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| Michael Marshall |
No one disputes that 1939 -1945 was MOdernity's War.
The only real question is, 'was that war a success or a failure for Modernity?'
Most historians still feel that that only Modernity's Science saved "The Civilized World" from the evils of the anti-modernist Nazis, when the Allied fighting man proved no equal to the German armed forces in pure fighting technique.
By contrast, I feel that Modernity was the overarching ideology of the war, shared across all the Allied and Axis nations.
I believe that the Axis and Allied nations both had overly-optimistic initial war aims in 1938-1942.
These hubris-filled PLAN As came from both sides' overly optimistic views of Modernity's potential to excel particularly well under war conditions.
( Modernity had made many previous claims to hold all the secrets of Synthetic Autarky.)
I , on the other hand, feel that almost anyone - including Modernists - can govern in good times.
But that it is during wars that Modernity particularly fails to deliver its promised goods.
So what Modernists on both sides did was come up with new PLAN Bs when their original PLAN A failed ---- and then barefacedly claim that this new PLAN B was their old PLAN A all along !
Unexpectedly it worked.
It worked I think because almost all historians ,until recently ,were themselves fully modernist, and thus swimming in the same Kool Aid they were supposed to be analyzing.
I have already pointed out that Dr Martin Henry Dawson inadvertently became part of one Plan B.
Dawson ,working in a spirit of COmmensality with penicillium fungus, had put trillions of tiny unicelled fungi chemical factories into 700 two liter flasks and thus helped bring naturally-grown penicillin to a point where the public demanded it be made in huge amounts.
Pfizer, who had been working with Dawson, simply piled those trillions upon trillions of tiny penicillium factories into a series of impressive looking four storey tall 'flasks' and bare-facedly called it 'High Technology'.
The media ever a sucker for pretty pictures over hard digging, fell for the story.
They needed a new High tech wins the war success story when war medicine's original PLAN A (synthetic penicillin) failed to materialize despite a Manhattan Project-scaled effort in the US and UK.
Even the Manhattan Project itself can be seen as a PLAN B too.
The original PLAN A (precision bombing, with high level B-29s and NORDEN Bombsights) failed totally in its claim to quickly bring Germany and Japan to their knees, without a need for an old-fashioned infantry-led invasion--- and without killing many innocent civilians.
Quietly Allied governments fell back upon imprecise 'area bombing' ----burning entire metropolitan cities, along with all their residents, evoking a faint hope clause that the heat of the fires might also twist those cities' war factories' machine tools into useless knots.
But precision-bombing with High Explosives (HE) had been sold as an entirely man-made success story --- as a fully Modernist effort --- as military autarky.
The Norden Bombsight it was claimed, would aim the bomb so well that it would surmount any attempts by Mother Nature to pull it off its anointed course.
Man's high explosives (HE) also works as well in snow, rain,wind and excessive cold/ hot as in fair weather.
But the time-proven alternatives to HE and precision bombing were always rejected by the military leaders, out of a gut instinct that the real credit for their success would go to Nature, not to Modernist Man.
These alternatives I term "CLOUD WARFARE" .
For these war clouds of Poison Gas, Smoke, Radiation (Fallout),Incendiary (Fire) and Germ only succeed if the wind and humidity levels are just so.
Mother Nature can either help move these killers onto the target or scatter it wildly far away, diluting beyond effectiveness.
Consider the most successful bombing efforts of WWII : the firestorms of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo.
Despite the massive amounts of fire bombs dropped, Modernist Man couldn't create those fire storms - or if so, firestorms would have happened many times over during WWII.
No, Mother Nature had to step in, in COmmensal fashion, and lend a hand - by giving the bombing crews lots of wind combined with super dry air (low humidity levels).
The fire bombs did no more than act as a sort of barbecue starter - the real fuel was the wood of the city combined with all that oxygen continuously coming in on the wind.
The energy from a thousand tons of magnesium, phosphorus and napalm is nothing against the energy put out by 100,000 tons of combustible wood and oxygen.
Ancient warfare always knew that nothing could destroy an enemy's empire like firing up their cities on a nice hot,dry, windy day - firestorms are as much a part of pre-modernity as they are of the WWII era.
Even Hiroshima was as much death by fire and radiation as it was death by explosion - and if the winds had been high, many more might have died in other communities - conversely if heavy rains had fallen as the Bomb dropped, deaths would have been reduced by being limited to the immediate blast area.
Darn !
Nature gets much of the credit for the death rate in either case.
But Hiroshima was successfully sold as High Tech when in reality it was as ancient a form of warfare as anything the Hittites ever thought up.
Dr Henry Dawson worked with Nature to save hundreds of thousands of lives --- but General Curtis LeMay also worked with Nature, only this time to take hundreds of thousands of lives.
So WWII's COmmensality, (its low tech PLAN B solution to high tech PLAN A public relations disasters) proved very much a two-edged sword.
I never claimed global commensality was all hearts and flowers....
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