What I tend to see is the notion that a CPs victory must lead to a worse off world, it comforts us to think that despite the tragedy that is the balance of our 20th century, it could be worse, the past was as good as it gets, we are lucky to have gotten here. One can spin dystopian narratives out of any embers, antisemitism, bigotry, genocide, war, these and more thread through history, before 1914 it was the Belgians who had in fact committed one of the very worst atrocities of genocide, the public reaction in Germany to events in Southwest Africa was revulsion and changes came, the Dreyfus Affair shows that justice can prevail over the antisemitism pulsing in liberal France, it is in Russia that the progrom was born, in the Opium War it was British business that championed a war to sell drugs, the United States was built upon the extermination of Natives and the enslavement of Africans, its own path paved in misery. To simply paint Germans as habitual villains is bigotry. They committed villainy and are no innocents, just like the remainder of the actors in this tragedy. To me it is tragic that we hear arguments that we need the next war and its suffering to make us better. I see too much hindsight and a lot of apology in that. i look at the trends before the war as a dim illumination into the future, events during the war upended many, chose new paths, it is the overall path that remains.
I am an unabashed cynic and do not believe that mankind will chose the high road unless lost. Colonialism will end, the British ideals will uproot it, but it would persist longer. German industrialism was creating a highly socialistic populace and a merger of industry and worker and state. Russian absolutism was fueling violent revolution to bring changes that had stagnated too long ago. Germany was already the largest or one of the largest trade partners with each of its enemies, it could not survive in autarky. Britain was already becoming a service economy rather than an industrial one. A CPs victory is not going to be better, but will it be any worse? I think it really just looks as bad, the damage to each nation is great, a generation of youth is lost, political reform is coming, social changes are coming, reactionaries are trying to halt it, revolutionaries are trying to hasten it. We can have a right-wing Russia or France, a Communist Britain or Germany, we can have another war, the paths are there, or we can see Russia stumble in between to evolve into a functioning democracy, we can see the Social Democrats reform Germany, we can see Britain accepting that colonialism is at odds with its ideals, the USA might end Jim Crow without having to liberate Dachau. The Congo might be the last crime of genocide, the war might be the last one to settle petty arguments of Kings and politicians, the path to yet more evil is really how we see ourselves in the mirror.
