1939-1945 : scenery chewing actors ...

1939-1945 : 'civilized men' battle each other to divide the natural world - but then , totally unexpectedly , it resists...

"1939 -1945 : Scenery Chewing Actors" is a wonderful ambiguous title.

Does it mean ham actors like Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill tore up the natural world, in passing,  as they struggled to lead all humanity ?

Or does it mean does it mean the best laid plans of mousy prime ministers and ratty war lords are blunted and broken when the neutral seeming natural backdrop to their human-only drama turns out to be very much alive around and willing to bite back ?


Or perhaps, that a lot of both can be found in the actual events of that six year long war.

A 'civilized men' upon 'civilized men' military conflict,  mixed in with the natural world exhibiting unexpected 'push back'  against the pretensions of those 'civilized men' , right across the globe....

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....