Nazis and Communists and Japanese militarists all acted as if the human gene pool was a fetid swamp , better off drained of all Jews, Romas, Polish intellectuals ,Russian Kulaks, Chinese peasants and the handicapped.
They argued that at an abstract level, mainstream Science supported their interest in a program of active genetic pruning - and they weren't really wrong.
Their war was a first and foremost a war of plenticide against "The Plenitude of Being" , to use Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy's evocative term from his famous book on "The Great Chain of Being".
But we all knew what was happening from the start (Nanking, among others) and yet the world went on doing mostly nothing.
The twin plenticide against abundant compassion
Our historically strong sense of boundless human compassion , concern and pity (a Plentitude of compassion or an Agape amount of love) seemed to have greatly atrophied in those years.
For those were the years of Modernity and Scientism , that horrible 'era of errors' that ran from the 1870s to the 1960s.
Science in that era did not actually discourage feelings of empathy and compassion.
Instead it merely cautioned that acting upon them was a regrettable waste of time - the weak would still go to the wall in the end - and worse - helping them would only harm the overall human race.
"Remember 'The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number' and stifle your pity and your sorrow."
WWII - the very Apogee of Modernity - should not only be remembered for the Nazi et al war of plenticide against the right of all varieties of humanity to exist .
It needs to be remembered as well for the fact that while most of the world did not actively kill other varieties of humanity they still managed , by a sin of omission, to wage plenticide against their normally abundant compassion enough to let it happen...
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