'expanding diversity' at war against 'reductive eugenics'

'Expanding diversity' was always as much a dog whistle concept to its supporters as 'eugenic reduction' was to its supporters.

Diversity supporters knew exactly what it meant.

It meant fairly sharing society's pie with coloreds, cripples, kikes, queers and gals as well as with the preppy jockie boys from the WASP side of life.

Just as reductionists knew their concept meant keeping almost the whole pie to themselves, with only the crumbs falling ("trickling down") to the small side of life.

Let the war drag on for years, rather than let Indian colonial soldiers win the war by being the bulk of our infantry

As a result, more than the course of the military war per say, the real fear among elites on all sides was that winning and surviving a total war would require a 'coalition of all the talents', fatally exalting expansive diversity for other 'lessers' over their own restrictive eugenics.


As Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Henry Stimson and Charles De Gaulle made abundantly clear, they'd rather lose the war or greatly delay its victory, than see their front lines dominated by those they regarded as genetically unfit.

The French military concept of "blanchiment" is a good start to describe their basic beliefs - though their phobia hardly started and stopped with men of color.

If anything, they feared the possible advance of women much more sharply.

Henry Dawson, in his own small way, decided to contest these views.

First by enlisting the most despised of the small in Nature - the penicillium fungoid growths (to use a term much favoured by A. Hitler and H.P. Lovecraft) - to save the lives of 'the least of these' in humanity.

These were "the 4Fs of the 4Fs", the SBE patients whom 'Republican Death Panels' had condemned to death by deliberately withholding their life-saving medicine.

The payoff for ten billion of us, since 1940, from Henry Dawson's wartime 'coalition of all talents' was a form of herd immunity from the endemic infectious diseases now contested by the vast penicillin (beta lactam) family of antibiotics.

Even more importantly, eugenics' strength is much reduced while embracing diversity is in favour with most of us.

This, rather than his boon of penicillin-for-all (or HGT et al), is the true legacy of Dr Dawson....