Stanley Baldwin : through rain, sleet, or snow - in a triumph of the will - the bomber always gets through, like Superman they're faster than a speeding bullet

Other than by specialists , Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of Britain is little remembered today --- except for this simple and rather commonplace remark that he made in 1932 - one that merely reflected back the view held by all modern civilized people in his day.

Unfortunately - as we learned during WWII - this remark (belief) hardly reflected reality - out there in the cold, dark, windy and rainy real world.

But then when do the thoughts of middle class, middle aged, well educated people ever do that ?

A good family name, a good income and a good university education practically guarantees you the right to sit in an armchair pontificating on everything and anything without ever once testing it with a real finger in a real wind.

And truth told, Baldwin didn't actually use those words - but he certainly implied them - them and much more.

Because his speech didn't even count the weather and hours of daylight as factors in his claim (no one else ever did then either).

Baldwin, with all Modernity bromidizing at his side in somnolent agreement, merely felt that the multi engined bombers in 1932, being basically slighter faster than that era's single engine fighter aircraft, could always push through an attack against the best in human resistance.

Leni Reifenstahl actually made her film Triumph of the Will to celebrate Germany's airpower around this very point.

 But her film could have just as easily have been made on commission for RAF Bomber Command or the Bomber mafia of the US Army Air Force --- without too many fundamental changes.

The film's precis was that a single Modern Man (read: Superman) could best an army of un-modern men and as for Mother Nature, she was but a passive backdrop to this human drama happening at the front of the stage.

In reality, while Nature bats last , she also bats hard : bowling Modernity totallyout by 1945 --- ushering in Nature-friendly post-Modernity...

Homo Proponit

Man Proposes ,1939 - 1945

The wars and the killings started by the Axis began in 1931 in Manchuria and carried on in full flood until at least 1946-1947,  as it played itself out in a series of local but bloody civil wars or wars of national liberation.

At least fifteen full years of non-stop bloodletting somewhere in the world, directed or started by the Axis.

Despite all of this, what makes the very much shorter six years of WWII (September 2 1939 -September 2 1945) truly unique in humanity's long run of war and violence is not the record number of people who died, nor the attempted industrial mass murder of all Jews, all Romas and all Slavs.

Rather it is most unique for the fact that it was history's only true world war : combat conducted 24/7/365 all around the world, in all extremities of heat, cold , distance and remoteness for six long years.

High in the Poles, mountains and skies; deep in the ocean depths , in watery trenches and  hot swampy jungles - and in the driest of sand deserts.

WWII can't just be another property from Central Casting ; it is all of Central Casting  - and more.

So what started out as a human drama - an intra-species family fight within the human race - unexpectedly became as well a war of Human versus Nature.

It is fair to say, that as a result,  the long term consequences of WWII were not something any leader in any nation in 1939 - Allied, Axis or Neutral - had any reason to suspect , fear or welcome.

Homo Proponit indeed ......

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....

WWII through a female-oriented lens...

I am not a female.

My most extensive bout of diaper changing was over 35 years ago, when I routinely changed diapers on adults with mental ages of one or two, in a mental hospital.

Never been a parent.

But neither did I grow up a privileged upper middle class male, waited upon hand and foot while I floated above it all , exalting in my profound thoughts.

Pause here for loud guffaw from Rebecca....

I had led a frugal life, living on a very small income and working at a variety of manually-oriented jobs.

I am very aware of the ability of material limitations to prevent grand ideas ever coming into actual existence.

And I have an ingrained respect for street smarts - be they from adults with a mental age of one or two, from infants with mental ages of one or two, or even when coming from the very humble-seeming bacteria.

Most think that World War Two was the apogee of modern science.

I ,and Adorno, disagree.

I see it was the time when Modernity was finally given its oats and told to 'go for it' .

Modernity then proceeded to 'go postal' and tore itself apart - on the inside .

It took thirty more years for Modernity to start to show its scars --- and it is still not dead yet.

I am here to help kill it - before it kills all of us and all of the Earth...

AGAPE penicillin: Nature Won; Modernity Zero

Sixty five years later is Einstein's famous formula still the one that best describes 1945 ?

ie  E=MC2 


Or was the most lasting impact of  1939-1945's MODERN-WORLD war the fact that yesterday's Big MO (Modernity) lost.

And that Nature won.

And that in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka us PO folk (the baby boom generation and our children and children's children ) ?

(Sadly resigned godparents: Adorno and Horkheimer.)

IE, is  "WWII=MOgoesPO"   today's best short, short,
short but correct formulaic answer to the exam request to sum up mankind's biggest, bloodiest war ever ?

"Triumph of the Wild: World War Two"

World War Two is usually described as the triumph of one kind of human will over another kind of human will .

Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.

This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.

But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected  ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.

Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:

The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.

The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.

The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)

The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.

The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.

The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.

This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.

Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.

But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.

Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to  permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.

In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".

Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....