The Sixth Extinction and WWII : Jews and Romas not extinct but damned close

We live - for how much longer we will live I do not know - in both a modern plenticidal age and a postmodern neo-plenitude age.

We humans are trying hard as we can to kill off all other lifeforms, killing the golden goose, so we can have this earthly golden egg all to ourselves.

So we are plenticidal : killing off Nature's plenitude, thinking that draining her gene pool is a good thing , just as we used to think draining wetlands was a good thing too.

WWII's planned mass extinctions - and the inordinate fondness for beetles

All I really know about God is that He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles - all 350,000 species of them.

As it happens, so do I.

And I like to think that scientist Henry Dawson also did too.

If so , then he was very much alone.

Dawson's Plenty : penicillin rebukes the plenticidal war

Henry Dawson's call of "wartime penicillin for all" is sort of hard sayings version of the famous Atlantic Charter , if you recall the striking title of that popular series of bible study books.

By contrast, FDR and Churchill's actual Atlantic Charter (the public war aims of the Allies) also promised human rights for all - but only set at some faraway time in an indefinite future.

So their wartime promise was really a variant of a very familiar sort of soft sayings : high flowing but empty political rhetoric that you never intent to fulfill.

Churchill and FDR defended their stance by the specious claim that universal human rights was far too costly luxury in the total war against Hitler.

The Peace of Plenitude ; The War of Plenticide

The post-1945 attempts to kill all Bosnian Moslems, all the Rwandan Tutsi, all of China's rich peasants, all of Cambodia's educated - all in the name of Modernist Science and its hopes of improving the human gene pool by draining it - in fact only worsened the remaining gene pool in evolutionary terms.

All life's plenitude is worthy of life

The scientists of era of Modernity (1870s-1960s) believed that Darwin's evolution would be best served by Man giving Natural Selection a leg up - by Mankind draining the gene pool for humans and non-humans alike.

Cue Auschwitz and Aktion T4 and cue today's ever more rapid extinction of all species other than our own.

Those scientists were dead wrong - it was just bad science.

Pax Plenitudia --- Penicillin for all

Pax Plenitude , Pax Plentitude , Pax Plenitudo , Pax Plenitudia : the peace of plenty.

What a wonderful thought for troubled people to hold tight to during the darkness of WWII .

And what a wonderfully multi-dimensional metaphor !

Plenty of food, plenty of warm fires and warm clothes, plenty of hugs, plenty of peace.

Plenty of wartime penicillin : plenty of penicillin for all those in the world who would otherwise die without it.

And the plentiful peace that could at long last descent on world at vicious war precisely because of denial of human plenitude.

Dawson's Atlantic Charter : penicillin for ALL

The most ringing and the most important word in the famous Atlantic Charter (the avowed war aims under which the Allies fought WWII and the document both the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were based upon) is surprisingly small .

That word is "all"  - a modest , homey stand-in for the big word Universal that is more normally found in such documents.