You all know the score: WWII was all about the empires ---- the
empires of Britain and American and Russia and China fighting the empires of Germany and Japan.
Six huge military empires (and their allies) with hundreds of millions of men under arms, fighting for six long years all over six huge continents.
75 million dead, trillions and trillions of dollars of non-renewable resources blown up or sunk or burned.
K-selected history with a vengeance.
The God of WWII history books seems definitely on the side of the big battalions.
But I argue the biggest battle of World War Two actually happened off the battlefield and occurred instead, inside the educated middle class's collective conscience - and I aim to compress that battle into three short hours and three tiny rooms in a New York hospital and thrust it onto a stage near you.
This is the r-selected history of WWII - cutting it down to the essence...
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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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