Lost beneath all the signal moral failures of WWII's top civilizations (Auschwitz et al) was the many technological failures thrown up by the top human civilizations.
On all sides, all through that six year long war, their citizens were promised ultra quick successes, due to their side's superior technology.
(The Maginot Line - the Bomber Always gets Through, the Six Week Blitzkrieg against the Russians, and on and on.)
Technological failure at the top, over and over.
At the bottom, there was the unexpected technological triumph of primitive microbe-made penicillin winning against diseases the best human synthetics (the Sulfas and the never to be synthetized penicillin) couldn't hope to cure.
Also at the bottom,the even more unexpected success of Henry Dawson, Dante Colitti, John l Smith and Larry Elder, who together forced the Allies to stop using penicillin as an exclusive weapon of war and made wartime penicillin-for-all instead into the one moral triumph of WWII....
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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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