This was Henry Dawson's Acid Test : during World War Two, did the treatment of the weak and the strong by the nations that ultimately made up the Allies differ in kind or only in degree from that of the Axis nations?
Any single individual - let alone a single dying individual - could not pose that question across a broad spectrum of issues and expect to force a response.
But in focussing tightly upon the Allies' differential medical treatment of the lightly wounded combat soldier and of his high school pal back home dying of endocarditis, Dawson did manage to hit a sore spot among the Allies --- across America and Britain in particular.
In late 1943 , Henry Dawson was able to make the Allied public realize that , on this issue, their elite leaders differed far less in kind from the "the weak must die so the strong can flourish" philosophy of the Axis that anyone could have comfortably imagined back in 1939.
When the Allied public forced their leaders to alter course and provide penicillin, during wartime, for endocarditis patients, the whole of civilized thought shifted course --- permanently.
No mean response for a persistent little team locked away in a ward, a lab and a doctor's office ......
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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