WWII was a conflict within nations and within INDIVIDUALS ... as well as between nations

War ,to give it a quick definition, is a violent conflict conducted between nations, not between individuals.

But the intensity of commitment with which individuals and groups within any nation fight in that nation's war can vary immensely --- perhaps never more so than during WWII.

(We are not considering the rare case when a citizen is in total non-compliance with their nation's war decisions, by becoming a complete conscientious objector or a traitor.)

The existing WWI paradigm ,within which all existing history on that war has been written to date , never denies that each nation had a somewhat divided mind between 1931-1945 on various war issues.

Still writers accepting of that paradigm tend to focus exclusively on the nation against nation conflict and - I claim ! - seriously distort what was really going on and what was truly fundamental in a 'long history' view.

These writings tend to limit the war's big moments to a military battle between the modern age's various ideologies : liberal capitalist democracies versus race (Japan, Germany,and Italy's fascism) and class based (communist Russia) dictatorships.

There is no denying that for the world's population living inside the modern age bubble seventy five years ago , it was the differences between the various strands of modern thought that so dominated their minds.

But what excuse have we historical-minded authors , living seventy years after that bubble began breaking, to be 'captured' by our protagonists' ways of thinking ?

Historians like to claim lots of time is necessary between historian and event to render the beginnings of an objective assessment of it.

Isn't seventy five years (and more) time enough to look anew at WWII ?

To see it no merely as a Modern war, but in fact the last Modern war, and the beginnings of the post-Modern world ?

If we look again at the three big Modern ideologies : liberal capitalist imperialism, fascist cum racial imperialism and communist imperialism, we could today try to see that what they had in common , as opposed to what divided them.

What they held in common was an exclusivist or imperialist worldview that divided all the world into those deserving and those undeserving of the basic rights of humanness.

Does it really matter now, except in the details, whether or not their 'undeserving' included blacks or Jews or well off peasants ?

A Leningrad communist harshly criticizing another young communist for sharing her ration with her dying grandmother, saying the grandmother can contribute nothing to the struggle against the Nazi siege, but that young girl could and she needed all that food to keep up her strength.

A Nazi plan to kill off all German mentally challenged children in taxpayer-supported institutions so that their hospitals and staff could be used instead to look after moderately wounded soldiers capable of returning to the front.

An Allied medical establishment ( take your pick : America, the UK , Canada or Australia ) callously saying SBE was not 'a war disease' and so wives dying from it must be denied life-saying penicillin, so erring husbands with VD can return to fight on the front-lines.

This modern age utilitarianism and instrumentalism run wild - can you really tell its practitioners apart,  without a label ?

But there was an individual-based counter-reaction against it.

People all over the world between 1931 and 1946 began to internally wrestle with the morality of a exclusivist versus inclusivist worldview.

Admittedly tiny in numbers at first when it came to open rebellion against the Modern worldview, this critique came to centre on the idea that wartime penicillin should be offered to all and any.

We do know it received widespread public support, from August 1943 onwards,  at a time when the polls said that most peoples' hearts were still hardened against treating the Jew or black as fully human .

SBE, a rheumatic heart disease, was primarily a poor person's disease : the people who got it tended to be the poor among the visible minorities and immigrants.

The world's daily press correctly sensed it first.

They sensed the widespread public support for the idea these young patients with SBE should be saved, war or no war ---- number one by making a lot lot lot more penicillin than had been produced during the 15 years to date.

By 1949, the once-radical change was complete and modern exclusivity was being replaced plank by plank by our current post-Modern inclusivity.

So, for example, the  idea that it was right that enemy children should die because members of the Allied population had cut their penicillin for illicit gain was now widely viewed by film-goers as the ultimate of all possible evils,  as indicated by the viewer love of  a film that still ranks in the top ten of all time : "The Third Man" .

If only Henry Dawson was still around in 1949, to see what change in the public morality that he had wrought ....

" Crude is more than 'good enough' ...

... if it can save lives right now ! "

Lifesaving's perpetual understudy , Penicillin, unexpectedly made her long overdue debut in a medical theatre in uptown Manhattan on October 16th 1940 .

Albeit more than a dozen years after the best lifesaver ever known was first discovered.

It all happened when Dr Henry Dawson suddenly broke his understanding with biochemist Karl Meyer that penicillin would not be used systemically (given to save a life), until she had been synthesized or at least very highly refined.

It had been assumed that this happy event would probably occur sometime early in the new university term starting in January 1941.

But it had all changed now.

For Dawson was facing not just one but two young patients dying on his ward of the invariably fatal untreatable disease SBE that he was convinced penicillin could finally cure.

SBE usually hit the poor, immigrants and minorities.

Naturally enough, on the very first day of the new draft, they were judged by the eugenically-minded medical elite as being the 4Fs of the 4Fs,  life unworthy of wasting too much expensive and scarce medical attention upon in a time of war.

Dawson felt passionately different - he felt that saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs in a time of war was the best possible riposte to Hitler and his values : because not a military victory but a moral victory for the Allies was what was really needed to fire the world up to tackle the Nazis with serious energy.

'If crude penicillin can start saving lives now, it is more than refined enough' was Dawson's new mantra , as he introduced this neologism into the medical-chemical vernacular.

To a chemistry-besotted medical fraternity, wedded to ever greater purity and refinement , this deliberate use of the term crude tied together with their main job, lifesaving, was like a red flag.

Crude penicillin for crude patients was their unspoken sentiment.

It didn't make Dawson popular then or now with the medical and chemical communities..... or their historians.

Because it reminds us all, that as Hippocrates looked on in horror, for 15 wasted years the world medical community choose to put refinement before life-saving.

But what ordinary patients thought of Dawson's notions has hardly ever been asked.

I am a patient who has received cheap, abundant , natural , non-synthetic, non-patented, "inclusive" penicillin of the Henry Dawson variety and I am grateful to him : eternally grateful.

I don't think I am alone.

"Hyssop in a time of Cedar" then is a 'patient's eye view' of Henry Dawson's impact on the genesis of wartime penicillin : from exclusive, secret, patented and militarized to inclusive, public, public domain and de-militarized.

Because the knowledge that cheap, abundant penicillin was being made available - now - to dying people of all classes, colours and genders around the world was more than just WWII's equivalent of WWI's promise of a return to "a land fit for heroes" : it was the Word made visible.

It was not just the fact that penicillin , like the sulfa drugs before it, saved lives - that was not enough.

It more in the way news reports revealed that it was carried  literally around the world, by bombers diverted from their normal killing work, during the Total War to end All Wars, to save the lives of dying babies.

This - the promise of returning home to a world 'healthy enough for heroes' - finally seemed an Allied cause worth dying for.

This sentiment was best expressed, not by a British Prime Minister in a barnburner of a open air speech, but by the phrase-makers of an new age : an anonymous copywriter slaving away for a booze baron from somewhere out in the American Mid West.

Over a painting of a severely wounded American GI getting  penicillin in a vividly colourful jungle battlefield, were the evocative words , "Thanks to PENICILLIN - he will come home! "

And thanks too, to the bog-ordinary mold that created this miracle this ad reminded its viewers.

That something ordinarily so small and despised could wrought such miracles - that too put paid to Hitler and Tojo's claim that Might made right and Bigger was always better.

If inclusivity , rather than unitary exclusivity, is the hallmark of our post-modern era, then Henry Dawson's crude penicillin for crude patients was one of the physical first artifacts of postmodernity...