WWII: 2 billion moral decisions

Morally, for Earth's two billion individuals in those years, WWII (1931-1946) was about one thing and one thing only.

It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?

Bystanders make Bullies : in schoolyards or in World Wars

When Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler first crawled out from under their rocks and set to work, the nations they led were relatively weak and ally-less, particularly compared to the combined 'rest of the world', a world that professed to oppose them root and branch.

But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.


Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.

The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.

In  bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango :  one active bully and many in-active bystanders...

Hitler vs Henry Dawson : why contrast these two scientists ?

War historians are unlikely to ever be happy with a Hollywood movie presenting WWII as "The Battle between Ultimate Evil and Ultimate Good".

Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?

But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd  much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.

Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.

The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.

If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.

Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.

Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.

They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.

WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.

Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .

Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.

Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.

 Almost all the rest remained  *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.

(* "Effectively neutral"  is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them  -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)

A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.

Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma  in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them  if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.

Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.

Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.

Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.

So if  examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.

Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.

Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.

 They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.

This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.

Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.

The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.

Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.

It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?

I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....

It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini

Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:

"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."

But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.

However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.

In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.

But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.

So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.

But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.

Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.

Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.

Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg,  orthodox economics still daily  proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.

So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?

May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .

Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....

WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists

Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.

It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.

But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.

It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.

What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.

To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.

A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.

But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.

But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.

But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.

Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.

The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.

Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)

This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.

Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.

But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.

Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.

Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.

Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.

In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).

I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.

Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma),  with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....

WWII : From Manchuria Incident to Nagasaki, NEUTRALITY was majority position of world's sovereign nations

The idea that Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mussolini are among the most evil leaders of all time - and that people like them must be stopped at all costs - is a relatively recent idea.

It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking,  weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.

Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.

Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted  - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.

My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.

Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.

As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.

In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.

Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.

Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !

Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.

An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.

Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.

The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.

If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case)  could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.

In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.

In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.

(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)

America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.

One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.

Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?

I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.

The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and  early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.

A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.

In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.

It saw the then new idea of  Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.

One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.

Nature ruled !

And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.

So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.

It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.

But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.

 As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.

Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.

Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....

Civilization, regarded as a "Cartwright Machine"

A "Cartwright Machine" is a powerful and unique way, created by famed philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright,  of looking again at all of Humanity's machines , mental as well as physical.

Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.

This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.

The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.

Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.

For example:

The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.

Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.

The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.

Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.

But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.

Round One to Civilization.

But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.

Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally)  quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.

Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.

An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !

The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.

A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.

More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.

(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)

But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.

Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.

A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.

But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use  all the guns it made.

(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)

Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.

Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.

The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.

The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.

Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.

Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?

Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced,  kicks in on top.

A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.

Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.

But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.

In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.

But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.

Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of  Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.

Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.

Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.

This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.

And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.

German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.

This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.

None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.

They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.

The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.

It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed,  that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.

The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will  accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of  Hawaii.

But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.

Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.

(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)

The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .

In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.

WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.

This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of  Total War .....

Allies gave penicillin only to 1A soldiers for same reason they gave Czechoslovakia only to Hitler

The Allies weaponizing penicillin was as morally wrong as appeasing Hitler by giving him Czechoslovakia on a platter , and for exactly the same reasons.

The Allies totally failed to see that giving everything to the mighty and nothing to the weak was exactly what caused the war in the first place: weaponizing penicillin was not going to win the war but rather cause Allies to lose the moral peace.

'Eugenicide with an English accent' was not a moral counterweight to Hitler's values, but merely an Anglo-Saxon cousin of his.

Henry Dawson realized, very early on in the Fall of 1940, that any cause willing to save the lives of its very weakest, such as the SBEs, even during a Total War, would be a cause worthy of dying for.

By contrast, any cause that was only a weak 'me too' of its enemy's morality wasn't going to get 20 year old infantrymen up and out of their foxholes with any alacrity when the whistle blew.

Justice is only truly just when it is as fair to the weak as it is to the mighty, as fair to the foolish as it is to the wise : but God knows it isn't easy to make each new generation of humanity realize this.

The Germans, Japanese, Soviets did have a cause they believed was worthy of dying for, perverted as it was ---- one reason why as individuals and in small groups, they were usually much better troops than any of their opposing Allied troops.

Interestingly, the free Polish troops were also considered to be braver than the other Allied troops : they knew they were going to have to fight very hard to secure the postwar fate of Poland - to keep it out of Allied Russian as well as Axis German hands.

They lost, thanks to FDR - but Dawson didn't.

Penicillin was de-weaponized , albeit only by loud public demand and against government wishes,  and the Allies narrowly escaped being accused, postwar, having having caused a war crime of omission....

Hitler and his strongest critics agree: Holocaust unique because it sought to kill an entire ethnic group

I don't agree.

 I believe Hitler and his killing crews sought to make it easy on themselves while killing ten million Jews in cold blood, by not regarding them as ten million different individuals but merely as one great big reified lump, an ethnicity.

I don't believe that Hitler and his crew could have killed more than a few dozen a day, and even then only once in a while, if they had to sit behind a desk and look at the photos in hundreds of dossiers, devoid of ethnicity/religion /politics and decide which ones of those individual faces lived and which ones died.

Even Stalin, a very hands on guy when it came to the execution of the elite of the USSR, found it tough to do this sort of work all the time.

He often avoid all that hard thinking and deciding by simply issuing an order to the NRVD directing that all POWs with the simple label, "Polish", must be killed by next week.

Then he went off ,with a bottle in hand, to relax by watching a Hollywood comedy.

Sixty million individuals were killed in WWII ,including six million Jews - smoothly and easily - by deliberately not regarding them as  sixty million highly different individuals.

We must not let WWII like thinking slip in sideways by letting historians reifying Hitler's victims into a few big lumps.

We must always seek to unbundle their lives and the lives of those 'much like them' who did not die,  back into individual stories.

We must always remember that individual killers killed individual victims and overcome the easy (bottle in hand/Hollywood comedy) solution of simply assigning collective guilt to account for collective horrors and calling it an academic day.

Only in Hitler's mind, did one reified lump called "all Aryans" want to kill another reified lump called "all Jews"......

1939-1945 : Big MO goes Postal instead of going Monumental

Big MO is an appropriate nickname for The Age of Modernity because there was always something inhumanly massive about almost everything and anything that that age and the people within it turned their hands to.

Very hard indeed to imagine the people of the early 1940s not going Postal, and not going to deadly war with each other.

But if they hadn't been building bunkers and had been building monuments and buildings instead, this ponderous essence in their inner character might still be visible.

Hitler and Stalin, not wanting to be outdone by the Hoover Dam and the Maginot Line, were planning to leave their own marks in concrete and rebar steel, massive and tedious beyond all belief.

Modernity was all about regarding Reality as being thermo-settable : plastic until cured and then rigid forever more.

Concrete is the thermoset plastic par excellent : broken up, it is useless to re-melt into new concrete.

Rebar steel, while appearing to be plastic only when red hot and rigid at normal temperatures ( ie thermoset plastic in character) , is actually also somewhat thermosoft plastic in character as well.

Because used steel can be remelted and molded into a new shape as scrap, as part of the normal steel-making process.

Armour steel is thermoset plastic in its character, and became the wartime symbol of Modernity's massive and rigid nature.

Armour plate is plastic when red hot but at normal temperatures, it resists all change : even when change is coming at it in the form of a dense tungsten core of an anti-tank round moving in at 2500 miles an hour !

Bombers, bombs, bomber fleets - perhaps the most typical expression of Modernity at war, got steadily bigger and more armoured as the war progressed.

As did tanks, tank guns and tank fleets.

Ditto naval Taskforces : bigger battleships, bigger guns, bigger aircraft carriers, more armour, more speed, more aircraft and escort vessels.

More, more, more : every war machine just got steadily bigger, heavier, faster, higher, lower : extremes of any and all sorts.

Notably as the world got more war machines and the machines got bigger and fatter, the world's population growth shrank and people got thinner and thinner.

In WWII, (Modernity gone Postal), Modernity showed its true colors : placing machines before people even in the face of near universal malnutrition.

The "Not So Good" War : September 1931- December 1941

The Good War began December 11th 1941 when Adolf Hitler persuaded a reluctant American Congress to declare war against the evil of Nazism.


It lasted three years and eight months, from when America  declared war on the evilness of Nazi Germany until August 1945, when America defeated the evilness of Tojo's Japan.

It is the war between the armed forces of morality and the armed forces of evil that American TV chooses to celebrate endlessly.

Infrequently discussed - in America - though perhaps not in the rest of the world, was the ten years and three months of The Not So Good War.

It began with the manufactured Manchuria incident in September 1931 that allowed Japan to brutally invade China without any reaction from the armed forces of morality.

Eventually it involved  two dozen countries being invaded by aggressive neighbours without any action taken to defend them by the armed forces of morality.

That all changed when Hitler's declaration of military war against America on December 11th 1941, forced Congress and America to defend itself against this new military threat.

But this realpolitik approach to dealing with the worst evilness the world has ever known didn't make for good propaganda, both during the war and ever since, and so the War of Good against Evil was created - mostly, it must be said, on a Hollywood backlot set at the time

And ever since then, mostly it has been created in popular American history books, films and TV documentaries.

The big problem is that in any branch of any  public library, there will also be literally hundreds  of books, films and TV documentaries about the Holocaust and their basic line - to their authors' credit - is that America knew all about the Holocaust and did nothing while it was happening.

Hard to reconcile these two very popular "popular history" subjects , the Good War and the Holocaust , isn't it ?

It is almost as if the victims of all those years of the Not So Good War have become honorary Holocaust victims, with the six million dead European Jews also standing  in for millions more dead all around the world who America also knew about at the time but did nothing to help.

Because in many ways, the Not So Good War carried right on through December 11th 1941, on and on well past the official end of WWII.

Then 1939-1945 could best be seen as a six year effort to violently subjugate the Polish people, begun by Hitler, but when he proved to be not up for the job, was finished by Stalin, with the complicity of Churchill and FDR.

The Good War, by this reckoning , was just an cosmetic overlay over a series of episodes between a group of superpowers, with smaller nations mere pawns in the conflict .....

Anschluss began 75 years this minute ...the countdown to WWII had begun

At 5am on the morning of March 12th 1938, the infamous Anschluss began.

At that minute -exactly 75 years ago- leading elements of the German advance team crossed the Austrian-German border, the signal start to the countdown to World War Two , which itself began less than 18 months later.

We can no longer ask the German adults who made the decision to invade Austria why they did it, nor can we ask the adults of the rest of the world why they meekly let Hitler break the Versailles Treaty by doing so.

They are all dead - only the children and young adults of that era are still around and even they are among our most senior citizens.

The origins of WWII have now passed beyond "oral history" into
the history of paper documents.

In addition, simple math reminds us that all of us alive today have spent far more time in the Post Modern Era ( post 1945) than we have in the Modern Era (pre 1945).

As a result we no longer instinctively have a feel for Modernist thought.

The intellectual gulf - far wider than just 75 years - between us postmodernists and the modernists of Anschluss

So a huge intellectual gap looms between us and the senior planners of Anschluss (and the senior politicians, bureaucrats and generals who planned the muted reaction to it) .

It is more than just the 75 years of time between us and the event itself.

In reality, it is the ideological chasm between our postmodernist sentiment and the sentiment of  long dead men whose mental universe was hardened when they were teenagers, more than 125 years ago.

Any 21st century history of WWII can not - I believe - be content any longer merely reciting a long of events : a sort of journalistic W4 .

It must provide the 5th W (why?) and explain it in terms we in the post-modern world can understand......

Majority of Americans remain silent as Woodrow Wilson's legacy is brutally destroyed : 1938-1941

Thank God Almighty that Adolf Hitler declared war on America, because without it, would America have ever gone to war against the greatest evil the world has ever known ?

The fact remains that between September 1938 and December 1941, the majority of Americans had stood silent as the legacy of their own president Woodrow Wilson was brutally dismembered by the twin 'evil empires' of Hitler and Stalin.

Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Yugoslavia were all creations of Wilson's direct efforts at Versailles.

The larger spirit of Wilson's efforts : that small nations should be allowed to live without being swallowing up by their larger neighbour's brutal might  had , until 1938-1941, kept countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Albania, Norway, Holland and Greece independent.

Now that too was all gone.

Still the majority of Americans kept silent and indifferent ; they wanted to keep out of the "conflict between the nations" of Europe.

Conflict between nations ???!!!

When I learn that a high school senior and football star has walloped the hell out of a primary toddler his girlfriend was supposed to be minding, I do not call it a "conflict between school students" though that is technically and legalistically correct.

I call it child abuse and deadly assault : the 5 year old didn't start this "conflict" , the 17 year old went to war on it.

So it was when Russia invaded Estonia or Germany invaded Denmark , without any cause besides sheer evil greed.

Morally the excuses most Americans gave then for not going to the defence of the weak against the strong would not stand up in a court today, if they were accused of just standing by while a 17 year old football star beat the crap out of a 5 year old child.

And in a higher - moral - court , they did not stand up then.

This was the sort of moral cesspool that Henry Dawson was swimming against when he defiantly decided to introduce the Age of Antibiotics by treating the "weakest of the weak", the "4Fs of the 4Fs" with his crude penicillin, on the very day America choose to celebrate its "1As of the 1As" : Draft Registration day, October 16th 1940...

Like synthetic penicillin, the harder the A-Bomb was to make, the more attractive it was to the OSRD

Late in 1942, Britain's highest political, military and Intelligence leadership decided that the Atomic Bomb was almost certainly too difficult and too expensive for Hitler's Germany to produce during World War II ---- if only because it would take too many resources from more pressing necessities for the Nazi war machine.

But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.

These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.

(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)

But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.

They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.

But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.

Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.

Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.

But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only  the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.

America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only  information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.

Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.

Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.

(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)

I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.

Lessons from the attractiveness of difficult-to-synthesize penicillin

But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.

You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.

Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.

Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.

Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.

That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.

 Still,  a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.

Poor old Washington and poor old London and  poor old Berlin.

Always forced to fight a three front war.

Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......

Like Germany, Howard Florey effortlessly won all the tactical battles, losing only the strategic war to Henry Dawson

Eugenics was on the side of the Big Battalions...

Howard Florey was a WWII chicken-hawk, so it little surprises that his chosen hobby-horse, Allied war medicine, was vigorously and publicly 'On the Side of the Big Battalions'.

That meant making a virtue of denying aid to dying 4Fs, to give it instead to healthy 1As.

 But as Hitler had earlier found out to his cost, this was not a position designed to win over the small battalions of the world's hearts and minds.

Dawson's Folly

Dr Dawson's 'folly' - by contrast - was to give up his own life, during a Total War against the Ultimate Evil, trying to save the lives of the 4Fs of the 4Fs, those 'useless mouths' young people with SBE.

His folly was near-universally damned by those in America's scientific and medical elite who knew of it.

Only those who the British call "the punters" : ie, the housewives, the customers and the voters all over the world, approved his idea.

They chose not to judge the Allied Cause by when it ventured into Nazi like behavior (denying aid to the weakest) but only in its better moments, as when it changed its mind and came to the aid of the SBEs' small battalions, aiding the least of these.

A small gesture perhaps, but in the end, more than enough ....

By 1945, Martin Henry Dawson's 1940 war aim had become OUR war aim too

Baby, dank Harry Lime, werden nicht neeeding Teddy

In September 1940 , at the height of the Battle of Britain, war hero Martin Henry Dawson decided against rejoining the Canadian Army to help fight Hitler.

He would fight Hitler instead by saving the lives of the very people that Hitler (and a lot of Dawson's medical colleagues) judged to be "lives unworthy of life" --- particularly in wartime.

In five short weeks, he grew and then injected penicillin into two working class youths, a Negro and a Jew , both dying of invariably fatal SBE.

 In many eyes, they were judged to be the 4Fs of the 4Fs, and definitely not a priority for life-saving during a Total War.

But Dawson instinctively felt that this was something that would definitely separate the Allies from the Axis , proving that the Allies believed in saving all lives - in particular even the smallest and the weakest, "the least of these", as it were.

The Allied government-scientific-military-commercial establishment disagreed, saving penicillin only for the 1As of the 1As, the frontline combat soldiers away from the killing zone due to a non-fatal dose of the clap they had picked up.

They banned the use of penicillin to save SBEs , sentencing them to a certain death.

Dawson, himself dying from a terminal disease, defied the authorities and stole some government-issued penicillin to give to the SBEs , later getting secret supplies from a sympathetic CEO at a Big Pharma corporation.

His misdeeds inspired others, the story broke, Doctor Mom sided with Dawson's ideas and the males in the establishment reluctantly fell in line.

But very soon they saw the virtue in Dawson's ideas, and warplanes were soon flying about, dropping not bombs but penicillin for dying children in both Allied countries and in Neutral nations.

Penicillin-the-lifesaver-of-all-civilian-lives had become a very public weapon in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the world for the Allied cause.

So much so, in fact, that by 1949 erstwhile 'citizen of an Allied nation' Harry Lime was judged one of fiction's all time villains mostly because he had dared to water down the penicillin intended for dying children.  Dying Axis children.

It is this viewpoint, only 4 years after the war, that I thinks allows us to claim "The Third Man" as one of the first postmodern films.

Dawson was four years dead by that point, but I think he would have be proud to think how far his war aims had become our war aims.....

Martin Henry Dawson vs the American Red Cross 1940 on mixing blood of blacks , whites and slime

Heroes ????

The American Red Cross began WWII on the side of Hitler, banning the mixing of Negro blood with that of the pure white (Ayran) race when it came to blood transfusions, just as Hitler also opposed the mixing of Jewish and Ayran blood in German blood transfusions.

The idea of mixing the blood of slime and white people found appalling by 99.9999% of western doctors

The Red Cross and Hitler were probably equally opposed to the idea of mixing the blood of dirty basement wall slimy fungus with that of white Ayrans, when it came to using impure natural penicillin in systemic (in the blood stream) medications.

Dr Dawson obviously did not agree with any of this : his first patients to receive his life-saving impure natural systemic penicillin were a young black man and a young Jewish man : October 16th 1940 , New York City : the other (life-saving, not life-killing) "Manhattan Project" .....

Hitler was all about "The Triumph of the WORD" , not of the WILL : rhetoric = results

Triumph of mere WORDS ?

Add Churchill, FDR and Tojo to that sorry mess. All of the leaders of the biggest combatants of WWII felt that the war would be won when their opponents' morale and will was broken - not by good (bad ?) old-fashioned occupation of the opponents' home territory.


By talk, words, spin, PR, propaganda, censorship : psych warfare, not bullet-firing weapons.

But it all didn't work, did it?

FDR and Churchill invested the plurality of their war spending on the bombing of cities but failed to break the will of the Germans as much as Hitler's Blitz failed to break Britain.

Tojo and crew dreamed one decisive naval victory at sea would break the American will and force them to agree to letting Japan have its rightful place in the South East Asian sun.

No such defeat came, but even if it had, it don't have done anything but toughened the American will to defeat Japan - and as that will could have used quite a bit of toughening up, such a victory for Japan would have been very Pyrrhic in the end.

Hitler and the Germany Army assumed a few smashing victories in encircling Russian armies would break the will of the Russians, leading to the overthrow of the government and Russia would fall like a ripe plum into German hands.

Who knows what might have happened had Germany captured Moscow in 1941 ---- but the Panzers never really got there : Russian mud and Russian snow don't have ears or eyes and so ignored all the Nazi news of imminent Russian defeat.

WWII proves physical Reality Bites mere rhetoric

People do respond to bad news (and so morale can be broken) but physical reality does not.

Ultimately it was long distances and bad weather (leading to equipment failure and shortages of everything from food to shells to fuel) that frustrated and defeated most armies and navies in WWII --- not their human opponents.

The WORLD defeated the WORD......

Republicans: ABORTING the 47%, before they are born, will greatly reduce the federal deficit

ABORT the 47% ???

Eugenicists , such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, believe in putting all their eggs and sperm in 53% of the baskets , writing off (permanently) those who are down today (but who might be up again tomorrow).


But tomorrow, some of the surviving 53% might also be down  and hence would also be written off,  in ever new rounds of 'tough love'.

Regarding 'the down and out' as permanently down is like a circular firing squad

In this numbers game, after a series of round of recessions and booms,  very few people would be left in America, period - either to pay federal taxes or simply to breath free.

If Hitler had won the war and the world, the Nazis would have had round after round of purification trials, till almost nobody would be left alive - sort of like the Russian Politburo under Stalin or what happened in the last days of the French Revolution.

Purity and perfection tests never end, never are satisfied.

Ditto for Romney and Ryan who, unknowingly, are both advocates of seeing the world through the unvarying spectacles of the K-selecting eugenicist.

The world, to the K-selecting eugenicist, is simple, predictable and static.

In their view of world ecology, the whole world is one big niche, yesterday-today-tomorrow , and their job is to find the beings that best fill that permanent niche and discard the rest.

Commensalists, such as myself, feel differently : call us r-selecting types.

We don't believe in putting our eggs and sperm in one basket.

We see the world as dynamic and unpredictable, always changing.

See it filled with many constantly changing niches that are only partially and temporally filled by many different types of beings: we welcome diversity and feel it to be the best protection possible against tomorrow's unexpected massive changes.

We are not at all surprised to learn that some "pure-blooded" aboriginal tribes were almost totally wiped out by something like childhood measles, with the only survivors being a few "half-breeds", the children of tribe members who married Europeans with built-in resistance to measles.

We prefer to think of them as displaying hybrid resilience, not half-breed decadence, and we think the hard scientific evidence to prove it is on OUR side.

Romney's soaring political rhetoric sounds so good but it is based on outmoded, incorrect, science and when it collides with physical reality, it will always crash and burn....

"Wrong said Fred" : how two guys named Fred killed more people than Hitler

Soon to be a blockbuster movie --- or a few more years off ?

I have said before, "just what is it about the sight of smoke that makes certain rigid personality types go so absolutely snakey ?"

(You know : all those serial deniers of Holocaust smoke, acid rain, cigarette smoke, ozone holes, global warming ,industrial pollution, on and on and on.)

I have to come think that it is because, in even in their cases where they have spent a lifetime successfully and rigidly throttled all conscious thought of their individual guilt, smoke is "sin made all too visible".

Ie, it functions as a kind of  industrial stigmata , that severely threatens their normally secure sense of selfness in ways they can't handle - so they lash out in all directions.....