11-11-2022, 01:07 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-12-2022, 07:38 AM by FaceInTheCrowd.)
I think the Nazis who went to South America were people who were so notorious that whitewashing them would have been impossible. A relatively obscure rocket scientist was one thing, Josef Mengele would have been another matter altogether. Also, the people recruited to Paperclip were in Allied custody, while the South American exiles went on the run before the Allies could capture them. And they had no "core principles," other than their science, and were willing to work for anyone who sponsored them and pretend to drink their Kool Aid. They shouted "Heil Hitler!" prior to and during WWII and had no compunction about using slave labor to build their rockets, and after put their hands on their hearts and sang "land of the free."
The US did not escape WWWIII unscathed, but also did not collapse entirely. In the movie First Contact, Zephram Cochrane and his team initially thought the Borg attack on their base was by some faction called the "Eastern Coalition" that had previously launched attacks on North America. But Cochrane was trying to develop warp drive so he could sell it to someone, which meant there was still a working economy that had the resources to invest in space travel and not just in rebuilding a dystopian North America. Combined with the "post atomic horror" and stratification of wealth depicted previously in TNG and DS9, and what we get is a picture of a post-Khan world where society was functional for a portion of the population while the rest were plunged into poverty and chaos.
The US did not escape WWWIII unscathed, but also did not collapse entirely. In the movie First Contact, Zephram Cochrane and his team initially thought the Borg attack on their base was by some faction called the "Eastern Coalition" that had previously launched attacks on North America. But Cochrane was trying to develop warp drive so he could sell it to someone, which meant there was still a working economy that had the resources to invest in space travel and not just in rebuilding a dystopian North America. Combined with the "post atomic horror" and stratification of wealth depicted previously in TNG and DS9, and what we get is a picture of a post-Khan world where society was functional for a portion of the population while the rest were plunged into poverty and chaos.