By David Dvorkin

Wildside Press, 1987

195 pages

ISBN 1-58715-36-0

Reviewed by Alasdair Czyrnyj

In the course of fighting the Cold War, the United States has embarked on a number of questionable alliances with nations whose commitment to anti-communism seemed to be far greater than their dedication to American values. Much ink has been spilt on this type of hypocrisy of foreign policy, some of it dating back to the Roosevelt Administration’s occupation of the Phillipines at the beginning of the 20^th century. The standard defense from policy makers in Washington has been an appeal to necessity: we need allies, and this is what we have to work with. During the 1980s, policy-makers such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick further argued that if America worked closely with authoritarian regimes, the countries would be exposed to American ideals, and thus grow into healthy liberal democracies.

Budspy, written in the late 1980’s by sci-fi author David Dvorkin, takes a sledgehammer to this viewpoint with an alternate history that shows the darker effects of the Cold War on America itself. The history of Budspy is a cold warrior’s wet dream: in 1943, following Hitler’s death in the aftermath of the orderly German retreat from Stalingrad, the Western allies come to terms with Kurt Nebel, the Reich’s new leader and former secretary to Martin Bormann, and bow out of the conflict, leaving Nebel the task of saving Europe from Bolshevism, while Britain and America sit back, safe and happy.

The novel starts off in 1988, where a young man named Chic Western is going home after a day of work for the federal government in Washington. However, the reader quickly learns that Chic is no ordinary paper-pusher. He is, in fact a "budman" or "budspy," an agent of the powerful and secretive Ombudsman Commission. Created in 1957 by President Joseph McCarthy, the Commission is charged uprooting corruption in the federal government, mostly by subterfuge and covert operations. Chic is very much the proper spy; he believes in his work, does it well, and doesn’t ask questions.

Upon returning to the Commission’s headquarters, Chic finds himself dragooned into a new assignment. Someone in the American embassy in Berlin is passing classified information to the Soviets, and both the Reich and Washington want to put a stop to it. After receiving his new identity (in an homage to Robert Ludlum, Chic’s alias is "Jesse Bourne"), Chic is whisked away to Berlin, capital of the Third Reich and the greatest city on Earth.

In Budspy, the half-century of steady leadership under the technocratic policies of Kurt Nebel have made the Reich the pre-eminent power in Eurasia, if not the world. Berlin itself has been transformed into an monumental masterpiece, complete with the mile-long parade grounds, massive triumphal arches, and the awe-inspiring bulk of the dome of Albert Speer’s Great Hall, complete with mounted black sarcophagus of Hitler himself. The 300 million citizens of the Reich, many of them blond and blue-eyed, have lives of the utmost health and comfort, and are quite happy with their lives. In a rather surprising move, Nebel’s regime even ceased the persecution of the Jews, and even sponsored the creation of Israel. Germany itself is a hive of technical innovation, with a thriving space program and massive export industry. While the war with the Soviet Union still drags on, the populace fully expects victory to be completed with a generation. As Chic watches the enthusiasm of the crowds during the 45^th anniversary of Hitler’s death, he begins to wonder if the Germans "really are the Master Race after all."

However, Germany still hides a few secrets far from prying eyes, much like the surface of Berlin hides the filth-clogged waters of the buried Spree River. Chic’s experience of this side of the Reich comes from his new co-worker at the embassy, a German-American named Judy Melanius. Judy is, in many ways, the last idealistic American. Unlike her compatriots, Judy does not believe in the glittering artifice of Berlin, and is quick to point out the hypocrisies of daily life in the Reich, from the romanticization of Hitler in popular cinema, to the truth about the Reich’s source of cheap labor, to the existence of anti-Reich terror organizations. While Chic initially tries to keep his distance from Judy, he finds himself slowly drawn into her, and abandons his budman training to start a relationship with her.

Despite their fights on the morality of the Reich, one thing both Judy and Chic can agree on is that compared to the Reich, America looks very poor indeed. In fact, in the long years between 1943 and 1988, America has rotted away from within. The streets of Washington are filled with trash, and homelessness and mob violence are endemic problems. The Civil Rights movements of the 1960s are stillborn, and racial violence continues to tear the country apart, with newspapers printing sensationalist stories of riots, murders and lynchings. To make matters worse, an entire generation of American youth is being wiped out to maintain stability in the dying empires of both Britain and Japan, as well as in maintaining pro-American governments across Latin America. America, rather than relying on its own industry, has shifted back to primarily exporting resources and receiving fancy technology and consumer goods from the Reich. The government is secretive, paranoid, and cares little for its citizenry (In fact, by the end of the book, it is suggested that the government is testing biological weapons on American citizens without their knowledge). The people, meanwhile, prefer to live in blissful ignorance, and stick with simple morality plays or "nostalgia tours" that are frequented by hordes of camera-wielding Germans. In Budspy, America is dying, and nobody cares.

This rather bleak scenario is striking in that in satirizes and similar one written earlier in the decade, namely Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice. In Linaweaver’s novel, non-intervention in the Second World War leads to a prosperous libertarian America and a stuttering second-rate Third Reich. In Dvorkin’s book, however, the outcomes are reversed, with America playing second fiddle to the Reich. While America has been kept safe from communism, it has allowed Nazism to survive and even influence its own values, until America, indeed the entire West, becomes little more than "an etiolated copy of the Reich."

This concept of the distorting nature of evil runs through the entire book. The United States cooperates with the Reich to destroy the Soviets, and becomes degraded itself. The workforce at the embassy Chic works at curry favor with the Reich by rejecting every immigration application that comes their way. The Gestapo personnel Chic works with are dissolute, corrupt, and violent. Indeed, by the end of the story Chic realizes that even his beloved Ombudsman Commission is not above corruption, compounding the meaning of Judy’s declaration that "we are corrupted by our accommodation with evil."

While much of the scenario described in this book stretches plausibility, especially in the viability of a peacetime Reich economy, it is important for the message it carries. Ultimately, the hope that American values can reform the Reich is dismissed as little more than a pipe dream, and the Reich’s values soon come to dominate America. The case of America and the Reich could easily be mirrored with South Vietnam in the 1960s, Iraq in the 1980s, and with Saudi Arabia today. While allying with these countries makes geopolitical sense, these alliances only mask the revolting activities of these nations, and also serve to damage America abroad and at home.

While distasteful alliances are often necessary, necessity has a disturbing habit of growing and expanding into wholesale capitulation solely for the sake of survival. At that point, you’re really no better than your enemy.