Defeating WWII

By September 1945, the Axis had been decisively defeated.

End of story --- or was it?

Because defeating WWII itself, defeating the morally abysmal type of war it was (on all sides) took much longer and in fact is still ongoing.

Unsophisticated opinion in 1940 tended to emphasize how very different the western democracies, the axis and the communists were from each other.

Seventy five years on, we are likely to notice how much all groups back then held in common.

In particularly, they all held a quiet confidence that reducing human and biological diversity down to just "the winners" while "the losers" got binned was scientifically justified and hence morally justified.

Today, of course, we increasingly believe that the widest possible range in biological and human diversity is scientifically justified and hence once again morally justified.

"Biodiversity is a good thing" has become a politician's cliche.

There is ever growing support for the idea that the widest possible diversity in human types (signalled by support for civil rights for colored race individuals, Jews, aboriginals, women, gays, the handicapped,etc) is also best.

We have turned 180 degrees on this issue and it is the best single indicator of the difference between WWII's modern world and our present post-modern world.

How did it happen ?

How and when and where did scientific and popular opinion change on the virtues of including the small as well as the great into our charmed circle of life-worthy-of-life ?

I argue, in my book "the OTHER manhattan project", that it all began when wartime and postwar popular opinion ignored elite scientific opinion and focused on the ironic fact that it was a humble little household pest, the green blue slime, that had been busy saving their children during the war and afterwards.

While it as the best and the brightest in the biggest of human civilizations that were busy strafing, shooting, bombing and burning their kids during and after the war...

Misfits Acting Up : despite the Allies , Penicillin-for-All

What many call Eugenicide I call Plenticide.

That is because I think the same mass impulse among the educated of past years to cleanse the world of misfits (culminating in the mass murder of Slavs, Jews and Romas) also sought at the same time to rid it of all types of non-human "pests".

It was all part of the complex and unconscious reaction formed by a truly unfortunate coincidence thrown up in the late Victorian Era.

The 1870s' arrival of the machine cum chemical age seemed to negate the age-old need for human, plant and animal slaves - the sort of slaves the US Civil War had just been fought over.

Particularly as new strides in public health was greatly reducing death rates and thus visibly making the world an increasingly overcrowded place : lots of both 'first-rate' (masters) and 'second-rate' (slaves) people.

Yet in the same period, new advances in global transportation and communications also overwhelmed the affluent and educated with a vivid new sense of the plenitude of the world's cultures, languages, species, strains , habitats --- too too much way too too soon.

The machine world suddenly seemed to have far too many species and cultures - most of them seemingly inefficient as compared to the new Scientism Man.

Too many people at the same times the world seemingly could get by on a lot less - thanks to machines powered by the energy of fossil plants and animal 'slaves'.

Eugenics was thus born - at this exact time, in this exact place - as a result of this unconscious reaction among the affluent.

As was born the Gospel of Germs and the Gospel of Soap/Cleanliness, and new interest in Scientific Pest Control.

Immigration controls, culturalization campaigns against minorities and immigrants in schools, campaigns for greater purity in food and chemicals, synthetic replacements for everything natural - starting with food.

I could pile up the connected list of reactions for days at a time - but not today !

But note that they all started up right after the 1870s to blend together to produce what we now call the streamlined* age of Modernity.

*Streamlined = Eugenics = Plenticide = tidy up = clean up  = purify, all basically meaning the same thing in this context ...

Pure Sulfa or Salvarsan drugs were far more toxic than impure crude penicillin : so what was the fuss REALLY about then ?

Before 1945, an entire generation of doctors world wide (except for perhaps a half dozen of them) were more willing to put pure but toxic sulfa or salvarsan drugs into their patients than put impure but non toxic penicillin into them.

I will go further:  an entire generation of doctors were willing to seen letting their patients DIE, rather than be seen by other doctors as putting an impure substance into those dying patients.

an obsession with Purity - before even the patients' life 

In The Age of Modernity, before 1945,  an obsession with purity had its hands tight around the throat of medical morality ....