Showing posts with label nuremberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuremberg. Show all posts

Monday, June 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:

"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.

Friday, March 1, 2013

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Earthlings versus the Sky Gods : 1945 and "THE FALL OF MODERNITY"

   Everyone agrees that Post-Modernity began after 1945 and that thus, in some muted --- pastel --- fashion, Modernity must also have began its slow decline in that same momentous year.
   Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
   So 1945, Year of Revolution.
   Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
  No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass  protests or barricaded streets.
   For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
  Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
   In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
  Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
  Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
   At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
   Or a mushroom - your taste......