I hope my account of WWII is a gripping, paper-turning, human-interest story - but I hope it isn't of interest to humans because it is all about humans and all about humans only.
When War History ( capital W, capital H) is seen only through the prism of the clash of human wills, it ends up as just university-level navel gazing : navel-gazing with tenure.
War can be more accurately seen as the clash of various human wills with other human wills and all of these wills clashing with the material limitations of Reality.
I really would have loved to entitle this blog as:
"1939-1945: REALITY's side of the story."
But I feared that it would simply come across as just another tell-all recounting of this perpetually popular 'epic clash of human will' .
Reality merely being a codeword for 'yet newer archival revelations about human conduct'.
Now describing Reality, that Universe we all swim in, as Nature clearly has its dangers.
(Because when Reality is reduced to Nature , it is as if its limitations are seen as existing in a lesser, parallel world from the limitless mental world of us humans.
That is our familiar delusionary world of 'name it and claim it', 'dare to dream', 'mind over matter' , 'where there is a will there is a way' , etc.
Thankfully in much of today's conventional thought , The Natural World is often seen as extending to include everything just short of human mental thoughts - ie it does included our mortal fallible bodies and their material needs.
That is a definition of Nature I can sort of live with, though I personally believe our mental activities are just as much a part of the Natural World as my pet dog's daydreams.
So when reading this blog, recast your image of Nature to encompassing everything in the Universe, including our mental reveries, and you'll do just fine....
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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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