Somewhere in Lagos, on a humid evening in 2026, a man sits on a balcony staring into the darkness. The city is alive. Traffic crawls. Street vendors argue over prices. A church choir practises somewhere in the distance. A mosque's loudspeaker answers from another direction. Young people scroll through social media. Politicians lie. Activists protest. Foreign powers compete. Markets rise and fall. Nations disagree. Humanity continues its loud, chaotic conversation.
Then a strange question enters his mind. What if none of this existed? What if the Nazis had won. Not won a battle. Not held out longer at Stalingrad or pushed the Allies back at Normandy. I mean truly won. What if the swastika flag had been raised not just over Berlin but eventually over the entire planet, and what if that arrangement had simply continued, year after year, decade after decade, all the way to this year, to 2026, to this exact evening when I am sitting here thinking about it.
My name is Chucks Charles Okoroafor, and I want to be honest about something before I take you into this thought experiment. I am not writing this because I believe history could easily have gone this way, although historians will tell you there were several moments in the early 1940s when things could have tipped differently. I am writing this because imagining the absolute worst version of our world is sometimes the only way to truly feel the value of the world we actually have. So come with me. Let us walk into this other 2026 slowly, the way you would walk into a cold dark room, feeling along the wall for a light switch that we already know is not going to work.
A World That Forgot It Was Strange
The first thing you would notice in this other 2026, if you could somehow visit it the way a tourist visits a foreign country, is that almost nobody there would think their world was strange at all.
This is the detail that disturbs me most when I sit with this thought experiment. We tend to imagine a Nazi-dominated future as a world of constant visible horror, jackboots on every corner, soldiers dragging people from their homes on every street, sirens wailing through every night. And certainly in the early decades after such a victory, that horror would have been everywhere, raw and grinding and impossible to ignore. But eighty years is a long time. Eighty years is roughly three full human generations. Nobody alive in 2026 would remember a world before the Reich. Their grandparents would barely remember it. The strangeness would have worn off the way the strangeness wears off any system that simply continues long enough.
Children in this world would be taught from their earliest school days that the Führer was the natural and rightful leader of the planet, the way children in our world are taught that their country has a president or a prime minister or a king, without ever questioning whether the entire concept of having one is reasonable. They would learn it the way they learn that water is wet. Nobody questions water.
By 2026, this world would likely be living under its sixteenth or seventeenth Führer since Hitler himself, depending on how you calculate the average length of a rule and how violently or peacefully each transition of power occurred. If you take the rough lifespan and tenure patterns of twentieth century authoritarian leaders and project them forward across eight decades, accounting for the natural turnover of leadership through death, age, or internal political maneuvering within the party apparatus, you land somewhere in that range, a new face roughly every five to seven years on average once you account for some long reigns and some short ones. None of these successors would be remembered by the world as monsters. They would be remembered, in the official record, as great men. Their portraits would hang in every classroom and government office on every continent. Their birthdays would be public holidays. Their speeches would be memorised by schoolchildren the way some of us once memorised national anthems and pledges of allegiance without fully grasping the weight of the words coming out of our own mouths.
The swastika itself would have completed its transformation from a symbol of horror into a symbol of nothing in particular, which is in some ways more frightening than horror. It would simply be there, on flags, on the sleeves of postal workers, on the badges of schoolchildren, on the hoods of cars, the way a national flag is simply there in our world, present everywhere and noticed by almost nobody. Sports teams would wear it without a flicker of controversy. Toy companies would print it on the sides of plastic trucks made for toddlers. The horror of a symbol fades when an entire society has structured its language, its art, its sense of pride and belonging around it for three generations. This is perhaps the single most important thing to understand about ideology when it wins completely and is allowed to run unchallenged for a very long time. It stops behaving like an ideology that people choose to believe. It becomes the wallpaper of reality itself, and wallpaper, once it has been on the wall long enough, simply disappears from view.
The People Who Would Have Vanished or Nearly Vanished
I want to slow down here, because this is the part of the thought experiment that deserves the most care and the least speculation dressed up as entertainment.
The plans the Nazi leadership had for the populations of the world were not secret fantasies whispered in back rooms. They were written down. They were debated in policy meetings. They were the subject of actual administrative planning during the war itself, long before anyone knew how the war would end. A Reich that had won completely and held power for eighty years would very likely have pursued those plans to their fullest and most horrifying conclusions, simply because there would have been no remaining external power left on earth capable of stopping it.
For Jewish communities around the world, the implications of total and lasting Nazi victory are almost too dark to write in plain language, and I will not pretend otherwise or dress it up with softer words than it deserves. The stated goal was the complete removal of Jewish people and Jewish identity from the human story. An uncontested Reich with eighty more years and the full resources of a conquered planet would have had both the intention and the capacity to pursue that goal far beyond what was achieved during the actual historical Holocaust, which, monstrous as it already was, was carried out by a regime that was simultaneously fighting and ultimately losing a two front war. Remove the constraint of that losing war and you remove the only thing that limited the scope of what was attempted. In this alternate world, there is a real and grim possibility that organised Jewish life and Jewish communities as a continuous, visible, self-governing presence in the world would not exist by 2026, or would exist only in scattered, hidden, deeply endangered pockets, the way certain ancient minority communities survive today in tiny numbers in isolated corners of the world, present but barely so, their numbers so reduced that their long term survival itself is in question. The State of Israel, founded in our world in 1948 as a direct response to the Holocaust and the conviction that Jewish people needed a sovereign homeland never again dependent on the goodwill of others, would almost certainly never have come into being at all in this timeline. There would be no Israeli state, which also means there would be no modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the form we know it today, no decades of war and ceasefire and war again over Gaza and the West Bank, no peace negotiations, no current accusations and counter accusations about occupation or terrorism or self-defense or disproportionate response. Not because peace would have been achieved, but because one of the two parties to that long and painful conflict would likely never have been permitted to exist as a sovereign nation capable of having a conflict at all. That is a very different thing from peace. It is the silence of an empty room, not the silence of resolution.
The Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, including Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others, were designated in actual Nazi planning documents for a different but equally devastating fate. Vast stretches of land from Poland through Ukraine and deep into what we currently call Russia were intended to be cleared of much of their existing population and resettled by German colonists, with the remaining Slavic population reduced to a permanent underclass of forced laborers, deliberately kept uneducated and unskilled, existing only to serve the agricultural and industrial needs of their new German overlords. Over eighty years, this kind of sustained demographic and cultural policy, if fully implemented, would have meant the slow erosion or outright disappearance of independent Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian national identity as we currently understand it. The cities we know, the languages we know, the literature and music and cuisine that these cultures have given the world, all of it would exist in drastically reduced and altered form, surviving perhaps only in folk memory among a population that had been deliberately stripped of higher education and cultural infrastructure for three generations.
The Roma people, sometimes still referred to by the term Gypsies although many Roma consider that term a slur and prefer not to be called by it, were targeted in the actual historical genocide with an intensity that is sometimes underappreciated in popular memory next to the scale of the Holocaust against Jewish people. In a world where the Reich faced no external check on its actions for eighty years, the realistic possibility is that Roma people and their distinct culture, language, and identity would have been eliminated almost entirely from the European continent and likely from the world.
Pygmy peoples, the various indigenous forest communities of Central Africa often grouped under that single external label despite being many distinct peoples with their own names for themselves, were never a central focus of Nazi racial ideology in the way Jewish, Slavic, or Roma populations were, simply because Nazi racial theorists were primarily obsessed with Europe and treated sub-Saharan Africa as a secondary concern, important mainly as a source of land and raw materials rather than as a population to be exterminated outright. This does not mean their fate in this alternate world would have been good. It almost certainly would not have been. It simply means their disappearance, if it happened, would likely have come through a slower and quieter process of displacement, disease, forced labor, and cultural erasure rather than the deliberate systematic killing aimed specifically at Jewish and Roma populations. Quiet erasure over three generations can be just as final as fast violence. It simply takes longer and draws less attention while it happens.
For Black Africans more broadly, the people who look like me and the overwhelming majority of the people I see every single day on the streets of Lagos, the most likely outcome under a permanent global Reich would not have been a deliberate campaign of total extermination, since Nazi ideology, however monstrous, did still generally view African labor and African land as economically useful rather than purely as something to be erased. But useful in the eyes of an occupying power has never meant equal, has never meant free, and has never meant respected. The most probable outcome is a permanent, rigid, and brutally enforced racial hierarchy across the entire African continent, formalised in law and enforced by an occupying colonial administration far harsher and far more total than the historical colonialism Africa actually suffered under Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany itself in the early twentieth century. There would be no decolonisation movements of the kind that swept across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s in our actual history, because there would be no rival global power offering even rhetorical support to independence movements, and no exhausted European empires too weakened by their own world war to hold onto their colonies any longer. The Reich would not be exhausted. The Reich would be the only power left standing, with the full might of a planet behind it, and no competing ideology anywhere offering African peoples even the language of self-determination, let alone material support for achieving it.
A child born in Lagos in this other world would grow up understanding with complete clarity exactly where the official hierarchy placed him, and it would not be anywhere near the top.
A Map With No Familiar Names
If you tried to draw a map of this other 2026, you would find that many of the names and borders we take for granted simply would not be there.
Russia as a single, vast, independent nation stretching from the borders of Europe all the way across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean would very likely not exist in this world. Much of its western and central territory would have been absorbed, broken apart, or reorganised into colonial administrative zones under direct German settlement and control, exactly as Nazi planning documents from the actual war years describe in considerable and chilling detail. If Russia does not exist as a unified sovereign state, then the question of which country holds the title of largest country in the world by land area opens up in a genuinely interesting way. Canada might hold that title instead. Or the geography itself might be carved so differently, with so many new administrative borders drawn by Reich planners with no respect for old national lines, that the entire concept of "largest country" becomes difficult to even apply, since much of the relevant territory might not be organised into countries at all in the way we understand that word, but simply into provinces and protectorates of a single global authority.
Nobody in this world would have ever heard the names Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, for the simple reason that the nations these men actually came to lead in our own timeline, a sovereign Russian Federation and a sovereign People's Republic of China, would either not exist in anything resembling their current form, or would exist only as occupied territories or junior partners within a German-dominated global order, with their own political structures and leadership entirely subordinate to Berlin. China itself presents a fascinating and genuinely uncertain case within this thought experiment, since historical Nazi racial theory held deeply contradictory and confused views about East Asian peoples, sometimes treating Imperial Japan as an honorary equal ally during the actual war while simultaneously holding racist views about Asian peoples in general. It is entirely possible that in this alternate world, an independent or semi-independent East Asian power bloc, perhaps centered on a victorious wartime Japan, might exist as the one remaining major rival or uneasy partner to German global dominance, the two empires having divided the conquered world between themselves in an uneasy arrangement the way the actual Axis powers once discussed and partially planned to do. A multipolar world of exactly two poles instead of the many poles we actually have today, which would be only a very small and very cold comfort.
The United Nations, founded in our own history in 1945 specifically in response to the catastrophe of a war that this alternate world's Reich had instead won, would never have come into existence at all. There would be no concept resembling it, because the entire purpose of the United Nations is to provide a forum where sovereign and equal nations can negotiate, dispute, and cooperate with one another as formal equals under international law. A single global empire has no need for such a forum and would very likely regard the entire concept as dangerous nonsense, since it grants legitimacy to the idea that other nations have standing to challenge or even simply address the dominant power as something resembling an equal. There would be no General Assembly debates, no Security Council vetoes, no peacekeeping missions, no international courts of justice, no shared global institutions for managing pandemics, refugee crises, or climate change, because the entire intellectual framework of international cooperation between independent and sovereign states would never have been built in the first place. Whatever passed for global coordination in this world would simply be a chain of directives flowing outward from a single imperial center to administrators stationed across continents that the center had simply absorbed.
Counting Heads in a World That Was Never Allowed to Grow Freely
Would Nigeria have reached two hundred and thirty million people by 2026 in this other world. I find myself doubting it, and the reasons go far deeper than simple violence.
Population growth on the scale that Nigeria and many other African nations have experienced since gaining independence in the mid twentieth century is not simply a matter of biology continuing undisturbed. It is the product of a very specific set of historical conditions, including the end of direct colonial administration, the introduction of modern public health systems and vaccination campaigns largely driven by independent national governments and international health organisations, increased urbanisation, expanded access to education, and the kind of economic and political agency that allows a population to organise its own healthcare priorities, build its own hospitals, and direct its own resources toward its own people's survival and growth.
A colonial administration that exists purely to extract resources and labor for the benefit of a distant imperial center has historically had very little interest in investing in the health and growth of the populations it controls, beyond the minimum necessary to maintain a usable workforce. There would be no equivalent of the international health partnerships, the vaccination campaigns, the maternal health initiatives, or the local medical research institutions that have driven down infant mortality and extended life expectancy across Africa over the past several decades in our actual history. Entire cities that exist today might never have been built in anything like their current form. The Lagos I know, sprawling and impossibly dense and bursting with its own restless improvised energy, exists because Nigerians have spent decades building and rebuilding their own country according to their own priorities, however imperfectly and amid however much genuine struggle and frustration. Remove that self-direction entirely for eighty straight years and you remove the engine that built this particular city. It might still exist in some form. It would not be this.
The Question of Faith
Would Islam, the religion practised by hundreds of millions of people across West Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and far beyond, still exist as a living faith in this world. This question deserves more care than a quick answer.
Nazi ideology was never primarily concerned with theology in the way it was obsessed with race, but it held a deep and consistent suspicion of any religious system that claimed a source of moral authority higher than the state itself, since such a claim represents a direct rival to total political control. Christianity faced exactly this kind of pressure within Germany itself during the actual historical Nazi period, with the regime working to subordinate churches to state authority, promote a state-friendly version of Christian belief stripped of its more universalist and morally independent elements, and persecute clergy who resisted. There is good reason to think a permanently victorious Reich would have applied similar pressure to every major world religion it now controlled, Islam very much included, along with Christianity in its many forms, Judaism for the small remaining communities that might have survived, Hinduism, Buddhism, and traditional African religious systems as well.
The most likely outcome is not the complete and total disappearance of religious belief itself, since faith of some kind has a tendency to survive underground even under the most severe and sustained persecution throughout human history, and people throughout history have continued believing in private even when forbidden from worshipping in public. The more likely outcome is the deliberate hollowing out of religious institutions, with state-approved religious leaders installed to preach loyalty to the Reich alongside or even above their traditional teachings, sacred texts subtly edited or selectively taught to remove anything that might encourage resistance or independent moral judgment, and genuine independent religious leadership driven underground, monitored, or eliminated. Islam specifically, with its global community of believers spanning many nations and its historical emphasis on a moral law that exists above any single human ruler, would likely have been viewed by Reich authorities as a particularly persistent challenge to manage, much like Catholicism, with its own competing claim to a moral authority based in Rome rather than Berlin, would have been viewed as troublesome and worth careful and continuous suppression. Faith in this world would probably continue in some form. Whether it would still feel like the same faith its ancestors once practised, openly and without fear, is a genuinely different and much sadder question.
Machines, Minds, and the Architecture of Total Control
Here is something that surprises many people when they first sit with this thought experiment seriously. Technological progress does not require freedom in order to occur. It requires resources, organisation, scientific talent, and a state willing to invest heavily in research, and history shows quite clearly that authoritarian and even openly totalitarian systems can produce remarkable technological advancement when that advancement serves the interests of the people in power. The actual Soviet Union, for all its internal repression, achieved real and impressive feats in rocketry and space exploration. There is no reason to think a victorious Reich, commanding the full scientific and industrial resources of an entire conquered planet for eighty uninterrupted years, would have lagged behind in matters of technology. If anything, it might well have surpassed our own actual timeline in certain narrow areas, particularly anything connected to surveillance, control, or military dominance, precisely because those were the areas the regime would have most heavily and consistently funded.
Computers would exist in this world. Something resembling an internet, a network connecting computing systems across the conquered territories of the Reich, would almost certainly exist as well, since the sheer administrative and military advantage of such a network would have been obvious to any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy, even a deeply paranoid and authoritarian one, perhaps especially to a deeply paranoid and authoritarian one. And artificial intelligence, the same broad technology I am quite literally being used through as I help write this very essay in our actual world, would almost certainly exist there too.
The difference would not be whether the technology existed. The difference would be what it was built and trained and deployed to do first and most thoroughly. In our actual world, artificial intelligence systems were developed by a wide range of competing private companies, universities, and governments across many different nations with very different incentives and very different ideas about what such systems should and should not be permitted to do, which is precisely why we are currently having open public arguments in newspapers and parliaments and online forums about how these systems ought to be regulated, what limits should be placed on them, and whose values they should reflect. In a world with only one center of power and absolutely no competing voices left standing anywhere on the globe, artificial intelligence would almost certainly have been developed first and most intensively as an instrument of total population control rather than as a general purpose tool for creativity, education, or commerce. Every digital communication monitored and flagged for suspicious content. Every purchase recorded and cross referenced against an individual's official loyalty profile. Every individual assigned a continuously updated score reflecting the regime's assessment of their reliability, their usefulness, and their potential danger. Algorithms designed not merely to passively predict human behavior for the sake of advertising or convenience, as ours largely do today, but actively and deliberately to shape and gently steer that behavior toward total and unquestioning compliance, nudging people away from dangerous thoughts before those thoughts could even fully form into words. The most successful and most chillingly elegant outcome of such a system would not be the brute force suppression of visible rebellion, which is messy, expensive, and creates exactly the kind of martyrs and resentment that can eventually spark larger uprisings. The most successful outcome, from the regime's perspective, would be a population that had simply forgotten how to want anything different in the first place, a population for whom the very idea of an alternative had quietly faded from collective imagination the way certain words fade out of a language when nobody has any remaining use for them.
Trillionaires, in the sense we use that word in our own world to describe individuals who have accumulated personal fortunes exceeding one trillion dollars through competitive private enterprise across open global markets, would likely not exist in any meaningful sense in this other world, simply because open competitive private enterprise on a global scale as we currently understand and practise it would not exist either. Wealth in this alternate 2026 would flow primarily through the state and the party apparatus itself rather than through independent private accumulation, concentrated in the hands of high ranking party officials, military leadership, and the small circle of industrial combines permitted to operate at enormous scale specifically because they served the interests and the will of the regime directly. The closest equivalent to a trillionaire in this world would probably not be a single visible individual celebrated in business magazines the way we celebrate our own wealthiest entrepreneurs today, but rather an entire state owned industrial and military conglomerate, its true value and the true scale of its resources kept carefully hidden from public view and even from most of its own employees, who would have no real concept of competing alternatives against which to measure it.
Reaching Upward While Crushing Down
Human curiosity is a strange and stubborn thing, and it does not simply switch off because the political system surrounding it has become monstrous. People in this other 2026 would still look up at the night sky and wonder, the same way humans have wondered since long before any of our current nations or empires or ideologies existed at all.
There would very likely still be a space program in this world, probably an extremely well funded one, since the prestige and the military advantage of demonstrating mastery over rocketry and orbital technology would have been obvious to Reich leadership from a remarkably early stage. Satellites would orbit the earth, used primarily for military surveillance and global communications control rather than for the kind of weather forecasting and international scientific collaboration that occupies so much of our own satellite infrastructure today. Human beings might well have reached the moon in this timeline, and quite possibly even Mars by 2026, but the flag planted in that grey lunar dust would carry a swastika rather than the stars and stripes, and the achievement would be presented to a global population not as a triumph of curious humanity reaching outward together, but as final and irrefutable proof of the Reich's supreme and unchallenged destiny.
Military technology would have continued its relentless advance as well, because military technology always does under any sufficiently resourced state, regardless of that state's politics or ideology. Hypersonic missiles capable of evading existing defense systems. Long range ballistic missiles similar in concept and lethal purpose to the real world Iskander systems that exist today. Vast coordinated drone swarms, including the kind of expendable one way attack drones that have become a grim feature of real conflicts in our own actual world over just the past several years. Fast and frighteningly capable fighter aircraft, the descendants of the same engineering lineage that gave the actual Soviet Union, and gives the actual Russia of our own present day, some of its most feared and most technically impressive military aircraft. The crucial and genuinely terrifying difference in this alternate world would not be the sophistication of the weaponry itself, since sophisticated weaponry of roughly comparable lethality might well exist in both timelines by 2026. The difference would be that in our actual world, this kind of advanced and deeply frightening military technology exists in the hands of multiple competing nations who watch each other nervously and are forced, however imperfectly and however unevenly, to exercise at least some degree of mutual restraint, simply because any one of them unleashing such weapons without restraint risks devastating and immediate retaliation from a roughly comparable power. In this other world, this same terrifying technology would exist in the hands of exactly one power answerable to absolutely no one, and a monopoly on overwhelming force, held by a single actor and checked by no external rival anywhere on the planet, has always been one of the single most dangerous arrangements a society can possibly find itself living under.
What Survives in the Human Heart
I want to pause here and ask a softer and in some ways much harder question. Would the word love still mean the same thing to people living inside this nightmare.
I believe it would, at least in its rawest and most basic human form. Parents in this world would still hold their newborn children for the first time and feel that same overwhelming and helpless tenderness that parents have felt since the very beginning of our species, regardless of the flag flying over the hospital where the child happened to be born. Friends would still laugh together over small private jokes that mean nothing to anyone outside their circle. Two people would still fall for each other across a crowded room in some city under Reich administration, would still feel that same nervous flutter of hope and possibility, would still build a quiet private life together in whatever small space the regime allowed them to carve out for themselves.
But love, like every other deeply human thing, would have to learn to live within much narrower walls. People would learn, the way people always learn under any sufficiently repressive system throughout actual human history, exactly which relationships were safe to have openly and which were not, which feelings were safe to express in public and which had to be carried silently and privately, which dreams for their own children could be spoken aloud at the dinner table and which had to be quietly buried before they ever reached the lips. Love would not die in this world. It is far too stubborn and far too deeply written into what it means to be human to simply die. But it would breathe through much smaller windows, and people would grow so accustomed to those narrow windows that many of them would eventually stop remembering that wider ones had ever existed at all.
The Stubborn, Quiet Persistence of Resistance
Even after eighty unbroken years, I do not believe resistance would have disappeared entirely from this world, because resistance to total domination has never fully disappeared from any human society in all of recorded history, no matter how brutal or how long lasting the domination in question.
It would not look like the resistance movements we remember from old films, with dramatic underground newspapers and daring midnight raids and stirring secret radio broadcasts. By 2026, after three full generations of total surveillance and an artificial intelligence apparatus built specifically and continuously to detect exactly this kind of organised dissent before it could ever fully form, resistance in this world would likely have to be something far quieter, far more patient, and far more dispersed than anything from the actual historical resistance movements of the 1940s. It might exist mostly as small isolated acts that never connect into anything resembling a unified movement. A teacher who quietly and carefully teaches one true and forbidden fact to a single trusted student. A low level bureaucrat who deliberately loses a single file that might have condemned an entire family. A software engineer working deep inside the regime's own surveillance infrastructure who builds one tiny deliberate flaw into the system, a flaw too small and too well hidden for the regime's own quality control processes to ever catch, creating one small persistent blind spot where a sliver of genuine privacy might still survive.
Most of these scattered acts of resistance would fail, in the sense that they would not topple the regime or even meaningfully slow it down. Most of the people who attempted them would be caught, eventually, the way almost everyone eventually is caught by a system with that much total visibility into every corner of daily life. But a few might succeed in small, quiet, completely invisible ways, never recorded anywhere, never celebrated anywhere, mattering only to the small handful of people they personally managed to protect. Because if eighty years of unchallenged Nazi rule taught the world one single thing in this alternate timeline, it would be the same thing every other empire in actual human history has eventually been forced to learn the hard way. Human beings, even when they have been thoroughly conditioned from birth to obey, remain stubbornly and endlessly difficult to fully and completely own.
Propaganda That Doesn't Look Like Propaganda Anymore
The propaganda of this other 2026 would bear almost no visible resemblance to the crude black and white wartime posters we associate with actual historical Nazi messaging, the stern eagles, the bold blocky slogans, the deliberately heroic painted figures.
It would be personalised down to the level of the individual citizen. It would be intelligent in the sense that it would draw directly on the same kind of artificial intelligence systems used for surveillance, learning each person's particular private fears, their specific private hopes, their individual insecurities, and adjusting its precise message and tone accordingly without that person ever fully realising they were being deliberately and individually targeted at all. It would appear seamlessly woven into entertainment, into school lessons, into casual workplace conversation, into the background music chosen for a public space, never announcing itself clearly as propaganda the way an old wartime poster announces itself, because the single most effective propaganda in any system, in any era, in any timeline, is never the kind that anyone consciously recognises as propaganda while they are absorbing it. The most effective propaganda simply feels like ordinary common sense, like the obvious and unremarkable way things have always been and will always continue to be. And in this particular world, common sense itself, the very texture of what feels normal and self evident to an ordinary person going about an ordinary day, would have been carefully and deliberately engineered, generation after generation, until almost nobody remaining alive could clearly remember that it had ever been built at all, let alone imagine that it could have been built any differently.
Would the Slaughter Simply Become History
This is perhaps the single most uncomfortable question raised by this entire thought experiment, and I do not think it has a comfortable answer.
Would the deliberate slaughter of countless millions of human beings eventually be remembered, by the people living inside this alternate 2026, as a great historical evil. Or would it simply be remembered, if it were taught at all, as a regrettable but necessary historical episode, several brief paragraphs in an official state approved school textbook, framed the same way many genuinely ancient empires throughout actual human history have framed their own conquests and their own historical atrocities to their own descendants. Regrettable, perhaps, in the careful official language chosen to describe it. Necessary for the greater good that ultimately followed, the textbook would insist. But ultimately simply normal, simply how the world came to be the way it now is, simply the unavoidable price that earlier generations apparently had to pay so that the comfortable present generation could enjoy its current stability.
History has in fact done exactly this before, more than once, to more than one set of victims, in our own actual and entirely real timeline. Indigenous populations across multiple continents, including across vast stretches of the actual Americas, were displaced, enslaved, and killed in numbers that some serious historians now believe rival or even exceed the death toll of the actual Holocaust, and yet for many generations afterward, in many actual real world textbooks across multiple real nations, those staggering losses were minimised, sanitised, framed as the regrettable but ultimately unavoidable cost of progress and civilisation advancing, exactly the same patterns of careful linguistic softening we are imagining a victorious Reich's official records might apply to its own far larger and far more directly intentional atrocities. The dead, in this alternate world just as tragically as in certain real and shameful corners of our own actual history, would simply remain dead, their individual names and faces and the unique and unrepeatable particular love their own families once felt for them gradually fading first into statistics, then into footnotes, and finally into nothing at all, while the living, as the living have always eventually done throughout the whole of human history, would carry on with their ordinary daily lives regardless.
Sitting Back Down on the Balcony
I have spent a very long time now sitting with this dark and deliberately uncomfortable thought experiment, and I want to be completely honest about where it has actually left me, sitting here on this same balcony in Lagos where the whole exercise first began this evening.
It has left me grateful. Genuinely and quite unexpectedly grateful, in a way I did not fully anticipate when I first decided to follow this question all the way down into its darkest corners.
Our own actual world, the real one we all actually wake up inside every single morning, is loud and deeply messy and very often profoundly frustrating in ways both large and achingly small. America argues constantly with China. Russia and Ukraine remain locked in a brutal and grinding war. The Middle East continues to bleed from wounds that span generations and show no clean and easy resolution on any visible horizon. Nigeria struggles daily with corruption and uneven infrastructure and deep frustrating inequality even as it produces extraordinary art, extraordinary music, and extraordinary raw human resilience and creativity almost in spite of those very same struggles. Different religions compete loudly for souls and influence on the very same streets. Different and often deeply opposed political ideologies fight bitterly for power within the very same nations and sometimes within the very same families. Billionaires hoard wealth on a scale that strikes many people, myself genuinely included on certain days, as deeply and almost obscenely unjust, even as small entrepreneurs somehow still manage to build entirely new fortunes and entirely new lives from absolutely nothing, sometimes starting with little more than a market stall and an idea nobody else believed in yet.
None of it is remotely perfect. Very little of it would even qualify as fair if you measured it carefully and honestly against any reasonable standard of justice. But it is profoundly, defiantly, almost stubbornly plural. No single ideology has ever managed to fully conquer the human imagination on this actual planet of ours, not communism in its many attempted forms, not unrestrained capitalism in its most aggressive forms, not any single organised religion despite the deepest hopes and fervent efforts of some of their most devoted believers across many centuries, and most certainly, thank every god that any human being has ever sincerely prayed to across every single one of those centuries, not Nazism either.
That ongoing failure of any one single worldview to achieve total and lasting victory over all the others, that endless and exhausting and often genuinely infuriating argument between billions of different people holding billions of different and often directly contradictory ideas about how exactly a human life should properly be lived, is not at all a flaw in our current world that some better and more orderly alternative arrangement could easily fix if only the right people were finally and firmly placed in charge. It is, when you have spent enough time staring directly into the deliberately constructed alternative the way I have just spent this entire evening doing, very plainly and very clearly the entire point. The chaos itself, properly understood and given its fair due, is the actual victory, hard won and still ongoing and very far from finished. Multiple competing power centers checking and constraining each other's worst impulses, however imperfectly and unevenly, mean that no single regime anywhere on earth can ever fully and completely own the future of the entire human species, the way one regime very nearly did, in the actual real history of our actual real world, less than a single century ago.
So tonight, before I finally finish this drink and reluctantly head back inside, I find myself doing something I do not do nearly often enough amid all the daily noise and frustration of ordinary life. I am simply sitting here, quietly grateful for an untidy, argumentative, unevenly governed planet that nobody, mercifully, has ever quite managed to fully own.
Chucks Charles Okoroafor writes from Lagos, Nigeria.