Saturday, October 30, 2010

1945: how the Official Histories of wartime MODERNITY fabricated victory from the wreckage of defeat

  ABSTRACT: When WWII Modernity's PLAN A failed in 1944, a totally different (and postmodernist) PLAN B stepped in at the last minute to save the day.
   After the war, (modernist) Official Histories from organizations like the OSRD recast the methods and motivations of PLAN B organizers to make them appear to have been part of PLAN A all along.
  Meanwhile, the original PLAN A ( and PLAN B for that matter ) were relegated to mere footnotes.
  It is time overdue for a more accurate retelling, keeping PLAN A and PLAN B to their original separate (but parallel) paths.


                                  *************************


If I had to paraphrase all the Official Histories of World War Two Big Science organizations to a terse Hollywoodian 'High Concept Moment', it would sound like this:
 "Thanks to Allied Big Science (cue 'Hands Across the Water'), a Norden bombsight could flawlessly drop an A-Bomb into the centre of a deep barrel of fermenting - but very pure - penicillin from 15,000 feet ." 
@ Hope w/o Frontiers at
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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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