((This was originally posted to my discontinued blog, "THE CONTINUING STORY OF THE LITTLE BOY AND THE BABY GIRL", on July 15th 2011. The blog's subtitle, equally long-winded, was : . because WWII, PHYSICALLY, may be over, but mentally and intellectually the clash continues ----- with the fate of humanity on this planet hanging in the balance.))
WWII is usually thought of as the clash of arms and the clash of pre-existing (unalterable) values : Allied GOOD versus Axis EVIL.
But it really was the clash and exchange of mutable ideas during the course of 1939-1945 - everyone's ideas , even Hitler's, were altered over the course of those six years of war.
I am most interested in the deepest, the most fundamental of those opposing ideas, not merely the surface 'political' differences --- and I find them most clearly expressed in the words and actions of two immigrant academics on the campus of wartime Columbia University in Manhattan.
They knew of each other's existence, if only through newspaper stories and gossip, but they never seemed to have met, let alone engaged in polemics together.
If pushed, they might well have thought of each other as like- minded ; fellow travelers more than intellectual opponents.
But the wartime projects they set in motion, I believe, spelled out what WWII was all about clearer than anything else that so consumes the war's historians.
Their clash of worldviews was never seen as resolved and so WWII continues today; carrying on ,disguised, in bloody regional wars and in the clash of opposing value systems in nations nominally at peace.
But in the realm of Science, their clash was resolved - one side clearly lost the scientific battle but nevertheless went on to win the propaganda war and continues to do so.
The fate of humanity hangs on us admitting that WWII was, above all else, a clash of scientific theories and that based on the evidence, one side was clearly proven wrong.
Despite this, this is the type of science, the losing side, the incorrect side, is still taught in public schools and undergraduate classes and is still - literally - killing this planet....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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...
No comments:
Post a Comment