When nations bully

From 1931 to 1946 , the world saw an ending series of bullying sessions, as big and aggressive nations bullied small nations and small peoples and small individuals.

Contemporary historians are tending to extend WWII to run from 1931 to 1946  --- which is a good first step.

But they still tend to view it exclusively through political and military lenses, but might do well  to start calling a spade a spade .

Because contemporary parents and children (if not historians)  increasingly recognize bullying as something that does not begin and end in the childhood schoolyard ....

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....

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"....

WWII : more troops , longer war, but only 1/3 number of VCs

Canada had almost twice as many troops in WWII as in WWI, and it was a world-wide war that lasted 50% longer than the first war, but despite all this, Canada had less than 1/3 as many VC winners.

It is only given for bravery in face of the enemy, so the fact that  combat was far more mechanized in WWII ( ie fought at long distances from the enemy)  is often offered up as the excuse.

Dropping bombs from 20,000 ft might seem then to eliminate you from ever receiving a VC in theory --- but not in practise.

Bomber crews actually did get VCs ---- for trying to save fellow crew members  high up in the flak-filled skies.

The other view - mine anyway - is that people were less selflessly brave, over all,  in WWII than in the earlier war.

The character of virtually all the world's western-influenced population changed - for the worse - after WWI .

But not as a result of WWI , merely as the result of death carrying off the holders of older Victorian views on selflessness, replaced by the young bearers of the up-to-date, modernist , scientific, view of the proper morality:

"Be quick to defend your own national group to the death (and beyond) - but ignore or despise all others' cries for help."

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Philip Marlowe's mean streets were world wide......

God Only Knows why Henry Dawson did what he did - because no one else does ...

Next year will be ten years that I have been at it, trying to figure out why Henry Dawson did what he did and I am still no further ahead.
Consider this :

In late December 1940, Dawson got both some very good news and some very bad news from the doctors.

At age 45, he would be a father for the third time : Hurray !

Albeit his wife was in her forties , was physically handicapped and earns only a small salary.

This matters, because Henry had also just been told he has Myasthenia Gravis, a very serious auto immune disease that in the early 1940s generally killed within four and half years.

However, if he kept shorter hours, cut back on his stressful activities, stopped working around strong chemicals and ate and slept healthier, he might eke it out until better treatments came along.

Instead, Dr Dawson chose to plunge in ever harder into his self-chosen war task: bad chemicals, lots of stress and all.

He was trying desperately to save the lives of "The 4Fs of the 4Fs" : young people needlessly dying of the disease SBE,  because they were judged by the powerful to be only a burden in a time of Allied Total War.

Dying because the medicine that could save them (penicillin) was being reserved instead to use as a weapon of war.

If this sounds eerily like a more subtle version of Hitler's infamous T4 Aktion, you won't be far off.

Dawson's tiny little project was a sort of Aktion 4F, a moral counterblast at both the Allies and the Axis.

Now Dawson had a great moral right to do what he did with penicillin (including stealing scarce government-issued penicillin in a time of war !) because he was the first person in history to use it to try and save a life ( actually two : two SBE patients) - penicillin he had grown and processed himself.

This happened before America was at war, but at a time when the nation's medical and scientific leadership was hardening its heart in preparation to be as ruthless as Hitler, when and if Congress ever chose to fight him.

I believe Dawson reacted against this moral hardening of the arteries, seeing it as the absolutely worst way to win the "hearts and minds" battle against Hitler's ideas.

 Dawson was cautious, modest and retiring - his High School yearbook would have voted him "The Least Likely to Rebel".

His own field of expertise was miles and miles and miles away from SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis - a then invariably fatal heart disease).

He had never before ventured into making and purifying a brand new unknown drug.

He was regarded as a bit of a cracked pot by his colleagues with regard to his own personal research projects, which tended to limit his ability to draw in people into this Aktion 4F project.

This project of altruism literally killed him in the end - but he was not a religious believer so the basis for his extreme act of alturism is hard to find.

So why did he do it ?

I don't know.

But I do know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

SBE became one of the most curable of fatal diseases, thanks to Dawson's pioneering efforts.

But he did far more than that.

His project forced the Allies to change their War Aims - to stop treating penicillin as a weapon, kept in short supply only for curable Allied frontline troops.

Instead he forced them to seriously mass produce it and to start treating it as something that should be available for all, regardless of race, color or war status.

By late 1944, penicillin had become the ultimate symbol of that highly elusive "good" the Allies had been promising would surely come about , if only all the neutrals of the world got off the fence and helped defeat Hitler.

One explanation on why Dawson did it and how he did it, is  that God sometimes picks cracked pots and non-believers ,together with the weak and the foolish, to do big things and confound the Mighty and the Wise.

Dawson seems to fit all four categories.

And certainly the Age of Modernity, the Age of WWII, was the most hubris-bound age ever ; if any age ever needed confounding it was that one.

Dawson and God and penicillin and 4Fs : it just sounds like a Match made in Heaven to me ....

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.....

UK made sure others died in WWII, rather than her own citizens

More people died in WII than in WWI, but not every combatant nation of WWII suffered worse (or even as badly) as they had in WWI.

The UK was the first in and last out of WWII, the only nation at war continuously the whole world war.

It was a far more deadly war and lasted for the UK, six years rather than four.

Its population during the last war was slightly larger than it was in WWI.

Yet, surprisingly, only about one third as many people died.

Dividing the total number of deaths (divided by the total number of war years) into the total wartime population , I get a figure for what I call the intensity of war deaths, one that is about one fifth as great for WWII as it was for WWI.

(Producing the percentage of total population who died in the war each year ---- admitably a very crude indice ---indicating one person in 200 died each year of WWI, versus one person in 1000 died per year in WWII.)

Put another way, in WWI the UK experienced a lot more total deaths over a slightly smaller population over only two thirds as many years of war.

Put yet another way, I am saying that 60,000 deaths spread over 10 years of war in a population of 250 million people (USA/Vietnam War) feels much less bad than to have a population of 2.5 million experience 800 deaths over a one week period (Israeli Jews/Six Day War).

The number of dead the UK experienced in head to head clashes between the Germany Army and the British Army in North West Europe for one month in 1940 and again for 11 months in 1944-1945, was very tiny set against the total of people dead as result of WWII.

Yet in a way, it was the key death-toll event of the entire war.

Because defeating the German Army upon German soil was the only way to end WWII quickly and at a minimum loss of life upon all sides.

It took six years for the UK to do to the German Army what it should have done in six weeks in 1939.

With Germany out of the war in 1939, Italy and Japan would never have gone on their quests for world wide conquest.

The French and British empires in combination in 1939 had a far far far far larger manpower pool to draw upon that the Germans so any land army war would have gone to the Allies in the end.

But a vast conscripted infantry/artillery-based army of British and Dominion working class enlisted men, in combination with millions of conscripted darkie soldiers from the colonies, all demanding benefits for having saved the Empire, was totally unacceptable to the British elite.

They wanted a war won by a few big very expensive machines, driven by a few well educated middle class very white British men : bombers, battleships and tanks.

In the event, they got their 'middle class war' and lost the support of their Dominions and Colonies in the process : hoisted on their own high tech petards in the end......

If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...

One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?

If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.

But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.

All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.

By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize'  penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.

Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.

For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.

So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.

Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?

Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.

As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.

Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.

Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort  to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.

And we all should be grateful for that....