A touch of history

Saturday 30th May
By looking at the extraordinary events of the mid 1940s, we see human nature in all its extremes. We see bravery, altruism, waste and cruelty, all the big building blocks from which the future was to be built. And I think this was a major turning point in human development, especially with us in the West, and it wasn’t necessarily a progress we can be proud of.
When I was just a twinkle in my parents’ eye, three near-simultaneous events took place. First there was a war grinding to a halt, millions of humans dead, millions of humans dying of starvation, and in the middle of it all a man who scared the living daylights out of people (and when he shot himself, it gave my parents and many others the confidence to enlarge their families). Next, some hundred days later, an atom-splitting device exploded over a Japanese city. That showed how it was now possible to kill a whole planet by just pressing a button. These two events marking the close of one war gave rise to another war of fear, a precursor of what could happen one day.
The third significant event around this period didn’t get much publicity at the time, but later it was to become the very symbol of humans who’d become monsters. Perhaps it grew naturally out of the first two. Certainly it was a forecaster of what was to come. A new grim reaper had appeared in the form of a mindlessness combined with a clever idea that was to revolutionise food production. It was as if a new age were proclaiming itself: “the cage man cometh”, “the cage age has arrived”, “we can do the unspeakable”. And we did it, we threw away the last vestige of compassion - the circumstances had come about where cost effectiveness was going to rule everything. We started to use cages to entomb and enslave animals, en masse, for human gain.