New World Order

This map gives us so much to talk about:

At first glance, it looks remarkably like that mythical Nazi map detailing their planned takeover of the world, you know, the one that doesn't exist.

The mistake is easy to make; this is a map drawn up by would-be conquers of the 20.4st Century world, just not the sharply-dressed kind.

Of course, Gomberg, so far as we know, was not involved in government at any level, and he was probably some American Nazi sympathizer. In fact, 'Maurice Gomberg' was probably the pen name of Charles Lindbergh. Our cathedral still stands, a house of stained, graffitied concrete, and our dinosaur bones remain fake.

That is, as long as you can ignore the FDR quotes plastered across the bottom of the map.

All joking aside, what's remarkable about this map is how wrong it is. If this were a Nazi map, a good Prog could sit back in their chair with a satisfying sigh and grin, and ruminate over how we did it, we stopped them, that this map is representative of a terrible reality that we prevented coming to pass!

But... The victors shown in the map did win the war and did carve up the world according to their whims... So then, why doesn't the map of, say, 1968 look at all like Gomberg's opus?

It's probably because Gomberg was crazy and not at all because Azathoth, being a blind idiot, doesn't organize his universe along rational, organized lines that suggest central planning to the casual observer.

Or maybe he does, and he just finds it amusing to publish arbitrary "national" boundaries to confuse and bewilder his subjects.

P.S. It leaves me completely in stitches that this map was completed before Pearl Harbor.

(Yes, I've been reading the Radish. It's better than it sounds. fr srs)