Wings Over The World

 Charles A. Lindbergh (middle)

Bear with me. I am sore oppressed by time, yet this yells for me to put it down, so I shall do so in a very sketchy form.

I have been reading the Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, and am fascinated. I find his admiration of Nazi Germany to be founded upon Germany's advanced concept of war in the air, as well as the efficient industry and science of aeronautical engineering.

I find his lack of empathy for Jews living under the Nazi regime to be due to a one-sided man, a man who only views the world through the science in which he thrived and which rewarded him so greatly. In effect, Lindbergh rationalizes emotions, and has no understanding of true evil, which he seems to think is a momentary aberration from good, sound business practices.

Recall that the Wright Brothers flew in 1903, 110 years ago.
Aeronautics was the grand Science of the time. Pilots were celebrities and geniuses. This same era, from around 1890 to 1945, was the time of revolutions in physics: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, Einstein and Bohr.

H.G. Wells wrote in 1933 in his The Shape Of Things To Come:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come

Wells predicted a Second World War breaking out with a European conflagration from the flashpoint of a violent clash between Germans and Poles at Danzig. Wells set the date for this as January 1940...  The war ends [in 1950] with no victor but total exhaustion, collapse and disintegration of all the fighting states, and also of the neutral countries, equally affected by the deepening economic crisis. The whole world descends into chaos: nearly all governments break down, and a devastating plague in 1956–57 kills a large part of humanity and almost destroys civilisation.

Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship—"The Dictatorship of the Air"—arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transport systems, who are the only people with global power. This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religions...

Notice how all religions are eradicated.
Surely this must be poetic license of the author, and there can be no hidden connection between his science fiction forecasts and the coming Holocaust, as well as the subsequent genocides which seem to take place every decade around the globe!
Wikipedia, op.cit.

The abolition of Islam is carried out by the Air Police, who "descend upon Mecca and close down the main holy places", apparently without major incident. Eventually Islam disappears, its demise accelerated by the decay of Arabic and its replacement by "an expanded English"...
In the 1979 of real history, Khomeini's Islamic Republic of Iran came into being".


There is only a brief reference to the abolition of Buddhism and no reference to any serious problem encountered by the Modern State in eradicating it from East Asia.

The most prolonged and formidable religious opposition envisaged by Wells is from the Catholic Church (there is little reference to Protestants). The Pope and the entire Catholic hierarchy are gassed unconscious when blessing the new aircraft built by a revived Fascist Italy. After the Catholic Church is decisively crushed in Italy it finds refuge in Ireland, "the last bastion of Christianity". Ireland is also subdued, and then Catholic resistance is maintained only in Latin America, under "a coloured Pope in Pernambuco", until it too is finally put down.

Wells gives considerable attention to the fate of the Jews. In this history an enfeebled Nazi Germany is incapable of systematic murder on the scale of the Holocaust. However, Jews greatly suffer from "unorganized" persecution, and there is a reference to anti-Jewish pogroms happening "everywhere in Europe" during the chaotic 1950s. Then, in a world where all nation-states are a doomed anachronism, Zionism and its ambition to create a new state come to naught...
 Eventually, in Wells's vision, it is the Modern State's forced assimilation that triumphs and the Jews—who had resisted earlier such pressures—become completely absorbed in the general society and lose their separate identity...

We of a much later time than Wells are wiser with experience, and we know what form such "forced assimilations" would and will take.
How uncanny are the predictions of Genocide, as well as of Science. This should be called Ge-Fi for genocide fiction.
(And remember how we used to say that war was good for accelerating technological progress? As if new developments in poison gas and nuclear weapons are making our lives rosier... )

In the film based upon the book, Things To Come,produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies, a similar but different story emerges:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come

... By 1970, a local warlord called the "Chief" or the "Boss" has risen to power in the south of England and eradicated the sickness by shooting the infected. He dreams of conquering the "hill people" to obtain coal and shale to render into oil so his biplanes can fly again.

On May Day 1970, a futuristic aeroplane lands outside the town. The sole pilot, John Cabal, emerges and proclaims that the last surviving band of "engineers and mechanics" have formed a civilisation called "Wings Over the World". They are based in Basra, Iraq, and have renounced war and outlawed independent nations. The Boss takes the pilot prisoner and forces him to work for Gordon, a mechanic working on repairing the few remaining aeroplanes. Together, they [Cabal and Gordon] manage to fix a plane. When Gordon takes it up for a test flight, he flees to alert Cabal's friends.

Wings Over the World attacks Everytown with gigantic aeroplanes and drops sleeping gas bombs on the town. The Boss orders his biplanes to attack but they are shot down. The people of Everytown awaken shortly thereafter, to find it occupied by the Airmen and the Boss dead.

Sleeping gas is no longer deemed efficient by the world's military.

Now the reputation of Aeronautics is in decay. The great Genius Scientists spend their time looking for Dark Matter (and not finding it), or Dark Energy (and not finding it).
The idea of aeronautical personnel running a world government is laughable. The idea of the celebrity scientists of today running a world government is laughable. In fact, the idea of experienced politicians running a sole country seem to be verging on the impossible.

Today we see symbols of diminished aeronautical pretenses reaping random havoc on once thriving communities, which have the bad luck of being too close to the sacred enclosures of the one-time Dictatorship of the Air.

Goussainville-Vieux-Pays,
a city abandoned after Charles De Gaulle airport opened with flight paths directly overhead.

The Empty 14th Century Church With Airplane

A Street Desolate

Surfridge, California

abandoned due to LAX

 Before LAX Expansion in 1965

Surfridge Today

Are there common threads running through all this? Science, Genocide, Economic Destruction, Forced Migration of Populations? Which Dictatorships imprison us, and shall one ever free us, if we are to give up our freedom for evanescent peace?
It is all the story of our time. What we cannot see, historians of the Future shall.

We have been too one-sided. We either are religious at the expense of learning, or we are learned at the expense of religion.
God made us in His likeness:  Oneness.
Body and Soul. We must combine the Spirit, the Heart, the Body, and the Mind.

Then we may not have to rely on future historians to explicate our own lives to us!

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