Classic WWII lingo from among the ERs (the enlisted ranks) was the constant urgent question, "What's the Gen" ?
In a wartime atmosphere of constant censorship and propaganda, lies basically, "Gen" was that true rarity : the accurate information that lowly ERs really needed to survive the chickenshit of daily camp life - and later to survive dangerous frontline assignments.
Today Americans are more likely to ask "what's the score?" or "what's the scoop ?"to the same effect, but the phrase survives in the former British Empire.
We're no longer in a Total War but rather involved in something much much bigger : a looming environmental crisis that threatens the survival of not just ERs but all of humanity.
What remains similar with the situation in WWII is all the censorship and propaganda flying about, denying any crisis.
More that ever, we need to ask, 'What's the "Gen" ?' from everybody and anybody, if we are to get the best possible survival information.
We can't simply rely on the dwindling one percent of the world's population that are middle class male WASPs - partly because they got us into this mess in the first place.
But more importantly because the few people who pass the fearful WASPs' elaborate bloodtests for trustworthiness are simply not a big enough percentage of the world's brains to possibly come up with all the best survival solutions....
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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