"The Man in the High Castle"

 

I'm currently binge-watching a "made for Amazon Prime" movie called "The Man in the High Castle," and I must say it's one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen - and I'm only 2/3 of the way through Season 2 out of 4 seasons!

The show is about life in America after the Axis Powers won WWII. The Japanese control everything west of the Rockies and the German Reich controls everything to the east, with the Rockies themselves being declared a Neutral Zone. The Japanese-controlled area is called the "Japanese Pacific States," while the German-controlled area is called the "Greater Nazi Reich."

This show is so fascinating in so many ways! It's an adaptation from the book of the same name, and all I can say is whoever brought this book to life went out of their way to make it as authentic as possible, especially in the ways that the two parts of a conquered America differ from each other.

The series takes place in 1962, and from what I've learned from the episodes I've watched so far is that the war ended in 1947 when the Germans dropped an atomic bomb on Washington DC. FDR was never President, having been assassinated when he was a candidate in 1932, and I've yet to learn who was elected President in his absence. Most of the world is under either German or Japanese control, with Nazi Germany controlling most of the West and Japan controlling most of the East and all of the Pacific. Several areas of the world are Neutral Zones such as China and parts of South America, but the rest is under either Nazi or Japanese control.

By 1962 both parts of the conquered America have been shaped and transformed into what their conquerors envision, but the differences between the two are stark indeed. The Greater Nazi Reich is neat, clean, and very well-organized to the extreme, while the Japanese Pacific States are cluttered, dirty, and unorganized in typical Asian fashion. Most of the signage in the JPS is in Japanese, while the signage in the GNR are all in English. The technology is also vastly different; at the time of WWII Germany was the world's leader in technology of all kinds, especially in automobiles and aircraft, while Japan was pretty much lagging behind the rest of the world. This is apparent in the show as the Germans who travel from Germany to the GNR do so on the German designed (and conquered-French built) Concorde jets, while the Japanese are forced to travel by steamship since they don't have jet aircraft capable of making the trip. The Japanese are, of course, jealous of German technological advances, and the Germans look down their noses at the Japanese and are looking for any reason at all to start a war with them so they can take over the entire country.

But the one thing about this series that strikes me the most is the historically accurate lessons it teaches about just how brutal, inhumane, and unbelievably cruel both the Japanese Empire and the Nazi Reich was. If any of today's generation, which for the most part hasn't been taught a damned thing about World War II, want an accurate glimpse of what that era of our world's history was like, then this is the show they need to watch.

And they should be prepared to be shocked, disgusted, and nauseated at what they're gonna see. I know I was.

Still looking forward to the rest of the show.

Deo Vindice

IHC