Was the historical problem with City/Forever ever addressed?

[Guy Gardener]

Edith as a peace maker would have talked to several sides of any possible hostilities.

She would have met Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito among others, and tried to make them more agreeable people, and after they fell in love with her, it's possible that might have been %1 less dickish.

 

[T'Bonz]

I'm one of the relative handful of fans who never really thought this episode was a great as most people make it out to be, so I never gave the historical paradox you describe much thought.

I'm with you. It's a fine ep, but not one of my favorites.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Is it possible that after Pearl Harbour that America in this alternate Time Line had surrendered rather than reciprocate any declarations of war?

Americans (today?) I don't think could fathom how that might be possible, but becoming war like in return against the Axis was an appropriate response to the attack that happened, but what if the Japanese attack was more massive or against a different target?

If a more callow America couldn't stomach the thought of joining the war, and a diplomatic out was offered by the Japanese, to have this go no further, despite thousands of dead Americans, they might have taken it.

Why should the Japanese even turn back?

What if they held Pearl Harbour?

Let the Imperial navy keep Hawaii, and reopen the oil supply to stop their march forward, not that the US (mainland) coast line ever seem seemed like a reasonable target, on a long enough timeline anyones flag could be flying over The White House by 1960.

The whole point about a slippery demoralizing attack is to snap the will of a people until they're immediately unwilling to fight. Get your victims on their knees begging for mercy in the first 20 seconds, is sometimes a better course of action to play for, rather than inviting a well armed foe to slug it out for ten years, and maybe get something in the end. If profit is not possible from attacking without warning, if fear can't win a war with one battle by eliciting immediate capitulation from a quickly beaten people, what is the point of a first strike or a sneak attack other than to galvanize your enemy into a monster who wants to destroy you?

If the attack on Pearl Harbour had been more vicious, and the death toll had quintupled, or if the strike zone covered the entire state until it was nothing but a deathzone... America might have rightly decided to take the loss and sit out the war, if that was that.

Peace in our time.

In reality, the Japanese mistake might have been making a surgical attack against a military target.

You see how that's not what happened at Hiroshima, and if they knew what was coming in 1945, America would've been turned into a woman's workcamp in 1941 after all the men had been castrated and drowned.

Also...

What if Edith talked America into radically disarming in the 30s, and thoroughly converting into a peace time economy. If such an impossible thing were true, then the military fleet at Pearl would have been retasked to haulage and had no reason to group at a military base, which wouldn't have been a military base.

Pear would not have been a viable or usable target.

 

[J.T.B.]

Yeah, well... The Japanese might have had some wild ideas in WW2, but they were never so delusional as to think that a nation of 70 million could invade one of 130 million, half a world away.

There was no chance of "holding" Pearl Harbor. Destruction of the battleships was to eliminate or at least delay the possibility of a decisive fleet battle, which was the basic navy war plan vs. Japan. But there were still carriers, cruisers, many destroyers and perhaps most importantly divisions of fleet submarines that would have chewed the Japan-Hawaii supply lines to shreds. It was not even realistic to hold Midway in 1942, much smaller and 1500 miles closer.

Turning all of Hawaii into a "deathzone" was simply not within the capabilities of the Japanese force. The Pearl Harbor attack was very successful and consequential, but it was a get-in-get-out raid and had to be.

 

[Timo]

Hmm. Just reroute the useless Aleutian task force to accompany the carriers, land their troops on the confused island, and have them do a thorough job at demolishing, demoralizing and denying access. It's not as if Hawaii would have had means to resist (assuming the timing went right and no US naval or air units could be regrouped to repel the actual amphibious landing), so the fact that the invaders would have brought only light weaponry would be of little consequence.

"Holding" would simply be a fancier word for get-in-and-stay-until-told-otherwise, at which the Japanese were distressingly good. No, the folks who stayed would not be in control of the island. They wouldn't get resupplied. They wouldn't see their homes again. But that was standard fare even at the earliest stages of the campaign, and the mere idea of evil little slant-eyed guerrillas stalking poor innocent Hawaiians in every park and back alley would result in the US being forced to deliver exactly what the IJN wanted: a counterstrike (to safe face, and lives, rather than a base island the USN could do without if need be) wholly on Japanese terms, far away from US mainland, so predictable that the coveted decisive naval battle would necessarily have been pitched - and now without US battleships.

Now, this would be the "Nazi" version of the events: a ruthless application of all available resources in a decisive if slightly wasteful manner, but with essentially zero thought given to strategic or political concerns. (Plus, insert typical Nazi-style dumb luck: USN submarines at that point would have been rather useless due to their substandard early torpedo stock.) As the consequence of the "holding" operation, the IJN might well have inflicted much greater casualties on the USN, but of course not even those would ultimately have been decisive. And the political price of the "deathzone" approach would no doubt exceed the profit.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vandervecken]

I believe that in each visit to a Mirror Universe, that MU is created all at once by some precipitating event (like the ion storm in "Mirror, Mirror"). The MU had no prior existence; it came into being suddenly and imperfectly like a bad Xerox copy. So all the same individuals are copied into the MU, and in similar relationships and proximity, but they are different as well.

The created MU might then continue to exist after the Prime Universe characters leave it, or it might vanish. The science is not settled on this point. I believe it vanishes due to the Law of Conservation.

Granted, I have to disregard DS9's very decent MU episodes as fiction, maybe short stories by Jake Sisko, to make the math work out. This also explains how Vic Fontaine could be flesh and blood in the DS9 MU -- because there is no DS9 MU.

I loved that touch, the idea that Vic might be so fundamentally different in different realities. I don't see why it can't be.


I like the created all at once idea. Maybe the puncture in Mirror, Mirror was the catalyst for that instant copy. Maybe there wasn't an MU until those particular events. That origin could explain why the MU is such a fractured version of Trek prime reality, coming as it does out of a random event spawned by chaotic energies (the Halkan ion storm clashing with the transporter beam--pretty damned disparate).

Gods I hope the MU conquers the Abramsverse.

 

[Drone]

I
Also...

What if Edith talked America into radically disarming in the 30s, and thoroughly converting into a peace time economy. If such an impossible thing were true, then the military fleet at Pearl would have been retasked to haulage and had no reason to group at a military base, which wouldn't have been a military base.

Pear would not have been a viable or usable target.

^This. I'm surprised that in all the speculation in the thread, that this more than plausible explanation hadn't been proffered until now, well it took a Master..... Spock's summary describes a pacifism movement but doesn't really qualify its characteristics or modus operandi. I won't claim to have much knowledge on the percentage of the national budget that was being spent on the military from the mid-30's on, but what would make a lot of sense given Keeler's sensibilities, would be to foment a unilateral disarmament, with the savings going to greatly expanded social programs to enhance F.D.R.'s effort to provide relief and hope to the huge part of the population suffering under the depredations of the Depression. A total cashiering of the War Dept. would have been resisted and Keeler's greatest hope in this regard may have been thwarted, but perhaps only to a negligible degree. Not unlike Great Britain's military stultification prior to Churchill's return from the wilderness.

This would seem to be a very reasonable means to explain America's inability to effectively enter the fray, whatever the immediate cause, rendering the whole line of reasoning and back and forth about the Japanese launching an attack at all, pretty immaterial. The more likely scenario is no aid to the Soviets, perhaps a more innovative and devastating means for Germany to invade if not, at the least, greatly disable the Brits, and allow those aforementioned heavy water experiments to come to fruition. Entering the war significantly later because the possibility of a German dominated world could no longer be staved off, the US makes its bow, significantly overmatched technologically and lacking the experience initially to provide an effective counterweight. Imagine the Kasserine Pass taking place not in North Africa, but at a rather more important place and moment in the European theatre. Bad news. Capabilities would be ramped up quickly, as happened in reality, but with the German's oil supplies from Romania (and elsewhere) not denied and the Sword of Damocles nuclear attack in play because of aerial weapons systems that had the time and resources to have been developed relatively unfettered, it might make a whole lot of sense to quote that famous philosopher, William Hudson, "Game over, man, game over"!!

 

[Timo]

Might also be that the US maintained a strong military, but Keeler's efforts put it into close negotiations with Hitler's Germany, and it transpired that the US became a staunch ally of the Germans. It would make sense for such an ally to stay out of the scuffles in Europe - indeed, with such powerful support, it might be Hitler's expansion would not get out of hand and turn into open war, even (while Spock acknowledges the concept of WWII, he does not indicate any starting date - "peace negotiations dragging on" might mean it didn't escalate into great-power fighting until in the late 1940s, when Germany already had the A-bomb). Also, the support might directly (if unwittingly) help give Hitler his weapon sooner.

The main objection to Keeler achieving anything is that the powers were slated to be in conflict with each other in various ways regardless of US intent and action; the side objection is that many of those conflicts were already brewing and indeed igniting before Keeler acted. Fine and well - the issue isn't whether there would be conflict, but when. And WWII in our reality was a conflict that was ignored and delayed by various parties until it no longer was. It really only takes fine tuning to delay a few more years, resulting in the one important alteration that Hitler gets nukes before losing. And the US deciding to ally with Germany "in the late 1930s" could delay conflict in Europe at least until Stalin was ready to invade, which should have been plenty for an alternate Manhattan-Projekt to bear fruit - especially if the alliance prompted key scientists to breath out of relief and return to Germany (there'd have to be concessions in Hitler's policies for the alliance to happen, after all).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Drone]

Well, Charles Lindbergh was certainly cited as a Nazi sympathizer, despite some contradictory beliefs that he held, a position that certainly was maintained by the President and a number prominent in the administration. His views on isolationism were less ambiguous, and this was certainly a belief that was popular before the war in a great part of the U.S. But I don't think that extended directly to a widespread support for the Nazi cause. With the government opposed to his stance on what he believed were the many fine qualities extant in Germany, I don't believe that there was any unifying figure that was so nationally appreciated otherwise, that an effective tide to forge military ties with Germany, and in fact side with them in the conflict, was ever plausible and certainly would have become less so as the war in Europe began and evolved in its first year.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Almost no one knew that the Nazi cause was really about genocide, death camps and massgraves before 1944.

Supporters of the Nazi ideal before 1944, and I do mean well before 1944, were praising technology, sweet uniforms, full employment, low taxation, a budget surplus and a high GDP. Before they knew how the sausage was made, the Great Depression destroyed the rest of the world, so Germany looked like it was sitting pretty after "somehow" all their problems were thrown into trains.

Should Lindbergh have known better?

There's no way he could have.

PS

What is the Peace Movement? A lobby group that controls a huge voting block, A million bums who would other wise not vote, but instead vote per Edith's orders would be powerful at that point in history. I doubt it would be a monetary fund, the entire point of the needy is that they don't have money to eat, god forbid spare sheckles to bride politicians into obeying them. What if it was an actual political party? What if Edith met Franky becuase he was concerned that her "party" would split the vote and endanger his own presidency, or maybe he ws thinking about offering her the vice presidency?

Upon recovering, McCoy saved Keeler from dying in a traffic accident, unwittingly changing history. This resulted in the creation of an alternate timeline in which Keeler continued striving for her goals, and eventually founded one of the largest peace movements in the United States. Her actions finally attracted the attention of PresidentRoosevelt, with whom she met on February 23, 1936, to confer on her plan of action for assisting the needy. By the late 1930s, the growing pacifism caused by actions Keeler set into motion would delay the United States' involvement in World War II, allowing Germany to complete its heavy water experiments and be first in the development of the atomic bomb. This, together with the V-2 rocket, enabled Germany to conquer the world.

February 23, 1936, was a Sunday and nothing happened, according to the internet. two cops got shot in Cuba. That's it.

 

[T'Girl]

Supporters of the Nazi ideal before 1944, and I do mean well before 1944, were praising technology, sweet uniforms, full employment, low taxation, a budget surplus and a high GDP.

And blatant anti-semitism.

Nazi = Jews bad.

.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Nope. At the time it was perfectly fine to hate Jews, and no one cared, it was just part of the landscape. They killed Christ, so they deserve what ever they have coming. Whatever that is, banishment maybe? Yeah, send them away from where the real white people live.

We know it's bad because we're from the future.

At the time antisemitism was practically a nonissue, because they are from the past.

Segregating the Jewish people, to live in their own cities, was probably the worst that anyone could possibly imagine that would happen to the European Jews.

Hitler's plans for the Jews were publicly far more vague than Donald Trumps plans for the Mexicans.

 

[Marsden]

I don't actually see this as a historical problem, the point of the story, which the OP acknowledges, is that small things can cause huge ramifications. Just like Drone said, not feeling aggressive enough to move the Battleships from San Francisco to Hawaii to remind the Japanese Empire that the US has a navy wouldn't have made them a target. The Battleships were not routinely stationed there. That simple policy decision could have been all it took to delay US armed intervention for several years.

 

[J.T.B.]

Just like Drone said, not feeling aggressive enough to move the Battleships from San Francisco to Hawaii to remind the Japanese Empire that the US has a navy wouldn't have made them a target.

Sorry, but San Pedro/Long Beach! (see post 28)

 

[Marsden]

Well, California.
Not Hawaya

 

[J.T.B.]

Well, California.
Not Hawaya

Right! It just seems like Pedro is forgotten sometimes. Though maybe it will get its due now that USS Iowa is there.

 

[Drone]

Nope. At the time it was perfectly fine to hate Jews, and no one cared, it was just part of the landscape. They killed Christ, so they deserve what ever they have coming. Whatever that is, banishment maybe? Yeah, send them away from where the real white people live.

We know it's bad because we're from the future.

At the time antisemitism was practically a nonissue, because they are from the past.

Segregating the Jewish people, to live in their own cities, was probably the worst that anyone could possibly imagine that would happen to the European Jews.

Hitler's plans for the Jews were publicly far more vague than Donald Trumps plans for the Mexicans.

Records of the Roosevelt administration don't leave much doubt that there was an unquestioned knowledge of what was going on in those simple, non-sinister looking buildings scattered throughout Germany and Eastern/Central Europe. I don't doubt the British were similarly aware of the situation. The problem, other than irresolution in general, was what to do about it. Bomb the railways or the camps themselves?

I find your suggestion of an overall ignorance, if not callousness, or implicit agreement that the European Jews were inconvenient to think about, in the most benign formulation and an anachronism that nevertheless merited whatever fate it was left up to the tender mercies of the Nazis to determine to be inaccurate. Also, I'm not sure you're referring to domestic opinion in Germany or elsewhere in the world. Certainly antisemitism had been developed and molded to become the national mindset, overlaid on an already significant history of it there. But while it wasn't exactly negligible in other Western countries as well, I think if you're propounding that the argument was a predominant view held pretty much universally, I would say that it would be a naive contention. The widespread popularity of nativist and openly antisemitic rabble rousers declined in the US as the 30's played out and American Jews were increasingly important players in the federal and commercial power structure. I just don't think a blanket shroud of indifference and cluelessness was an overt element in many public societies, and for many citizens of the Allies, cognizance and revulsion towards the Nazi ideal, played a large role in distinguishing the blandishments of that efficient economic and social model from also being a humane and civilized power, one that merited the supreme effort to seek its halt and destruction, to say nothing of repudiating the fostering of a wish to emulate it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

If you want to say that the war department had some ideas about the truth in 1942, that is entirely believable, but if you want to say that Joe Sixpack knew about experimentation and the ovens in 1938, that's a horse of another colour entirely.

Google tells me that the first camp was discovered to be a camp by the Russian advance on 24 Jul 1944. Before that there were rumors, but nothing confirmed or newsworthy of print, so that's the sweet spot. 9 months between an accurate definition of the Nazi party and the end of World War II. During the rising deaths of 60 million people over the course of the war, it's possible that Charles Lindbergh changed his mind about the NAZI Party before July 1944...

Hmmm.

http://lindbergh106.weebly.com/a-nazi-sympathizer.html

Lindbergh was a scientist who looked at the Nazi war machine and said "Well that's ####ing effective". His support of the isolationist movement was because he didn't believe that the Nazis (and their superior technology) could be beaten by Europe + America, which is true. Only Europe + America + Russia could beat Germany, which was never going to happen because of Germany and Russia's iron clad non aggression pact.

Not a sympathizer for NAZI morality, just a realist about German engineering.

 

[Drone]

1938? Really? Of course neither John Q. Citizen or anyone else knew about experimentation and the ovens then as such doings weren't even going on then!!! The murder of Jewish civilians started in Poland with the onset of the war and they certainly were vigorously pursued thereafter in a more ad hoc basis, but the modus operandi that we're talking about here didn't really start until much later. You have heard of the Wannsee Conference, that codified the systematic programme of transportation throughout the continent and the means of efficacious disposal at the end of the line, haven't you? While it also dealt substantively with the SS as being the lead dog in the process and the effective definitions of who would be Jewish enough to be drawn into the horrors, this was the setting that really got the ball rolling for the mass systematic execution of these dictates as we think of them today. The date of the conference? Jan. 20, 1942.

Again, I would say that it is clearly documented that the President himself, as well as many members of his cabinet were aware of what was occurring long before any camp was actually liberated. Hence the continuing academic, moral, and ethical debate over why certain actions may or may not have been decided to avoid taking, that would have had some impact on the eventual totality of the attempted genocide. Definitely not some vague information privy to the War Department only.

As for Lindbergh, what you didn't mention, and I'll admit not following the link, is that as a scientist he was a noted proponent of eugenics, and while arguably not as virulently antisemitic as the hardcore, not acquiescent Nazi leadership, he did avow that Jews were of a lesser genetic strain. "We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races". As appeared under his hand in Reader's Digest in 1939. Roosevelt himself claimed his surety that Lindbergh was a Nazi in all the salient meanings of the term. As for his strenuous arguments about keeping America out of the fray, it wasn't because of fear of defeat, but that the US had no fight with Germany, nor should have Great Britain. "I was deeply concerned that the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler's destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia's forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization" (Lindbergh's autobiography). Hardly the apprehension of someone that fundamentally saw a justification in going to war with Germany, rather than actually holding them up as an ally to look up to and a bulwark against inferior hordes.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I am aware of the timeline, but I was going for an easy win.

You can't convict them of gassing people before they started gassing people.

Yes, I've seen Conspiracy, so I know enough about the Wannsee Conference.

No one in the States who didn't have it coming, was still publicly praising the Nazi party after Pearl Harbour (No, I'm not Bluto from Animal House, I know the Japansese attacked Pearl Harbour.).

The public didn't find out about what happened to the Jews until almost after the war, so "saving them" or "avenging them" was not a reason to enter the second world war 3 years earlier, because at that point the Holocaust was only at it's earliest stages of laying cement.

You do remember that when you started attacking me, that I was only talking about halfway through the 1930s that the Nazi party was seen favourably (by people who were wrong)? Y'know, before the Jewish relocations became obvious and before Poland? No one knew they were bad because they hadn't done anything verifiably bad yet, which was easy since they controlled the newspapers and radio. Hell, if they controlled the news, it's no wonder that anyone reading their disinformation and propaganda about being awesome believed their disinformation and propaganda about being awesome who didn't have boots on the ground to wonder where all the Jews and homosexuals were going.

It's kinda like Bill Cosby the rapist.

Before you found out this star of big screen and small was a serial rapist, the worst thing he had done to you was Leonard Part 6.

Before you'd recently found out that Cosby drugged and violated women, you'd probably spent the last 40 years having varying degrees of mancrushes on Bill because of Fat Albert or the Cosby Show.

Unless, or course if you alone in the 80s you could tell.

If under all that goofy charm, you still some how smelled rape on his breath and maybe you should have shot him dead like you wanted to in 1986, because only you knew that this was the right thing to do and damn the public consensus that Bill Cosby is the worlds Greatest Dad, they were wrong and you were right!

This metaphor was brought to you today by the letters THC.