Feral Historian
Published 11 Oct 2024The 1992 novel by Robert Harris is a great example of the otherwise generally mediocre “Germany won WWII” alternate history premise. By removing the regime from its current almost mythologized status as a unique and singular evil, instead portraying it as merely a repressive state in a Cold War, Fatherland illustrates an uncomfortable truth about realpolitik and atrocities.
00:00 Intro
00:55 The Case
02:20 Out of Myth, into the Mundane
06:13 Detente and Bureaucracy
09:11 HBO’s Adaptation
10:01 Ignoring Inconvenient TruthsCORRECTION: Somehow I put up a picture of Bormann when I was talking about Buhler.
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🔹 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYXH9BWD
October 6, 2025
Fatherland: Alternate History with a Point
September 30, 2025
How Tyrants Rise — and How to Stop Them – W2W 46
TimeGhost History
Published 28 Sept 2025Tyrants don’t just appear overnight — they rise through propaganda, fear, and control. In this episode of War 2 War, we explore how authoritarian leaders consolidated power in the 20th century, from the ruins of World War Two to the opening battles of the Cold War. How do tyrants gain control, how can you recognize the warning signs, and what can societies do to resist them? Drawing on lessons from Hitler, Stalin, and beyond, we break down the patterns of dictatorship and what history can teach us about confronting them.
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September 29, 2025
The Galactic Empire and a (Revised) Generic Model of “Fascism”
Feral Historian
Published 29 Sept 2023While we can classify significantly different regimes as “communist” based on their key similarities, we don’t have the same taxonomy for “fascism” as a political category. The term is either used so broadly it becomes meaningless, or defined so narrowly that it’s only relevant to Mussolini’s Italian Fascism.
But we can identify three key factors that, when all are present together, result in a system we can define as “fascist” in a sense that’s both historically based and general enough to be useful for analysis. In addition to laying out a simple model defining fascism, this video also dives into some history of Fascism and National Socialism, mixed with the kind of sci-fi analysis you’ve come to expect here.
00:00 Intro
00:35 Palp, Dolf, and Communists
04:05 Old Republic vs Weimar Republic
04:55 Party and State
08:57 Three-Point “Fascist Minimum”
09:24 “Third Way” Economics
15:12 Totalitarianism
19:19 Unifying Myth
22:53 Umberto Eco
24:46 Franco
26:25 Closing Miscellany🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
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September 14, 2025
September 10, 2025
Space Nazis! Evil Empires and Historical Memory
Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2022A brief look at the echo of Nazi Germany and its impact on American sci-fi, with a focus on Star Wars because it’s endured for nearly half a century.
September 4, 2025
Mussolini’s Blunder: Greece and North Africa 1940
Real Time History
Published 4 Apr 2025Hitler’s victories in 1940 present a historic opportunity to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to expand the Italian Empire. Instead, Italy suffers a series of humiliating disasters in Greece and North Africa. So why did Mussolini declare war on the Allies at this moment, and could Germany be ultimately responsible for the Italian fiasco?
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August 20, 2025
QotD: Most “mass movements” really do need that “vanguard” to start moving
Let us stipulate that Socialism’s appeal to the proles is “I offer you a good time”. Orwell takes this as read, but it also follows from the premises laid out earlier in the essay. Orwell equates “ease, security and avoidance of pain” with “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense”. The Commies explicitly promise the proles those things; he could’ve lifted that phrase straight from the Webbs’ most doe-eyed propaganda leaflet.
And yet, as Orwell knows better than anyone, the proles can’t do it on their own. You really do need a vanguard of the proletariat. As Orwell himself notes, Hitler was backed by the big industrialists, and if you really want to needle the eggheads in your life, point out how quickly and thoroughly the German professors knuckled under […] They couldn’t wait to lick his jackboots, any more than his British and American colleagues could wait to kiss Stalin’s ass. They called themselves a “workers’ party”, but in the early days [German fascists] were almost exclusively found among the dueling fraternities – and professors! — of the German university system.
In other words, maybe the proles don’t need nothin’ but a good time, like the old song says, but though the proles are the “mass” of “mass movement”, the “movement” part gets started considerably higher up the social ladder … that is, with guys like Orwell. Guys who know, deep in their bones, that there’s more to life than hygiene, short working hours, birth control, etc. Because he’s one of the great prose stylists, it’s not as apparent in Orwell, but in lesser hands than his you can smell the contempt dripping off every sentence an egghead writes about the proles …
It’s not that the proles want hygiene, birth control, etc. It’s what they need. What they deserve, when you come right down to it, because that’s what you do with livestock — keep ’em clean and well fed, and of course control their breeding. You could take the most purple passage of “animal rights” eco-lunacy and set it side by side with the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, and see no difference at all. Sure, every aspect of our lives is managed for us by Our Betters, but at least we’re free range!
Severian, “Bonfire of the Vanities II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-29.
August 10, 2025
August 8, 2025
Germany’s Darkest Night Yet? – Rise of Hitler 21 – September 1931
World War Two
Published 7 Aug, 2025September 1931: Berlin descends into chaos as Nazis unleash a violent pogrom on Jewish New Year — while the police stand by. The scandal of the Kurfürstendamm riot rocks Germany, but the month’s headlines don’t stop there: Hitler’s niece is found dead under mysterious circumstances, France’s leaders visit Berlin to a frosty reception, and Japanese troops invade Manchuria. Extremists surge at the polls as democracy teeters — can the Republic survive?
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August 3, 2025
20th century advertising alchemy rediscovered
Much sound and fury has been devoted to the ritual denunciations of American Eagle and their new ad campaign featuring blatant Nazi ideology and imagery, er, I mean Sydney Sweeney:
Whenever I endure a sentence which trespasses into a jibe about whiteness or men or some other illusory bugbear, I stop reading and launch the laptop through the window. This week, I’ve cleaned out eBay. As one delivery driver lugs a fresh laptop to my front door, another scoops up the last to fall from the sky.
Those all-too-common laments about skin colour or genitalia are the scarlet letter imprinted on the chest of the thoughtless bore. It’s a mind virus without antidote. Screeching “whiteness!” upon snapping one’s shoelace betrays sound psychological health.
Take Sydney Sweeney, an American actress blessed with a merciless, unfair genetic inheritance. This week, Sydney broke the internet. Her crime? She’s rather attractive. Worse yet, Sydney flaunts her icy, Scandinavian beauty.
In an advert for American Eagle, the dewy, lissom blonde squeezes her gymnastic body into a pair of denim jeans. Smouldering before the camera, Sydney flutters her “great genes”.
Those great genes sashay around a classic Mustang — 400 horses of unapologetic masculine energy. Sydney pats her hypnotic behind. She fires up that climate-melting engine. The infernal marriage of masculine-feminine consummates as she roars off into the distance.
Advertisers know what they did. Diana, Roman goddess and huntress of men. Her chariot, the male appendage made steel and exploding gasoline. A combination to light our monkey brains on fire. The symbolism hijacks our amygdala: buy these jeans, and she’s yours. Or, for the other sex, buy these and manipulate them.
I’m sorry to be so blunt, reader. Those claims, as primitive as they may appear, are the animating spirit of advertising. Back in the 1920s, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, transplanted Uncle Siggy’s theories into the advertising business. Out went staid adverts praising a product’s utility. In went adverts selling visions of your unconscious, insatiable self. Bernays transformed the public relations and advertising worlds. He sold products that stirred the galloping herds of the subconscious mind.
Take cigarettes. Before Bernays, smoking was a decidedly male pursuit. Tobacco giants, keen to double their potential customer pool, turned to him. Bernays transformed smoking from a vulgar, unladylike pastime into a symbol of freedom and female empowerment. Men buy Patek Phillipe watches for the same reason. As Dave Chappelle put it: “If a man could fuck a woman in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house”.
In just a few moments, Sweeney’s serpentine hips lulled advertising away from overt wokeness to its subliminal witchcraft. It worked. American Eagle’s stock surged fifteen percent.
For research, I studied the ad twenty-seven times. Your humble narrator bought thirty-seven pairs of jeans and then signed over his entire inheritance to Ms Sweeney.
The reaction on the identitarian left authored five additional chapters to the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
By teasing the words “genes” and “jeans”, Sweeney called for the annexation of Poland and the Sudetenland. MSNBC excelled itself, even birthing a new pidgin English indecipherable to 97 percent of native speakers:
“Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift towards whiteness”.
Well, that’s one way to think about it.
August 1, 2025
When Stalin and Hitler Teamed Up – Prussia 1931 – Rise of Hitler 20, August 1931
World War Two
Published 31 Jul 2025August 1931: Prussia becomes the battleground as a bizarre alliance of Nazis, Communists (under Stalin’s orders), right-wing elites, and President Hindenburg tries to topple Germany’s last major democracy. With foreign meddling, political violence, and backroom deals, the fate of the Weimar Republic hangs by a thread. Against all odds, the democratic coalition prevails — at least for now. But with chaos spreading and the world watching, can democracy survive the next assault?
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July 11, 2025
Why Didn’t France and Britain Stop Germany’s Secret Rearmament? – Out of the Bullpen 001
World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2025In this special “Out of the Bullpen” episode, we answer your burning questions about Weimar Germany’s most turbulent years. From clandestine military pacts with the Soviets to the creative ways Germany sidestepped Versailles, we dig into aspects which shaped a republic on the brink.
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June 27, 2025
Germany’s Constitution, Erotica, and a Pastor’s Dignity – Rise of Hitler 19, July 1931
World War Two
Published 26 Jun 2025A rogue preacher breaks into the Reichstag and steals silverware, banned erotica, and the 1848 German Constitution. As Germany’s banks collapse and panic spreads, the press is captivated by the strange tale of Walter Wohlgemuth: pastor, thief, and accidental symbol of a republic in crisis.
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June 25, 2025
H.G. Wells’ Things To Come: Through The Eyes of its Time
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jan 2025H.G. Wells’ Things To Come played much differently in 1936 than it does today. So much so that it offers us an insight into the politics of the period if we can step back from our post-WWII understanding and look at it on its own terms.
Link to the Coupland essay.
http://digamoo.free.fr/coupland2000.pdf00:00 Intro
02:08 Revolution Envy
05:15 The Gulf of Time
06:32 Wells and the BUF
08:02 Empire and Establishment
12:11 The World State
15:18 To Understand the Past …
June 9, 2025
QotD: “Defending” democracy with totalitarian methods
These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a working men’s college in South London. The audience were working‐class and lower‐middle‐class intellectuals — the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to he tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves!
Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940, it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible Quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalization of other discontents. But how much of the present slide to ward Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the “anti‐Fascism” of the past ten years, and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press“, 1945 (written as the introduction to Animal Farm, but not published in Orwell’s lifetime).
