If small science is beautiful and bountiful then no smaller (or better) example exists then the tiny penicillium factories that produced penicillin when the biggest factories of Man could not

In the Fall of 1940, Dr Henry Dawson set out to embarrass the Allies to actually do something concrete to match their high sounding (but actually empty) Atlantic Charter style rhetoric about protecting the rights of the small in the war against Big Evil.

So he deliberately recruited some very small (and very overlooked) individuals into his "Big Tent Coalition of All the Talents" that came to be the other Manhattan Project.
Dawson specifically went out of his way to go to the bottom, not the top, of the hospital patient pecking order when he asked some young Black and Jewish patients dying of SBE if they wished to volunteer to form his pioneering clinical trial of the world's first systemic antibiotic.

Systemic but not synthetic antibiotic.

For on October 16th 1940, he deliberately chose to snub received scientific opinion and instead inject natural raw penicillin into this pair of nobodies.

Penicillin that was also made by nobodies : some of the smallest, most despised but also most sophisticated chemical scientists in the world : individual penicillium 'fungoid growth' cells.

Each one a complete chemical plant but each also so tiny that they are best seen with electron microscopes.

Millions and ultimately billions of us in the biggest, richest and most sophisticated civilizations have benefitted greatly ever since from these efforts of the small individuals who were so despised and overlooked by the Big back then.

I can't help but feel that that was the ironic point intended by Dr Dawson...

Was Harper willing to pimp out Rachel in Niqab in Riyadh, to hustle arms deal for General Dynamics , while refusing to let her wear Niqab in Quebec City ?

The Economist Magazine says Canada has been revealed to the world as exhibiting an unexpected mean streak in the current election.

This election has indeed been unusual but not because Canada has a new mean streak.

During WWII, Canada, the country of birth of my biographic subject Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had a secret internal plan than "No (Jews) Is Too Many" --- while publicly proclaiming itself as the Peaceable Kingdom.

Infrequently admitted by Canada-boosters, the country ended up with the worst record in the entire world when it came to accepting Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

What is really new is that Canadians are suddenly reversing this hundred and fifty year old policy and being mean in public.

Given that traditionally Canadians have been secretly mean to outsiders all the while being publicly hypocritically proud of their exalted human rights record, Canadians being forthrightly mean in public might even be seen as a moral step forward !

The elevation of a forthright Australian gun-for-hire named Lynton Crosby to run the Canadian Conservative Party's electoral campaign begins then to make sense.

Crosby has orders to re-elect PM Stephen Harper by creating some of his infamous 'dog whistle' wedge issues: in this election, in this country, by suddenly turning the election ballot question onto the mostly ignored but very divisive minor issue over whether women should be allowed to wear Niqabs at government offices.

Harper has always said he'd never put the almighty dollar above defending human rights when it comes to personally hustling massive Canadian weapon sales abroad.

Campaigning in Quebec City, Harper insists he is totally opposed to forcing women to wear Niqabs - a form of face covering most often seen in ultra traditional Moslem countries like Saudi Arabia, where this is hardly the Saudis' worst violation of individual rights - the country executes almost as many people each year as North Korea, China or even America.

Daughters for Dollars

But Harper would hardly be the first world leader (or monarch !) who has been willing to meet the Saudis' strict social customs more than half way, at least while in Riyadh and at least long enough to successfully hustle a few billion more dollars in arms contracts.

I believe Stephen Leacock's once highly popular "Arcadian Adventures among the Idle Rich" may hold the key to the Canadian character.

For Dr Dawson was an young man when this searing attack on Canadian hypocrisy by a professor at his university came out.

Perhaps partially as the result of this famous book, Dawson, born into an atmosphere of traditional Canadian hypocrisy but raised with a pronounced moral conscience, was always particularly sensitive to the contrast between high blown public sentiments and low blown private government inactions.

For example, the very public Atlantic Charter versus the very private reality that all Allied governments sharply restricted volunteer colored recruitment in the Allied invasion armies, even if it meant Hitler had a military advantage as a result.

Combatting (Allied) bystander hypocrisy rather than bully (Axis) meanness was what Dawson chose to focus on in 1940 -1945.

In 1984-1993, I chose to do exactly the same here in Nova Scotia when I found people laughing about an open secret, a powerful politician's serial sex crimes, yet were unwilling to stop him, so more young girls wouldn't assaulted.

Sexual assaults and then the brutal murders of hundreds of women, aboriginal women in particular, is the issue Canada and PM Harper should really be discussing in this election - not a handful of women choosing, of their own free will, to wear niqabs, at a public ceremony in a supposedly free country.....

A bad faith Charter 'written on the water', just off Newfoundland

All of India knew very well the saying that when you make a promise you don't intend ever to keep, you say you 'wrote it on the water'.

Since Winston Churchill had no intention of keeping the promises of self determination found in the Atlantic Charter he had signed with FDR in August 1941, the fact that this Charter was literally 'written on the water' off Argentina Newfoundland was a telling, even poetic, lapse in British spin-doctoring....

'Hitler treats white folks in Europe worse than a bunch of darkies in our overseas colonies' --- Allied world

The nerve of that man !

'There is a time and place for mistreating people ---- but today's Europe is not it - the Atlantic Charter is Britain and America's commitment that Europe will no longer be so mistreated....'

Other than as victims, does a successful WWII book actually NEED women, blacks, Jews, the handicapped, the poor, gays, civilians ?

The Fox News-ization of WWII : history as re-written by talk radio ...

To answer my title's question : of course not.

The most prominent woman leader in WWII - almost the only one - was Eleanor Roosevelt - and her little bit of influence came mostly from her nation-wide newspaper column, not from being inside the corridors of actual decision making.

Ditto goes almost all of the small/weak/unfits/misfits I earlier mentioned.

Sure Jews and gays were plentiful in corridors of power in most Allied nations - but powerful acting as representatives of the Jews and of the gays --- no, no ,no , a thousand times not.

If you want to distort history, satisfy your aging male writer's ego and make lots and lots of money, you can happily focus on the WWII that was all about Modernity and the good old days when male middle class still dominated the lesser breeds and genders.

But 1945 did not just mark the Apogee of Modernity, Big Science and the hegemony of the big Western Powers - it also is taken - by general academic consensus - to be the year that marks the start of the Nadir of Modernity and the rise of our present Postmodern era.

Because, underneath the Boy's Own World of virtually all of today's most popular WWII books , there were an awfully lot of unfits taking FDR's Four Freedoms and the Allied Atlantic Charter very seriously indeed.

Which is to say, a lot more seriously than did the guys who originally wrote them ...

The three types of humanity in the early 1940s --- at least as people 'at the top' saw it

In 1940, those people with all the cultural hegemony and economic power found it intellectually easy to divide the world into just three groups.

Type A (themselves) were the smallest group : male and middle aged (generously if vaguely defined as lying between the immature young adult and the senile/impoverished elderly) and from their culture's dominant (and usually majority) ethnicity & religion and middle class or well educated and physically, mentally and morally 'fit' .

Type C , always a poor and repressed minority (and forming a majority only of history's victims of witch-hunts and scapegoating), were all those who fitted in none of these five categories.

Members of Type B , by far the largest group, fitted in at least one of these five categories and so could share , at times, the feeling that they were some small way part of Type A's in-group --- this is how the tiny Type A group maintained its social hegemony over the vast majority of people outside it.

Ie all whites, no matter how poor and uneducated, were in some sense were usually judged superior to even well educated blacks.

But equally , some in Group B could possess three or four of the five characteristics of the the top group and thus possess considerable social and economic power but because they failed in one or two categories could chose to side, at times , with Type C.

I label these people as "inside agitators".

I have pointed to five of The Seven who led the battle to rescue "Penicillin-for-All" as being "inside agitators" --- because I think their physical handicap heightened their innate sensitivity to the plight of the handicapped in a time of utilitarian Total War.

I hope my definition is broad enough to include societies like Japan where the in-group was not white but still found ways to lord it over the small Japanese minorities , along with Koreans, Chinese et al.

And that it adequately covers societies like the USSR where being from the old middle class society was a bad thing but where the educated new middle class of party bureaucrats (or engineering graduates) from working class families ruled the roost over the poorer less educated working class in practise, if not in official rhetoric.

The Type A people were united world wide in treating Type C people badly - basing their actions upon the popular belief in scientific eugenics as their justification for ignoring age old religious beliefs in the essential equality of humanity.

But various people in the Type A group differed widely in just how badly to mistreat them.

So that WWII was not at all a battle between absolutely opposing philosophies but rather a matter of various sides differing over the degrees of their discrimination against 'the unfit'.

Everyone agreed there were already too many Jewish in their nation's universities and professions.

But America tended to merely limit their numbers by formal or informal quotas while Germany started by firing them all , then denied them any other form of work or education, next forced them to emigrate and finally determined to kill them all in gas chambers.

Similarly Germany and America both disliked blacks but while the Nazis killed them, only some in America killed blacks and then only sometimes.

The rest were content to merely treat them as second class in a vast varieties of ways , sometimes even unconsciously while consciously feeling prejudice free.

FDR's 1941 Four Freedoms speech and the subsequent Atlantic Charter tended to queer this pitch - because those documents did (albeit in vague terms) set the Allies absolutely against both Axis rhetoric and practise and much of the Allies' current practise.

(For example, FDR's Freedom from Want included 'the right to adequate medical care' -  something that Dr Dawson welcomed even as the Anglo-American medical-scientific elite opposed it.)

So now the Allied leadership were pointing to The Four Freedoms as the cause for which they wanted the ordinary people of the world to go off to die to defend - at the same time that they themselves were not practising those high-sounding ideals.

No playwright of fiction could have better designed the conditions to ensure the resulting grand dramatic moral conflict.

Enter now Dr Martin Henry Dawson, stage left , to set that moral conflict into play ...