When asked for causes and reasons for WW-II, there are two things which I'd always put at the top of the list. One would be Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution, which was the most major philosophical foundation of the fascist and communist states of the 20'th century, i.e. the idea that your fellow man is basically a meat byproduct of stochastic processes rather than a fellow child of God as had previously been universally believed.
Two would be the question of out-of-control arms races and their consequences. During the age which ended after WW-I the most expensive military items had been capital ships and those had service lives measured in decades. After WW-I, the most major expense items began to include aircraft and tanks and those became outmoded after four or five yerars, leaving the nations wishing to engage in arms races with three bad choices. They could:
- Try to do what England did, i.e. prototype new weapons without actually building them, hoping to have a year or two after the outbreak of any major war in which to ramp up, i.e. hoping to get lucky. This left England with very little in the way of infrastructure to support modern weapons or people trained in their actual use when war did break out.
- Do what France and Poland did, i.e. build complete new generations of weaponry and look like the baddest of the bad for five or six years without getting into a major war. This bankrupted those countries after which socialists took over their governments and decimated their militaries and military industries, leaving them easy pickings for Hitler.
- Do what Hitler did, i.e. try to catch a wave and ride it. Totally implement new generations of weaponry and then try to acquire Kublai Khan's old job title, i.e. King of the World. In other words, the day after you become King of the World or Kha Khan, it won't really matter how much you owe the bankers for whatever it took to get there.
Saddam Hussein had basically fallen into the same trap in 1991, i.e. he basically owed so much money that the only real hope he had was taking over a rich neighbor.
. Poor Walter.
