Both.
I love puns and word play and my blog and musical project are called "Weft over Warp" because those three little words allow me to fully encapsulate the unexpected outcome of WWII.
In making fabric, the threads that can be thought of as the vertical members are called the warp.
They are very strong , to stand the strain of being stretched on the loom and they never ever touch each other so they can be correctly viewed as being the stand-offish threads.
By contrast, the weft are those threads that horizontally connect all the standoffish warp members - vital to holding the fabric together.
That's all they do : 'only connect'.
They are also quite weak as thread goes and yet essential in holding the fabric together --- indeed their very weakness give the cloth extra flexibility , which also helps it survive as fabric.
So now let us look at the concept of "Warring upon the Weak", as applied to WWII.
That concept has been generally (and erroneously) limited to the Nazi project (Aktion T4) to kill off those mentally and physically handicapped among the German population.
Oh Dear !
This is fundamentally naive - a toxic hangover from the days when modernist historians wrote about modernist events during the modernist age - unconsciously researching away like beavers with blinkers on.
From German Nazis to American Democrats to Russian Communists , the whole modernist world was consumed with genuinely extending the benefits of citizenship in their respective nations.
The difficult for us in the post modernist age , is to see all the people they did not extend full citizenship too - in practise the vast majority of the world's population.
Blacks and coloured peoples of all sorts, women, children, the physically and mentally and morally 'defective', homosexuals, various ethnicities like Jews and Romas, various religious groups , pacifists- on and on and on and on and on.
This is clear enough to all - even to latter-day modernists (shout out to the Koch Bros !).
But why ?
How did they justify denying citizenship and even life outright to many and granting only partially citizenship to as many others ?
They began their madness by claiming that Science had proven ( it hadn't) that evolution was progressively directional towards the ever bigger, more complex and more perfect.
Life, as they saw it, had started off eons ago with tiny weak bacteria and progressed to today's modern western-oriented urban educated protestant aryan upper class physically, mentally and morally fit virulent and willful adult males.
Evolution being a constant work in progress , with much specific local and temporary backsliding set against the general gradual trend to ever upwards progress and perfection , there were always lots of humans and other beings that were below the best of these western-oriented males.
Some like the Nazis wanted most of them dead , others like liberal-minded Americans, merely wanted them labelled , protected and denied entry into positions in society that would only harm them and society itself.
Women were judged to be weakened by feelings of maternalism and their womb generally, so were felt incapable of being in the military or in the top of government and business - unless their area was exclusively about women's concerns.
Blacks were seen as physically strong but shifty in character and unintelligent.
French Canadians like Joseph-Armand Bombardier were judged incapable of handling machinery and well into the 1960s were denied jobs inside pulp mills and kept outside chopping wood and toting bales of pulp.
Remember that, the next time you fly Bombardier's planes or ride his trains !!
Hitler respected his enemies in the west of Europe as near equals to Germans, southern Europeans were seen below par but okay.
But the eastern Slavs he saw as being like animals and he determined to starve and kill them out of existence in eastern Europe and western Russia.
He thus took on an enemy twice his size because he felt they were inherently weak and handicapped.
(As did most all western opinion well into 1942.)
Just as Japan did likewise with China.
And again western opinion followed suit.
Britain (and France) badly underestimated the Germans economically , fully expecting to defeat them quickly by economic blockade - even after the Fall of France and the Blitz.
Germany underestimated the Americans - as did the Japanese - not economically - but as weak fighters unwilling to take heavy losses and keep on going.
America and Britain both badly underestimated the Japanese technical capabilities.
All sides in this modernist war underestimated the abilities of Nature - forces and beings like climate and microbes, distance, dust, dirt and logistics.
Almost all underestimated the ability of old people, women, children and the urban working class to survive prolonged aerial bombing and siege starvation.
A war all sides expected to be over in one year, dragged on into six long bloody and expensive years.
No one's predictions in 1939 came near to being fulfilled in 1945.
WWII was far from a modernist triumph - in fact it spelt its death knell.
It was a triumph of the weak over the strong, weft over warp, of microbe resistance over man-made sulfa drugs, of Slavic partisans against the German High Command - on and on.
And the weft triumphed in other ways as well : the Allies were a bit less indifferent to the fates of the weak and as a result "only connected" better than the Axis - proved better at forming the extended and interconnected grand coalitions of the strong and the weak nations needed to defeat the Axis.
The Allied human fabric held - the Axis human fabric did not.
So - have I made my case for my title as apt and fitting ?
I love puns and word play and my blog and musical project are called "Weft over Warp" because those three little words allow me to fully encapsulate the unexpected outcome of WWII.
In making fabric, the threads that can be thought of as the vertical members are called the warp.
They are very strong , to stand the strain of being stretched on the loom and they never ever touch each other so they can be correctly viewed as being the stand-offish threads.
By contrast, the weft are those threads that horizontally connect all the standoffish warp members - vital to holding the fabric together.
That's all they do : 'only connect'.
They are also quite weak as thread goes and yet essential in holding the fabric together --- indeed their very weakness give the cloth extra flexibility , which also helps it survive as fabric.
So now let us look at the concept of "Warring upon the Weak", as applied to WWII.
That concept has been generally (and erroneously) limited to the Nazi project (Aktion T4) to kill off those mentally and physically handicapped among the German population.
Oh Dear !
This is fundamentally naive - a toxic hangover from the days when modernist historians wrote about modernist events during the modernist age - unconsciously researching away like beavers with blinkers on.
From German Nazis to American Democrats to Russian Communists , the whole modernist world was consumed with genuinely extending the benefits of citizenship in their respective nations.
The difficult for us in the post modernist age , is to see all the people they did not extend full citizenship too - in practise the vast majority of the world's population.
Blacks and coloured peoples of all sorts, women, children, the physically and mentally and morally 'defective', homosexuals, various ethnicities like Jews and Romas, various religious groups , pacifists- on and on and on and on and on.
This is clear enough to all - even to latter-day modernists (shout out to the Koch Bros !).
But why ?
How did they justify denying citizenship and even life outright to many and granting only partially citizenship to as many others ?
They began their madness by claiming that Science had proven ( it hadn't) that evolution was progressively directional towards the ever bigger, more complex and more perfect.
Life, as they saw it, had started off eons ago with tiny weak bacteria and progressed to today's modern western-oriented urban educated protestant aryan upper class physically, mentally and morally fit virulent and willful adult males.
Evolution being a constant work in progress , with much specific local and temporary backsliding set against the general gradual trend to ever upwards progress and perfection , there were always lots of humans and other beings that were below the best of these western-oriented males.
Some like the Nazis wanted most of them dead , others like liberal-minded Americans, merely wanted them labelled , protected and denied entry into positions in society that would only harm them and society itself.
Women were judged to be weakened by feelings of maternalism and their womb generally, so were felt incapable of being in the military or in the top of government and business - unless their area was exclusively about women's concerns.
Blacks were seen as physically strong but shifty in character and unintelligent.
French Canadians like Joseph-Armand Bombardier were judged incapable of handling machinery and well into the 1960s were denied jobs inside pulp mills and kept outside chopping wood and toting bales of pulp.
Remember that, the next time you fly Bombardier's planes or ride his trains !!
Hitler respected his enemies in the west of Europe as near equals to Germans, southern Europeans were seen below par but okay.
But the eastern Slavs he saw as being like animals and he determined to starve and kill them out of existence in eastern Europe and western Russia.
He thus took on an enemy twice his size because he felt they were inherently weak and handicapped.
(As did most all western opinion well into 1942.)
Just as Japan did likewise with China.
And again western opinion followed suit.
Britain (and France) badly underestimated the Germans economically , fully expecting to defeat them quickly by economic blockade - even after the Fall of France and the Blitz.
Germany underestimated the Americans - as did the Japanese - not economically - but as weak fighters unwilling to take heavy losses and keep on going.
America and Britain both badly underestimated the Japanese technical capabilities.
All sides in this modernist war underestimated the abilities of Nature - forces and beings like climate and microbes, distance, dust, dirt and logistics.
Almost all underestimated the ability of old people, women, children and the urban working class to survive prolonged aerial bombing and siege starvation.
A war all sides expected to be over in one year, dragged on into six long bloody and expensive years.
No one's predictions in 1939 came near to being fulfilled in 1945.
WWII was far from a modernist triumph - in fact it spelt its death knell.
It was a triumph of the weak over the strong, weft over warp, of microbe resistance over man-made sulfa drugs, of Slavic partisans against the German High Command - on and on.
And the weft triumphed in other ways as well : the Allies were a bit less indifferent to the fates of the weak and as a result "only connected" better than the Axis - proved better at forming the extended and interconnected grand coalitions of the strong and the weak nations needed to defeat the Axis.
The Allied human fabric held - the Axis human fabric did not.
So - have I made my case for my title as apt and fitting ?
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