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Notes -
I will admit, by the end of Man in the High Castle, I wasn't entirely against the Nazis. Perhaps a part of it was the rapidly deteriorating state of my own world, paying an ever increasing diversity tax in an increasingly violent and low trust society. Perhaps a part of it was the way the show had not the founding stock, and founding principles, of America rising up to save it. Instead that task fell to black communist who rescue an America only too happy to collaborate with the Nazi's (but which suddenly found themselves free of them) from their own rotten soul. I mean, if you make me choose between black communist and Nazi's, I'm choosing the Nazi's 1000% of the time.
The black Communist didn't save America. John Smith was supposed to have -- he was supposed to have been playing the long game, rising to the top of the American Nazi hierarchy and then breaking with Berlin and restoring America, but he turned Nazi in truth. It's implied that after his suicide, his second in command (Bill Whitcroft, as white a guy as you can ask for) in fact will do this.
The Bill Whitcroft character is the weakest of window dressing to the moral themes the show is muddling through. He barely exist. Tell me how many episodes he was in? Tell me one other thing about him? What was his character arc? What does he stand for? He's in the background, nearly invisible for an amount of time I can scarcely recall, then suddenly he asserts himself like a Deus Ex Machine in the last episode or two? He might as well be Harrison Ford's phoned in voice over at the end of Blade Runner. He's a meaningless non entity, a utilitarian script gimmick, who does not engage with the themes of show what so ever. And the themes are clear, and they draw from fictitious historical works like the 1619 Project, especially towards the end as the black communist story arc progresses, and they become the moral center of the show, who's principles go entirely unexamined and unchallenged, even as they monologue that the Nazi's and the American's weren't all that different to them.
He's there to hold out the hope of some sort of positive ending that, given the conditions, simply should not be possible, which is why he's so weak as a character. Yes, a deus ex machina, but the fact that the writers felt the need to have that (rather than let the black communists win, or just devolving into chaos) is significant. The idea of Smith playing the long game isn't weak like that, they hint at it throughout at least the later seasons.
That the black communists in the show think the Americans and the Nazis were pretty much the same is what you'd expect from such a group (compare Muhammad Ali's "No Viet Cong ever called me [the N-word]") but it doesn't mean the show was actually endorsing that view. Kido essentially makes the same claim to Frank Frink at Manzanar; are we supposed to believe him too? No, the show clearly prefers the old America over Nazi or Japanese rule, even if it refuses to idealize it.
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