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.

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.

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.

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.