NYC-based Dr Henry Dawson in 1941 was clearly an intervenor with his 'inclusive' penicillin (and may I point out that adult intervenors (as I well know) were often bullied themselves as children).
SBE patients , such as his patients Charlie and Miss H were clearly the innocents.
NYC-based Dr Foster Kennedy in 1941 was clearly a bully, particularly telling that he would use the excuse of the shortage of staff and resources during an upcoming war as an excuse to finally implement his long held plan to kill all the deformed children.
Shades of Adolf Hitler in an exactly similar setting.
His active verbal supporters at the very top of the world's largest and most influential mental health body, the American Psychiatric Association, were clearly the stone-hearted bystanders a bully needed to get away with his deeds.
In the wider world of WWII, one can easily spot the bullies, the innocents and stone hearted bystanders (aka Neutrals) as individuals and as (almost) entire nations.
But sadly, no one nation stands out as a whole hearted intervenor.
That noble task is left to a few in all nations, to try and heal the hearts of the stone-hearted majority by rousing their consciences to the sad and unfair fate of the small and the weak in face of bullies.
Bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and sometimes even people like Churchill and others on the Allied and Neutral side.....
Showing posts with label wwii. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wwii. Show all posts
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Are the small just a tiny part of the Modern past or a vital part of the Postmodern future ?
Two hundred years from the event, historians will be telling classrooms that when it comes to exam time, they should remember that WWII boiled down to just one issue.
One - scientific - issue.
Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?
In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.
On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.
By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.
But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.
For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.
But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.
That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...
One - scientific - issue.
Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?
In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.
On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.
By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.
But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.
For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.
But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.
That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
When nations bully
From 1931 to 1946 , the world saw an ending series of bullying sessions, as big and aggressive nations bullied small nations and small peoples and small individuals.
Contemporary historians are tending to extend WWII to run from 1931 to 1946 --- which is a good first step.
But they still tend to view it exclusively through political and military lenses, but might do well to start calling a spade a spade .
Because contemporary parents and children (if not historians) increasingly recognize bullying as something that does not begin and end in the childhood schoolyard ....
Contemporary historians are tending to extend WWII to run from 1931 to 1946 --- which is a good first step.
But they still tend to view it exclusively through political and military lenses, but might do well to start calling a spade a spade .
Because contemporary parents and children (if not historians) increasingly recognize bullying as something that does not begin and end in the childhood schoolyard ....
Saturday, August 10, 2013
In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science
During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.
Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.
It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.
Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.
In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.
Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.
Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.
So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."
Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.
Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.
But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.
By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.
By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.
Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.
Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.
But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.
This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).
So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.
If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.
But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....
Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.
It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.
Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.
In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.
Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.
Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.
So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."
Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.
Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.
But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.
By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.
By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.
Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.
Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.
But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.
This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).
So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.
If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.
But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
WWII as a baseball game between Modernity and Reality (and 'Reality Bats Last' )
WWII was (and it wasn't) a battle royal between the belief that reality is a lot more simple and predictable than it looks at first glance and the belief that reality is much more complex and much less predictable than it looks at first glance.
Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .
Or simply groused about the foolish optimism of the bigwigs, back of the front lines , to the other enlisted men, much as Willy and Joe did.
So - in one sense - there was NO battle royal over this great divide.
But - in another sense - there was a tremendous battle royal with 70 million dead and much of the world's wealth destroyed.
This is because reality, with we can give it a human like capability for a wee moment , held fast to its own opinion.
Or so it would seem.
Because almost every prediction Modernity Man made during WWII did a big belly flop and batted zero .
In this baseball game, reality batted last.
And reality consistently revealed itself to be far more complex and far less predictable than all the politicians,CEOs,editors, scientists, generals (and armchair generals) had ever suspected.....
Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .
Or simply groused about the foolish optimism of the bigwigs, back of the front lines , to the other enlisted men, much as Willy and Joe did.
So - in one sense - there was NO battle royal over this great divide.
But - in another sense - there was a tremendous battle royal with 70 million dead and much of the world's wealth destroyed.
This is because reality, with we can give it a human like capability for a wee moment , held fast to its own opinion.
Or so it would seem.
Because almost every prediction Modernity Man made during WWII did a big belly flop and batted zero .
In this baseball game, reality batted last.
And reality consistently revealed itself to be far more complex and far less predictable than all the politicians,CEOs,editors, scientists, generals (and armchair generals) had ever suspected.....
A war story for women : the story of the OTHER Manhattan Project
I fully expect many more women than men will read my book "Heart and Mind Agape - a Good News story from the bad news war".
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
I wanted to tell the un-told story of Manhattan's other wartime Project, one with a much happier WWII ending and one with post-war ramifications much more uplifting than the other's enduring threat of nuclear death for all.
So yes, mine is a war book for women.
Men will just have to suck it up and get over it.....
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
I wanted to tell the un-told story of Manhattan's other wartime Project, one with a much happier WWII ending and one with post-war ramifications much more uplifting than the other's enduring threat of nuclear death for all.
So yes, mine is a war book for women.
Men will just have to suck it up and get over it.....
Friday, July 26, 2013
The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy
Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.
But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".
Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.
I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.
But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.
On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.
A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.
WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....
But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".
Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.
I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.
But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.
On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.
A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.
WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Dawson rebukes the "bystanders" of the Allied "coalition of the UN-willing"
In 1939, the British and French empires were initially unwilling to honour even the letter of their solemn pledge to come to the aid of Poland if it was attacked.
And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.
But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.
And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.
Let us always honour them for at least that.
For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.
And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.
Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.
Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.
They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).
Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.
So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.
Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.
Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.
We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.
It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .
One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.
So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.
But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .
My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' , open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.
His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.
He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.
They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.
But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .
All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.
I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.
Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.
Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....
And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.
But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.
And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.
Let us always honour them for at least that.
For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.
And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.
Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.
Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.
They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).
Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.
So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.
Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.
Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.
We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.
It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .
One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.
So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.
But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .
My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' , open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.
His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.
He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.
They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.
But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .
All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.
I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.
Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.
Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
WWII : excessive group-love led to excessive groupthink
In my previous postings over the past few years, I have tried - separately - to indicate that the horrors of WWII were caused by excessive group-love and by excessive groupthink : I now realize both are bound intimately together.
The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.
By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.
It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.
But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.
It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.
It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.
But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.
WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.
Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.
In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.
They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.
An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.
Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.
At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....
The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.
By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.
It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.
But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.
It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.
It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.
But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.
WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.
Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.
In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.
They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.
An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.
Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.
At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....
Monday, July 8, 2013
WWII : more troops , longer war, but only 1/3 number of VCs
Canada had almost twice as many troops in WWII as in WWI, and it was a world-wide war that lasted 50% longer than the first war, but despite all this, Canada had less than 1/3 as many VC winners.
It is only given for bravery in face of the enemy, so the fact that combat was far more mechanized in WWII ( ie fought at long distances from the enemy) is often offered up as the excuse.
Dropping bombs from 20,000 ft might seem then to eliminate you from ever receiving a VC in theory --- but not in practise.
Bomber crews actually did get VCs ---- for trying to save fellow crew members high up in the flak-filled skies.
The other view - mine anyway - is that people were less selflessly brave, over all, in WWII than in the earlier war.
The character of virtually all the world's western-influenced population changed - for the worse - after WWI .
But not as a result of WWI , merely as the result of death carrying off the holders of older Victorian views on selflessness, replaced by the young bearers of the up-to-date, modernist , scientific, view of the proper morality:
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Philip Marlowe's mean streets were world wide......
It is only given for bravery in face of the enemy, so the fact that combat was far more mechanized in WWII ( ie fought at long distances from the enemy) is often offered up as the excuse.
Dropping bombs from 20,000 ft might seem then to eliminate you from ever receiving a VC in theory --- but not in practise.
Bomber crews actually did get VCs ---- for trying to save fellow crew members high up in the flak-filled skies.
The other view - mine anyway - is that people were less selflessly brave, over all, in WWII than in the earlier war.
The character of virtually all the world's western-influenced population changed - for the worse - after WWI .
But not as a result of WWI , merely as the result of death carrying off the holders of older Victorian views on selflessness, replaced by the young bearers of the up-to-date, modernist , scientific, view of the proper morality:
"Be quick to defend your own national group to the death (and beyond) - but ignore or despise all others' cries for help."
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Philip Marlowe's mean streets were world wide......
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
God Only Knows why Henry Dawson did what he did - because no one else does ...
Next year will be ten years that I have been at it, trying to figure out why Henry Dawson did what he did and I am still no further ahead.
Consider this :
In late December 1940, Dawson got both some very good news and some very bad news from the doctors.
At age 45, he would be a father for the third time : Hurray !
Albeit his wife was in her forties , was physically handicapped and earns only a small salary.
This matters, because Henry had also just been told he has Myasthenia Gravis, a very serious auto immune disease that in the early 1940s generally killed within four and half years.
However, if he kept shorter hours, cut back on his stressful activities, stopped working around strong chemicals and ate and slept healthier, he might eke it out until better treatments came along.
Instead, Dr Dawson chose to plunge in ever harder into his self-chosen war task: bad chemicals, lots of stress and all.
He was trying desperately to save the lives of "The 4Fs of the 4Fs" : young people needlessly dying of the disease SBE, because they were judged by the powerful to be only a burden in a time of Allied Total War.
Dying because the medicine that could save them (penicillin) was being reserved instead to use as a weapon of war.
If this sounds eerily like a more subtle version of Hitler's infamous T4 Aktion, you won't be far off.
Dawson's tiny little project was a sort of Aktion 4F, a moral counterblast at both the Allies and the Axis.
Now Dawson had a great moral right to do what he did with penicillin (including stealing scarce government-issued penicillin in a time of war !) because he was the first person in history to use it to try and save a life ( actually two : two SBE patients) - penicillin he had grown and processed himself.
This happened before America was at war, but at a time when the nation's medical and scientific leadership was hardening its heart in preparation to be as ruthless as Hitler, when and if Congress ever chose to fight him.
I believe Dawson reacted against this moral hardening of the arteries, seeing it as the absolutely worst way to win the "hearts and minds" battle against Hitler's ideas.
Dawson was cautious, modest and retiring - his High School yearbook would have voted him "The Least Likely to Rebel".
His own field of expertise was miles and miles and miles away from SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis - a then invariably fatal heart disease).
He had never before ventured into making and purifying a brand new unknown drug.
He was regarded as a bit of a cracked pot by his colleagues with regard to his own personal research projects, which tended to limit his ability to draw in people into this Aktion 4F project.
This project of altruism literally killed him in the end - but he was not a religious believer so the basis for his extreme act of alturism is hard to find.
So why did he do it ?
I don't know.
But I do know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
SBE became one of the most curable of fatal diseases, thanks to Dawson's pioneering efforts.
But he did far more than that.
His project forced the Allies to change their War Aims - to stop treating penicillin as a weapon, kept in short supply only for curable Allied frontline troops.
Instead he forced them to seriously mass produce it and to start treating it as something that should be available for all, regardless of race, color or war status.
By late 1944, penicillin had become the ultimate symbol of that highly elusive "good" the Allies had been promising would surely come about , if only all the neutrals of the world got off the fence and helped defeat Hitler.
One explanation on why Dawson did it and how he did it, is that God sometimes picks cracked pots and non-believers ,together with the weak and the foolish, to do big things and confound the Mighty and the Wise.
Dawson seems to fit all four categories.
And certainly the Age of Modernity, the Age of WWII, was the most hubris-bound age ever ; if any age ever needed confounding it was that one.
Dawson and God and penicillin and 4Fs : it just sounds like a Match made in Heaven to me ....
Consider this :
In late December 1940, Dawson got both some very good news and some very bad news from the doctors.
At age 45, he would be a father for the third time : Hurray !
Albeit his wife was in her forties , was physically handicapped and earns only a small salary.
This matters, because Henry had also just been told he has Myasthenia Gravis, a very serious auto immune disease that in the early 1940s generally killed within four and half years.
However, if he kept shorter hours, cut back on his stressful activities, stopped working around strong chemicals and ate and slept healthier, he might eke it out until better treatments came along.
Instead, Dr Dawson chose to plunge in ever harder into his self-chosen war task: bad chemicals, lots of stress and all.
He was trying desperately to save the lives of "The 4Fs of the 4Fs" : young people needlessly dying of the disease SBE, because they were judged by the powerful to be only a burden in a time of Allied Total War.
Dying because the medicine that could save them (penicillin) was being reserved instead to use as a weapon of war.
If this sounds eerily like a more subtle version of Hitler's infamous T4 Aktion, you won't be far off.
Dawson's tiny little project was a sort of Aktion 4F, a moral counterblast at both the Allies and the Axis.
Now Dawson had a great moral right to do what he did with penicillin (including stealing scarce government-issued penicillin in a time of war !) because he was the first person in history to use it to try and save a life ( actually two : two SBE patients) - penicillin he had grown and processed himself.
This happened before America was at war, but at a time when the nation's medical and scientific leadership was hardening its heart in preparation to be as ruthless as Hitler, when and if Congress ever chose to fight him.
I believe Dawson reacted against this moral hardening of the arteries, seeing it as the absolutely worst way to win the "hearts and minds" battle against Hitler's ideas.
Dawson was cautious, modest and retiring - his High School yearbook would have voted him "The Least Likely to Rebel".
His own field of expertise was miles and miles and miles away from SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis - a then invariably fatal heart disease).
He had never before ventured into making and purifying a brand new unknown drug.
He was regarded as a bit of a cracked pot by his colleagues with regard to his own personal research projects, which tended to limit his ability to draw in people into this Aktion 4F project.
This project of altruism literally killed him in the end - but he was not a religious believer so the basis for his extreme act of alturism is hard to find.
So why did he do it ?
I don't know.
But I do know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
SBE became one of the most curable of fatal diseases, thanks to Dawson's pioneering efforts.
But he did far more than that.
His project forced the Allies to change their War Aims - to stop treating penicillin as a weapon, kept in short supply only for curable Allied frontline troops.
Instead he forced them to seriously mass produce it and to start treating it as something that should be available for all, regardless of race, color or war status.
By late 1944, penicillin had become the ultimate symbol of that highly elusive "good" the Allies had been promising would surely come about , if only all the neutrals of the world got off the fence and helped defeat Hitler.
One explanation on why Dawson did it and how he did it, is that God sometimes picks cracked pots and non-believers ,together with the weak and the foolish, to do big things and confound the Mighty and the Wise.
Dawson seems to fit all four categories.
And certainly the Age of Modernity, the Age of WWII, was the most hubris-bound age ever ; if any age ever needed confounding it was that one.
Dawson and God and penicillin and 4Fs : it just sounds like a Match made in Heaven to me ....
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Hitler vs Henry Dawson : why contrast these two scientists ?
War historians are unlikely to ever be happy with a Hollywood movie presenting WWII as "The Battle between Ultimate Evil and Ultimate Good".
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Friday, June 28, 2013
UK made sure others died in WWII, rather than her own citizens
More people died in WII than in WWI, but not every combatant nation of WWII suffered worse (or even as badly) as they had in WWI.
The UK was the first in and last out of WWII, the only nation at war continuously the whole world war.
It was a far more deadly war and lasted for the UK, six years rather than four.
Its population during the last war was slightly larger than it was in WWI.
Yet, surprisingly, only about one third as many people died.
Dividing the total number of deaths (divided by the total number of war years) into the total wartime population , I get a figure for what I call the intensity of war deaths, one that is about one fifth as great for WWII as it was for WWI.
(Producing the percentage of total population who died in the war each year ---- admitably a very crude indice ---indicating one person in 200 died each year of WWI, versus one person in 1000 died per year in WWII.)
Put another way, in WWI the UK experienced a lot more total deaths over a slightly smaller population over only two thirds as many years of war.
Put yet another way, I am saying that 60,000 deaths spread over 10 years of war in a population of 250 million people (USA/Vietnam War) feels much less bad than to have a population of 2.5 million experience 800 deaths over a one week period (Israeli Jews/Six Day War).
The number of dead the UK experienced in head to head clashes between the Germany Army and the British Army in North West Europe for one month in 1940 and again for 11 months in 1944-1945, was very tiny set against the total of people dead as result of WWII.
Yet in a way, it was the key death-toll event of the entire war.
Because defeating the German Army upon German soil was the only way to end WWII quickly and at a minimum loss of life upon all sides.
It took six years for the UK to do to the German Army what it should have done in six weeks in 1939.
With Germany out of the war in 1939, Italy and Japan would never have gone on their quests for world wide conquest.
The French and British empires in combination in 1939 had a far far far far larger manpower pool to draw upon that the Germans so any land army war would have gone to the Allies in the end.
But a vast conscripted infantry/artillery-based army of British and Dominion working class enlisted men, in combination with millions of conscripted darkie soldiers from the colonies, all demanding benefits for having saved the Empire, was totally unacceptable to the British elite.
They wanted a war won by a few big very expensive machines, driven by a few well educated middle class very white British men : bombers, battleships and tanks.
In the event, they got their 'middle class war' and lost the support of their Dominions and Colonies in the process : hoisted on their own high tech petards in the end......
The UK was the first in and last out of WWII, the only nation at war continuously the whole world war.
It was a far more deadly war and lasted for the UK, six years rather than four.
Its population during the last war was slightly larger than it was in WWI.
Yet, surprisingly, only about one third as many people died.
Dividing the total number of deaths (divided by the total number of war years) into the total wartime population , I get a figure for what I call the intensity of war deaths, one that is about one fifth as great for WWII as it was for WWI.
(Producing the percentage of total population who died in the war each year ---- admitably a very crude indice ---indicating one person in 200 died each year of WWI, versus one person in 1000 died per year in WWII.)
Put another way, in WWI the UK experienced a lot more total deaths over a slightly smaller population over only two thirds as many years of war.
Put yet another way, I am saying that 60,000 deaths spread over 10 years of war in a population of 250 million people (USA/Vietnam War) feels much less bad than to have a population of 2.5 million experience 800 deaths over a one week period (Israeli Jews/Six Day War).
The number of dead the UK experienced in head to head clashes between the Germany Army and the British Army in North West Europe for one month in 1940 and again for 11 months in 1944-1945, was very tiny set against the total of people dead as result of WWII.
Yet in a way, it was the key death-toll event of the entire war.
Because defeating the German Army upon German soil was the only way to end WWII quickly and at a minimum loss of life upon all sides.
It took six years for the UK to do to the German Army what it should have done in six weeks in 1939.
With Germany out of the war in 1939, Italy and Japan would never have gone on their quests for world wide conquest.
The French and British empires in combination in 1939 had a far far far far larger manpower pool to draw upon that the Germans so any land army war would have gone to the Allies in the end.
But a vast conscripted infantry/artillery-based army of British and Dominion working class enlisted men, in combination with millions of conscripted darkie soldiers from the colonies, all demanding benefits for having saved the Empire, was totally unacceptable to the British elite.
They wanted a war won by a few big very expensive machines, driven by a few well educated middle class very white British men : bombers, battleships and tanks.
In the event, they got their 'middle class war' and lost the support of their Dominions and Colonies in the process : hoisted on their own high tech petards in the end......
Monday, June 24, 2013
If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...
One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
Sunday, June 16, 2013
WWII : began and ended September 2nd 1939, at 11 pm ....
Is it not a good general rule that Great Powers, once they had finally and formally declared war on another Great Power (as opposed to simply invading and gobbling up various small powers ) do not withdrawn from that fight until they themselves were either defeated or successful ?
Recall how WWII almost never began:
After an extremely hostile reception in the British parliament to his last minute attempts to avoid fulfilling his promise to go to war with whoever invaded Poland, Neville Chamberlain and his cabinet met in a mood of grim determination , abetted by an ominous thunderstorm from Mother Nature.
They finally voted, late on that evening of September 2nd 1939, to send Hitler a blunt ultimatum --- one with a very short response time, after which they would immediately declare war on Germany.
This turned a local war between a Great Power and a small power, one not greatly different from Hitler's smoothly successful earlier invasion of the rump of Czechoslovakia on March 15th 1939, into a full blown global war.
The UK actually declared war on September 3rd, but almost all historians agree that it was this cabinet decision the evening earlier that really launched WWII.
WWII, they say, certainly didn't begin with the Japanese invasion of China in 1931, or the invasion of Eithopia by Italy in 1935.
A world war needs formal war declarations between at least two Great Powers to truly make it so.
A formal war declaration between two fairly equally sized Great Powers ensures that the resulting conflict would be long, fiercely fought and a global fight.
So they see WWII as growing by a few key dates :
In 1939 the French empire joins the British empire in declaring war on the German empire.
In 1940, the Italian empire declares war on the British and French empires.
In 1941, the German empire declares war on the Russian and American empires, and Japan declares war on the American, British and French empires.
The Russian empire declares war on the Japanese empire in the dying moments of WWII, in August 1945.
But I will argue that there was in fact only one key date : September 2nd 1939.
If Great Powers don't seek a compromise peace after formally going to war with another Great Power - and WWI and WWII certainly suggests this to be the case - then WWII began with this formal war declaration of the UK to Germany which had to end with the defeat of one or the other side.
But could we predict which one would win on September 2nd 1939 ?
I say yes : the UK.
In 1939, the UK's global strength was not really its Empire.
Instead it was really anchored by several - distantly remote from Western Europe - clusters of British-oriented but nominally independent Dominions.
In the White Dominions, most of the population in control were fairly recent immigrants from the UK : think of them as the UK abroad rather than as reluctant colonies ever willing to change sides to go with the new winner.
India, for example, might have abandoned Britain if she was really on her uppers.
The white Dominions really being (at least in 1939) extensions of Britain itself, would not give up so readily.
So Germany would first have to defeat all of the British Isles and Eire --- perhaps a fairly do-able task in 1940.
But then they would soon have to take on all of Canada and Newfoundland, filled with fleeing diehards from the UK, if they wanted to feel permanently secure.
(And probably America too, if at some point it seemed Germany might defeat Canada.)
And then South Africa and the nearby White dominated British African colonies.
And then Australia and New Zealand and their mandate territories.
It was as if Napoleon thought he could defeat four (4) different Russias in succession.
Churchill or Britons of his ilk (and there were many of them) if they did lose the UK to Germany, would not just give up.
Instead they would fight a slow delaying rear guard action from Dominion to Dominion confident that Hitler's racist policies would wear out his welcome fairly quickly, no matter how much of the world he held by force of German arms.
But if Hitler had attacked only the French empire and Britain for some reason had remained neutral, would the French overseas territories have fought on and on after the Fall of France?
Not in 1940 , they won't have had.
But those three Dominion clusters, each the size of Western Europe, were the anchors that would have ensured that some British-led coalition would have ultimately defeated Hitler regardless of how luck and his decisions had worked out.
He lost his war the day it began : it just took six years to make it official ....
Recall how WWII almost never began:
They finally voted, late on that evening of September 2nd 1939, to send Hitler a blunt ultimatum --- one with a very short response time, after which they would immediately declare war on Germany.
This turned a local war between a Great Power and a small power, one not greatly different from Hitler's smoothly successful earlier invasion of the rump of Czechoslovakia on March 15th 1939, into a full blown global war.
The UK actually declared war on September 3rd, but almost all historians agree that it was this cabinet decision the evening earlier that really launched WWII.
WWII, they say, certainly didn't begin with the Japanese invasion of China in 1931, or the invasion of Eithopia by Italy in 1935.
A world war needs formal war declarations between at least two Great Powers to truly make it so.
A formal war declaration between two fairly equally sized Great Powers ensures that the resulting conflict would be long, fiercely fought and a global fight.
So they see WWII as growing by a few key dates :
In 1939 the French empire joins the British empire in declaring war on the German empire.
In 1940, the Italian empire declares war on the British and French empires.
In 1941, the German empire declares war on the Russian and American empires, and Japan declares war on the American, British and French empires.
The Russian empire declares war on the Japanese empire in the dying moments of WWII, in August 1945.
But I will argue that there was in fact only one key date : September 2nd 1939.
If Great Powers don't seek a compromise peace after formally going to war with another Great Power - and WWI and WWII certainly suggests this to be the case - then WWII began with this formal war declaration of the UK to Germany which had to end with the defeat of one or the other side.
But could we predict which one would win on September 2nd 1939 ?
I say yes : the UK.
In 1939, the UK's global strength was not really its Empire.
Instead it was really anchored by several - distantly remote from Western Europe - clusters of British-oriented but nominally independent Dominions.
In the White Dominions, most of the population in control were fairly recent immigrants from the UK : think of them as the UK abroad rather than as reluctant colonies ever willing to change sides to go with the new winner.
India, for example, might have abandoned Britain if she was really on her uppers.
The white Dominions really being (at least in 1939) extensions of Britain itself, would not give up so readily.
So Germany would first have to defeat all of the British Isles and Eire --- perhaps a fairly do-able task in 1940.
But then they would soon have to take on all of Canada and Newfoundland, filled with fleeing diehards from the UK, if they wanted to feel permanently secure.
(And probably America too, if at some point it seemed Germany might defeat Canada.)
And then South Africa and the nearby White dominated British African colonies.
And then Australia and New Zealand and their mandate territories.
It was as if Napoleon thought he could defeat four (4) different Russias in succession.
Churchill or Britons of his ilk (and there were many of them) if they did lose the UK to Germany, would not just give up.
Instead they would fight a slow delaying rear guard action from Dominion to Dominion confident that Hitler's racist policies would wear out his welcome fairly quickly, no matter how much of the world he held by force of German arms.
But if Hitler had attacked only the French empire and Britain for some reason had remained neutral, would the French overseas territories have fought on and on after the Fall of France?
Not in 1940 , they won't have had.
But those three Dominion clusters, each the size of Western Europe, were the anchors that would have ensured that some British-led coalition would have ultimately defeated Hitler regardless of how luck and his decisions had worked out.
He lost his war the day it began : it just took six years to make it official ....
Thursday, June 13, 2013
What would the Commensal Story of WWII look like ?
Can the entire story of WWII ever be accurately and exhaustingly told, except from the point of view of the winning Great Powers like the USA, the UK and the USSR ?
Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?
Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?
Or is there a theory that allows anyone (and everyone) to write insightfully about the interactions between the BIG and the small in WWII, interactions that did not ,in fact, all go the way the BIG would have wanted ?
I believe the theory of "involuntary commensality" , the claim that all Life must dine involuntarily at the common table that is Lifeboat Earth, is just that window ....
Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?
Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?
Or is there a theory that allows anyone (and everyone) to write insightfully about the interactions between the BIG and the small in WWII, interactions that did not ,in fact, all go the way the BIG would have wanted ?
I believe the theory of "involuntary commensality" , the claim that all Life must dine involuntarily at the common table that is Lifeboat Earth, is just that window ....
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Must Progress inevitably get mightier and wiser ?
During the truly horrible and nasty 1930s and early 1940s, at the apogee of Reductionist Modernity, this idea was the overall global "meta-ideology".
So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.
Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.
Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.
Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.
Fit, very fit.
Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.
During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.
Was this true ?
At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.
Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !
This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .
Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".
If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.
You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....
So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.
Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.
Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.
Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.
Fit, very fit.
Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.
During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.
Was this true ?
At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.
Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !
This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .
Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".
If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.
You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Islands and WWII : did anything else important happen (yawn) ?
For hundreds of millions of avid newspaper readers during WWII, an atlas was essential to follow the conflict's global course.
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.
(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)
An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.
Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.
It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain and its target on the coastline of the mainland.
So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.
That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.
Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.
(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)
An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.
Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.
Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.
It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain and its target on the coastline of the mainland.
So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.
That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.
Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....
a Commensal history of WWII includes the small and the great, the hubristic and the nimble
To render the sprawling activities of WWII palatable to digestion (because even the most devoted of readers have their limits) the tendency of authors is to show the war as seen through the eyes of the Great Powers and the Great Men.
And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.
A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.
But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.
It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.
It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....
And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.
A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.
But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.
It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.
It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....
Monday, May 27, 2013
Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWII
England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war, not all on their tiny , tiny own.
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.
If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.
Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".
The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.
But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.
Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.
They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.
Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.
But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.
Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.
Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.
The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.
Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.
And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.
Who would have won WWII then ?
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.
If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.
Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".
The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.
But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.
Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.
They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.
Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.
But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.
Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.
Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.
The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.
Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.
And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.
Who would have won WWII then ?
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