Monoculturalism KNOWS the one right easy way ahead - so who needs alternatives, allies... or employees ?

While that whole violent era between 1875 and 1965 was notably and horribly selfish, surprisingly,  this was actually incidental to its main thrust.

Hubris, not selfishness, was its key characteristic.

It simply convinced itself that the deep structure of Reality was easily reduced to something quite simple and quite predictable, particularly compared to the apparent surface complexity of Reality.

If it was then simple to pick the one and only most correct way to proceed in all aspects of life - and that way forward was dead easy to manage as well - why bother with other peoples who might offer (obviously erroneous) alternative solutions to each problem?

Other people, worse, who consider all possible solutions to be iffy at best and requiring many allies & employees to be even a little successful !

If Austria, Czechoslovia, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway et al had nothing to offer that wasn't second-rate to your own completely right and fully adequate solutions, why then bother to go to their defence ?

Neutrality - the default position for 90% of the world in September 1939  - was not just bystander-at-a-bullying-session selfishness in fancy dress, it was hubris in tails ....

Monoculturalism isn't just the thousands who murdered Jews and Roma but also the billions who were bystanders

It is comforting to billions of us - some of us who lived through WWII and the rest direct descendants of others who lived through that war - to see that much of the current Holocaust discussion now  focusses on the mindset of the thousands of individuals who directly murdered tens of millions of people in cold blood between 1939 and 1945.

Geonocide Porn - the details recounted over and over.

So vivid.

But the role of the Holocaust enablers was much more diffuse, much less vivid.

It consisted of  billions of people knowing that mass killings were going on, perhaps even sighing in regret , but then basically doing nothing to stop it.

Choosing instead perhaps to indirectly profit from the boost to your own national economy through infusions of  stolen Jewish gold.

Or working  to see that no Jewish refugees got admitted to your country or even receive passage across your country to somewhere where they might be taken in.

Monoculturalism is self interest and selfishness made into a public ideology and world view and it defined the majority of the world during WWII while  polyculturalism - accepting that while people can be very different they are also ultimately fellow human beings worthy of as much life and dignity as we seek for ourselves - was a rare commodity indeed.

One worth celebrating in my book-blog MO goes PO...

Multiculturalism is the 'token hippie' variant of Monoculturalism

Seventy five years after WWII should have taught them better, all nations remain de facto monocultural but have learned to put up with some token multiculturalism, just as long as it restricts itself to a few street festivals with dancers in colourful 'ethnic' costumes and lots of spicy dishes.

But as the grandson of grandparents who came to Canada as young adults from England and Hungary, I have no one 'old country' ethnic culture to fit into under this multiple but strictly separate cultures model.

Instead I am fully polycultural - sharing a mix of Canadian, British, Hungarian and even American cultures within myself.

I don't think I am alone --- because even those of us who don't have mixed parentage still grow up in a vast globe-wide inter-related mix of cultural influences that simply were unavailable to the pre-war generation.

So, for example, the chances of a draft age American teenager enjoying a sub-titled Japanese monster-from-the-deep movie (and thus gaining some insight into the shared humanity of American and Japanese culture) was less than zero in 1940, but a commonplace event today.

If I had to think of the most visible prewar symbol of monoculturalism I would think of the Isolationism movement in the USA ( a movement shared most of the rest of the world between 1938 and 1941).

But to find a fitting symbol of the new postwar polyculturalism, I can think of nothing better than the growing coalition of the United Nations in place by the Fall of 1945.

But that massive global change first had to happen inside the minds of millions of individuals over the six years of WWII --- a conflict and a battle that remained all mental, internal and private.

Not easy then to write about.

I have chosen to focus, instead, on a largely unknown conflict within the Allied world over just who (or what) would make wartime penicillin and just who would get it.

Because, I believe it to be the best possible example of that internal mental conflict looked like when it was made external, physical and visible ...