WWII : High School, with machine guns, writ large

Years and years of the preppie jocks (the somebodies) dropping bombs on the losers, misfits, dorks and nobodies after class in the school yard, while most of the rest of us just looked on, bystanders ...

WWII as a dispute about dining : closed - or open - commensality ?

Between 1931 and 1941, Japan, Germany, Italy and Russia gobbled up a dozen or so small nations while the people in the "universality of human rights" espousing parts of the world (hello America !) sat silently on their hands , bystanders at a schoolyard bullying session.

They said, basically, that Manchuria, Albania, Ethiopia , Czechoslovakia , Poland, Denmark, Belgium et al were not members of their national family and hence not invitees at their dining table.

So the troubles of the Poles and Danes (or American blacks and other national minorities) were of no concern to them.

They espoused exactly the same  "closed"  attitude to the matter of who dines at the common table as did Hitler ,the dark-haired Aryan wannabe , regarding the German citizens who were Jews and Romas.

Jesus practised an open commensality - inviting all humanity to be part of his family and invited all to dine around his common table.

The 'princes of HIS churches' circa 1931 to 1945, by and large did not practise Jesus's open commensality.

They preferred greatly to save their own church buildings and pensions rather than try and save other human lives.

 Or their own souls : for martyrs the cause, these men  definitely were not.

A few others did more, gave their lives to save Jews and others and the moral import of their stories are being told well.

But Henry Dawson also gave up his live to aid all humanity ( advocating "open" commensality for all humanity needing life-saving penicillin) .

His story, along with that of others like Robert Pulvertaft and Jimmy Duhig, has never been told fully and completely in all its moral implications.

"all Life is family : Agape's Manhattan Project" tries to address this omission....

WWII: Bullies and Bystanders vs Innocents and Intervenors

NYC-based Dr Henry Dawson in 1941 was clearly an intervenor with his 'inclusive' penicillin (and may I point out that adult intervenors (as I well know) were often bullied themselves as children).

 SBE patients , such as his patients Charlie and Miss H were clearly the innocents.

NYC-based Dr Foster Kennedy in 1941 was clearly a bully, particularly telling that he would use the excuse of the shortage of staff and resources during an upcoming war as an excuse to finally implement his long held plan to kill all the deformed children.

Shades of Adolf Hitler in an exactly similar setting.

His active verbal supporters at the very top of the world's largest and most influential mental health body, the American Psychiatric Association, were clearly the stone-hearted bystanders a bully needed to get away with his deeds.

In the wider world of WWII, one can easily spot the bullies, the innocents and stone hearted bystanders (aka Neutrals)  as individuals and as (almost) entire nations.

But sadly, no one nation stands out as a whole hearted intervenor.

That noble task is left to a few in all nations, to try and heal the hearts of the stone-hearted majority by rousing their consciences  to the sad and unfair fate of the small and the weak in face of bullies.

Bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and sometimes even people like Churchill and others on the Allied and Neutral side.....

In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science

During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.

Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with   its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.

It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that  Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.

Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.

In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.

Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.

Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.

So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."

Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.

Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.

But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.

By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.

By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.

Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many  opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.

Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.

 But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.

This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).

So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.

If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.

But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....

Bystanders make Bullies : in schoolyards or in World Wars

When Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler first crawled out from under their rocks and set to work, the nations they led were relatively weak and ally-less, particularly compared to the combined 'rest of the world', a world that professed to oppose them root and branch.

But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.


Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.

The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.

In  bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango :  one active bully and many in-active bystanders...