Scott asked:
It is common knowledge that the USA was late in committing to a side in WWII. I wonder what the world would look like today had they chosen to support Hitler.
It seems too dogmatic to simply assume that the right side won: Further, that nothing but evil emerged from Nazi Germany. Clearly when the victors get to write history the first goal is to prevent an uprising from the defeated foe, but can we really be so sure that where the planet is at today is a better place?
Answer by Shaun Williamson
There was never any chance that the U.S.A would enter the war on the side of Hitler. Hitler had a plan, after he had defeated Western Europe and the USSR he would wage war on America, the last of the democracies. Hitler frequently expressed contempt for the U.S.A. He despised all democracies.
The American public were against getting involved in any European war and this prevented the U.S. president from entering the war earlier. However he helped the British right from the start by selling them cargo ships and other equipment.
It may seem to you too dogmatic to assume the right side won but then I imagine that maybe you are too young to have any experience of real evil.
Making lampshades out of peoples’ skin, performing medical experiments on children, mass murder including the mass murder of handicapped German children. Killing German students who tried to protest about their loss of freedom. Maybe these things don’t matter too much to you.
The right side did win. Hitler was a madman who was stupid enough to think he could fight on two fronts at once and that he could annoy the Americans by signing a treaty with the Japanese. The Japanese were not so stupid. The Japanese Commander in Chief knew that if they couldn’t destroy the U.S. navy in the first six months of war, Japan would lose.
Hitler was stupid, he completely underestimated the industrial strength of the U.S.A. By the end of the War the U.S. was making a vast amount of weapons, ships, tanks etc. and supplying them to all the allies. Hitler drove out all the Jewish scientists including Einstein. This ensured that the Americans got the atomic bomb and Hitler didn’t.
In a democracy anybody can write the history and if they write truthfully and back up what they write with facts they will be believed. There was no conspiracy to make Hitler seem more evil that he was. The Nazis left behind lots of written records and vast piles of corpses. They tried to hide many of their crimes but they didn’t succeed. I suggest that you should read some history books with an open mind.
People who live in democracies should remember how lucky they are. They can protest, they do get to vote. When you protested in Nazi Germany they took you away and they killed you. Support your local democracy and be glad that you live in a democracy.
Ask a Philosopher 
I have a few points to make about the answer given.
First, I am really uncomfortable with the insulting tone towards the questioner. The writer lists the most extreme things the nazis are accused of having done and flat out states that these things don’t matter to the person asking the question. This is insulting and undercuts intellectual honesty.
The US entered World War I because of accusations about atrocities having been committed against people under German occupation. These atrocities turned out to have been almost without exception, lies. The lies were mostly made up by British Intelligence to get the US public behind a US entry into the war on the side of the Allies.
It seems perfectly reasonable to question the common wisdom about Getmany having been terrible. So I would encourage everyone to read history. Read primary sources. Read multiple perspectives.
Having done this. I agree with the writer in his moral assessment of the Nazi regime – and the Soviet Regieme. But u like the writer, I applaud the person asking the question for asking it. It does no good to anyone to shut down questions with appeals to emotion and claims that the person asking does not care about atrocities.
You say “The US entered World War I because of accusations about atrocities having been committed against people under German occupation. These atrocities turned out to have been almost without exception, lies.”
This is completely untrue, America only joined in WW1 when their hand was forced by the The Zimmermann Telegram. The tales of German atrocities were not made up by the British,
Germany was entirely responsible for their own downfall, they invaded France without any provocation riding roughshod through neutral Belgium, a country don’t forget who’s very neutrality Germany were pledged to defend. They pillaged the town of Dinant and massacred it’s inhabitants and did the same to the historic city of Louvain only days later torching it’s famous library with it’s irreplaceable collection of medieval manuscripts..and all this before the war was even a month old.
i think you pretty much nailed it, Shaun. It seems to be considered gauche in some intellectual circles these days to say there is such a thing as objective reality. I’d add that, had Germany taken over the African colonies of France and possibly Britain, the likely fate of the inhabitants would have been enslavement while Germany exploited the natural resources of Africa, followed by eventual genocide with maybe a remnant kept alive as slaves. What would eventually have happened in Asia? Certainly a similar program is not out of the question. Philip K. Dick’s alternate history Man in the High Tower speaks of a holocaust in Africa and Germany planning a nuclear attack on Japan.
Interesting that Pat Robertson has a book arguing that Britain provoked World War II. I suspect that he won’t say it aloud, but he secretly thinks letting Germany have its way in the Third World might not have been a bad idea.
We must also consider that waiting too long might have allowed conditions to deteriorate to the point where Britain couldn’t have prevented defeat or conquest. If the tinfoil-hat types are correct and FDR allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen, it was one of the best decisions in history, because our isolationists would have kept us out of World War II until it was unwinnable.
As to Jay’s comment, actually, modern concentration camps, both in fact and in name, were invented by the British during the Boer War to control the hostile civilian population. I was surprised, reading old news articles about Japanese internment in World War II, to see the camps openly labeled “concentration camps.” Think about it – the name means a place you concentrate people for easier control – and until the Nazis began running their death camps, the term had no sinister connotations (we called Russian camps slave labor or prison camps). But the Boer War was one reason backers of apartheid dismissed outside criticism with utter contempt.
In any case, preserving strategic advantage against a regime that is not only evil, but actively conquering other countries, is hardly a bad thing.
Actually the first modern concentration camps were opened in the United States in 1838, when the Van Buren administration used them to remove the indigenous Cherokee population.
Germany’s imminent threat to U.S. power is the reason the United States sided with that beacon of freedom and democracy, Stalinist Russia. The U.S. did not fight Germany because of the concentration camps and human rights violations or because Germany was not a democracy under Hitler.The U.S.S.R. invented modern mass concentration camps to disappear undesirables and millions were murdered by the regime. The German death camps weren’t a factor in U.S. policy makers’ agenda.