From John Ray's shorter notes
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6 June 2017
Master innovators again
A few days ago, I pointed out that I am so far from being a white supremacist that I am in fact a N.E. Asian supremacist. The Left will still call me a racist for that but they called a sentimental Christian gentleman named George Bush II a Nazi so I think we can see that they have no truth in them (John 8:44).
The main point of my previous post was however to point out how people descended from German tribes living on the Southern shore of the Baltic 1500 years ago had a remarkable record of innovation -- so much so that they can be seen as having created the modern world. Documentation of that remarkable record can be seen here.
The leading tribe concerned we know as the Saxons but North Germans generally were not too different, as was shown by the rapid Northern adoption of that great Saxon innovation: Protestantism. Saxon culture rapidly became the culture of all the Northern German lands. The South, of course, remained Catholic.
I now want to make a small update to that. I want to show that innovativeness among the descendants of the old Saxons continues to this day. It is not a mere historical curiosity. Modern day descendants of the old Saxon people in both Britain and Germany are great innovators to this day. That we have invented unusually desirable societies in which to live is of course very vividly shown by the way most of the rest of the world wants to come and live among us.
But I want to highlight here something less obvious but which is only half-known these days: The German innovations of WWII. I imagine that most people know that Nazi Germany was the first nation to deploy both cruise missiles and ballistic missiles (V1 and V2) but that is merely the headline of WWII German innovation. Germany also deployed in WWII the first jet fighter aircraft (the ME 262), the first military radar, the first assault rifle (the Sturmgewehr), the first smart bomb and the first military helicopter. Germany deployed a range of new technologies that were not fully adopted by the USA until the Iraq war. Germany re-invented modern warfare.
At the outset of the war, German ships had radar while British ships did not. The British however improved their radars much more rapidly so they gained most from that technology. It is usually pointed out that both radar and the jet engine were British inventions but the British of course are also descendants of those South Baltic tribes so my generalization about the great innovators is in fact reinforced by that.
I am not going to say anything about the Sturmgewehr as I know that many of my readers will be gun enthusiasts who know far more than I do about the subject. When it was issued to German troops, however, they were ecstatic.
I must make a note about the Focke helicopters. They used a twin rotor configuration quite different to what we mostly see today but that configuration puts all its power into lift -- so that is why the heavy-lift Chinook helicopters also use a version of that configuration. The Focke helicopters have only one modern-day descendant but it is a distinguished one. The Chinook is a real military workhorse
And then there were the various German smart bombs -- precision guided munitions to be technical. Germans tried several versions of them and some were very effective -- and effective relatively early on in the war. The sinking of the allied troopship "Rohna" in 1943 with great loss of life (1,100) was seen as so frightening that the allied powers hushed it up completely. It has become known only in recent times. To my knowledge it wasn't until Iraq that the USA used smart bombs in combat.
And Germany did all that despite losing so many top flight physicists and other scientists to Hitler's madness about the Jews. It was a solely German effort. Germany also went close to deploying an atom bomb but air raids on the facilities being used for that derailed the effort.
So the ball that Luther set rolling in 1517 in Saxony is still rolling. New ideas are still proliferating among those of Saxon ethnic or cultural descent right into the modern era. I think most people reading here will know about Alan Turing and the origins of computers and even the internet was a British/American invention.
China will one day swamp us economically but I think that the descendants of those South Baltic tribes of 1500 years ago will remain the great innovators. I am pleased that I speak a version of that South Baltic language: English
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