Saturday, October 30, 2010

1945: how the Official Histories of wartime MODERNITY fabricated victory from the wreckage of defeat

  ABSTRACT: When WWII Modernity's PLAN A failed in 1944, a totally different (and postmodernist) PLAN B stepped in at the last minute to save the day.
   After the war, (modernist) Official Histories from organizations like the OSRD recast the methods and motivations of PLAN B organizers to make them appear to have been part of PLAN A all along.
  Meanwhile, the original PLAN A ( and PLAN B for that matter ) were relegated to mere footnotes.
  It is time overdue for a more accurate retelling, keeping PLAN A and PLAN B to their original separate (but parallel) paths.


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If I had to paraphrase all the Official Histories of World War Two Big Science organizations to a terse Hollywoodian 'High Concept Moment', it would sound like this:
 "Thanks to Allied Big Science (cue 'Hands Across the Water'), a Norden bombsight could flawlessly drop an A-Bomb into the centre of a deep barrel of fermenting - but very pure - penicillin from 15,000 feet ." 



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