Thursday, July 3, 2014

Misfits : despite Allies, Penicillin-for-All

Elites physically and mentally fit but morally unfit ....


Morally, WWII was a truly sordid war where in all the world's nations (with just a few sturdy exceptions) only fought the Axis if the Axis attacked them first.

Certainly that was the case of the two biggest neutrals or non-interventionalists, the USSR and the USA ,but it applies to all but the British Commonwealth as well.

And even in the Commonwealth , in places like Eire, Quebec, Afrikaner South Africa, Congress India et al, hundreds of millions were unwilling to fight the Axis.

So it would not at all be true to say that WWII was fought by national leadership elites (the fittest of their nations by definition) who saw before them a stark choice : life-saving penicillin for all ---- or penicillin only for those Aryan enough or rich enough to have a right to it.

Only a handful of misfits saw both sides in that war as being on the wrong side of that stark choice and who then fought all out - morally - to see that victory was re-defined as Penicillin-for-All.

Just four years after the war's end,  the Allied world - led by Britain and America - cheered to the rafters a film (THE THIRD MAN) that defined the ultimate villainy as being the Allies denying lifesaving penicillin to dying former Axis patients from the city of Hitler's youth.

I think Martin Henry Dawson would have quite liked that.....

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

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