WWII was (and it wasn't) a battle royal between the belief that reality is a lot more simple and predictable than it looks at first glance and the belief that reality is much more complex and much less predictable than it looks at first glance.
Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
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.
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.
Dr Kenneth Deeth , Canadian Armoured Division Medical Corps : penicillin just in time
In 1997, a Hengelo Netherlands doctor named W Y Sijtsema published (in Dutch) an article about the earliest known use of penicillin to save a life in his country : a very moving story and one with with a Canadian connection.
(I mean a connection beyond Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson's monumental pushing and prodding that got wartime penicillin going in the first place.)
Sijtsema's article title is translated (in English) as "Penicillin: Just in Time".
After his doctor father Jan M Sijtsema passed on, W Y discovered some interesting dusty files in his father's attic, concerning a young new mother dying of childbed fever just after delivering a son, in early May 1945.
(I mean a connection beyond Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson's monumental pushing and prodding that got wartime penicillin going in the first place.)
Sijtsema's article title is translated (in English) as "Penicillin: Just in Time".
After his doctor father Jan M Sijtsema passed on, W Y discovered some interesting dusty files in his father's attic, concerning a young new mother dying of childbed fever just after delivering a son, in early May 1945.
A war story for women : the story of the OTHER Manhattan Project
I fully expect many more women than men will read my book "Heart and Mind Agape - a Good News story from the bad news war".
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
"Penicillin : Just in Time" , a movie just waiting to be made
Too bad so many books, movies and TV shows force us to remember how WWII ended with a bang over a city in Japan, with tens of thousands of young mothers and babies burning to death in the streets below.
Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.
Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.
The world in September '39 : as divided as it had ever been, as divided as it had always been, as divided as it always would be
Seventy five years on, we still can see the differing value systems that divided modern liberal and conservative capitalist from modern communist and socialist from modern fascist and nazi.
But we now see something that they themselves could not see : just how united ,in so many ways, that these variants of High Modernity actually all were with each other.
But we now see something that they themselves could not see : just how united ,in so many ways, that these variants of High Modernity actually all were with each other.
Modernity's fear : not the Wrath of God or Nature, but the Wrath of Neighbours
The claim that the 19th century saw the "Death of God" is so well known that it is easy to overlook that the Victorian Age also came to accept the claim of the "Death of Nature" as well.
Sir Charles Lyell came up with this particular claim, though he was always quick to say that he still believed in God, despite most of his friends in Science no longer doing so.
Sir Charles Lyell came up with this particular claim, though he was always quick to say that he still believed in God, despite most of his friends in Science no longer doing so.
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