Everyone agrees that Post-Modernity began after 1945 and that thus, in some muted --- pastel --- fashion, Modernity must also have began its slow decline in that same momentous year.
Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
So 1945, Year of Revolution.
Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass protests or barricaded streets.
For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
Or a mushroom - your taste......
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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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