If it is as the mainstrean mythology says, that it was only Modern Civilization that stood between us and an eternal Nazi hell, why then has Modernity been tossed aside like a used condom ?
Why then has the blessed savior been replaced by what ? - the same sort of eco-anti-modern trash that the no-smoking, teetotalling, vegetarian Hitler himself peddled ?
Well of course there is always the alternative explanation : that Hitler and Stalin and Tojo et al were fully modern figures.
Unfortunately they were all too fully modern figures, people who took Modernity's values to their logical conclusions --- until the civilized world reared back in revulsion at the god they had cast up and worshipped.
In this explanation we got through WWII with our modernist hegemony all in one piece (more or less) but in the calmer post war waters we began a long slow reassessment of the values we had taken for granted for more than a century.
And, by the 1979, we were prepared to say that we are totally changed from what we had been in 1939, 40 years earlier.
We are post all the modernity stuff, past it ,well past it.
It was grandpa's stuff, not ours.
But if we were sure of what set of values we didn't hold, we seemed far less certain of what new values we now did hold.
Christ people,people : soon the world will have been post-modern longer than it ever was bloody modern !
What are we for people ?? We have got to stop defining ourselves by what we are against.
Small 'g' greens the world over aren't going to have any real impact until we greens sort this WWII thing out.
We'll get no where until we answer the really big question: was it Modernity that saved the day in '45 - or was it the sort of thing that got us into trouble in '39 in the first place ????
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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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