WWII : began and ended September 2nd 1939, at 11 pm ....

Is it not a good general rule that Great Powers, once they had finally and formally declared war on another Great Power (as opposed to simply invading and gobbling up various small powers ) do not withdrawn from that fight until they themselves were either defeated or successful ?

Henry Dawson, Leo Durochers and The Virile Age

In 1939, the fiery new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers set the tone for his famous tenure at the beleaguered team.

The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.

However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.

What would the Commensal Story of WWII look like ?

Can the entire story of WWII ever be accurately and exhaustingly told, except from the point of view of the winning Great Powers like the USA, the UK and the USSR ?

Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?

Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?

It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini

Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:

"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."

But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.

However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.

In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.

But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.

So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.

But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.

Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.

Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.

Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg,  orthodox economics still daily  proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.

So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?

May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .

Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....

Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"

Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .

For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.

The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.

Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.

But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.

However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.

No wonder his view was ignored.

However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.

And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .

The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector :  AND  .

Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.

Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND  4F civilians , on both sides of the war

But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.

For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....

Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live

Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.

But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.

The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of  individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of  a heterogeneous aggregate.

Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very  stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.

And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.

What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.

However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....

Modernity : CONCRETE Dams vs ABSTRACT Delusions ...

When was Chopin born, when did he die, where did Chopin end and his brother begin ?

All concrete questions we can definitively answer.

That's the terrible thing about individuals, the thing that made modernists from all camps hate them so : if forces one to take the coke out of one's nose and actually deal with hard facts and numbers and dates.

But imagined communities - those hallucinations shared by tenured professors and certified lunatics in the 1930s , now that was their preferred cup of tea.

One man justifies murdering foreigners because he was told to by voices coming out of the radio, the other justifies because he hears voices coming out of the national volk.

What volk ? - all of them ? - did you ask all of them ?

And what nation ? - what are its boundaries ? and when was it born exactly ?

Part of the disadvantages of a free public education is that you can now think ( supposedly) in abstractions.

Before that, country people called a cape "Burnt Head" because , well, it looked like a burnt head.

Obviously too bloody concrete-minded by half.

Instead,  middle class chatterers flocked to hundreds of housing estates that were prettily named "Forest Hills" but were neither forested or hilled and these modernists don't even see the incongruity of it all.

In the 1930s these chatterers resented party politics and all its arguing over what government projects went to what specific classes and specific areas and specific industries.

"Let us have a single strong man , well supplied with  scientific experts, who will supply us with the one scientifically correct answer that will serve the 'national interest' ", they cried.

It would be nice to interview this national interest, in the way one can interview an individual person or key members of an individual industry, but one can't.

It's a virtual bogus reality, like bad acid, it doesn't exist and can't exist : a distracting abstraction.

My family can rarely agree, any more than your family can : and an entire nation of 75 million Germans are even less likely to all agree about something of supposedly common interest.

But abstract groups of differing individuals into vapourous reifications* and their Holocaust is practically done for.

* To reify is to take a bunch of heatedly bickering individuals ( all the people in the world who are in some way seen by others and themselves as Jewish or part Jewish or formerly Jewish or newly Jewish for example) , turn them into an abstraction, "The Jew", and then turn that abstraction into a solid lump of concrete "all Jews in Europe are EVIL and all must DIE this year".

All moderns didn't plan Holocausts but almost all moderns mentally divided people into abstract lumps, with such thinking  as 'The French Canadian' isn't fundamentally capable of handling modern machinery" etc, etc.

Remind yourself of that 'fact' as you board your next Bombardier-built jet or train in perfect expectation you will arrive in one piece.

Because an individual French Canadian called Joseph-Armand Bombardier set out to refute that abstract claim in 1941, at the height of the Modernists' war.

I think he has succeeded, don't you ?

Not from our war : "Second Front in the Soviet Far East , NOW !"

Dream on.

Shamefully, there was no public Western pressure put on Stalin to open any sort of Second Front on Japan from the North, during the desperate days of mid 1942 or ever after.

Ever after,  as in : no major postwar historical school has ever focused on this baneful fact.

Instead Japan and Germany successfully held back, retreating very slowly, while being attacked on only two major fronts at a time.

(They themselves succeeded best when they only attacked on one major front at a time.)

Yet Germany and Japan rapidly fell apart when they were under attack on three major fronts all at once.

In 1944, Germany fell apart the moment it had to supply artillery shells to three major battle zones : in the East, in the West after D-Day in France and in the South as the twenty nation Allied army continued its push into Vienna and Munich via Italy.

In August 1945,  Japan also suddenly fell apart when it was under attack on three fronts : in the Pacific from the USA, in the East by the Chinese and British Burmese Army, and now in the North from the USSR.

The Russians only fought Germans and were so carefully neutral towards Japan they won't allow US flights over Soviet airspace en route to Japan ---- even the Swedes and Swiss were far far less neutral than that, to the German war machine.

The British basically only fought Germany and Italy, on land.

The USA fought Japan, Germany and Italy full out, on land, from the Fall of 1942 --- but not decisively, until late 1944, because they lacked support from their other major allies and faced a divided American military brass and public.

Churchill (Italy) and MacArthur (Philippines) share the blame with Stalin

Both Germany and Japan needed to face three major land battles at a time to lose, though one major battle front and two minor battle fronts all at the same time might also have spelt a faster doom.

Interesting to imagine the combined effect of a major American landing in the South of France at the same time as a minor British Commonwealth landing in Sicily and a huge Russian offensive against Germany, if tied simultaneously to a major Burmese Army/Chinese offensive and a small Russian advance into Manchuria via Mongolia, coupled with an American bomber campaign from the Aleutians and a land attack on an Japanese island very near to the Japanese main islands.......