It is an embarrassing and little-discussed fact, but until May 8, 1945, Germany operated under the Weimar Constitution.

After the Reichstag Fire the Reichstag put the emergency clause in the Weimar Constitution into effect.

The only reason the Weimar Constitution is no longer in effect is because Germany lost World War II.

I wrote a piece about Militant Obedience.

No matter how many words you cover it with, the only LOGICAL difference between Lincoln’s new Constitution declared in the Gettysburg Address and Hitler’s Weimar Constitution is that Lincoln won and Hitler lost,

We DO NOT want to get derailed on this fact, but it IS a fact.

It is a simple fact of life that the parameters of ANY discussion of public affairs are set by who won.

This is not even mildly disputable. If, as Buchanan discusses in his book, Britain had not gone nuts and declared war on Germany when Germany AND Russia invaded Poland, all of our public discussion would have an entirely different twist.

Germany would have been able to invade Russia, an aim Hitler had announced in Mein Kampf in the 1923.

Please note that I am NOT discussing anything specific about alternative history, which is subject to debate. All I am saying is that any alternative history would have produced an alternative DEBATE. History COULD have been different.

No one has any trouble with the simple fact that history COULD have been different.

I am talking about an equally indisputable fact: If history had been different, all the “reasonable discussion” we see professional commentators engage in would be unrecognizable.

If Englishmen and Americans had not been killed off by Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would have had Stalin all to himself. Ideally, the two dictators would have worn each other out, but in the long run, in a one-to-one match up, the USSR would probably have been beaten.

Now imagine the “reasonable debate” in the post-War years.

Germany would have had nuclear weapons. It would be the Lindbergh faction who would have bumper stickers saying “Better Nazi Than Dead.”

The left would have been made up entirely of nuke crazies.