Actor J. Paul Boehmer in the Star Treck Enterprise season opener, part II as a Waffen SS officer. Star Treck Enterprise: Storm Front
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The final part of the Enterprise season opener aired this last Friday evening and it was overall a decent episode. The writers of the series have taken pains to make the latest captain a bit rougher and grity as compared to the other characters in the successful franchise.
I won't go into the details on the episode, that can be watched and read from the web site or on TV when it is re-aired. What I wanted to comment on was thier always deft treatment of history and in this instance with cause and effect.
It is discovered that someone (a temporal agent) has altered history by assasinating Lenin in 1916. Lennin has been in exile in Switzerland since Tzarist Russia had him expelled for his agitation and political sedition. He is all but quiet however in his exile and has planned a return to Russia when the timing becomes right. He doesn't make it, however, and the communist revolution that Lennin will start never happens. According to this episode, since there was no Bolshlevick Russia to oppose his own National Socialist revolution in Germany, Hitler does not see the east as a threat and as he start war in 1939 he can do so without that threat to his back door. Hitler then is enabled to conquer the west with impunity and take Britain out as well before turning to the United States and to Russia.
Interesting process of cause and effect that does lend itself to creative "what if" scenarios. Without a communist Russia under a Stalin, what would Europe look like today? Quite different I would imagine in both geo-political borders and overall mind set.
Although, with any cause and effect scenario, one can never quite escape the overall fabric of history and must then go even further back in order to describe a valid "what if".
All sci-fi aside, the most pain ful Star Treck episodes to watch have been thier "historical" ones. It is too easy to sacrifice truth and realisim for artistic message and image. The Waffen SS soldiers (elites in the German Army whose prowess on the battlefield earned them both notoriety and respect from all sides of the war) were bumbling idiots as envisioned by the series writers and director.
But, I digress!
Unfortunatly, the nuance of the "Lennin gambit" let's call it isn't as clean as one might think. In 1916 the second year of the stalemate war was in full gear with both the British and French preparing the next big "breakthrough" offensives and the Germans were merely "holding the line" in the west while contending with the Russians in the East and spreading thier resources thinner in other parts of the world to prop up thier allies in the Balkans.
In actuality, a Russia without Lennin would have spelled a prolonging of the "Great War" by keeping Germany's forces spread between two fronts and keeping Austria-Hungry in the war. When the Commintern sued for a seperate peace with Germany, thus taking Russia out of the war, the Imperial War staff of Ludendorf and Hindenberg where brought from the East and allowed a breadth of control over German war strategy that had hitherto been only in the person of the Kiaser himself. The disasterous German spring offensives in 1918 drained thier manpower then in turn lead to a collapse of the western front in the face of the renewed allied offensives in the summer/fall of 1918.
The Lennin gambit lays quite a bit upon the conflict of National Socialisim against Bochlivisim as a guiding factor in WWII. It is no doubt that Hitler cast envious eyes upon the Serf's under Communist rule but it lays too much upon this one singular point of Hitler's war aspirations. It also leaves quite a lot unanswered from the first war.
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