Smart phones & Dumb Cops : why WWII revelations are history not journalism

Tiny, high resolution , sound and colour motion cameras - like those found in even the cheapest of today's smart phones, didn't exist back in WWII.

Tiny (but noisy) 8mm color motion cameras did exist then, but were rare and needed good strong summer daylight to work well. The ability to record sound and film together in one compact package simply didn't exist for another 25 years .

The closest equivalent to the Internet and YouTube back then were the newsreel firms but these handful of global firms were under firm government censorship control in peace as well as in war.

Dumb cops - like the dumb cops in the Nazi extermination camps - could get away with a whole lot of evil back then, assured that at best a few grainy black and white stills might get smuggled out.

A Low Dishonest War

Auden's phrase "a low dishonest decade" is - rightly - taken to mean The Dirty Thirties, but he first used that phrase in a poem written during the opening days of WWII , which he correctly saw as a direct consequence from the debased (lack of) ideals of the 1930s.

Indeed 'a low dishonest war' did follow the low dishonest decade,  because most of humanity fails to rise to the challenge and change its spots.

The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy

Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.

But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".

Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.

I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.