Nazis manning 88mm gun might be eugenic but its shells were not - democratically wounding 1A soldier and 4F civilian alike

Deadly group A strep bacteria (GAS) will tolerantly and democratically carry off all sorts of injured and wounded individuals : Aryan, Jewish, 4F ,1A , fit, unfit , warrior or civilian.

It knows and accepts no hierarchy of worthiness but like any incoming artillery shell it kills and maims in perfect equal opportunity randomness.

Remember all this when the true wartime story of penicillin-for-all is made into a typical Hollywood fantasy.

Under Hollywood's blinkered gaze, wartime penicillin would have to have been manufactured by 1A handsome , virile/virulent , WASP military doctors with chiseled chins.

Their moral conflict driving the plot would be this : should they interrupt their vital violent combat work , just to rescue some weedy swarthy 4F civilians on the Home front who are once again revealed as too inept to resist fatal bacterial infections like GAS on their own ?

In reality , it was of course totally all the other way around.

In fact it was weedy 4F stay-at-home unfits who created the wartime penicillin that saved the lives of hunky virile 1As dying helplessly from bacteria-infected wounds from random 88mm shell fragments.

A plot so subversive of the established American literary cultural and political order that Jesus and the Gospel authors could probably write it in their sleep.

But equally so it is a plot that would be far beyond what the most supposedly 'radical' graphic novelist or Indie film director could ever write.

They - to date - have only unconsciously reproduced the traditional authoritarian rejections of democratic debate over values.

They have only unconsciously continued to hype the ageless American monomyth of regenerative violence that by-passes democratic debate ,compromise and tolerance , albeit a monomyth now cloaked in the hippest of counterculture colours...

Moral equivalency : the Nazi Hunger Plan and Allied bombing of civilians

Not enough has been said about how Axis and Allied in WWII were motivated - first and last - by fears of the dysgenic consequences of another WWI style war.

To Germans, WWI was lost by the British blockade starving an undefeatable (militarily) Germany into surrender.

Not that Germany hadn't tried to remain well fed by starving the peoples of the lands it occupied - but clearly, as civilian Germany had still gone hungry and lost the war, they hadn't been nearly rapacious enough.

That wasn't about to happen in WWII  ---- the Hunger Plan against the Slavs and the Holocaust against the Jews were proof of that.

The Allies saw WWI as an event where the fittest sons of the fittest families had disproportionally died in combat while the unfittest stayed well fed and safe at home - safe at home to multiply endlessly.


Conventional human-oriented (infantry and land battle oriented) war was thus not eugenic but dysgenic - killing the fit and preserving the unfit.

A new long range mechanical war directed at the enemy's civilian-operated war factories and their workers was the alternative.

Fit middle class men no longer crawled through the mud - they cooly pushed buttons at the complex command centre of large machines of war : battleships, submarines, bombers, tanks, long range rockets.

They aimed to hit hard and accurate from a long - safe - distance away.

By war's end, tanks could penetrate a half foot of hardened armour from a safe mile away and submarines had torpedoes that could travel 25 miles as could battleship shells.

In the air, bombs were routinely dropped from 25,000 or more feet up and rockets travelled up to 250 miles away to hit cities.

Morally, they were all just stand-off weapons for the squeamish.

Now naval and aerial blockade campaigns could ensure that hundreds of thousands of babies starved slowly to death 2500 remote miles away --- so as not to offend any (diminishing) middle class sensibilities.

German 1A troops were kept fit and fed by starving to death the 4Fs of Eastern Europe.

Britain and America had hoped to never have their 1A troops directly engage 1A Axis troops on German and Japanese home territory.

Killing enough 4F Germans and Japanese by direct civilian bombing and indirect naval blockades should cause the enemy 1A army to surrender first without any need for your own 1A army to be bloodied.

It didn't work in Germany but it sort of did in Japan - after the American A-bomb, in combination with an old-fashioned infantry-led direct land assault by the Russians, tipped the scales.

My stance ?

If you have to defeat an evil-doer by extreme force ( and Hitler, Stalin and Tojo fit that bill) and you have greatly superior population numbers - as the Allies ALWAYS did , the answer is clear.

The means that produces the least deaths among your side and the enemy's side of conscripted soldiers and conscripted civilians is a massive infantry led direct assault on the enemy's home territory on simultaneous multiply fronts.

Britain ,France - even America - were not willing to overwhelm the Axis by large armies - if much/most of the people in those victorious large armies were their colored colonials.

(Let remind you that the largest volunteer army history has ever seen yet was the WWII Indian army.)

If Indian concerns had been addressed and India conscripted at WWII (let alone WWI) levels , the Indian Army might have cowed even Hitler into a negotiated peace rather than be overwhelmingly defeated by 10 million dark Indian infantrymen on German soil.

In WWII, we would rather have lost to fellow white racists than to win by means of a multi-colored armed forces that would give those coloreds the moral means to demand independence or basic human rights.

If the war had to be won by means of people we considered unfit - we'd rather just lose --- the unfits' role in the war were simply to be pliant blockade and bombing victims on the other side.

Luckily , one group of unfits - Dawson's unfits - rejected that role.

Instead these 4Fs repeatly rescued dying 1A soldiers with big needles of cheap, plentiful "Penicillin-for-All" ....

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 ...

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...

Misfittin' : despite the Allies, delivering Penicillin-for-All

Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.

Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.

WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.


And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.

But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.

And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.

We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.

But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?

I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....

Acting Up : even if you can't , sometimes you simply must

This story* is not a conventional adventure story --- where the hero and heroine are always handsome and physically fit.

Fit is important, because doing the right thing always seems to be both physically and emotionally arduous.

But in this story, the villains are villains precisely because they think of themselves as handsome and physically fit.

And based on that slender intellectual reed, they then go on to act like they regard anyone who isn't handsome and fit as having no right to be treated as a full member of the human family.

So our heroes and heroines this time out are not conventionally handsome or physically fit - far far far from it , in spades .

Rather they are pushed to become our reluctant heroes and heroines precisely because they have a lifetime of experience being  seen 'weak' and 'damaged' or 'defective' and can feel deep inside just how damaging the labelling of half of humanity as defective could be.

The bad people in this story advocated and practise Plenticide but didn't see it as any sort of "cide' or murder.

They were merely weeding out and tidying up the very messy natural garden that the last owner of on planet earth ( God) had left behind.

Where in our current post-modern era we seek out variety and regret the loss of biological variety in the disappearing rain forest , this earlier era sought to reduce all the excess variety as clutter - for example , ultimately seeking to replace all natural food with a few synthetic pills !

When The Seven chose to Act Up way back then, they began the shift from that era of errors to our present day...

* : World War Two

the fit warring upon their opponents' "unfit" : WWII in a nutshell

Eugenically speaking, WWII was a Proxy War.

Opposing groups of the high tech 'fit' warred mostly upon their opponent's low tech 'unfit' population.

All in the hopes this would cause their opponents to surrender without much direct (dysgenic) combat between the opposing 'fits'.

So - for example - German civilians on German soil were bombed for six full years before British troops* finally fought a badly faded German Army on German soil,  in the dying moments of WWII.

The wealth needed for the fit to be able to undertake these high tech 'proxy fights' was disproportionally taken from the politically weak on each side.

In the case of Germany it was the Jew ,Slav and Western European in that order of severity.

Great Russia took all resources , below a very low minimum, from its entire population ,below a tiny elite.

In terms of severity : first, above all , the peoples of its westernmost dependencies --- the result of Great Russia's decision to limit the fighting to there.

They did not just go hungry and cold the most - they also died the most - by far.

Then, on the Great Russia home front -- those with low technical skills and the elderly and unwell.

For the Japanese elite, the peoples of the occupied lands (the Chinese always getting it worst) and then the Japanese working class : rural, urban and soldier.

The politically powerful German working class ate well right into 1945 while Jew and Slav slowly starved to death and even Frenchmen went around hungry all the time.

The equally politically powerful working class people of the UK always ate well during WWII - many ate much better than during the best years of the Depression, let alone the worst.

So the people of the British Commonwealth (sic) who ate worse (admittedly not all did and not all the time) were the native darkies of their colonies.

Being far wealthier, the British didn't need to steal as ruthlessly as the desperately inefficient food-producing Germans did.

But when things did get tough (Bengal and in parts of Africa) they proved to be as amoral as the Nazis in spirit,  if not in letter of application.

And when it came to starving Occupied Europe, the British were as unbending as the Germans --- if not more so - as the case of the Greek and Dutch famines can attest.

Lesser known is their deliberate starving of Channel Ports held by the Germans and occupied by tens of thousands of trapped French and Belgian civilians.

Not just food and fuel in short supply was diverted to the fit away from the unfit - so too was medicine and medical care.

The politically weak were subjected to dangerous medical experiments without genuine informed consent.

None of the young healthy doctors who performed these experiments upon them thought to do the experiments upon themselves as some of an earlier generation of doctors had done.

Nor did these healthy 1A doctors go into combat zones.

As I say, eugenically it was a Proxy War designed to ensure that win or lose, the fit survived.

My blog posts have laboured long on just who got and did not get penicillin - I needn't remind faithful readers of just how unfair to the politically weak the whole process was.

In terms of death and suffering those judged unfit died out of all proportion to their percentage of the world's population - the eugenicists won this battle.

But they lost the war -- because none of the fit got at the end of the war what they expected to get at the beginning of the war.

Instead the will of the fit was blunted over and over by the wild and the weak ....

* The number of British Commonwealth army troops who died combat deaths on German soil was a tiny tiny percentage of the total British Commonwealth military and civilian dead.

Evolution of tanks - like the Evolution of Life - is all about compromises and niches

Reality is so varied and changing (in ways we humans will never ever be able to totally control or predict) that Evolution continuously throws up many successful ("fittest") evolving life forms to fill its many and evolving niches.

I was reminded, again,  of this while reading of the terrifying battles around the Vistula River in the winter of 1945 between German Tiger II tanks and Soviet T-34 tanks.

The long gun and excellent optical sight of the Tiger II was so good it could accurately destroy the enemy's main battle tanks from distances of up to 2.5 miles ; something today's best tanks would be hard pressed to match.

High speed shells from a long gun barrel leave in a fast straight line,  thus being both accurate and able to punch through thick armour, but normally both these qualities fall off quickly at increasing distances.

Close up, shorter guns firing slower shells can punch through medium thick armour with sort of acceptably accuracy.

To combat this, the Tiger II had very thick armour all around, particularly in the front, making them hard to destroy at even short distances, but also making them very slow and heavy on the ground.

But on cold hard ground they moved quickly enough and turned about quickly enough and so were able to destroy T-34s at a safe distance and get to any new locations where they were needed to stop break throughs dead.

Then the weather got warmer - now man and tank on both sides had a new misery.

They were warmer ,yes, but now their boots or tank tracks got stuck in the mud.

It proved fatal for the Tiger IIs. Fittest in the older - cold weather - niche - they proved to be unfit for the mud niche.

With the Tiger IIs stuck fast in mud due to their heavy weight, the lighter T-34s nimbly moved in behind then and destroyed them at close range through the Tiger II's thinner rear armour.

In a niche of mud, they were - temporarily - the fittest.

Despite the reality of no one size fits all, modernist armies still dreamed of producing all-arounder tanks, the "fit" for all situations instead of the "fittest for particular situations".

It is relatively easy to produce tanks with big long guns, immense armour, high speed, "low to the ground-ness" and great traction off road.

But as a result they consume lots of fuel and so have short range and a high rate of mechanical breakdowns in rough terrain : heavy and fast means pushing the finite metal strength limits of transmissions, tracks and engines.

Their weight and size makes it hard to haul them back to the rear for safe repair over wartime's normally terrible road conditions and impossible for them to cross small bridges , or be put on planes, many trains or most transporter trucks.

And they really don't like mud : their tracks are made as wide as possible to defeat mud issues given their great weight of armour and gun -- but too wide in the tracks department and their speed and fuel usage suffers.

They are ponderously might yes, but nimbly mite they are not.

And like all machines, they just sit there when out of gas - human soldiers can keep on fighting without food, their bodies wasting down to supply the missing energy.

But tanks without fuel can't waste down their armour to provide fuel and just sit there useless.

Before the Vistula battle actually began, some of the German tanks were moved into position, without using any petroleum fuel, to be used "hull down" as pillboxes, hauled there under a layer of hay by teams of Polish horses.

The mite Polish horses ambled their way to the front lines, eating their fuel along the roadside as they went : slowly and neatly confounding the German mighty....