What things would we not have today had we lost World War 1 or 2?

November 9, 2006 6:03 AM

What things would we not have today had we lost World War 1 or 2?

I am a teacher in a high school in the UK and am leading a whole school assembly for Remembrance Day.

I have been given the usual suggestions by other staff about remembering the sacrifices made for us to protect our freedoms. This got me thinking, what tangible things might we not have if we (the allies) had lost either of the World Wars.

For example, we probably would not have experienced any films made by Steven Spielberg due to his religious background.

Are there any other films, music, foods, customs that people might suggest?

posted by ndaguiar to society & culture (40 comments total)

Jews, banana breakfast.
posted by OmieWise at 6:13 AM on November 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

Once you start unraveling causality, there's no stopping. If we'd lost WWII, Styron wouldn't have written Sophie's Choice, but there wouldn't have been a Hiroshima, and no Cold War, either.
posted by paulsc at 6:14 AM on November 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

If we had lost WWI, we wouldn't have had WWII.
posted by thirteenkiller at 6:18 AM on November 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

There wouldn't be any Godzilla movies.
posted by DrSkrud at 6:19 AM on November 9, 2006

No nuking Japan means no Godzilla, or any of the messed-up anime that's just a big metaphor for nuclear war.
posted by jozxyqk at 6:19 AM on November 9, 2006

Modern digital computers, modern cryptography, information theory, Jews, banana breakfast.
posted by orthogonality at 6:20 AM on November 9, 2006

Sorry to derail, but what on earth is banana breakfast and what has it got to do with the outcome of WWII? I really have no idea.
posted by different at 6:24 AM on November 9, 2006

If the Allies had lost WWII, there would be no speculative fiction wondering what would have happened if the Allies had lost WWII.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:26 AM on November 9, 2006

Banana breakfast is the culinary masterpiece described at the start of Gravity's Rainbow, arguably one of the most important novels of the second half of the 20th century, and certainly one of the best to take WWII as a backdrop.
posted by OmieWise at 6:31 AM on November 9, 2006

If we hadn't won WWII, the US wouldn't have gotten rich off Europe's weakened post-war economy. Without this "world trade," there wouldn't have been a World Trade Center. Also there would be no Israel. No World Trade Center + no Israel = no 9/11. Without 9/11, we wouldn't have been spurred into action against evildoers, so evildoers would probably rule the world right now.
posted by thirteenkiller at 6:32 AM on November 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

different writes "Sorry to derail, but what on earth is banana breakfast and what has it got to do with the outcome of WWII?"


It's a great scene early on Gravity's Rainbow. Bananas are scarce in London during the war (in part because many banana plantations are occupied by the Japanese, and because shipping has been allocated to war materiel), but some pilots contrive to get a lot of bananas and put off mortality with a blow-out breakfast. Pynchon describes them making dozens of different dishes utilizing bananas.
posted by orthogonality at 6:52 AM on November 9, 2006

No cold war? No US? United Cuban States or someting...

If we had lost, it wouldn't be hard to consider we would have lost territory as well... so who knows what the composition of North America would have been.

It's pretty hard to speculate... roaring 20s, great depression, civil rights...

Man when I read the question, first thought that came into my mind was Jews... which is a terrible thing to say... glad someone else has a sense of humor not completely unlike myself... cause really it's not funny - but it's like that ol' joke about what kind of car jesus would have driven. People can speculate, but no one's really sure. On the other hand we have a pretty good idea what the Romans would have driven... nails.

/offensiveness.
posted by eleongonzales at 6:54 AM on November 9, 2006

What would Britain have lost if it had lost WW1: Colonies. The brown-people inhabitants of various parts of the world would have been oppressed by Germans instead of the British and French. And Britain wouldn't have the world-straddling empire that it does today.

You'd still have crappy Spielberg movies. It's not like Germany had any serious plans to actually invade and occupy the US and exterminate Jewry here.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:00 AM on November 9, 2006

Fair chance that China wouldn't have had a revolution in 1949 if Britain and France had collapsed.

Of course, you probably don't have a China at all if Imperial Japan's still in control of most of East Asia.
posted by genghis at 7:07 AM on November 9, 2006

This is a huge question and one that has been very popular with writers. Uchronia lists hundreds of alternative histories by point of divergence. The world wars start here. These texts should give you some good ideas.

There is also tons of discussion of this on newsgroups like alt.history.what-if and soc.history.what-if.
posted by ninebelow at 7:17 AM on November 9, 2006

What things would we not have today if we had lost World War II?

One word:

Freedom.
posted by 543DoublePlay at 7:23 AM on November 9, 2006

I think that had Germany been able to win or at least have enough leverage at the end of WWI (say they had captured Paris) to get a non punitive armistice then it is very likely that WWII would never have happened. No overwhelmed and resentful German populous, no need for a scapegoat to blame WWI on = no widespread antisemitism, or anti communism which would probably obliviate the factors which gave rise to the Nazis. That being said it is possible that the soviets would have started WWII, as it is likely that they would have still come into existence regardless of Germany's status, one can hope that the Kerensky government would have managed to survive, but that is unlikely.
So who knows? Maybe a red Europe which endures to this day? That is the thing with historical speculation, it is a circle jerk, and people can come up with reasons to justify everything.
posted by BobbyDigital at 7:26 AM on November 9, 2006

No Monty Python.
No great Hitler jokes.
The Holocaust would have been covered up and unknown.
No cold war, meaning no space race, meaning nobody on the moon.
We'ld all be speaking german.
I imagine most of the world would be in constant revolution.
No nuclear power.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:29 AM on November 9, 2006

I would not have my wife, who is my life.
posted by anadem at 7:32 AM on November 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

Big exciting post-imperial messes in Europe and East Asia to go with the current exciting post-imperial messes in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:01 AM on November 9, 2006

It's not like Germany had any serious plans to actually invade and occupy the US and exterminate Jewry here. - ROU_Xenophobe

We wouldn't have Philip Roth, or his book The Plot Against America which is an alternative history about what might have happened had Charles Lindbergh won the presidency instead of FDR. According to some sources, Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer. So it may not have been a plot originating from Germany, but joining up with the Nazi's could conceivably have been an inside job.
posted by hazyjane at 8:02 AM on November 9, 2006

Len Deighton wrote a novel exploring a Nazi occupied Britain called SS-GB. There are some ideas on this wiki as well as the other links.
posted by plokent at 8:11 AM on November 9, 2006

About 18-20 years ago, there was a BBC drama series that explored the consequences of the Germans winning WWII. I can't, of course, remeber the title.
posted by theora55 at 8:28 AM on November 9, 2006

If the Allies had lost WWII:

The Nazis would have succeeded in wiping out Europe's Jewish population. A similar genocide, aimed at the indigenous Sephardim, might have taken place in the Middle East as well, depending on how much influence the Axis had won in that region.

Nazi conquest and colonization of Eastern Europe, perhaps resulting in a similar slaughter of the native peoples. Hitler really hated Slavs. Imagine a cluster of colonial-settler fiefdoms ruled by "Aryan" minorities where the map now shows Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, etc. That's what Eastern Europe would look like today.

Finlandization of England.

The military conflict would have eventually ended and transmuted into something like the cold war.
posted by jason's_planet at 9:09 AM on November 9, 2006

theora55: If Britain Had Fallen?
posted by different at 9:19 AM on November 9, 2006

Germany's model was not terribly sustainable, and I think if we had lost WWII Nazi Germany would not have been viable for too long. I question a few things here, how do you define lost? All of Europe lost? All of Asia lost? N America?

It's a near impossible question to answer with any certainty.
If the war had dragged out much longer I doubt we would have been to the moon by now, Israel would most likely not exist, nor Iraq. But I think Nazi Germany could not have won in the long haul. Once they started attacking everyone their loss was inevitable, and just a matter of how bloody it became...
posted by edgeways at 9:33 AM on November 9, 2006

I think that had Germany been able to win or at least have enough leverage at the end of WWI (say they had captured Paris) to get a non punitive armistice then it is very likely that WWII would never have happened.

Why do we assume Germany wouldn't demand a punative armistice from France? Hitler and the Nazis could then happen just as easily in France. Sartre would only be read by extreme right-wing white supremicists.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:52 AM on November 9, 2006

congrats, you made me drop $5 to answer your question...

we would not have a music industry period.

early (1940's - 50's) tv and music production was dependent on reel-to-reel tape recorders as a way of archiving material. everything prior, as i'm sure you are aware, was live, from Orson Wells to the Big Band Hour. archiving was (and is) a big deal.

as per the pediarticle, Jack Mullin, stole the technology for reel-to-reel (using plastic tape) from German radio stations working as an operative during WWII. With help from Bing Crosby, he commercially marketed it.

as a historical footnote, these machines once used magnetized piano wire as it's medium. tightly stretched across two giant spools, it would broadcast speeches and propaganda without wearing out any vocal chords (it always seems they were shouting).

woe be told about the sound engineer who was near one of these monsters when the wire breaks....
posted by emptyinside at 10:03 AM on November 9, 2006

I personally probably wouldn't be here, since my dad was a Marine on Okinawa expecting to invade the home islands of Japan, and that would have been a damn bloody battle had the bombs not fallen.
posted by GaelFC at 10:04 AM on November 9, 2006

If we had lost WWI or WWII this thread wouldn't exist. :-)

Seriously we probably wouldn't have...

AIDS
Blockbuster Movies
Cable Television
CDs and DVDs
The Cell Phone
The Civil Rights Movement
Environmentalism
Football, American Style
High Definition TVs
The Internet
The Personal Computer
Reality Television
Rush Limbaugh
TV Sitcoms
Tang
Velcro
Video Games
A War on Terror

...to name but a few.
posted by dgeiser13 at 10:07 AM on November 9, 2006

dgeiser13 writes "Seriously we probably wouldn't have...

"AIDS"

Uh, how do you figure? Were the Nazis less prone to viral biology?
posted by OmieWise at 10:33 AM on November 9, 2006

You'd still have crappy Spielberg movies. It's not like Germany had any serious plans to actually invade and occupy the US and exterminate Jewry here.

On the other hand, if Germany had won WWI their filmmakers might have stayed there rather than coming to America when the Nazis started coming to power.

So you'd still have crappy movies, but more of them would be in German.
posted by dagnyscott at 2:08 PM on November 9, 2006

The Indiana Jones franchise would sure be different
posted by Merlyn at 2:35 PM on November 9, 2006

I find it odd to see technology-related items in this thread. Sure, inventions would have evolved in a different manner and at a different pace, but it's not like Germans are inherently anti-technologists. Far from it.

I see things like modern computers, cell phones, etc. as inevitabilities under all but the most Luddite regimes.
posted by trevyn at 3:37 PM on November 9, 2006

I agree with trevyn - the Allies and Germans invented many of the same important new technologies (jet engines, radar, nuclear weapons) almost simultaneously. In fact, the Germans were even miles ahead in some respects (rockets). So there's no reason that technological progress would have been slowed at all had the Germans won.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:54 PM on November 9, 2006

According to The City on the Edge of Forever (Star Trek, TOS), if the Nazis had won WWII, the United Federation of Planets would not exist.

oh, wait...
posted by jasper411 at 4:58 PM on November 9, 2006

> Uh, how do you figure? Were the Nazis less prone to viral biology?

Well, I know Wikipedia isn't an authoritative source but I've always understood that the experts believe that HIV originated from monkeys in Africa. I think a shakeup in the European political landscape would definitely have affected Africa and whatever led to HIV being transmitted to humans has a decent chance of not occuring.

That's the great thing about causality. No one knows what would've happened in another timeline.
posted by dgeiser13 at 8:09 PM on November 9, 2006

Talking sea otters.
posted by billtron at 8:48 AM on November 10, 2006

The Holocaust would have been covered up and unknown.

I disagree! It was being reported well before the end of the war, and word of mouth is always stronger than attempted cover ups. There were thousands of Germans that knew the Jews were being taken away by the government, and you can't erase people's memories, only stifle their voices. The least that would have happened, in my opinion, is that it would have diluted into a myth, told down the generations as something that might possibly have happened, like the Crucified Soldier.
posted by saturnine at 2:06 PM on November 11, 2006

dgeiser--Fair enough as a theory, although probably incorrect, since HIV was most likely transmitted to humans through the butchering of monkeys for food, and there really isn't much reason to think that hunting would have been substantially different simply because geopolitics was. Keep in mind, too, that the earliest HIV samples isolated from human blood are sometime in the late 50s or early 60s, so the species hopping event probably occurred pretty close to WWII.
posted by OmieWise at 7:00 AM on November 15, 2006