Its usually said that a lack of strategic natural resources - ferroalloys, petroleum, even coal was the downfall of Japan and Germany.
Don't buy it.
They began to run short of these materials in 1945, months away from losing a six year long war of attrition.
Running short of these materials moments before their defeat was more of a sign rather than a cause of their collapse.
The empire held and controlled by Germany between 1940 and 1944 was more or less the area held by today's EU --- just as the empire that Japan held in those years was the same as what we call the South East Asia Economic Tigers.
These two areas then and now, along with America and the former USSR, were the powerhouses of the globe - in terms of people, industry,science.
Yet these two empires failed to either adequately feed their subjects or turn them into willing citizens, prepared to work hard and die hard for those empires.
Lack of food and lack of civic support worked together in an entangled way --- if the subject people had felt warmly towards Japanese and Germans ,they would have produced the food to fill their bellies and quiet their dislike.
Lack of Calories is just another way to say lack of Citizenship and vice versa.
The modernist rulers of these empires failed to treat Nature (or people they considered lessors/close to Nature) with the respect they deserved and then paid the price when their potential strong empires collapsed from within --from lack of supporters.
The Soviets also failed to feed their people and while they inspired the naive, the rest they had to drive into battle with guns at their heads.
Things weren't so dramatic in the American and British empires but even there relatively few people were willing to volunteering for infantry, eager to drive the Japanese and Nazis from their conquests.
People did not flock to the colors in a sort of moral crusade.
Instead, they saw its as a grimly necessary 'job' and plodded into battle led by generals equally cautious and uninspiring.
True, food was more or less adequate in these empires.
But the ruling people (and the subject peoples) of empires based on a mild form of racism were hardly going to go all out to defeat other empires that were also based on racism, now were they ?
In the end, it took six long , costly, years for a half dozen world-sized empires to defeat two relatively small empires --- hardly an inspiring record...
Monday, March 12, 2012
NAS tipped to run American AUSCHWITZ after Nazi conquest ???
Organized Science, if it knows nothing else (a claim easy to defend), sure knows how to sing for its supper.
That is why Scientism is our one and only God.
Organized Science knows just when to switch sides and to start sucking up to the newest powerful entities in town and it knows just who is powerless enough to safely kick in the teeth.
It also picks its opponents it chooses to publicly battle very carefully so that none of the resulting mud sticks to its priestly skirts.
The NAS choose not to criticize Raymond Loewy's ROCKETPORT vision at the New York's World Fair of 1939-1940----- and silence is assent.
The Rocketport was the most scientifically loony idea at a Fair replete with scientifically loony ideas.
The so called 'Rocket' , a small ocean liner in size, was actually a cannon projectile fired in New York and designed to land in Paris ------- somehow without the resulting enormous G-Forces mushing everybody inside the projectile into protoplasm.
(Humans might survive 200 Gs all over their body, if its only for a fraction of a second as in a car crash, but this voyage would impose at least 20,000 Gs for a fatally long time, even if we ignore the peak force of about 200,000 Gs at blast-off......)
Loewy got away with his loony tune idea because he claimed it came to him from studying scientific journals (rather than saying he saw it in a vision after praying to the Virgin Mary).
Whether the idea came from the Journal SCIENCE or MATTHEW 12 in the Bible, the idea was equally crazy.
But rest assured that the NAS would only have rushed forward to condemn it as scientifically invalid if the idea had come from their bete noires in the camp of the dreaded 'Religion'.
The All-American idea of applied negative Eugenics (can you say Auschwitz, boys and girls ?) was a much more damaging loony idea the NAS choose not to publicly attack - until it was far far too late and after eugenics had been already discredited by the march of events in Eastern Europe.
That is what I mean by Science's Bad Faith --- its unwillingness to attack anything as unscientific, no matter how loony or deadly, if doing so risks lowering the awesome respect ordinary people still have for those 'wonder-working wizards' of science.
In the end, it all comes down to "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" as that famous scientist Brian Mulroney once observed ---- he also said "there is no whore like an old whore".
True, so true.....
That is why Scientism is our one and only God.
Organized Science knows just when to switch sides and to start sucking up to the newest powerful entities in town and it knows just who is powerless enough to safely kick in the teeth.
It also picks its opponents it chooses to publicly battle very carefully so that none of the resulting mud sticks to its priestly skirts.
The NAS choose not to criticize Raymond Loewy's ROCKETPORT vision at the New York's World Fair of 1939-1940----- and silence is assent.
The Rocketport was the most scientifically loony idea at a Fair replete with scientifically loony ideas.
The so called 'Rocket' , a small ocean liner in size, was actually a cannon projectile fired in New York and designed to land in Paris ------- somehow without the resulting enormous G-Forces mushing everybody inside the projectile into protoplasm.
(Humans might survive 200 Gs all over their body, if its only for a fraction of a second as in a car crash, but this voyage would impose at least 20,000 Gs for a fatally long time, even if we ignore the peak force of about 200,000 Gs at blast-off......)
Loewy got away with his loony tune idea because he claimed it came to him from studying scientific journals (rather than saying he saw it in a vision after praying to the Virgin Mary).
Whether the idea came from the Journal SCIENCE or MATTHEW 12 in the Bible, the idea was equally crazy.
But rest assured that the NAS would only have rushed forward to condemn it as scientifically invalid if the idea had come from their bete noires in the camp of the dreaded 'Religion'.
The All-American idea of applied negative Eugenics (can you say Auschwitz, boys and girls ?) was a much more damaging loony idea the NAS choose not to publicly attack - until it was far far too late and after eugenics had been already discredited by the march of events in Eastern Europe.
That is what I mean by Science's Bad Faith --- its unwillingness to attack anything as unscientific, no matter how loony or deadly, if doing so risks lowering the awesome respect ordinary people still have for those 'wonder-working wizards' of science.
In the end, it all comes down to "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" as that famous scientist Brian Mulroney once observed ---- he also said "there is no whore like an old whore".
True, so true.....
Ironies abound: Dawson immediately BEFORE Penicillin was studying L-Form bacteria - that rare exception to penicillin's lethal charms ....
One of the very first people to study L-forms was Dr MARTIN HENRY DAWSON in 1939-1940.
Immediately afterwards, on October 16th 1940, he did something truly different.
He injected a young man (dying of 'incurable' subacute bacterial endocarditis) with the juice of some mold he brewed up.
The young man lived - becoming the first ever person to get a needleful of natural, systemic, penicillin.
What makes this so unusual is that L-forms are that rare form of bacteria that are IMMUNE to penicillin's effects.
Talk about an abrupt switch from MATTER to ANTI-MATTER !
Dawson paddled about in 'the quiet backwaters' of medical science in his detractors' eyes.
Most doctors thought then and still do think that L-Form bacteria are defective ,useless, lab curios.
Bacteria define themselves by their strong semi-rigid outer cell walls - the secret of their success as Life's most plentiful and longest living life form.
L-forms lack that wall and by rights shouldn't be alive or reproduce.
But they do - and their success implies that all bacteria have retained extremely old genes (perhaps the oldest genes on Earth) that lie dormant until (or when) they are attacked by antibiotics that destroy cell walls.
Because penicillin-type wall-dissolvers weren't invented by Man (only in his dreams) but rather by other bacteria about the same time that the very first bacteria emerged.
The ability to survive without either bacteria walls (or bacteria's binary fission genes) means that L-forms probably look like the very first life-forms that ever existed - perhaps from before even DNA was perfected.
Still think they're useless ???????????
In his day job Dawson helped society's chronically 'defective' people live better lives : in his spare time, he studied bacteria's chronically 'defective' life forms.
What he learned from the 'defective' bacteria's amazing will to live, he later applied towards not letting any of his human 'defectives' be written off to die, by the cruel ramp doctors of American War Medicine....
Home GROWN natural penicillin: one of WWII's few AGRICULTURAL successes ....
In the beginning, WWII talked big - promising to put a Gas Chamber and Crematorium on the Moon and a Chicken in Every Pot, but as usual it was all just talk.
In the end it couldn't even do the simplest of things, like taking the garbage out and getting all the kids fed and on to school on time.
Amidst the HIGH TECH disaster that was WWII, there was one LOW TECH (agricultural) success, a quiet triumph of courage, hope and chivalry:
Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" project was New York's LOW TECH counterpart to the much better known HIGH TECH Manhattan Project.
Only this time it was humans working with Nature, not against it ; an effort to save lives, not take them.
Dawson grew mold, not food.
Millions of the kids who owed their lives to his natural systemic penicillin would not have really needed it if they had adequate food.
Nevertheless he did his best, he did his bit - and above all he did it Nature's way, not Modernity's way.
When it came to making penicillin, his Natural approach batted One and Modernity's synthetic approach ended up batting Zero....
In the end it couldn't even do the simplest of things, like taking the garbage out and getting all the kids fed and on to school on time.
Amidst the HIGH TECH disaster that was WWII, there was one LOW TECH (agricultural) success, a quiet triumph of courage, hope and chivalry:
Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" project was New York's LOW TECH counterpart to the much better known HIGH TECH Manhattan Project.
Only this time it was humans working with Nature, not against it ; an effort to save lives, not take them.
Dawson grew mold, not food.
Millions of the kids who owed their lives to his natural systemic penicillin would not have really needed it if they had adequate food.
Nevertheless he did his best, he did his bit - and above all he did it Nature's way, not Modernity's way.
When it came to making penicillin, his Natural approach batted One and Modernity's synthetic approach ended up batting Zero....
No shots exchanged, no fisticuffs,never even met : The WWII clash of Szilard and Dawson.
((This was originally posted to my discontinued blog, "THE CONTINUING STORY OF THE LITTLE BOY AND THE BABY GIRL", on July 15th 2011. The blog's subtitle, equally long-winded, was : . because WWII, PHYSICALLY, may be over, but mentally and intellectually the clash continues ----- with the fate of humanity on this planet hanging in the balance.))
WWII is usually thought of as the clash of arms and the clash of pre-existing (unalterable) values : Allied GOOD versus Axis EVIL.
But it really was the clash and exchange of mutable ideas during the course of 1939-1945 - everyone's ideas , even Hitler's, were altered over the course of those six years of war.
I am most interested in the deepest, the most fundamental of those opposing ideas, not merely the surface 'political' differences --- and I find them most clearly expressed in the words and actions of two immigrant academics on the campus of wartime Columbia University in Manhattan.
They knew of each other's existence, if only through newspaper stories and gossip, but they never seemed to have met, let alone engaged in polemics together.
If pushed, they might well have thought of each other as like- minded ; fellow travelers more than intellectual opponents.
But the wartime projects they set in motion, I believe, spelled out what WWII was all about clearer than anything else that so consumes the war's historians.
Their clash of worldviews was never seen as resolved and so WWII continues today; carrying on ,disguised, in bloody regional wars and in the clash of opposing value systems in nations nominally at peace.
But in the realm of Science, their clash was resolved - one side clearly lost the scientific battle but nevertheless went on to win the propaganda war and continues to do so.
The fate of humanity hangs on us admitting that WWII was, above all else, a clash of scientific theories and that based on the evidence, one side was clearly proven wrong.
Despite this, this is the type of science, the losing side, the incorrect side, is still taught in public schools and undergraduate classes and is still - literally - killing this planet....
WWII is usually thought of as the clash of arms and the clash of pre-existing (unalterable) values : Allied GOOD versus Axis EVIL.
But it really was the clash and exchange of mutable ideas during the course of 1939-1945 - everyone's ideas , even Hitler's, were altered over the course of those six years of war.
I am most interested in the deepest, the most fundamental of those opposing ideas, not merely the surface 'political' differences --- and I find them most clearly expressed in the words and actions of two immigrant academics on the campus of wartime Columbia University in Manhattan.
They knew of each other's existence, if only through newspaper stories and gossip, but they never seemed to have met, let alone engaged in polemics together.
If pushed, they might well have thought of each other as like- minded ; fellow travelers more than intellectual opponents.
But the wartime projects they set in motion, I believe, spelled out what WWII was all about clearer than anything else that so consumes the war's historians.
Their clash of worldviews was never seen as resolved and so WWII continues today; carrying on ,disguised, in bloody regional wars and in the clash of opposing value systems in nations nominally at peace.
But in the realm of Science, their clash was resolved - one side clearly lost the scientific battle but nevertheless went on to win the propaganda war and continues to do so.
The fate of humanity hangs on us admitting that WWII was, above all else, a clash of scientific theories and that based on the evidence, one side was clearly proven wrong.
Despite this, this is the type of science, the losing side, the incorrect side, is still taught in public schools and undergraduate classes and is still - literally - killing this planet....
PEN ,"G" Floor, Oct 16 1940
The very first natural systemic penicillin ever made came out of a small lab in the Physicians & Surgeons Medical School (P & S) Building of Columbia University in Upper Harlem, New York.
In just five weeks, start to finish, it was ready to be injected by team leader Dr Martin Henry Dawson into a young man named Charlie Aronson on October 16 1940.
It was the first ever day of America's peacetime Selective Service (a system still with us 75 years later).
A day for America to separate (and celebrate) its 1A men and to dismiss and ignore its 4F men - like Charlie.
For Dawson, it was 25 years to the day when the news of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell first reached North America - 25 years to the day when he, along with tens of thousands of others world wide, resolved to join up to fight the wicked Huns who killed Cavell.
In Dawson's case, he first joined up as a medical orderly - so today marked his 25th year in the world of medicine.
Despite Charlie being diagnosed with a then invariably fatal disease called SBE , the semi-purified penicillin didn't seem to hurt Charlie at all.
Instead - and unexpectedly - he survived and became the presumably ever-grateful PATIENT ONE of the Antibiotics Revolution.
The penicillin for the very first life-saving use of the 75 year old gold standard of antibiotics (injectable penicillin) was labelled PEN "G".
This was not because "G" stands for G-old Standard, or because the original penicillin was a G-olden Yellow in color or because "G" denotes Benzyl (injectable) Penicillin or because some drug company thought PEN "G" would make a catchy brand name for the horsey set.
All these things are true - completely true --- but they are all pretty latecomers to this particular party.
That very first life-saving penicillin was called PEN "G" for one very simple reason: the labs of Dr Dawson and his co-workers on his tiny team ( Karl Meyer ,Gladys Hobby and Eleanor Chaffee) were on Floor"G" of that building.
Their doubting colleagues at P&S Columbia regarded this 'pen.. (what ever) stuff' as something pretty crackpotty ; something being brewed up by that free spirit Dawson and his motley crew back in the remote North West corner of Floor "G" .
Being the first ever in the world - hell in the entire universe - to use systemic natural penicillin to save lives gives Dawson's team bragging rights to call their homebrew penicillin whatever they wanted to:
Their brew was penicillin from "G" Floor of P & S : and hence familiarly know as PEN "G" , for short...
PEN ,"G" Floor, Oct 16th 1940
The very first natural systemic penicillin ever made came out of a small lab in the Physicians & Surgeons Medical School (P & S) Building of Columbia University in Upper Harlem, New York.
In just five weeks, start to finish, it was ready to be injected by team leader Dr Martin Henry Dawson into a young man named Charlie Aronson on October 16 1940.
It was the first ever day of America's peacetime Selective Service (a system still with us 75 years later).
A day for America to separate (and celebrate) its 1A men and to dismiss and ignore its 4F men - like Charlie.
For Dawson, it was 25 years to the day when the news of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell first reached North America - 25 years to the day when he, along with tens of thousands of others world wide, resolved to join up to fight the wicked Huns who killed Cavell.
In Dawson's case, he first joined up as a medical orderly - so today marked his 25th year in the world of medicine.
Despite Charlie being diagnosed with a then invariably fatal disease called SBE , the semi-purified penicillin didn't seem to hurt Charlie at all.
Instead - and unexpectedly - he survived and became the presumably ever-grateful PATIENT ONE of the Antibiotics Revolution.
The penicillin for the very first life-saving use of the 75 year old gold standard of antibiotics (injectable penicillin) was labelled PEN "G".
This was not because "G" stands for G-old Standard, or because the original penicillin was a G-olden Yellow in color or because "G" denotes Benzyl (injectable) Penicillin or because some drug company thought PEN "G" would make a catchy brand name for the horsey set.
All these things are true - completely true --- but they are all pretty latecomers to this particular party.
That very first life-saving penicillin was called PEN "G" for one very simple reason: the labs of Dr Dawson and his co-workers on his tiny team ( Karl Meyer ,Gladys Hobby and Eleanor Chaffee) were on Floor"G" of that building.
Their doubting colleagues at P&S Columbia regarded this 'pen.. (what ever) stuff' as something pretty crackpotty ; something being brewed up by that free spirit Dawson and his motley crew back in the remote North West corner of Floor "G" .
Being the first ever in the world - hell in the entire universe - to use systemic natural penicillin to save lives gives Dawson's team bragging rights to call their homebrew penicillin whatever they wanted to:
Their brew was penicillin from "G" Floor of P & S : and hence familiarly know as PEN "G" , for short...
Thumbing their nose at MODERNITY.....
During WWII (the very apogee of MODERNITY) in New York City (the very epicenter of Modernity) , a dying doctor and his few square feet of Mother Nature quietly thumbed their nose at MODERNITY...
.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.
Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.
That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.
Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.
Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...
.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.
Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.
That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.
Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.
Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...
Yes , WWII was a HIGH TECH triumph - it was just LOW TECH that it couldn't handle...
The HIGH TECH successes of WWII ?
Where do we begin?
The A-Bomb of course, along with the B-29 intercontinental heavy bomber and the Norden Bombsight. The V-2 sub-orbital ballistic missile, against which there was ( and is) no defense, suitable to be upgraded with the newer, smaller, atomic bombs for added horror.
That American inter-war wonder of the modern age, the prison gas chamber, adapted to large scale use at Auschwitz , where when combined together with the best practices in computerized database tracking, worked to ensure that mass murders were no longer undocumented, undisciplined, melees.
The Hunger Plan - the plan to double the agriculture output of a million square kilometres of Eastern Europe and Russia.
This to be achieved by killing the existing 50 million residents and their useless mouths (and hands and brains).
They would be replaced by a hundred thousand big tractors powered by petroleum from the Caucasus and controlled by skilled Aryan operators.
Scientific, Mechanical, Agriculture, done right.
LOW TECH failures - well yes, a few, but hardly worth mentioning in the standard triumphant accounts of the war.
For example, the Americans could put a Bomb on Hiroshima (and ultimately a Man on the Moon), but couldn't seem to put a waterproof boot on its lowly MOS 745s (infantry rifleman) in wet, cold, Italy in the late summer of 1943.
Trenchfoot has low tech solutions but Scientific America couldn't find them - or more likely, deemed them too boringly low tech to assign its best talents toward.
LOW TECH failure #1, #2, #3,#4 ad infinitum ?
The failure of human society to at the very least feed everybody a basic diet.
Now don't start by blaming Mother Nature for WWII's famine deaths.
Compared to say 1936 or 1946, the war years were ones without dramatic floods or droughts --- we should have expected surpluses not mass famine.
Let me repeat -- more people died of hunger and hunger diseases as a result of WWII, than died in combat or by execution by gas or gun.
Nature , in those war years, stood ready to yield up her bounty to not just feed the world but make it fat.
Modernity failed to cultivate that potential bounty and then further failed to equitably distribute what food it did produce.
Even Modernity can feed enough of the world , to stave off mass famine, in peacetime.
But in wartime, when it was given its head to do much better, it instead SNAFU-ed up big time.
Postmodernity was birthed in the mass famine of 1945-1946.
A philosophy that couldn't even handle the most basic, most essential task that Humanity requires - Food - is not worthy of our respect or our loyalty.
When the global environmental meltdown goes Postal, do you really want Modernity's zealots to be put back in the driver's seat?
Wasn't one WWII, two WWIIs too many ???????
Where do we begin?
The A-Bomb of course, along with the B-29 intercontinental heavy bomber and the Norden Bombsight. The V-2 sub-orbital ballistic missile, against which there was ( and is) no defense, suitable to be upgraded with the newer, smaller, atomic bombs for added horror.
That American inter-war wonder of the modern age, the prison gas chamber, adapted to large scale use at Auschwitz , where when combined together with the best practices in computerized database tracking, worked to ensure that mass murders were no longer undocumented, undisciplined, melees.
The Hunger Plan - the plan to double the agriculture output of a million square kilometres of Eastern Europe and Russia.
This to be achieved by killing the existing 50 million residents and their useless mouths (and hands and brains).
They would be replaced by a hundred thousand big tractors powered by petroleum from the Caucasus and controlled by skilled Aryan operators.
Scientific, Mechanical, Agriculture, done right.
LOW TECH failures - well yes, a few, but hardly worth mentioning in the standard triumphant accounts of the war.
For example, the Americans could put a Bomb on Hiroshima (and ultimately a Man on the Moon), but couldn't seem to put a waterproof boot on its lowly MOS 745s (infantry rifleman) in wet, cold, Italy in the late summer of 1943.
Trenchfoot has low tech solutions but Scientific America couldn't find them - or more likely, deemed them too boringly low tech to assign its best talents toward.
LOW TECH failure #1, #2, #3,#4 ad infinitum ?
The failure of human society to at the very least feed everybody a basic diet.
Now don't start by blaming Mother Nature for WWII's famine deaths.
Compared to say 1936 or 1946, the war years were ones without dramatic floods or droughts --- we should have expected surpluses not mass famine.
Let me repeat -- more people died of hunger and hunger diseases as a result of WWII, than died in combat or by execution by gas or gun.
Nature , in those war years, stood ready to yield up her bounty to not just feed the world but make it fat.
Modernity failed to cultivate that potential bounty and then further failed to equitably distribute what food it did produce.
Even Modernity can feed enough of the world , to stave off mass famine, in peacetime.
But in wartime, when it was given its head to do much better, it instead SNAFU-ed up big time.
Postmodernity was birthed in the mass famine of 1945-1946.
A philosophy that couldn't even handle the most basic, most essential task that Humanity requires - Food - is not worthy of our respect or our loyalty.
When the global environmental meltdown goes Postal, do you really want Modernity's zealots to be put back in the driver's seat?
Wasn't one WWII, two WWIIs too many ???????
Sunday, March 11, 2012
WWII : 20th Century Dress Rehearsal for a 21st Century Global Meltdown....
On all sides, WWII (Modernity's War) was exalted to be the planned Triumph of Man's Will over the Ways of Nature.
But it hardly turned out that way did it?
There is little consensus on what exactly PostModernism is or is not , but all observers agree that VJ Day 1945 marked the beginnings of PostModernity ---- and the death throes of unreconstructed Modernity.
Actually I should say that is the academic understanding of 1945's consequences (few would disagree that Modernity finds little traction on your average university campus these days !)
But things are quite different down here at Ground Zero : there is little evidence that the Chambers of Commerce and the conservative Political Parties have ever heard about PostModernity's triumph among the thinking class.
For here at Ground Zero, practice is dominated by those who do (and deny) , not by those who think.
Man's Will is still expected to overcome, in the best 1930s style, any limits Nature may impose on Life.
Its not that Republicans and corporate CEOs totally deny there are any problems with our relations with Nature - far from it.
It is just that they steadfastly deny these problems - and others - can not be solved in time by Man's mental ingenuity, a little hard work and some cash.
World War Two should remind us that while Republicans,Soviets, Nazis and CEOs can govern more or less successfully in peacetime, war has a way of revealing the flaws in Modernity's Platonic certitudes....
But it hardly turned out that way did it?
There is little consensus on what exactly PostModernism is or is not , but all observers agree that VJ Day 1945 marked the beginnings of PostModernity ---- and the death throes of unreconstructed Modernity.
Actually I should say that is the academic understanding of 1945's consequences (few would disagree that Modernity finds little traction on your average university campus these days !)
But things are quite different down here at Ground Zero : there is little evidence that the Chambers of Commerce and the conservative Political Parties have ever heard about PostModernity's triumph among the thinking class.
For here at Ground Zero, practice is dominated by those who do (and deny) , not by those who think.
Man's Will is still expected to overcome, in the best 1930s style, any limits Nature may impose on Life.
Its not that Republicans and corporate CEOs totally deny there are any problems with our relations with Nature - far from it.
It is just that they steadfastly deny these problems - and others - can not be solved in time by Man's mental ingenuity, a little hard work and some cash.
World War Two should remind us that while Republicans,Soviets, Nazis and CEOs can govern more or less successfully in peacetime, war has a way of revealing the flaws in Modernity's Platonic certitudes....
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
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 :
Sort of like what God Himself would have done, if only he was as smart as us....
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" ...
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...
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...
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...
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