One thousandth anniversary

I'm a little uncertain about posting this map and scenario: this may cause creeping out, and might be inferred to indicate an unhealthy interest in the Third Reich. But once I get something started, I tend to finish it, so...

A fantasy map (because those loony sickoes could never have pulled it off), derived from reading some pessimistic old SF stories with an anticipated or imagined Nazi victory (a couple shorts by Boucher, Kornbluth’s “Two Dooms”, Asimov’s “Living Space”, and "The Man in the High Castle'. ) Props to SRegan at alternatehistory.com for his map with the flooded Sahara.

This world exists a thousand years in the future (well, about 924 to be precise). It is a unified planetary empire which also rules over Venus, Mercury, Mars and the more mineral-rich asteroids (It claims the whole solar system, but those outer planets are _cold_). The capital of the planet is located in New Washington, smack dab in the middle of what was once Oklahoma. However, this was not always the case - in fact, before the Year of the Three Fuhrers some seven centuries ago, the capital was actually Germania (formerly Berlin). For this is a universe in which Hitler won the Second World War, and the Reich went on to win the Third, nuclear one.

Following the global warming and resource depletion-related disasters of the 21st century, there was a long period of retrogression, as the world sank “into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and … more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” Whacky Nazi “science”, religious paganism, wars between various Gauteliers at the crumbling fringes of world empire, and the occasional civil war with nukes involved: things sank into a backward mess along the lines of Kornbluth’s “Two Dooms,” only more so.

Nuclear power (thorium breeders), solar, wind, and hydro power allowed the maintenance of a modern life-style for the elite, but much of the world population sank back to an almost pre-industrial standard of living.

After Germania and much of central Europe went up in smoke in the 23rd century (the anti-missile tech did not work anywhere near as well as promised) the Empire for all intents and purposes fragmented, with local empires emerging in the Americas, India, and even North China, only occasionally deferring to the theoretical rule of the new capital in New Berlin (formerly Heydrichstad) in Germanized Muscovy.

The “inferior races”, relocated to inhospitable climes, passed from the overlordship of one power center to another, and occasionally became independent: indeed, the Indonesians briefly managed to carve out an empire of their own during one particularly chaotic era. The idea of a final liquidation of all non-Aryans occasionally was mooted, but said people were always too useful as labor and in any event for centuries there was no central government strong enough to enforce such measures planet-wide.

Technological progress slowed to a crawl. “Nazi science” discouraged studies in biology, computer technology was suspect as a means of disseminating information, and scientists in general were suspect as being overly cosmopolitan and too given to doubts on the Aryan Way of things. Good, solid engineers were more reliable. In any event, the essentially feudal society of the post-21st century Dark Age didn’t generally think much of universal education.

Things changed, as they always do. Power and industrial might shifted away from battered Europe to a repopulated North America, where the locals, although mostly speaking German after a few centuries, even after the removal of Jews, Blacks, Orientals, and insufficiently blond-and-blue-eyed Slavs, retained a distinct local identity and resentment towards rule from Europe.

In the 25th century, after the final collapse of the authority of the government in New Berlin, the ambitious governor of North America east of the Mississippi moved to position himself as the new Welt-Fuhrer. Aided by the fact that North America had managed to stay out of a major war for the last century, and was one of the few places where science had been genuinely moving forward, he was able to establish himself as the effective overlord of nearly half the planet, although it was another century before the government of the World Empire was universally accepted as having moved across the Atlantic. Although the non-slave inhabitants considered themselves Aryans first of all, they also considered themselves Americans, and named the new planetary capital after the ancient capital of their nation.

Other things changed. Slavery was eliminated, and black Africans, “non-Aryan” Indians, Slavs, East Asians and Arabs were allowed to leave their reservations as something other than conscript labor or slaves, while those reservations slowly moved from colonies to puppet states to self-governing parts of the world state. The Fuhrer became the Emperor of Mankind, and progress in science and technology sped up. Race Science was slowly dropped and replaced by rational biology. As a more law-bound and less “feudal” form of government came into being, the feuding warlords of the borderlands became a thing of the past, and the last nuclear civil war took place in the early 26th century. Meanwhile, humanity returned to the Moon, and then to Mars and Venus. The 27th century saw the initial colonization of Mars.

The attempted to create an improved breed of humans through genetic engineering and cybernetics in the 29th did not go well, and several hundred millions died in the Gene Wars. This led to the Imperial Council displacing the Emperor, who was relegated to a ceremonial position, and the most powerful man (or woman) on Earth became the Head of the Council.

The current Head enjoys a good Lager as much as anybody, speaks excellent Classic German, and his first name is Adolph. His last name is Swahili and he is very dark-skinned indeed: facts that nowadays bother rather few people.

More-or-less democracy or not, no Empire or State likes the idea of being built on a charnel-house. Poor maintenance of historical archives from the 22nd to the 25th century has helped in a fairly thorough white-washing of Hitler’s record, although even school-board approved histories note him, like Mao in China today, as a “great man who made mistakes.” Revisionists attempting to show the Founder’s feet of clay are frustrated by fragmentary and often contradictory records, and nobody is entirely sure who the Jews were and what made them a threat (current debate on whether they were an apocalyptic cult – like the “Year Zero” movement of the 23rd century or the “biocidists” of the 29th – is currently quite heated). Then there’s that odd group in Central Africa who claim they _are_ Jews, but nobody takes them seriously.

(One of these days they'll dig up one of those pre-WWIII US time capsules, and then the historian-fur will really fly).

Nowadays, many North Americans speak “revived” English which would strike most from OTL as a garble of German and English, although everyone with a basic education also speaks the global Lingua Franca of Classical German. Persians, Finns, Turks, lighter-skinned Latin Americans have all been absorbed into the “Aryan” race which inhabits the majority of the planet.

Religion is largely a spent force: most people are atheists or agnostics, although some watered-down versions of the old pagan cults retain some popularity. Islam re-emerged hiding places in Africa and SE Asia in the 27th century, albeit in some heavily mutated forms: Christianity also held out in Africa and some parts of the Americas. (The former sites of Mecca and Medina were ceded by the Arabian Reich’s government for them to rebuild their holy cities in: it’s definitely a meteor, but nobody can be sure if it is the actual Kaaba stone or not).

The one Old Religion that is truly a mass faith is Hinduism, which in various mutant forms held out in India among people considered too backwards to bother divesting of their absurd, un-Aryan faiths: there are now several preachy offshoots of Hinduism setting up ashrams on every continent and on Mars as well. Most East Asians are non-religious or follow various localized cults, although Buddhism holds on in Tibet, a fortuitous side effect of the Nazi interest in Eastern mysticism.

Languages have changed: a great shuffling of peoples occurred as Germans removed Africans from the healthier, cooler parts of Africa, forced Poles and Ukrainians and Serbs and Russians together into Siberia, sent darker-skinned Latin Americans and inhabitants of the US to Africa, depopulated N. China and resettled the Japanese survivors of the very short “WW 3.5” in Canton.

And this continued, with the displacements resulting from the reworking of Africa’s water systems: the displacement of a large proportion of the essentially unassimilable Arabs who remained stubbornly Islamic: the various internal wars in SE Asia, and various decimations of rebellious subject peoples: and the very messy removal of “useless mouths” from agricultural land during the climate crises of the 21st and 22nd centuries. German, Italian and Spanish has replaced most other languages in the Middle East, NE Asia, Africa, Australasia, etc., but split into several dialects during the long Dark Ages.

The population of SE Asia was mixed and remixed over the centuries. The one identity to truly survive was that of the Chinese, although after a millennium and the assimilation of Koreans, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Japanese (a tiny Japanese-speaking enclave still exists in the western mountains), etc., they are culturally quite alien to the Chinese of our time and dimension. Similarly, the tribes and nations of today’s Africa are mostly gone, although through a series of historical accidents the Mossi-speaking peoples still live close to where they always did. A widespread technically skilled and clannish caste in most African states, the Murricans remain Christian and still use English in their religious ceremonies, a version rather closer to the original than the “revived English” of North America.

N. America, thanks to abundant population movements in the last couple centuries, doesn’t _look_ too different, racially speaking, than OTL - unlike, say, 90% white Korea. Native American nations exist in South and Central America (the Germans always had a romantic fondness for Native Americans) and there used to be a large reserve in North America, but after the place became effectively independent this was eliminated (although its inhabitants were allowed to either move to Latin America or become properly non-uppity second-class citizens.)

Although Italy and Spain were long ago subordinated to Nazi rule, the Latins were allowed to maintain their colonies in Africa, and eventually imposed their language and culture, although the majority of North Africans are of Arabic and Berber origin genetically (the Italian and Spanish/Iberian Fascists were much less fussy about intermarriage with the North Africans than they were with, say, Ethiopians). In Latin America, most of the population has moved from Spanish and Portuguese to the local German dialect, outside of the historically poorer and more backwards Andean and Central American areas, where German rule was generally indirect at most. The Argentines are jokingly made out to be “more German than the Germans”, while the Amazon region was simply taken over by the Germans in the late 20th century due to Brazilian “misuse” of the area. (The Nazis were always big on nature).

India is…different. The Reich never quite decided whether the Indo-European speaking Indians were too contaminated by non-Aryan blood to be treated as even lower-grade Aryans: lower castes, Dravidians, and those with the wrong balance of money and melanin were sent south, but North India varied between puppet state and colony over the first few centuries of the Nazi regime, before emerging as a local power under a dynasty of local Gauteliers “gone native”: during that era, a great deal of effort was made to make the place more “respectably” Aryan, with a lot of German classes, hair dyeing, skin bleaching, and (ick) sperm imports from guaranteed blond and blue-eyed donors.

Still, it never really stuck, and the attempt to make Hinduism a “Vedic” higher religion sans all the “barbarous” accretions in the end didn’t work out. Today, a great many Indians still speak their old languages (admittedly larded with German-derived words), follow the Hindu faith (quite thoroughly mutated), will only eat beef when they are convinced it’s a proper synthetic rather than vat-grown meat, and loudly proclaim that brown (or even black) is beautiful.

Earth is urbanized and densely populated, with over 16 billion inhabitants mostly inhabiting towering mega-cities with 50 million or more inhabitants: wilderness is carefully preserved (the Nazis have always been big on nature: the earth choked on fossil fuel fumes in the 21st century, but the Nazis protected the Amazon and the Central African jungles at gunpoint until they dried out). There are long waiting lists for permission for visitors, but not as long as one might expect. (For many life-long urbanites, the New England woodland is as scary as the Amazon jungle: it has been a long time since food was grown in the dirt).

Technology is advanced: food is now produced indoors, either purely synthetically or vat-grown meats or ultra-dense gene-engineered hydroponic plant growth. Fusion power and solar power satellites now provide enough power to provide a good standard of living for all, robots capable of mimicking human intelligence are a common sight, and fusion-drive ships zip (well, not exactly: the solar system remains large) between planets, and genetic tweaks and advanced medical techniques have raised the average lifespan to near 140.

Women’s status has varied with time and place, but up until a few centuries ago they were always subordinate, their main role to bear sons for the Reich. With the democratization of society and the freeing of thought, women’s equality finally emerged after a millennial eclipse, but in spite of formal legal equality planet-wide, there is some variation in actual practice, with women having social status comparable to those in OTLs Scandinavian society in North America, NE Asia, and Iran, while at the other end having essentially 1950s OTL US social status in parts of SE Asia and Africa.

Although society is now fairly democratic, the State still retains some alarming powers: for one thing, many crimes carry the penalty of sterilization, and for serious offenders, “segregation” in guarded reservations located like old-time Czarist Siberia, in isolated areas with a nasty climate. (Quite a few are in Antarctica). The state also controls reproduction: in the past it pushed for high birthrates for “Aryans”, now it strictly pushes for an average of 2.12 children for those who haven’t moved to the off-planet frontier.

And although racial discrimination is mostly gone, Aryanism/Germaneness being considered more a "state of mind" than a matter of skin hue, the State remains _quite_ concerned about people's "state of mind." The notion that there can be many equally valid ways of looking at the world is looked upon with skepticism: there is much popular talk of “destructive memes” and “dysfunctional cultures.” World State head-doctors work hard to instill in the general population “civilized” and "rational" ways of thought, as defined in North America and other Germanized lands. Many find considerable pressure to conform to “rational modes of behavior” if he or she is too loudly religious or has something negative to say about the March of Progress or is too particularist (AKA patriotic).

(Part of this is just that nobody wants a return to the old days of global civil war: the notion of truly sovereign states living in peaceful harmony seems absurdly naive to most inhabitants of this world.)

Among the various nationalities, particularly discontented (although for different reasons) are the Old Germans and the Slavs. Old Germans live between the Ural Mountains and the Loire: they consider themselves the descendants of the original empire-builders, and find the current centralization of planetary power in N. America as annoying as any Roman senator of distinguished ancestry did about the capital being in Constantinople. The fact that while power seems to be shifting again, it is not in their favor but in the direction of South and Southeast Asia, only adds injury to insult.

The Slavs, confined to Siberia and N. Central Asia, make up only 1.25% of humanity, but make up for it with attitude. They bitterly argue against World Government refusals to give them special breeding rights to regain the numerical weight they had in the 20th century: they push their way onto colonization lists to every crumbling rock in the solar system: only in the most desperate of circumstances will they speak anything but their German-cleansed, Russian/Polish/Serb/Ukrainian/Czech melange of a language: and they constantly and bitterly revisit crimes committed against them centuries ago. Most people find them more annoying than even the French...

Bruce