Sentiment follows the Science : the world as a bystander, as Bullies Hitler & Stalin beat up the small

We can't hope to explain the moral inactions of the modern world during WWII by simply referring to the postmodern sentiments of  seventy five years later or the premodern sentiments of seventy five years earlier.

That Hitler, Stalin and Tojo invaded small country after small country after small country while the world's peoples did basically nothing, unless and until their own nation was under direct attack, is a fact.

A fact as known to the people of 1940 as it is to us in 2015.

But a fact must first fit into a generally accepted system of explanation to be fully 'understood' : call that system of explanation a global worldview, hegemony, ideology, ethos, sentiment --- what have you.

Modern sentiment (or lack thereof) followed upon Modern Science

I believe most of the educated middle class during the Modern Era did greatly 'regret' that the small and the weak were nothing but road kill beneath the advancing wheels of the biggest civilizations.

But they regretted the small and the weak's demise with a faint shrug of their shoulders --- they firmly believed that the 'Laws of Nature', as demonstrated by modern Science, simply meant the demise of the small was inevitable and could, at best, be only delayed but never stopped.

Their demonstrated lack of 'sentiment' towards WWII's weak and the small was at least consistent with their existing scientific beliefs.

Postmodern sentiment followed postmodern science

By contrast, in the Fall of 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson felt his own scientific research indicated precisely the reverse view of the 'Laws of Nature'.

He felt that in History's long run, the small and the weak tended to vanquish the big and the complex.

The tiny bacteria, for instance, surviving all over the world for four billion years and counting versus the huge dinosaurs : where are they today ?

Dawson's willingness to give up his own life, that Fall of 1940, to see that wartime penicillin was extended to all those dying for lack of it, is usually explained as the result of his great sentiment towards 'the plight' of the weak and the small.

But it could also be argued - it is so argued, at least by me - that his sentiment towards the weak and the small followed precisely his growing (postmodern) scientific understanding of the resilience of the weak and the small ...

Henry Dawson's Social Medicine vs The Holocaust

Sometimes anonymous online commentators glibly refer to Canada's Medicare (a system of taxpayer-supported medical care for all) as a holocaust.

It has plenty of problems but it is not a holocaust - in particular it is not The Holocaust.

That because Social Medicine , to use that term in its 1930s popular political sense rather than in today's restricted academic sense , was in fact the very antithesis of all the medical holocausts that WWII threw up.


The Holocaust , the Hunger Plan , Aktion T4 and certain German and Japanese medical experiments are merely the most infamous of those moral disasters.

Canadian Medicare is a good 21st century example of 1930s Social Medicine.

In theory (and hopefully in practise too) it says that a guilty war criminal with a life threatening infection is triaged to greater and earlier medical care than his innocent victim who has a broken finger - though both will be treated as promptly as we can , to the best extent we can.

Regardless whether or not that they can pay , regardless of whether they are criminal , regardless of whether they brought the illness upon themselves, regardless of their future economic contribution (or burden) to society.

It says all life has an intrinsic absolute right to life and the best health humanly possible and -crucially - it says this right is not contingent but is permanent.

All other medicines can also value any individual life as highly as Social Medicine does but when circumstances change against their own criteria, they are then inclined to view that same life as a 'life unworthy of life-saving medical care'.

Medicine for Profit has no inherent bias against any sexual orientation, race, gender, social class etc : their skin color may vary but the color of their money remains the same.

But if an injury causes someone to lose work and to be no longer able to afford medical care that could get them back to work , Medicine for Profit no longer want to treat them.

At a turn of a dime, an individual goes from "most favoured nation 1A" to "4F outlaw state".

Even in wartime, Medicine for Profit will continue to give the best possible care to people who can't or won't contribute anything to the war effort, - regardless of their race or gender - as long as they can pay handsomely.

But uniquely during wartime , War Medicine emerges and it is equally unbiased as Medicine for Profit seemingly is.

It is willing to give the best possible medical care - free or cheaply - as long as the person will be, after treatment , able to return to combat or can continue to provide a scarce skill vital to the war effort.

But if in wartime, one is both too poor and too permanently disabled to continue to do vital war work, one falls between two harsh cracks and becomes the 4Fs of the 4Fs, now becomes a life judged 'life unworthy of life-saving medicine'.

Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson successfully cured many such 4Fs of the 4Fs, public ward SBE patients regarded as having an invariably fatal disease , despite the wish of the Anglo American medical establishment that they be quietly Slow Coded to death.

They were to be denied the only medicine that could save them - penicillin - and instead deliberately given medical treatments that had always proven useless to stop their disease.

They were passively put to death because they judged - morally - as having no permanent inherent instrinsic value - only one contingent on their continuing to have lots of money or lots of health and scarce skills.

Others were actively put to death during wartime in America to aid the war effort.

Poor , confined, powerless people , 4Fs of the 4Fs, who were manipulated into contracting a potentially fatal disease that the scientists experimenting on them sometimes then proved unable to cure, despite their best medical efforts.

Prisoners, GIs, orphans, people in mental institutions or poorhouses, blacks, aboriginals, the rural poor and uneducated in foreign lands.

All varieties of the powerless, with families unlike to bite back effectively even when they awoke to what was happening to their relatives.

These poor subjects - not patients , because they did not start out with the disease that the experimenters were examining - were reduced to mere tools - on the moral level of the 100 million animals we kill annually for medical science or the countless disposable hand wipes we throw into the landfill.

All this Anglo American wartime abuse of inherently worthy life is a long way from today's Canadian Medicare.

But what it is morally very close to is the sort of values the Allies claimed they were willing to die to defeat - the medical values of Hitler and Tojo ....

WWII : the warlords as scientists ...

Nature Resists, 1939-1945 : science proposes, nature disposes

The Allied-Axis started out fighting one enemy and ended up fighting a totally unexpected enemy.

Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo were all well known for having a strong personal interest in science and technology.

FDR had none, but he was astute enough to know that he needs lots of science and technology and astute enough to give it a free hand.

Willing indeed to risk public ridicule by requesting 50,000 planes a year from the 1940 American economy.

Planes, planes and planes enough to tell the world America was going to fight, if it had to, with high tech machines not low tech doughboys.

So a science war, even a scientism war ; a war exclusively fought between the world's top high tech manpower.

And Nature ?

Yawn !

An inert, passive backdrop.

Or was it ......?

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...

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 : 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.....

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......

a Modernist is anyone who has never changed a diaper...

Hitler, Stalin, Mao,Tojo -  do you think any of those utopian dreamers ever changed a diaper?