That is not a typo: I am interested in the abject historical neglect of the extent to which WWII was a war fought by words as well as by weapons .
No popular audiences wanted the war, so every leading nation at
war had to woo a large number of audiences.
First it had to deal with the concerns of its domestic population - civilians at home and their 'boys' under arms overseas.
Then your allies - their governments and their restless domestic audiences.
The neutrals - you hoped to move them to allies or away from your opponents to at least true neutrality.
Your opponents' domestic population and maybe even their military and elite.
The occupied people and one's colonial populations were extremely important.
A moment's attention would lead one to quickly see the need to divide all these big populations into many subsets, each with their own unique concerns and need for unique messaging.
I tend to think very "election-ly" about everything , so I tend to see the war as a six year long election campaign fought between three major political parties (and a lot of lesser ones) for the hearts and minds of the world's electorate.
Each party laid forth its claims of virtue and attacked the others' shortfall between their virtues claimed and their very sorry failings in practice.
The three parties?
The ANGLO SAXON Atlantic Charter (Four Freedoms) Party , the GERMAN SAXON New Order Party and the JAPANESE SAXON Co-Prosperity Sphere Party....
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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...
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