Tiny, high resolution , sound and colour motion cameras - like those found in even the cheapest of today's smart phones, didn't exist back in WWII.
Tiny (but noisy) 8mm color motion cameras did exist then, but were rare and needed good strong summer daylight to work well. The ability to record sound and film together in one compact package simply didn't exist for another 25 years .
The closest equivalent to the Internet and YouTube back then were the newsreel firms but these handful of global firms were under firm government censorship control in peace as well as in war.
Dumb cops - like the dumb cops in the Nazi extermination camps - could get away with a whole lot of evil back then, assured that at best a few grainy black and white stills might get smuggled out.
As indeed happened, once - with virtually no impact on public opinion - assuming many of the wartime public ever saw them.
But today a dumb cop shots a child nine times and the smartphone video (full colour, full motion, full sound of the whole thing) goes viral worldwide on YouTube before the police bosses and the police unions can even get all their lies in working order.
Poop hits fan, mothers ( voters) are outraged : men (aka "the dumb") run for cover.
Nothing will actually change in any one specific case of dumb cops caught on camera, mind you.
Except that public cynicism about our leaders will only continue to grow beyond all measure, compared to how our grandparents trusted their leaders during WWII.
If YouTube and smartphones had been around during 'the low dishonest war' that was WWII, a lot of the really mean bad thoughtless things done on all sides might have been reined in a little by force of public opinion.
But they didn't - so few wartime revelations were first published as journalism in the same days and weeks they first happened.
Instead it will be the work of future historians - even 50 years from now - to first reveal this or that shabby tale of wartime moral evil.....
Showing posts with label a low dishonest decade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a low dishonest decade. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Friday, July 26, 2013
A Low Dishonest War
Auden's phrase "a low dishonest decade" is - rightly - taken to mean The Dirty Thirties, but he first used that phrase in a poem written during the opening days of WWII , which he correctly saw as a direct consequence from the debased (lack of) ideals of the 1930s.
Indeed 'a low dishonest war' did follow the low dishonest decade, because most of humanity fails to rise to the challenge and change its spots.
But some did - the few righteous from all nations, classes, creeds and genders - all who did their bit to redeem the worse aspects of WWII's low dishonesty.
Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was one such individual and moreover his small actions pioneering penicillin had a huge ultimate impact - an almost exact example of the claim that 'saving just one person can ultimately help save all' ...
Indeed 'a low dishonest war' did follow the low dishonest decade, because most of humanity fails to rise to the challenge and change its spots.
But some did - the few righteous from all nations, classes, creeds and genders - all who did their bit to redeem the worse aspects of WWII's low dishonesty.
Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was one such individual and moreover his small actions pioneering penicillin had a huge ultimate impact - an almost exact example of the claim that 'saving just one person can ultimately help save all' ...
The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy
Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.
But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".
Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.
I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.
But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.
On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.
A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.
WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....
But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".
Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.
I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.
But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.
On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.
A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.
WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....
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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...