What If . . .

Back when I was working on the ol’ book, I often had to face what would happen if the story took place across a different time frame. Like what would happen if, instead of cats & a savior delusion, the main character had been inspired to kill off, say, Hitler or Stalin.
     Yeah, I know: same ol’ hypothetical bullshit as I usually get into. Nothing new going on, just a chance to bend the time line.
     But you have to ask, as Spike Lee obviously did when he made the movie that few have seen, The CSA. And if you ain’t seen it yit, I suggest you do a Netflix or whatever to watch it. With an open mind, of course.
     The movie aforementioned is based on the situation that would have become the USA, had the South won the Civil War. After all, it could have happened. Only needed one solid victory on the side of the South and a couple European countries would have weighed in, changing the dynamic of the po’ Southern States not having the industrial base upon which to support a truly powerful war effort.
     Which brings me back to the hypothetical situation of Hitler having been blown to bits, if only Hitler had stayed at the podium in the Burgerbraubierkeller back in 1939.
     I suspect that having been blown to bits, Hitler would have become a martyr for the Nazi cause. I also seriously suspect that there would have been a raging monkey bloodbath as the result of a successful assassination.
     How this would have played out over time, of course, would require a serious amount of background knowledge and the ability to coalesce out of all the information, some idea of the possible twists and turns of the subsequently altered timeline.
     Would the Nazi’s have risen to power at all without their hypnotic guru and leader? Good question, even rhetorically.
     If the Nazi’s hadn’t risen to power, would the emperor of Japan been tempted to take advantage of FDR’s seeming lack of attention to what some think were obvious signs of an immanent attack on US military bases in the Pacific. Not many folks like to consider the connection between Japanese militarism and Nazi militarism, even with the story that Hitler had a fit when he heard of the Pearl Harbor attacks.
     And then there’s the military situation between Russia and Japan in the years leading up to the beginning of Soviet military operations resulting from Hitler’s decision to repeat Napoleon’s attack on Russia. This played mightily into the decades of war that had been going on in various levels of simmer between Japan and Russia even before Japan went after US interests in the Pacific.
     And while the rest of the world was bashing it out over Nazism and American liberties, China was going through its own revolution of sorts while also trying to get out of becoming Japanese colonial property.
     Without Hitler at war with Europe and England, the Japanese would have been facing a completely different enemy. Hell, if you want to get real hypothetical, consider the world’s history without Hitler or Stalin.
     A couple planned murders here and there in Europe and Russia and the entire planet would have lived a completely different post-depression/economic collapse. Without Hitler, would Mussolini have had a chance at becoming the political equivalent of Don Vito? It’s a thing to consider. Obviously.
     Consider what it would have meant if the world economy hadn’t gone so seriously into the toilet in the very early 30s. It would have changed the base of discontent and frustration of the average person and in Germany would have made for a different set of speeches and scape goats in the rise of Nazism.
     Without the economic troubles of the 30s, Lenin’s control of the newly-birthed socialist/communist government would have been running on a different set of economic values. You have to ask, had there been no Depression, would Lenin have been able to hold on to Russia?
     Or, for that matter, what if Stalin had been assassinated instead of Lenin?     
     Maybe that’s one of the joys of being a whack-fiction writer. You know: the kind of thing that proposes a world familiar by names and titles but completely changed by the flow of circumstance.
     
All together, and more realistically, these sorts of hypothetical games are useless. They waste time and energy that could be focused on more meaningful pursuits.
     But it’s the hypothetical at the basis of existence that spills over into what some folks might want to call art.
     People make decisions every day on “what if” moves. Cross the street: it’s always preceded by a hypothetical question.
     “What if I wait until after the cement truck passes?”
     It’s the same old dream time stuff that we either get used to running as children or we never get hooked on good enough for us to turn into the fabled starry-eyed dreamers of legend, fame and fiction writing.
     Me? Obviously hooked good.
     If there’s any benefit – other ’n not being struck by a truck crossin’ the street, it provides me with plenty of deep philosophizing time, all of which time I could or should put to other uses.
     But I always end up wondering “What if I don’t ask ‘what if?’”
     I dunno.
     What if you ask it instead? Would the flag be different today? Would Stalin have killed between 30 and 50 million folks? Would Castro have been a revolutionary?
     Would it make a difference to you?