Opinion: The beauty and danger of alternate history
In the 1920’s, War Plan Red was approved and the U.S. annexed Canada. In 1963, Lee Harvey missed his shot, sparing JFK. In 1969, cosmonaut Alexi Leonov became the first man on the Moon.
Of course, none of these things are actually true. The U.S. has never annexed Canada. Kennedy passed away after Harvey made his mark and the first man on the Moon was an astronaut from Ohio named Neil Armstrong.
Yet, people explore these stories frequently. The idea of an alternate-history story certainly isn’t new. If anything, it’s a common way to go when asking “What-If’s.” Shows like Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” and books such as Phillip Roths’s “The Plot Against America” explore massive divergences in history. While some books, like Stephen Baxter’s “Voyage” are more grounded in reality, others like Harry Turtledove’s “Guns of the South” go wildly off the rails, as Confederates with AK-47’s isn’t exactly a common trope.
The main thing that unites these aforementioned books is that they don’t fail to point out the flaws in the history they change. They make very clear that they’re fictitious, unlikely scenarios. Roth’s novel plays off the fact that Lindbergh served as a spokesperson for the America First Committee, an isolationist political party within the U.S. What he changes is Lindbergh using his reputation to propel himself to political office. Readers merely play witness as he secures the position of the 33rd President of the U.S.
Roth takes careful steps to assure that this change is as realistic and fleshed out as possible. In a 2004 essay for the New York Times, Roth mentions “[wanting to keep] everything else as close to factual truth as [he] could.” In the time that Lindbergh serves as President in Roth’s work, he highlights the horrific societal effects on certain populations within the U.S., taking extra care in highlighting the rampant antisemitism of the era that Lindbergh was so fond of. He does his best to make it organic.
This is the magnificence of well written alternate history. It allows readers to imagine worlds where something went just a little different, but consideration is still taken to try and avoid whitewashing history.
When alternate history becomes revisionism
Choosing to forgo the careful respect for actual history is what’s known as revisionism. Rather than a curious exploration or a glorified “what-if,” revisionism is the terrible art of taking actual history and tailoring it to tell the story the manipulator desires. Perhaps the two largest cases are the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth and the still-churning debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The first of these two examples originated shortly after the end of the Second World War in Europe. In a memorandum written by several former Nazi generals, they pleaded that any members of the Wehrmacht be released and rehabilitated, as they were not criminals in the same vein as the Schutzstaffel or military high command. This provided the necessary foundation to pry a fictitious divide between the Wehrmacht and other parts of the Third Reich’s war machine. Even before this point, the infamous cry at Nuremberg, that soldiers were merely “following orders” had somewhat downplayed the severity of Wehrmacht involvement in German atrocities. All of this was done to try to rebuild the military forces of West Germany without their “‘new’ generals” association to the horrific crimes of the Third Reich being dredged up. By artificially inflating the image of a “clean” Wehrmacht, no one had to deal with the ethical dilemma in reappointing the Reich’s former soldiers to positions within the rebuilt German armed forces.
Worse still, it permitted Holocaust denialism to flourish, damaging awareness of one of humanity’s greatest, darkest losses of life. Though an attempt at correcting this was undertaken during the Historikerstreit, the damage had already been done. The association between either the Schutzstaffel being the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust, or outright Holocaust denialism was already too ingrained in pop-history. Even to this day, the Schutzstaffel or Gestapo is the go-to for the generic evil Nazi soldier, in spite of the fact that such horrific convictions could be found even amongst the common foot soldier.
A beautiful counter to this myth is Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men,” which highlights how something as seemingly disconnected as a reservist policing force could aid in the implementation of a mass genocide. Though the book highlights the effects of conformity and moral shifts caused by a fanatical regime, it still concludes simply that there’s no set example for what a war criminal looks like.
Revisionism and the atomic bomb
An equal, if not worse act of revisionism, is Japanese Nuclear victimization, which came into play after the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Prior to that happening, the Empire of Japan likely killed some three to five million prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians during their WWII campaigns in East Asia and the South Pacific. One of the most notable of their slaughters was the Rape of Nanjing. In two months following their 1937 capture of the then capital city of China, they killed some 300-350,000 people. Of these deaths were some 20-80,000 women who were used as comfort women before being executed. This level of nationalistic fanaticism, which the U.S. believed would be on full display in any mainland invasion of Japan, only provided further reason for the deployment of the nation’s newest weapon: the atomic bomb. Originally developed in a race against Germany, the shift of the war efforts away from Europe as it became increasingly obvious that the Reich would soon capitulate had military minds looking eastward. It was also the belief of the U.S. Military that, should an atomic device fail upon deployment, the Germans would gleam more from its capture then the Japanese. Thus, on August 6, 1945 at 8:15 AM, the first ever combat deployment of an atomic warhead occurred. The B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the Little Boy plutonium device on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, at 11:02 AM, Bockscar, another B-29 piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, dropped the uranium Fat Man device on Nagasaki. Low estimates put the immediate and following deaths caused by the detonations around 110,000 people, while later estimates pushed that to over 210,000. The former was the estimate made by the U.S. Military soon after the attacks. The latter was made and spearheaded by multiple Japanese efforts. Neither number is inherently wrong or right, and an average would do no justice to either.
Denying the suffering brought by the atomic detonations would be a significant act of revisionism; however, using the event as a way to create sympathy for Japan’s government and policies is even worse. Post-war Japan was swift in turning the bombings into national rallying points. Following the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident, in which a Japanese fishing boat was exposed to fallout from American nuclear testing, a new form of journalism overtook headlines in Japan. Referred to as August Journalism, the headlines for the same month tend to focus on Japan’s role as a victim of the atomic bombs.
In one such article for NHK world by Yotsumoto Jun and Okada Noriko, an interview with Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow perhaps best reflects the opinion amongst the Japanese public: “Japan was a victimizer, as well as a victim. There is no side that’s more in the right or wrong. Killing is wrong for both sides.”
Lingering effects of August Journalism
Even as recently as this year, this type of August Journalism remains present. When Oppenheimer released in Japanese theaters, there was criticism for its lack of a depiction of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. During the annual Peace Message ceremony at Hiroshima, the prefecture’s governor made sure to focus solely on the bomb and its disastrous power, a step away from efforts in the 1990s to finally acknowledge the weight of Japanese crimes in the decision to deploy the warheads. The debate over the ethics of the atomic bombing is a never ending flurry of perspectives, a debate field that assuredly will not soon quiet.
Japan has continually downplayed both the ethics of the bombing and their use of comfort women and forced laborers. Their actions are so contentious that it prompted an international feud between Japan and one of their close neighbors, South Korea. Korea demanded reparations and a proper apology for those who had suffered as comfort women, and permitted former forced laborers to sue the Japanese companies that had used them. Japan in response, gave a half-baked apology and threatened to reduce the trade status between the two nations. It wasn’t until 2021 that a proper apology was actually issued, but the matter of reparations remained untouched. Such is the state of the matter that Korea has gone as far as ruling that Japan must pay reparations, and that, after the failure of the 2015 agreement, must make an effort to acknowledge the crimes. Of course, nothing has materialized from this, namely from the efforts of one former Japanese Prime Minister, the late Shinzo Abe.
Abe has been part of the problem when it comes to revisionist history. He was part of an active effort to deny any Japanese involvement in the system. Three weeks after the foundation was laid on the 2015 reparations agreement, he denied there were any documents proving such a system existed. He even went after the newspaper Asahi for reporting evidence to the contrary. He downplayed Nanjing, denied comfort women’s existence, and attempted to clear the name of a Class-A war criminal.
And yet people voted for him, voted to change their own history. Abe highlighted that this type of revisionism is more than just a niche issue; it can directly impact the world it leaks out into. These two examples only provide a microcosm of the risks in playing with history. For every silly story about Canada being the 51st state, or a Soviet being the first man on the moon, there is someone willing to go farther. Far enough to downplay deaths or horrific crimes. That is the innate beauty and danger of Alternate History: the never ending risk of revisionism, and the inescapable delight of historical curiosity.
