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....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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