Here’s a question kick around:

At the end of the day, if you had to choose a post-WWII Europe governed by the Nazis or dominated by Communism under Stalin, which would you choose?

The ‘gut’ response that we’ve been programmed since childhood to give is ‘well, I’m certainly not choosing Hitler,’ but here are a few things to mull over before you actually answer, some serious, some less so.

1) The total number of people killed by Stalin through his purges, warfare, gulags, POW executions etc. ranges from 3 to 60 million. If you blame Hitler for every death in WWII, then obviously even the 60 million compares favorably to the Nazis. However, if you take a second world war as an inevitable outcome of the Paris Peace Process in 1919 and the Great Depression (which I do), then you have to inevitably argue that the war deaths in WW2 would have occurred WITH OR WITHOUT the Nazis in power. This is, of course, theory-crafting, but, at the end of the day, if we merely hold the Nazis accountable for, say, 4-7 million Holocaust-related deaths (unforgivable to be sure, but not tens of millions of people), then Stalin beats them in terms of brutality by a staggering number.

2) Regardless of all the fighting that went on in WWII, eastern Europe was still controlled by a dictator, just not a fascist one. Poland’s sovereignty, the original pretext for the declarations of war, was rendered forfeit anyway. Whereas the eastern European countries seized under Nazi invasion would have been nominally capitalist, they were reduced to pauper states under socialism, and the stagnation of their economies is still evident today.

3) The Nazis had better uniforms, spoke a more evil-sounding language (you have to admit that German sounds brutal), and were easily the most interesting and diabolical bad guys in history. The communists, as it turned out, were kind of bungling dopes. I mean, am I the only person who sighed loudly upon hearing that Indiana Jones’ main antagonists in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were Russians? It didn’t exactly pan out well either, did it? Let’s face it, if we’re going to be squaring off in a Cold War with one group of evil guys or another, I’d rather take the ones who do evil in style and don’t come off looking like complete amateurs every time they threaten you.

So, yeah, what do you think? I mean, after World War 2 we ended up in a 45 year cold war regardless. Even if the Nazis had ‘won’ WWII (IE defeated Russia, taken England in a cross channel invasion) there never, ever would have been an invasion on the U.S (you’re talking about the same logistical nightmare that would have prevented the U.S. from invading Europe if England had fallen. No staging ground in England means no D-Day, and the Nazis couldn’t have pulled it off in reverse). Therefore, you probably would have seen a similar cold war develop between the two superpowers after the dust had settled even if the Nazis had been victorious. To a degree, history would have remained largely the same, albeit with different antagonists glaring at each other from across the Atlantic.

As it actually happened, after all the carnage in WWII there were still bad guys in power, and they still held half of Europe. The Russians weren’t really good at what they did though: everywhere they went was ruined by their occupation, and even without a major catalyst like a war, they still couldn’t hold their empire together in 1989.

So, if you were FORCED to choose, who would you take, the Nazis or the Communists? We saw what we got with one… having been there, would you take a different route if given the opportunity to pick your foe?

Subtext: I am NOT a neo-Nazi, or Nazi sympathizer, or anything of the sort. It just struck me tonight that the Nazis made far better opponents than did the Russians, and since we’d have likely been stuck being on the brink of war with one or the other for half a century, it might be interesting to have a choice as to who you’d prefer to be dealing with.