The troll in the High Castle

 A while ago, with respect to Iran, some wingnut troll trotted out--again--Neville Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler, and Munich. Rather than make the obvious refutations of the analogy, I got to thinking--what would have happened if Britain had taken the George Bush route and attacked Hitler early?

(Before I begin, I'll take note of William Manchester's contrafactual argument that if Chamberlain had hung tough at Munich, and if it had come to war, the Czech army could very well have repulsed Hitler. I think that Hitler would not have forced it until Germany was stronger. But this is not about Munich: it's that bigger, more dramatic change.)

If, say, a time traveller, had gone back from the present day to 1936, and after proving that she's from the far, far future by showing off her iPod Touch, she left them a laptop full of German High Command plans, Albert Speer's memoirs, and video clips of Auschwitz. 

Suitably electrified, instead of of just letting Hitler militarize the Rhineland,  Britain declares war on Nazi Germany. The menace must be nipped in the bud.

The problem is that it's the middle of a worldwide depression, and Britain is still hugely changed by the loss of nearly an entire generation of young men. The anger at the government and the ruling classes that prosecuted that nightmarish war is intense--and the example of Bolshevik Russia is never far away. 

As a result, when the mobilization orders go out, the result is massive riots--that begin to turn into something that looks like a revolution. Police lines fall before enormous crowds. A shooting war breaks out in Ireland. The houses of Parliament are occupied, and the King flees to Germany, where he is shown on newsreels standing next to Hitler giving the stiff-arm salute.

The French government falls, and while there is rioting in Paris, Marseilles and Lyons, order is preserved. The Socialist Republic of Great Britain  is announced: It declares itself in solidarity with the world wide Communist Revolution and declares itself allied with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

There is mutiny in the British Fleet, and throughout the Empire. Many officials refuse to recognize the Communist government, but are revolted by the action of the King. Britain recognizes Ireland's sovereignty and signs a treaty of Equality with the Irish Government. It also tries to reach out to the Government of France and, ironically, declares it's willingness to help France defend itself against Fascist aggression.

France does not have a chance to consider the offer when Germany invades. Though not at full armored strength and not fully trained, the Wehrmacht makes short work of the French Forces, and France falls in the autumn of 1937.

In America the Neutrality Act had already been passed in !935, and isolationism was the order of the day. Under pressure from the US, Canada had repudiated England's socialist government but refused to declare its independence. Enough of the British Fleet and the Army had found refuge in Canada that it was now a considerably larger military power than the United States--a  fact that made some Americans  nervous.

In the spring of 1938 the Nazi Invasion of England began. Hitler termed it 'a valiant attempt to remove from the shoulders of the Anglo-Saxon Race the yoke of International Jewish Communism.' Canada mobilized with no help from the US, though thousands of volunteers streamed north across the border.

And although the Canadian forces staged a dramatic landing in the mouth of the Severn, and fought the   Wehrmacht at the Battles of Woodmancotte, Cheltenham, and Gloucester, they finally withdrew to their ships, at first to Ireland, and then home, their ranks swelled by huge numbers of British civilians, many of them Jews. (the video clips had filtered down, in filmstrips and flip-books, and they knew what their fate would be.

Although The Soviet Union had condemned the invasion of Britain in the strongest possible terms, Stalin had not lifted a finger to help his fledgling ally.

Ireland surrendered to the Nazis in the fall of 1938. Czechoslovakia surrendered without a shot, and Poland followed in a brutal campaign. The King returned to England, with his new Prime Minister, Sir Oswald Mosley. The first concentration camps

By October of 1939, Hitler, along with Mussolini, controlled all of Europe from Land's End to the borders of Russia, except for Switzerland.

His victory was facilitated , of course, by America's reluctance to get involved in any way with what was being called the Nazi-Communist War. If there was any thought of fighting it was with a Canada bulging with British refugees and soldiers.  They were still in a recession, and Franklin D. Roosevelt lost the 1940 Election to Wendell Willkie, who ran on a platform of anti-Canada sentiment and Red-baiting.

Many refugee scientists, led by Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, tried to lobby for American entry into the European War, but Willkie reacted with outright hostility, declaring them persona non grata and forcing them to leave for Canada. Prompted in part by the documents from the future, Einstein and the rest, with much misgiving, emigrated to the Soviet Union to counter the Nazi push for an Atom Bomb.

Hitler controlled Russia--more or less, to the Urals. But behind that mountain wall, Stalin had not given up--although the world felt it was only a matter of time .

The atomic bomb, delivered by a Jewish crew in a Canadian aircraft, that destroyed the city of Berlin in 1949, killing Hitler and most of the higher-ups in the Nazi Party, effectively ended Germany's attempt to conquer Russia. The world was aghast, however, at such a nightmarish weapon in the hands of the Red Joe Stalin. 

It was this that finally made America awake from its long isolationist slumber. And although Republican President Charles L McNary was against it, a young firebrand from Wisconsin (which had a bad immigrant problem) name Joseph McCarthy started pounding the table for war with Canada as allies of the Reds.

In 1952, The United States issued a series of ultimatums to the British Commonwealth of Canada--to be met with an announcement by Communist Party Secretary Lavrenti Beria that any American aggression  against Canada would be considered by the Soviet Union as an attack against itself.

It was at that point that America truly looked up and saw a world, where it was not drowned in third world misery, was divided between fascism and communism.

And on the entire continent of Europe, there was not a single Jew left alive.