Allied Big tent needed, to defeat Axis quickly

In mid 1940, the Axis's Big Tent still included fellow traveller Joseph Stalin*, along with a whole host of quasi fascist governments in the nominally Neutral nations. (Franco and Petain's governments were among the most prominent).

The British Empire alone, still had a huge demographic advantage over the Axis nations it was formally at war with, if Whitehall choose to include the colored populations of the Far East, Africa and the West indies, along with the French-speaking Canadians.

By and large it did not.

If the army forces placed in Britain as a potential invasion force against Germany's home territory had to be too small to do the job as a price for remaining basically all-white and all Protestant, so be it.


Because if Britain's infantry was boosted by six million Indian "colored" volunteers that then led the successful invasion into Germany (at the cost of the de facto recognition of the postwar independence of India) then Churchill and ninety percent of the English elite wanted no part in it.

The lessons of The Great War for the world's elites : modern all-out war unleashed social changes almost worse than abject military defeat...

Over and over, all the Allied nations (along with the Axis, by the by) chose to be at a military disadvantage, in a total war situation, rather than risk the unleashing of the social consequences of a Big Tent coalition, because it would result in a too wide a sharing of the moral success of victory.

One almost feels that if the elites had believed that the war could have been successfully conducted a small elite force of middle class volunteers in metal machines of submarines, airplanes and tanks, waging war from far above the fray, they would have done so.

Foregoing the conscripting of mass infantry armies of working class men, all demanding postwar pensions and political and moral rights that come from having personally defeated the enemy in old fashioned face to face combat.

It was the united effort to avoid sharing the wartime responsibilities, if it also meant sharing postwar power, that Dr Henry Dawson set out to combat with his personal Manhattan Project ....

 * Who can forget Stalin's northern naval base that he provided for Nazi u-boats - who besides the apologist historians for the Allied cause ?

Surviving on Lifeboat Earth

Surviving on Lifeboat Earth requires a coalition of all talents, small as well as great.

Similarly, in the fall of 1940, winning the military and moral war against the Axis nations and their fellow travellers among the world's Neutral nations (remember, at that time, they formed the majority of the world's nations !) would also take a 'coalition of all talents', or so thought an obscure doctor in a New York hospital.

Dr Henry Dawson's resulting "small" penicillin Manhattan Project was intended to serve as both as a rebuke to the Allied leadership for editing out most of the world's beings from their coalition plans and as a pilot project example of all the good things that happen when a coalition of all talents is really set to work.

Dawson's 1940 vision of "abundant patent-free natural penicillin for all even during a total war" has benefitted ten billion of us in the seventy five years since, mostly through a form of herd immunity.

Certainly Dawson also made many great pioneering scientific breakthroughs in all kinds of areas, such as DNA, HGT, Quorum sensing, curing the incurable SBE etc.

However, I believe that his greatest contribution to humanity during his tragically short life was actually his project's putting real flesh on the then highly controversial claim that the world was better off with more, not less, human and biological diversity in its portfolio.

Putting the fatal "post" into 1945 Modernity

By 1945, Dawson's project (together with projects from people like Dr Mengele, operating from the totally opposite end of the moral spectrum) helped upend the certitudes of man-centred Progress and together put the fatal "post" in Modernity...

The why of Dawson's "small" penicillin

Life, if we but let it, is a 'Coalition of All Talents', containing not just Plan A but also all other Plans right up to Plan Z, and is never more useful then in a crisis situation.

If, instead, one instantly consigning all the small to the category of 'useless' and then start doing the same to all women and to all non-WASP populations etc, that is rather like sending more than half of your army home ---- on indefinite leave.

Not a smart move in any war --- particularly not in a war that you are already losing.

In the dark days of late 1940, Dr Henry Dawson thought the Allied cause certainly needed the talents of all, rather than discarding more than half of humanity on the spot.

To both rebuke the Allies and to set an alternative example, Dawson's Manhattan-based "small" penicillin project deliberately used the talents of the neglected small penicillium to try and bring the neglected small SBE patients back to happy productive lives....