The very word "war" medicine seems to stir something vaguely Mars-like, deep within the soul of the chickenhawk doctor or scientist.
Successfully conceiving ,in an academic lab at the University of Chicago, a way to reduce combat deaths from shock seems to transport one almost up to the frontline evacuation hospitals, directly under hostile fire.
Being there, doing it, roughing it , all sweaty and virile-like : medical science with the smell of the locker room and the men's shower stall about it.
By contrast, what can any doctor - any real doctor - actually do about those dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) ?
These hopeless cases shouldn't even be occupying an acute hospital bed - particularly in wartime.
They should be handled by women - nurses - in a secondary hospice or in a palliative care situation at home.
And arthritis 'care' - not really medicine is it ? Helping impoverished old ladies too frail to bend over properly to get dressed and to do their toiletry.
Again - women's work. A job for personal care assistants and social work case workers. Social medicine.
But (Martin) Henry Dawson persevered , hung on in there , all through the war, treating those chronically ill with arthritis and the very 4Fs of the 4Fs, those dying of SBE .
Perhaps because he was that rarity : an American medical researcher in 1940 who already had a stirling war record in the front lines (in the medical corp, infantry and artillery), with a medal for valour and two serious war wounds to back him up.
The Military Cross winner from Venus, as it were ......
Showing posts with label martin henry dawson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label martin henry dawson. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
the Good , as well as the Bad , gets intensified under the pressures of wartime
In her time - during and after WWI - nurse Edith Cavell was as famous as Oscar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and all the other WWII "Righteous Among the Nations" combined.
She devoted her life to nursing, mostly in Belgium though she was British herself, and didn't see why WWI should interrupt her practise of trying to save all patients, regardless of whether they were German, Belgian or Allied.
She was shoot however , by a German firing squad, for the war crime of helping Allied soldiers to escape the brutal German occupation forces enslaving Belgium.
Britain has claimed it had gone to war precisely to defend the right of neutral little Belgium not to be over run and then brutally enslaved by her bigger neighbours.
But many in her political and military elite thought it was right and just for the Germans to shoot her - they would have done the same - in fact did the same to Mata Hari.
World public opinion decidedly thought otherwise and her death became a big factor in turning neutral America to the Allied cause and for inspiring tens of thousands of youth in all the Allied countries to immediately join up as medical workers or soldiers.
News of her execution hit North American newspaper readers October 16th 1915.
It immediately inspired Martin Henry Dawson to become a medical orderly oversea.
He subsequently changed his life career plans and became a doctor.
On October 16th 1940, exactly 25 years later to the day he entered the medical world, Dawson ushered in one of those sort of earth-shaking events that only happens once every few centuries.
He gave two dying young men some of that elixir of life, natural penicillin, and so began our present Age of Antibiotics.
Neither man was Belgian, but for Dawson the principal was still the same : the small were being crushed beneath the interests of the big and he was as determined to fight that outrage as hard in WWII as he had in WWI.
These two men were being neglected by a medical community and drug company industry that had become focused on profitably war medicine for the 1As of the world , not on 'socialistic' social medicine to aid the 4Fs of the 4Fs.
Dawson saw that solely a military effort to defeat the Nazis or the Huns was never going to be enough, not if there was no moral battle behind it.
Sinking to the level of the Prussian military mindset, in WWI London or in WWII New York he saw was no way to win the hearts and minds of neutral nations - or even for retaining the loyalty of one's own citizens.
So, no Dawson did not go forth into battle on behalf of Mars in this second world war as he had eventually in the first.
He stayed home and treated only people too '4F' to ever be useful for military duty or even for the fast pace and long hours of munitions factory work.
He worked on the Venus side of Manhattan exclusively and his direct war impact was limited to filling the hearts of people all over the world with renewed hope.
But i believe that his efforts saved far more lives ,and probably won the war quicker, than The Bomb ever did.....
She devoted her life to nursing, mostly in Belgium though she was British herself, and didn't see why WWI should interrupt her practise of trying to save all patients, regardless of whether they were German, Belgian or Allied.
She was shoot however , by a German firing squad, for the war crime of helping Allied soldiers to escape the brutal German occupation forces enslaving Belgium.
Britain has claimed it had gone to war precisely to defend the right of neutral little Belgium not to be over run and then brutally enslaved by her bigger neighbours.
But many in her political and military elite thought it was right and just for the Germans to shoot her - they would have done the same - in fact did the same to Mata Hari.
World public opinion decidedly thought otherwise and her death became a big factor in turning neutral America to the Allied cause and for inspiring tens of thousands of youth in all the Allied countries to immediately join up as medical workers or soldiers.
News of her execution hit North American newspaper readers October 16th 1915.
It immediately inspired Martin Henry Dawson to become a medical orderly oversea.
He subsequently changed his life career plans and became a doctor.
On October 16th 1940, exactly 25 years later to the day he entered the medical world, Dawson ushered in one of those sort of earth-shaking events that only happens once every few centuries.
He gave two dying young men some of that elixir of life, natural penicillin, and so began our present Age of Antibiotics.
Neither man was Belgian, but for Dawson the principal was still the same : the small were being crushed beneath the interests of the big and he was as determined to fight that outrage as hard in WWII as he had in WWI.
These two men were being neglected by a medical community and drug company industry that had become focused on profitably war medicine for the 1As of the world , not on 'socialistic' social medicine to aid the 4Fs of the 4Fs.
Dawson saw that solely a military effort to defeat the Nazis or the Huns was never going to be enough, not if there was no moral battle behind it.
Sinking to the level of the Prussian military mindset, in WWI London or in WWII New York he saw was no way to win the hearts and minds of neutral nations - or even for retaining the loyalty of one's own citizens.
So, no Dawson did not go forth into battle on behalf of Mars in this second world war as he had eventually in the first.
He stayed home and treated only people too '4F' to ever be useful for military duty or even for the fast pace and long hours of munitions factory work.
He worked on the Venus side of Manhattan exclusively and his direct war impact was limited to filling the hearts of people all over the world with renewed hope.
But i believe that his efforts saved far more lives ,and probably won the war quicker, than The Bomb ever did.....
to RAMZI YOUSEF : a loving rebuttal
When asked why he hoped his 1993 bomb inside Manhattan's World Trade Center would kill all of the 50,000 people at the complex, the chief planner of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, said the planned massive carnage was partly to avenge the 250,000 Japanese killed by the bombs of the Manhattan Project.
It is true that the current wartime image of Manhattan does present a particularly Mars like character.
Pre-1945 Manhattan was not just the birth place of the technology that fuelled the Cold War atomic arsenals, it was also the financial and intellectual home of Eugenics - which culminated in The Holocaust.
But Manhattan is Janus-like as we all are, as the whole world is.
Within it are found big and small, good and bad, Eugenics and Emma Lazarus : indeed Venus, as well as Mars.
Venus even in, particularly in, times of war - seemingly the natural home of Mars.
Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project , to liberate natural penicillin from corporate greed and eugenic medicine so that it could bring succour to the poor, the tired and the huddled in a war-torn world, saved far more lives than The Bomb ever lost.
If Ramzi Yousef had only known the full (in the round /the 360 degree) story of Manhattan, he might have thought twice about planning that 1993 bomb.
Much the same goes for those who planned 9/11 and those planning future assaults on Manhattan.
I am not a Manhattanite and reluctant to blow someone other city's horn unasked : but I simply feel that the world - and that included Manhattanites - must know more of the long ago wartime days when 'Manhattan was from Venus' , as well as from Mars....
It is true that the current wartime image of Manhattan does present a particularly Mars like character.
Pre-1945 Manhattan was not just the birth place of the technology that fuelled the Cold War atomic arsenals, it was also the financial and intellectual home of Eugenics - which culminated in The Holocaust.
But Manhattan is Janus-like as we all are, as the whole world is.
Within it are found big and small, good and bad, Eugenics and Emma Lazarus : indeed Venus, as well as Mars.
Venus even in, particularly in, times of war - seemingly the natural home of Mars.
Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project , to liberate natural penicillin from corporate greed and eugenic medicine so that it could bring succour to the poor, the tired and the huddled in a war-torn world, saved far more lives than The Bomb ever lost.
If Ramzi Yousef had only known the full (in the round /the 360 degree) story of Manhattan, he might have thought twice about planning that 1993 bomb.
Much the same goes for those who planned 9/11 and those planning future assaults on Manhattan.
I am not a Manhattanite and reluctant to blow someone other city's horn unasked : but I simply feel that the world - and that included Manhattanites - must know more of the long ago wartime days when 'Manhattan was from Venus' , as well as from Mars....
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Henry Dawson, Champion of the Second Chance ... and the Second Glance
Manhattan-based doctor (Martin) Henry Dawson championed the smallest, weakest and poorest of beings all his life.
On one hand, they were human beings, such as the institutionalized chronically ill at Goldwater Hospital.
Or discarded young people , dying needlessly from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).
In both cases, he wanted to give them a second chance at a near normal life in what was, after all, the famed City of the Second Chance.
On one hand, they were human beings, such as the institutionalized chronically ill at Goldwater Hospital.
Or discarded young people , dying needlessly from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).
In both cases, he wanted to give them a second chance at a near normal life in what was, after all, the famed City of the Second Chance.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Remembering when Manhattan was from Venus
"Now I am become Hope, Healer of Nations."
Just because that is all that the 9/11 bombers chose to recall , is no reason to emulate their example.
(Ie, the 911 planners chose only to focus upon the Mars side of Manhattan's Janus-like face.)
Wartime Manhattan : from Mars ... or from Venus ?
If I might be permitted to gently chide the citizens of Manhattan, may I suggest that they had done very little, themselves, to balance the horrific wartime image of their city created by being tagged as the place that 'birthed' the atomic bomb and its potential destruction of the entire world.
To the 911 bombers, it is the best known image of the borough.
(And by the way, it is only men, like the bosses of the best known wartime Manhattan Project , who talk about 'birthing the bomb' and think of naming it 'Little Boy'.)
Woman know better.
They actually do birth children and know that a bomb isn't a baby.
To the 911 bombers, it is the best known image of the borough.
(And by the way, it is only men, like the bosses of the best known wartime Manhattan Project , who talk about 'birthing the bomb' and think of naming it 'Little Boy'.)
Woman know better.
They actually do birth children and know that a bomb isn't a baby.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
To 911 Bombers, Manhattan was from Mars - Henry Dawson's story could have reminded them it was also from Venus
We must alway remember that there was an other Manhattan Project during WWII ; unfortunately one that remains almost totally unknown to this day.
It involved Dr Martin Henry Dawson sacrificing his own life, all in an effort to see that wartime penicillin's scanty production and distribution was de-militarized by the Allies and then made available to all the world's 'tired, poor and huddled'.
It involved Dr Martin Henry Dawson sacrificing his own life, all in an effort to see that wartime penicillin's scanty production and distribution was de-militarized by the Allies and then made available to all the world's 'tired, poor and huddled'.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Janus Manhattan : "destroyer of worlds" or "provider of life-affirming balm" or both ?
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| Penicillium Monstrance |
When native Manhattanite Robert J Oppenheimer proclaimed - portentously - "Now I am become DEATH , the destroyer of worlds" after the Manhattan Project's first atomic explosion , he seems to set Manhattan's wartime image in concrete for all time.
It was this existing image of Manhattan that the 911 bombers relied upon to soften the outrage against their mass killings.
But the real Manhattan is far too complex and dynamic to ever present just one face to the world --- and so it was with its activities between 1939 and 1945.
For Manhattan ,Janus-like , had another (almost unknown and largely mis-understood) Project during WWII.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson the medical scientist had a very simple thesis : that Life inevitably 'Comes in All Sizes'.
As a result, 'global commensality' (all life dines at a common table) is a necessity forced upon all of us living beings and we might as well learn to accept it.
But the tenet of his age, The Age of High Modernity (1875 -1965), was that Bigger was Better, in fact the inevitable path of progress.
So small life would have to give way and disappear before the forces of the giants of life.
Dawson believed that WWII would end quicker, with fewer deaths, if the Allies set out to defeat Hitler morally, as well as just militarily.
Instead they were seeming intent on matching Hitler's evil doctrines, albeit in a muted fashion, cut for cut.
Killing American patients like Charles Aronson by passive neglect was hardly morally different than killing German patients like Martin Bader by active injection.
In an era that exalted the Big, Dawson dared to defend the small : small patients like Charlie and small cures, like natural penicillin from mold slime.
Another native Manhattanite , Gladys Hobby, was the most religious devout on Dawson's tiny team.
Instead of a text from Hindu religion, we might choose to see a quasi-Christian symbol in her practise of daily carrying petri dishes of sectoring penicillium mold to the wards holding the dying patients like Charlie.
She did it, she says, to sustain their morale so they might live long enough for enough penicillin to be produced by her team to save their lives.
Anyone who as ever seen a photograph of sectored penicillium mold on a flat petri dish can not help but think it reminded them of something , but just what ?
Spikes of blue with golden droplets on top radiate in all directions, ending in a circle of white mold growth.
It is a radiant, jewel like image - rather like a stylized sun.
Like a - that's it - a monstrance : that sun-like object that contains the sacred Host and is held aloft by the priest and minister on special occasions.
A stylized sun, radiating in all directions, warming all, was always an universal symbol of life and hope, even before Christianity.
The Host in a monstrance - Jesus's body for real or as a symbol - is the unifying symbol of the Christian tradition : offering up the hope of (eternal) life , particularly as it is often exposed before those facing death.
But sometimes Jesus offered an earthly life as well as an eternal heavenly life.
So even Lazarus died, physically, in the end, as would patients like Charlie : but even so , every additional day on earth seemed a precious boom and balm to the troubled patient and their families.
Eventually a nearby doctor , Dante Colitti, was inspired to emulate Dr Dawson's government-bucking actions to obtain illicit penicillin supplies for discarded Americans.
He got the masters of Yellow Journalism , the Hearst papers, to go to bat on behalf of the Yellow Magic and a beautiful thing soon happened.
For when a two year baby named Patricia Malone got snatched back from death , around the world 'Doctor Mom' soon was demanding that the men get their butts off the couch and start seriously producing penicillin, now ! ----- fifteen long years after it was first discovered.
Dawson was only a part of the long story of penicillin and antibiotics but he is the whole story of wartime penicillin.
Without his moral drive, the medical cum scientific cum commercial powers-to-be would have still been trying to make highly profitable , patent-able ,synthetic penicillin years after the war ended, instead of mass producing life-saving natural ( public domain) penicillin during the war that so badly needed it.
Dawson's moral urgency personally moved the family of the Pfizer boss and moved that boss to mass produce natural penicillin as soon as possible - and it was Brooklyn based Pfizer that made the vast bulk of the wartime penicillin., let us never forget.
My book about Dawson's Manhattan Project is written as a deliberate rebuttal to the story the 911 bombers told against Manhattan, to try and justify their mass killings.
What they said about Manhattan wasn't totally untrue but it told only part of her story.
Because, like Life itself, Manhattan 'Comes in All Sizes' : she has been the home to unbelievably good things as well as bad things.
I would so much like to ask the 911 bombing planners and their supporters if they or their loved ones had ever been saved by cheap abundant penicillin and do they know that the effort to de-militarize penicillin and make it available to all was spawned in the same Manhattan they love so much to hate ?
Hopefully this book will be the start of that conversation we need to have with the Manhattan-haters.....
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Dawson rebukes the "bystanders" of the Allied "coalition of the UN-willing"
In 1939, the British and French empires were initially unwilling to honour even the letter of their solemn pledge to come to the aid of Poland if it was attacked.
And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.
But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.
And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.
Let us always honour them for at least that.
For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.
And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.
Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.
Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.
They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).
Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.
So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.
Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.
Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.
We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.
It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .
One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.
So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.
But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .
My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' , open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.
His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.
He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.
They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.
But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .
All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.
I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.
Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.
Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....
And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.
But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.
And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.
Let us always honour them for at least that.
For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.
And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.
Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.
Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.
They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).
Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.
So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.
Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.
Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.
We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.
It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .
One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.
So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.
But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .
My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' , open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.
His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.
He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.
They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.
But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .
All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.
I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.
Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.
Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
WWII : excessive group-love led to excessive groupthink
In my previous postings over the past few years, I have tried - separately - to indicate that the horrors of WWII were caused by excessive group-love and by excessive groupthink : I now realize both are bound intimately together.
The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.
By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.
It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.
But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.
It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.
It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.
But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.
WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.
Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.
In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.
They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.
An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.
Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.
At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....
The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.
By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.
It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.
But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.
It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.
It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.
But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.
WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.
Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.
In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.
They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.
An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.
Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.
At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Some conversations, a couple should never have to have...
It was a private conversation , so we can only imagine what was said, based upon our knowledge of the events discussed and the personalities of the pair.
Marjorie, always a bit of a coquette , never more than when she has news like this, came in to talk to Henry just before New Year's Eve 1940 :
"I've been to see the doctor and..." a teasing, girlish lilt leaves the sentence unfinished.
Henry has a more subdued personality while also being much more intense. With a ready wit.
A dry,wry ,sardonic sort of wit, very much in the scottish presbyterian style.
So typically he simply says, in a quiet throwaway voice:
"...And so have I..."
Marjorie, the flow of her expected storytelling interrupted, reacts with surprise :
"Why Henry, whatever for ?!"
(Because after all, Henry himself was a highly regarded medical doctor.)
"No. Marjorie, you go first."
Marjorie proceeds to tell Henry the hardly unexpected news, given her obvious manner : they are to have a new baby, in September or October of next year.
It will be their third - a late child, because their others (Shirley and Keith) were born in 1928 and 1930.
Marjorie will be almost 38 when the baby is born, Henry just turned 45.
But parents their age are much more likely to immediately start calculating just how old they will be when baby is in some expensive university.
No couples more so than the Dawsons, themselves both were educators and very well (and very expensively) educated.
Both are likely to be retired by the time this third baby finishes its first of several degrees.
Yet it was already looking like they won't have enough money to provide a good education to their two existing children.
In fact it was the only issue the two ever fought about.
"You're always helping other people's children - isn't past due time you started helping your own children ? By opening a downtown private practise like all your friends ?"
Part of the problem was that a post-graduate education takes time and money and so Henry was 33 before he had his first steady job, and that at the very bottom of the academic hierarchy.
He had only gotten tenure as a professor four years earlier, at the last possible opportunity : obviously then he was not one set for the fast advancement lane.
His real problem - if there was one - was he lived only for his science work and had no aptitude for well paid medical administration or making lots of money working with well-to-do private patients.
Marjorie had a job but it was low paying and her obviously good education and drive had to be set against the fact she had a severe congenital hip defect, which despite many childhood operation hadn't been able to be set right.
She needed a cane sometimes, and a special driving license, and the problem was only going to get worse with time.
But enough about the good news.
There was no way to sugarcoat Dawson's news and he wasn't inclined to either over-dramatitize it or lie about it.
(To his wife anyway, his children needn't have this hanging over their crucial teenage years.)
"You remember the odd way my eyes and face have been looking the last month ?"
Marjorie had .
But she had put it down to Henry trying to do his day job and be a good father and husband --- while simultaneously completing the editing of the big book, deal with his father's recent death and above all, by throwing himself headfirst into his latest scientific project.
Oh the Project ! Above all, Henry's unilateral snap decision to advance its pace by about three months : the straw that broke the camel's back, in Marjorie's mind.
Marjorie was not alone in thinking he should have gone slow on his latest project , at least until the big book was back from the printers and in the subscribers' hands.
But Henry had been unmoved, saying death couldn't wait until the beginning of the next semester.
So now this.
"Well", said Henry, "I read a little." " On the possible causes of those - unusual - set of facial features, because I had never seen anything like them before as a doctor."
"After just a bit of reading, I quickly went to see a specialist - a neurologist."
"Oh."
"It is early days and there be another explanation , or it might only be a minor version of these diseases - but it is starting to look like either a brain tumour or MG : Myasthenia Gravis..."
A quiet, in-drawing, "oh" from Marjorie.
But Henry wasn't quite finished:
"...and I hope to God, its a brain tumour."
A much louder "OH!" this time from Marjorie, because what could be worse than brain tumours ?
Brain tumours, with their intensely painful headaches and their usual quick deaths, possible operation or not.
But what is MG - or rather more importantly, what was MG as seen from the point of view of 1940?
In 1940, it is now certain that many people had mild cases of MG but never saw the inside of a hospital about it . They never knew they had it and generally as long a life as anyone else.
It was not easy to diagnose this autoimmune disease in 1940.
We now know that it happens when our own body creates antibodies that inadvertently interrupts the chemical process that sends signals along our nerves.
But we still don't know what agent triggers the body to create such antibodies in the first place.
It is easiest to detect when it involves the nerves of the eyes and the face : the combination of a flattened smile, distinct facial sagging and drooping eyes is pretty unique.
Repeated use of these nerves and muscles appears to 'tire them', though what is actually happening is a build-up of the antibodies at the nerve interceptors.
Frequent rest periods will stop this process and restore these nerves and muscles' function and the face will appear normal looking --- for a while, until the build-up occurs again.
But often the mouth muscles are involved and then we see a nasal voice and uncontrollable drooling.
It is hard to get a good cough and it becomes difficult to swallow water or food successfully.
Despite this, there is no loss of reflexes, no lack of the senses mental or physical ,no lack of coordination and above all no generalized sense of fatigue.
The disease is not 'progressive' itself ,(progressively getting worse over time), and seems to go away after these localized tired muscles are rested.
So why did a Canadian study, published at the time of Dawson's disease ,discover that on average MG patients lived only four and a half years and had a miserable and painful life over that period ?
The key word is "patient" : only those with severe enough symptoms to become hospital MG patients were counted in those statistics and these patients almost all had bulbar muscle and sometimes even respiratory muscle involvement, in addition to eye and facial issues.
The bulbar muscle affects above all that complicated dance we must all do, all the time, whenever we attempt to swallow and breath at the same time.
Mess it up and food and water end up our nose or in our lungs and we become prone to death by pneumonia either from bacteria or from faulty aspiration of solids into our lungs.
Call this death from the top of the lung.
Some patients even have reduced function of the various 'outside' muscles that support lung function : the muscles of the diaphragm, thoracic and upper airway. Call this death from the bottom of the lung.
By 1940, most patients that were diagnosed with the severe forms of MG and who lived very near good medical care survived the first few of what were called immediately life-threatening "MG Crisis." (Basically a breathing crisis.)
But each crisis left damage to lung and heart and so while the disease itself wasn't really "progressively getting worse", one still died a painfully slow death from the side affects, as each repeated crisis left one more vulnerable to the next one.
By 1940, there was a drug that helped, but its side affects were bad enough ,particularly as correct dosage was in an early stage , to make many patients wish for the quick,quiet release of death instead.
Also by 1940, there was treatment in iron lungs - only decades later was it realized this made the condition fatally worse ,not better, because the air pressure process was moving in the wrong direction (it was negative not positive.)
Unfortunately, this single simple change (a flick of a switch) came too late to save thousands; not arriving at his Henry's own Presbyterian Columbia hospital, for example, until 1962.
Finally by 1940 a brand new surgery process showed a cure for about a half of the severe cases - the other unaffected half were mostly men in Henry's age bracket, for whom it did nothing and only left them further weakened by a major operation.
Still in 1940, there was a flicker of hope, for even the most severe examples of MG.
It was the simple fact that drug, iron lung treatment and surgery were all literally brand new and could only be expected to improve dramatically over time and perhaps spur even better ideas.
If 1940 MG patients could totally change their lifestyle, they might live long enough to be around for the better treatments when they arrived.
But when Marjorie asked Henry what did a patient need to avoid to be spared the worst of MG, she had to cry out in anger.
The things be avoided were all the things that Henry liked to do in excess !
Always had, always would :
Repetitious eye and muscle use, such as reading medical journals, peering into microscopes or talking with patients to get detailed patient histories.
Working long hours into the evenings, weekends and holidays, without proper food ,water or rest, in hot chemical-filled atmospheres.
Working in environments where virulent throat and lung bacteria are common.
"Henry, you just have to stop all your involvement in this project - leave it to someone else - think of your children, above all the new baby."
"I don't want to be raising three kids on my own in four and a half years , not on my tiny salary and this bad hip."
Marjorie was entirely typical of people all around the world in 1940 and it was people like Henry who were - Thank God ! - the lonely exception.
She cared, truly cared, for example, about all people starving in the French and later Greek famines.
But she was like Henry's colleagues who admired his moral sense but decried his lack of a sense of proportion , of knowing when to stop.
"You've made your point - and it is a good one - but now it is time to move on."
Henry was willing, even eager, to move on - or even more likely not to have gotten involved in the first place - if only there was someone else to do the job right.
For Henry Dawson was no volunteer, no charismatic leader at the front line, spurring others on.
But he was of a type, a not un-common type : a 'stepper into breaches' -------- but only when he was needed.
"If I stepped back, you know that this part of the project would die."
"Sorry, bad choice of words - those young lads in Ward G-East would die."
"I do care about my family and friends, but someone in this darned world has to also care about strangers too."
So, with eyes badly drooping but jaw firmly set, Henry wearily got up.
He had a needle to give ; a very special needle of his very special new home grown drug.
The needle won't contain much of the drug despite months of unremitting hard work and it probably won't save this particular patient.
But it offered the negro lad hope and shown him at least someone cared .
After he gave the youth his needle, Dawson would sit for him a while - not just to see if it had an effect , though that is what he told his colleagues.
He would sit with him because the young man was all alone and he was dying and because it was New Year's Eve.
The young man would be all alone and dying and all around him he could hear the sounds of young student nurses and young student doctors merrily celebrating new beginnings and the New Year.
So Dawson would sit with him through the celebrations and talk with him, maybe share a little something with him.
And do so with dignity : because now he , too, would grow to know what a re-occurring ever-worsening fatal disease feels like.
From the inside.
So there they sat, in the dark of New Year's Morning, January 1st 1941 : dead men , waiting .....
Marjorie, always a bit of a coquette , never more than when she has news like this, came in to talk to Henry just before New Year's Eve 1940 :
"I've been to see the doctor and..." a teasing, girlish lilt leaves the sentence unfinished.
Henry has a more subdued personality while also being much more intense. With a ready wit.
A dry,wry ,sardonic sort of wit, very much in the scottish presbyterian style.
So typically he simply says, in a quiet throwaway voice:
"...And so have I..."
Marjorie, the flow of her expected storytelling interrupted, reacts with surprise :
"Why Henry, whatever for ?!"
(Because after all, Henry himself was a highly regarded medical doctor.)
"No. Marjorie, you go first."
Marjorie proceeds to tell Henry the hardly unexpected news, given her obvious manner : they are to have a new baby, in September or October of next year.
It will be their third - a late child, because their others (Shirley and Keith) were born in 1928 and 1930.
Marjorie will be almost 38 when the baby is born, Henry just turned 45.
But parents their age are much more likely to immediately start calculating just how old they will be when baby is in some expensive university.
No couples more so than the Dawsons, themselves both were educators and very well (and very expensively) educated.
Both are likely to be retired by the time this third baby finishes its first of several degrees.
Yet it was already looking like they won't have enough money to provide a good education to their two existing children.
In fact it was the only issue the two ever fought about.
"You're always helping other people's children - isn't past due time you started helping your own children ? By opening a downtown private practise like all your friends ?"
Part of the problem was that a post-graduate education takes time and money and so Henry was 33 before he had his first steady job, and that at the very bottom of the academic hierarchy.
He had only gotten tenure as a professor four years earlier, at the last possible opportunity : obviously then he was not one set for the fast advancement lane.
His real problem - if there was one - was he lived only for his science work and had no aptitude for well paid medical administration or making lots of money working with well-to-do private patients.
Marjorie had a job but it was low paying and her obviously good education and drive had to be set against the fact she had a severe congenital hip defect, which despite many childhood operation hadn't been able to be set right.
She needed a cane sometimes, and a special driving license, and the problem was only going to get worse with time.
But enough about the good news.
There was no way to sugarcoat Dawson's news and he wasn't inclined to either over-dramatitize it or lie about it.
(To his wife anyway, his children needn't have this hanging over their crucial teenage years.)
"You remember the odd way my eyes and face have been looking the last month ?"
Marjorie had .
But she had put it down to Henry trying to do his day job and be a good father and husband --- while simultaneously completing the editing of the big book, deal with his father's recent death and above all, by throwing himself headfirst into his latest scientific project.
Oh the Project ! Above all, Henry's unilateral snap decision to advance its pace by about three months : the straw that broke the camel's back, in Marjorie's mind.
Marjorie was not alone in thinking he should have gone slow on his latest project , at least until the big book was back from the printers and in the subscribers' hands.
But Henry had been unmoved, saying death couldn't wait until the beginning of the next semester.
So now this.
"Well", said Henry, "I read a little." " On the possible causes of those - unusual - set of facial features, because I had never seen anything like them before as a doctor."
"After just a bit of reading, I quickly went to see a specialist - a neurologist."
"Oh."
"It is early days and there be another explanation , or it might only be a minor version of these diseases - but it is starting to look like either a brain tumour or MG : Myasthenia Gravis..."
A quiet, in-drawing, "oh" from Marjorie.
But Henry wasn't quite finished:
"...and I hope to God, its a brain tumour."
A much louder "OH!" this time from Marjorie, because what could be worse than brain tumours ?
Brain tumours, with their intensely painful headaches and their usual quick deaths, possible operation or not.
But what is MG - or rather more importantly, what was MG as seen from the point of view of 1940?
In 1940, it is now certain that many people had mild cases of MG but never saw the inside of a hospital about it . They never knew they had it and generally as long a life as anyone else.
It was not easy to diagnose this autoimmune disease in 1940.
We now know that it happens when our own body creates antibodies that inadvertently interrupts the chemical process that sends signals along our nerves.
But we still don't know what agent triggers the body to create such antibodies in the first place.
It is easiest to detect when it involves the nerves of the eyes and the face : the combination of a flattened smile, distinct facial sagging and drooping eyes is pretty unique.
Repeated use of these nerves and muscles appears to 'tire them', though what is actually happening is a build-up of the antibodies at the nerve interceptors.
Frequent rest periods will stop this process and restore these nerves and muscles' function and the face will appear normal looking --- for a while, until the build-up occurs again.
But often the mouth muscles are involved and then we see a nasal voice and uncontrollable drooling.
It is hard to get a good cough and it becomes difficult to swallow water or food successfully.
Despite this, there is no loss of reflexes, no lack of the senses mental or physical ,no lack of coordination and above all no generalized sense of fatigue.
The disease is not 'progressive' itself ,(progressively getting worse over time), and seems to go away after these localized tired muscles are rested.
So why did a Canadian study, published at the time of Dawson's disease ,discover that on average MG patients lived only four and a half years and had a miserable and painful life over that period ?
The key word is "patient" : only those with severe enough symptoms to become hospital MG patients were counted in those statistics and these patients almost all had bulbar muscle and sometimes even respiratory muscle involvement, in addition to eye and facial issues.
The bulbar muscle affects above all that complicated dance we must all do, all the time, whenever we attempt to swallow and breath at the same time.
Mess it up and food and water end up our nose or in our lungs and we become prone to death by pneumonia either from bacteria or from faulty aspiration of solids into our lungs.
Call this death from the top of the lung.
Some patients even have reduced function of the various 'outside' muscles that support lung function : the muscles of the diaphragm, thoracic and upper airway. Call this death from the bottom of the lung.
By 1940, most patients that were diagnosed with the severe forms of MG and who lived very near good medical care survived the first few of what were called immediately life-threatening "MG Crisis." (Basically a breathing crisis.)
But each crisis left damage to lung and heart and so while the disease itself wasn't really "progressively getting worse", one still died a painfully slow death from the side affects, as each repeated crisis left one more vulnerable to the next one.
By 1940, there was a drug that helped, but its side affects were bad enough ,particularly as correct dosage was in an early stage , to make many patients wish for the quick,quiet release of death instead.
Also by 1940, there was treatment in iron lungs - only decades later was it realized this made the condition fatally worse ,not better, because the air pressure process was moving in the wrong direction (it was negative not positive.)
Unfortunately, this single simple change (a flick of a switch) came too late to save thousands; not arriving at his Henry's own Presbyterian Columbia hospital, for example, until 1962.
Finally by 1940 a brand new surgery process showed a cure for about a half of the severe cases - the other unaffected half were mostly men in Henry's age bracket, for whom it did nothing and only left them further weakened by a major operation.
Still in 1940, there was a flicker of hope, for even the most severe examples of MG.
It was the simple fact that drug, iron lung treatment and surgery were all literally brand new and could only be expected to improve dramatically over time and perhaps spur even better ideas.
If 1940 MG patients could totally change their lifestyle, they might live long enough to be around for the better treatments when they arrived.
But when Marjorie asked Henry what did a patient need to avoid to be spared the worst of MG, she had to cry out in anger.
The things be avoided were all the things that Henry liked to do in excess !
Always had, always would :
Repetitious eye and muscle use, such as reading medical journals, peering into microscopes or talking with patients to get detailed patient histories.
Working long hours into the evenings, weekends and holidays, without proper food ,water or rest, in hot chemical-filled atmospheres.
Working in environments where virulent throat and lung bacteria are common.
Emotional work-related stress.
"I don't want to be raising three kids on my own in four and a half years , not on my tiny salary and this bad hip."
Marjorie was entirely typical of people all around the world in 1940 and it was people like Henry who were - Thank God ! - the lonely exception.
She cared, truly cared, for example, about all people starving in the French and later Greek famines.
But she was like Henry's colleagues who admired his moral sense but decried his lack of a sense of proportion , of knowing when to stop.
"You've made your point - and it is a good one - but now it is time to move on."
Henry was willing, even eager, to move on - or even more likely not to have gotten involved in the first place - if only there was someone else to do the job right.
For Henry Dawson was no volunteer, no charismatic leader at the front line, spurring others on.
But he was of a type, a not un-common type : a 'stepper into breaches' -------- but only when he was needed.
"If I stepped back, you know that this part of the project would die."
"Sorry, bad choice of words - those young lads in Ward G-East would die."
"I do care about my family and friends, but someone in this darned world has to also care about strangers too."
So, with eyes badly drooping but jaw firmly set, Henry wearily got up.
He had a needle to give ; a very special needle of his very special new home grown drug.
The needle won't contain much of the drug despite months of unremitting hard work and it probably won't save this particular patient.
But it offered the negro lad hope and shown him at least someone cared .
After he gave the youth his needle, Dawson would sit for him a while - not just to see if it had an effect , though that is what he told his colleagues.
He would sit with him because the young man was all alone and he was dying and because it was New Year's Eve.
The young man would be all alone and dying and all around him he could hear the sounds of young student nurses and young student doctors merrily celebrating new beginnings and the New Year.
So Dawson would sit with him through the celebrations and talk with him, maybe share a little something with him.
And do so with dignity : because now he , too, would grow to know what a re-occurring ever-worsening fatal disease feels like.
From the inside.
So there they sat, in the dark of New Year's Morning, January 1st 1941 : dead men , waiting .....
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Hitler vs Henry Dawson : why contrast these two scientists ?
War historians are unlikely to ever be happy with a Hollywood movie presenting WWII as "The Battle between Ultimate Evil and Ultimate Good".
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
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