Imagine the liberation of Belgium in the Fall of 1942, rather than in the Fall of 1944, a wonderfully early liberation made possible because the Allies chose to take advantage of their huge demographic advantage over the Axis.
A huge army made of soldiers from all segments of the Allied cause, including millions of frontline Indian and African troops.
That would be an excellent example of a Big Tent effort that included the small as both people to be helped (Belgium) and among those helping them (the frontline Indian and black soldiers).
Showing posts with label allied. Show all posts
Showing posts with label allied. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2015
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Aylan Kurdi : will former Allied nations match refugee efforts of former Axis nations ?
A former Axis nation, the very crowded Germany still managed to take in almost 80,000 refugees last year.
By contrast, Canada, a former Allied nation, is both big and empty - 35 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles.
In 1956, with less than half as many people (only 16 million people) it still took in almost 40,000 Hungarian refugees.
In 2015, that would mean it would need to take in 80,000 Syrian refugees to match its 1956 effort.
So far, in total, over this entire multi-year refugee crisis, Canada has taken in just 1,000.
By contrast, Canada, a former Allied nation, is both big and empty - 35 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles.
In 1956, with less than half as many people (only 16 million people) it still took in almost 40,000 Hungarian refugees.
In 2015, that would mean it would need to take in 80,000 Syrian refugees to match its 1956 effort.
So far, in total, over this entire multi-year refugee crisis, Canada has taken in just 1,000.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Upending Science after '45 : Purity into Diversity
They touted protecting the gene pool before WWII, yes they did, but they really meant just protecting and purifying the white European subset of the human subset of the overall global gene pool.
Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.
Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.
It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.
Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.
So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.
Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.
In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.
Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.
He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...
Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.
Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.
It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.
Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.
So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.
Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.
In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.
Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.
He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...
Sunday, June 28, 2015
1940 : majority of world opposed Progress but resigned to it as inevitable
In 1940, energetic elites, at every social level and in every nation and colony on Earth, tended to automatically see themselves as 'advanced' and 'progressive' - though they divided sharply over the details of what constituted 'advances' in 'Progress'.
For too long a time after 1940, we have focused on these vocal minorities' rhetorical differences, rather than what unconscious assumptions that they all held in common.
So we know all about the rhetorical differences between those claiming to seek liberal democratic mixed economies in each nation and those seeking scientific socialism (in one nation !) or those seeking scientific national socialism/fascism for one nation.
We fail to notice their actions differed only in degree not kind.
Meanwhile the majority of the world's population were more frightened than glad about the prospects of yet more Progress, but they weren't about to fight it.
(True, other sizeable traditional elites (the Catholic church for one) had lots of tested older intellectual tools to bring to their opposition to Progress thus defined .
But in practise they had no convincing or current intellectual tools to defeat this anthropocentric definition of Progress.)
The silent cowed majority had long ago become convinced by a generation of intellectual heavyweights, and by the intellectuals' journalistic popularizers, that the continued panzer-like Progress of the new/fit/mighty over the bodies of ancient/unfit/weak was an inevitable fact of Nature, proven beyond a doubt by Science.
So the continuous slow starvation and TB-hastened deaths of the America's original ancient native populations was regrettable --- but also inevitable.
I believe you can divide up the entire wartime world into Axis and Allied camps, even if only in their lean towards one or the other camp, country by country, year by year.
And that all of those countries, among their energetic young elites anyway, the belief in the inevitable Progress of the big over the small did not differ at all between the Allied and Axis, except in degree....
For too long a time after 1940, we have focused on these vocal minorities' rhetorical differences, rather than what unconscious assumptions that they all held in common.
So we know all about the rhetorical differences between those claiming to seek liberal democratic mixed economies in each nation and those seeking scientific socialism (in one nation !) or those seeking scientific national socialism/fascism for one nation.
We fail to notice their actions differed only in degree not kind.
Meanwhile the majority of the world's population were more frightened than glad about the prospects of yet more Progress, but they weren't about to fight it.
(True, other sizeable traditional elites (the Catholic church for one) had lots of tested older intellectual tools to bring to their opposition to Progress thus defined .
But in practise they had no convincing or current intellectual tools to defeat this anthropocentric definition of Progress.)
The silent cowed majority had long ago become convinced by a generation of intellectual heavyweights, and by the intellectuals' journalistic popularizers, that the continued panzer-like Progress of the new/fit/mighty over the bodies of ancient/unfit/weak was an inevitable fact of Nature, proven beyond a doubt by Science.
So the continuous slow starvation and TB-hastened deaths of the America's original ancient native populations was regrettable --- but also inevitable.
I believe you can divide up the entire wartime world into Axis and Allied camps, even if only in their lean towards one or the other camp, country by country, year by year.
And that all of those countries, among their energetic young elites anyway, the belief in the inevitable Progress of the big over the small did not differ at all between the Allied and Axis, except in degree....
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
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.
But relatively few of the modern world's adults saw it that way during the six long years of the war : even fewer forcefully proclaimed it that way during the war and did so from beginning to end.
If their initial wartime actions speak much louder than their later verbal recollections, almost all of the modern world's adults choose to stand around as bystanders while schoolyard bully Hitler beat up on little primary pupil Poland.
Very few neutral nations (and the neutral individuals within them) changed their minds about fighting Hitler and his Axis over the course of those six years of the war - unless they themselves were directly attacked by Hitler or his Axis.
Even then, few thought that Hitler was the ultimate symbol of evil.
Rather the adults still saw Hitler as just another invader who must be repelled, albeit an highly effective invader and hence a highly dangerous invader, one who must be stopped dead in his tracks.
The modern elites at the top of both the West and in Russia thought it quite possible that either the West or Russia might sue for a separate peace with Hitler at any point during the war - as France had already done.
That hardly sounds like people who saw Hitler as the symbol of the ultimate evil who must be stopped even if it cost all their lives to do so.
The great majority of the people murdered by Germany were killed by its armed forces rather than by the SS.
(I can repeat that sentence slowly and calmly, once you're sitting down, if its all been too great a shock to you.)
Despite that, almost all of the military and political elite in the West still thought of those German armed forces as basically like their own Allied armed forces and treated them accordingly - right up to the end of the war.
And well beyond : for many, that remains a belief until this very day.
From day one, the Allied governments' propaganda insisted that Hitler's Germany was evil but then didn't act like it was evil and so failed to convince themselves, their publics or the peoples in the neutral majority around the world.
They failed to do wartime things differently enough from the Axis to convince most that its actions were truly beyond the civilized ken.
Instead they said it was perfectly okay to go on denying Jews jobs and housing - but it was not okay to mass murder them - but we won't do much to stop that mass murder - beyond defeating Hitler - because he was also attacking us - the non-Jews.
If was as if all the modern world's adults during WWII were nothing more than modern objective W5 journalists, carefully reporting that he says "he wasn't mass killing the Jews", while she says "Hitler was too".
If WWII had in fact been anything like what W5 reporter Tom Brokaw* imagined it to have been (the ultimate battle between good and evil), I doubt whether we'd still be writing and reading about it 75 years later.
We are still fascinated by it, like white mice bait before a cobra, because WWII was in fact so filled with neutral hypocrisy that it almost crowds out all the brutality.
An endlessly multi-layered onion of a melodrama, far more Noirish than anything Hollywood could ever dream up ...
__________
* Tom Brokaw was born in early February 1940 and was five and two thirds years old when Japan formally surrendered.
Born just early enough to still bathe deep in the postwar modernist triumphant glow.
I strongly question whether, if he had been born even just three or four years later, he would have ever written his infamous book, "The Greatest Generation".
But relatively few of the modern world's adults saw it that way during the six long years of the war : even fewer forcefully proclaimed it that way during the war and did so from beginning to end.
If their initial wartime actions speak much louder than their later verbal recollections, almost all of the modern world's adults choose to stand around as bystanders while schoolyard bully Hitler beat up on little primary pupil Poland.
Very few neutral nations (and the neutral individuals within them) changed their minds about fighting Hitler and his Axis over the course of those six years of the war - unless they themselves were directly attacked by Hitler or his Axis.
Even then, few thought that Hitler was the ultimate symbol of evil.
Rather the adults still saw Hitler as just another invader who must be repelled, albeit an highly effective invader and hence a highly dangerous invader, one who must be stopped dead in his tracks.
The modern elites at the top of both the West and in Russia thought it quite possible that either the West or Russia might sue for a separate peace with Hitler at any point during the war - as France had already done.
That hardly sounds like people who saw Hitler as the symbol of the ultimate evil who must be stopped even if it cost all their lives to do so.
The great majority of the people murdered by Germany were killed by its armed forces rather than by the SS.
(I can repeat that sentence slowly and calmly, once you're sitting down, if its all been too great a shock to you.)
Despite that, almost all of the military and political elite in the West still thought of those German armed forces as basically like their own Allied armed forces and treated them accordingly - right up to the end of the war.
And well beyond : for many, that remains a belief until this very day.
From day one, the Allied governments' propaganda insisted that Hitler's Germany was evil but then didn't act like it was evil and so failed to convince themselves, their publics or the peoples in the neutral majority around the world.
They failed to do wartime things differently enough from the Axis to convince most that its actions were truly beyond the civilized ken.
Instead they said it was perfectly okay to go on denying Jews jobs and housing - but it was not okay to mass murder them - but we won't do much to stop that mass murder - beyond defeating Hitler - because he was also attacking us - the non-Jews.
If was as if all the modern world's adults during WWII were nothing more than modern objective W5 journalists, carefully reporting that he says "he wasn't mass killing the Jews", while she says "Hitler was too".
If WWII had in fact been anything like what W5 reporter Tom Brokaw* imagined it to have been (the ultimate battle between good and evil), I doubt whether we'd still be writing and reading about it 75 years later.
We are still fascinated by it, like white mice bait before a cobra, because WWII was in fact so filled with neutral hypocrisy that it almost crowds out all the brutality.
An endlessly multi-layered onion of a melodrama, far more Noirish than anything Hollywood could ever dream up ...
__________
* Tom Brokaw was born in early February 1940 and was five and two thirds years old when Japan formally surrendered.
Born just early enough to still bathe deep in the postwar modernist triumphant glow.
I strongly question whether, if he had been born even just three or four years later, he would have ever written his infamous book, "The Greatest Generation".
Friday, July 11, 2014
Morally and metaphorically, my book is about the 97 pound weakling who sticks a needle into the guy who once kicked sand in his face - saving his life !
In every book I have ever read about WWII , the small (4F)(unfit) (weak) get deadly sand kicked in their face by big bullies --- at home* as well as abroad --- for six long years.
Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.
(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)
But I think there is one exception:
All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.
It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .
Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.
(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)
But I think there is one exception:
The unlikely triumph of a small group of American 'unfits' who defied both Allied and Axis Eugenicists (and their own physical failings) to bring us the blessings of cheap, abundant Penicillin-for-All .
All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.
It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Action 4F hooks up with Action T4 : Allied and Axis eugenic ethics 'mate like minks' during WWII ...
Action T4
It seemed clear to the Nazis (and to most Allies) that if the people they viewed as "unfit" weren't going to be useful on the combat front that didn't mean they should be left off scot-free.
They too must help the war efforts in some tangible way.
Perhaps by receiving less food, heat and medicine --- since they couldn't do useful war work or even simply breed more healthy future warriors.
The Nazis quickly parted company with many (but by no means all) Germans , Allied and Neutrals by deciding the unfit could really best help the war by being murdered --- to free up yet more food and more hospital attention for other "fitter" Aryans.
Action T4 - the secret - official - mass murders of all the unfit ended after a couple of years , under strong if muted protests from the general German public.
(It carried on - unofficially - throughout the war and beyond - as a secretive and unorganized effort supported by wink, wink silence from superiors.)
But this public protest only arose in strength with rumours that the Nazi eugenicists planned to start killing the elderly and the wounded soldiers of non-poor German families --- as well as those of the poorest German families.
This social animus against those unable to fight in combat seems to be universal and eternal.
Action 4F
And almost always, the strongest public anger does not spill over against those who are "fit but not at the front" (those in society with valuable special skills working in "deferred" jobs).
This is because they are society's bosses and able to make life miserable for any who dare to complain publicly.
"So you think your husky young Foreman should be at the Pacific Front do you ?"
"Well then how about you spending some time in the heat of Guadalcanal , Mr drill press operator !"
This implied threat from the powerful had hidden teeth - most men with deferred valuable skills knew that if enough women or blacks were trained to do their jobs, their deferment would end and they would be called up.
This, and not the general prejudice against women and blacks , was the real (if semi-secret) reason why white male worker protests against hiring women and blacks were so frequent and so violent.
So public anger had to be directed instead against the weakest , poorest and least popular members of society --- those 4Fs who came from poor and or minority groups.
They could be safely attacked without any risk that they, their families or their communities could successfully counterattack.
Most girls , just for instance , made it very clear that they won't be seen dating or flirting with those unfortunate teenager college boys with 4F cards.
Seventy five years later this very public rebuke to vulnerable teenage identities clearly still stings in the memoirs of these now elderly men.
Conscious anger mixed with much unconscious guilt in the minds of Allied society's most powerful who were not at the front in WWII (and who had also frequently evaded serving in combat in WWI as well.)
This is shown by the astonishing eagerness with which the Allied elites made the poorest and the weakest in Allied society (its metaphorical 4Fs) the unwitting subjects in endless dangerous medical experiments - as assayed in Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files .
Or the eagerness with which they denied the poorest lifesaving medicines as a form of brutal eugenic triage.
I hope I am not seen as excusing the Nazis' actions but merely stating a historical consensus that the Nazis got even more brutal against the unfit as the objective and subjective conditions of the war worsened for them .
By objective I mean the evidence that in war years of bad European food harvests, they determined not to lose this war (unlike the first war) on the German home front - and so made others suffer more so that Germans continued to eat well.
(Ordinary Germans ate better in WWII than they had during the 1930s' Depression period - because of a government plan that enabled German soldiers to sent home food they bought openly and freely from other Europeans .
The Nazis secretly made it work financially for them by in effect creating hugely unfair currency exchange rates.)
By subjective, I mean when it seemed clear to the Nazis in the Fall of 1941 that they might not secure new living space in western USSR , they began killing all of Europe's Jews - not just some of the Jews in parts of Eastern Europe - as a new war objective they could easily reach, to justify all the German war dead.
I mention all this because we mustn't let the Allies off too lightly in these brutal eugenic sweepstakes.
They afterall invented most of the original eugenic dogma the Nazis picked up and ran with.
And the historical evidence indicates that the Allied eugenic actions got more brutal as the war worsened against them.
If the war had continued to worsen badly against them who can say if their 4F Action horrors might not have rivalled those of the Action 4T ?
Certainly, on the military front, the Allied record displays a despicable eagerness to see that the hapless 4Fs of the occupied lands and of the Axis suffered (by Allied bombings) before the 1As of the Allies did (by directly engaging the German troops on Western European soil).
But that squalid history is a post for another day ....
Friday, December 13, 2013
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.....
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.....
Monday, August 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.....
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Keep something out of the newspapers and it can remain a secret forever - even when it is not : the case of wartime DDT
Hard to explain why both the Germans and the Japanese of WWII failed to make use of DDT to reduce their truly immense manpower losses due to endemic insect borne diseases : its use alone, could have prolonged the war a year or two more.
After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.
It had been re-synthesized in 1939 and patented by the Swiss firm Ciegy who proceeded to offer patent licenses to everyone : neutral, Allied and Axis nation alike : just as the Swiss firm Oerlikon did with its anti-aircraft guns, used by almost all military forces during WWII.
But in wartime, busy generals and even busier bureaucrats and politicians don't have time to read scientific journals, patent applications and industry magazines : though they do like to glance through their familiar newspaper from time to time, to relax.
So if you can keep news of a weapon out of the newspapers, as the US successfully did by censoring both DDT's domestic use and domestic coverage of DDT's success overseas, you can keep it effectively secret - albeit an "open" secret - throughout the war.
Unbelievable but true.
And an example of how the Allies planned to keep synthetic penicillin an effective - if open - secret as well....
After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.
It had been re-synthesized in 1939 and patented by the Swiss firm Ciegy who proceeded to offer patent licenses to everyone : neutral, Allied and Axis nation alike : just as the Swiss firm Oerlikon did with its anti-aircraft guns, used by almost all military forces during WWII.
But in wartime, busy generals and even busier bureaucrats and politicians don't have time to read scientific journals, patent applications and industry magazines : though they do like to glance through their familiar newspaper from time to time, to relax.
An "open" secret can still be effectively a total secret
So if you can keep news of a weapon out of the newspapers, as the US successfully did by censoring both DDT's domestic use and domestic coverage of DDT's success overseas, you can keep it effectively secret - albeit an "open" secret - throughout the war.
Unbelievable but true.
And an example of how the Allies planned to keep synthetic penicillin an effective - if open - secret as well....
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Too many defensive histories of WWII ; too few explanations...
This blog and its eponymous website were created because I believe that there has been far too few books written about World War Two.
At first, or even second glance, this seems to be a totally untenable position to defend.
'Glut' is the usual word used to describe the mini-industry of books, movies and TV shows produced about WWII.
But I hold that all the books about the war, to date, have come in two (distinctly biased) thirty five year long 'chunks'.
The first 'chunk', produced during the war itself and on until the late 1970s, were written by participants, middle aged or older in 1940, who had started and sustained the war but who were too old to actually fight in the foxholes.
(These people were born mostly between about 1885 and 1900.)
Their books defended the specific positions and decisions they and their allies had taken during that war.
By the 1980s most were dead or in their mid eighties and their publishing careers were over.
Then starting around 1980, we got a second glut of books - this 'chunk' written by people who had been teenagers in 1939 and so hadn't started or run the war but who, thanks to their frontline bravery, finally ended the bloodshed.
These people had been born between about 1914 and 1929.
They stoutly defended their nation's overall goals during the war, while feeling free to criticize specific activities - after all, they had been too young to actually order any of those 'wrong-in-hindsight' decisions.
Now the youngest of them, in turn, are in their mid eighties and their publishing efforts have almost fallen silent.
What is most notable about all these books, in both chunks, is their defensive cast.
All these authors somehow sensed that the generations who hadn't been participants in the war failed to see it as a clear cut case of Good against Evil.
But I think that in the course of assembling a quick argument to dismiss such an absurd claim, all of these authors found some merit in the later generations' case.
They were then reduced to defending ,or explaining away, actions that were hard to condone in normal times, as regrettable actions taken at the nadir of a Total War they felt they were losing.
I will be 60 this year and came of age when the Cold War, let alone the Second World War, was at its moral ebb.
Seventy years of distance from the wartime deluge of propaganda should allow me and others of my generation (and younger) to finally seek explanations of WWII that do not, in advance, seek to explain away actions taken by any side or person in this conflict.
Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think I would be writing about WWII - growing up, that seemed as something for grandfather's and father's generations to do.
I came at the war obliquely after a lifetime of interest in Eugenics and Modernity - Eugenic Modernity, for short.
One should always strive to see that Eugenics and Modernity in America, Russia, Japan and German had a mixture of things they did or believed in common and a mixture of things they did or believed differently.
But after 70 years of books focussed on the differences between Communism, Capitalism and Fascism one does long for and hunger for a bit of balance and redress where their similarities are also compared and evaluated.
Fair is fair.
My bias in advance:
I see World War Two as a war that the educated in America, Japan,Russia,Germany (and in all other countries) had predicted would come, should come, must come : a biologically-scientifically proven battle that must take place between 'the fittest of the fit societies' for survival.
A war between humans, with the world present only as an inert backdrop.
That is not to say that most of them also didn't fear and dread it and wish it won't happen.
It is just that, as Richard Overy claims in his book "THE MORBID AGE", they expected it was about to happen because modern science had proven it had to happen - it was in our genes.
Evolution, Natural Selection,Progress , Genetics had all foredained it would be so.
So by June 1940, the ground rules for this drama had been laid out.
Against a totally inert backdrop of Nature, six huge military empires (the British Empire,America,German-occupied Europe,Russia, Japan and China) would fight it out over six vast continents - and as it turns out in a neat trick in symmetry, over six long years.
A mind war (martial spirits), not a material war (motor spirits).
In the beginning, Japan and Germany , tiny nations with few natural resources but abundant will-to-power in science and warfare, bested the bigger empires.
Did their military or scientific vigor falter during the war, leading to their defeat?
Few military men who ever directly engaged the forces of those two comparatively small nations felt that the Germans or Japanese fighters could be bested by the Allied side, one on one.
Our will-to-freedom simply couldn't reliably best their will-to-power.
This view is held by virtually all the world's public - that the average German or Japanese soldier, as individual fighters, were fiercer than Allied soldiers, on average.
So perhaps Allied Science bested Axis Science. Much of the public -at least the older public - still believes this.
Interestingly, few scientists or historians who have studied the matter, do so.
So we are left with the consensus view that while Blitzkreig wars strike hard and fast, they also strike short.
That is to say, that the Japanese and German Blitzkreig in the Spring of 1942 fell short by only conquering about 8% of the world each, when what they really needed to do to be ultimately successful was to conquer about a half the world each.
Specifically German troops had occupy Britain and Japanese had to occupy Australia and both had to have met in Tehran and at the Urals Mountains by Spring 1942.
Under these conditions, America would have to resign itself to dominating the Americas and the southern half of Africa, but not seriously attempting to defeat Japan and Germany.
But the land and naval Blitzkreigs only conquered about one sixth of the world's surface and eventually the resources of the other five sixths defeated the Axis in a long slow war of attrition.
Thus accepting that the human factors failed to explain the ultimate defeat of the Axis ( the Allied morale/courage and scientific ability not being better enough in themselves to defeat the Japanese or Germans ) , the consensus view is forced back upon a material explanation for the war's outcome.
A explanation, from our best educated, for the outcome of the war that is totally at variance with the explanation for the start of the war, again from the world's best educated.
The Germans and the Japanese didn't lack ambition - they planned and agreed to meet in Tehran and on the Urals.
They bested all the human enemies they ever met.
So why did they fail? Why did Tojo, Hitler and Mussolini, ham actors all, fail to chew the scenery?
Why did the scenery prove much less than an inert backdrop, why did the scenery end up chewing the actors ?
Now I include such ham actors as Churchill and FDR, Portal and Hap Arnold and all those other Allied proponents of a swift Air based victory.
This because if the German armoured tank based Blitzkreig failed to deliver what it promised and the carrier & landing craft based Japanese Naval Blitzkreig failed to deliver, so did those B-17s and Norden bombsights and their Aerial Blitzkreig.
Three separate Blitzkreigs - three separate failures that crossed the Allied-Axis divide.
Why did they all fail?
These are some of the questions I hope to raise and hope to begin to answer.
There have been many accounts of the world war, I hope this one is a GREEN account - one that looks at least as much as the world's part in the war as we have given the humans' part in the war to date.....
At first, or even second glance, this seems to be a totally untenable position to defend.
'Glut' is the usual word used to describe the mini-industry of books, movies and TV shows produced about WWII.
But I hold that all the books about the war, to date, have come in two (distinctly biased) thirty five year long 'chunks'.
The first 'chunk', produced during the war itself and on until the late 1970s, were written by participants, middle aged or older in 1940, who had started and sustained the war but who were too old to actually fight in the foxholes.
(These people were born mostly between about 1885 and 1900.)
Their books defended the specific positions and decisions they and their allies had taken during that war.
By the 1980s most were dead or in their mid eighties and their publishing careers were over.
Then starting around 1980, we got a second glut of books - this 'chunk' written by people who had been teenagers in 1939 and so hadn't started or run the war but who, thanks to their frontline bravery, finally ended the bloodshed.
These people had been born between about 1914 and 1929.
They stoutly defended their nation's overall goals during the war, while feeling free to criticize specific activities - after all, they had been too young to actually order any of those 'wrong-in-hindsight' decisions.
Now the youngest of them, in turn, are in their mid eighties and their publishing efforts have almost fallen silent.
What is most notable about all these books, in both chunks, is their defensive cast.
All these authors somehow sensed that the generations who hadn't been participants in the war failed to see it as a clear cut case of Good against Evil.
But I think that in the course of assembling a quick argument to dismiss such an absurd claim, all of these authors found some merit in the later generations' case.
They were then reduced to defending ,or explaining away, actions that were hard to condone in normal times, as regrettable actions taken at the nadir of a Total War they felt they were losing.
I will be 60 this year and came of age when the Cold War, let alone the Second World War, was at its moral ebb.
Seventy years of distance from the wartime deluge of propaganda should allow me and others of my generation (and younger) to finally seek explanations of WWII that do not, in advance, seek to explain away actions taken by any side or person in this conflict.
Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think I would be writing about WWII - growing up, that seemed as something for grandfather's and father's generations to do.
I came at the war obliquely after a lifetime of interest in Eugenics and Modernity - Eugenic Modernity, for short.
One should always strive to see that Eugenics and Modernity in America, Russia, Japan and German had a mixture of things they did or believed in common and a mixture of things they did or believed differently.
But after 70 years of books focussed on the differences between Communism, Capitalism and Fascism one does long for and hunger for a bit of balance and redress where their similarities are also compared and evaluated.
Fair is fair.
My bias in advance:
I see World War Two as a war that the educated in America, Japan,Russia,Germany (and in all other countries) had predicted would come, should come, must come : a biologically-scientifically proven battle that must take place between 'the fittest of the fit societies' for survival.
A war between humans, with the world present only as an inert backdrop.
That is not to say that most of them also didn't fear and dread it and wish it won't happen.
It is just that, as Richard Overy claims in his book "THE MORBID AGE", they expected it was about to happen because modern science had proven it had to happen - it was in our genes.
Evolution, Natural Selection,Progress , Genetics had all foredained it would be so.
So by June 1940, the ground rules for this drama had been laid out.
Against a totally inert backdrop of Nature, six huge military empires (the British Empire,America,German-occupied Europe,Russia, Japan and China) would fight it out over six vast continents - and as it turns out in a neat trick in symmetry, over six long years.
A mind war (martial spirits), not a material war (motor spirits).
In the beginning, Japan and Germany , tiny nations with few natural resources but abundant will-to-power in science and warfare, bested the bigger empires.
Did their military or scientific vigor falter during the war, leading to their defeat?
Few military men who ever directly engaged the forces of those two comparatively small nations felt that the Germans or Japanese fighters could be bested by the Allied side, one on one.
Our will-to-freedom simply couldn't reliably best their will-to-power.
This view is held by virtually all the world's public - that the average German or Japanese soldier, as individual fighters, were fiercer than Allied soldiers, on average.
So perhaps Allied Science bested Axis Science. Much of the public -at least the older public - still believes this.
Interestingly, few scientists or historians who have studied the matter, do so.
So we are left with the consensus view that while Blitzkreig wars strike hard and fast, they also strike short.
That is to say, that the Japanese and German Blitzkreig in the Spring of 1942 fell short by only conquering about 8% of the world each, when what they really needed to do to be ultimately successful was to conquer about a half the world each.
Specifically German troops had occupy Britain and Japanese had to occupy Australia and both had to have met in Tehran and at the Urals Mountains by Spring 1942.
Under these conditions, America would have to resign itself to dominating the Americas and the southern half of Africa, but not seriously attempting to defeat Japan and Germany.
But the land and naval Blitzkreigs only conquered about one sixth of the world's surface and eventually the resources of the other five sixths defeated the Axis in a long slow war of attrition.
Thus accepting that the human factors failed to explain the ultimate defeat of the Axis ( the Allied morale/courage and scientific ability not being better enough in themselves to defeat the Japanese or Germans ) , the consensus view is forced back upon a material explanation for the war's outcome.
A explanation, from our best educated, for the outcome of the war that is totally at variance with the explanation for the start of the war, again from the world's best educated.
The Germans and the Japanese didn't lack ambition - they planned and agreed to meet in Tehran and on the Urals.
They bested all the human enemies they ever met.
So why did they fail? Why did Tojo, Hitler and Mussolini, ham actors all, fail to chew the scenery?
Why did the scenery prove much less than an inert backdrop, why did the scenery end up chewing the actors ?
Now I include such ham actors as Churchill and FDR, Portal and Hap Arnold and all those other Allied proponents of a swift Air based victory.
This because if the German armoured tank based Blitzkreig failed to deliver what it promised and the carrier & landing craft based Japanese Naval Blitzkreig failed to deliver, so did those B-17s and Norden bombsights and their Aerial Blitzkreig.
Three separate Blitzkreigs - three separate failures that crossed the Allied-Axis divide.
Why did they all fail?
These are some of the questions I hope to raise and hope to begin to answer.
There have been many accounts of the world war, I hope this one is a GREEN account - one that looks at least as much as the world's part in the war as we have given the humans' part in the war to date.....
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