Zyklon B and Penicillium C : as Auschwitz tries to eradicate one 'Fungoid Growth', Brooklyn's Pfizer bring another to worldwide prominence

Why 'Jewish Penicillin' in the world's largest Jewish city actually is penicillin !

Hitler fiercely believed the world's Jews were all evil agents bent on ceaseless cosmic dissolution, with their chief targets the world's most organic civilizations - above all the Aryan Race.

So when he hurtled the abusive term 'fungoid growths' at the Jews in one of the most famous passages from his autobiography, Mein Kampf, it had an almost literal rather than figurative meaning.

That is because it is indeed the fungus molds who are Nature's prime agents at dissolving organic material.

(Dissolving their tough chemical bonds and thus releasing their building blocks to rejoin the earth's greatest resource cycles involving elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur etc.)

The Nazis and their intellectual fellow travellers around the world were, above all, fixated on maintaining rigid social, ethnic, gender boundaries at a time of great social fluidity.

So it is not at all surprising that proto-Nazi HP Lovecraft saw the world's greatest evils as looking like shapeless, boundary-less, oozing fungal slime.

He (and the Nazis) all failed to see that their hoped-for world of total stability and non-decay/non-renewal would be lifeless in its lack of variety and so fragile that it would be likely to fail to surmount any sudden small change from outside.

So, in Nazi controlled Europe, synthetic Zyklon B gas was used to take the lives of over a million of the Jewish 'fungoid growths'.

But in the largest Jewish city of New York, in those same years, other nature-made fungoid growths were blessing the world with the life-giving gift of penicillin.

Now that's something that is almost poetic in this symmetry .....

Eugenics' biggest failure

By the start of WWII, the Nazis, guided by the best eugenic advice in the world, had unerringly separated the great Germanic civilizations into the wheat and the chaff ---- and by then either forced the chaff into exile or had had them murdered.

And in the seventy five years since, what have these former great civilizations ever produced - besides the cuckoo clock ?

The human ability to accurately predict winners and determine the universally and eternally 'right' answers is very limited.

Be the predictors being yesterday's Himmler or today's hot new geneticist.

For untutored geniuses emerging from the ranks of oppressed minorities are pretty much as common as universities having to baby sit the untalented offspring of first rate geniuses.

What the Nazis had actually exiled or murdered were all the various sorts of Germans who had shown a willingness to stir up the pot, for good or bad.

What was left behind was not just that pot - it was also seventy five million people as inert as that pot.

Luckily their postwar children and grandchildren are all over the map - smart, dumb and everything in between .

Life can resume in the new Germany with the full breath of humanity's wide diversity of beings  and so we might once again see world culture and science enriched by contributions from the Germanic lands ...

Action 4F hooks up with Action T4 : Allied and Axis eugenic ethics 'mate like minks' during WWII ...

Action T4

It seemed clear to the Nazis (and to most Allies) that if the people they viewed as "unfit" weren't going to be useful on the combat front that didn't mean they should be left off scot-free.

They too must help the war efforts in some tangible way.

Perhaps by receiving less food, heat and medicine --- since they couldn't do useful war work or even simply breed more healthy future warriors.

The Nazis quickly parted company with many (but by no means all) Germans , Allied and Neutrals by deciding the unfit could really best help the war  by being murdered --- to free up yet more food and more hospital attention for other "fitter" Aryans.

Action T4 - the secret - official - mass murders of all the unfit ended after a couple of years , under strong if muted protests from the general German public.

(It carried on - unofficially - throughout the war and beyond - as a secretive and unorganized effort supported by wink, wink silence from superiors.)

But this public protest only arose in strength with rumours that the Nazi eugenicists planned to start killing the elderly and the wounded soldiers of non-poor German families --- as well as those of the poorest German families.

This social animus against those unable to fight in combat seems to be universal and eternal.

Action 4F

And almost always, the strongest public anger does not spill over against those who are "fit but not at the front" (those in society with valuable special skills working in "deferred" jobs).

This is because they are society's bosses and able to make life miserable for any who dare to complain publicly.

"So you think your husky young Foreman should be at the Pacific Front do you ?"

 "Well then how about you spending some time in the heat of Guadalcanal , Mr drill press operator !"

This implied threat from the powerful had hidden teeth - most men with deferred valuable skills knew that if enough women or blacks were trained to do their jobs, their deferment would end and they would be called up.

This, and not the general prejudice against women and blacks , was the real (if semi-secret) reason why white male worker protests against hiring women and blacks were so frequent and so violent.

So public anger had to be directed instead against the weakest , poorest and least popular members of society --- those 4Fs who came from poor and or minority groups.

They could be safely attacked without any risk that they, their families or their communities could successfully counterattack.

Most girls , just for instance , made it very clear that they won't be seen dating or flirting with those unfortunate teenager college boys with 4F cards.

Seventy five years later this very public rebuke to vulnerable teenage identities clearly still stings in the memoirs of these now elderly men.

Conscious anger mixed with much unconscious guilt in the minds of Allied society's most powerful who were not at the front in WWII (and who had also frequently evaded serving in combat in WWI as well.)

This is shown by the astonishing eagerness with which the Allied elites made the poorest and the weakest in Allied society (its metaphorical 4Fs) the unwitting subjects in endless dangerous medical experiments - as assayed in Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files .

Or the eagerness with which they denied the poorest lifesaving medicines as a form of brutal eugenic triage.

I hope I am not seen as excusing the Nazis' actions but merely stating a historical consensus that the Nazis got even more brutal against the unfit as the objective and subjective conditions of the war worsened for them .

By objective I mean the evidence that in war years of bad European food harvests, they determined not to lose this war (unlike the first war) on the German home front - and so made others suffer more so that Germans continued to eat well.

(Ordinary Germans ate better in WWII than they had during the 1930s' Depression period - because of a government plan that enabled German soldiers to sent home food they bought openly and freely from other Europeans .

 The Nazis secretly made it work financially for them by in effect creating hugely unfair currency exchange rates.)

By subjective, I mean when it seemed clear to the Nazis in the Fall of 1941 that they might not secure new living space in western USSR , they began killing all of Europe's Jews - not just some of the Jews in parts of  Eastern Europe - as a new war objective they could easily reach, to justify all the German war dead.

I mention all this because we mustn't let the Allies off too lightly in these brutal eugenic sweepstakes.

They afterall invented most of the original eugenic dogma the Nazis picked up and ran with.

And the historical evidence indicates that the Allied eugenic actions got more brutal as the war worsened against them.

If the war had continued to worsen badly against them who can say if their 4F Action horrors might not have rivalled those of the Action 4T ?

Certainly, on the military front, the Allied record displays a despicable eagerness to see that the hapless 4Fs of the occupied lands and of the Axis suffered (by Allied bombings) before the 1As of the Allies did (by directly engaging the German troops on Western European soil).

But that squalid history is a post for another day ....

WWII's war of the 1As upon the world's 4Fs

The Jews in the mind of the  Nazis : not un-natural but rather  hyper-natural

WWII started out , on all sides, with at least this in agreement : in part, it was to be a military conflict fought out exclusively between various groups of physically healthy, literate , law-abiding,  heterosexual, white men.

Which is to say, the military part of the war was to be exclusively between 'civilized men'.

All the rest of us, the vast majority of us : children, women, 4Fs, colored folks of all kinds, queers , cripples, crooks - on and on - were to remain nearly inert and invisible : acted upon rather than actors.

Just part of the neutral (natural world) backdrop to this ongoing human drama happening under the stage lights.

Let us look , for an example, to what the Nazis deliberately chose not to call Jews.

For the Nazis clearly regarded all Jews as un-human,  but not un-natural.

So, the Jews were never referred to as Robots for example - though this was a very hot social meme in the very years the Nazi ideology was finding its feet.

Instead they were consistently referred to as Bacteria.

Curious that.

Because not only are bacteria very much a part of the natural world , they were believed then (as we do today) to be the very founding fathers and mothers of all life - civilized man included !

In fact, a consistent way to belittle any group of humans that you feared but didn't dare to publicly admit that you feared them, was to describe them in terms of being outside the civilized world and part of the natural world.

For robots might not just kill today's humans, but also represent the future form of advanced humanity.

By contrast, bacteria can kill today's humans but represented a supposedly simpler  'natural' past.

This allowed civilized man to have his cake and eat it too : simultaneously describe the weak as both dangerous and yet simple and harmless.

So women, for example, were associated with (and consigned to) the damp, dirty, bodily functions civilized man had reluctantly retained - for now - from their origins in the natural world.

Childbirth, child rearing, washing up , house cleaning : diapers and dishpans and floor mops.

As long as women were kept in the kitchen and washroom or in industrial settings very much like kitchen or washroom, civilized man was safe from them.

As a result, during WWII , women are the only ones photographed tending to the hands-on growing and nurturing of the slimy smelly natural penicillium in small milk bottles.

By contrast, men were the only ones photographed tending the dozens of instrumentation dials remotely governing the actions of the enormous 'deep tank' penicillin machines.

So it was in September 1939 that it seemed that civilized man had all the innings as headlines screamed "German tanks maul Polish horses".

The newspaper world clearly saw the German Aryans as unvaryingly associated with high tech mechanical world of tanks, just as the Polish Slavs were inevitably twinned to the natural world of horses.

Fortunately , the rest of us (together with our (?) brother and sister beings in the natural world) pushed back, resisted and acted-up against the efforts of civilized man to re-make our world .

And by early 1945, Polish horses were hauling German tanks, well and truly run out of the fuel of hubris.....

Hating the handicapped isn't a crime in the Canada of Henry Dawson's birth

When an Ontario mom living a few doors away wrote a letter urging a couple euthanize their autistic grandchild, the general public was outraged.

 But not the police ---- or the academics in this area of the law.

Apparently hating the handicapped is not a hate crime in Canada : but hating Jews, Blacks , Orientals, Catholics or Gays definitely is.

Despite this mile-wide gap in current law, it won't hurt to remind Canadians that Hitler started off by killing the handicapped and only moved onto killing Jews and Gypsies later.

Which is why Henry Dawson was so focused on protecting handicapped individuals, deemed "4Fs of the 4Fs",  from the baneful neglect of Allied governments seemingly intent on matching the Nazis' policies in a muted "me too", step by step ......

Hitler was all about "The Triumph of the WORD" , not of the WILL : rhetoric = results

Triumph of mere WORDS ?

Add Churchill, FDR and Tojo to that sorry mess. All of the leaders of the biggest combatants of WWII felt that the war would be won when their opponents' morale and will was broken - not by good (bad ?) old-fashioned occupation of the opponents' home territory.


By talk, words, spin, PR, propaganda, censorship : psych warfare, not bullet-firing weapons.

But it all didn't work, did it?

FDR and Churchill invested the plurality of their war spending on the bombing of cities but failed to break the will of the Germans as much as Hitler's Blitz failed to break Britain.

Tojo and crew dreamed one decisive naval victory at sea would break the American will and force them to agree to letting Japan have its rightful place in the South East Asian sun.

No such defeat came, but even if it had, it don't have done anything but toughened the American will to defeat Japan - and as that will could have used quite a bit of toughening up, such a victory for Japan would have been very Pyrrhic in the end.

Hitler and the Germany Army assumed a few smashing victories in encircling Russian armies would break the will of the Russians, leading to the overthrow of the government and Russia would fall like a ripe plum into German hands.

Who knows what might have happened had Germany captured Moscow in 1941 ---- but the Panzers never really got there : Russian mud and Russian snow don't have ears or eyes and so ignored all the Nazi news of imminent Russian defeat.

WWII proves physical Reality Bites mere rhetoric

People do respond to bad news (and so morale can be broken) but physical reality does not.

Ultimately it was long distances and bad weather (leading to equipment failure and shortages of everything from food to shells to fuel) that frustrated and defeated most armies and navies in WWII --- not their human opponents.

The WORLD defeated the WORD......

"Race",before DNA, was BLOOD : literally. The hidden subtext behind penicillin's 15 year delay.

BLOOD was destiny, before DNA

The discovery of different blood types in the early 20th century allowed the science of eugenics to 'claim' a scientific basis for denying marriage between people of different colours, because it meant the mixing of their blood.


Their blood - that gooey red stuff - not Genes and not DNA.

"Blood" Eugenics has been re-written out of History

Don't let today's geneticists try and re-write history ---- the laws did not talk about genes or chromosomes ---- they said blood and they meant it.

In WWII, the great American Red Cross, won't let black blood pollute the lily pure blood of white folk even in transfusions to save a life.

No talk from the Red Cross of genes or DNA ---- blood.

The thought of sticking impure mold slime juice into white people's bloodstreams so sickened almost all middle class doctors between 1928 and what - 2028 ? , that they'd rather let their patient die than give them life-saving natural penicillin.

Don't ever forget the 6 million the Nazis killed of the Jews - or the 30 million dead from other groups as well - but give a thought to the Holocaust of people who might have lived out normal lives, if only hundreds of thousands of doctors had done with impure, dirty, crude, natural penicillin what Doctors Martin Henry Dawson and James Duhig did with it : save lives.

Penicillin didn't really start saving lives until 15 years after it was first discovered ---- using the same primitive level of technology in 1943 as was rejected in 1928 : what changed wasn't the technology but the moral character of the doctors involved : from 9-5 benchwarmer doctors and racist eugenic doctors to highly moral, driven, humanists....

Republicans: ABORTING the 47%, before they are born, will greatly reduce the federal deficit

ABORT the 47% ???

Eugenicists , such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, believe in putting all their eggs and sperm in 53% of the baskets , writing off (permanently) those who are down today (but who might be up again tomorrow).


But tomorrow, some of the surviving 53% might also be down  and hence would also be written off,  in ever new rounds of 'tough love'.

Regarding 'the down and out' as permanently down is like a circular firing squad

In this numbers game, after a series of round of recessions and booms,  very few people would be left in America, period - either to pay federal taxes or simply to breath free.

If Hitler had won the war and the world, the Nazis would have had round after round of purification trials, till almost nobody would be left alive - sort of like the Russian Politburo under Stalin or what happened in the last days of the French Revolution.

Purity and perfection tests never end, never are satisfied.

Ditto for Romney and Ryan who, unknowingly, are both advocates of seeing the world through the unvarying spectacles of the K-selecting eugenicist.

The world, to the K-selecting eugenicist, is simple, predictable and static.

In their view of world ecology, the whole world is one big niche, yesterday-today-tomorrow , and their job is to find the beings that best fill that permanent niche and discard the rest.

Commensalists, such as myself, feel differently : call us r-selecting types.

We don't believe in putting our eggs and sperm in one basket.

We see the world as dynamic and unpredictable, always changing.

See it filled with many constantly changing niches that are only partially and temporally filled by many different types of beings: we welcome diversity and feel it to be the best protection possible against tomorrow's unexpected massive changes.

We are not at all surprised to learn that some "pure-blooded" aboriginal tribes were almost totally wiped out by something like childhood measles, with the only survivors being a few "half-breeds", the children of tribe members who married Europeans with built-in resistance to measles.

We prefer to think of them as displaying hybrid resilience, not half-breed decadence, and we think the hard scientific evidence to prove it is on OUR side.

Romney's soaring political rhetoric sounds so good but it is based on outmoded, incorrect, science and when it collides with physical reality, it will always crash and burn....

Newspapers report Global Warming like they did the Holocaust : urge caution, await further confirmation

We didn't report the LAST holocaust either

If you want to be a bystander at a new Holocaust (if you want to be be newspaper editor), there is no need to stretch yourself to penning anything like truly original thoughts.

 Why not just cut and past what past editors at your paper wrote at the first discovery of an intact Nazi death camp , like the infamous Lubin-Majdanek back in the summer of 1944 ?

As today with climate change, most editors then studiously ignored the reports of dozens of senior western reporters.

In this case, the reports of those who personally visited this Soviet-liberated hell-horror in the summer of 1944.

"Let us not jump to conclusions and hasty actions."  "Let us  seek further and further and further confirmation." "We need more - yet more - and more - and more eye witness reports ." "We need more and documented proof."

 Rather like playing out to the bell, in a game of sport, when your team is ahead.

On and on it went - to the end of the war and beyond.

Some still deny, still await further definitive proof, more documents, still seek 110% total certainty.

Sound familiar ?

Delay, delay, delay ; deny, deny, deny.

No wonder  so many Jews ,then and now, felt that the Allies' unspoken wish was that the Nazis would do their dirty work for them (if only the newspaper editors could be relied upon to stall the story getting wide - and angry - coverage, until it was far far too late.)

And we know how well the press did do its (non) job.

Fortunately, none of those publishers, editors or reporters has been allowed to sleep easy in their graves on this one.

Thousands of otherwise fine people are remembered only today for "Blowing the Big One" .

No "ongoing news peg" has been so thoroughly studied and dissected from all angles, day by day, in all papers, in all countries as has the non-reporting of the Holocaust, 1939-1945.

A thousand book-length theses have been written on it, country by country, newspaper by newspaper - all the guilty named and dismembered.

About a dozen new theses are written every year on the subject - and probably will be till the end of time.

Or perhaps not.

Because there is all the new non-reporting, the new skeptical shoulder-shrugging, lip-curling in denial, the new could careless-ness, the new un-reporting of a new Holocaust.

This time the non-reported-seriously story is how all humanity is sleep-walking itself to its own globe-sized crematorium .

And it will become a New Generation's ready thesis material.

Time-transport the Terrence Corcorans of this world back to 1939-1945 and watch them counsel delay and inaction..

All of the Terrence Corcorans of the world will be dead by then, but haste not to erect monuments to their undying honor : they will be remembered - yes, fulsomely - but in disgust and horror.

Just as their fore bearers of 1939-1945 are today.

I personally do not doubt that if Terrence had been an editor back in 1939-1945, he would have counselled " much more detailed research and no hasty calls for action".

This, despite the news about Majdanek merely confirming five solid years of  earlier reports of Nazi mass killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

 He just seems to be that type of guy. Now he will deny this,  as it is de rigeur to support the Jews today among his type of political  thinkers.

But based on how he is not covering the Second Holocaust, why should anyone believe his claims about how he would have covered the First Holocaust ?

Poetic justice then, his final fate at the hands of the historians : their wheels may grind exceedingly slow, but they grind exceedingly fine and his actions during The Second Holocaust will be caught between them forever and ever.

And may I add, in my old-fashioned Catholic way : Amen .....