AnchorSteam wrote: ↑17 Feb 2022 06:49
It is goofy and pretty a a good illustration of how taking a "what if?" too far is just
sooooo wrong.
I don't think it's necessarily a matter of
too far, rather of good versus bad alternate history.
Alternate history is best employed as a means of counterfactual reasoning. This is where we take a historical narrative ("X happened because Y") and test that narrative by asking "Does X happen absent Y?" or "Does Not X happen even in the presence of Y"?
One of the problems with alternate history is that anybody can do it but it's extremely difficult to do well: thus the field contains mostly bad material. Changing one variable incepts changes to theoretically unlimited additional variables. Good alternate history requires, inter alia, the judgment to know which variables might meaningfully change. It then requires the knowledge and analytical skills to describe how they likely would have changed. A convincing ATL should incorporate humility regarding the counterfactual "values" of changed variables - one way to do so is always to select the underside case of counterfactual values.
I'll use my own work as an example. One historical narrative is that Germany lost because the Allies had numerical/economic preponderance that precluded anything but the OTL outcome. We can test that narrative by evaluating, e.g., a small counterfactual change that retains overwhelming Allied preponderance and asking whether a different outcome is likely in the counterfactual. My
Ostheer-centric counterfactual does exactly that. It gives Germany an armaments boost equal to <1% of German GDP prior to Barbarossa, and shows that German victory in the East during 1942 is the likely outcome. Had the SU fallen, the
historical record is clear that the West had not even a plan to invade Europe.
This counterfactual analysis can then be used for several further analytical purposes. For one, it negates the argument that Germany lost due to being outnumbered/outproduced - a 1% economic delta doesn't change the fact of being outnumbered/outproduced. It shows that German strategic blunders were necessary to her defeat, most importantly the failure to take the SU seriously.
Another mode of analysis removes the hindsight inherent in dominant historical narratives and evaluates Allied strategy as the world appeared to contemporaries. How does this look? Well in 1941 the US and UK assumed Germany would defeat the SU (they did not uniformly assume collapse in 1941 but nearly all thought SU would be functionally defeated by the end of 1942). We should evaluate US strategy given that strategic outlook, and the US's later realization (during 1942) that Soviet defeat would at least preclude "Germany First" and would likely preclude defeating Germany at all. Under those two facts, the war's course and/or outcome were completely out of W.Allied hands - if the SU endured they'd win; if it didn't they were unlikely ever to defeat Germany (at this time the A-bomb was not a strategic factor).
In all of this, the counterfactual reasoner should keep her mind on the fundamentals driving the analysis rather than becoming too tied to ancillary paths along a counterfactual history, which branch out in theoretically unlimited directions.
