Both with 40 million citizens : 1870s' twin industrial giants, Germany and America

It is very, very, very hard for us today in 2015 to put ourselves in the mental mindset of the old men running the world in 1939.

For they had grown up during the heady worldwide high tech industrial boom that began in the 1870s.

Neutrality, not Brutality, WWII hallmark

Only the (postwar : postmodern) grandchildren and possibly the children of the modern adults of WWII have always seen Hitler and WWII as symbols of the ultimate evil and brutality.

WWII ruptured modern continuity

I argue - after recalling various international long term social survey results * - that over questions of humanity's ability to control physical reality, a person born in 1941 (a Boomer) tends to have more in common with someone born in 2001, sixty years later, than with someone born in 1935, only six years earlier.

Sustaining our climate disaster : 'talkin' about my generation' --- the hyper-active Rogue Boomers ruining our planet, with our passive help

True : we didn't start the fire - blame the beginnings of our carbon burning frenzy on our parents, grandparents and great great great grandparents.

But we are the generation in charge now - in fact the generation in charge when the global (rather than local) dangers of the Big Smoke first became apparent to all but those of closed minds.

So the responsibility for ruining paradise is really upon us, the Boomer Generation - those of us born roughly between the early mid Forties and the early mid Sixties.

We'll be the ones still in charge when the CO2 and elevated temperature levels rise so high they tip us into irreversible disaster.

Enough already about War's impact on Nature : what about Nature's impact on War ?

With only the very best of intentions, environmentalists have tended to focus on what war does to nature - say for example, in reviewing the impact of leaking oil from the thousands of oil tankers sunk at the sea during war in the last 120 years.

But again, totally unintentionally, all this effort tends to show Man as all-powerful (here in a war mode busy destroying nature) and Mother Nature as basically an endless victim.

But in fact, the reverse is true.

History is replete with examples where Mother Nature has effortlessly shattered the over-arching hubris of war-makers : any number of  history-changing examples spring to mind - usually where unexpected bad weather destroys the plans of invasion fleets - on the water, in the air, over land.

But bad weather leading to bad harvests works just as well : the course of the Nazi Holocaust follows more exactingly the wavering course of the annual German domestic harvest results than it ever does the wavering course of the brain chemicals inside Adolf Hitler's head.

In 1939, no side expected WWII to last so long and cost so much in lives and material : what really prolonged it on both sides was modernity's failure (in peace as in war) to calculate in the truly awesome powers of climate and geography compared to the still puny powers of man's ideologies, demographies and technologies.

Viewed this way, WWII becomes less a contest of man against man, of ideology and technology against ideology and technology and more an unequal donnybrook between man-the-feeble and Mother-Nature-The-Mighty.

My blog and book series, un-superheroes, will provide many such weather/climate/geography examples from our LAST global disaster, WWII, because our current global disaster is once again a man versus climate fight - one where the speedy application of any past learned lessons could literally save our lives ...

Super Heroes started WWII -- but only un-superheroes could end it ...

It flatters us greatly to focus upon WWII as simply a war between good (us) and evil (them).

This, rather than accurately/painfully contrasting the high expectations of all sides in September 1939 (and many other such key dates throughout the six year conflict) with the depressing reality of September 1945.

For the swift and powerful English and German bomber fleets (or swift and powerful Russian and German tank armies) (or  swift and powerful Japanese and American carrier task forces) did not 'always get through' .

No major campaign - and the war itself - ever ended in a breakthrough after a few swift painless weeks, as promised.

Super Hero militaries and their civilian fellow travellers certainly talked  a lot during WWII--- but they did not walk.

Instead civilians in bomb shelters,  little Grumman fighter planes, muddy infantrymen and tiny corvette navies plodded their way to a sad, slow victory : in a truly un-superheroic fashion

WWII to be a war of physics, all ELEGANCE and PARSIMONY ; instead it was a war of history, multi-causal, protracted, all plentitude and fecundity

Remember how quick WWII was supposed to be?

Within hours of war's declaration, all those deadly accurate surgical strikes with poison gas by massed fleets of heavy bombers ('that always get through') upon civilian cities (who 'always panic and surrender') ?

Japan's lightning war to successfully force America to grant it 'living space' within most of the Far East ?

Germany's easy conquering all of the USSR to the Urals,  before the first snow flies ?

How USSR's massive armoured forces on its borders would quickly defeat any invasion by Germany's 'state of the art' puny Panzer Is, IIs and IIIs ?

How Germany couldn't feed its people or its economy so that the British economic blockade, backed by more surgical bomber strikes, would quickly force the Germans to their knees ---- without the need for any British boots on European soil ?

When all Modernity thought about conducting war - that is how it all thought it would go.

Post modern historians - and post modern society generally - no longer sees wars (or any other human activities) as quite that quick and easy....

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.


And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.

But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.

And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.

We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.

But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?

I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....

Acting Up : even if you can't , sometimes you simply must

This story* is not a conventional adventure story --- where the hero and heroine are always handsome and physically fit.

Fit is important, because doing the right thing always seems to be both physically and emotionally arduous.

But in this story, the villains are villains precisely because they think of themselves as handsome and physically fit.

And based on that slender intellectual reed, they then go on to act like they regard anyone who isn't handsome and fit as having no right to be treated as a full member of the human family.

So our heroes and heroines this time out are not conventionally handsome or physically fit - far far far from it , in spades .

Rather they are pushed to become our reluctant heroes and heroines precisely because they have a lifetime of experience being  seen 'weak' and 'damaged' or 'defective' and can feel deep inside just how damaging the labelling of half of humanity as defective could be.

The bad people in this story advocated and practise Plenticide but didn't see it as any sort of "cide' or murder.

They were merely weeding out and tidying up the very messy natural garden that the last owner of on planet earth ( God) had left behind.

Where in our current post-modern era we seek out variety and regret the loss of biological variety in the disappearing rain forest , this earlier era sought to reduce all the excess variety as clutter - for example , ultimately seeking to replace all natural food with a few synthetic pills !

When The Seven chose to Act Up way back then, they began the shift from that era of errors to our present day...

* : World War Two

Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) : died much too young , so billions won't

When ten billion of us - so far - have lived longer and healthier lives because of Dr Dawson's agape sacrifice, it would seem that some stone monument to mark his brief time on Earth is neither fully adequate -- or required.

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 ......?

Nature bowls last , 1939-1945

Treat your enemy as subhumans ---- as the Axis regarded its Slav and Chinese opponents and as the Allies regarded the Japanese.

Regard many of your allies and colonies' citizens as not much better.

Combine that with regarding your national own working class in almost as dismissive terms.

All this certainly widens the scope of what the people who ran WWII from the top regarded as aspects of 'the natural world',  rather than beings fully civilized humans like themselves.

So when I say that Nature bowled last, Nature's bowling could run a very wide gamut indeed .

Not just freezing cold and machine-ruining dust, or harvest failures or microbial resistance to sulfa drugs.

Not just what five thousand of Nature's kilometres really means to an overtaxed human logistic system.

It moves onwards to include all those lowly Slav and Chinese peasants who turned into deadly partisans --- rather than simply turning turtle as predicted.

It is working class East Enders defying the uncaring 'Teflon Winnie' to turn Tube Stations into the effective bomb shelters he had failed to provide.

And it is immigrant and minority American patients and families,together with their GPs ,"acting up" to defy the penicillin-denying medical elite of the OSRD/NAS death panels.

In this six year long stage drama, the 'natural world' scenery ends up eating even the hammiest of 'human world' actors....

Mite is Right - Might is Right. Both ? Or Neither ?

There are niches enough for all : the large, medium and the small.

There is no evidence in the Earth's current environment that contradicts the idea that there won't always be room for some big and medium creatures,  above the size of the ever-present microbes.

But the scientific assumption  that the trend of evolutionary Progress is moving in a direction that indicated that only Big beings - ie humans and their herds - will dominate the Earth is hardly borne out by long term evidence.

Or by the current evidence that humanity is well equipped, mentally and technologically, to instantly blow itself all up.

This idea of evolutionary Progress was , in practise , further defined into the assumption that the only thing Big and complex, in an otherwise simple universe, were upper class western-oriented males .

People of colour, and other minorities, immigrants, the poor, women, children, the handicapped --- all were absorbed under the rubric of being potentially small and weak and unneeded on this evolutionary voyage.

This assumption guided the leadership of the Allies, Neutral and Axis nations of WWII - until it ended in disaster for all.

Instead we must accept that we are all, Big and small, stuck here together on Lifeboat Earth , willy nilly,  family : we Big can't divorce the small - and they can't divorce us.

We don't have to love each other - lambs and lions lying down together - but we must learn to accept the inevitably and agree to get along.

Accepting the fact is step one on Humanity's long course of post-Hubris recovery....

WWII : pure science collides with impure reality

If anyone learned the key science lesson of WWII, it wasn't the adults of the day.

Rather that science lesson was partially absorbed by children born in 1938 and afterwards , children too young to share the glow most in the Allied world felt about the supposed leading role science played in defeating the Axis.

I say partially because wartime science was generally blamed by these young people only for deliberately  promising and then succeeding in killing as many people as it possibly could possible , particularly killing as many civilians as possible.

When its actual biggest scientific and moral failures were for what it promised both sides during the war but then didn't deliver.

Sins of omission rather than sins of commission.

So bad efficient science merely replaces good efficient science in the baby-boomer academics' eyes, when a more accurate and devastating charge is to say pure science was, and is always, overwhelming inefficient.

As it must be, as long as it continues to deny that reality is inevitably and invariably dirty , mixed , intermingled and impure.....

All life is family : science at War (1939-1945) with reality

During the era of modernity, 1870s- 1960s , politics was science and science was politics , both united around the idea that ultimately physical reality was really quite simple and so should human reality be.

Simple, pure, few/big,slow to change, predictable.

Modernity and its science had never had a war where it could show its stuff, earlier wars being run by the old men who grew up before scienticism replaced religion.

Now there were old men running this war who were teenagers when scienticism was in its fullest flower.

Let the games begin !

But their best laid plans were soon burnt out shells and nobody survived WWII with their predictions intact, as the actual complexity of reality confounded the mightiest and wisest over and over.

Supposedly 1945 marked the apogee of modernist science, winning the war for the Allies etc ( insert A bomb and penicillin here).

In fact it was its nadir , the birthdate of post-modernity , post-modern science ...

science LOST world war two...

'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'

I doubt that all historians think that way.

 I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).

What I think best describes WWII is that all sides constantly expected one thing to happen, based on their scientific beliefs, and over and over another unexpected thing actually happened.

Let us look at the mid term American elections for what I mean : if ,when asked 'who won' I said 'the politicians' , you'd think me very rude indeed.

'Yes, yes, but who won :  Republicans or Democrats ?'

We expect conflicts , with winners and losers , in almost every aspect of human life - but not in science.

Everything that happened scientifically in the war is simply credited to 'science' , with no sense of the possibility of scientific winners and losers or of scientific conflicts.

1940's Allied plans for precision bombing with the Norden bombsight and the 1945 Allied atomic fire bombing all of civilian Hiroshima merely to burn down its naval base are in 100% opposition to each other - scientifically - but they get rolled up together as just two of the many scientific triumphs of WWII.

Wartime penicillin was delayed for decades by the Allied scientific elites' determination to first make it as highly profitable patentable synthetic penicillin.

But when this failed and the underdog natural penicillin proved the real winner, the academic history of penicillin elided synthetic penicillin from our memory banks, like a Stalinist commissar vanished from a group photo.

Reading the published histories of penicillin, one might think that the OSRD proponents of synthetic penicillin (and the steadfast opponents of the OPRD's natural crude penicillin) had been ardent champions of the natural method all along.

Here are two rival Washington bureaucracies , competing. No surprise surely, but because they are scientific bureaucrats , conflict is denied by science-cheerleading historians and the great triumph of the tiny OPRD is transferred to the mighty OSRD, by implication.

So if the story of wartime penicillin's fierce internecine war is ever to be told, a political scientist, not a medical scientist, is the best person for the job....

WWII : Science at war against physical Reality...

Just because you come across the bodies of a lot of robbers over in the Sierra Madre part of town, this does not automatically mean it was the result of a fight between cops and robbers, good guys versus bad guys.

Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.

In terms of their approach to science, all the major combatant empires of WWII thought alike (reality was simpler than it appears)- but they differed wildly - militarily - on how best to divide up the global colonial pie.

However all their collective science efforts soon ran smack into the actual complexity of physical reality and ended up shattered upon it - though almost no one foresaw this ('this' being post-Modernity) at the time.

I think my thesis does a better job than the current historical consensus about WWII in explaining why, if the forces of modernity beat back the fascist forces of anti-modernity in 1945, does 1945 also mark the beginning of the end for the victorious modernity forces.

WWII as a dispute about dining : closed - or open - commensality ?

Between 1931 and 1941, Japan, Germany, Italy and Russia gobbled up a dozen or so small nations while the people in the "universality of human rights" espousing parts of the world (hello America !) sat silently on their hands , bystanders at a schoolyard bullying session.

They said, basically, that Manchuria, Albania, Ethiopia , Czechoslovakia , Poland, Denmark, Belgium et al were not members of their national family and hence not invitees at their dining table.

So the troubles of the Poles and Danes (or American blacks and other national minorities) were of no concern to them.

They espoused exactly the same  "closed"  attitude to the matter of who dines at the common table as did Hitler ,the dark-haired Aryan wannabe , regarding the German citizens who were Jews and Romas.

Jesus practised an open commensality - inviting all humanity to be part of his family and invited all to dine around his common table.

The 'princes of HIS churches' circa 1931 to 1945, by and large did not practise Jesus's open commensality.

They preferred greatly to save their own church buildings and pensions rather than try and save other human lives.

 Or their own souls : for martyrs the cause, these men  definitely were not.

A few others did more, gave their lives to save Jews and others and the moral import of their stories are being told well.

But Henry Dawson also gave up his live to aid all humanity ( advocating "open" commensality for all humanity needing life-saving penicillin) .

His story, along with that of others like Robert Pulvertaft and Jimmy Duhig, has never been told fully and completely in all its moral implications.

"all Life is family : Agape's Manhattan Project" tries to address this omission....

WWII: Bullies and Bystanders vs Innocents and Intervenors

NYC-based Dr Henry Dawson in 1941 was clearly an intervenor with his 'inclusive' penicillin (and may I point out that adult intervenors (as I well know) were often bullied themselves as children).

 SBE patients , such as his patients Charlie and Miss H were clearly the innocents.

NYC-based Dr Foster Kennedy in 1941 was clearly a bully, particularly telling that he would use the excuse of the shortage of staff and resources during an upcoming war as an excuse to finally implement his long held plan to kill all the deformed children.

Shades of Adolf Hitler in an exactly similar setting.

His active verbal supporters at the very top of the world's largest and most influential mental health body, the American Psychiatric Association, were clearly the stone-hearted bystanders a bully needed to get away with his deeds.

In the wider world of WWII, one can easily spot the bullies, the innocents and stone hearted bystanders (aka Neutrals)  as individuals and as (almost) entire nations.

But sadly, no one nation stands out as a whole hearted intervenor.

That noble task is left to a few in all nations, to try and heal the hearts of the stone-hearted majority by rousing their consciences  to the sad and unfair fate of the small and the weak in face of bullies.

Bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and sometimes even people like Churchill and others on the Allied and Neutral side.....

Are the small just a tiny part of the Modern past or a vital part of the Postmodern future ?

Two hundred years from the event, historians will be telling classrooms that when it comes to exam time, they should remember that WWII boiled down to just one issue.

One - scientific - issue.

Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?

In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.

On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.

By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.

But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.

For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.

But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.

That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...