What if God was a blob like none of us, just a smear upon a subway wall...or tenement hall ?

WWII as "dirty" penicillin vs ethnic "cleansing" and racial "purity"

What if Jesus came back - during WWII - and no one even noticed ?

But no, not this time as a simple carpenter's helper, slouching into town as 'a dolt on a colt'.

Because humble as that act was, it didn't really curb human hubris for very long.

No, this time, to really rub some salt of humility into the open wound of overweening hubris, He comes back as a blob.

Just a smear on a subway wall, or tenement hall, HP Lovecraft's moldy smelly slimy smear relentlessly spreading all over your favourite pair of boots, in some dark dank closet.

Penicillin "J", only now, coming out of the closet, to offer hope in a time of horror.

Tiny hyssop, in a time of giant Cedars ...

WWII's civilized Penicillin bat first, but natural bat last....

Rather like the war itself, actually.

In the beginning, German armoured battle groups, Japanese naval task forces and Allied heavy bomber raids were all supposed to speedily defeat time and space (& weather, etc).

Stride the globe effortlessly with mechanical feet, night and day, the year around --- modern middle class men commanding modern middle class (killing) machines.

No more need for millions of old fashioned cannon fodder recruits from the peasant and working class, limping about on shank's mare, dragging along bolt action rifles.

Didn't work out though, did it ?

(Insert here : Schweinfurt, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal.)

Far too much land and water to hold and re-supply, too much weather, too much snow and cold, too much heat and thirst.

Never enough food.

Logistics - the big bugbear of modern progressive advanced war - is just a complicated way to say "Mother Nature always bats last"....

How ever could three nations, with only 1% of earth's land territory and 10% of world population, hold the rest of us at bay, for six long years ?

Neutrality.

The neutrality of the schoolyard bystander - the Nordic disease - which by 1939 had infected almost the whole world.

Accept as a given fact that a Grade Six bully (Hitler) can't really beat the crap out of dozens of primary school kids (Poland et al), not all by themselves, not unless the rest of the schoolyard stands around with their hands in their pockets, agnostic as the results of the 'fight'.

Because in the Age of Human-Only Progress, it was seen as inevitable that the biggest and toughest humans would beat up the smallest of humanity, as it was that they beat up insects and bacteria.

Might was just bound to be right, in the struggle of the survival of the fittest.

Regrettable but true.

Our great great grandparents sighed for a moment, just a moment, over the very sad fate of the Belgians or the Canadian Indians, and then got on with life.....

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.

That boom was primarily led by the inventions of just two industrial giants, equal to each other in population and scientific knowledge : Germany and America.

For us today can only see that America is more than four times the population of Germany and still growing - while Germany is losing population fast.

But back then both were equal in population with forty million people each.

Those old - badly outdated - childhood memories of when Germany was still equal in population and technology to the USA continued to govern the emotions of the old men who ran the Allies WWII war effort.

They thus greatly overestimated Germany's demographic and industrial strength and gravely underestimated their own.

This led them to avoid an early conventional weapons-based ground assault on Germany using their overwhelmingly superior demographics in favour of a slower (big money but small manpower) air-led assault using supposedly superior and secret technology.

The war thus dragged on needlessly for six bloody years, 75 million died directly and indirectly as a result , Russia did the land assault (albeit badly) and so got most of Europe behind the Iron Curtain - leading to a further 50 years of the Cold War.

A tragedy on so many fronts ....

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".

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.

And that similarly, on this issue, someone born in 1935 tends to have more in common with someone born in 1875, sixty years earlier, than they do with someone born in 1941, only six years later ...

*Large scale (35,000 or so respondents) national "General Social Surveys" have been repeatedly conducted in many nations over the past few decades, annually or biannually.

They usually freely available over the internet and are always the first port of call for academics,authors and journalists when reviewing changes in social attitudes over time in various sub groupings of society.

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.

Most of us - in fairness - believe in human induced climate disaster and worry what can be done.

But we worry and fret so completely passively that we might as well not even show up o to be weighed on the moral scales.

Meanwhile some of us Boomers are moral monsters - hardly sleeping or taking vacations we are so busy thinking of new ways to dig up, transport and burn ever more carbon, ever faster.

These rogue Boomers run countries as Prime Ministers, Presidents and Dictators (pardon my redundancies), run big international corporations, run big international media empires.

But they are a minority - albeit a very active and self confident minority - and they only get away with it because we in the vast Boomer silent majority let them, all because we hold our own convictions so lightly and feebly.

They - the rogue Boomers - privately admit, in their heart of hearts, that human carbon emissions are changing the climate.

But they remain (both publicly - and much more crucially, privately) convinced that real world human engineering can quickly, cheaply, easily overcome any problems that the egghead scientists in their ivory tower labs can detect.

Yet another postwar Manhattan Project will solve any problem.

Telling indeed that the people most convinced of the efficiency of WWII bureaucracy were the ones who never personally suffered through it's chickenshit, to use the words of Paul Fussell, who did know of it first hand.

I would say it was the youngest of the young adults from the WWII - those too junior to know of the mid level real world frustrations - together with all those too young to know much (or anything) personally of WWII.

They are the ones who fell hardest for the carefully cultivated postwar myth of the efficiency of the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's secretive, un-democratic, throw big money at any problem approach.

That meant almost everyone in the  postwar world born after 1920 initially bought into Vannevar Bush's Big Lie.

Over time, personal experiences with postwar bureaucratic failures and revelations about what really went on in WWII converted many us to becoming a Doubting Thomas about the touted advantages of another Manhattan (nuclear) Project type operation to solve anything.

But clearly the rogue Boomers (in terms of personality: action-oriented unreflective, shallow types) never got the memo : because most never ever read a book - or ever changed their mind - after college.

What I think I can bring to the effort to fight to save our climate before it is too late is all the research work I have done on the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's little-known alter ego : the Manhattan (penicillin) Project.

It was everything - in almost every detail - that the nuclear project was not and so it offers, I believe, a way out of our climate dilemma ....

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.