How did we get here? Czolgosz to the Soviets...

Okay, see if you follow this:

I think it was Wikipedia that had a picture of President McKinley up on the home page, and I remembered that Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist that killed him in 1901. The event was highlighted in Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, where anarchists--at the time the equivalent to today's terrorists or the mid-fifties communists (all around boogeymen)--had a place at the table of main-periphery-character attention. It was another anarchist, Gavrilo Princip, that killed Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and set off what was then called The Great War, but later retconned to World War I.

Then I set about trying to find a picture of Czolgosz, because I had an idea of what he might have looked like (it wasn't the same guy). When I found the picture, using his name and the Google images tab, one picture had a scene from a play (starring women) and there were other names of assassins, one being Giuseppe Zangara, who in 1933 shot and killed the mayor of Chicago. In Miami.

See, Zangara's target, most everyone believes nowadays, was FDR, who was sitting right next to the Mayor.

That led to a link to the Philip K. Dick novel "The Man in the High Castle", which is an alternate universe in which Zangara's assassination of FDR was a success, and the story takes place in the 1960s, after the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese and Fascist Italians were victorious in WWII.

Reading a synopsis of the book, I was struck by an early sentence: "In 1941, the Nazis conquered the Soviet Union..."

Uhh, I don't think so. With Japan attacking in the east and the Nazis in the west, I guess, after maybe twenty years of straight war, those two may have been able to put the pinch on Moscow, but I don't know. What I do know about Russia is: 1) Invading has never been a good idea; and 2) it's full of fucking Russians, man!

With absolutely no intervention from America or any kind of help from China, who'd been battling the invading Japanese hordes since 1937, maybe...I dunno, I still don't see it, and definitely not by 1941.

I've never read any of Philip K. Dick's books, but I respect him. Blade Runner and Total Recall are some movies based on his stories, and that's pretty cool. The Nazis beating the Soviets? Funny that that's the stretch for me, and not androids or memory fabrication and implantation.