How ever could three nations, with only 1% of earth's land territory and 10% of world population, hold the rest of us at bay, for six long years ?

Neutrality.

The neutrality of the schoolyard bystander - the Nordic disease - which by 1939 had infected almost the whole world.

Accept as a given fact that a Grade Six bully (Hitler) can't really beat the crap out of dozens of primary school kids (Poland et al), not all by themselves, not unless the rest of the schoolyard stands around with their hands in their pockets, agnostic as the results of the 'fight'.

Because in the Age of Human-Only Progress, it was seen as inevitable that the biggest and toughest humans would beat up the smallest of humanity, as it was that they beat up insects and bacteria.

Might was just bound to be right, in the struggle of the survival of the fittest.

Regrettable but true.

Our great great grandparents sighed for a moment, just a moment, over the very sad fate of the Belgians or the Canadian Indians, and then got on with life.....

"The Banality of Indifference" in WWII

Worldwide, for every individual WWII mass-murderer, 99 people were willing to fight to oppose to their behavior while 900 people were simply regretfully indifferent to the suffering they were causing others.

The article is about that vast majority - the nine hundred out of a thousand who all sighed for a moment on first hearing news of yet more brutalities but then did precisely nothing when it came to converting sighs into actions.

Pace Hannah Arendt, this is all about 'the banality of indifference'.

Almost 2.5 billion people lived or were conceived throughout the six years of WWII, of whom 75 million died as the direct or indirect result of the war :  .3% of the world population.

But 750 million suffered terrible privations in occupied or invaded/bombed territories -- many led shorter postwar lives as a result.

Beyond rationing and regulations, most of those in the better off countries also suffered --- particularly from worrying about relatives and friends in combat zones or upon learning of their deaths.

Of those 2.5 billion people, relatively few wanted to mass-murder people in the name of war and enjoyed it and fearlessly publicly justified it.

Let us suggest they might be as few as one person in a thousand - 2.5 million proud wartime mass-murderers world wide.

Most of the millions of others who mass-murdered in the name of war simply followed orders to shot hostages, fire up barns filled with children or bomb residential areas from the air because they feared harsh official punishment or social abuse from their male comrades if they failed to 'act tough' and be 'patriotic'.

To be specific - a mere handful actually and actively gassed or shot 6 million Jews but most of the educated world - in Germany and in the Allied and neutral worlds knew it was happening at the time and still did nothing, as once again the big brutalized the weak and the small.

Which is also what they had done as Manchuria, Ethiopia,Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland,Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania , Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Greece, Yugoslavia all fell one after another, before their bigger neighbours.

A few individuals can hold their heads up for consistently urging military action to stop this onslaught of the big upon the small as early as the beginning of the1930s, but no single nation can do so.

Even the governments of France and Britain in September 1939 first sought a negotiated way out of actually having to go to war upon the invasion of Poland as they had earlier publicly promised.

The facts are harsh : almost no nation ever went into armed combat against the evil Hitler unless and until their landmass or sea vessels were directly attacked by the Nazis.

Until then, most remained agnostic as to the evils of Hitler.

In 1940, most of the world's population thought, in the abstract, that the invasion of the small by the big was morally very wrong ---- but that sadly it was also evolutionarily inevitable.

The inevitable 'wave of the future', in the words of that year's bestselling author, Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

The most successful evolutionary response, she and most of the educated people in the world believed, was to work to protect their 'own kind' and to reduce their morality urges to sending a few food bundles to the afflicted.

They failed to see that all of humanity was their 'own kind' and were light years away from present day thinking that all life on earth is also our 'own kind' and that we are all essential to each other's long term survival on lifeboat earth.

Using Anne's husband's Charles Lindbergh's diaries and verbal utterances in 1939-1941 as an example, protecting all life or protecting all humanity had literally narrowed down to protecting once's fellow white middle class protestant native born Republican Americans from the Mid West.

For Lindbergh's internal enemies list was even longer than that of Richard Nixon, but nowhere as as long as Lindbergh's 'mere indifference to their fate list' : for that spanned the world...

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.....

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.....

During the Ultimate Battle against the Nazi Evil, most of the world spent it parked in NEUTRAL

Only one nation group ( the British Commonwealth) was an combatant during the entire six years of WWII (September 1939 to September 1945) : even the original aggressor, Germany, ceased to be a combatant with its surrender early in 1945.

Every other nation on Earth - bar none - was neutral in the battle against Hitler and the Nazi Evil : for some, most or all of World War Two.

The sad fact is that most of the world's independent nations 'dog-danced' around the greatest moral crisis Humanity has ever faced.


Many independent nations were at first neutral, then supported the Axis, and then finally the Allies : depending whatever material advantage they thought they would gain moment by moment, rather than reflecting on the morality of the conflict and joining the side whose values they closest supported.

Again the British Commonwealth was the exception and it never wavered : it was opposed to Germany's invasion of its neighbours from beginning to end.

Many countries were further divided into two main camps : either over neutrality versus support for combat or between those opposed and pro the Axis.

Many of these nations had citizens fighting in organized groups both for and against the Nazis: so their nation was undergoing an form of  Civil War during the greater world war.

Some even divided like Gaul - in fact very like modern day Gaul.

In 1941, France's public divided into three parts: those who supported Vichy's official "neutrality", those who joined the French SS troops that fought for Hitler, and those members of the Free French Forces who fought against Hitler.

My math suggests that the when you divide the six years of war into the world's population of  independent states (those nations who had the power to decide for themselves whether or not they went to war), the largest lump of "people times days" was for neutrality rather than for combat on one side or the other !

The Good War ? Give me a large break !

The Korean War or the First Gulf War were good wars, where many nations promptly committed real lives and real money to quickly stop a nation from further invading its neighbour.

Parked in neutral during the most important moral conflict ever

By contrast, WWII as a Bad War - particularly in view of the moral stakes involved : which everyone agrees were the highest in all history.

Most people in the world, most of the time, did nothing to stop Hitler from invading Poland and executing its civilians (and did nothing to help all the other nations he subsequently invaded ,s beginning ten months later).

Prove me wrong : note the populations of all the independent states existing in September 1939, and then note how many days each of these independent nations were engaged in combat or parked in neutral.

(For example : Great Britain , 50 million in combat for 6 years. The United States, 135 million, in combat for 3 1/2 years. Turkey, 18 million in combat for zero years and so on.)

Ignore colonies with no real choice whether to fight or stay neutral - like India.

And deal only with nations that make a formal declaration of war, followed by a population-proportional commitment of troops into combat.

I think you will be shocked : how on earth could the Official Story of WWII be at such variance with the cold hard facts ????