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 ?
This way of looking at WWII emphasizes that nations were not the only active participants in this conflict, regardless of many academic and popular historians make that claim explicitly or implicitly.
So Spain might have been officially Neutral during WWII , but semi-unofficially many of its men went off to fight with the Axis against the Russian communists while a few others slipped away quietly and volunteered to fight in the Allied armed forces.
Britain was always a combatant on the Allied side, but it too have its divisions of opinion among its citizens.
It had its willing and unwilling conscripts, its eager volunteers and and its turncoat traitors.
It also had a great many citizens ("funk holers") who laid low, kept their mouth shut and who did as little as possible with regard to working in the war economy to shorten the war and thought only of ways to make money and keep safe.
Many of them were quite prepared to make nice with either the British or the German government, depending on who won the war.
I say WWII lasted 15 years .
For me, it really began in Manchuria - attacked in 1931 by Japan while 2 billion other earthlings basically did nothing to stop it.
Its mid-point was the infamous Munich Agreement in late 1938, again a sell-out of a small nation, a sell-out agreement cheered to the walls by 2 billion earthlings.
Even the formal ending of the war didn't stop the deaths.
In 1946, Moldova , a small food-producing part of the USSR, saw many of its farmers semi-deliberately starved to death despite a surplus of food produced.
This was because Moscow took most of Moldova's food to send to Eastern Europe so the Russians could play the role of food-delivering liberators, even if it meant that their own people back home starved.
Fearful of making the large republics like the Ukraine hate Moscow even more for yet another deliberate famine, Stalin chose to pick on a small republic - one he knew couldn't bite back effectively.
Other governments knew of general famine situations throughout the USSR in 1946 but little real noise was made urging Moscow to feed its own first and let America surpluses fed soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.
So Stalin bullied Moldova and again another bully got away with it.
Hirohito, Hitler and Stalin : Bully - Bully - Bully.
Many people said, between 1931 to 1946, that these affairs were just 'schoolyard fights' in distant lands and no concerns of theirs : they chose to be non-interventionalists, chose not to help the smaller party.
But when a High School senior / beefy football star beats up a little girl in the primary grade and chooses to do so in the schoolyard, we should call it for what it really is : a savage case of bullying.
The kids who silently stand around watching an uneven schoolyard 'fight' all grow up one day : and they then stand around silently while Germany beats the hell out of Belgium and Greece et al.
Bystander children become adult bystanders at a whole series of holocausts enacted out in the global schoolyard.....
Showing posts with label manchuria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manchuria. Show all posts
Monday, August 5, 2013
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Not from our war : "Second Front in the Soviet Far East , NOW !"
Dream on.
Shamefully, there was no public Western pressure put on Stalin to open any sort of Second Front on Japan from the North, during the desperate days of mid 1942 or ever after.
Ever after, as in : no major postwar historical school has ever focused on this baneful fact.
Instead Japan and Germany successfully held back, retreating very slowly, while being attacked on only two major fronts at a time.
(They themselves succeeded best when they only attacked on one major front at a time.)
Yet Germany and Japan rapidly fell apart when they were under attack on three major fronts all at once.
In 1944, Germany fell apart the moment it had to supply artillery shells to three major battle zones : in the East, in the West after D-Day in France and in the South as the twenty nation Allied army continued its push into Vienna and Munich via Italy.
In August 1945, Japan also suddenly fell apart when it was under attack on three fronts : in the Pacific from the USA, in the East by the Chinese and British Burmese Army, and now in the North from the USSR.
The Russians only fought Germans and were so carefully neutral towards Japan they won't allow US flights over Soviet airspace en route to Japan ---- even the Swedes and Swiss were far far less neutral than that, to the German war machine.
The British basically only fought Germany and Italy, on land.
The USA fought Japan, Germany and Italy full out, on land, from the Fall of 1942 --- but not decisively, until late 1944, because they lacked support from their other major allies and faced a divided American military brass and public.
Both Germany and Japan needed to face three major land battles at a time to lose, though one major battle front and two minor battle fronts all at the same time might also have spelt a faster doom.
Interesting to imagine the combined effect of a major American landing in the South of France at the same time as a minor British Commonwealth landing in Sicily and a huge Russian offensive against Germany, if tied simultaneously to a major Burmese Army/Chinese offensive and a small Russian advance into Manchuria via Mongolia, coupled with an American bomber campaign from the Aleutians and a land attack on an Japanese island very near to the Japanese main islands.......
Shamefully, there was no public Western pressure put on Stalin to open any sort of Second Front on Japan from the North, during the desperate days of mid 1942 or ever after.
Ever after, as in : no major postwar historical school has ever focused on this baneful fact.
Instead Japan and Germany successfully held back, retreating very slowly, while being attacked on only two major fronts at a time.
(They themselves succeeded best when they only attacked on one major front at a time.)
Yet Germany and Japan rapidly fell apart when they were under attack on three major fronts all at once.
In 1944, Germany fell apart the moment it had to supply artillery shells to three major battle zones : in the East, in the West after D-Day in France and in the South as the twenty nation Allied army continued its push into Vienna and Munich via Italy.
In August 1945, Japan also suddenly fell apart when it was under attack on three fronts : in the Pacific from the USA, in the East by the Chinese and British Burmese Army, and now in the North from the USSR.
The Russians only fought Germans and were so carefully neutral towards Japan they won't allow US flights over Soviet airspace en route to Japan ---- even the Swedes and Swiss were far far less neutral than that, to the German war machine.
The British basically only fought Germany and Italy, on land.
The USA fought Japan, Germany and Italy full out, on land, from the Fall of 1942 --- but not decisively, until late 1944, because they lacked support from their other major allies and faced a divided American military brass and public.
Churchill (Italy) and MacArthur (Philippines) share the blame with Stalin
Both Germany and Japan needed to face three major land battles at a time to lose, though one major battle front and two minor battle fronts all at the same time might also have spelt a faster doom.
Interesting to imagine the combined effect of a major American landing in the South of France at the same time as a minor British Commonwealth landing in Sicily and a huge Russian offensive against Germany, if tied simultaneously to a major Burmese Army/Chinese offensive and a small Russian advance into Manchuria via Mongolia, coupled with an American bomber campaign from the Aleutians and a land attack on an Japanese island very near to the Japanese main islands.......
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
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.....
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.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...