Stanley Baldwin : through rain, sleet, or snow - in a triumph of the will - the bomber always gets through, like Superman they're faster than a speeding bullet

Other than by specialists , Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of Britain is little remembered today --- except for this simple and rather commonplace remark that he made in 1932 - one that merely reflected back the view held by all modern civilized people in his day.

Unfortunately - as we learned during WWII - this remark (belief) hardly reflected reality - out there in the cold, dark, windy and rainy real world.

But then when do the thoughts of middle class, middle aged, well educated people ever do that ?

World over Will , 1939 - 1945 : Matter over Mind

By all contemporary accounts,  it was the lack of actual photos and movies of actual deaths (from anywhere inside the vast numbers of German concentration , POW and mass elimination camps) that prevented the many public verbal and written accounts of the Holocaust from being believed while it was happening.

After all, anti-Semitic acts and talk actually went up , not down,  in the Anglo-American world during WWII.


Many in the Allied camp - perhaps 25 % - seriously blamed the "Jew-dominated FDR government" for creating the war,  while many others accused Jews of shirking front line combat to remain home as war profiteers instead.

So it was the extensive newsreels of British or American troops examining the dead and dying , most mere skeletons, in the western concentration camps that finally got through to the Home Front doubters about the millions killed in the invisible  eastern extermination camps.

I suspect that it was less the fact of their deaths ( seventy million had already died from the war worldwide) than the pictures of their starved condition that finally got through to people.

All the detail-filled verbal and written contemporary accounts of the Holocaust , even when they came from the lips of people like Churchill  (not really regarded by anyone, not even Nazis, as 'a stooge of the Jews') were dismissed as mere artifacts of the will and the mind .

All the world's population had six long years to become used to the near total disconnect between what they could actually see at work or all around them, versus the public (verbal/written) propaganda  told about it.

But the mid to late 1945 newsreels were too long, too many and too varied to appear easily doctored  -- they were artifacts of the real world and of matter and they were readily and strongly believed.

What better proof then for my thesis that The mental Will might have started the war on all sides, but that it was The material World that actually won out in the end....?

Nature bowls last : Matter over Mind, 1939-1945

Sir Charles Lyell as intellectual godfather to Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will".

Who would have known ?

But it was Sir Charles, in a 1863 book, who first summarily dismissed materialism as a philosophy with a single memorable phrase : "MIND OVER MATTER".

He opined that all the evidence from evolutionary progress ('ever onward to those broad sunlit uplands') indicated that the mind was gradually but steadily winning dominion over mere matter obstacles.

Oh yes, what Canadian can forget that 'dominion' was word de rigueur  for English language intellectuals in the sunny 1860s ?

'Mind over Matter' : Lyell's memorable catchphrase came to sum up Modernity's essence for the populations and leaders of the Allied, Axis and Neutral camps during WWII.

So, in its spirit, on the very first day of the war, headlines all the world over (incorrectly) blatted "German tanks maul Polish horses".

But in the dying days of the European phase of the war no such headlines came out, that by the Spring of 1945 , now "Polish horses haul German tanks".

The tanks were disguised as Polish peasant  haywagons, en route to their last role as hull down pillboxes in the battle for the German heartland.

The Germans had no more gasoline for the tanks and in any case had run out of engine spare parts to re-start them.

German morale was still high..... but motor oil supplies were very low.

In Japan : ditto, ditto.

There legions of schoolkids and grandmothers destroyed all the sacred pine trees they could find, all to extract the basis of very little, very crude, airplane gasoline from their roots.

The German tankers were desperate to get their tanks into hidden position before the Soviets arrived, but the Polish horses took their good old time, re-fueling along the sides of the road, eating the Spring's first tender shoots.

The war - for Germany at least - was no longer moving along at Man's Blitzkrieg tempo, but rather at Nature's own pace.

'Matter over Mind' , at last ....

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 .....

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning  to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.

Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....

Liberty without Limits is the Law of the Jungle & the Law of the Strong

    Let's re-phrase that: unbridled Liberty is the law-lessness of the Jungle and of the Strong.
     The Liberty Movement, always powerful not never in power, has never had to admit this fact of life.
    God deliberately gave humanity a world and universe with limits - both biological and material - for a reason.

   HE felt that given Free Will but left to our own moral resources, we would tend to display as much hubris as we do altruism.
    So we humans - even today in the 21st century - get tired,  get hungry and thirsty, get sick, get bored, age,weaken and die.
   Only in the virtual world of the human imagination - the fetid world of the libertarian mind - does the human will inevitably triumph over material and biological restraints.
    If Hitler had been content to merely dream of (or perhaps write about) Operation Barbarossa, instead of trying it out in the real world outside the Fantasyland of Libertarian self-centredness, he might have pulled it off.
   A sort of German ATLAS SHRUGGED.....

Himmler: "Now I become Death"

I got it wrong, didn't I?

You know better than me - it was actually Robert Oppenheimer who uttered those famous words from the Bhagavad Gita when the Atomic Bomb successfully exploded on cue.

But actually Himmler never went anywhere without his own leather bound copy of BG - even slept with it at night.


It was the moral staff he leaned on to kill , kill and kill again without getting emotionally involved.

He paraphrased its main message quite closely in his famous Posen Speech, as he steeled the SS elite to do 'their painful duty' and kill every last Jew on the planet, children and all -- for the greater good of the greatest number - Himmler-Hindu-Utilitarianism as it were.

We see this same 'painful duty' line in the contemporary recorded and later re-counted justifications of the key participants for their actions in Aktion T4 and in the organized killings of Romas, Slavs and Homosexuals as well.

Menwhile, in the Allied World, Einstein also thought highly of this book and its main message : the self-sacrificing Will-To-Duty on behalf of Mankind , as did Ghandi and Herman Hesse.

The triumph of  sheer willpower, laid out in various forms, had a wide appeal across much of the world's educated elite in the years from the 1880s to the 1980s.

 I repeat: WWII was a fight within a family.....

"Triumph of the Wild: World War Two"

World War Two is usually described as the triumph of one kind of human will over another kind of human will .

Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.

This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.

But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected  ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.

Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:

The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.

The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.

The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)

The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.

The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.

The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.

This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.

Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.

But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.

Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to  permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.

In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".

Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....