1845-1945 : SECOND Industrial Revolution or the SECOND Fall of Man ?

Maybe a bit of both ?

The-People-Of-The-Second-Fall claim they have repudiated Original Sin and that as a result, anything that God can do, they can do too - only better.

As Rickey Santorum, the prelate of The Church of the Deniers ,  reminds us :

"We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create."

When God's Natural World makes mistakes, its our job to save Nature from itself and fix things up.

Sort of like what God Himself would have done, if only he was as smart as us....

Nov 1938-Nov 1945 :The SEVEN YEARS of Silence

In mid-November 1938,  all the reading world heard about KRISTALNACHT and the organized Nazi attacks against all Jewish people they could get their hands on at the time.

It wasn't till exactly seven long years later,
that all the reading world again learned about fresh Nazi attacks against Jews.

Mid-November 1945 marked the beginning of the most famous of the Nuremberg trials.

Only this time, the Jews the Nazis could get their hands on numbered nine million ,not ninety thousand , and the Nazis were hardly restrained by world public opinion - though as it turned out, they had no fears on that account.

 Amazingly,death camps like Treblinka had started being discovered a good year before the Nuremberg Trials.

However the world hadn't immediately realized that they were a new low in global cruelty - camps designed for death (and death only) .

 Rather they were seen as particularly brutal versions of the long familiar 1930s Concentration Camps seen in Germany proper.

 (Basically imprisonment-at-hard-labour camps.)

In addition, Jews were seen at first as just one of dozens of ethnic groups killed in these camps - rather than being these camps' prime focus and their largest number of victims -  in absolute numbers and ,above all, in relative terms.

November 1945 changed all that as the world heard about the Six Million Dead for the first time.

This because while reports about the millions of Jews, Poles and Russians being killed during the war were also reported during the war, they were not featured in any media - this knowledge was public but not popular, in my special sense of those terms.

WWII has been given many labels : a very damning one is "The SEVEN YEARS of Silence" ...

The heart-less HEARTLAND

You gotta admire their consistency:

1940 Isolationists

1942 Polish Holocaust Deniers

2012 Environmental Crisis Deniers...

Crisis-Deniers say THEY won WWII, but I deny that...

It is clear: whoever wins "The War over the Interpretation of World War Two" also wins "The Crisis-Denier War" .

That Battle of Interpretation is over just who won and just who lost WWII (and won or lost it how) .

The truth is nobody won WWII, at least no human society won WWII.

 At best, perhaps, Mother Nature and her human friends won WWII - at least won the intellectual battle part of that war.

If we are honest and compare the final results for human planners against their initial expectations, we must agree 1945 was a crushing defeat for planners on all sides of the war.

But the "MORDER SIND UNTER UNS" are still here, still denying.

When it comes to denying Holocausts, why stop at just one?

They might as well admit it : they're addicted to denial.

Deny, Deny, Deny.

"Hear no evil, see no evil, above all, smell no evil: deny, deny, deny."

They see no crisis, only successes.

They get away with it, at least among older people, because they claim the MYTH of WWII backs their position.

 'Modernist Science found the solutions then and it will do so again ; we just need a few more Manhattan Projects.'

The WWII fact is that WWII science, modernist science, "almost lost Detroit"; the WWII myth is that modernist science saved it.

Chutzpah indeed is modernist science claiming it saved Detroit, when in fact, "we almost lost Detroit" .

The legend of WWII is that "Allied Science beat Axis Soldiers".

"They had the better soldiers but we had the better scientists."

"Modernist Science rescuing the civilized world from Atavistic Violent Warfare."

But Scientism, instead of claiming credit for ending WWII, should accept the bulk of the blame for starting it.

Hitler/Stalin/Tojo were bog-ordinary criminal scum floating upon an extraordinary ocean of evil unleashed by the relentless logic of Modernity and the Enlightenment.

They seized the opportunity to do wrong on a global scale unseen before - but who provided the opportunity ?

Now modernist science, bloodied but still unbowed, is denying that Human actions are destroying this planet in a million different ways - death by a million strokes.

They modestly claim they're actually saving Nature, saving it from the mistakes it has made (!)

I believe the best way to halt the Environmental Crisis is to first confront the myths over WWII - an event that began over 80 years ago and ,at first glance, seems to have little to do with today's energy and pollution problems.

I hope to prove that view wrong: that the first great global environmental, food and energy crisis happened inside WWII, almost unnoticed by anyone but the hundreds of millions of ordinary people who suffered through it .

Re-examining the global environmental,food and energy crisis of the 1940s might serve both as a warning and give us some prevention clues as to how best to deal with a similar global crisis in the 2040s.

Let us , in this way , work to extract what little good we can from that horrible, horrible war...

"POLISH HORSES HAUL GERMAN TANKS" - now there's fact I'd like to see become legend...

As a respite from all those frequently republished photographs from September 1939 of German tanks romping it up over Polish Cavalry units, it would be nice just one time to see some photographs from
Poland taken at the exact opposite end of the war - April 1945.

By this point the Germans were making more, and better, tanks than they had ever done previously - but to what end ?

They were out of tank fuel.

So they demanded Polish farmers cover the tank transporters with hay and hitch them up to their teams of horses and oxen.

Then slowly, very slowly, the panzers would be moved up to the west bank of the Vistula River, to await the final Russian offensive across the river from the east bank and straight into Berlin.

The tanks would be buried, hull down , at the bottom back side of slight hills , their turrets pointed at the most likely crossing points.

The very opposition of Lightning War or Blitzkreig.

Now there was no more fuel dumps, but the Polish horses did pause frequently, for a leisurely
refueling of grass and and equally leisurely dump of ( ooops ! - can't say more - this is a family blog !)

For once, the Germans couldn't simply shoot the Poles, at least not the Polish horses, in an effort to make them move faster.

At long last, war for the Germans Overmen moved at the speed of Nature, not Man.

Now I call that poetic - and I think it is worth a photo.

Funny those German amateur photo snappers, usually so omnipresent at scenes of martial triumph or whenever partisan children are being hung, seem not to have churned up any photos of tanks disguised as hay rides plodding down the road to Gotterdammerung at the speed of ox....

Where are the panzer Ones that Won the east, the west, the north, the south ?

Curious, is it not , all those thinly veiled paeans by present-day Allied authors written to the Nazi Panzer Corps that are illustrated on their covers by Panzer Tiger and Panther tanks.

I mean those are the tanks the Nazis produced when they were losing all the battles.

Why not show the images of the blitzkreig-era tanks that Germany actually used to conquer Poland, France, the Balkans and Norway in a blink of an eye ?

You know, all those dinky looking Panzers I and IIs.

The 5 tonne Panzer I was a little heavier than George Foreman (but not as tall) and packed almost as hard a punch - two light machine guns.

Steel plating about a 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick was its only armour - yes it could stop a bullet, if it was travelling in from a great distance, but not as well as today's infantryman's body armour.

Holy smoking wacky-tobacky, Batman !

One begins to see how these awkward FACTS would spoil the LEGEND  - but let us by all means continue to 'print the legend' .

Truth is, if the September 1939 photographs weren't labelled and national markings are not visible, you'd have a heck of a time telling the difference between the nominally fully-mechanized German panzer column and a column of the nominally horse-oriented Polish Cavalry.

About 1/3 of the total Nazi tank corps was lost during the brief victorious Polish campaign - about 1/2 of those permanently.

At any one time 1/2 of all of Germany's tanks were out of action during the Polish campaign - sometimes due to Polish anti-tanks guns or rifles , but mostly due to mechanical problems - this despite a campaign conducted over a very short time period, over very short distances, and in excellent weather....things don't get much more cushy in peacetime 'war games' .

But the myth that the Allied media (supposedly *Allies of the Poles by the way) touted at least as much as the Nazi media, right from the start of WWII , was of mechanized columns of 20th century  German Panzers inevitably crushing the hapless 19th century Polish Horse Cavalry.

Modernist Man had a Legend ("GERMAN TANKS MAUL POLISH HORSES") already formed in his rationalistic mind and he wasn't going to be bothered by mere facts.

My job is to take Modernist Man (or his son and grandson) by the scruff of his neck and rub his nose into the unpleasant facts until he squeals....

* With Allies like that, what Pole needs enemies ?

Not going to re-"print the legend" ....

'Does the World really need another history of WWII' , I hear you ask.

' Another History of WWII ? ' :  I haven't seen many.

Rather I mainly see the never-ending printing and re-printing of the Legend as Fact....

Tojo/Hitler/Stalin : ganger-bangers 'wasting people' in the ultimate 'hood ...

Say what you will about Gangsta Rappers or the Mafia but you gotta admit they just totally, totally, lack ambition.

After all, they only aspire to waste a few dozen victims over their lifetimes.

But each of the three ganger-bangers dictators of the 1933 to 1953 period aimed much higher.

Each individually 'wasted' tens of millions of people during their reigns.

These were those millions upon millions of people they neither killed during combat nor set out to deliberately and directly murder by gun, rope or needle.

These were all the people that these three dictators figured they could afford to kill off fairly quickly by starvation, neglect and overwork , because the value of their continuing physical labour and brainpower was judged less valuable than the minimal cost of providing them a little more food and care.

Against the minimal numbers of low level people these three killers judged were actually needed in a Mechanical Age and a Mechanical War , there seemed lots more expendable human hands still pouring out the pipeline.

But, in fact, all three lost their wars ( including Stalin) because of their desperate shortages of 'manpower'(ie people) actually needed to successfully impose their will upon Mother Nature and upon other nations.

Forget their millions of deliberate murders - these three spendthrifts 'wasted' more lives than they murdered : even if they had never murdered one soul during their reigns, their Crimes Against Humanity would still make the stones cry out....

Can our world, particularly our world at war, get along without natural resources (such as most people) - substituting pure mental ingenuity instead?

Which is to ask, " was the war of 1939-1945 better labelled 'SOLOW'S WAR' ?"


Fundamentally, the leading lights of the Allies , as well as those of the Axis , would have agreed.


(As would the elites of most of the Neutrals, if they had been asked to think about it).


They all thought that, in the end, human mental MINDpower could surmount anything MATERIAL that Mother Nature could throw at them : be it a feast of bad weather or a famine of natural rubber.


Now nobody started an aggressive war (or conducted a defensive war) between 1939 and 1945 because of the economic theories of Robert Solow.


He was only 15 when the war began and he didn't utter his immortal quote that:

       "If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources. 

("The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics.") Robert M. Solow. The American Economic Review, Vol. 64 

until 1974, 35 years later.

Besides as which, the theory hardly originated with Professor Solow --- it would be far, far better to lay credit where credit is due , at the feet of English Chemist John Dalton and his multitude of disciples in all the scientific and quasi-scientific disciplines.

But Solow is the one who has made the concept famous in contemporary times and who can say whether Dalton might have changed his views, in the lighter of newer scientific knowledge, if he had lived that long.

Robert Solow is still alive, has never fundamentally denounced this claim and so let him wear it.

Solow and Dalton's theory is basically a re-statement of The Good News Law (the First law of Thermodynamics) without the awkwardness of The Bad News Law (the Second Law of Thermodynamics) raining on the parade.

One could call The First Law of Thermodynamics the apogee of human hubris, just as the Second law of Thermodynamics is its nadir.

But haven't I already used that line to describe WWII  ?

And your point being ?

A war history that isn't just about the clash of WILLS -- impossible ?

I hope my account of WWII is a gripping, paper-turning, human-interest story - but I hope it isn't of interest to humans because it is all about humans and all about humans only.

When War History ( capital W, capital H) is seen only through the prism of the clash of human wills, it ends up as just university-level  navel gazing : navel-gazing with tenure.

War can be more accurately seen as the clash of various human wills with other human wills and all of these wills clashing with the material limitations of Reality.

I really would have loved to entitle this blog as:
"1939-1945: REALITY's side of the story."

But I feared that it would simply come across as just another tell-all  recounting of  this perpetually popular  'epic clash of human will' .

Reality merely being a codeword for 'yet newer archival revelations about human conduct'.

Now describing Reality, that Universe we all swim in, as Nature clearly has its dangers.

(Because when Reality is reduced to Nature , it is as if its limitations are seen as existing in a lesser, parallel world from the limitless mental world of us humans.

That is our familiar delusionary world of 'name it and claim it', 'dare to dream', 'mind over matter' , 'where there is a will there is a way' , etc.

Thankfully in much of today's conventional thought , The Natural World is often seen as extending to include everything just short of human mental thoughts - ie it does included our mortal fallible bodies and their material needs.

That is a definition of Nature I can sort of live with, though I personally believe our mental activities are just as much a part of the Natural World as my pet dog's daydreams.

So when reading this blog, recast your image of Nature  to encompassing everything in the Universe, including our mental reveries, and you'll do just fine....

the upcoming "PROGRESS versus the PLANET" conflagration...

I think MODERNITY BITES !, that it is literally killing us and this planet.  The apogee of MODERNITY was expected to be WWII. And from 1939 to 1942 that was indeed the case.  But starting in late 1942, I think we can see that NATURE BITES BACK.  Modernist Science had a hard time hanging on to its prestige till the war ended.  But having lost the conflict to NATURE, Modernist Science at least resolved to win the WRITING WAR.  This was easily done since NATURE can't speak or write.  I intend to tell NATURE's side of WWII.  In addition, I wish to suggest that an alternative value system from that same WWII period still is essential if the Earth and us are to survive the upcoming "PROGRESS versus the PLANET" conflagration...

NATURE bites back (gently) : "Vita Com Mensa"

World War Two, that Very Bad News War, can now be seen as the peak of NON-RENEWABLE MODERNITY, both the apogee of the Modern Age and also its nadir.

Since then, people have wondered just what belief system would and should replace Non-Renewable Modernity.

I believe Non-Renewable Modernity's best replacement can be described as " VITA CON MENSA" .

That is the view that that 'all Life dines at a common table' .

In other words, Commensality, in its broadest and most generous sense.

Yes I admit much of this can also be seen asPost-Modernity.

 But its almost 75 years after Kristallnacht and Munich.

We have been Post Modern almost longer than we have been Modern !

Isn't about time this new era got a name of its own, instead of just being the negation of its predecessor ?

Isn't time for Humanity to admit that it isn't beyond and above Nature and its material limits.

Isn't it past time  that we accept that we are embedded in Nature and Nature in us, like it or not.

And shouldn't we accept that all life forms are interdependent on each other for their very survival.

I believe before we can begin saving this burning planet from ourselves, we must learn to think and feel differently. 

We must cast off all traces of Non-Renewable Modernity and start embracing Commensality as our new credo.

That Pitbull Bites --- as did WWII....

Cancer bites - Mosquitoes bite.

Insects, cancer: they all suck, they all bite.

Getting bitten by a pitbull bites.

All these things have two closely related meanings:
They are all metaphorically dreadful and they are all literally painful.

Just as 1939-1945 (aka WWII aka MODERNITY UNLEASHED) was.

WWII bites, WWII sucks, because it bit 60 to 75 million people and bit them to death.

And that sucks, Big Time ----literally and figuratively....

"NON-RENEWABLE Modernity" was an "AUTARKY Modernity" wannabe

Modernity actually and always aspired to Total Autarky in relationship with Nature : reducing all Biology and Life to a matter of Geology, making absolutely everything , including Life itself, synthetically out of rocks - the famous "air,water and coaltar" of  1940s chemistry.

But until that glorious day, Modernity knew it got its energy from non-renewable energy sources.

It was non-renewable in a peculiar sense of that phrase, at least in today's eyes.

Modernists didn't really feel that the world itself was about to run out of coal, gas and petroleum - not at least for many many centuries to come --- but they all fretted that their nation - and their's alone - would soon run out, before their enemies or competitors did.

This is what gives that special frenetic, panic-stricken, edginess to the supposedly optimistic Age of Modernity .

 Could their nation learn how to break up atoms to produce endless amounts of energy and new elements, before their country ran out of its reserves of fossil fuels ?

Ultimately, Modernists like Hitler and Stalin and Churchill believed that the only real energy in reality was human mental energy, the Triumph of the WILL, but until the human mind unlocked the secret of the atom, petroleum would have to serve a very poor second....