Paradoxes of World War II
The Second World War was unique and paradoxical. It is no exaggeration to say that it is endowed with more world-historical meaning than any other conflict. Yet its very scope makes any grand interpretation inherently incomplete. France and Britain went to war to defend Poland, and yet by war’s end they had abandoned it to its fate as a Soviet satellite. The Soviet Union for its part suffered the greatest casualties of any state, and yet until 1941 it was a secret collaborator of Nazi Germany. The western powers fought in the name of freedom and democracy alongside a totalitarian regime that terrorised and murdered its own people in the millions. (Luka Ivan Jukic)
Good Lord! .... So much of the world was, and still is, on fire with anger and bombing. (I, too, have been inexplicably angrier over the last few years.)
It could be that the human race so desperately needs a unifying fate-determining common cause, that an Earth-impacting asteroid threat or, better yet, a vicious extraterrestrial attack is what we have to collectively brutally endure in order to survive the longer term from ourselves.
Humanity would all unite for the first time ever to defend against, attack and defeat the humanicidal multi-tentacled ETs, the latter needing to be an even greater nemesis than our own formidably divisive politics and perceptions of differences, both real and perceived — especially those involving race and nationality.
During this much-needed human alliance, we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and experience thus witness just how humanly similar we are in the ways that really count. [Then again, I was told that one or more human parties might actually attempt to forge an alliance with the ETs to better their own chances for survival, thus indicating that our deficient human condition may be even worse than I had originally thought.]
Yet, maybe some five or more decades later when all traces of the nightmarish ET invasion are gone, we'll inevitably revert to those same politics to which we humans seem so collectively hopelessly prone — including those of scale: the intercontinental, international, national, provincial or state, regional and municipal. And again we slide downwards.