England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war, not all on their tiny , tiny own.
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.
If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.
Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".
The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.
But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.
Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.
They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.
Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.
But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.
Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.
Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.
The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.
Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.
And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.
Who would have won WWII then ?
Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts
Monday, May 27, 2013
Saturday, March 9, 2013
MODERNITY as just one vast marketing ploy
At its very base base, Modernity consists of convincing other people (call 'em customers or colonies, tis the same) that you are smart (progressive/a professional scientist) and they are stupid (backward/laypeople).
Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.
The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.
In most rural Nova Scotia farmhouses until recently, the biggest and cosiest room in the house was the kitchen where the big wood stove was the entire house's only form of heat.
There the kids would gather after school - by necessity in winter - to keep warm and watch mom prepare and then cook biscuits ,made from flour and water, that the kids immediately consumed. Artificial chemical preservatives need hardly enter such an immediate process.
But starting in the 1920s, bread manufacturers and their clever Goebbels of Madison Avenue successfully convince a new generation of Moms - and kids - that mom's homemade bread was unsafe and unhygenic.
Scientists in white gowns in white factories could put the right sort of chemicals in bread to kill all germs - and not so incidentially - allow factory bread to be shipped a thousand miles across a nation, sit about for weeks and still not grow mold before being consumed.
Germs were destroyed - as were local bakeries.
All the moms in the Nova Scotia rural hinterland became an internal colony, as she no longer baked bread to compete with Ben's , the huge breadmaker in the imperial metropolitan centre of Halifax.
Instead she focused on cutting fish at the local fishplant and with her earnings now bought Ben's fluffy white stuff.
When I was a kid, the local children were embarrassed to have to bring delicious homemade bread and baked-beans sandwiches to school and would trade it for sandwiches of Ben's bread and Kraft sandwich spread.
Howard Florey was the son of an industrialist and knew all there was to know about how modernity cum industrialization cum imperialism worked.
He was always most reluctant to ever give anyone some of his penicillium spores (usually sending rubbishy mutant spores unlikely to produce penicillin, if he was pushed to respond conventionally as one scientist to another scientist's request for some of the material mentioned in his published article.)
By contrast, he was almost willing to be seen forcing some of his Oxford Standard dried penicillin powder upon you , so as to prove he had made dry penicillin first and had set down the standard for others to follow.
He was actually doing nothing that Britain's political and industrial elite hadn't already worked out for themselves long before.
Give a colonist a vial of British-made penicillin and he could save a life for a day but then he'd need to trade cheap Indian cotton for expensive British penicillin, forever, if he hoped to go on saving Indian lives.
"Give a man a fish" et al, in a new guise.
By contrast, Robert Pulvertaft and Nancy Atkinson had different plans.
Howard Florey visited both and publicly - reluctantly - praised both, but was really was privately furious at both.
Pulvertaft in Cairo, Egypt had used Florey-made and British industry-made dry penicillin powder but they often arrived in pretty bad shape - unlike a fungi spore they didn't really survive travel well.
But Pulvertaft had also secretly got a sample of Fleming's penicillium spores mailed to him from a pal at Wellcome Labs in London - and as spores do - they traveled perfectly well indeed and started into making penicillin right away.
He was, like a rural Nova Scotian mom, making homemade penicillin in front of the patients to be consumed on the spot - and so like mom, didn't really need a whole lot of fancy high tech chemistry to render his penicillin safe.
His patients were wounded soldiers in his large base hospital and the liquid penicillin was barely produced by the penicillium spores in the hospital lab than it was coursing through the veins of the grateful soldiers : drying and chemical preservatives hardly entered into this cosy setup.
And he freely began to teach the local natives and other military units how to make their own penicillin with spores of his.
His efforts made Florey and Whitehall very angry indeed --- Britain hoped, once it had synthesized penicillin , to see a huge trade in penicillin in exchange for Egyptian cotton etc.
Nancy Atkinson because she was located in Adelaide Australia, Florey's home town, had his number and knew of his peculiar - grasping - personality.
She avoided approaching Florey, got her penicillin from Fleming himself and soon got a local Adelaide firm to make local penicillin and gave some spores to Duhig in Brisbane so he too could goose up the tardy government approach to providing enough penicillin for civilian as well as soldier.
Florey was very angry that he - as the long time away "local boy" - hadn't been invited in to help in Australia. Maybe his selfish and secretive attitude had something to do with it ?
I have said that the biggest reason for the long delay in providing wartime penicillin to those dying for lack of it was Florey, Flemings and AN Richards' obsession with weaponizing it.
By this I meant they rejected Pulvertaft and Duhig's implicit argument that penicillin was best used systemically (injected into the entire body) for life-threatening blood poisoning because - technically, as a drug - that is where it worked best.
And that this being the case, life-threatening blood poisoning cases were almost always sent to the big hospitals with a big enough lab and staff to make the penicillin,on the spot, for the steady stream of blood poisoning cases coming in.
There was no need to waste time making penicillin a stable enough material to send from a central factory to store in regional warehouses until traveling detail salesmen had sold it in small amounts to individual GPs.
Disagreeing strenuously, Florey, Fleming, Richards et al felt the greatest war need was for a local antiseptic to be poured or sprinkled inside wounds on the battlefield , soon as a soldier was wounded.
Let me say that more careful research,after the war,( including some by Pulvertaft himself) concluded this was an artificial problem - and that into this square artificial hole both the round sulfa and round wartime penicillin were reluctantly pushed - both failing , but for different reasons.
But sulfa and penicillin did save many lives, but not on the battlefield, but rather back in the base hospital, doing what they did best - reach into every part of the body and killing bacteria out in the open.
Killing bacteria in hard to get to places remained (and remains) hard to do - but if these bacteria did not get into the blood stream, they were almost never fatal in and of themselves.
But let us now combine weaponized penicillin with imperialized penicillin : because a dry , stable, complicatedly mass produced penicillin also suited the post war aims of Britain : to profitably sell high tech medicine to nations less advanced than European ones.
Convincing the lesser breeds that homemade (really made by skilled microbiologists in big hospital labs) penicillin, like homemade bread, was so un-civilizied , was at least half the battle.....
Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.
The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.
In most rural Nova Scotia farmhouses until recently, the biggest and cosiest room in the house was the kitchen where the big wood stove was the entire house's only form of heat.
There the kids would gather after school - by necessity in winter - to keep warm and watch mom prepare and then cook biscuits ,made from flour and water, that the kids immediately consumed. Artificial chemical preservatives need hardly enter such an immediate process.
But starting in the 1920s, bread manufacturers and their clever Goebbels of Madison Avenue successfully convince a new generation of Moms - and kids - that mom's homemade bread was unsafe and unhygenic.
Scientists in white gowns in white factories could put the right sort of chemicals in bread to kill all germs - and not so incidentially - allow factory bread to be shipped a thousand miles across a nation, sit about for weeks and still not grow mold before being consumed.
Germs were destroyed - as were local bakeries.
Re-casting Mom as a lesser breed
All the moms in the Nova Scotia rural hinterland became an internal colony, as she no longer baked bread to compete with Ben's , the huge breadmaker in the imperial metropolitan centre of Halifax.
Instead she focused on cutting fish at the local fishplant and with her earnings now bought Ben's fluffy white stuff.
When I was a kid, the local children were embarrassed to have to bring delicious homemade bread and baked-beans sandwiches to school and would trade it for sandwiches of Ben's bread and Kraft sandwich spread.
Howard Florey was the son of an industrialist and knew all there was to know about how modernity cum industrialization cum imperialism worked.
He was always most reluctant to ever give anyone some of his penicillium spores (usually sending rubbishy mutant spores unlikely to produce penicillin, if he was pushed to respond conventionally as one scientist to another scientist's request for some of the material mentioned in his published article.)
By contrast, he was almost willing to be seen forcing some of his Oxford Standard dried penicillin powder upon you , so as to prove he had made dry penicillin first and had set down the standard for others to follow.
He was actually doing nothing that Britain's political and industrial elite hadn't already worked out for themselves long before.
Give a colonist a vial of British-made penicillin and he could save a life for a day but then he'd need to trade cheap Indian cotton for expensive British penicillin, forever, if he hoped to go on saving Indian lives.
"Give a man a fish" et al, in a new guise.
Enter Pulvertaft, Atkinson and Duhig
Howard Florey visited both and publicly - reluctantly - praised both, but was really was privately furious at both.
Pulvertaft in Cairo, Egypt had used Florey-made and British industry-made dry penicillin powder but they often arrived in pretty bad shape - unlike a fungi spore they didn't really survive travel well.
But Pulvertaft had also secretly got a sample of Fleming's penicillium spores mailed to him from a pal at Wellcome Labs in London - and as spores do - they traveled perfectly well indeed and started into making penicillin right away.
He was, like a rural Nova Scotian mom, making homemade penicillin in front of the patients to be consumed on the spot - and so like mom, didn't really need a whole lot of fancy high tech chemistry to render his penicillin safe.
His patients were wounded soldiers in his large base hospital and the liquid penicillin was barely produced by the penicillium spores in the hospital lab than it was coursing through the veins of the grateful soldiers : drying and chemical preservatives hardly entered into this cosy setup.
And he freely began to teach the local natives and other military units how to make their own penicillin with spores of his.
His efforts made Florey and Whitehall very angry indeed --- Britain hoped, once it had synthesized penicillin , to see a huge trade in penicillin in exchange for Egyptian cotton etc.
Nancy Atkinson because she was located in Adelaide Australia, Florey's home town, had his number and knew of his peculiar - grasping - personality.
She avoided approaching Florey, got her penicillin from Fleming himself and soon got a local Adelaide firm to make local penicillin and gave some spores to Duhig in Brisbane so he too could goose up the tardy government approach to providing enough penicillin for civilian as well as soldier.
Florey was very angry that he - as the long time away "local boy" - hadn't been invited in to help in Australia. Maybe his selfish and secretive attitude had something to do with it ?
I have said that the biggest reason for the long delay in providing wartime penicillin to those dying for lack of it was Florey, Flemings and AN Richards' obsession with weaponizing it.
By this I meant they rejected Pulvertaft and Duhig's implicit argument that penicillin was best used systemically (injected into the entire body) for life-threatening blood poisoning because - technically, as a drug - that is where it worked best.
And that this being the case, life-threatening blood poisoning cases were almost always sent to the big hospitals with a big enough lab and staff to make the penicillin,on the spot, for the steady stream of blood poisoning cases coming in.
There was no need to waste time making penicillin a stable enough material to send from a central factory to store in regional warehouses until traveling detail salesmen had sold it in small amounts to individual GPs.
Disagreeing strenuously, Florey, Fleming, Richards et al felt the greatest war need was for a local antiseptic to be poured or sprinkled inside wounds on the battlefield , soon as a soldier was wounded.
Let me say that more careful research,after the war,( including some by Pulvertaft himself) concluded this was an artificial problem - and that into this square artificial hole both the round sulfa and round wartime penicillin were reluctantly pushed - both failing , but for different reasons.
But sulfa and penicillin did save many lives, but not on the battlefield, but rather back in the base hospital, doing what they did best - reach into every part of the body and killing bacteria out in the open.
Killing bacteria in hard to get to places remained (and remains) hard to do - but if these bacteria did not get into the blood stream, they were almost never fatal in and of themselves.
Weaponized penicillin was imperialized penicillin
But let us now combine weaponized penicillin with imperialized penicillin : because a dry , stable, complicatedly mass produced penicillin also suited the post war aims of Britain : to profitably sell high tech medicine to nations less advanced than European ones.
Convincing the lesser breeds that homemade (really made by skilled microbiologists in big hospital labs) penicillin, like homemade bread, was so un-civilizied , was at least half the battle.....
Friday, March 16, 2012
Who or what are the NATURE-DENIERS you ask ?
You've heard about Jewish Holocaust deniers and about Climate Holocaust deniers but who, you ask in bewilderment, are the NATURE-DENIERS ?
Well they're not Commensalists - the Age of Commensality believes all life on Earth, willy-nilly, dines at a common table (in a word is all commensal) - it believes mankind is not above Nature but fully in it - so it hardly denies Nature .
No, these deniers are all varieties of Modernists, people who believe that we can, if necessary, get along perfectly well without natural resources or indeed without Nature and even without those people they see as being closest to Nature.
The millions of people that the Nazis shot, gassed and starved in their Holocaust were (*almost) all people they viewed as living in a world far away from civilized man and close to (bestial) Nature.
(* I admit I think the Nazis had mixed feelings about the Communist commissars, Polish intellectuals and educated Jews that they killed .
They saw most Poles, Slavs and Jews as close to animals and germs but saw the intellectuals among them as even more dangerous, because they were both 'smart' and 'dirty' .)
It must be admitted that the Nazis lacked ambition - they only killed 6 million in the most organized part of their killing spree.
Today's climate change deniers might just end up killing 6 billion of us if the world's climate goes to hell in a hand basket at the same time we run out of agricultural necessities like phosphorus.
(Solar might get us past the worst of the end of oil and coal -- but we can't expect the nuclear industry to transform us up a mess of the element phosphorus out of lead like some 21st century alchemist.)
The climate change deniers along with the environmental degradation deniers and resource depletion deniers are like the Nazis in basically denying that Nature can bite back .
So they assume, for example, that Nature can take all the Co2 we can hand it and just deal with it, somehow.
"Suck it up Nature !"
Modernity is supposed to have an Imperialistic side , a sort of evil twin brother hidden off to the side.
Bosh, I say, bosh.
Modernity only had one colony and always one colony - Nature.
Every other subject they colonized - from women and children, the poor and the disabled, to people in places like India and Africa - were always subjugated because they were judged close to Nature ------- and hence fair game.
Notice that none of the modernist nations ever seriously thought of turning other modernist nations into colonies -- this was called 'honor amongst modernists' ....
Well they're not Commensalists - the Age of Commensality believes all life on Earth, willy-nilly, dines at a common table (in a word is all commensal) - it believes mankind is not above Nature but fully in it - so it hardly denies Nature .
No, these deniers are all varieties of Modernists, people who believe that we can, if necessary, get along perfectly well without natural resources or indeed without Nature and even without those people they see as being closest to Nature.
The millions of people that the Nazis shot, gassed and starved in their Holocaust were (*almost) all people they viewed as living in a world far away from civilized man and close to (bestial) Nature.
(* I admit I think the Nazis had mixed feelings about the Communist commissars, Polish intellectuals and educated Jews that they killed .
They saw most Poles, Slavs and Jews as close to animals and germs but saw the intellectuals among them as even more dangerous, because they were both 'smart' and 'dirty' .)
It must be admitted that the Nazis lacked ambition - they only killed 6 million in the most organized part of their killing spree.
Today's climate change deniers might just end up killing 6 billion of us if the world's climate goes to hell in a hand basket at the same time we run out of agricultural necessities like phosphorus.
(Solar might get us past the worst of the end of oil and coal -- but we can't expect the nuclear industry to transform us up a mess of the element phosphorus out of lead like some 21st century alchemist.)
The climate change deniers along with the environmental degradation deniers and resource depletion deniers are like the Nazis in basically denying that Nature can bite back .
So they assume, for example, that Nature can take all the Co2 we can hand it and just deal with it, somehow.
"Suck it up Nature !"
Modernity is supposed to have an Imperialistic side , a sort of evil twin brother hidden off to the side.
Bosh, I say, bosh.
Modernity only had one colony and always one colony - Nature.
Every other subject they colonized - from women and children, the poor and the disabled, to people in places like India and Africa - were always subjugated because they were judged close to Nature ------- and hence fair game.
Notice that none of the modernist nations ever seriously thought of turning other modernist nations into colonies -- this was called 'honor amongst modernists' ....
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