Hitler never seriously tried to bomb Oxford England , despite its very militarily important engineering works.
The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.
After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.
Showing posts with label hitler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hitler. Show all posts
Aug 26, 2014
Aug 13, 2014
Wartime penicillin only cures one NEW disease , until the Allied medical elite put a stop to its efforts...
Allied doctors "Code Slow" minorities, immigrants and poor to certain death
Sometimes true facts are far stranger than anything that bad acid and bad Hollywood writing could dream up.
Fact is, wartime penicillin's so called 'miracles' usually consisted in curing many diseases than earlier medicines also cured --- albeit very fitfully.
This earlier medications - basically the various biological serums , heavy metal based drugs and the sulfa pills - had dangerous side effects, took a lot longer, were more painful , cost more , required more skill.
Above all, their cure rates were much lower than early penicillin - of the total number of patients both type of medicines treated, penicillin saw far more lives saved.
Only one new disease - SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis ( the disease that made Rheumatic Fever (RF) so terrifying) was converted from nearly 100% fatal to nearly 100% curable , by penicillin and penicillin alone.
(Thank you Dr Dawson on behalf of my brother Bruce, who got heart valve damage from RF but never got SBE.)
Unbelievably , the Anglo-American medical establishment, taking a page from Hitler's eugenic playbook , used 'military necessity' as an excuse not to give life-saving penicillin to militarily-useless SBE patients.
Unlike Polio research - which was never curtailed during the war and mostly afflicted the middle class (can you say 'doctors', boy and girls ?) , SBE mostly afflicted the minorities, immigrants and the poor.
But perhaps I am telling you something you may have already suspected, bless your cynical little souls ...
Jul 7, 2014
Uniformitarian Authoritarianism : yep ! , they're closely related
So there it is then : Sir Charles Lyell and Adolf Hitler joined at the intellectual hip.
Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.
Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.
Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).
Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.
Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.
That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....
Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.
Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.
Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).
Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.
Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.
That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....
Jul 5, 2014
"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"
What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?
In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.
But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...
May 27, 2014
WWII : the warlords as scientists ...
Nature Resists, 1939-1945 : science proposes, nature disposes
The Allied-Axis started out fighting one enemy and ended up fighting a totally unexpected enemy.
Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo were all well known for having a strong personal interest in science and technology.
FDR had none, but he was astute enough to know that he needs lots of science and technology and astute enough to give it a free hand.
Willing indeed to risk public ridicule by requesting 50,000 planes a year from the 1940 American economy.
Planes, planes and planes enough to tell the world America was going to fight, if it had to, with high tech machines not low tech doughboys.
So a science war, even a scientism war ; a war exclusively fought between the world's top high tech manpower.
And Nature ?
Yawn !
An inert, passive backdrop.
Or was it ......?
1939-1945 : scenery chewing actors ...
1939-1945 : 'civilized men' battle each other to divide the natural world - but then , totally unexpectedly , it resists...
"1939 -1945 : Scenery Chewing Actors" is a wonderful ambiguous title.
Does it mean ham actors like Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill tore up the natural world, in passing, as they struggled to lead all humanity ?
Or does it mean does it mean the best laid plans of mousy prime ministers and ratty war lords are blunted and broken when the neutral seeming natural backdrop to their human-only drama turns out to be very much alive around and willing to bite back ?
Or perhaps, that a lot of both can be found in the actual events of that six year long war.
A 'civilized men' upon 'civilized men' military conflict, mixed in with the natural world exhibiting unexpected 'push back' against the pretensions of those 'civilized men' , right across the globe....
Dec 5, 2013
Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science
Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
Nov 19, 2013
"Family" just means you can't divorce your mother or brother like you can your spouse or business partner...
I don't want to imply some lovey-dovey view of reality when I say all life is family.
After all, us humans and the lions both want to kill and eat baby lambies, not lie down together with them.
I mean instead, for example, that we can't divorce the trillions of microbes that live in and on each of us and are in a very real sense, a muddled-up part of us.
Reductionism ,that shared intellectual bond between Hitler and Einstein, simply fails to work as a metaphor of how the world is built up ---- as opposed as to how it looks when we tear it down...
After all, us humans and the lions both want to kill and eat baby lambies, not lie down together with them.
I mean instead, for example, that we can't divorce the trillions of microbes that live in and on each of us and are in a very real sense, a muddled-up part of us.
Reductionism ,that shared intellectual bond between Hitler and Einstein, simply fails to work as a metaphor of how the world is built up ---- as opposed as to how it looks when we tear it down...
Nov 4, 2013
Commensality : closed , open --- and global
Hitler regarded German Aryans as family - so they all got invited to eat at his table - but German Jews and German Romas did not - they might have once been Germans citizens but were not 'family'.
So, they got no meal invite but rather a whiff of lethal gas instead.
Hitler practised what is technically called "closed" commensality : only inviting a select few to dine around the common table.
Jesus (and Martin Henry Dawson with penicillin) practised "open" commensality : all humanity was invited to the family dining table .
Practising closed or open commensality are voluntary decisions : acts of free volition.
But today, many people like myself don't believe one can "practise" global commensality --- we simply regard it as an established, inevitable -scientific - fact of life.
All Life, small and big, willy-nilly, dines around the only dinner table that Life in the universe appears to have : lifeboat Earth.
Taking in each other's laundry in endless cycles of energy and matter use and re-use.
Dawson seemed to be working towards such a global view of commensality but died very young before his 49th birthday.
However, interestingly, his personal research interest over his short lifetime was in the robust commensality (shared on both sides) of microbes and humanity....
So, they got no meal invite but rather a whiff of lethal gas instead.
Hitler practised what is technically called "closed" commensality : only inviting a select few to dine around the common table.
Jesus (and Martin Henry Dawson with penicillin) practised "open" commensality : all humanity was invited to the family dining table .
Practising closed or open commensality are voluntary decisions : acts of free volition.
But today, many people like myself don't believe one can "practise" global commensality --- we simply regard it as an established, inevitable -scientific - fact of life.
All Life, small and big, willy-nilly, dines around the only dinner table that Life in the universe appears to have : lifeboat Earth.
Taking in each other's laundry in endless cycles of energy and matter use and re-use.
Dawson seemed to be working towards such a global view of commensality but died very young before his 49th birthday.
However, interestingly, his personal research interest over his short lifetime was in the robust commensality (shared on both sides) of microbes and humanity....
Aug 5, 2013
WWII: 2 billion moral decisions
Morally, for Earth's two billion individuals in those years, WWII (1931-1946) was about one thing and one thing only.
It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?
This way of looking at WWII emphasizes that nations were not the only active participants in this conflict, regardless of many academic and popular historians make that claim explicitly or implicitly.
So Spain might have been officially Neutral during WWII , but semi-unofficially many of its men went off to fight with the Axis against the Russian communists while a few others slipped away quietly and volunteered to fight in the Allied armed forces.
Britain was always a combatant on the Allied side, but it too have its divisions of opinion among its citizens.
It had its willing and unwilling conscripts, its eager volunteers and and its turncoat traitors.
It also had a great many citizens ("funk holers") who laid low, kept their mouth shut and who did as little as possible with regard to working in the war economy to shorten the war and thought only of ways to make money and keep safe.
Many of them were quite prepared to make nice with either the British or the German government, depending on who won the war.
I say WWII lasted 15 years .
For me, it really began in Manchuria - attacked in 1931 by Japan while 2 billion other earthlings basically did nothing to stop it.
Its mid-point was the infamous Munich Agreement in late 1938, again a sell-out of a small nation, a sell-out agreement cheered to the walls by 2 billion earthlings.
Even the formal ending of the war didn't stop the deaths.
In 1946, Moldova , a small food-producing part of the USSR, saw many of its farmers semi-deliberately starved to death despite a surplus of food produced.
This was because Moscow took most of Moldova's food to send to Eastern Europe so the Russians could play the role of food-delivering liberators, even if it meant that their own people back home starved.
Fearful of making the large republics like the Ukraine hate Moscow even more for yet another deliberate famine, Stalin chose to pick on a small republic - one he knew couldn't bite back effectively.
Other governments knew of general famine situations throughout the USSR in 1946 but little real noise was made urging Moscow to feed its own first and let America surpluses fed soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.
So Stalin bullied Moldova and again another bully got away with it.
Hirohito, Hitler and Stalin : Bully - Bully - Bully.
Many people said, between 1931 to 1946, that these affairs were just 'schoolyard fights' in distant lands and no concerns of theirs : they chose to be non-interventionalists, chose not to help the smaller party.
But when a High School senior / beefy football star beats up a little girl in the primary grade and chooses to do so in the schoolyard, we should call it for what it really is : a savage case of bullying.
The kids who silently stand around watching an uneven schoolyard 'fight' all grow up one day : and they then stand around silently while Germany beats the hell out of Belgium and Greece et al.
Bystander children become adult bystanders at a whole series of holocausts enacted out in the global schoolyard.....
It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?
This way of looking at WWII emphasizes that nations were not the only active participants in this conflict, regardless of many academic and popular historians make that claim explicitly or implicitly.
So Spain might have been officially Neutral during WWII , but semi-unofficially many of its men went off to fight with the Axis against the Russian communists while a few others slipped away quietly and volunteered to fight in the Allied armed forces.
Britain was always a combatant on the Allied side, but it too have its divisions of opinion among its citizens.
It had its willing and unwilling conscripts, its eager volunteers and and its turncoat traitors.
It also had a great many citizens ("funk holers") who laid low, kept their mouth shut and who did as little as possible with regard to working in the war economy to shorten the war and thought only of ways to make money and keep safe.
Many of them were quite prepared to make nice with either the British or the German government, depending on who won the war.
I say WWII lasted 15 years .
For me, it really began in Manchuria - attacked in 1931 by Japan while 2 billion other earthlings basically did nothing to stop it.
Its mid-point was the infamous Munich Agreement in late 1938, again a sell-out of a small nation, a sell-out agreement cheered to the walls by 2 billion earthlings.
Even the formal ending of the war didn't stop the deaths.
In 1946, Moldova , a small food-producing part of the USSR, saw many of its farmers semi-deliberately starved to death despite a surplus of food produced.
This was because Moscow took most of Moldova's food to send to Eastern Europe so the Russians could play the role of food-delivering liberators, even if it meant that their own people back home starved.
Fearful of making the large republics like the Ukraine hate Moscow even more for yet another deliberate famine, Stalin chose to pick on a small republic - one he knew couldn't bite back effectively.
Other governments knew of general famine situations throughout the USSR in 1946 but little real noise was made urging Moscow to feed its own first and let America surpluses fed soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.
So Stalin bullied Moldova and again another bully got away with it.
Hirohito, Hitler and Stalin : Bully - Bully - Bully.
Many people said, between 1931 to 1946, that these affairs were just 'schoolyard fights' in distant lands and no concerns of theirs : they chose to be non-interventionalists, chose not to help the smaller party.
But when a High School senior / beefy football star beats up a little girl in the primary grade and chooses to do so in the schoolyard, we should call it for what it really is : a savage case of bullying.
The kids who silently stand around watching an uneven schoolyard 'fight' all grow up one day : and they then stand around silently while Germany beats the hell out of Belgium and Greece et al.
Bystander children become adult bystanders at a whole series of holocausts enacted out in the global schoolyard.....
Jul 8, 2013
Bystanders make Bullies : in schoolyards or in World Wars
When Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler first crawled out from under their rocks and set to work, the nations they led were relatively weak and ally-less, particularly compared to the combined 'rest of the world', a world that professed to oppose them root and branch.
But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.
Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.
The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.
In bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango : one active bully and many in-active bystanders...
But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.
Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.
The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.
In bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango : one active bully and many in-active bystanders...
Jul 2, 2013
Hitler vs Henry Dawson : why contrast these two scientists ?
War historians are unlikely to ever be happy with a Hollywood movie presenting WWII as "The Battle between Ultimate Evil and Ultimate Good".
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Jun 10, 2013
It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini
Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
May 22, 2013
WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists
Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.
What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.
To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.
A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.
But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.
But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.
But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.
Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.
The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.
Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)
This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.
Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.
But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.
Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.
Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.
Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.
In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).
I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.
Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma), with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....
May 7, 2013
WWII : From Manchuria Incident to Nagasaki, NEUTRALITY was majority position of world's sovereign nations
The idea that Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mussolini are among the most evil leaders of all time - and that people like them must be stopped at all costs - is a relatively recent idea.
It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking, weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.
Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.
Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.
My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.
Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.
As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.
In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.
Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.
Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !
Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.
An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.
Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.
The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.
If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case) could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.
In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.
In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.
(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)
America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.
One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.
Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?
I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.
The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.
A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.
In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.
It saw the then new idea of Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.
One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.
Nature ruled !
And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.
So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.
It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.
But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.
As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.
Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.
Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....
It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking, weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.
Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.
Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.
My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.
Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.
As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.
In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.
Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.
Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !
Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.
An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.
Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.
The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.
If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case) could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.
In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.
In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.
(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)
America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.
One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.
Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?
I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.
The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.
A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.
In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.
It saw the then new idea of Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.
One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.
Nature ruled !
And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.
So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.
It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.
But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.
As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.
Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.
Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....
May 4, 2013
Civilization, regarded as a "Cartwright Machine"
A "Cartwright Machine" is a powerful and unique way, created by famed philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, of looking again at all of Humanity's machines , mental as well as physical.
Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.
This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.
The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.
Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.
For example:
The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.
Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.
The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.
Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.
But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.
Round One to Civilization.
But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.
Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally) quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.
Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.
An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !
The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.
A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.
More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.
(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)
But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.
Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.
A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.
But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use all the guns it made.
(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)
Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.
Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.
The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.
The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.
Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.
Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?
Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced, kicks in on top.
A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.
Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.
But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.
In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.
But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.
Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.
Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.
Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.
This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.
And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.
German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.
This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.
None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.
They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.
The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.
It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed, that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.
The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of Hawaii.
But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.
Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.
(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)
The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .
In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.
WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.
This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of Total War .....
Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.
This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.
The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.
Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.
For example:
The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.
Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.
The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.
Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.
But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.
Round One to Civilization.
But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.
Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally) quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.
Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.
An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !
The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.
A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.
More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.
(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)
But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.
Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.
A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.
But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use all the guns it made.
(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)
Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.
Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.
The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.
The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.
Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.
Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?
Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced, kicks in on top.
A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.
Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.
But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.
In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.
But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.
Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.
Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.
Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.
This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.
And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.
German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.
This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.
None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.
They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.
The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.
It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed, that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.
The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of Hawaii.
But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.
Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.
(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)
The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .
In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.
WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.
This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of Total War .....
Apr 30, 2013
Allies gave penicillin only to 1A soldiers for same reason they gave Czechoslovakia only to Hitler
The Allies weaponizing penicillin was as morally wrong as appeasing Hitler by giving him Czechoslovakia on a platter , and for exactly the same reasons.
The Allies totally failed to see that giving everything to the mighty and nothing to the weak was exactly what caused the war in the first place: weaponizing penicillin was not going to win the war but rather cause Allies to lose the moral peace.
'Eugenicide with an English accent' was not a moral counterweight to Hitler's values, but merely an Anglo-Saxon cousin of his.
Henry Dawson realized, very early on in the Fall of 1940, that any cause willing to save the lives of its very weakest, such as the SBEs, even during a Total War, would be a cause worthy of dying for.
By contrast, any cause that was only a weak 'me too' of its enemy's morality wasn't going to get 20 year old infantrymen up and out of their foxholes with any alacrity when the whistle blew.
Justice is only truly just when it is as fair to the weak as it is to the mighty, as fair to the foolish as it is to the wise : but God knows it isn't easy to make each new generation of humanity realize this.
The Germans, Japanese, Soviets did have a cause they believed was worthy of dying for, perverted as it was ---- one reason why as individuals and in small groups, they were usually much better troops than any of their opposing Allied troops.
Interestingly, the free Polish troops were also considered to be braver than the other Allied troops : they knew they were going to have to fight very hard to secure the postwar fate of Poland - to keep it out of Allied Russian as well as Axis German hands.
They lost, thanks to FDR - but Dawson didn't.
Penicillin was de-weaponized , albeit only by loud public demand and against government wishes, and the Allies narrowly escaped being accused, postwar, having having caused a war crime of omission....
The Allies totally failed to see that giving everything to the mighty and nothing to the weak was exactly what caused the war in the first place: weaponizing penicillin was not going to win the war but rather cause Allies to lose the moral peace.
'Eugenicide with an English accent' was not a moral counterweight to Hitler's values, but merely an Anglo-Saxon cousin of his.
Henry Dawson realized, very early on in the Fall of 1940, that any cause willing to save the lives of its very weakest, such as the SBEs, even during a Total War, would be a cause worthy of dying for.
By contrast, any cause that was only a weak 'me too' of its enemy's morality wasn't going to get 20 year old infantrymen up and out of their foxholes with any alacrity when the whistle blew.
Justice is only truly just when it is as fair to the weak as it is to the mighty, as fair to the foolish as it is to the wise : but God knows it isn't easy to make each new generation of humanity realize this.
The Germans, Japanese, Soviets did have a cause they believed was worthy of dying for, perverted as it was ---- one reason why as individuals and in small groups, they were usually much better troops than any of their opposing Allied troops.
Interestingly, the free Polish troops were also considered to be braver than the other Allied troops : they knew they were going to have to fight very hard to secure the postwar fate of Poland - to keep it out of Allied Russian as well as Axis German hands.
They lost, thanks to FDR - but Dawson didn't.
Penicillin was de-weaponized , albeit only by loud public demand and against government wishes, and the Allies narrowly escaped being accused, postwar, having having caused a war crime of omission....
Apr 25, 2013
Hitler and his strongest critics agree: Holocaust unique because it sought to kill an entire ethnic group
I don't agree.
I believe Hitler and his killing crews sought to make it easy on themselves while killing ten million Jews in cold blood, by not regarding them as ten million different individuals but merely as one great big reified lump, an ethnicity.
I don't believe that Hitler and his crew could have killed more than a few dozen a day, and even then only once in a while, if they had to sit behind a desk and look at the photos in hundreds of dossiers, devoid of ethnicity/religion /politics and decide which ones of those individual faces lived and which ones died.
Even Stalin, a very hands on guy when it came to the execution of the elite of the USSR, found it tough to do this sort of work all the time.
He often avoid all that hard thinking and deciding by simply issuing an order to the NRVD directing that all POWs with the simple label, "Polish", must be killed by next week.
Then he went off ,with a bottle in hand, to relax by watching a Hollywood comedy.
Sixty million individuals were killed in WWII ,including six million Jews - smoothly and easily - by deliberately not regarding them as sixty million highly different individuals.
We must not let WWII like thinking slip in sideways by letting historians reifying Hitler's victims into a few big lumps.
We must always seek to unbundle their lives and the lives of those 'much like them' who did not die, back into individual stories.
We must always remember that individual killers killed individual victims and overcome the easy (bottle in hand/Hollywood comedy) solution of simply assigning collective guilt to account for collective horrors and calling it an academic day.
Only in Hitler's mind, did one reified lump called "all Aryans" want to kill another reified lump called "all Jews"......
I believe Hitler and his killing crews sought to make it easy on themselves while killing ten million Jews in cold blood, by not regarding them as ten million different individuals but merely as one great big reified lump, an ethnicity.
I don't believe that Hitler and his crew could have killed more than a few dozen a day, and even then only once in a while, if they had to sit behind a desk and look at the photos in hundreds of dossiers, devoid of ethnicity/religion /politics and decide which ones of those individual faces lived and which ones died.
Even Stalin, a very hands on guy when it came to the execution of the elite of the USSR, found it tough to do this sort of work all the time.
He often avoid all that hard thinking and deciding by simply issuing an order to the NRVD directing that all POWs with the simple label, "Polish", must be killed by next week.
Then he went off ,with a bottle in hand, to relax by watching a Hollywood comedy.
Sixty million individuals were killed in WWII ,including six million Jews - smoothly and easily - by deliberately not regarding them as sixty million highly different individuals.
We must not let WWII like thinking slip in sideways by letting historians reifying Hitler's victims into a few big lumps.
We must always seek to unbundle their lives and the lives of those 'much like them' who did not die, back into individual stories.
We must always remember that individual killers killed individual victims and overcome the easy (bottle in hand/Hollywood comedy) solution of simply assigning collective guilt to account for collective horrors and calling it an academic day.
Only in Hitler's mind, did one reified lump called "all Aryans" want to kill another reified lump called "all Jews"......
Mar 18, 2013
1939-1945 : Big MO goes Postal instead of going Monumental
Big MO is an appropriate nickname for The Age of Modernity because there was always something inhumanly massive about almost everything and anything that that age and the people within it turned their hands to.
Very hard indeed to imagine the people of the early 1940s not going Postal, and not going to deadly war with each other.
But if they hadn't been building bunkers and had been building monuments and buildings instead, this ponderous essence in their inner character might still be visible.
Hitler and Stalin, not wanting to be outdone by the Hoover Dam and the Maginot Line, were planning to leave their own marks in concrete and rebar steel, massive and tedious beyond all belief.
Modernity was all about regarding Reality as being thermo-settable : plastic until cured and then rigid forever more.
Concrete is the thermoset plastic par excellent : broken up, it is useless to re-melt into new concrete.
Rebar steel, while appearing to be plastic only when red hot and rigid at normal temperatures ( ie thermoset plastic in character) , is actually also somewhat thermosoft plastic in character as well.
Because used steel can be remelted and molded into a new shape as scrap, as part of the normal steel-making process.
Armour steel is thermoset plastic in its character, and became the wartime symbol of Modernity's massive and rigid nature.
Armour plate is plastic when red hot but at normal temperatures, it resists all change : even when change is coming at it in the form of a dense tungsten core of an anti-tank round moving in at 2500 miles an hour !
Bombers, bombs, bomber fleets - perhaps the most typical expression of Modernity at war, got steadily bigger and more armoured as the war progressed.
As did tanks, tank guns and tank fleets.
Ditto naval Taskforces : bigger battleships, bigger guns, bigger aircraft carriers, more armour, more speed, more aircraft and escort vessels.
More, more, more : every war machine just got steadily bigger, heavier, faster, higher, lower : extremes of any and all sorts.
Notably as the world got more war machines and the machines got bigger and fatter, the world's population growth shrank and people got thinner and thinner.
In WWII, (Modernity gone Postal), Modernity showed its true colors : placing machines before people even in the face of near universal malnutrition.
Very hard indeed to imagine the people of the early 1940s not going Postal, and not going to deadly war with each other.
But if they hadn't been building bunkers and had been building monuments and buildings instead, this ponderous essence in their inner character might still be visible.
Hitler and Stalin, not wanting to be outdone by the Hoover Dam and the Maginot Line, were planning to leave their own marks in concrete and rebar steel, massive and tedious beyond all belief.
Modernity was all about regarding Reality as being thermo-settable : plastic until cured and then rigid forever more.
Concrete is the thermoset plastic par excellent : broken up, it is useless to re-melt into new concrete.
Rebar steel, while appearing to be plastic only when red hot and rigid at normal temperatures ( ie thermoset plastic in character) , is actually also somewhat thermosoft plastic in character as well.
Because used steel can be remelted and molded into a new shape as scrap, as part of the normal steel-making process.
Armour steel is thermoset plastic in its character, and became the wartime symbol of Modernity's massive and rigid nature.
Armour plate is plastic when red hot but at normal temperatures, it resists all change : even when change is coming at it in the form of a dense tungsten core of an anti-tank round moving in at 2500 miles an hour !
Bombers, bombs, bomber fleets - perhaps the most typical expression of Modernity at war, got steadily bigger and more armoured as the war progressed.
As did tanks, tank guns and tank fleets.
Ditto naval Taskforces : bigger battleships, bigger guns, bigger aircraft carriers, more armour, more speed, more aircraft and escort vessels.
More, more, more : every war machine just got steadily bigger, heavier, faster, higher, lower : extremes of any and all sorts.
Notably as the world got more war machines and the machines got bigger and fatter, the world's population growth shrank and people got thinner and thinner.
In WWII, (Modernity gone Postal), Modernity showed its true colors : placing machines before people even in the face of near universal malnutrition.
Mar 13, 2013
The "Not So Good" War : September 1931- December 1941
The Good War began December 11th 1941 when Adolf Hitler persuaded a reluctant American Congress to declare war against the evil of Nazism.
It lasted three years and eight months, from when America declared war on the evilness of Nazi Germany until August 1945, when America defeated the evilness of Tojo's Japan.
It is the war between the armed forces of morality and the armed forces of evil that American TV chooses to celebrate endlessly.
Infrequently discussed - in America - though perhaps not in the rest of the world, was the ten years and three months of The Not So Good War.
It began with the manufactured Manchuria incident in September 1931 that allowed Japan to brutally invade China without any reaction from the armed forces of morality.
Eventually it involved two dozen countries being invaded by aggressive neighbours without any action taken to defend them by the armed forces of morality.
That all changed when Hitler's declaration of military war against America on December 11th 1941, forced Congress and America to defend itself against this new military threat.
But this realpolitik approach to dealing with the worst evilness the world has ever known didn't make for good propaganda, both during the war and ever since, and so the War of Good against Evil was created - mostly, it must be said, on a Hollywood backlot set at the time
And ever since then, mostly it has been created in popular American history books, films and TV documentaries.
The big problem is that in any branch of any public library, there will also be literally hundreds of books, films and TV documentaries about the Holocaust and their basic line - to their authors' credit - is that America knew all about the Holocaust and did nothing while it was happening.
Hard to reconcile these two very popular "popular history" subjects , the Good War and the Holocaust , isn't it ?
It is almost as if the victims of all those years of the Not So Good War have become honorary Holocaust victims, with the six million dead European Jews also standing in for millions more dead all around the world who America also knew about at the time but did nothing to help.
Because in many ways, the Not So Good War carried right on through December 11th 1941, on and on well past the official end of WWII.
Then 1939-1945 could best be seen as a six year effort to violently subjugate the Polish people, begun by Hitler, but when he proved to be not up for the job, was finished by Stalin, with the complicity of Churchill and FDR.
The Good War, by this reckoning , was just an cosmetic overlay over a series of episodes between a group of superpowers, with smaller nations mere pawns in the conflict .....
It lasted three years and eight months, from when America declared war on the evilness of Nazi Germany until August 1945, when America defeated the evilness of Tojo's Japan.
It is the war between the armed forces of morality and the armed forces of evil that American TV chooses to celebrate endlessly.
Infrequently discussed - in America - though perhaps not in the rest of the world, was the ten years and three months of The Not So Good War.
It began with the manufactured Manchuria incident in September 1931 that allowed Japan to brutally invade China without any reaction from the armed forces of morality.
Eventually it involved two dozen countries being invaded by aggressive neighbours without any action taken to defend them by the armed forces of morality.
That all changed when Hitler's declaration of military war against America on December 11th 1941, forced Congress and America to defend itself against this new military threat.
But this realpolitik approach to dealing with the worst evilness the world has ever known didn't make for good propaganda, both during the war and ever since, and so the War of Good against Evil was created - mostly, it must be said, on a Hollywood backlot set at the time
And ever since then, mostly it has been created in popular American history books, films and TV documentaries.
The big problem is that in any branch of any public library, there will also be literally hundreds of books, films and TV documentaries about the Holocaust and their basic line - to their authors' credit - is that America knew all about the Holocaust and did nothing while it was happening.
Hard to reconcile these two very popular "popular history" subjects , the Good War and the Holocaust , isn't it ?
It is almost as if the victims of all those years of the Not So Good War have become honorary Holocaust victims, with the six million dead European Jews also standing in for millions more dead all around the world who America also knew about at the time but did nothing to help.
Because in many ways, the Not So Good War carried right on through December 11th 1941, on and on well past the official end of WWII.
Then 1939-1945 could best be seen as a six year effort to violently subjugate the Polish people, begun by Hitler, but when he proved to be not up for the job, was finished by Stalin, with the complicity of Churchill and FDR.
The Good War, by this reckoning , was just an cosmetic overlay over a series of episodes between a group of superpowers, with smaller nations mere pawns in the conflict .....
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