Tumblr @avramchaja
being a jew studying preholocaust european jewish history is just mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns-

@meirmakesstuff
WWII alternate history stories always go “What if the Nazis won.” WHAT IF THE JEWS LIVED?

@kanguin
That’s actually such a good point about alternative history. So many ask “what if we got the bad ending?”, ignorant of the fact we did, that’s just a worse ending.

Asking “what if the Nazis won” allows one to live in the safe world where the Nazis were the root source of evil in WWII. Asking “what if the Jews lived” forces you to confront the fact that almost all of Europe was complicit in their eradication. Every European power, the United states, everyone involved hated the Jewish people. Everyone was complicit in antisemitism, everyone just sat back and let it happen.

It took an invasion of Poland for the UK and France to act, and it took a direct attack on the US for the US to officially get involved. All of the torture, enslavement, and murder of Jews before this were overlooked because not even below the surface, the German antisemitism wasn’t unique. And basically nobody has the guts to address that.

Source

It is difficult to believe a better world is possible when so much time is spent imagining that this is the best of all possible worlds.

For all of the re-imaginings of what might have happened if the Nazis had won or if the U.S. Confederacy had won or even what if the Roman Empire had never fallen, a more interesting question that probably has never been explored in speculative fiction is, “What if the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had endured?”

The reason there were so many vibrant Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the time before the Shoah is that the Polish-Lithuanian Empire was, for all of its flaws, a political entity built on the assumption of ethnic and religious diversity.

It was not a foregone conclusion that it would fall to “nation-states” or to other empires with more chauvinistic imperial cores.

More generally, Europe was not required to engage in genocidal colonialism. Whiteness and white supremacy were not inevitable developments in world history. Despite what some might claim of the Immortal Science and its teaching, capitalism was not a natural, inevitable stage of development as like following some laws of physics.

A better world was possible. A better world still is.