The censorship is especially noteworthy given the content of the show. TMITHC is an alternate history tale in which the Axis Powers won World War II and subjected America to a fascist police state. It is, in other words, an imaginative critique of exactly the sort of government that might censor advertisements it didn’t like.
The country is split into two territories. From the East Coast to a little past the Mississippi is the Greater Nazi Reich, run with all the orderly brutality of the real Third Reich. In the years after America was conquered, the Nazis ran ruthless extermination programs to rid their new territory of Jewish people and others deemed undesirable.
From the West Coast to somewhere around the Rockies are the Japanese Pacific States. The capitol city is a bustling San Francisco, and Americans are second-class citizens.
But the Japanese do not share the Nazis’ interests in racial purity and technology. The result of the first is a tenuous safety for Jews capable of concealing their identity. The result of the second is an equally tenuous balance of power with a Germany growing increasingly bellicose as elder Nazi leaders jostle to succeed an aging Adolf Hitler.
In between the two territories is the “neutral zone,” a lawless area where many African Americans, disabled people, and political dissidents have fled for refuge. Here some vestiges of independent America remain — like bookshops selling Bibles, which are banned in both Axis-occupied regions. But the neutral zone poses its own risks, with cutthroat bounty hunters lynching people on the Nazi kill list.
While the plot and characters of TMITHC are fascinating, it’s the world that’s most fascinating.
A central theme — particularly in depictions of the Greater Nazi Reich — is the sheer normalcy of the whole situation.
A boy reads an Old West comic book; it’s called “Ranger Reich.”
A man makes a call on a pay phone; it’s branded with a tiny swastika.
In a tony Long Island neighborhood, Americans cheerily cook out, pick up the newspaper, and yell a neighborly greeting: “Sieg heil!”
Perhaps the most unsettling moment comes in the pilot episode, when one of the lead characters, Joe Blake, is driving a truck from New York City to the neutral zone. He punctures a tire and pulls over, only to realize he doesn’t have any tools and there’s nothing for miles around.
Just as Joe’s cursing his luck, a police officer pulls up. He helps change the tire, even offering Joe a sandwich in the process.
The whole exchange is utterly friendly and normal, luring the viewer to relax as Joe relaxes, to think that perhaps here, far from the populous East Coast cities, the Nazis rule in name only.
And just as that sense of normalcy sets in, Joe notices something softly falling all around him. Is it snow? No, the season’s wrong.
“What is that?” Joe asks.
“Oh, that’s the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
Even before the cop explains, the sickening realization arrives.
“Yeah, Tuesdays, they burn the cripples, the terminally ill. Drag on the state.”
Even Joe — whom we’ll soon learn is himself a Nazi agent — seems taken aback. As a non-resident of TMITHC’s reality, watching a Missouri State Trooper casually explain the local hospital is part death camp is more grotesque than the explicit scenes of fascism the series contains.
Indeed, it’s this combination of pleasant familiarity with horrifying difference that makes TMITHC so effective. As Andrew Liptak remarks at i09, “The show seems to make a certain point: people will largely go along with their government and leadership simply because that’s what’s done.”
The initial Axis conquest of America was violent, to be sure, but a mere decade and a half later, explicitly racist fascism has become routine, even positive. And that, more than anything else in this alternate reality, is the truly scary part — because military conquest of America is unthinkable, but a gradual acceptance of totalitarian government?
It’s not difficult to imagine how that could become real.
Bonnie Kristian writes weekly for The Week and at Rare.us. Read more at http://rare.us/voices/bonnie-kristian/
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