The other Manhattan Project (1940-1945) was Henry Dawson's ultimately successful effort to "Defend the small, in a Time of the Big".
He sought to defend all of us as equally unique and small individuals.
This, in an age that preferred to see only large reified collectivities.
He had to fight against two billion people and a world that had taught themselves to show group love to their 'own kind' and exhibit group hate for all other humans.
While its impact was ultimately enormous, his four person team was as small as the better known Manhattan Project team was big.
But appropriately so.
Because both the patients he hoped to aid ("The 4Fs of the 4Fs" - young people needlessly dying because they were seen as worthless along the mean corridors of wartime medical science) and the means he hoped to use to save them (invisibly tiny fungus factories) were also very small.
This particular life-saving fungus that he was the first to use to save a life was originally found on a hyssop branch in Sweden .
We might recall that the Bible memorably uses the tiny hyssop to contrast with the enormous cedars of Lebanon, as examples of the breadth and width of God's concerns and love.
Modernity's War (WWII) was all about bigness --- as were the peacetime decades proceeding it.
It was a Time of Cedars and the smaller nations of the world were nothing but hyssop underfoot, trampled upon before the onslaught of German, Russia and Japan (and sometimes America and Britain.)
Dawson was too old (and too physically unfit) to once again to rush to the defence of small nations like Belgium --- as he had in WWI.
But he could at least defend the weakest members of the Allied Nations from efforts of many in the Allied medical and scientific elite to defeat the Nazis by matching the Nazi, tactic by tactic.
WWII was hardly The Good War, it was in fact a war of enormous bad faith on all sides, an all-around bad news war.
But in the story of Dawson's dying effort to aid others weaker than himself, we finally have, coming out of that dreadful conflict, a truly GOOD NEWS STORY.......
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
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....
Thursday, August 8, 2013
"Lawrence J Malone" "Katherine M Malone" "Patricia Malone" "Jean Malone" : whatever happened to 1943's "Penicillin Baby" ?
I often wonder what ever happened to the family of the once briefly world famous "Penicillin Baby", Patricia (Patty) (Pat) Malone, after their fleeting two months of sudden fame from mid August to mid October 1943.
I have had some luck tracing the family backwards, before that time period, but very little luck finding any of them after that date.
First, let me say what I have found after 1943.
The couple Lawrence J (probably John, after his father) Malone and Katherine M Malone had two daughters, Jean born in 1936 and Patricia born in 1941.
(We know this from the 1940 census and the age given for Patricia in late 1943 in all the news stories.)
We know their exact address in 1943 (83-11 34th Avenue) - which matches the same one in the 1940 census. (Today 8311 34th Avenue.)
Their 1943 photo appearances closely matches the ages and occupations given in the 1940 census, given us added comfort.
Now Jean and Patricia are (statistically) more likely than not to live to young adulthood, marry and have children, in the period 1940 to 1965.
In time, Lawrence and Katherine's older relatives would die, as would the couple themselves.
In communities smaller than New York, all this would certainly generate press announcements of engagements, marriages, births, graduations and deaths allowing us to track the family even after the girls married and took up different last names.
But I can find nothing at all on Google's various sources for such information.
All I can find is the Social Security death registration of the mother Katherine M Malone.
Her birth date (1913) and location at time of death, Jackson Heights Queens New York, match the 1940 census.
She was an unpaid homemaker back then.
But in 1960-1961 she became part of the paid workforce and got a Social Security number issued in New York City.
When she died, a few more parts of her life became part of the public domain : her exact birth date (March 27th 1913) and her month of death (March 1994) probably a little before March 27th 1994.
Now the early 1960s were a crucial date for the Social Security System .
After 1962, all deaths reported (not all are reported but doing so gains survivors the death benefits) were put on computer and made public.
Deaths before that (1936-1962) are not public. And after 1961, many people once not covered by Social Security were added in : many of them holding middle class jobs like certain quasi-self -employed professionals.
Lawrence as an insurance adjuster might not have ever fitted the Social Security requirements if he was truly self employed.
But more likely is the possibility he died fairly young or got too sick to work just before 1960-1961, which is why his wife started working and why he was never found on the death index.
(He'd be 103 or 104, if alive today --- so he is probably dead.)
Jean and Patty would be 24 and 19 by 1960 and one or both probably taking expensive post-secondary education, so this might be another reason for their mom to go to work at that time.
But no death notice for Lawrence or for Patty and Jean - at least under their unmarried names : but the girls, at 77 and 72 in 2013 , might still both be alive.
One more thing : if you type in Malone and their Jackson Heights address , 83-11 (8311) 34th Avenue into Google, you get a public database suggesting that two sets of Malones lived in that same small apartment building and used the same telephone number.
(1-718-424-2936)
(When subscribers quit or die, their number get re-assigned.)
One is Lawrence J Malone and Katherine M Malone --- the other is John M Malone aged 77 (in 2013 ? - this isn't clear but it does make John Malone the same age as Jean Malone.)
But as indicated in the last blog, the 1940 census calling her Jean isn't likely to be wrong -- her mother was the informant and the information is recorded in a particularly clear handwriting.
A nephew ? But Lawrence only had a sister . A more distant relative of his father ?
Dead end.
But we have found a little more about Lawrence and his daughters from earlier times.
Lawrence was born and raised in mid Manhattan and his parents were New York born and raised as well.
Perhaps he also worked in Manhattan and only lived in Jackson Heights, then a new middle class residential suburb for the upwardly mobile.
Such as was Lawrence . Very few New Yorkers put the birth announcement of their new children in the august and expensive pages of the New York Times , but he did.
Both girls, un-named, were born in Park East, a private hospital in mid Manhattan.
Jean, July 3rd 1936 and Patricia, July 25th 1941.
Both dates match our other information, as do the names of the parents as reported in Times.
Canny professionals often self-promote themselves subtly by these sort of announcements, if their industry ethics forbid direct advertising.
In 1930 , the census indicates that Lawrence's father John was unemployed doing odd labour jobs and his mother did outside housework but Lawrence had some college education and was a steno at a steamship line.
By 1940, he was an insurance adjuster and making a very good income for his age.
Lets look at the 1915 census to measure how far he had come.
In 1915 he was 6, born 1909 or 1910. His older sister Jennie was 8 and born around 1907.
His father John was a polisher and was born around 1876.
His mother Mary did housekeeping and was a year older than her husband (supposedly).
They lived at 505 West 49th Street in Manhattan.
They have two boarders, women both named Walsh : Margaret born in 1880 a laundress and Catherine born in 1882 unemployed.
Perhaps sisters of Mary (Walsh) Malone ?
By 1930, the family is smaller but still at the same address.
Jennie and Margaret were gone elsewhere. Lawrence's age seems correct but sadly John and Mary and Kath Walsh have ages out a few good years from the 1915 information.
Kath is now working as a cleaner of buildings.
May 1930 was not yet The Great Depression - not in New York and not anywhere - so, except for Lawrence, the family hadn't really done well from the booming 1920s.
With their exact ages so far off in each census - and with very common Irish American names - it isn't really possible to determine when John and Mary died ; there are several good possibilities.
The same for the Walsh women.
A New York based genealogist specializing in Irish families might do more but I may have come to a dead end.
As always, I hope what information I have been able to find , combined with the new interest roused by my book's fascinating story, will enable others to find out more about Patricia Malone --- along with Charles Aronson, Aaron Alston, HH and Eleanor Chaffee Hahnel and all the others in Henry Dawson's penicillin story......
I have had some luck tracing the family backwards, before that time period, but very little luck finding any of them after that date.
First, let me say what I have found after 1943.
The couple Lawrence J (probably John, after his father) Malone and Katherine M Malone had two daughters, Jean born in 1936 and Patricia born in 1941.
(We know this from the 1940 census and the age given for Patricia in late 1943 in all the news stories.)
We know their exact address in 1943 (83-11 34th Avenue) - which matches the same one in the 1940 census. (Today 8311 34th Avenue.)
Their 1943 photo appearances closely matches the ages and occupations given in the 1940 census, given us added comfort.
Now Jean and Patricia are (statistically) more likely than not to live to young adulthood, marry and have children, in the period 1940 to 1965.
In time, Lawrence and Katherine's older relatives would die, as would the couple themselves.
In communities smaller than New York, all this would certainly generate press announcements of engagements, marriages, births, graduations and deaths allowing us to track the family even after the girls married and took up different last names.
But I can find nothing at all on Google's various sources for such information.
All I can find is the Social Security death registration of the mother Katherine M Malone.
Her birth date (1913) and location at time of death, Jackson Heights Queens New York, match the 1940 census.
She was an unpaid homemaker back then.
But in 1960-1961 she became part of the paid workforce and got a Social Security number issued in New York City.
When she died, a few more parts of her life became part of the public domain : her exact birth date (March 27th 1913) and her month of death (March 1994) probably a little before March 27th 1994.
Now the early 1960s were a crucial date for the Social Security System .
After 1962, all deaths reported (not all are reported but doing so gains survivors the death benefits) were put on computer and made public.
Deaths before that (1936-1962) are not public. And after 1961, many people once not covered by Social Security were added in : many of them holding middle class jobs like certain quasi-self -employed professionals.
Lawrence as an insurance adjuster might not have ever fitted the Social Security requirements if he was truly self employed.
But more likely is the possibility he died fairly young or got too sick to work just before 1960-1961, which is why his wife started working and why he was never found on the death index.
(He'd be 103 or 104, if alive today --- so he is probably dead.)
Jean and Patty would be 24 and 19 by 1960 and one or both probably taking expensive post-secondary education, so this might be another reason for their mom to go to work at that time.
But no death notice for Lawrence or for Patty and Jean - at least under their unmarried names : but the girls, at 77 and 72 in 2013 , might still both be alive.
One more thing : if you type in Malone and their Jackson Heights address , 83-11 (8311) 34th Avenue into Google, you get a public database suggesting that two sets of Malones lived in that same small apartment building and used the same telephone number.
(1-718-424-2936)
(When subscribers quit or die, their number get re-assigned.)
One is Lawrence J Malone and Katherine M Malone --- the other is John M Malone aged 77 (in 2013 ? - this isn't clear but it does make John Malone the same age as Jean Malone.)
But as indicated in the last blog, the 1940 census calling her Jean isn't likely to be wrong -- her mother was the informant and the information is recorded in a particularly clear handwriting.
A nephew ? But Lawrence only had a sister . A more distant relative of his father ?
Dead end.
But we have found a little more about Lawrence and his daughters from earlier times.
Lawrence was born and raised in mid Manhattan and his parents were New York born and raised as well.
Perhaps he also worked in Manhattan and only lived in Jackson Heights, then a new middle class residential suburb for the upwardly mobile.
Such as was Lawrence . Very few New Yorkers put the birth announcement of their new children in the august and expensive pages of the New York Times , but he did.
Both girls, un-named, were born in Park East, a private hospital in mid Manhattan.
Jean, July 3rd 1936 and Patricia, July 25th 1941.
Both dates match our other information, as do the names of the parents as reported in Times.
Canny professionals often self-promote themselves subtly by these sort of announcements, if their industry ethics forbid direct advertising.
In 1930 , the census indicates that Lawrence's father John was unemployed doing odd labour jobs and his mother did outside housework but Lawrence had some college education and was a steno at a steamship line.
By 1940, he was an insurance adjuster and making a very good income for his age.
Lets look at the 1915 census to measure how far he had come.
In 1915 he was 6, born 1909 or 1910. His older sister Jennie was 8 and born around 1907.
His father John was a polisher and was born around 1876.
His mother Mary did housekeeping and was a year older than her husband (supposedly).
They lived at 505 West 49th Street in Manhattan.
They have two boarders, women both named Walsh : Margaret born in 1880 a laundress and Catherine born in 1882 unemployed.
Perhaps sisters of Mary (Walsh) Malone ?
By 1930, the family is smaller but still at the same address.
Jennie and Margaret were gone elsewhere. Lawrence's age seems correct but sadly John and Mary and Kath Walsh have ages out a few good years from the 1915 information.
Kath is now working as a cleaner of buildings.
May 1930 was not yet The Great Depression - not in New York and not anywhere - so, except for Lawrence, the family hadn't really done well from the booming 1920s.
With their exact ages so far off in each census - and with very common Irish American names - it isn't really possible to determine when John and Mary died ; there are several good possibilities.
The same for the Walsh women.
A New York based genealogist specializing in Irish families might do more but I may have come to a dead end.
As always, I hope what information I have been able to find , combined with the new interest roused by my book's fascinating story, will enable others to find out more about Patricia Malone --- along with Charles Aronson, Aaron Alston, HH and Eleanor Chaffee Hahnel and all the others in Henry Dawson's penicillin story......
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
"Patricia Malone","Anne Shirley Carter", "Marie Barker" : penicillin heroines, but only for two months and long long ago ...
 |
| Marie Barker, dying, refused penicillin 1943 |
Instead, from mid August 1943 till mid October 1943, their eyes were caught by the unlikely front page pictures (unlikely for newspapers at peace as well as at war ) of very sick young females, ranging from ages of two to their early twenties.
Daughters and granddaughters very much like their own.
All were either being saved from death because they had pried a little penicillin from the hard-faced men in the medical-pharmaceutical establishment --- or were dying because they had failed to move these men.
For two months these young women - some just babies themselves and some new mothers with new babies - were featured almost daily in most of the North American dailies and weeklies, usually with a photo prominent in the story.
It is the female-ness of these pictures, particularly set against the then steady front page diet of butch men with guns, that intrigues me.
The photos feature sick young women surrounded by other women : men are a comparative rarity.
Mothers and nieces comfort daughter and aunt, as in the above photo of Marie Barker. A baby is comforted by a mother (Katherine M Malone), a female nurse, or a female baby doll - as in the case of Patricia Malone.
(Though we do also see photos of her comforted by the doctor (Dante Colitti) and father (Lawrence J Malone) who pushed to get her life saving penicillin.)
Doctor Mom was sending a message : to Congress, to the feckless AMA , NAS and OSRD and above all to the patent-obsessed Pharmaceutical industry.
One pharmaceutical leader, John L Smith, was pushed and prodded by his wife Mae to remember that penicillin, discovered in 1928, could have saved their precious daughter Mary Louise ---- if only some people had got off their fannies and thought about the children.
He responded by pushing his small firm to go all out to produce penicillin in world-saving amounts and by the Spring of the next year , the penicillin famine was well on to its way to being solved.
Patty, Anne and Marie all faded out of the story - their part in forcing men to finally make penicillin - 15 years late - for children was all conveniently underplayed by the men who wrote most subsequent penicillin histories.
But a penicillin history from a woman who was in the front lines of penicillin from its North American beginnings and knew John L Smith well (Gladys Hobby), never let her readers forget that it was those pictures of dying daughters that finally moved the men from killing to life-saving.
If only for a few months ....
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Penicillin Baby Patricia Malone survives !
In earlier posts I had mentioned that "The Penicillin Baby", little two year old Patty Malone, whose fight against a fatal staph disease had gripped all of North America for six weeks between August 12th and September 22nd 1943, had finally died of her disease in mid September 1943.
But perhaps it isn't true.
This "claim" was based on a secondary report on her story, in an official history of the Pulitzer Prize, and from what I could find ( and not find) in newspapers from that time that are on Google when I looked.
(The newspaper and editor who had got the life-saving penicillin for her from a heartless American government had won a Pulitzer for their efforts.)
I usually search about every two months as new newspapers get digitalized and get put on the Net, while other newspapers disappear off the Net.
Today I found two stories - from tiny obscure rural newspapers (actually a good sign - meaning it was wire copy and available to all) with a photo, both from AP.
They showed that Patty was released, fit and well, to her parents Lawrence J and Katherine M Malone on September 22nd after a six week stay at Lutheran hospital in New York.
I say fit and well because the text says so and the image of little Patricia in her cute new bonnet proves it - we also have earlier photos when she was very near death to show the distinct difference.
Emboldened by all this --- and the fact that I now had the mother's middle initial ---- I went back to the 1940 federal census in America to look real hard.
Ironically, I finally had to put less in , rather than more, and I found in 1940 a Lawrence and Katherine Malone at their exact 1943 address (apartment 1c) (83 -11 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Flushing, Queens, New York), the one mentioned in many newspaper stories of the time.
(This mania for disclosing exact full names and exact full addresses was a style of many newspapers back then.)
Age and occupation matched their appearance in the 1943 photos.
(The census showed he had a few years of college, was an insurance adjuster and made a good salary of $3200 in 1940.)
They had a daughter, Jean, born in 1937. Katherine (M) Malone, the stay-at-home mother was the informant, so this had to be accurate - besides the handwritten information of the census taker was extremely neat and readable.
But a telephone number database showed a John M Malone, born about 1939 , living at the 1943 Malone address fairly recently.
If Lawrence's middle name was John, statistically more than moderately likely, then he might well name a son John.
His same telephone number was earlier held by Lawrence J Malone and Katherine M Malone living at that same address !
I tried a search in the US Social Security death registry ( a list of all people who worked for pay and so paid into the system and were alive and working after 1960, when the data started getting put into a computer database.)
I did find a Katherine M Malone whose birth ( March 27 1913) matched the 1940 census information - she died in March 1994 in Jackson Heights.
Lawrence J Malone was born in New York 1910 and was also raised in New York , as was his wife. But the names and dates on record for New York were all for men born much later than that.
So perhaps he died before 1960.
Patricia Malone was born in 1941 (as she was two in late 1943) so if she lived to adulthood and never married she might be a Patricia A Malone, born April 14 1941, who died September 2 2009 in Brooklyn.
A search for a John M Malone on the death index found nothing - he might well still be alive, as could Jean and Patricia - the average birth date of many Americans dying today is some time in the 1920s, not in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
I will push on and search harder, but for now a nice photo of the bonneted baby Patricia, September 22nd 1943, obtained from a small town rural weekly in Texas.
Yes, a New York story, published even in the tiny town of Mexia Texas.
Because this was a Good News Story that every parent and grandparent in North America kept a moist eye on, particularly at the height of all the death and destruction of the Bad News War....
Monday, August 5, 2013
WWII: 2 billion moral decisions
Morally, for Earth's two billion individuals in those years, WWII (1931-1946) was about one thing and one thing only.
It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?
This way of looking at WWII emphasizes that nations were not the only active participants in this conflict, regardless of many academic and popular historians make that claim explicitly or implicitly.
So Spain might have been officially Neutral during WWII , but semi-unofficially many of its men went off to fight with the Axis against the Russian communists while a few others slipped away quietly and volunteered to fight in the Allied armed forces.
Britain was always a combatant on the Allied side, but it too have its divisions of opinion among its citizens.
It had its willing and unwilling conscripts, its eager volunteers and and its turncoat traitors.
It also had a great many citizens ("funk holers") who laid low, kept their mouth shut and who did as little as possible with regard to working in the war economy to shorten the war and thought only of ways to make money and keep safe.
Many of them were quite prepared to make nice with either the British or the German government, depending on who won the war.
I say WWII lasted 15 years .
For me, it really began in Manchuria - attacked in 1931 by Japan while 2 billion other earthlings basically did nothing to stop it.
Its mid-point was the infamous Munich Agreement in late 1938, again a sell-out of a small nation, a sell-out agreement cheered to the walls by 2 billion earthlings.
Even the formal ending of the war didn't stop the deaths.
In 1946, Moldova , a small food-producing part of the USSR, saw many of its farmers semi-deliberately starved to death despite a surplus of food produced.
This was because Moscow took most of Moldova's food to send to Eastern Europe so the Russians could play the role of food-delivering liberators, even if it meant that their own people back home starved.
Fearful of making the large republics like the Ukraine hate Moscow even more for yet another deliberate famine, Stalin chose to pick on a small republic - one he knew couldn't bite back effectively.
Other governments knew of general famine situations throughout the USSR in 1946 but little real noise was made urging Moscow to feed its own first and let America surpluses fed soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.
So Stalin bullied Moldova and again another bully got away with it.
Hirohito, Hitler and Stalin : Bully - Bully - Bully.
Many people said, between 1931 to 1946, that these affairs were just 'schoolyard fights' in distant lands and no concerns of theirs : they chose to be non-interventionalists, chose not to help the smaller party.
But when a High School senior / beefy football star beats up a little girl in the primary grade and chooses to do so in the schoolyard, we should call it for what it really is : a savage case of bullying.
The kids who silently stand around watching an uneven schoolyard 'fight' all grow up one day : and they then stand around silently while Germany beats the hell out of Belgium and Greece et al.
Bystander children become adult bystanders at a whole series of holocausts enacted out in the global schoolyard.....
It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?
This way of looking at WWII emphasizes that nations were not the only active participants in this conflict, regardless of many academic and popular historians make that claim explicitly or implicitly.
So Spain might have been officially Neutral during WWII , but semi-unofficially many of its men went off to fight with the Axis against the Russian communists while a few others slipped away quietly and volunteered to fight in the Allied armed forces.
Britain was always a combatant on the Allied side, but it too have its divisions of opinion among its citizens.
It had its willing and unwilling conscripts, its eager volunteers and and its turncoat traitors.
It also had a great many citizens ("funk holers") who laid low, kept their mouth shut and who did as little as possible with regard to working in the war economy to shorten the war and thought only of ways to make money and keep safe.
Many of them were quite prepared to make nice with either the British or the German government, depending on who won the war.
I say WWII lasted 15 years .
For me, it really began in Manchuria - attacked in 1931 by Japan while 2 billion other earthlings basically did nothing to stop it.
Its mid-point was the infamous Munich Agreement in late 1938, again a sell-out of a small nation, a sell-out agreement cheered to the walls by 2 billion earthlings.
Even the formal ending of the war didn't stop the deaths.
In 1946, Moldova , a small food-producing part of the USSR, saw many of its farmers semi-deliberately starved to death despite a surplus of food produced.
This was because Moscow took most of Moldova's food to send to Eastern Europe so the Russians could play the role of food-delivering liberators, even if it meant that their own people back home starved.
Fearful of making the large republics like the Ukraine hate Moscow even more for yet another deliberate famine, Stalin chose to pick on a small republic - one he knew couldn't bite back effectively.
Other governments knew of general famine situations throughout the USSR in 1946 but little real noise was made urging Moscow to feed its own first and let America surpluses fed soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.
So Stalin bullied Moldova and again another bully got away with it.
Hirohito, Hitler and Stalin : Bully - Bully - Bully.
Many people said, between 1931 to 1946, that these affairs were just 'schoolyard fights' in distant lands and no concerns of theirs : they chose to be non-interventionalists, chose not to help the smaller party.
But when a High School senior / beefy football star beats up a little girl in the primary grade and chooses to do so in the schoolyard, we should call it for what it really is : a savage case of bullying.
The kids who silently stand around watching an uneven schoolyard 'fight' all grow up one day : and they then stand around silently while Germany beats the hell out of Belgium and Greece et al.
Bystander children become adult bystanders at a whole series of holocausts enacted out in the global schoolyard.....
Sunday, August 4, 2013
It's Milton's AGAPE not the Greek AGAPE...
I have been going backwards and forwards in my mind - and in my heart - about the exact spelling (and pronunciation) of my book title.
Agape with a macron (a long flat line as a accent) over the "e" at the end of the word signals the Greek word and meaning : pronounced a-GAP-eh, all slurred together.
A word, used mostly by Christians, to mean an openness to others' needs.
Agape, without the macron, is a word invented by the famous Christian poet John Milton, from the word "gape" : to stare, open- mouthed.
A + gape gave us "agape", to be in the state of open-mouth-ness, in wonder,awe and eagerness.
Pronounced : (soft a) A gape , with a small separation between A and gape.
As I have said in previous blogs, Dr Francis Peabody said that a-GAP-eh ,to be truly effective in helping someone in need , requires our mind as well as our heart.
We must care about an individual, in all their unique individuality, if we are to be effective in caring for that individual's needs.
Dr Henry Dawson had spent a dozen years, from 1927 to 1939, listening - really listening - to the strivings of Life's smallest and weakest beings, the microbes.
So he was in an excellent position, starting in September 1940, to effectively care for some of the wartime world's smallest and weakest human beings.
They were "the 4Fs of the 4Fs" , the many young SBE patients dying needlessly of wartime benign neglect, by direct orders from the top of the Allied medical-scientific establishment.
His heart was open (agape) to the needs of the SBEs, but so were the hearts of many other doctors before him.
But unlike them, his mind was also open (agape) to the solution : medicine made by foul-smelling microbe feces , aka natural penicillin.
So Milton's Agape fits Dawson's efforts more completely than does the Greek Agape' from the New Testament, which also fits, but only partially so.
Similarly, my book's sub-title could refer the Gospel message (Good News).
Or it could merely repeat a cliche from contemporary news-reporting : with newscasters always trying to finish off the mostly grim news of the broadcast by ending with a "brite" or a "Good News Story" : a lighter toned, uplifting story.
One immediately thinks of the Anne Murray song, "A Little Good News", written by Rocco, Black and Bourke.
Its arresting opening referenced "Bryan Gumbel talkin' about the fightin' in Lebanon" --- a totally unexpected something cum hook I am sure immediately caught the ear of every songwriter on the planet.
My book's title and sub-title doesn't preclude someone thinking of them as terms from the New Testament of two thousand years ago , but I wish to say that for me at least, it is a variant of that old eternal message, but dressed in current post-modern garb....
Agape with a macron (a long flat line as a accent) over the "e" at the end of the word signals the Greek word and meaning : pronounced a-GAP-eh, all slurred together.
A word, used mostly by Christians, to mean an openness to others' needs.
Agape, without the macron, is a word invented by the famous Christian poet John Milton, from the word "gape" : to stare, open- mouthed.
A + gape gave us "agape", to be in the state of open-mouth-ness, in wonder,awe and eagerness.
Pronounced : (soft a) A gape , with a small separation between A and gape.
As I have said in previous blogs, Dr Francis Peabody said that a-GAP-eh ,to be truly effective in helping someone in need , requires our mind as well as our heart.
We must care about an individual, in all their unique individuality, if we are to be effective in caring for that individual's needs.
Dr Henry Dawson had spent a dozen years, from 1927 to 1939, listening - really listening - to the strivings of Life's smallest and weakest beings, the microbes.
So he was in an excellent position, starting in September 1940, to effectively care for some of the wartime world's smallest and weakest human beings.
They were "the 4Fs of the 4Fs" , the many young SBE patients dying needlessly of wartime benign neglect, by direct orders from the top of the Allied medical-scientific establishment.
His heart was open (agape) to the needs of the SBEs, but so were the hearts of many other doctors before him.
But unlike them, his mind was also open (agape) to the solution : medicine made by foul-smelling microbe feces , aka natural penicillin.
So Milton's Agape fits Dawson's efforts more completely than does the Greek Agape' from the New Testament, which also fits, but only partially so.
Similarly, my book's sub-title could refer the Gospel message (Good News).
Or it could merely repeat a cliche from contemporary news-reporting : with newscasters always trying to finish off the mostly grim news of the broadcast by ending with a "brite" or a "Good News Story" : a lighter toned, uplifting story.
One immediately thinks of the Anne Murray song, "A Little Good News", written by Rocco, Black and Bourke.
Its arresting opening referenced "Bryan Gumbel talkin' about the fightin' in Lebanon" --- a totally unexpected something cum hook I am sure immediately caught the ear of every songwriter on the planet.
My book's title and sub-title doesn't preclude someone thinking of them as terms from the New Testament of two thousand years ago , but I wish to say that for me at least, it is a variant of that old eternal message, but dressed in current post-modern garb....
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