Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Philip Bent VC : physical courage of the highest order

Agape Valour has no 'hometown'


The idea that most VCs had one and only one hometown - pace UK Local Government Minister Eric Pickles' idea that their one and only hometown should have a government subsidized cobblestone to mark the one hundredth anniversary of WWI - is factually wrong.

Moreover, it goes against the firm ideas of the lady who set up the standards of the Victoria Cross - Queen Victoria herself.

She felt their true hometown was the entire British Empire .

And the lifestories of most VCs shows they frequently travelled and worked widely across that Empire -- before often joining up far from their birthplace to fight and perhaps dying on behalf of it.

Moreover, true valour, like agape love, is distinguished above all by its open-heartedness.

It is above all else that brave willingness to lose one's own life trying to save the lives of others you often do not know and often may not even like if you did.

The standard talk about 'I just did for the lads in my unit' is just that : talk.

Most military units are not even initially set up upon the idea that all its members were to be drawn from just one locality.

Even the few locality-based combat units in existence generally have such heavy casualties early on that they are eventually mostly made up of replacements drawn randomly from all over the nation.

And there is rarely much time in real war to truly bound into the legendary 'band of brothers'.

Replacements are killed or wounded-out before almost anyone even knows their name or hometown.

No, the brave never liked to admit it publicly, but they general acted to save wider visions : the Allied cause or the American way of life or simply to save a bunch of fellow human beings.

Valour wants nothing to do with hometown turf wars....

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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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