Moral equivalency : the Nazi Hunger Plan and Allied bombing of civilians

Not enough has been said about how Axis and Allied in WWII were motivated - first and last - by fears of the dysgenic consequences of another WWI style war.

To Germans, WWI was lost by the British blockade starving an undefeatable (militarily) Germany into surrender.

Not that Germany hadn't tried to remain well fed by starving the peoples of the lands it occupied - but clearly, as civilian Germany had still gone hungry and lost the war, they hadn't been nearly rapacious enough.

That wasn't about to happen in WWII  ---- the Hunger Plan against the Slavs and the Holocaust against the Jews were proof of that.

The Allies saw WWI as an event where the fittest sons of the fittest families had disproportionally died in combat while the unfittest stayed well fed and safe at home - safe at home to multiply endlessly.


Conventional human-oriented (infantry and land battle oriented) war was thus not eugenic but dysgenic - killing the fit and preserving the unfit.

A new long range mechanical war directed at the enemy's civilian-operated war factories and their workers was the alternative.

Fit middle class men no longer crawled through the mud - they cooly pushed buttons at the complex command centre of large machines of war : battleships, submarines, bombers, tanks, long range rockets.

They aimed to hit hard and accurate from a long - safe - distance away.

By war's end, tanks could penetrate a half foot of hardened armour from a safe mile away and submarines had torpedoes that could travel 25 miles as could battleship shells.

In the air, bombs were routinely dropped from 25,000 or more feet up and rockets travelled up to 250 miles away to hit cities.

Morally, they were all just stand-off weapons for the squeamish.

Now naval and aerial blockade campaigns could ensure that hundreds of thousands of babies starved slowly to death 2500 remote miles away --- so as not to offend any (diminishing) middle class sensibilities.

German 1A troops were kept fit and fed by starving to death the 4Fs of Eastern Europe.

Britain and America had hoped to never have their 1A troops directly engage 1A Axis troops on German and Japanese home territory.

Killing enough 4F Germans and Japanese by direct civilian bombing and indirect naval blockades should cause the enemy 1A army to surrender first without any need for your own 1A army to be bloodied.

It didn't work in Germany but it sort of did in Japan - after the American A-bomb, in combination with an old-fashioned infantry-led direct land assault by the Russians, tipped the scales.

My stance ?

If you have to defeat an evil-doer by extreme force ( and Hitler, Stalin and Tojo fit that bill) and you have greatly superior population numbers - as the Allies ALWAYS did , the answer is clear.

The means that produces the least deaths among your side and the enemy's side of conscripted soldiers and conscripted civilians is a massive infantry led direct assault on the enemy's home territory on simultaneous multiply fronts.

Britain ,France - even America - were not willing to overwhelm the Axis by large armies - if much/most of the people in those victorious large armies were their colored colonials.

(Let remind you that the largest volunteer army history has ever seen yet was the WWII Indian army.)

If Indian concerns had been addressed and India conscripted at WWII (let alone WWI) levels , the Indian Army might have cowed even Hitler into a negotiated peace rather than be overwhelmingly defeated by 10 million dark Indian infantrymen on German soil.

In WWII, we would rather have lost to fellow white racists than to win by means of a multi-colored armed forces that would give those coloreds the moral means to demand independence or basic human rights.

If the war had to be won by means of people we considered unfit - we'd rather just lose --- the unfits' role in the war were simply to be pliant blockade and bombing victims on the other side.

Luckily , one group of unfits - Dawson's unfits - rejected that role.

Instead these 4Fs repeatly rescued dying 1A soldiers with big needles of cheap, plentiful "Penicillin-for-All" ....