Thoughts on Jo Walton's "Ha'Penny"
So I just finished reading Jo Walton's Ha'Penny -- the sequel to her alternate-history murder mystery Farthing. Both are very well-written books, and I love the characters. However, I was upset at the implied portrayal of fascism and how it was used. I ended up staying up late last night finishing Ha'Penny, but then couldn't sleep afterwards.

The background of the books is that England makes peace with Germany in early 1941 after the fall of France. Subsequently, England sees a rise in anti-Semitism and repressive government. The books ask important questions about the rise of power, but I think they also misrepresent in many ways.

Killing Hitler?

Alternate histories about WWII abound, and I think that they are still relevant for the modern day. One of the most popular alternate history ideas is killing Hitler prior to or during the war, and what that would do to the Nazi party. (A variant of this appears in Ha'Penny.) This has a lot of relevance to people in our dealings with Iraq and other repressive countries. Our key mistake in Iraq came from the idea (promoted by G.W. Bush and others) that if we just got rid of Saddam Hussein, then Iraq would get better. This isn't unique to Bush, though. Clinton similarly fumbled in his attempts to snatch up clan leaders in Mogadishu in 1993.

Leaders can be important, but they aren't the movement. One of the problems I had with Walton's books was that England was vastly different politically and socially from pre-war Germany and Italy. It had a fairly long history as a unified nation and an established government. Nazism and Fascism were rooted in their countries' culture. The general agreement among historians I know is that killing Hitler during the war would have been a boon to Nazi Germany, letting the military commanders do their jobs better under a less influential leader. Killing him early on before the Nazis rise to power might have changed things, but its not clear that it would be any improvement overall.

As far as I know, assassination is almost always a misperception that killing the leader will eliminate the movement. I'm hard-pressed to think of an example when political assassination worked to achieve its broader goals. I am inclined to think that public resistance is better. This includes passive resistance, but also armed resistance to violence. Still, even violent protest is different than assassination.

Have there been assassinations that worked to improve things?


What particularly annoyed me about Ha'Penny was that the choice outlined was between the assassination plot and actively helping the Farthing regime. That is, there were arguments against assassination -- namely that someone else would take over the party, the bombing would justify more draconian laws to suppress terrorism. I don't think it was mentioned, but in addition, it would completely discredit the political opposition that Lord Scott was party to the assassination attempt. However, since no one else was doing anything to resist the regime, those came across as weak excuses.

For example, even though Carmichael considered leaving the country, he never even considered releasing the story of Thirkie's murder, which would discredit him and benefit the falsely-accused David Kahn. There were many other options as well. The book strongly implied that working in the system as Carmichael seemed to inherently meant selling out, which I think is unfair to the heroism of figures like Oskar Schindler.

Incidentally, it seems to me that there are parallels drawn between Carmichael and Ernst Röhm, who was the founder of the SA (stormtroopers). Röhm was a homosexual man of socialist politics who supported the Nazis until he was killed in a move to suppress the SA's power.