damnatio memoriae'ed by that point such that scant a single person remembers the history of either Illinois or Oklahoma as bastions of socialism before they were obliterated.

May Day comes from the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, and Labor Day was the petty rescheduling of it by another one of the worst POTUSes who obeyed the business lobby in advanced: Grover Cleveland.

I should read the book (I’ve liked every Philip K Dick thing I’ve read), though the sets were 50% of the appeal for the TV show for me. Not sure if it pulls in the FDR subplot or not, so I cited the show.

I didn't watch more than the first season of the show... but the setting for the novel is an alternate history in the 1960's where FDR had been assassinated in the 30's (failed in our timeline) and the US was isolationist and never entered WW2 until it was conquered by Nazi Germany and Japan.

And he wrote the plot for each character by tossing coins and looking up corresponding passages in the I-Ching

Imo Nazism was doomed from the start since fascist imperialist ideologies will inevitably fail as they challenge the sovereignty of more and more countries. Going to war against the world doesn't seem like a winner's bet to me.

But also they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil - isn't that what triggered the invasion in the first place?

Any particular incarnation of fascist imperialist ideology is doomed, but they can last longer than you, do a lot of damage on the way down, and in a couple of decades the revival effort will be on among people who think the reason they failed was that they were too soft-hearted and not decisive enough. Even non-fascists regularly buy into the idea that brutality works as long as you're fully committed to it.

> they were doomed before the Russian invasion since they were out of oil

Didn't they were receiving oil (and other raw materials) from the URSS beforehand?

edit: found a figure on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_economic...

I don't know if that'd cover the war needs in oil of Germany, but once they had started a war with the soviet, they had no choice but to try to get to the Caucasus for the oil.

Most modern nations have adopted national socialism as their form of government by now, haven't they?

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