The thing about Fallout America is that, for all the evils of communism... America was literally no better and possibly even worse.
Er, no. No it was not. They weren't murdering tens of millions, nor were people starving to death. At most, you had some people being racially discriminated against, or accused of Communism, or the CIA spiked them with LSD and they were tripping balls and seeing aliens everywhere. But it was nowhere near the carnage, suffering, and despair that Communism brought to the nations it enveloped.
The rampant corporate bullshit made the Gilded age look like the idealized version of a communist nation in comparison, They were more than happy to test hilariously dangerous biological or chemical weapons on prisoner's, dissidents, or even plain old civilians that hadn't done anything wrong. Massacred canadian protestors to their forced annexation...
Again, they made 1950s Cold War America look evil by making corporate greed and immoral experiments, as well as slaughter of dissidents commonplace in it. All so they can whine about how evil right-wing America was, when in the real world, America was nowhere near that bad in the 1950s.
Fuck, Nuka cola was able to get away with lacing their soda with literal radioactive waste.
Which shouldn't be possible, since the FDA came into being before World War II, so Nuka-Cola stuffing radioactive waste into soda should have been fucking impossible in the Cold War.
The most extreme forms of capitalism are just as horrific and evil as communism.
No they are not. The worst thing the capitalists burped out are Robber Barons who bribe politicians and treat workers like shit. Communists kill tens of millions of their own civilians just because their collectivization plans blow up in their faces. The former, at most, probably killed thousands, maybe millions of people, due to their negligence. The latter killed tens of millions of people because they were too proud to admit they're wrong.
Heck anti-communist propaganda was used to suppress thingsa like critical thought or complaints about government policy for awhile, and "fighting them commie pinkos" was used to excuse all sorts of awful stupid shit in IRL.
None of which reached the same levels as the USSR or Red China literally slaughtering people just for having the wrong opinions. The worst thing that can happen to you is you get blacklisted or thrown in jail. In Communist lands, if they found out that you spoke out against the government, you get shot by a firing squad or you get worked to death in a gulag.
Fallout America is "A what could have been" if the Vietnam war and the nixon scandals hadn't broken our trust in the american government to a degree.
Which is completely stupid. The kind of things that Fallout America was able to get away with would never pass muster in the America after WW2, which had A) unions that put a check to corporate abuse of workers, B) had the FDA which checked what you put in your edible/drinking products, and C) still allowed the kind of freedom of speech that the Soviets and Red China would never tolerate.
Fallout was just cold war america's own brand of evil taken to its logical extreme.
No it isn't. It's a liberal's strawman of 1950s America that exposes the authors' lack of education when it came to the politics and systems of Cold War America.
It's not necessarily a take on America as it was, but what it could have become if it had continued the way it had been going back during the pre-Vietnam cold war.
Except pre-Vietnam America had checks and balances that wouldn't let the kind of abuses that Fallout America had.
And fallout america is portrayed that way because IRL america is indeed, Selfish, Arrogant, and Immoral... Just to a lesser degree. Heck our nation was built on being selfish immoral assholes to our fellow man.
Not after WW2. Shit, even during the Great Depression, we had welfare and public works programs up the ass. The selfish "I can do things on my own" America died when Lincoln transformed the nation in the Civil War from a hodge-podge of independent republics into a single, unified country. They even had the Progressive Movement that took place in the 1910s and 1920s where they sought to solve society's problems and make life better for the average citizens. Then before WW2, FDR added welfare programs and public-works programs into the national government's budget. So even pre-Vietnam America had a lot of things that would take care of people.
Leftists act as if America losing Vietnam really changed America for the better, that it forced the mask off America and made revolutionary inroads possible, when the Civil Rights movement was underway before Vietnam, and a lot of social welfare and progressive reforms (like the FDA) were happening long before World War 2 and the Korean War exploded.
Quite frankly, it just shows to me that the people who wrote Fallout 1 and 2 didn't study American history one bit. They just went with leftist stereotypes of American history without looking at the country from a more objective viewpoint. It's just "AMERICA IS BAD BECAUSE THEY WERE PARANOID ABOUT COMMIES!" when in reality, anyone who's seen a country devastated by Communism would treat Commies the same way soceity treated the Nazis after WW2.
