Other than by specialists , Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of Britain is little remembered today --- except for this simple and rather commonplace remark that he made in 1932 - one that merely reflected back the view held by all modern civilized people in his day.
Unfortunately - as we learned during WWII - this remark (belief) hardly reflected reality - out there in the cold, dark, windy and rainy real world.
But then when do the thoughts of middle class, middle aged, well educated people ever do that ?
A good family name, a good income and a good university education practically guarantees you the right to sit in an armchair pontificating on everything and anything without ever once testing it with a real finger in a real wind.
And truth told, Baldwin didn't actually use those words - but he certainly implied them - them and much more.
Because his speech didn't even count the weather and hours of daylight as factors in his claim (no one else ever did then either).
Baldwin, with all Modernity bromidizing at his side in somnolent agreement, merely felt that the multi engined bombers in 1932, being basically slighter faster than that era's single engine fighter aircraft, could always push through an attack against the best in human resistance.
Leni Reifenstahl actually made her film Triumph of the Will to celebrate Germany's airpower around this very point.
But her film could have just as easily have been made on commission for RAF Bomber Command or the Bomber mafia of the US Army Air Force --- without too many fundamental changes.
The film's precis was that a single Modern Man (read: Superman) could best an army of un-modern men and as for Mother Nature, she was but a passive backdrop to this human drama happening at the front of the stage.
In reality, while Nature bats last , she also bats hard : bowling Modernity totallyout by 1945 --- ushering in Nature-friendly post-Modernity...
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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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