Monday, March 12, 2012

Yes , WWII was a HIGH TECH triumph - it was just LOW TECH that it couldn't handle...

The HIGH TECH successes of WWII ?

Where do we begin?

The A-Bomb of course, along with the B-29 intercontinental heavy bomber and the Norden Bombsight. The V-2 sub-orbital ballistic missile, against which there was ( and is) no defense, suitable to be upgraded with the newer, smaller, atomic bombs for added horror.

That American inter-war wonder of the modern age, the prison gas chamber, adapted to large scale use at Auschwitz ,  where when combined together with the best practices in computerized database tracking, worked to ensure that mass murders were no longer undocumented, undisciplined, melees.

The Hunger Plan - the plan to double the agriculture output of a million square kilometres of Eastern Europe and Russia.

This to be achieved by killing the existing 50 million residents and their useless mouths (and hands and brains).

They would be replaced by a hundred thousand big tractors powered by petroleum from the Caucasus and controlled by skilled Aryan operators.

Scientific, Mechanical, Agriculture, done right.

LOW TECH failures - well yes, a few, but hardly worth mentioning in the standard triumphant accounts of  the war.

For example, the Americans could put a Bomb on Hiroshima (and ultimately a Man on the Moon), but couldn't seem to put a waterproof boot on its lowly MOS 745s (infantry rifleman) in wet, cold, Italy in the late summer of 1943.

Trenchfoot has low tech solutions but Scientific America couldn't find them - or more likely, deemed them too boringly low tech to assign its best talents toward.

LOW TECH failure #1, #2, #3,#4 ad infinitum ?

The failure of human society to at the very least feed everybody a basic diet.

Now don't start by blaming Mother Nature for WWII's famine deaths.

Compared to say 1936 or 1946, the war years were ones without dramatic floods or droughts --- we should have expected surpluses not mass famine.

Let me repeat -- more people died of hunger and hunger diseases as a result of WWII, than died in combat or by execution by gas or gun.

Nature , in those war years, stood ready to yield up her bounty to not just feed the world but make it fat.

Modernity failed to cultivate that potential bounty and then further failed to equitably distribute what food it did produce.

Even Modernity can feed enough of the world , to stave off mass famine, in peacetime.

But in wartime, when it was given its head to do much better, it instead SNAFU-ed up big time.

Postmodernity was birthed in the mass famine of 1945-1946.

A philosophy that couldn't even handle the most basic, most essential task  that Humanity requires - Food - is not worthy of our respect or our loyalty.

When the global environmental meltdown goes Postal, do you really want Modernity's zealots to be put back in the driver's seat?

Wasn't one WWII, two WWIIs too many ???????

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