Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...the Galt were exterminated. To be replaced by Aryan feifs much like the Rus of saga.'

It is worthwhile for the full understanding of history (including the constant temptation to paint the Nazis as uniquely evil, unlike anything in Western/Capitalist/Anglo history) to realize that Hitler's primary mistake was that he was just too late in history. The 19th and earlier centuries were perfectly happy to engage in his sort of project --- exterminate everyone inconvenient in North America and Australia, enslave anyone in Africa who looked like they might be a good worker --- and Hitler made the fatal mistake of assuming that he could re-enact the US cavalry's triumphs going east rather than west.

And truth is, if we look at the way people (in the US, UK, etc) spoke and acted in the 1930s and 1940s, he might well have got away with it if the Russians had not been (a) a little too European, and (b) able to fight back.

If he'd planned Lebensraum in Africa, to the south rather than the east, the world might look very different today. The world we live in that tells almost every school kid about the Jewish genocide is the same world where the official US and Israeli policy is denial of the Armenian genocide, and as for the Herero genocide, well, who's even heard of that? The world didn't care about massacres in Africa in 1908, and wouldn't have cared about them in 1944 either.