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'.