Sometimes I am at one with all those TV detectives whose constant riposte is "I don't believe in coincidences".
Perhaps it all was a big coincidence that the same people who were so insistent that penicillin had first to be made in the big companies' chemical plants before it could begin saving lives, were equally insistent that wartime penicillin be preserved solely for saving the lives of the fittest 1A troops.
But I don't think so.
Just as I don't think it is a coincidence that the people who were perfectly content to use penicillin as made by the humble microbes were equally determined to see that wartime penicillin was distributed to all - particularly to the humble and to Life's 4Fs, the weak and vulnerable.
But don't you dare call these differing opinions on how to make and distribute wartime penicillin just a 'moral' battle for the soul of WWII .
Because it was much scientific as it was moral : almost all these people based their moral beliefs upon their scientific beliefs.
So that being unwilling to go to the aid of small countries unable to fight off the bigger, stronger German military was as much an erroneous science based decision ("Progress sees the bigger best the smaller") as it was an erroneous moral decision....
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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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