Books about WWII published in 1945 were eager to tell readers just how very different ,morally, the Allied , Axis and Neutral Nations all were.
Perhaps by 2025, authors will be more willing to tell us what shared values the civilized folks in the Axis, Allied and Neutral nations all had in common.
By then , almost all of the adults who ran WWII will be gone and we can be a bit more honest about the shared values that motivated all sides in the war.
Maybe then we can admit that it was only when those shared values saw their most extreme expressions, did differences and doubts start showing up among civilized humanity .
Most of WWII's civilized humanity had to be forced to rediscover their common embeddedness within Nature.
This only happened under wartime necessity ,when like puppies, they had their noses rubbed into it.
But others, like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his natural penicillin project, spent the war demonstrating that good things happen when Humanity works together with Nature .
Historians have grown ever more despondent about WWII.
They just keep discovering ever more extraordinarily evil things the Axis had intended to do, if they had been more successful
in combat, and they continue to encounter more and more evilly banal things the Allied and Neutral countries did do, during the war.
Fewer and fewer truly good news stories are emerging from the archives of this 'bad news war'.
But I believe Dawson's story truly is good news, for all of us and for all time.
Not because of his wartime act of heroism, no matter how extraordinary it was and how beneficial it was to suffering millions.
Now I think his real, continuing, value to audiences 75 years later, is how he achieved those heroic activities, by working with Nature, not against it.
As we prepare to contest those who, still, believe Humanity is above and beyond Nature , we need stories of pioneers to cheer our hearts and give us courage.
I believe Dawson's story will do just that....
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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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