20-11-2009, 11:22 AM
Thanks David for your thoughts.
Interesting you mention Germany. Germany was one the most active players in Afghanistan along with the British Empire and the Soviet Union, so much so, that the Afghan government had to adopt a policy of strict neutrality and ask all German non-diplomats to leave. They went one further and made all foreign non-diplomats leave. They seem to have taken a lesson from what happened to Persia, i.e., Stalin and Churchill basically occupied it for the duration of the war.
The strange thing is, as soon as the war was over, the Germans came back. Germany again became the major foreign aid donor to Afghanistan along with the US and USSR, in the 1960s I think, and did large infrastructure projects.
The big connexion with the Third Reich in the region isn't talked about much: Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler's greatest fan. Burma, Thailand, Indonesia etc. all hailed their Japanese Axis liberators and used the rhetoric of the Japanese Greater Asian Co-Prosperty Sphere as a springboard for national self-determination. Woodrow Wilson, of course, had only advocated national self-determination for white people.
I understand Peter Levenda studied some primary documents from the Ahnereb. It would be interesting to see what he came up with. The film Seven Years in TIbet with Brad Pitt was a whitewash of history in several ways, putting a friendly face on Nazism but also clouding what the Nazis were really doing in Tibet.
It's also interesting how Japan conducted itself in Manchuria vis-a-vis Jews. The Japanese military leadership seems initially to have subscribed to the idea of the Protocols of the Elders of Sion, but with a twist: they didn't think the Jews were so bad anyway, and sought to curry influence with the secret rulers of the earth by adopting a policy of tolerance toward Jews. This lasted throughout the war, with some wrinkles now and again. There was Japanese milkitary intelligence agent/diplomat Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas/Kowno, Lithuania, who issued Jews travel visas to get to Manchuria, and there was a semi-tolerant Japanese leadership at the Shanghai ghetto who saw the Jews as fellow Asians. This is probably the source of the legend Philip K. Dick used in Main in the High Castle, a book about an alternate reality in which Germany and Japan win the war and partition North America. The book references another book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (yes, this is what some Israeli leader used to say there were too many Palestinians, but it's from the Old Testament) in which the Allies win the war.
"Allies"... During the war they usually called them the United Nations. After the war they renamed them Allies.
The idea of an alternate reality with a different outcome for WWII isn't new at all. For instance, see the audio files here (a Brothers Cameron production in Canada by the way):
Nazi Eyes On Canada directory
and especially this one:
Premiere Show
Japan has also had its share of novels where Imperial Japan won.
Interesting you mention Germany. Germany was one the most active players in Afghanistan along with the British Empire and the Soviet Union, so much so, that the Afghan government had to adopt a policy of strict neutrality and ask all German non-diplomats to leave. They went one further and made all foreign non-diplomats leave. They seem to have taken a lesson from what happened to Persia, i.e., Stalin and Churchill basically occupied it for the duration of the war.
The strange thing is, as soon as the war was over, the Germans came back. Germany again became the major foreign aid donor to Afghanistan along with the US and USSR, in the 1960s I think, and did large infrastructure projects.
The big connexion with the Third Reich in the region isn't talked about much: Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler's greatest fan. Burma, Thailand, Indonesia etc. all hailed their Japanese Axis liberators and used the rhetoric of the Japanese Greater Asian Co-Prosperty Sphere as a springboard for national self-determination. Woodrow Wilson, of course, had only advocated national self-determination for white people.
I understand Peter Levenda studied some primary documents from the Ahnereb. It would be interesting to see what he came up with. The film Seven Years in TIbet with Brad Pitt was a whitewash of history in several ways, putting a friendly face on Nazism but also clouding what the Nazis were really doing in Tibet.
It's also interesting how Japan conducted itself in Manchuria vis-a-vis Jews. The Japanese military leadership seems initially to have subscribed to the idea of the Protocols of the Elders of Sion, but with a twist: they didn't think the Jews were so bad anyway, and sought to curry influence with the secret rulers of the earth by adopting a policy of tolerance toward Jews. This lasted throughout the war, with some wrinkles now and again. There was Japanese milkitary intelligence agent/diplomat Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas/Kowno, Lithuania, who issued Jews travel visas to get to Manchuria, and there was a semi-tolerant Japanese leadership at the Shanghai ghetto who saw the Jews as fellow Asians. This is probably the source of the legend Philip K. Dick used in Main in the High Castle, a book about an alternate reality in which Germany and Japan win the war and partition North America. The book references another book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (yes, this is what some Israeli leader used to say there were too many Palestinians, but it's from the Old Testament) in which the Allies win the war.
"Allies"... During the war they usually called them the United Nations. After the war they renamed them Allies.
The idea of an alternate reality with a different outcome for WWII isn't new at all. For instance, see the audio files here (a Brothers Cameron production in Canada by the way):
Nazi Eyes On Canada directory
and especially this one:
Premiere Show
Japan has also had its share of novels where Imperial Japan won.
