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.

Kyoto Protocol and Atlantic Charter : all smiles on outside , all self interest inside

As a moderately well known (and formerly very active) Green politician and activist , it must seem very odd that I have seemingly suddenly turned my back on the party and the movement.

All to devote myself instead to a book on some obscure events from seventy five years ago during WWII.

But I disagree.

I see lessons for us all today from those events so long ago, as the Anglo-American "special relationship" faces its toughest ever crisis : human climate change.

Atlantic Canada : harmlessly old-fashioned to Americans and Britons alike

Atlantic Canada has always seemed harmlessly old fashionedly American to Americans and harmlessly old fashionedly British to the British.

Useful that , in times of war : because as a result, Atlantic Canadians have always been trusted as go-between liaisons linking these two often-sparring partners.

Dawson vs Florey : Plentifier vs Plenticidalist : postmodernity vs modernity

Modernity hated ambiguity and mystery : there always had to be only one correct "clearcut" answer --- not a diversity or variety of maybes, sometimes and sort-ofs.

A clearcut binary division between the right answer or the wrong answer, the right method or the wrong method, the normal individual and family or the deviant individual and family.

Not unexpectedly then, Modernity also wanted a small, clean, clear, pure, gene pool.

And Modernity's eugenic-dominated Science was glad to help.

Plenticidal Modernity's pruning hook unleashed against Victorian architecture

Well before the Jewish Holocaust, Plenticidal Modernity was at work busy eliminating all the "useless mouths" of exuberant Victorian architecture : the end result being the bare grey concrete monstrosities of  The International Style , that Auschwitz of Architecture.

The Victorian Era was also the era of the Evangelical Majority and it is very tempting to see the Evangelical belief in the worth of all the varieties of humankind echoed in their highly eclectic building style.

Pax Penicillia and Martin Henry Dawson's "Neo-Plenitude"

The ever increasing use of the term "Neo-" since 1945 suggests that today we differ greatly from our grandparents in no longer holding fast to their Faith ---- a faith in ever-onward progress.

Today we often prefer a self-conscious circling back to older ideas (usually meaning "anything other than modernist" ideas) , rather than constantly seeking out ever newer ideas.

But because of our awareness that those older ideas have been very heavily modified by the weight of history upon them since they were first articulated, we prefer to prefix them with Neo- .

After Britain sues for an Armistice , France, standing alone against Hitler, seals its "special relationship" with America at St Pierre et Miquelon

In May 1940, Germany , reverting to its original invasion route,  has totally failed to break through the French lines and has subsequently suffered heavy losses.

A relatively unknown French general is now effectively in charge of the country,  after he so successfully rallied the badly commanded French troops, in heat of battle, to conduct a fiery take-no-prisoner defence of every inch of French soil.

In June, Germany successfully invades and occupied most of the English Home Counties , from Portsmouth to Watford to Clacton on Sea and now the Lord Halifax led Conservative government has sued for peace.

The price of that peace is that Britain has agreed to become Neutral .

If only GOD was a book acquisitions editor in London or New York ....

...HE probably say "we seem to have plenty of books on enacted war crimes but what about the even bigger war crimes that were crimes of intention , not of fully carried out action ?"

Because Christians - along with a lot of other religions and even some non-religious people - believe that it is mental intentions , even more than as actual actions, that makes something a crime and a mortal sin.

August 1943 to August 1945 : when Pax Americana was soft penicillin power, not hard atomic bomb power

Why exactly does Penicillin remain the best known and best loved medication of all time ?

Consider these points in its disfavour.

Its amazing life-saving qualities were not truly unique - not before or after it first became famous in late 1943.

The then still new Sulfa drugs, first popularized in the late 1930s , were also miracle life savers.

But , unlike 1943 penicillin , they were also inexpensive, abundant in supply and could be taken as infrequent pills.

Penicillin was in extremely short supply and was very, very expensive . It also required refrigeration and had to be given by needle.

In fact, in some ways, the original Penicillin was one of the worse ever drugs for a patient to receive.

Globalization of 1880s and 1980s differs only by passage of one hundred years

The long, slow, steady passage of time has been the number one reason why the anger and angst felt by the teenagers of the 1880s (about the then new and disturbing global mixing and diversity of modernization) has mellowed in the teenagers of the 1980s.

Habit - boring old shoe habit - has worked better to grow the seeds of tolerance than any amount of sensitivity training....

modernity's "Purity obsession" as unconscious reaction against the "mixing" of early modernization

The first task of Modernity's newly invented "Science" was to erect a hyper-nationalist border around "The Truth".

A border complete with guards, fences and passports - between the "truth" inside and the "non-truth" outside , the "normal" inside and the "non-normal" outside.

These new "scientists" didn't do all this consciously.

Pre-1945 modernity sought to reduce the human gene pool...

.... while post-1945 postmodernity seeks to preserve the human gene pool.

The elderly Congressmen of 1946 (who had been teenagers in the 1880s) who thought that there could only be one "atomic secret" and that America had it - that was quintessentially Modern.

 Similarly the fact that middle aged voters today (who were teenagers in the 1980s) show a wide tolerance for racial, sexual, physical and cultural variety is quintessentially Postmodern.

Darwin descends into accepting Galton and Spencer as converts

Herbert Spencer - it must be said - got Darwin's Theory of Evolution just half right, as did Francis Galton.

the many DIFFERENT worlds of World War I and II experiences : Graham Broad's "A SMALL PRICE TO PAY"

Hollywood's constant export of American-oriented war films to the rest of us to the contrary , humanity does not collectively share one great big universal WWI or WWII  experience.

The truth is 'we all' experienced both wars in very many wildly different ways - varying from 'the best of times' to 'the worst of all possible times'.

Nazi Aktion T4 as 'death by meritocracy'

The Great Chain of Being, as educated Man saw it anyway, was God's ordering of classes of being --- from very imperfect to PERFECT.

Nothingness was at the very bottom, and God at the very top : Man was in the high middle area.

But note the perfect and imperfect were born that way : their perfectness was ascribed ,  not something learned and earned/un-earned by being marked in some merit testing.

Great Chain of Being vs Darwin

In the pre-1859 thinking that lay behind the concept of The Great Chain of Being , all species of Life were born on the same day (all had a common birthday) but all were subject to different individual creations (so had different 'parents' , in a metaphorical sense).

 In 1859, Darwin neatly reversed this : now all species of Life had one common parent (some slimy little bacteria) but all the species had wildly different birthdays, as Life branched out over time from that early single bacteria's beginnings.

Cue the scientific 'justification' for Aktion T4 and the Holocaust.

Bacteria will have 7 billion years of life on Earth : homo sapiens lucky to see 7 million

If statistical evidence from the fossil record is anything to go by, the bacteria will live on Earth at least one thousand times longer than us homo sapiens.

Now biology books that highlighted this inconvenient truth by reviewing the entire passage of life on earth from beginning to predicted end at least would not fall into the normal "GREAT CHAIN OF  EUGENIC BEING" trap.

Humans the Michael Ignatieff of Biology ?

Are humans 'just visiting' planet Earth ?

Just a parasite-predator 'taker' feeding off the hard work of humble autotrophic producers ?

'White Finches evolved to be Black' : is ANY of this true ?

Well 'finches' are 'finches' - we'll let that semi-accurate layperson definition stand, for the sake of argument.

But did all the white finches, as gradually as Darwin claimed they must, all turn into black finches ?

But might it really be that most finches used to white and now - currently and only here and not there - most are black ?

Because the locks change faster than the keys : Darwin's loss is Dawson's gain

Charles Darwin had to seriously bent and twist the scientific evidence that lay before him to satisfy his twin personal concerns before he could publish his famous theory.

He wanted to both claim that Evolution indeed happened (boo-woo! said his fellow well-to-do Victorians) but that fortunately it happened extremely slowly (hooray!)

Would WWII even have happened - if Sweden an ally of UK and France in 1939 ?

Hitler was just a short man with bad skin , greasy hair and some extreme ideas - a crank.

Hitlerism is what happened when many believe believed all of his ideas and worked hard to try them out -- and when many more lukewarm half-believers and non-believers passively let them.

Serious histories of WWII : geographic hard power over science faux power

Far far too much attention is paid in WWII histories to the new weapons created by wartime scientists and not enough to the vastly altered geographic balance of power of that war viv vis WWI only 25 years earlier.

Neutrality and Appeasement are - morally - the same

Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler's evil - despite frequent attempts by many writers on the fringe far right to defend it - is a truly dead horse and my book won't spend much time kicking it.

But WWII would never have even started if others hadn't remained stoically neutral bystanders to bullyboy Hitler's evil for the twelve long years of his reign of terror.

Militarily, Baltic is a two nation sea : Sweden and Germany

Today's Russia , China or America could never be dominant players in a serious Baltic Sea war - the same goes for Britain, France, Italy and Japan,  even in their naval heyday.

Geographic hard power here trumps military hardware Faux Power.

Sweden's long twin coasts and many mid-Baltic islands dominate the central Baltic - Germany's two coasts much less so, but its similarly central Baltic location and bigger population make up for that.

Would WWII ever have happened without Neutrals like Sweden and Switzerland ?

If most of the countries that were allies of France and Britain in WWI hadn't remained neutral in 1939, WWII might never had begun .

But for today let us consider that those few who were neutral with regards to the Kaiser and who also remained neutral to the far far more evil Hitler twenty five years later.

Nationalism over resolving greenhouse gas fallout is the gravest threat this globe faces

Is World War II , the war created by excessive national selfishness , really over ?

I ask if so, why then do nations still delude themselves that they have to the sole sovereign right to burn hydrocarbons within their own borders as they see fit ?

Didn't we learn quickly after WWII that nationally created atomic testing fallout and germ warfare experimenting fallout simply refused to stay put ?

Can we expect nationally-produced greenhouse gas fallout to be anymore cooperative ?

Inventing 'science' and 'scientists' as a reaction against the chaos of modernization

The mid-nineteenth century invented that most paradoxical and yet key figure of Modernity : the dynamically active full-time experimentalist called "the scientist" , intent on proving that the world is both statically knowable and statically controllable.

This invention , still damaging our world , was an unconscious reaction against the early side effects of modernization.

Female observational science vs Male experimental science ??

Because most scientists (particularly most powerful scientists) are men , how male scientists feel about the world soon ceases to be a mere opinion and hardens into 'a fact of life.'

And so it is in the closeted world of Science, that most still think that experimental science - such as giving a healthy bunny rabbit a serious disease, killing it and examining its entails in the Roman fashion - is far superior to mere observational science.

Hitler creates the war-winning Allied coalition

It should never have turned out this way, but it did.

Except for the British and French empires - and even they very reluctantly - no Allied nations ever went into combat against the evil Axis, unless directly attacked by the Axis first.

Nobody , at least no nation , (some individuals did much better) went to war against the Axis because innocent fellow beings, who they didn't know personally , were being murdered by armed thugs.

No nation ever showed any selfless agape love for their fellow beings.

Immediately releasing to the world a sound 35mm colour film of the Trinity Test

What if America had decided to record a proper colour motion film of the July 1945 Trinity Test - only this time in 35mm and with sound ?

And if the test had worked, then releasing the film to the whole world ?

The soft power reason 1945 British Commonwealth not globe's only Superpower

Strictly in terms of geographic climate hard power, the 1945 British Commonwealth (then at the height of its geographic extent) was the world's only global superpower.

Having lots of sovereign territory spaced out all over the world is the best way to be a superpower --- for a variety of reasons.

Selling the 1945 A-Bomb : Reprise of Selling the Norden Bombsight (part 1)

The Era of Modernity (1870s-1960s) had many sins.

Today I will discuss one in particular : how because Modernity had both the technological means and the (wrong) ideological beliefs , the mass creation of Faux Power was almost inevitable.

Believe me, this expanded Faux Power was a nasty new companion to traditional humanitarian Soft Power and geo-climate Hard Power and the main reason why WWII was humanity's deadliest and most immoral war.

If Faux Power is seen merely as the combination of a very little soft and hard power mixed in with lots and lots of false hype about both , then it is really timeless.

But its mass communication , combined with successful mass self-censorship, was newly tried in WWI and only really successful in WWII .

Blitzkrieg meets geographic hard power : its total failure to conquer BIG NATIONS

Today's EU, geographically, is about as big as were the eight 'big' nations of WWII.

Hold that thought for a moment or two.

If we consider the 1940 version of the Indian empire and not today's India, they definitely included Russia , Canada, China, America, Australia, Brazil and perhaps India and perhaps British southern Africa  -South Africa and Rhodesia and Kenya etc.

Japan and Germany , France and Italy were not among them. - no Europeans in the lot.

Hard Power of the "Realists" : Maginot Line, Singapore , Prince of Wales and Repulse

As long as we have 'realists', we will have bloody long bloody wars

Foreign Affairs 'realists' are men and women who don't give a toss about suffering humanity in general and who claim that humanity's bonds stop at artificially drawn-up national boundaries.

As a result, they say our concerns about our neighbour's difficulties should extend no further than to determining their national status ; if they are one of 'us' , then by all means defend them.

But if these suffering humans are foreigners , then only help them to the extent that it helps our "interests" (inevitably that really means economic interests) in their area - otherwise cast them adrift to their fate.

When did the Canadian liner "Duchess of Richmond" arrive in Halifax with the "most important cargo ever to reach the shores of the New World" ?

The epoch-shaping voyage of the SS Duchess of Richmond definitely ended in Halifax Nova Scotia sometime in the first week of September 1940, but I have seen the date given confidently as either the 5th, 6th and 7th of that month.

(The date as being the 6th is from the Official Chronology of the US Navy and it gives a convincing amount of detail to support this claim.)

Among them, that Winston Churchill himself remarked on the strange coincidence that the first US destroyers and the Duchess of Richmond carrying the British sailors destined to man them arrived the same day in Halifax.

One of those first vessels, the USS Buchanan - HMS Campbeltown , later became famous for successfully ramming and blowing up the drydock at St Nazaire.

The cavity magnetron that made microwave radar work was not the only interesting cargo the Duchess of Richmond transported to Halifax during the WWII period.

Soft Power : not all hearts and flowers : its Sam Slick, soft sawder, paper moons, cardboard seas

As hard power, the worse-than-useless Norden Bombsight was never up to much.

But its failures were kept as secret as its technical details and instead it was highly publicized as America's war-winning secret weapon.

All this Sam Slick  PR was soft sawder soft power - phoney soft power created around (supposed) hard power.

Like assigning royalties from SCHINDLER'S LIST to the SS Oldtimers Association

When people ask how my Dawson book project is going,  I have to answer , 'not well'.

People still are not getting it at all.

They all wonder why I don't copyright the book  and get it published by a 'regular' publisher (shades of "when are you going to get a real job ?").

Postmodern open "Soft Power" vs Modern secret "Hard Power"

The old - "Modern" - world was organized around hard power's secrecy and monopoly .

In this world, one person only - the American President - had his finger on the red button that simply said "Bombs Away !"

Our new world - "Postmodern" - is organized around the public openness of soft power.

Now seven billion fingers hover above a nation's "Friend Me" button and collectively we all decide its cultural and moral status and hence its soft power.

Halifax, September 7th 2015 : 75th anniversary of the arrival of "the most important cargo ever to land in the New World"

When the British liner The Duchess of Richmond docked in Halifax on September 7th 1940, few informed observers had any doubt what that all important cargo was.

Clearly it was the liner's one thousand Royal Navy sailors all set to man the 50 "destroyers for bases" ships that were busy arriving in Halifax that day to be de-commissioned by the US , handed over, and then promptly re-commissioned by the UK and Canada.

Of course, they were wrong --- the tale is far more interesting than that and little known even in Halifax, where it all began.

Joshua Lederberg "straightens" out 1950s bacteria - rescuing them from Henry Dawson's necrophilia label !

Joshua Lederberg loved to say how in the late 1940s and early 1950s, everybody (but him) thought that bacteria were asexual plants.

He soon straightened them and the bacteria out : he demonstrated that (once in about a billion go-a-rounds in a few strains of) bacteria have normal man-on-top sex just like animals and humans.

1940 : Annus Mirabilis for Nova Scotia Science : Dawson, Laurence, Avery , MacLeod ...

If you are a young Nova Scotian , determinedly outbound to greener (oil-stained) pastures in Alberta , you may not believe the following post - it was , after all , published on April 1st.

You may not believe it because it involves Nova Scotians at the forefront of scientific issues so important that even you - grasshopper - have heard of them once or twice.

And you definitely won't believe that these Nova Scotians did it all on their own nickel - without any government grants - working after hours : evenings, weekends and holidays.

Google the names of these Nova Scotian scientists , grasshopper , they really do exist :

I write about wartime penicillin rivalry from a seemingly unique perspective : as a practitioner from the world of politics

It constantly amazes me that all the noteworthy books and academic papers to date on wartime penicillin have been written either by people from the worlds of medicine/science or by historians and economists of industry, science and technology.

Where, oh where, are people from the world of politics and political science when it comes to writing about the highly politicized saga of wartime (and postwar) penicillin ?

Here's why I ask :

Yellowmagic diplomacy : Walter Mitty for real

The journalistic prose in the late summer of 1943 couldn't have gotten much purpler, short of entering into the fictional world of Walter Mitty as created by James Thurber.

A heavy bomber pounds though the southern night, a rare and dangerous night flight in those years , on a cross country mission of mercy to save a winsome young girl with only hours to live.

Eight thousand pounds of death dealing high explosives, the normal cargo of the B-24 bomber, had been abruptly jettisoned for just eight grams of precious lifesaving penicillin.

The Liberator bomber (The Liberator ! : you didn't think the B-24 Liberator was picked over the B-17 Flying Fortress by accident did you ?) was met at the airport at Macon Georgia by Klieg Lights, reporters' flash bulbs, screaming sirens and a police motorcycle escort.

The attractive teenage girl's progress and her every comment was breathlessly reported.

What red blooded teenage boy won't wanted to have been that handsomely uniformed rakish young pilot jockeying that magnificent steed of the air to win the heart of fair maiden ?

Walter Mitty lives in the breast of most of us.

Combining lifesaving penicillin, a 'just hours to live' race against time , and "The Gospel of the Air" was a heady and astute mix for the US Army PR staff to whip up.

Though they were to get only a minority of the long promised but never quite delivered penicillin , the US Army was getting 110% of the blame for penicillin shortages and it didn't like that.

Not one bit.

The US Army Air Force, and not the US Navy and certainly not the OSRD (stick-handing off the blame to others, as always) , figured in most of these air-penicillin rescues that somehow never failed to make it into the papers.

Bogged down in Italy, the US Army that summer certainly won all the really key battles - in Washington DC and in the women's pages of every hometown newspaper ....