Neutrality, not Brutality, WWII hallmark

Only the (postwar : postmodern) grandchildren and possibly the children of the modern adults of WWII have always seen Hitler and WWII as symbols of the ultimate evil and brutality.

But relatively few of the modern world's adults saw it that way during the six long years of the war : even fewer forcefully proclaimed it that way during the war and did so from beginning to end.

If their initial wartime actions speak much louder than their later verbal recollections, almost all of the modern world's adults choose to stand around as bystanders while schoolyard bully Hitler beat up on little primary pupil Poland.

Very few neutral nations (and the neutral individuals within them) changed their minds about fighting Hitler and his Axis over the course of those six years of the war - unless they themselves were directly attacked by Hitler or his Axis.

Even then, few thought that Hitler was the ultimate symbol of evil.

Rather the adults still saw Hitler as just another invader who must be repelled, albeit an highly effective invader and hence a highly dangerous invader, one who must be stopped dead in his tracks.

The modern elites at the top of both the West and in Russia thought it quite possible that either the West or Russia might sue for a separate peace with Hitler at any point during the war - as France had already done.

That hardly sounds like people who saw Hitler as the symbol of the ultimate evil who must be stopped even if it cost all their lives to do so.

The great majority of the people murdered by Germany were killed by its armed forces rather than by the SS.

(I can repeat that sentence slowly and calmly, once you're sitting down, if its all been too great a shock to you.)

Despite that, almost all of the military and political elite in the West still thought of those German armed forces as basically like their own Allied armed forces and treated them accordingly - right up to the end of the war.

And well beyond : for many, that remains a belief until this very day.

From day one, the Allied governments' propaganda insisted that Hitler's Germany was evil but then didn't act like it was evil and so failed to convince themselves, their publics or the peoples in the neutral majority around the world.

They failed to do wartime things differently enough from the Axis to convince most that its actions were truly beyond the civilized ken.

Instead they said it was perfectly okay to go on denying Jews jobs and housing - but it was not okay to mass murder them - but we won't do much to stop that mass murder - beyond defeating Hitler - because he was also attacking us - the non-Jews.

If was as if all the modern world's adults during WWII were nothing more than modern objective W5 journalists, carefully reporting that he says "he wasn't mass killing the Jews", while she says "Hitler was too".

If WWII had in fact been anything like what W5 reporter Tom Brokaw* imagined it to have been (the ultimate battle between good and evil), I doubt whether we'd still be writing and reading about it 75 years later.

We are still fascinated by it, like white mice bait before a cobra, because WWII was in fact so filled with neutral hypocrisy that it almost crowds out all the brutality.

An endlessly multi-layered onion of a melodrama, far more Noirish than anything Hollywood could ever dream up ...
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* Tom Brokaw was born in early February 1940 and was five and two thirds years old when Japan formally surrendered.

Born just early enough to still bathe deep in the postwar modernist triumphant glow.

I strongly question whether, if he had been born even just three or four years later, he would have ever written his infamous book, "The Greatest Generation".

Action 4F hooks up with Action T4 : Allied and Axis eugenic ethics 'mate like minks' during WWII ...

Action T4

It seemed clear to the Nazis (and to most Allies) that if the people they viewed as "unfit" weren't going to be useful on the combat front that didn't mean they should be left off scot-free.

They too must help the war efforts in some tangible way.

Perhaps by receiving less food, heat and medicine --- since they couldn't do useful war work or even simply breed more healthy future warriors.

The Nazis quickly parted company with many (but by no means all) Germans , Allied and Neutrals by deciding the unfit could really best help the war  by being murdered --- to free up yet more food and more hospital attention for other "fitter" Aryans.

Action T4 - the secret - official - mass murders of all the unfit ended after a couple of years , under strong if muted protests from the general German public.

(It carried on - unofficially - throughout the war and beyond - as a secretive and unorganized effort supported by wink, wink silence from superiors.)

But this public protest only arose in strength with rumours that the Nazi eugenicists planned to start killing the elderly and the wounded soldiers of non-poor German families --- as well as those of the poorest German families.

This social animus against those unable to fight in combat seems to be universal and eternal.

Action 4F

And almost always, the strongest public anger does not spill over against those who are "fit but not at the front" (those in society with valuable special skills working in "deferred" jobs).

This is because they are society's bosses and able to make life miserable for any who dare to complain publicly.

"So you think your husky young Foreman should be at the Pacific Front do you ?"

 "Well then how about you spending some time in the heat of Guadalcanal , Mr drill press operator !"

This implied threat from the powerful had hidden teeth - most men with deferred valuable skills knew that if enough women or blacks were trained to do their jobs, their deferment would end and they would be called up.

This, and not the general prejudice against women and blacks , was the real (if semi-secret) reason why white male worker protests against hiring women and blacks were so frequent and so violent.

So public anger had to be directed instead against the weakest , poorest and least popular members of society --- those 4Fs who came from poor and or minority groups.

They could be safely attacked without any risk that they, their families or their communities could successfully counterattack.

Most girls , just for instance , made it very clear that they won't be seen dating or flirting with those unfortunate teenager college boys with 4F cards.

Seventy five years later this very public rebuke to vulnerable teenage identities clearly still stings in the memoirs of these now elderly men.

Conscious anger mixed with much unconscious guilt in the minds of Allied society's most powerful who were not at the front in WWII (and who had also frequently evaded serving in combat in WWI as well.)

This is shown by the astonishing eagerness with which the Allied elites made the poorest and the weakest in Allied society (its metaphorical 4Fs) the unwitting subjects in endless dangerous medical experiments - as assayed in Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files .

Or the eagerness with which they denied the poorest lifesaving medicines as a form of brutal eugenic triage.

I hope I am not seen as excusing the Nazis' actions but merely stating a historical consensus that the Nazis got even more brutal against the unfit as the objective and subjective conditions of the war worsened for them .

By objective I mean the evidence that in war years of bad European food harvests, they determined not to lose this war (unlike the first war) on the German home front - and so made others suffer more so that Germans continued to eat well.

(Ordinary Germans ate better in WWII than they had during the 1930s' Depression period - because of a government plan that enabled German soldiers to sent home food they bought openly and freely from other Europeans .

 The Nazis secretly made it work financially for them by in effect creating hugely unfair currency exchange rates.)

By subjective, I mean when it seemed clear to the Nazis in the Fall of 1941 that they might not secure new living space in western USSR , they began killing all of Europe's Jews - not just some of the Jews in parts of  Eastern Europe - as a new war objective they could easily reach, to justify all the German war dead.

I mention all this because we mustn't let the Allies off too lightly in these brutal eugenic sweepstakes.

They afterall invented most of the original eugenic dogma the Nazis picked up and ran with.

And the historical evidence indicates that the Allied eugenic actions got more brutal as the war worsened against them.

If the war had continued to worsen badly against them who can say if their 4F Action horrors might not have rivalled those of the Action 4T ?

Certainly, on the military front, the Allied record displays a despicable eagerness to see that the hapless 4Fs of the occupied lands and of the Axis suffered (by Allied bombings) before the 1As of the Allies did (by directly engaging the German troops on Western European soil).

But that squalid history is a post for another day ....

Misfits : despite Allies, Penicillin-for-All

Elites physically and mentally fit but morally unfit ....

Morally, WWII was a truly sordid war where in all the world's nations (with just a few sturdy exceptions) only fought the Axis if the Axis attacked them first.

Certainly that was the case of the two biggest neutrals or non-interventionalists, the USSR and the USA ,but it applies to all but the British Commonwealth as well.

And even in the Commonwealth , in places like Eire, Quebec, Afrikaner South Africa, Congress India et al, hundreds of millions were unwilling to fight the Axis.

So it would not at all be true to say that WWII was fought by national leadership elites (the fittest of their nations by definition) who saw before them a stark choice : life-saving penicillin for all ---- or penicillin only for those Aryan enough or rich enough to have a right to it.

Only a handful of misfits saw both sides in that war as being on the wrong side of that stark choice and who then fought all out - morally - to see that victory was re-defined as Penicillin-for-All.

Just four years after the war's end,  the Allied world - led by Britain and America - cheered to the rafters a film (THE THIRD MAN) that defined the ultimate villainy as being the Allies denying lifesaving penicillin to dying former Axis patients from the city of Hitler's youth.

I think Martin Henry Dawson would have quite liked that.....

WWII : an EUGENIC war , on both sides - nay, all sides

A truly moral Nuremberg Trial would have considered the war conduct of the Allied and Neutrals, as well as that of the Axis...

Now it is well known that Germany spent its second world war preoccupied, not with winning the military war itself, but with eugenically killing all the 4Fs it could find and then tossing them in open pit graves or into furnaces.

(Cite here the Holocaust, Aktion T4 and the Hunger Plan.)

Eugenic Triages from all sides of WWII

Less well known is the fact that the Allies and the Neutrals were also preoccupied with matters eugenic in the midst of an all-out military war : in this case, a steely determination to avoid killing any of their 1As if they could at all help it.

Naval blockades, aerial bombings and denying the spreading of information about new life-saving medicines and pesticides were the ways the Allied hoped to avoid engaging their 1A young males in hand to hand combat with 1A males from Germany, Japan and Italy.

The British scientists and the military had been united as one with British politicians is disclaiming any need for British troops to invade Germany to fight German troops there.

Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of  September 1939, but it was not until the sixth year of the war and during the last months of the
European part of that war, that British 1A males finally engaged in deadly combat with 1A German males on German soil.

(The whole war might have ended in months not years, if only the vastly larger manpower pool of the French and English empires had been conscripted into a ground army intent on invading western Germany while the bulk of her army was in the East , invading Poland.)

Instead, they said, naval blockades and aerial bombings and denying new lifesaving medicine would kill enough women, children and elderly in Occupied Europe and Germany to make the young male German 1As want to voluntarily surrender, far in advance of any British invasion with ground troops upon German soil.

Of course, the Neutrals did the best eugenic job of the lot in preserving their own 1As and not diluting them with any 4F gene pools.

They did so by (A) not joining the effort to defend the weak and the small and the innocent and by (b) not letting any of the weak/small/innocent into their countries as hapless refugees.

The dysgenic myth of WWI

It was claimed by avid eugenists during WWI (and by most educated people after the war ) that only the best had died in the Great War while back home the cripples and mentally deficient had breed like rabbits.

No evidence was put forth to support either of these claims - it seemed so common sensical.

In fact by the end of it,  the Great War had killed millions of men who either had been or would have been rejected as 4F material at the start of the war - a war this big cut a wide swath through all men with two legs, from 18 to 45 , in most combat nations.

And the evidence shows in fact that the physically and mentally challenged people around the world and through all the ages marry less frequently and have kids less frequently than the average population.

It is pretty hard to marry and raise a family without first having a steady well paying job  - as most of us who are physically and mentally fit already know first hand.

How much harder for those with mental or physical challenges ?

So, absorbing this false lesson , all the post WWI world's elites sought to avoid wars where their 'best' took on the 'best' from a nation of equal or greater demographic and military power.

This didn't mean no more war - it just meant that post WWI nations tended to attack nations smaller than themselves or to invade countries bigger than themselves that they thought were divided internally or were inept as warriors.

So Germany and Japan invaded Russia and China under reason one, while Japan attacked America under reason two.

And in any and all cases, nations tried to first win wars by killing or terrifying or starving/freezing the civilians of an opposing nation of a size similar to their own, rather than in engaging in direct combat with that nation's armed forces.

But because eugenics was invented in the victorious Allies's nations and only later taken up by the Axis and Neutrals, anything vaguely universally eugenic about the whole war was strictly excluded from consideration at Nuremberg - only crimes unique to the Axis were considered crimes against humanity.

Trust me on this one, every school child one hundred years from now will know WWII to be an eugenic war from push to finish - and on all sides ....

The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy

Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.

But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".

Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.

I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.

But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.

 On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.

A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.

WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....

Part of "The Penicillin Holocaust" : Allied POWs dying needlessly of infection because the Allies decided they didn't deserve penicillin...

A whole lot of people died needlessly of infections that wartime penicillin could have/ should have cured --- all because the Allies decided to treat it as a military weapon of war --- only to be used to cure lightly wounded Allied combat troops, to get them back under enemy fire as soon as possible.

Clearly that meant they would rather not have to give penicillin to seriously wounded Allies men or to civilian patients at home or in neutral countries.

In addition, no penicillin for dying civilians in occupied nations or in enemy countries either.

None to enemy troops obviously or to enemy POWs ( though this latter decision was against past custom and current international law.)

But it also meant none for dying Allied POWS behind enemy lines either.

Millions of needless deaths : "The Penicillin Holocaust"

These are just some of the human and moral costs when medical doctors, in their role as government and military advisors, counselled keeping penicillin as a secret weapon of war rather than a public and universal lifesaver.

But one doctor sacrificed his own life to oppose this horrendous policy tooth and nail : Henry Dawson ....

Henry Dawson's war aims : "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar..."

The Allies, convinced their troops lacked the Nazi and Japanese killer instinct, spent most of the war trying to prove Dawson wrong by demonstrating that they could be tougher than tough.

But given their overwhelming advantage in men and material over the Axis, it didn't seemed to be working very fast.

But it did eventually work -  at least militarily : only when the Allies seemed sure to win did people in neutral and occupied nations move, ever so slowly, over to the Allied side.

Certainly the moral claims that the Allied raised as to why to support them seemed to have little credibility at home as well as abroad.

Deeds, not words, was what the undecided were looking for - and they found few deeds to reassure them that the Allies wouldn't just be a milder eugenic version of the harshly eugenic Axis.

But in the final days of the long, long war, they saw some reason for hope.

Penicillin the deed

The Allies were beginning to fly penicillin into occupied countries and to neutral sick children and even using it to save the lives of dying Axis POWs : these were deeds, at last, Dawson deeds, not mere empty rhetoric.......