By September 1945, the Axis had been decisively defeated.
End of story --- or was it?
Because defeating WWII itself, defeating the morally abysmal type of war it was (on all sides) took much longer and in fact is still ongoing.
Unsophisticated opinion in 1940 tended to emphasize how very different the western democracies, the axis and the communists were from each other.
Seventy five years on, we are likely to notice how much all groups back then held in common.
In particularly, they all held a quiet confidence that reducing human and biological diversity down to just "the winners" while "the losers" got binned was scientifically justified and hence morally justified.
Today, of course, we increasingly believe that the widest possible range in biological and human diversity is scientifically justified and hence once again morally justified.
"Biodiversity is a good thing" has become a politician's cliche.
There is ever growing support for the idea that the widest possible diversity in human types (signalled by support for civil rights for colored race individuals, Jews, aboriginals, women, gays, the handicapped,etc) is also best.
We have turned 180 degrees on this issue and it is the best single indicator of the difference between WWII's modern world and our present post-modern world.
How did it happen ?
How and when and where did scientific and popular opinion change on the virtues of including the small as well as the great into our charmed circle of life-worthy-of-life ?
I argue, in my book "the OTHER manhattan project", that it all began when wartime and postwar popular opinion ignored elite scientific opinion and focused on the ironic fact that it was a humble little household pest, the green blue slime, that had been busy saving their children during the war and afterwards.
While it as the best and the brightest in the biggest of human civilizations that were busy strafing, shooting, bombing and burning their kids during and after the war...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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...
No comments:
Post a Comment