WWII lasted over twenty five years (with the last six years involving combat operations in every corner of the world) --- combat that saw seventy million die and a billion more suffered greatly.
It pitted - at times - all of the then fashionable ideologies (Neutrality, Fascism, Mixed Market Capitalism, Communism, Anti-Modernity Churches) against each other in mortal (if not always physical) combat.
But almost a century later (need I remind you that the Russian Revolution is exactly 100 years old next year ?) what it is becoming clear is that it was never a Total War, at least not in any cultural sense.
The contesting powerful elites within all the nations (Neutrals, Allies & Axis) all shared too similar a worldview with their national and international opponents to unleash a truly cultural Total War.
Stuck inside the mono-modernity whale like all virtually everyone born between about 1865 and 1925, even the most fiercely anti-modernity church leaders were blinkered in their unconscious acceptance of currently fashionable anti-compassion assumptions.
One has only to see how limited was the Soviet use of women's mental and leadership abilities, even in the very darkest of days for the USSR.
Or how unwilling were the Allies to actually apply the soaring principles of the Atlantic Charter to their own domestic affairs.
Or the Allies & Neutrals' & The Churches unwillingness to loudly emphasize that ending the Axis mass killing of our fellow human beings (the Jews, Romas, Slavs and Han Chinese) was something that all collective humanity just had to involve itself in.
But what seemed to have happened during WWII's six long disappointing years of combat (disappointing for all sides) was that much of humanity began losing a fundamental confidence in the ability of mono-modernity to correctly predict and control the future.
With those early - but profound - doubts, we begin to see a shift to the sort of poly-modernity that is prevalent today...
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