World War Two: a global referendum on Modernity

If WWII was a Civil War among earthlings, a global referendum on the value of Modernity taken to its logical extreme, how did the vote go ?

I think an overwhelming majority of the world voted for Modernity.

But many had started having a few small doubts and wanted a few correctives and adjustments.

A victory then, for Modernity.

But DOUBT is the ultimate solvent, 'The Seven Year Itch' of human thought and over time, those tiny doubts grew and grew and are growing still.

Call it a PyrrhicVictory for Modernity...

World War Two : a CIVIL war among Earth's humans

I have said that 75 years on, World War Two and its lead up is looking more and more like an internal family fight between the most modern nations in the world.

 They were united in believing that there were far too many Jewish undergraduates in university but differed over the solution: while many countries supported the idea of informal hidden quotas, only a few nations felt that all current Jewish students should be expelled and even fewer felt that Jewish undergraduates should be taken out and gassed to death.

Substitute Negroes, homosexuals, defective newborns ,morons in mental homes, Polacks and other immigrants and you get a similar pattern.

But I don't really mean it.

I do not really think WWII was basically a war between nations over just how far  to take the logic of Modernity with regards to those judged less worthy of civilized modern life.

Instead, I have found that history reveals that in almost every nation on the planet World War Two generated strong disagreements within its domestic population over how to react to the varing propositions that Hitler,Tojo,Stalin, FDR and Churchill were making as to the reasons for joining their side of the fight.

Many people back then had far more in common with various peoples in many other nations than they did with their own fellow nationals .

WWII created transnational collections of individual consciences (& individual responses) that spanned the globe - from 100% pro-Hitler to 100% anti-Hitler and everything in between.

Today's (and certainly tomorrow's) historians are going to have to start studying the individual responses to the rise of Hitler and let the crude blunt instrument of a nation's overall response to Hitler to languish for a while...

"Triumph of the Wild: World War Two"

World War Two is usually described as the triumph of one kind of human will over another kind of human will .

Victory is said to have come to the Allies because the minds/rationality/willpower of the free scientists of the democracies were much smarter than the fanatically-willed minds of the soldiers and scientists of Germany and Japan.

This despite the fact that almost everyone agrees that the Axis were the far tougher soldiers: scientific willpower trumped military willpower.

But the military staff of all the combatant nations found that their war plans rarely worked anywhere near as well as they were expected  ----the fog of war had never seemed thicker.

Unexpectedly, their plans' biggest failings were usually against the forces of nature rather than against the forces of man:

The constant ability of unexpected bad weather to delay offensives and the power of national harvest failures to push leaders into new, ever more foolish, invasions schemes.

The overwhelming consequences of rugged geography ,and vast distances in general, on logistical efforts.

The perpetual shortages of natural materials and energy (including- unexpectedly for modernists - shortages in human energy !)

The failures of man-made/synthetic substitutes to remedy Nature's shortfalls.

The inaccuracy of workmanlike Newtonian mechanics ,at distances longer than a Nelson broadside , the list goes on and on.

The world's biggest and most modern nations went into World War Two knowing it would be a very tough war - but were united, at least, in believing their only really tough opponents would be groups of other humans.

This is to say, they were all Modernists to the core and hence all students - perhaps unknowingly - of Sir Charles Lyell.

Nature was supposed to have been tamed within reasonable limits and only humans could hold up other humans in their goals.

But few Germans today are willing to rate Stalin's army as being a greater enemy than Russian winter and Russian mud and the sheer Russian expanse.

Even fewer of today's airforce staff officers still believe that German fighters and ack-ack
guns were the prime reason why massive numbers of Allied bombers failed to  permanently knock out any German power plants or oil refineries.

In a world war that ended up being as much being 'against the world' as being 'conducted all over the world', Modernity took a blow it never fully recovered from: "Wild Trumps Will, every time".

Nature bats last... but it bats long and it bats hard....

the coalition of the Un-willing

On the afternoon of September 2st 1939, it seemed as if the global coalition of those nations willing to face down Hitler numbered exactly "zero".

(Poland had no moral choice to make - it was simply invaded.)

But Britain and France still had sizable numbers of their elite willing to listen to Italy's plea for a conference to settle this dispute between neighbours 'honorably' - as was done at earlier ...at Munich.

So World War II was by no means a certainty that afternoon.

Only at 1130 pm that night, during a tremendous thunderstorm, when the British Cabinet voted to go to war with Germany next morning, unless it ceased its war against Poland, did the 'world war' portion of the localized German-Polish war really begin.

As the 'Greatest Generation ever' basks in the glow of praise for doing its bit in 'the Best War ever'/ 'the last Good war' , it is worth recalling the long,long timeline of just when (or even if) each nation on earth decided to join the coalition of the willing against Hitler  - and whether or not they followed these bold words up, by actually sending their citizens into combat.

Some waited the full twelve years from 1933 to 1945 to oppose Herr Hitler (and only verbally at that) and some never did.

The very first combatant nation was Germany , on August 31 1939. The last new combatant was the USSR, going to war against Japan on August 8th 1945.

In between those six years, the world's nations shifted their feet from side to side to side, going from neutrality to supporting one side but remaining neutral, to joining them formally as an ally to changing sides or back again to neutrality and just about everything in between.

Many only joined the war against Hitler in the Spring of 1945, with Germany defeated and in fear they would be denied a seat in the proposed postwar United Nations organization, unless they at least declared war on Hitler before Berlin surrendered.

At any one time, a nation's formal decision about wartime status and its more informal 'leanings' to one side or other (or the intensity of its commitment to its allies) were usually opposed by a good sum of its citizens as 'going too far' or 'not far enough'.

Really 'the coalition of those willing to oppose Hitler' was in the end made of of individuals, not nations.

They joined it one at a time and varied day by day in the intensity of their commitment against Hitler's ideals.

Looking for the opponents to Hitlerism at the level of 'the nation' reveals that all nations on earth were immorally slow to take him on and is a crude measure of the long road to defeating the ideas of Hitler as well as just his military forces.

Individuals both did much,much better than the various nations - and much,much worse...

Does 'Mo goes Po' mean 'MOdernity goes POstal?'

A couple of friends, who know my sense of humour, asked me if "MO goes PO" stood for MOdernity goes POstal.

It does not, although I do think Modernity did go postal between 1939 and 1945 - its just that Modernity could have gone postal for a while and then made a complete recovery.

But it didn't.

So the bigger story is how Modernity plunged, over six years, from its Apogee at the New York World's Fair's visions of the World of Tomorrow all the way down to to its Nadir at Auschwitz.

It never recovered and it was forced to see its era very slowly and very quietly fade away.

(Significantly, the 1939-1940 NY World's Fair was also the time and place for the first ever fan convention for Sci Fi literature - at that time it was the literature that was the most unquestioningly Modern.

I doubt you could say that of most Sci Fi stories, post 1946.)

It is a lot to ask of the six short years from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1945 ; can I make my case it actually happened in that a brief a time period?

I think so - the emotional change inside our hearts happened during the war, even if the actions that followed had to wait for peacetime conditions to be allowed to come forward.

If my project ever get produced as a play,film or musical, those six years will have to get packed into three hours - at the most - compressing the experience of the Mo-to-Po Revolution into an even tighter time experience.

Martin Henry Dawson

I think my 15 scenes plus one afterword will do a good job of compressing those six years into a fulfilling dramatical experience, at least as seen from the point of view of Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team in the lab on Floor G ....

Personal animosities at Columbia Eye Institute pushed Meyer into Dawson's arms on penicillin?

Blepharitis , a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, remains one of the world's most common eye problems.

Much of the time it is caused by staph bacteria and at the start of world war two, staph was one of the few common pathogen bacteria not killed by the various sulfa drugs - the 'antibiotics' of the day.

This was a big problem for the military of all the combatant nations of that war.

They regarded aviation as the alpha and the omega of modern warfare and so gave inordinate attention to the brand new field of "aviation medicine".

One only has to recall the moral panic the Allies fell into on mere rumours that the Germans had discovered the Viagra of aviation - a cortisone that let their pilots fly higher faster longer, well you get the picture.

Meyer had a consultancy with Schering Corp America - an German-owned company - involving ,among other things, attempts to create stable esters of penicillin.

Fears that Schering's work on cortisone was at the behest of the Nazis, ( it was not) rendered Schering totally suspect in the eyes of British and American intelligence circles.

Anyone connected with Schering - like Karl Meyer and his penicillin efforts - went into a little black book of "no-nos".

Aircrews and Blepharitis

An existing, generally intractable, case of blepharitis kept a lot of potential air crews out of the various air forces right at the recruiting office - that was problem A.

Problem B was that a lot of crews seemed to get blepharitis,  either after they had been through training or while out on active service .

This was perhaps due to the strain of operating in the air of five miles up, behind an oxygen mask for hours.

It doesn't directly worsen your vision but it gives you blurry eyes which comes much to the same thing.

It also needlessly worried aircrews, who feared it meant worse things than it did.

Not just pilots or gunners are hit by its effects - engineers, navigation officers and bomb setters all had to look at lots of crucial numbers on lots of dials in very dim light - one pair of blurred eyes at the wrong moment could be terminal for the entire plane and crew.

Karl Meyer ,as a German Jewish emigre, had an easier relationship with Dr Ludwig Von Sallmann, who also was in exile --- from his native Austria because his wive was Jewish.

But even Sallmann only seemed to want to put Meyer's semi-purified penicillin into animals and then didn't publish anything on the results till a few years later (in 1943 - at least 2 years after the first experiments).

Typically of many,many doctors, he published freely on his early work with penicillin only after Baby Patty Malone made penicillin world famous, safe and respectable.

At least Dr Phillips Thygeson did put the crude penicillin into the eyes of 8 patients with chronic blepharitis caused by (sulfa-resistant) staph bacteria, between the late Fall of 1940 and the early Spring of 1941, with some very good results.

But he refused to publish on this success (adding his name to Fleming and Paine et al in England who also refused to publish their spectacular early successes with crude penicillin and eye diseases.)

The history of penicillin might have been much different if these doctors had crowed just a little.

Thygeson finally published on bleparitis and penicillin - in 1945 - noting its key military importance !

I think an oral history interview with Thygeson late in life suggests what happened:
I don't think he could stand Meyer much.

He accused him of being a constant paranoid about his work--- and having a gutteral accent that no student could understand.He said nothing about Sallmann's accent - though Sallmann had arrived in America about 8 years after Meyer.

Now a young student had heard all of these stories, feared dealing with Meyer but found him soft spoken and kind and stuck with him throughout his career long enough to write his  affectionate obit - so opinions clearly differed on Meyer's manner and personality.

Dawson hung in with him for almost 10 years, so he couldn't have been impossible to work with.

In fact, Meyer gradually transferred himself from the eye clinic to the internal medicine department where Dawson worked.

Thygeson chose not to help out Meyer, Dawson or the fate of penicillin by publishing in an area sure to advance penicillin's importance in the eyes of the military-oriented OSRD of Vannevar Bush.

Instead he stuck to publishing on his results with sulfa drugs - these were totally pure, came via the highly conventional route of a commercial drug company - and didn't work and had potential toxic side effects.

But they didn't come from the home brew lab of Karl Meyer and that might have been a big point in their favour...

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo

Pneumococcal capsule,Hyaluronan,Penicillin like electron, proton and neutron to Dawson

I have said that Martin Henry Dawson's roughly 20 year career as a medical scientist can be divided into three parts based on three types of streptococcus bacteria: s pneumococcus, s pyogenes and s viridans.

Another way to look at the three phases is to look at the key substance he was studying in each phase and contrast how our body felt about each of them.

The pneumococcus flourish in the blood stream and in our liquid-oriented parts of our body by wearing a sugar-coated capsule around themselves, to evade the non-adaptive part of our immune system.

But humans also have an adaptive immune system and it can learn to recognize the sugar capsule and kill the bacteria inside it.

To survive, the pneumococcus have learned, in their own counter defense, to make a 100 different capsules (or to wear no capsule at all !). When this in turn doesn't work, they trade the various capsules around by HGT - horizontal gene transfer - the only reason we humans could begin play around with DNA.

So Dawson's pioneering work on DNA is obviously still hot stuff.

In terms of the body's immune system, these sugar capsules are highly anti-genic : the body sees them as the enemy and goes into warp overdrive to deal with them.

Dawson then flipped 180 degrees and dealt with the capsule of the deadly GAS bacteria - a bug that can still kill humans in dozens of different ways.

Their trick is to have a capsule made out of something only animals make - this chemical hyaluronan is used all through the animal body in dozens of quite different applications.

We humans now use it ,in medicine, for dozens of additional uses.

Our body regards it as 100% gen, ie  "us" - the very us-ness of us.

Sometimes however the body in attacking the bacteria inside the hyaluronan capsule, thinks the capsule is also somehow non-human and then goes off attacking parts of the human body that look just like it.

This is called 'molecular mimicry' and it lies behind auto immune diseases like Rheumatic Fever that Dawson works so hard to cure.

Because so many of the diseases we are likely to get today are considered to be auto immune diseases, this also remains hot stuff in the area of medicine and science.

Finally Dawson flipped yet again ,180 degrees ,to take up the cause of penicillin in 1940 when it interested no one.

It is, at best, an okay killer of bacteria - when just viewed in its killing aspects. From the viewpoint of working doctors or pharma executives in 1940, its killing disadvantages far outweighed its moderate killing abilities.

Dawson saw beyond this, to grasp the one thing about penicillin which remains unique about it even today when there have been thousands and thousands of antibiotics tested
for their usefulness in fighting disease.

Some individuals are allergic to penicillin - very very few seriously.

But broadly speaking only some of us are allergic to something , while if it is toxic, it is toxic to all of us.

Penicillin isn't toxic to us - at all . The salt it is wrapped around, chemically speaking, can be toxic if we don't watch our fluid levels, but that is about it.

Our body regards this small molecule as basically invisible - it does not regard it as gen ( part of itself) or antigen (part of a pathogen) nor  even as a potential food - it passes quickly through our body, our liver above all, as invisible and as harmless as water.

Most doctors - Alexander Fleming above all - only saw the fact that penicillin passed quickly through the body as its prime disadvantage.

But Dawson had devoted just 15 years to substances that hung about the body only too well and his mind was 'prepared'  (in the Pasteurique sense of that word) to see the advantages of any substance that our body regarded as neither genic or antigenic or as food.

Penicillin was the neutron of the human immune system and Dawson put that neutron to work......

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo