WWII : a diversity of ideological rhetorics but a striking uniformity of methodology

There were only 2 billion people on Earth in 1940 but seemingly at least that many ideologies - every kind of -ism under the sun.

An -ism or ideology can be thought of as the governing presumptions of a Great Civilization or a potential Great Civilization.

(That last sentence was perhaps full of redundancies because as anyone ever heard of a small civilization ?)

In 1940, the most powerful of these -isms were actually scientism, nationalism, capitalism, racism, and imperialism.

But the most rhetorically warring ones , the ones with the most acknowledged supporters, were not them at all.

Rather they were ones called something like Liberalism,Conservatism, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Democratic Socialism orJapanese Yamato-ism.

In rhetoric, this lot all seemed as different from each other as could possibly be.

However all these the ideologically warring Great Civilizations also saw that the same common international language (advanced modern era science) was the real key to achieving their rhetorically different aims.

So much so that the -ism of scientism ended up ensuring that the tails of these very different ideological dogs all wagged in the same direction.

Now early Modern Era science was not really very 'open-mindedly scientific'.

Scientists back then frequently set out to prove up unstated and largely unconscious assumptions that the scientists had already made about the basics of Reality : philosophy first, empiricism second.

At a time when the number of publishing research-oriented scientists were comparatively few and the history of such activity only a few decades old, it was easy for these pioneering scientists to unconsciously select various tiny aspects of the vast array that is Reality and present them as typical - and so 'proving up' their philosophic thesis.

Today we having millions of publishing scientists and a hundred and fifty years of scientists doing such activity. And now we have the Internet conveying all of this published research instantly and cheaply to all other scientists.

As a result, much more of the complexity of Reality has come to light and this very diversity and complexity, in of itself, has destroyed the belief that human science can quickly and confidently uncover the secrets of Nature.

But none of this was terribly evident in 1940 --- the ism of Scientism ruled , warmly supported by the Left or the Right, across the entire world of Civilizations.

In fact to be a Civilization was to be scientific and to be scientific was to be part of a Civilization.

Since Modern Era Civilization always consisted of imperial dominion over other ("lesser") human beings and since Modern Era Science always consisted of imperial dominion over ("lesser") Nature, the two provided a complete continuum of dominance over other beings and other things.

All the Great Civilizations agreed on the right and need to dominate lesser beings and things - they only differed in who this imperialism was supposed to benefit.

The middle class and deserving working class in democratic imperial civilizations, the working class in socialist and communist imperial civilizations, the Aryans, Romans or Yamato races in the German, Italian and Japanese imperial civilizations.

In all cases, a tiny elite at the top of each great Civilization benefitted the most and suffered the least under any reversals.

One billion people in the world during WWII experienced longterm severe shortages of food - but no member of any ruling class, regardless of the -ism they espoused - anywhere ever went to bed hungry.

Call this a young child's (profound) understanding of what all the -Isms and Great Civilizations and Scientism really meant ...

Fermi's Paradox ("Where are they?") meets Dawson's Paradox ("Why are they still here?")

Scientists who smallmindedly pursue only one scientific question their whole careers can still end up being regarded as 'great' scientists, if the question they ask (and the answer they provide) is big enough to matter deeply to all of us.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson basically spent his personal research career asking, if life truly was "the survival of the fittest", why it was that Life's most unfit lifeforms - the small, simple,primitive microbes - were also, far and away, its oldest and most successful survivors ?

Because in 1940, it was crystal clear to almost every human on Earth that we were Life's most successful species and that the small weak and primitive microbes were our very antithesis.

But Dawson tried to burst this bubble of hubris and group think , by daring to ask , "well then why are these manifestly unfit beings still around ---- and been around since Life began ?"

Dawson's Paradox was a counterpart to Fermi's Paradox

The famous atomic scientist Erico Fermi once famously asked, if the possibility of many lifeforms in the vast universe is so great, then "Where were they?"

Dawson similarly asked , if the microbes are so manifestly unfit,  then "Why are they still here?"

Dawsonian Revolution's twin triumphs : primitive penicillin and its 'primitive' distribution

The man at the top of the Anglo-American civilization (Winston Churchill) fully backed the Allied medical-scientific experts who insisted upon first civilizing and synthesizing (and patentizing) primitive penicillin before considering its civilized (hierarchical/restricted) distribution during WWII.

By contrast, Dr Martin Henry Dawson insisted from the start (October 1940) that primitive (fungus-made) penicillin was safe enough and efficiently enough produced to enable the world to start right now - today ! - saving those people dying of diseases penicillin could cure.

And he also demanded that his primitive made penicillin be distributed as a primitive society would distribute it - equally to all those in need, war or no war.

We really shouldn't be surprised by all this.

An essential characteristic of all 'civilizations', experts insist, is that it has a high measure of both social and geographic stratification - a hierarchy of inequality.

Those same experts say that 'primitive' and barbaric societies share a common egalitarian spirit of sharing equally.

True, in politicians' rhetoric, 'the civilized' show a great egalitarian spirit while 'the barbaric' have a hierarchy of cruel rulers and enslaved subjects.

Of course remember that $6 and politicians' rhetoric will get you a small cup of Starbucks, with any luck ....

Auschwitz and Penicillin put the fatal post into Modernity

Who stuck the fatal post into Modernity ?

Was the doctors of Auschwitz alone, with their horrific experiments on living human guinea pigs, with all their fatal injections and monitoring of mass gassings ?

Not on the evidence.

The agreed Allied lie in 1945 was that the Nazis were an outlier, dedicated to destroying civilization and science and returning us all to a savage and more primitive age.

It sounded good - at least it sounded good to the people so far up the top of the Allied world that they had lost touch with the greater reality below.

But the billion or so ordinary people at the deeply suffering edge of WWII weren't so sure.

No, Auschwitz helped a lot - as did Naking, Hiroshima and the Katyn Forest killings.

But they altogether still weren't enough -  all dismissed as either horrors done by non-civilized evil-doers or regrettable actions done in the course of winning a great moral crusade.

What really put the fatal post into Modernity was the contrast provided by the fact that while the best of human civilization's chemists had totally failed to produce a lick of life-saving penicillin throughout the whole war, the much despised primitive basement slime produced scads of it - effortlessly.

Advanced German medicine - the best in the civilized world - gave us Auschwitz while the despised Lovecraftian slime gave us a priceless lifesaver.

Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?

'Advanced' Auschwitz doctors and 'Primitive' penicillium lifesavers exchange places as postmodernity replaces modernity

Progress 1945 : German medicine, long regarded as the most modern and advanced, gives us human guinea pigs dissected alive and the white coats who gave the lethal needles and monitored the fatal gas.

Non-Progress 1945 : the much despised primitive basement mold and slime, the ultimate horror in a modern Lovecraftian world, gives us the life-saving penicillium.

Me, a boomer kid and an elementary student in 1950s North America, trying hard to reconcile what my teachers and the media told me about progress versus slime ....

Auschwitz AND Penicillin created Post-Modernity

No matter how many scholars say it while dancing on the sharp point of a pin, it simply isn't true.

The horrors that Auschwitz came to represent simply weren't enough to break through human civilization's enormous hubris in the heady post-victory days of 1945.

In fact, the journalists had already all been squared and the agreed story was to be that the Nazis had long been openly at war, well before 1939, against the modern world.

That they were a throwback to our barbaric past, trying to destroy civilization.

But Modern Civilization had been stronger, with better, more modern science, and had so cast out this one bad apple from the European basket.

Primitive barbaric Nazi science had been bested.

And soon all would be once again bright and cheery in the broad uplands of this best of all possible current worlds.

(And please put your sunglasses on and hold onto your hats, because the Future's going to be so Bright, you gonna wanna wear shades !)

Yes, Modern Civilization had had one bad outlier, its tame apologists boldly admitted, but the structure itself was sound.

But in fact it was 'the best of Allied science' that had been bested - and not by some yet more advanced civilization - but rather by the most primitive and despicable creature imaginable : stinky smelly basement fungal slime.

All the Smartest Chemists in the Universe, from all civilizations in the world, working full out with unlimited funds, had failed to make penicillin - something the despised slime tossed off with the ease and grace of Nijinsky.

The 'primitive' slime was supposed to remain securely at the very bottom of the Ladder of Progress - with 'advanced' civilizations like Germany and America supposed to be secure at the very top.

When suffering humanity needed advanced civilization the most, it let them down - instead a despised being, a broken vessel, a stone all builders rejected, gave them life...

Now human hubris had a tough contrast to reconcile : all civilization (not just a nasty outlier of it) had failed to produce the priceless lifesaver penicillin - instead that was done - and worse, done easily and effortlessly - by the supposedly most primitive life form imaginable - a lower fungus.

What on Earth then was truly Progressive and what was truly Primitive ?

French civilization versus Swiss culture : imperialism is the missing ingredient

Ever hear anyone, anywhere, ever talk about 'small' civilizations ? Yeah, me neither. Civilizations are always coupled with "great" ---as in large. Not necessarily as in 'morally good, kind and caring'.

The word civilizations, used in the plural, actually implies, quite strongly, large imperial empires.Always has, always will.Its just a euphemism for imperialism, really.

For run of the mill commonplace acts of naked dominance against other humans and against Nature, but done this time large, on a grandest of scale.

Large expansionist empires divided geographically and ethnically, with a central core of privilege and an outer core of the not privileged.

And throughout the entire empire slash civilization an unequal social hierarchy of one powerful and well off class at the top and other poorer, less powerful classes way below.

At the start of WWI, the term 'civilizations' were mostly limited to places in Europe, with only Sweden and Switzerland among the fully sovereign countries without empires and hence not having a civilization to export to needy darkies.

Even more importantly,in this expanded sense of Europe, only Russia, the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary were empires without overseas possessions.

Even the regarded as not fully civilized Americans had overseas colonies.

Overseas colonies many many miles of ocean waters away satisfied the progressive Era mind.They liked a clear - if highly artificial - separation in every thing.A clear separation between the darkie subjects over there and the whitey rulers over here.

While in the older style of civilization cum empire, a subject could move more easily over land to the centre core with no realistic border barriers at ports of entry, and then hope to pass as a ruler.

Civilized behavior - courtly behavior - genteel - gentlemanly  : again all these words are but euphemisms for the fact that every civilization absolutely needed an aristocracy and a hierarchy of the privileged master top and the subjugated subject bottom to qualify as a civilization rather than just a nation or a culture.

It was absolutely true when Churchill said we were defending Western Civilization --- more's the pity ....

Remember this well whenever you hear WWII propaganda claiming the Allies were defending civilization.They were indeed --- but was that actually something to be proud of ?

Wouldn't defending democracy and civil rights be something more of what the world might actually rally around. Except of course then, defeating Germany's empire would mean also breaking up the British and French empires....

Humans an annual; bacteria a perennial

The single human species can be thought of as an showy but short lived annual with the hundreds of thousands of unspectacular bacteria species as the perennials of major lifeforms.

Today's typical born-in-North-America human reproducing unit consumes enough energy and materials over a typical 25 year generation period to reproduce about a billion trillion trillion of individually slightly different bacteria in the same period of time.

Humans need hundreds of energy slaves to maintain their life style and even then many couples have only one or none kids - kids that take 25 years for themselves to be able to reproduce.

And of course, it takes two adults to make a baby.

Bacteria need very little material and energy to reproduce, sometimes in as little as 25 minutes, not years, and don't need a mate either.

They operate collectively as a vast world wide quasi lending library of genes - every bacterial a potential lender or borrower of 'sometimes useful' unique genes.

This would be far too expensive a library, in metabolical terms, for all bacteria to make all these genes all the time.

But when bacteria somewhere on Earth suddenly need one of these rare genes, they quickly obtain it from other bacteria that hold that particular rare gene, via horizontal gene transfer, HGT.

So while somewhat simple individually, overall the bacteria family is complex enough to handle almost any curve ball the changing environment can throw at it.

But above all, bacteria have evolved downward in size and movement and reproductive choice ( cloning) as to need very little energy and matter to survive, endure and in better times, reproduce.

Put another way, bacteria are not just Life's fastest breeders - they are also its slowest.

Bacteria can survive a hundred and fifty years or more barely alive before they get enough energy and material to reproduce, allowing this form of life to survive on one billion trillion trillionth of what a human couple would need to survive upon.

Human civilization is all very elaborate and showy but without a massive steady flow of energy and material to sustain it will quickly collapse.

A few thousand humans could live on as hunter gatherers in a moderately impoverished world - below that level of subsistence, they do would die out and vanish for all time as a species.

Meanwhile, those barely mobile tortoises of Life/ those non-spectacular perennials of Life (the bacteria) end up finishing the race of Life well ahead of the more showy annuals and speedier hares.

And what we humans need to ask ourselves : is true 'Progress' better defined as a matter of shortlived Annuals or of long living perennials ?

Ladder of 'Progress' features primitive lifesaver at very bottom and advanced evil-doer at the very top ?

Imagine true Progress defined as a primitive basement slime saving millions of lives instead of being defined as an advanced civilization, Beethoven and Goethe to its past credit, coldblooded shooting thousands of babies in the face.

Pretty hard to imagine, isn't it ?

Much better we stick with tradition, tried and true : advanced Auschwitz at the very top versus primitive Penicillium at the very bottom.....

Why the world couldn't believe the wartime photographs of the Holocaust

'Civilized people simply don't exploit and murder other civilized people' is what everyone thought at the time.

And, by and large, this was true - in a sort of 'honour among thieves', civilizations tended not to exploit other civilizations - preferring to exploit the vast majority of the world, all those other people they deemed 'uncivilized' - in fact doing so was the very hallmark of being civilized.

To be civilized was to hold dominion over lesser 'others'.

So during WWII, civilized people in the world were greatly horrified to learn that the civilized Germans were forcing the civilized French to provide involuntary labour, 'just as if the French were but mere darkies in some overseas French colony'.

But since the Eastern Europeans weren't really civilized, well documented reports of them being murdered in the millions by the Germans - made public before the half way mark of the war had even been reached - caused almost no outcry, beyond a few exiled or immigrant Poles and Jews....

Dawson's opponents, not Dawson, had special concern about SBE patients in September 1940

Pity the poor historian ( like me !) trying to recover the substance of the visual glances,the brief shoulder shrugs,  the sotto voce verbal hints and half finished sentences, all very typical of conversation within small cliques in a small staff room, when the group is divided up into various opposing factions of colleagues, who must still at least pretend to get along at work.

I believe that in September 1940, upon his return to medical school and hospital, Dr Martin Henry Dawson half overheard some conversations between members of a group of his colleagues who not well disposed to social medicine, even in peacetime.

The Fall of France had happened and many Americans believed the Fall of Britain was soon to follow.

The American medical elite, made up mostly of  conservatives not in favour of medical intervention towards the weak at home or abroad, were now all claiming to be preparing for a possible war.

Maybe they were - in part.

But for many of them, talk of war preparation allowed them to reduce the alarming amount of social medicine (treating the poor dying like the rich dying) being practised.

They insisted they were only seeking to reduce medical intervention among the domestic weak and small because all existing resources (and more) were needed for possible future medical intervention in support of Europe's weak and small nations.

Reducing domestic comfort and aid because of possible foreign intervention ---- which they were still strongly opposed to !

I call that classic 'Bad Faith' and template Orwellian Double Talk.

I think it was these colleagues who mentioned the SBE patients as the classic sort of 'bed waster' that a war medicine hospital could no longer afford.

We know there was already some existing consensus on ignoring the SBEs under war conditions because there was almost no resistance from doctors in America in the Fall of 1942, when the disease was declared by the NAS 'death panels' to be of no military value and so denied penicillin - the only medicine that could save its patients' lives.

This censenus was also found among doctors in Canada, the Uk and Australia as the NAS ban on the use of wartime penicillin for dying SBE patients was extended by the medical establishment in those countries again without almost any controversy.

But Dawson himself had never before spoken or written or researched on SBE and its patients.

His sudden concern in September 1940 to make the 4F SBEs the focus of his wartime natural penicillin crusade, I believe, came from him half overhearing his conservative colleagues dismissing them as worthy of equal treatment to the war wounded 1As.

Dawson's empathy for the unjustly neglected simply kicked in ....

A bad faith Charter 'written on the water', just off Newfoundland

All of India knew very well the saying that when you make a promise you don't intend ever to keep, you say you 'wrote it on the water'.

Since Winston Churchill had no intention of keeping the promises of self determination found in the Atlantic Charter he had signed with FDR in August 1941, the fact that this Charter was literally 'written on the water' off Argentina Newfoundland was a telling, even poetic, lapse in British spin-doctoring....

'Hitler treats white folks in Europe worse than a bunch of darkies in our overseas colonies' --- Allied world

The nerve of that man !

'There is a time and place for mistreating people ---- but today's Europe is not it - the Atlantic Charter is Britain and America's commitment that Europe will no longer be so mistreated....'

Parasitic progress versus Complexity progress : Humans & Vitamin C

"Complex Guys Finish Last" -- Leo Durocher.

During the Error of Anthropocentric Progress (1875-1965), it was an unconscious and assumed given that ever greater biological complexity was a direct proxy for ever greater biological progress.

Call it the Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg Law of Eugenics.

Because it basically ignored totally the equally common - and perhaps even more successful - biological progress towards becoming less complex, to becoming a taker not a maker in Republican-Conservative speak, a parasite dependant in part on sponging off others' hard work for your basic survival.

It is truly rare in the big big world of Life to find beings who can't make their own Vitamin C.

We virtually all need it to survive - lots of it - and daily.

For safety's sake we mostly make it ourselves, out of that even more basic-to-all-Life substance called glucose.

But a few creatures - finned fish, bats, some birds, ape like beings, guinea pigs do not.

They let a gene needed to make the stuff mutate away ---- because they already eat a Vitamin C heavy daily diet of fresh plants and animals rather than say just surviving on dried seeds like some birds.

And yes humans are on that list of vitamin C takers not makers.

Making that gene and the resulting gene product was all very fine but it consumed a daily chunk of food and effort perhaps better devoted to making our muscles and brains bigger.

That is why all parasites accept the loss of valuable genes - because they can get the substance it makes much easier by sponging off others.

Now lets go back to the 1930s, when human efforts to successfully make Vitamin C synthetically out of inorganic chemicals in big chemical factories was hailed as a signal triumph of progressively complex humanity.

No longer would we need to eat fresh fruit and vegetables every day just to survive.

But call artificial Vitamin C a very mixed triumph, a delayed triumph for picky two years olds against "Mommy" ----- rather than a triumph for fully grown up adult moms and dad.

Because just as Mom always said, eating fresh fruit and vegetables does indeed give us many, many other benefits beyond just serving as inert packages to transport Vitamin C into our stomachs..... 

Where and when was first ever intradermal penicillin sensitivity test given ?

At NYC's Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, on  October 16th 1940.

In fact it was the historical first ever antibiotic injection given to a patient (two patients actually) followed up a few hours later, after no reaction was observed, by a larger (and later still larger) doses given subcutaneously.

Amazingly, Dr Martin Henry Dawson's careful and cautious technique on that historical day are still followed to the letter by all well trained nurses and doctors....

Robot kills human - German police ponder charges while ambitious politicians consider options....

One wonders if Europe's political parties will not also re-consider their rhetorical options, in light of this terrible incident involving a robot crushing a young human (fellow) employee to death at a Volkswagen plant at Baunatal near Frankfurt.

Will this death alter the right wing ( and sometimes left wing) political blame game?

Causing politicians to shift from blaming migrant workers for all their society's woes, to laying a little anger on non-human machinery brought in to replace humans ?

Etc...

Why the only real civil war has always been over healthcare : because the right to life is the ultimate civil right, above the right to vote or a right to apply for a job

Give Blacks and Jews the right to vote and the right to apply for jobs and education, if you must, but don't - for Jefferson Davis's sake ! - give them to right to be treated fairly when they turn up in a hospital ER.

Because DOAs can't vote or take jobs or occupy your stupid son's rightful seat at Yale.

Accept what I claim and you begin to see the real bite in the unholy but quiet battle between medical proponents of Social Medicine and War Medicine (Thomas Parran versus Lewis Weed), circa October 16th 1940.

On that day, Professor Martin Henry Dawson gave history' first ever injections of microbe-made penicillin to two 4Fs, a Jew and a Black, opening our Age of Antibiotics, on a day otherwise devoted to registering America's 1As in the first ever peacetime draft.

His impetus ?

Returning that Fall from vacation to learn that his medical school and hospital was downgrading any focus on social medicine, his area of interest, to up its preparation for war-oriented medicine.

His response ?

Parry, and then thrust, deep, with  .1 ml of Pen "G" in butyl alcohol.....

If we never longer think the Sun revolves around us, we still think it shines out our ass...

Life in the Universe apparently could occur on any one about 100 billion other planets that have the exact complex mix of conditions needed.

This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.

Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.

But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.

All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.

Ditto for us humans generally.

God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.

We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.

Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.

A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.

So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.

Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.

If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.

Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.

If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.

But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.

And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.

Hence this book ...

Forties Era 'Science Man' : anything Mother Nature can do, I can do better

Mechanical and Synthetic autarky

With extensions of his limbs and mind, with machines and beaker flasks, 1940's Civilized Man could top any physical feat that nature's most noblest creatures could ever hope to do.

And he had a fist full of recent new world records to prove it.

For in this new era of unending progress, man could now fly higher than an eagle, deeper than a whale, move faster than a cheetah.

Dig deeper than any mole, live higher up a mountain than any polar bush.

Sure a penguin lived at the edge of Antarctica, but had any penguin gone to the South Pole - or the North ?

Had he, had he ??

Smelter fires hotter than any volcano, electrical sparks bigger than any lightning strike.

On and on it went : even man-made silk finer than any mere worm could weave.

Designer meals (and soon, designer babies) better than mother could ever make.

Who needs Mother Nature consuming calories when her jobs could be done better by engines and beakers ?

So, about those plans to "kill off all the smallpox virus on the Earth, as 'life unworthy of life' "?

Just a start, buddy, just a start ....

Planet-wide planned genocide of Jews superlatively unique

Every every recent Summer Olympics about seven billion unique individuals lend at least half an ear to its ongoing results.

But about ten seconds after the starter's gun goes off during the 100 metre sprint for men, we with television sets learn about someone who is superlatively unique : the fastest human on the entire planet (at least for a few weeks).

Were the Nazis' WWII efforts to kill the Jews 'unique' ?

Of course - all genocides are unique - all events, like all individuals, are unique.

But the overall tenor of the secretive Nazi intentions, never carried out fully, suggested that they eventually intended to kill every last Jew on the entire Earth, just as if they were smallpox viruses.

Unlike say Rwanda's Tutsis, huddled together handily in a relatively small area, Jews were to be found in practically every country on Earth, so an effort to kill all of them required an extremely ambitious plan to conquer the whole Earth first.

The geographic sweep of this genocide marks it as unique in human history to date.....