In the context of WWII's values (on both sides) , the reality* of wartime Penicillin-for-All truly was a miracle - a moral miracle.
Correspondingly, it really is no surprise that this miracle could only have been conceived by a bunch of 'misfits' doing a moral end-run around the 'normal' elite of America and Britain.
For scientifically (sic) dividing the world into the healthy and fit versus the misfits and unfits was simply the normal way of thinking, in the era of modernity, for almost anyone with an education.
Luckily - and incidentally decisively refuting the idea of the worthlessness of the 'abnormal' - a few people outside the blessed circle of normalcy could see inside it and see its flaws.
They then laboured to successfully expose them.
With the acceptance of the reality of wartime Penicillin-for-All (marked above all by the critical and popular success of 1949's The Third Man and by the 1945 defeat of the anti-penicillin-for-all British Conservatives) our own era of post-modernity and its privileging of diversity and variety began ...
* The Atlantic Charter talked the same talk of Penicillin-for-All but that's all it was - just talk - the various Allies on various issues had absolutely no intentions of taking it seriously - during or even after the war.
That the moral concept of Penicillin-for All was put into practise during a total war in 1943-1944 truly is astounding - spelling the death knell of Modernity's values even before the revelations of Auschwitz in 1945-1946 ....
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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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