How would staying out of WWII have saved us from the Cold War?

Is this analogous to Kerry vs Bush today?

Read this review futher, and you learn that later in the book you have Walter Winchell running for President in 1942, Lindbergh disappearing in a airplane which results in his VP attempting a fascist coup which results in a restoration of Roosevelt. All in a page and a half. Huh?

"Alternate History" fiction can't devolve into fantasy, but once you've made the switch, you can't then continue to play games with reality. No self respecting Sci-Fi magazine would accept this. An exploration of the "what if?" of the US not getting into thw war may be a worthy subject, but this book doesn't seem to address it.

Had either the Germans or the Russians secured nuclear weapons, they would have used them. We entered and won WW2 stopping them from this.

Perry

pj:

We'd not have saved Communism.

AWW:

Not quite. Kerry just wants to fight the specific boats that attacked Pearl Harbor. Bush wants to fight the Japs, Nazis, and Soviets.

What if Landon had been running for re-election in 1940?

If Lindbergh was more antiwar than antiJew -- a doubtful and probably meaningless distinction -- then he wouldn't have been willing to go to war against Bolshevism either?

Right?

Careful how you answer this one, Orrin.

Harry:

Right. If Lindbergh had been running things we'd not have gone to war period.

Perry:

Neither was going to and they'd have used it on each other. Good riddance.

Germany was only months away in 1945. What do you mean? They would have nuked GB.

Perry:

They were nowhere close.

Perry, oj's right.

Germany was years away from nuclear weapons, although they could have constructed what we're now calling a "dirty bomb".
However, that wouldn't have done them much good, since it wasn't until the 60s that humans realized just how potentially harmful radioactive particles are, and so such a device wouldn't have inspired much fear.

oj:

Since by your reckoning Germany couldn't have kept Russia subjugated, wouldn't Russia have been Communist anyhow ?

That's odd. We're supposed to attack Russia in 1945 when it was powerful, but not in 1939 when it was weak.

I'd guess, if Lindbergh had been president, he'd have been cheering to keep the ovens hot.

Well, if we had avoided WWII altogether, we would be able to drop that whole hyphenation thing from Judeo-Christianity.

No. Communism had failed. We rehabilitated it by making it look like it beat Hitler.

Harry:

Having gone to war to fight totalitarianism we should have defeated it. Replacing Hitler with Stalin served no good interest.

Two generations of marxist anti-American had
FDR's pro-Soviet entanglements to
help bolster their claims that communism was
a viable system.

I cannot concur. Roosevelt's policy was as brilliant as Polk's. We maneuvered the branches of European totalitarianism into tearing each other down and maintained the situation until its rotting remains came crashing down. Pretty nice work.

Lou:

Unless you were behind the Iron Curtain or one of the 60 million Chinese dead or 2 million Vietnamese or a Korean or a Cambodian or until you consider the destruction American society suffered and the trillions wasted. Our maintenance of the Soviet Union is a moral stain on our soul.

I do not need the Irish Catholic Thomas Fleming to define anti-semitism for me. And I certainly don't have any tolerance for someone who tries to peddle the nonsense that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor. The Japanese and the Japanese alone bear that responsibility. As far as the European theatre is concerned, Hitler declared war on us first, not the reverse.

All that being said, Philip Roth just doesn't get it. Even his essay in the NY Times Book Review shows that. He exhibits the frequent NY Jewish conceit that all Christians are identical in thought, style and behavior to the thuggish, knuckle-walking pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic urban working class, for whom Jew-hatred and violence against Jews were a major preoccupation. They and their scrofulous priests brought the contagion from Europe with them. Since New Yorkers, particularly Jewish ones, really do have the Weltanschauung famously depicted by Saul Steinberg, they make the erroneous extrapolation that their experience with the soi-disant 'Christians' of the City was the sum and total of the Jewish/Christian experience in America.

The areas where Protestantism in its various forms was in the ascendancy even in the hottest spots for Ku Kluxery were virtually absent any of the kind of daily effrontery and physical assaults that characterized life in NYC in the 30s. And today it is the fundamentalist Christians who are the most philo-semitic group in the nation, well beyond what is commonly alleged to be their interest in Israel's role in their eschatology. My own experience indicates that Biblically-based Protestants have a sincere interest in Judaism and in Jewish people generally.

I lived for a year in the Deep South (Hattiesburg, MS) where I made many friends and encountered not one whiff on hostility because of my Jewishness. My parents have lived near Jacksonville, FL for several years and have the same experience.

When I listen to my rabbi or other prominent Jews complain about 'the Quiet Holocaust' because of intermarriage or complain about Baptist efforts at conversion of the Jews, it just makes my blood boil. Any comparison between well-dressed, well-mannered, articulate young people talking to you about the Gospel and the Cossacks or the Black Hundreds or the Inquisition is just nonsense. Paraphrasing Jules Winfield,' Same ballpark. Ain't no ballpark that big. Ain't even the same (expletive) sport.'

Bart:

FDR beat Hitler to the punch in his 12/09/41 radio address, just five days after the Chicago Tribune leaked Rainbow Five.

Did Hitler do that as part of some Baldrick-like 'clever plan?'

FDR had the opportunity to declare war on Germany and chose not to because he was not certain he could sell it to the American people. Hitler just made his job easier.

Bart:

Yes, FDR had the advantage because Hitler was insane. He was easily provoked into doing what FDR wished, just as the Japs had been.

OJ,

Had we not entered WW2, Germany would have had the time to develop nuclear weapons, they certainly had an advanced weapons program and many highly prized scientists. I think a nuclear capable Hitler is a bigger problem than a hot Stalin. We know Stalin never used them. The same cannot be said for Hitler. GB would not have capitulated like the French, the country would have been utterly destoyed and Hitler would have made sure they were subjugated. I could ask where the morality is in this senario. The moral argument for attaching Russia or not attaching Hitler cannot be applied in an after the fact - add up the deaths approach - Perry

Perry:

Yes, it should be applied before the fact. Justify replacing Hitler with Stalin rather than getting rid of both.

As far as US government planning is concerned, non-US lives are not equivalent to US lives. In other words, a plan that involves relatively few Americans dying while millions of eastern Europeans live miserable lives isn't that bad a bargain.

What, you mean Roth wrote a book like this and he didn't use his mighty imagniation to have Lindbergh name Edith Keeler as Secretary of State?

John -- That may be the most disturbing web site I've ever seen.

If we could have defeated Stalin cheaply, it would have been a reasonable idea. In 1945, we could not have defeated him at all, and earlier, thanks to Republican pacifism and Progressive defeatism, we could not even have engaged him.

That said, I view the failure of Eastern Europe to have been returned to the same old Jew-hating antidemocrats in 1945-7 with a certain calm.

We can differ over how hard it would have been to beat Stalin in '45 after we'd rescued him. But there's no doubt we could have beaten him easily had we left him to slog it out with Hitler on his own. And if we weren't going to fight him then it was a waste to fight Hitler and just replace him with Stalin.

Actually, not, Orrin, and this just displays your lack of understanding of logistics.

In 1939, even if we had had a large military force, we could not have engaged the USSR. On what front could we have approached?

Since the USSR had defeated Germany (thanks to the stalwart resistance of the British and Greeks earlier in the year) by September-October 1941, if we had stood aside, Russia would eventually have reached the English Channel.

Maybe not for 10 or even 15 years, but who doubts their tenacity?

Even an exhausted Russia would have deterred us from the Continent. We were just barely able to go back even though the USSR had diverted 90% of the German forces

Harry:

Yes, had we simply not saved his war machine for him Stalin would not have prevailed in '41. In fact, he'd likely have met the tsar's fate in another losing World War effort. Even had he won somehow they'd have been so exhausted they'd have no more been able to dominate the continent than the Nazis were.

Well, since we didn't do a thing for him until 1942, he victory in 1941 was his alone, though if the valiant British and Greeks had not diverted enough -- barely enough -- German power, it probably would have gone the other way.

Either way, the US would never have set foot in Europe ever again

Historians (other than Party historians) disagree:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/soviet_german_war_03.shtml