I suspect it would be isolationist at first, except perhaps beating up some Latin American states and setting up puppets (maybe grabbing some of the emptier deserts from Northern Mexico). It would probably become more hostile as time went on, but would also fall further and further behind on the technology front as corruption and mismanagement so tied to dictatorships (and the muzzling of the educated classes) holds them back.
How dangerous would a Fascist America be?
- Thread starter GlobalHumanism
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Not to mention the inevitable brain-drain following the slide to despotism. People from Albert Kahn to Richard Feynman leaving and taking their expertise with them.
The question of whether a fascist US would be friendly with the Axis Powers is an interesting one. On hand is the similar ideologies and the ability to carve up the world between them... but on the other hand is the tendency towards isolationism, the problem that friendship with the Axis offers the US little (the US already has its own continent and the Axis can't stop it moving into South America if the US so desires), and that a continental American Empire might be considered comparable, or possibly even inferior, in industrial potential to a putative Eurasian Nazi one at some point in the future.
Put that way, America might decide that the unknown threat and power of an ascendant Nazi Germany was a greater threat to US interests than the known of Britain. But more probably they'd just sit back and watch.
Put that way, America might decide that the unknown threat and power of an ascendant Nazi Germany was a greater threat to US interests than the known of Britain. But more probably they'd just sit back and watch.
jahenders
Banned
It's true dangerousness would depend, of course, on the international response thereto. This could manifest in several ways:
- Possibly aligning with other fascist governments for joint gain
- Possible conquest
A fascist US might see Japanese aggression in the Pacific far differently and, though they'd worry about a Japanese threat, the US might see value to splitting up Chinese or Dutch assets. So, instead of condemning Japanese actions in China, the US might demand a share. Note that the US was involved in China just a few decades before.
As far as conquest, a Fascist, and aggressive, US in the 30s might have argued, "Hey, we need to ensure that we're ready if this world war spreads. Last time, the Germans tried to get Mexico to attack us. Therefore, we're just going to take over Mexico so there's no threat of that happening again." So, then the US rolls through some/all of Mexico and either takes all of Mexico or moves the border a few hundred miles South, making it much more defensible.
Finally, even assuming a fascist US still fought Germany (not certain), they might welcome Russia's suffering as an opportunity to weaken another adversary. So, they might not do much in the way of Lend Lease and, assuming Russia still somehow survives, might really race to grab as much of Europe as possible, moving the "iron curtain" quite a ways East.
- Possibly aligning with other fascist governments for joint gain
- Possible conquest
A fascist US might see Japanese aggression in the Pacific far differently and, though they'd worry about a Japanese threat, the US might see value to splitting up Chinese or Dutch assets. So, instead of condemning Japanese actions in China, the US might demand a share. Note that the US was involved in China just a few decades before.
As far as conquest, a Fascist, and aggressive, US in the 30s might have argued, "Hey, we need to ensure that we're ready if this world war spreads. Last time, the Germans tried to get Mexico to attack us. Therefore, we're just going to take over Mexico so there's no threat of that happening again." So, then the US rolls through some/all of Mexico and either takes all of Mexico or moves the border a few hundred miles South, making it much more defensible.
Finally, even assuming a fascist US still fought Germany (not certain), they might welcome Russia's suffering as an opportunity to weaken another adversary. So, they might not do much in the way of Lend Lease and, assuming Russia still somehow survives, might really race to grab as much of Europe as possible, moving the "iron curtain" quite a ways East.
This is quite a commonly held view, though I always wonder how much of it has to do with the desire to see Nazi Germany defeated in any conceivable circumstance.
The issue of course starts with "how many years" and "how much more painful". Even IOTL the Soviet losses were horrendous. How many more years can the Soviets throw everything into the meatgrinder until they throw the last kitchen sink? Sure, the Germans are in the same boat so to speak here, but absent the huge pressures from the USA and all the numerous aid coming from it to their enemies the Nazis are in a much better relative position than they were IOTL at any time from December 1941. onwards. Not to say that this is a sure way to get a Nazi victory, but if you're looking for a POD that allows the Germans to win under their own strength rather than having to rely on Allied blunders, a totally isolationist USA os pretty much the best scenario. Though I do believe that a stalemate is more plausible than any side winning outright here.
Yes, they did indeed show that the Soviets can avoid losing the war even in their worst-case scenario. They hardly prove that the massive Soviet successes of 1943.,1944. and 1945. can be achieved with no US help whatsoever.
US commitment amounted to a whole lot more than trucks. And there's always the question whether Britain and it's Empire would stay in the war till the end. AFAIK without the USA, Britain would have been in danger of bankruptcy sometime mid-war.
In terms of having men to fight, I should point out that around half of the total Soviet military casualties (captured, killed and wounded) during the Great Patriotic War was during the six months of Barbarossa, the other half being taken over the next three-and-a-half years of war. So it is arguable that Germany had blown its one big shot to 'bleed the Soviets dry' before the USA even entered the war. Between decent commanders being both promoted up from the lower ranks and pulled out of the gulags, even the Red Army of 1942 was not the near-total catastrophe it was in 1941, and it probably never was the '2 Conscripts, 1 Rifle' business that some books and movies of dubious accuracy portray. And as for willpower, well, the Germans had demonstrated quite thoroughly to the Soviet people, between their consistent dismissal of international treaties as scraps of paper and their almost-unparalleled attempt at industrial genocide in the occupied territories, that surrender was not an option. The Soviets had nothing to lose from keeping up the fight.
Which says nothing about them being able to win the war on their own power. Oh, the Soviets will fight all right, but conquering Berlin is far, far from being certain in this scenario.
jahenders
Banned
I agree, they may be able to avoid conquest alone, but they'll take far more losses having that fight without Lend Lease and such. Also, being able to mount a huge counteroffensive is quite another thing.
If the US isn't involved, the UK could do little offensively and, so, wouldn't occupy as much German attention (once Sea Lion was abandoned). Also, without the US/UK Bomber offensives, the Russians would be facing a lot more German troops, tanks, artillery, etc and the Germans would have far better ability to shuffle troops about.
When the US was isolationist it was only really concerned with Latin America and China and didn't want much involvement with the rest of the world. In the Atlantic, it had the security of the Royal Navy to hide behind so it could remain in isolationism.
So I would say a Fascist, imperialist US would be interested in the same areas. It could easily dominate Latin America, but might come into conflict with Japan in the Far East as they would have overlapping ambitions.
It's also hard to imagine the a US (even when Fascist) being enemies with the British because the US before WWII depended on the Royal Navy in the Atlantic for its security (much like today where the US accuses its allies of not spending their share on defence, the US did the same thing with Britain for most of the 19th century until WWII and didn't build up its own navy in the Atlantic as much as it could have for most of this period because the Royal Navy served many of its interests already), and could use Britain as an ally against Japan.
Fascists may hate democracy, but they see it as weak and crumbling rather than a serious threat, unlike Communism. So I could see a Fascist USA tolerating the UK.
So a Fascist US might remain neutral in Europe and recognise and support German and Italian conquests in Europe and Africa. It would, of course, be hostile to the USSR.
So I would say a Fascist, imperialist US would be interested in the same areas. It could easily dominate Latin America, but might come into conflict with Japan in the Far East as they would have overlapping ambitions.
It's also hard to imagine the a US (even when Fascist) being enemies with the British because the US before WWII depended on the Royal Navy in the Atlantic for its security (much like today where the US accuses its allies of not spending their share on defence, the US did the same thing with Britain for most of the 19th century until WWII and didn't build up its own navy in the Atlantic as much as it could have for most of this period because the Royal Navy served many of its interests already), and could use Britain as an ally against Japan.
Fascists may hate democracy, but they see it as weak and crumbling rather than a serious threat, unlike Communism. So I could see a Fascist USA tolerating the UK.
So a Fascist US might remain neutral in Europe and recognise and support German and Italian conquests in Europe and Africa. It would, of course, be hostile to the USSR.
I think it would strongly depend on how we came to fascism and when. The more desperate a times, the meaner people can be.
I'd think it would be more of an extreme version of the 50's mixed with a lot of subtle and not so subtle propaganda. Folksy racism, unspoken insults, religious intolerance, heavy prejudice against homosexuals and political dissidents, a feeling of social superiority, cult of personality around our leaders, etc....
I'd think it would be more of an extreme version of the 50's mixed with a lot of subtle and not so subtle propaganda. Folksy racism, unspoken insults, religious intolerance, heavy prejudice against homosexuals and political dissidents, a feeling of social superiority, cult of personality around our leaders, etc....
A fascist USA would've been dominated by big businesses selling to the highest bidder.
Big businesses would suppress unions and any visible minority that demanded too much. Factory owners and mine owners hire private security guards to force shrinking miners back to work. Sometimes the National Guard brings thier machine guns to back mine owners.
For example, big farmers could use the KKK to intimidate blacks into shutting up and working hard for minuscule wages. No need for uniformed street gangs (aka. German Nazi Party) just terrorize uppity negros in the middle of the night. No official recognition that the KKK did anything nasty. No public recognition that the KKK is backed by mine-owners or plantation owners.
If Mexico resisted the efforts of fascist American big business to dig mines in Mexico, uppity Mexican politicians would be replaced by more "compliant" Mexican politicians, occaissionally backed by the USMC.
As for Canada, a fascist America sees it as dominated by the King, a traditional form of fascism and Canada can afford to pay for weapons, ships, etc. The USA uses any war as an excuse to gain trade concessions in the British Colonies.
The USN expands to protect American ship owners and trading interests.
American Airlines and the USAAF build air bases near US-owned mines, banana plantations, etc. allowing powerful fascist business-owners to travel at will while side-stepping starving local peasants.
Big businesses would suppress unions and any visible minority that demanded too much. Factory owners and mine owners hire private security guards to force shrinking miners back to work. Sometimes the National Guard brings thier machine guns to back mine owners.
For example, big farmers could use the KKK to intimidate blacks into shutting up and working hard for minuscule wages. No need for uniformed street gangs (aka. German Nazi Party) just terrorize uppity negros in the middle of the night. No official recognition that the KKK did anything nasty. No public recognition that the KKK is backed by mine-owners or plantation owners.
If Mexico resisted the efforts of fascist American big business to dig mines in Mexico, uppity Mexican politicians would be replaced by more "compliant" Mexican politicians, occaissionally backed by the USMC.
As for Canada, a fascist America sees it as dominated by the King, a traditional form of fascism and Canada can afford to pay for weapons, ships, etc. The USA uses any war as an excuse to gain trade concessions in the British Colonies.
The USN expands to protect American ship owners and trading interests.
American Airlines and the USAAF build air bases near US-owned mines, banana plantations, etc. allowing powerful fascist business-owners to travel at will while side-stepping starving local peasants.
I admit it's a bit of a spitball, and I know it's terrible to link direct to Wikipedia, but the figures for the total military casualties of the Soviet Union during World War Two is about 8.7 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union and the figures for the Soviet casualties of Barbarossa are held by Soviet archives to be around 4 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa Not quite half of 8.7, but close. Note this is military deaths, and it involves killed, wounded and captured, though survival rates of PoWs in the East is so terrible anyway it might as well be deaths.
The point is that after Barbarossa, Germany is no longer fighting an enemy that is at peacetime mobilisation. No more Front-long advances with huge kessels that pocket half-a-million soldiers at once. They get one more advance, with one Army Group, before they have to endure another counteroffensive (which IOTL destroyed Sixth Army).
... I start to think, that some of you guys don't really know what 'fascism' is and is about. ...
It is not 'just' racism or antisemitism or anti-socialism or any mixture of that.
It is not 'just' a dictatorship with the 'guys up' distributing the wealth between them.
It is not 'just' suppression of any kind.
Unfortunatly there is an iflation in the use of the word 'fascism' or 'fascists'. Today there are people calling every kind of assumed suppression 'fascist'.
There are the 'fascist' teachers at every level of school, simply because they 'suppress' us to learn for not getting an E or even F in examens, 'forcing us to use our time for learning.
There are 'fascist' shopkeapers making us criminals, since they don't just give us what we want for free, TVs, PCs, booze, ....
There are 'fascist' policemen suppressing us to give all this 'taken' stuff back to the shopkeaper or even put us in jail.
Well, back to topic I have a question : What might a US of A 'fascism' might look alike ?
It would need external enemys (Mexicans ?, Brits ?, Europeans ?, Canadians ?)
It would need internal enemys (blacks ?, jews ?, mexicans ?, communists ?, catholics ?)
But ... as every historical 'fascism' had, it would also need a positive ideal !!
Like the 'aryan germanic warrior' as descibed by Tacitus (Germania)
Like the 'roman legionnaire and Centurio' as described by Tacitus (Historia)
Like the heros of the Kalewala for the Finns (no matter, that is was a make-shift mythology)
Like the magyar horse warriors defeating the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation
Like the ever by heart been catholic alpine Noricans, who defeated (at some point) the mighty roman legionnairs (even though at that time they didn't call it catholicism ;-P )
As a fascist leader/politician you NEED such a positive ideal to present, the older in history the better, best go back to the old Atlanteans, ...
just being 'anti-'something is not enough to raise in the heights of german Hitlerism/Nazism or italian Mussolinism/Faschism.
What would/could be such a positive ideal be for a fascist US of A ?
It is not 'just' racism or antisemitism or anti-socialism or any mixture of that.
It is not 'just' a dictatorship with the 'guys up' distributing the wealth between them.
It is not 'just' suppression of any kind.
Unfortunatly there is an iflation in the use of the word 'fascism' or 'fascists'. Today there are people calling every kind of assumed suppression 'fascist'.
There are the 'fascist' teachers at every level of school, simply because they 'suppress' us to learn for not getting an E or even F in examens, 'forcing us to use our time for learning.
There are 'fascist' shopkeapers making us criminals, since they don't just give us what we want for free, TVs, PCs, booze, ....
There are 'fascist' policemen suppressing us to give all this 'taken' stuff back to the shopkeaper or even put us in jail.
Well, back to topic I have a question : What might a US of A 'fascism' might look alike ?
It would need external enemys (Mexicans ?, Brits ?, Europeans ?, Canadians ?)
It would need internal enemys (blacks ?, jews ?, mexicans ?, communists ?, catholics ?)
But ... as every historical 'fascism' had, it would also need a positive ideal !!
Like the 'aryan germanic warrior' as descibed by Tacitus (Germania)
Like the 'roman legionnaire and Centurio' as described by Tacitus (Historia)
Like the heros of the Kalewala for the Finns (no matter, that is was a make-shift mythology)
Like the magyar horse warriors defeating the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation
Like the ever by heart been catholic alpine Noricans, who defeated (at some point) the mighty roman legionnairs (even though at that time they didn't call it catholicism ;-P )
As a fascist leader/politician you NEED such a positive ideal to present, the older in history the better, best go back to the old Atlanteans, ...
just being 'anti-'something is not enough to raise in the heights of german Hitlerism/Nazism or italian Mussolinism/Faschism.
What would/could be such a positive ideal be for a fascist US of A ?
Deleted member 1487
Total military deaths. Casualties were well in excess of double that. In fact Russian historians today state that Kirosheev's 8.7 million is a drastic undercount of military deaths and the actual death toll was in excess of 11 million if not close to 15 million deaths. IIRC the total casualties (death, wounded, missing) was in excess of 30 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World...viet_Union#Russian_Military_Archives_database
None of that includes wounded. That is just dead. The current official Russian government sanctioned death toll of 26.6 million dead (military and civilian) may well be an under count of total deaths given that the military death toll is at least double what the 'official' Kirosheev numbers are.
The fact is that beyond the 6 months of fighting in 1941, which were the most lethal per month for the Soviets without question, were not anywhere near half the total military war dead and wounded. Likely it was only about 1/4th of the total war casualties (dead/wounded/missing).
Given that you can ask a half-dozen professional political scientists to give an exact definition of Fascism and get a dozen answers, that's hardly surprising.
External enemies are easy to come by; depending on the specific structure, a fascist United States might even adopt the Japanese as one of the external enemies.
Internal enemies are equally easy to come by, and likely will involve blacks, Socialists, and Jews, given the strains of racist nationalism present in the USA in OTL during the period.
If that isn't obvious, then I fear you're clearly unacquainted with American Culture and don't know what 'America' "is and is about."
The positive ideal is, obviously, The Founding Fathers. They're borderline-deified in present culture; it was worse before. A fascist United States is one with images of Washington and Jefferson on everything, looking down on us all in their benevolent gaze. It likely emphasizes the Jeffersonian Democratic tradition: the idealization of agrarianism, the intense distrust of financial structures, an expansionist gaze (Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty" that included Canada and Mexico, and carrying further still), et cetera. The hyper-idealization of the Founding Fathers and the elevation of (carefully curated) quotations to the level of holy writ... yep, that's American Fascism, right there. Wrapped in the Flag, carrying a cross, and deifying the dead.
You are definitely right in saying that Fascism is very prone to looking towards the past, even an imagined past. The Nazis wanted a Neo-Pagan race of Germanic warriors. I believe Hitler often used the word 'tribe' in his speeches. Mussolini wanted a restored Rome to seize the whole of the Mediterranean. The Japanese government seemed to pine for a new Sengoku Jidai where the real power was entirely with the warlords, and to set right the past failures of an empire on the mainland. Compare this to the Communist vision of an entirely new world order. However people live in the future communist world, it's guaranteed to be a way of life that isn't supposed to have happened before.
For America, I think a Fascist 'Dream' would be a significantly twisted and distorted version of the ideals set by the Founding Fathers. Jeffersonism, mutated heavily and put on crack, could pick up in following by riding a wave of anti-immigrant, anti-communist, anti-semitic (Who runs all those nasty evil banks?) sentiment. People frustrated by the failing banks and the dirty cities full of foreigners and Coloreds, yearning for Good Old Days when every man worked his own land (or owned somebody to do it for them), and the only bother in the world were them Injuns. External threats would be, I suppose, the British and the Soviet Union, the former for colonialism and the latter for breeches in private property. While it is far from 'required', it's also handy for writing purposes that this appeal to agrarianism and psychopathic distrust of industrialisation would significantly weaken the US as a technological and scientific power, so a hypotethical fight between it and the Free World (read: History's largest colonial empire and a communist dictatorship) would be more even.
You got this out just before I was finished! I love this new forum