"Nature Made Me Do It" : All mass killings were Mercy Killings in the Modern Era

If you were fully Modern and truly believed that Nature and Darwin and Evolution had revealed the inevitability of the strong replacing the weak and the big the small, then can it ever  be said that you murdered the small and the weak ?

Weren't you simply tugging gently, tenderly, at their ankles, to hasten a merciful end, at a hanging that Mother Nature herself had ordained ?

Shouldn't you be thanked by their families , not despised ?

being Modern means never saying "The Devil Made Me Do It"

And why drag the Devil and the whole question of morality and evil into this : aren't we just talking about speeding up a scientific inevitability ?

Weren't most of the war deaths of the 20th century not military deaths at all but rather medicalized violence : death as therapy and death as mercy killings ?

ALL life is worthy of life as a full citizen or are just SOME judged 'worthy' ?

Nazi Germany - even at the depths of its imminent defeat - treated its full citizens well : recall that POW Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden factory that made food supplements for pregnant mothers at the time of that city's Allied firebombing in February 1945.

But its non full citizens it killed outright or worked to death as starved slaves.

'Life worthy of Life' - 'Life unworthy of Life' are infamous German cum Nazi catchphrases that have come to symbolize THEM, so as to separate US for any shared responsibility for the horrors of  the
eugenic mass murder of WWII.

But when we re-cast those catchphrases as' life worthy or unworthy of life as full citizens' , we become uneasily aware that no society in the early 1940s was free of the sin of treating some of its members as less than fully human.

None .

When Henry Dawson proved this up for the Anglo Allies over their denying of life saving penicillin to young SBE patients deemed useless for the war effort - judged just 'useless mouths' consuming valuable medical resources - he made it clear to many just how close the Nazis and their erstwhile opponents really were, morally......

British surrender of LEROS spoils the smooth panty lines of WWII narratives

WWII began in early September 1939 and ended in early September 1945 : a net package of precisely six years with a seemingly nicely symmetrical 50/50 narrative arc about it.

(Conveniently for that oh so smooth narrative arc, truly significant events usually did occur around each of the seven Septembers.)

So go ahead ---- pick up any book on WWII at random and watch how smoothly the author's narrative is sure to unfold --- all the while bulldozing over any awkward facts in the process !

It will claim, for example , that for the first three years of the war, almost to a day, ie from early September 1939 to early September 1942, the Allies falter and fall back while the Axis advance ever forward.

Indeed, that month does mark the furthermost geographic advances of both Germany and Japan.

But then - almost on a dime, the tide turns - and now all the advances go to the Allies.

 From this moment forth the Axis only retreats , until its final formal defeat three years later, almost to the day.

(Here insert Stalingrad, Guadacanal, the Torch landings and El Alamein for colour illustration).

LEROS is one of the bumps in the panty liner of WWII narratives...

But then factor in the September 8th 1943 abject surrender of a sizeable British force on the island of Leros to the victorious Germans , more than a year later after the tide supposedly 'turned' , a big part of the little known British disaster called The Dodecanese campaign.

Little known today - though much remarked upon at the time - because it foils completely this nice smooth narrative arc and raises too many awkward questions about the whole Allied spin on WWII , as seen in virtually every book ever written on the war.

Seventy five years on, the whole world constantly pats itself on the back for the part its grandparents valiantly played in stopping the horrible horror and total evil of Nazism.

But if this is truly so, why were the Russians irrationally fighting to the death rather than surrender to the Nazis, even when beaten, only two months into their war, while the British were still rationally surrendering upon defeat to the Jerries, more than three years into their war ?

I do believe a lot of interesting and important things happened between 1939 and 1945, but the military battles were not among them.

Rather, WWII's  military actions were often deeply influenced by the results of mental conclusions already made, long in advance.

Made by the elites of the various nations of the world, all gauging each other in terms of the psychic distance between their elite values and the elite values of  any other potentially aggressor nation.

The conclusions reached decided whether that nation actively and determinedly declared war against other nations at war or whether the declaration of war was merely a formality, forced on them from the outside and not followed by any real action.

Or perhaps they decided to remain Neutral. If so, how 'neutral' ? Very friendly neutral ? Neutral Neutral ? or Hostile Neutral ?

In particular, the judged psychic distance between the various nations went into the political and military thinking of all nations as they pondered how readily they might surrender to the enemy , in the face of a likely military defeat.

Would they in the elite then all be lined up and quickly shot , or would they be treated with dignity as officer POWs and as the new passively collaborating administrative and commercial underlings ?

The conclusions reached then now seem startling in our present day eyes.

 The elites of the Western Allies and of the overseas Neutrals simply didn't think in ,the early 1940s, that their values and those of the ordinary German people and elites were all that far apart, deep down.

(The same goes for the elites of the 'colored' world, about the Japanese.

Excepting that the Slavs felt very differently about the Germans ---- as did the Chinese about the Japanese. And vice versa. As a result, most of the casualties of WWII occurred around these two combat zones.)

Back to the peoples of the Western Allies and their comparatively mild dislike of ordinary Germans .

Polls during WWII in Britain and America clearly demonstrate the existence of this view - even among ordinary people - and that it grew in popularity as the war went on. By contrast, Jews became less ,not more, popular as the war went on.)

So the people of the West didn't really want to go to war with the Germans, not merely to defend the interests of some unknown bunch of far off slavic peasants that the Germans were bringing their civilizing campaign upon.

And they didn't fear going into captivity as officer POWs or acting as the collaborating elite of a newly occupied subject nation within the German empire.

So why occur unnecessary military and civilian losses when you are clearly beaten ?

The Nazis were a bit of a different matter. They clearly did go too far, of course, way,way too far in actually acting upon their dislikes.

But even their dislikes were also largely in tune with the other countries' elites at that time.

They didn't like Socialist trade unionists, Modernist artists and intellectuals, Communists, Jews, Gypsy travellers, Homosexuals, Coloreds and those hopelessly deformed from birth --- but then who did - really ?

Most of the world's elite , in the early 1940s, believed as a fundamental of reality, that all Humanity could be scientifically divided into those Nature deemed worthy of full citizenship and those deemed worthy only of lesser citizenship - or worse.

Only a few - like Henry Dawson - among the world's elite, disagreed strongly with that global scientific consensus.

The elites of all the nations of WWII : victims, bullies, bystanders and reluctant intervenors were generally were united in sharing the supposedly scientific values of exclusion.

By contrast, fewer of our (younger) elites still feel so today and the (younger) non-elites among us are far more powerful overall, and most of them tend to favour values of inclusion.

Between the younger 'us' and our older grandparents and great grandparents there is a complete moral and scientific volte face of 180 degrees.

Until we accept that, we are going to keep getting the true history of WWII completely wrong .....

Churchill's bombers burn babies while FDR's bombers deliver penicillin to babies

I have tried awfully hard to find stories of Churchill's bombers delivering bottles of penicillin, rather than bombs of napalm, to the world's babies.

No luck so far.

But newspapers in 1943-1944 were rife with stories of FDR's bombers delivering various tiny bottles of penicillin half way around the world to save babies.

It is usual to emphasis how well the left-leaning FDR government got along with the right-leaning Churchill government but it is also possible to overdo all the censor-approved bonhomie.

Wartime penicillin is a clear example where the two differed wildly, with dire permanent consequences for Britain and the British Tories.

The Tory-dominated Ministry of Supply ,egged on by the likes of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, successfully kept the miracles of penicillin out of the popular British press, so that it might remain below the radar of the German chemists.

The hope was secret penicillin could be a medical-military weapon, a nasty surprise to drop on the Jerries on D-Day when Allied troop casualties quickly returning to the front while Axis wounded festered and died with only the outdated sulfa drugs to heal them.

The cost of the beginnings of an adequate supply of penicillin for British civilian and soldier alike was only one or two of Butcher Harris's endless bomber squadrons, but the MOS successfully throttled back penicillin production expenditures so that only British troop needs could be ( just barely) met.

In America, FDR's new Deal was dying, a victim of the war.

But in its last hurrah, the very New Dealish WPB (War Production Board) set the USA supply requests at a level a thousand times higher than the British levels, despite a population only three times bigger !

Thanks to Henry Dawson and Dante Colitti and Citizen Hearst, an outraged American public, led by Doctor Mom, demanded to know why the American drug companies were not cashing in on those massive 'firm orders' from Uncle Sam.

Henry Dawson's early supporter from the drug industry, John L Smith of Pfizer, took up the public's challenge and soon was producing penicillin at rates many dozens of times higher than the rest of the world combined.

Flush with excess penicillin, America could easily afford to divert some of its bombers off the killing work and towards delivering tiny vials of penicillin to dying children world wide.

Widely reported in the world press, this penicillin diplomacy from America quietly replaced the Pax Britanica with Pax Americana despite the fact that the Brits had held an exclusive on the life-saving balm for more than a dozen years.

Back home in the UK, things got worse for Churchill.

He had been widely expected to win the 1945 election - not the least by his lackluster opponents in the Labour Party , for his efforts in winning the war.

But doubts over Tory fairness in the quality of medical care for rich and for poor, highlighted in a famous Daily Mirror cartoon of a wounded British soldier, silently moved many voters (in an era before 'public' public polling) over to their opponents.

Unfairness of who got or did not get scarce British penicillin ( versus news stories of obvious American abundance), highlighted by newspaper stories of dying British children with SBE being denied the life-saving mold , was an important part of that emerging move away from the Tory-led government.

Penicillin was British-born, damn it all, and Churchill's government had fumbled the ball, giving it away to the Americans and yet denying it to British civilians.

Who gave a hoot - now - about how many European babies Butcher Harris's bombers had burned while flying above a war won on the ground by millions of Ivans ?

Wartime penicillin never cured Churchill's pneumonia - that is a myth.

But its British failure surely killed his electoral prospects, just as its American success helped pull Harry Truman back out of his expected electoral defeat.....

1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

After all, sharing unexamined assumptions is what makes two scientists 'peers' in the first place

Logically, the only thing worth examining is the unexamined assumptions that we all hold in common

The only real test of a scientific hypothesis is to have it reviewed by non-peers , for they will probably not share the underlying 'unexamined assumptions' that form the outer limits of whatever space a potentially new scientific theory can inhabit in a particular discipline.

By its very definition, peer review always fails, must fail, any truly ground-breaking scientific effort.

But having new ideas torn apart by non-peers is difficult in practise because many non-peers will fail to fully understand the context of the subtle internal arguments being made in support of that particular hypothesis.

Perhaps pre-publishing a particularly bold and unorthodox hypothesis to the world wide web and inviting critiques from all and sundry might get an useful blend of non-peers and peers tearing it apart.

But for most academics, the hypothesis in their potential article or monograph is simply too limited in 'newness' to be viewed as controversial by more than their fellow specialists.

This is a long roundabout way of saying that if a hypothesis really deserves a Nobel prize, it better have been first rejected by peer reviewers in all of the most influential journals in that scientific field.

Unfortunately, most Nobels are for normal science,  for works that only bites away at exciting new patches of grass , well inside the unexamined assumptions that form a scientific field's boundaries.

The Modern Age (and its Science) had a particularly strongly hegemonic set of unexamined assumptions to hold it together .

 This was in fact the main reason for the strength and uniformity of the underlying beliefs that united Modernity's many warring ideologies.

As a result, when a few minor and extremely non-charismatic  scientists fundamentally challenged those unexamined assumptions, they were not put on trial and burned at the stake, in a scientific sense.

Instead their views merely caused bemusement and puzzlement among the scientists and the science-following educated laity of the Modern Age.

These minor scientists might not even have been aware of how fundamental their critiques were.

Thus they saw no need to further nail their views dramatically, in a Luther-like fashion, upon the nearest lab wall as some sort of troop-raising manifesto.

One minor scientist however, did unite his intellectual opposition to the Modern Age's unexamined assumptions with his moral objections to the Modern Age's behavior and his impact, perhaps as a result, had world wide and prophetic impact.

His name was Henry Dawson (Martin Henry Dawson).

The conclusions he drew about the microbial small and the weak from his pioneering studies in HGT (and other such marvels) , put steel beneath the velvet of his moral objections as to how the human small and weak were being mis-treated by Modernity's Axis and Allied alike in WWII.

His heart was open, agape, to the sufferings of small but his mind was also open, agape, to the brilliance of the small as well.

And that made all the difference......