Allies reluctant to help the small and weak - even more reluctant to let them help

Dawson offered 'hope for all' --- with 'help from all'

The WASP patricians (FDR and Churchill among many) running the Allied show during WWII could find it embarrassingly hard at times to bend down to help small and weak peoples in desperate need.
But at least this wartime task fitted in with their peacetime traditional notions of patrician obligation to extend charity to others.

What they and their ilk couldn't accept at all was the truly radical idea of accepting charity offers from the weak and the small designed to help them, the rich powerful leaders of rich powerful nations, not to lose the war against the Axis.

So they'd repeatedly indicated they would rather lose the war to fellow white man (Hitler) than win it with masses of darkie infantry troops.

'Share the wealth' with the small via a meagre trickle down, was always much more to their taste than to fully share responsibilities (and power) with the small.

At first glance, Dr Martin Henry Dawson's wartime Manhattan-based project to try and save 'the least of these' in medical priority lists, 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' (the young patients dying from SBE) seemed to fit in well with the patricians' notions of charity to the weak and small.

This despite the fact that it involved saving a category of patients that the patricians of the medical elite had already decided would be among the first to die by 'benign neglect', as they began triaging the priorities in the Allied war medicine effort.

But Dawson also totally rejected the medical consensus to wait for a medicine made by the white man, even if it only came after the war, rather than use medicine made by Nature's 'darkies of the darkies', the tiny microbes.

He gladly turned to them instead and these small and weak beings successfully made the medicine that saved both the small and weak in wartime and also the healthiest, wealthiest and most powerful among us in peacetime : natural penicillin.

Eighty five years later, we're still waiting for White Man's artificial penicillin and the little darkie bugs are still making natural penicillin and all the other beta lactam antibiotics that form the bulk of our defences against fatal infectious diseases.

If we had instead waiting for the WASPs to get their act together, most of us would have died on infections by now....

"Save the Poles, Save the Poles !!"

In early 1940, German propaganda films about their brutal invasion of Poland were still freely making the rounds of the cinemas of Neutral America.

Poet W.H. Auden, an Englishman Overseas at a time his home was at war, had ventured in one New York movie theatre to see the blond beast close up and personal.

But what really struck him was not the film itself but how the audience - mostly German-Americans - spontaneously began shouting out "Kill the Poles, Kill the Poles !!".

What might have been truly remarkable though would have been to hear ordinary Americans (fore-bearers from any country of origin) spontaneously shout out "Save the Poles, Save the Poles !!".

This was because forty years into the new Century, Victorian notions of charity, sympathy, empathy, chivalry and gallantry were pretty well gone, save only for employing vicariously at fictional films in the cinema.

In 1940 America, cheering the fictional underdog was alright ; fighting overseas to save real life underdogs was decidedly not.

Walter Mitty, I think it is only fair to say, was an avid Isolationist in his public politics, a brave Interventionist only in his wildest daydreams....

WWII's clash of arms ended in 1945 but clash of its ideals continues

In September 1939, Britain (and France) did reluctantly go to war against Germany when it invaded Poland --- but hardly to protect this smaller, weaker nation from being being swallowed up by a bigger neighbour.

They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.

Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.
Traded then away without ever consulting their governments, let alone their populations.

The spirit of charity to weaker strangers (regardless of their economic or political value to the charity-giver) certainly did not animate any government during WWII.

The clash of arms of WWII did indeed happen between nations and as such, has been examined past the point of exhaustion by too many authors.

Examined but without however providing an unifying explanation to account for WWII's global indifference towards the lives of weaker strangers displayed by all three sides - Axis, Allies and Neutrals.

So to examine WWII's clash of ideals (because this disregard for the lives of weaker strangers was never universal at the individual level) we need to look well before and after 1945 and get down to the level of individuals .

Down right to the micro level , to examine over time the changing and differing opinions within families and between spouses.

For why was it so that a majority in every nation on earth in those years was so self confident that their indifference to the fate of weak strangers was scientifically (and hence morally) justified ?

I think we need to seek the origins for the universally brutal nature of WWII in the 1920s' changing attitudes towards the idea of charity, as displayed first at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and hundreds of former 'charity' hospitals like it all over the world.

It has long been noted (and then ignored) that during the Era of Modernity the leading explanations for how reality worked were biological and even medical --- rather than theological, philosophical or based upon the hard sciences of physics and chemistry.

Social Darwinism is thus mis-named : it really is Medical Darwinism.

For it was the medical examinations conducted during national universal conscription selection processes that provided the data for so many peacetime, non-military, social decisions.

So medicine did not sit on the sidelines on WWII , merely patching up the wounded ---- then current medical value systems began WWII's clash of ideals and only a change in today's medical value systems can finally end it.....

WWII : excessive group-love led to excessive groupthink

In my previous postings over the past few years, I have tried - separately - to indicate that the horrors of WWII were caused by excessive group-love and by excessive groupthink : I now realize both are bound intimately together.

The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.

By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.

It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.

But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.

It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.

It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.

But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.

WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.

Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.

In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.

They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.

An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.

Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.

At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....