WWII's the Mighty and the Wise "confounded" by bacteria and bazooka Resistance Movements

It is clear now that WWII's twin defeats of Sulfa drugs and Armoured tanks by the bacterial and bazooka "Resistance Movements" spelt the beginning of the end for prewar Reductionist cum Constructionist Modernity.

(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.

Sir Edward Mellanby , mentor of Dawson's rival  Sir Howard Florey and head of Britain's agenda-setting MRC (Medical Research Council) from 1933 to 1949, famously claimed in the late 1930s that the synthesis of the sulfa drugs meant we could soon close all our infectious hospitals and kiss infection deaths goodbye.

But by 1943, Bacterial Resistance rendered the sulfa drugs almost useless and allowed penicillin's vast family of antibiotics to become the first port of call for the never ending new strains of bacterial death , though we are still racing very hard to produce new antibiotics to match ever new bacterial resistance.

And always will : that is the way of Commensality Modernity , the way of real reality.

The armoured tank, immune to mere infantry weapons and the indirect fire of artillery, was widely proclaimed as the major reason why the Great Powers would always quickly and easily overrun small powers, particularly those small powers without natural barriers to easy tank passage.

But by 1943 the Bazooka Resistance, today represented by the soviet-era RPG 7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade seen in every revolution and insurrection, transformed that certitude.

The light, man-carriable , easily concealed bazooka-style anti-tank weapons ensures that an invading Great Power would now have a very tough time invading and successfully occupying a small power.

Tanks would now have a tough time evading the lethal bazooka --- particularly in rocky hilly mountain valley roads, in muddy swamps and while making their way along narrow forests and jungle trails.

Above all the tank was now incredibly vulnerable to hand-held anti-tank weapons while threading their way through the built-up urban areas found in even the flattest, smallest and barest of small powers.

Reductionist/Constructionist Modernity held that effectively reality was binary, with Particle Physicists at one end and Plasma Particles at the other, and everything else in between being basically useless mouths or useless molecules.

But the medium sized stuff in between had proved unwilling to just go away and had gummed up the works of both the Axis and Allied great powers during WWII, again and again.

I rather doubt that commensal expert and infantry veteran Henry Dawson was truly surprised.....