MovieChat Forums > The Man in the High Castle (2015) Discussion > The Year Zero plan makes no sense.

The Year Zero plan makes no sense.


First off, what I like is that this particular plot draws inspiration from the real-world Chinese Cultural Revolution. You'd expect a surviving Nazi authoritarian regime would resort to this particular form of a "managed revolution" by manipulating youth rebelliousness.

What I find to be less believable is that the Himmler's regime wants to obliterate US history. Now, I don't think that a Nazi propaganda machinery, as effective as it was and as it would have become in the alternative 1960s would ever do a stupid thing like that.

This is a world where the Nazis and the Japanese, the two competing powers, each control roughly a half of what used to be the US, with a lot of American men occupying responsible positions, even the most high ranking ones, like Smith does.

And Smith, for example, and many other collaborators (in either policing or military capacity) had once served in the US army before the US lost the war. And who did they fight? Smith fought the Japanese, for example, and many others probably fought against Germans as well.

So, a Nazi propaganda machinery would probably use this anti-Japanese experience of the US history and blow it up. I don't think they would want to erase it. Similarly, the Japanese propaganda would probably like to stress that Americans fought the Germans twice during the 20th century in their part of the occupied US.

Therefore I believe that either Axis power would play up some parts of the US history, rather than obliterate it altogether.

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That would remind them that they were once a proud nation, its best to eradicate all memories of what they were, besides the Japanese is hardly a threat to them.

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Well, the Japanese have stoked anti-colonial sentiments in the Asian countries they had invaded. And also Nazis blended well with local nationalisms in the occupied Europe, directing them against Jews and Communists, of course. Just saying....

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I think u have forgotten that they are still allies even after the war ended , it would remain so till one decide to attack the other.

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You always need to trash the old history and culture of the people if you want to mold them into some sort of socialist/fascist/communist obedient mass.

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I think phase one is get rid of it, phase two would have been "re-write it". Once the symbols (Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell, other...things that have "liberty" in them...) were gone, they would throw out the textbooks and write new ones about how Lincoln was wrong for freeing the slaves and how "all men are created equal" was clearly referring just to Aryans and other Nazi B.S.

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