making sure that Hitler, not Stalin, take ALL the rap for our ills

In terms of the sheer number of murders ordered by both, it is hard to decide who was worst - Hitler or Stain.

But in terms of the popular imagination, as seen exhibited by individuals and the entertainment and news media, it is no contest -- Hitler gets almost all the blame.

Upon Hitler, not Stalin, we have displaced all our guilt for past wrongs the West inflicted on 'Others' in the recent past.

I argue we downplay Stalin because the specific nature of his victims were not replicated among those victimized by the (usually less lethal) violence that all of the West inflicted on Others during the era of Panic Modernity, running roughly between the 1860s and the 1960s.

By contrast, the nature of Hitler's victims, again with our violence usually dialled down a few notches compared to his, were exactly the sort also targeted by the Western democracies.

It is our ghosts, the sins of our grandfathers, that we are attempting to exorcise by displacement, putting all the evil in that era totally onto Hitler and the Nazis.

"He and he alone did all those bad things - never us - we were always and only the good guys during the war - remember ?"

By contrast, Stalin claimed to be the voice of the Russian working class, with his victims mostly from the middle class of Russia. (In fact, he killed many millions for being both middle class and of minority ethnicities such as Ukrainians, Poles and Jews.)

But Hitler proudly claimed his victims/enemies were inferior foreigners and coloreds from outside, uppity women and pansy men, defective unfit individuals, together trade unionists/socialists/communists.

His potently appealing mix of enemies captured all the middle class paranoias --gender, race, class and xenophobia --- that the West's Panic Modernity exhibited in its heyday.

What we can't handle that Panic Modernity represented a relapse, for all of us, in the course of our favourite narrative, the one about the ever upward progress in becoming a nicer gentler humanity, year by year, decade by decade.

In fact, to take but one example, the popular ideal for males in the 1830s was far kinder and gentler than the ideal model for male behavior in the 1930s.

Neither the Left or the Right now wants to admit that we might have gone down the same road as Hitler's Germany if the circumstances had been similar.

After all we, the we old enough to recall something of the war and its immediate aftermath, are talking about the actions and opinions of our own parents and grandparents.

Our genes are their genes.

What in our own past we can't deny and ignore outright, we happily displace onto Hitler and the SS.

Only when time lets us admit that the upward progress of human niceness can in fact have its relapses and wrong turns, will we ever be able to move on...

It wasn't just the Bomb that changed everything in '45

Everyone agrees our world changed fundamentally in 1945, but nobody is exactly sure why.

It should have been the apogee of that era of "pure is simple" modernity. But the 'triumph' of the atomic bomb and the defeat of the Axis felt like ashes in most mouths.
 The big problem was Germany. 

For the civilization supposedly at the very top of the Tree of Life had brought forth only the 'invasion ecology' of Auschwitz : an attempt to gas every last Jewish 'invasive fungus', all to protect the "human ecosystem".

Meanwhile (and ironic, given Hitler's antipathy to 'impure' Manhattan) there a tiny being from the very bottom of the Tree of Life (also a 'fungus') had just bested the top scientists in producing the vital lifesaving Penicillin.

With history's worst evil coming from the very top and history's greatest good from the very bottom, the war flipped the prewar description of the Tree of Life having a civilized top and savage bottom.

Among the baby boomer kids, it all worked to greatly discredited their elders' worldview.  

In 1965, the Boomers birthed a new era of respect for Life's true diversity and complexity. 

Today their "Evolution by Inclusion" joins a much more nuanced take on Darwin's original exclusionary vision of evolution.

Getting pregnant by someone who didn't say they had AIDS --- or Mental Health issues

We are appalled today that anyone would impregnate someone without telling them first that they have AIDS.

The chronic disease AIDS, top scientists tell us, is both highly infectious (a sort of virus-caused 'genetic infection') and in a sense directly inheritable - a disease able to be directly passed on to the newborns of the pregnant woman.

These sort of 'infectious genetic' concerns are hardly new.

Seventy five years ago, top scientists also told us that all sorts of chronic diseases (laziness, lust and epilepsy among the hundreds of them) were both highly infectious and directly inheritable.

An endless number of chronic conditions, even things like alcoholism,criminality and idleness, were supposedly caused by a single dominant gene that was always passed on to the children of the person with those conditions --- through the 'genetic infection' of sexual intercourse.

The fixed assumption that the gene allele of the partner without these chronic conditions would be unable to be the dominant gene allele is another example of hypodescent.

Hypodescent is the belief that children from a mixed marriage between a high status race and a low status race always take on the racial characteristics of the low status race.

Yes, you read correctly : the weaker genes always - always, always, always - easily beats the stronger genes.

As I had said in an earlier post, this is really the erecting of a 'total barrier' taboo, completely designed to prevent people from ever finding out that the 'racial' characteristics of mixed race unions were in a word, mixed rather than exclusively from the lower status race.

Anyway, back then, most educated people believed this guff.

So it was as appalling to most of us then as the AIDS scenario is to us today, that someone would marry without first telling their potential spouse that they suffered from epilepsy.

Before dismissing ordinary people back then as idiots, let us however put the blame where it is most due : on the relatively few scientists who touted this nonsense and on the huge number of scientists who knew better but didn't grass on fellow scientists.

The blue wall of silence ('never grass') exists just as strongly among clinicians and chemists as it does among cops and crooks....

It was rational for the very Powerful to fear the very Weak, if weakness (degeneracy) was indeed infectious and then inheritable ...

If your basic (often unconscious) assumptions are plum-dead crazy, as they usually were during the 1860s-1960s era of Panic Modernity, it matters not how logical and rational your subsequence arguments are.
This was definitely the case with the way Modernity thought about contact with people who had physical, mental or moral weaknesses.

There is no evidence that your daughter marrying a man who had Rheumatic Fever as a child lead inevitably to her children receiving his 'gene' for rheumatic fever.

In any case, the ill effects of this particular once very common disease could always be greatly reduced and the disease is now so successfully preventable as to be almost unknown to current generations of parents --- there is nothing truly 'infectious' or 'inevitable' about it.

Only a tiny (but definite) contribution from one's genes helps bring on Rheumatic Fever - it is mostly a disease caused by overcrowded and ill-ventilated homes and then poor medical followup, both the result of poverty and prejudice against minorities and immigrants.

But Modernity was an era when most people actually thought a grandparent who started into drinking too much would pass his resulting alcoholism on to his kids and their kids --- so marrying an alcoholic's kid was seen as a personal disaster and a disaster for the nation and race.

TB, mental illness, criminality, laziness, free and easy female sexuality, along with an ever growing list of chronic and congenital illnesses, were seen as inevitably inheritable.

Worse : all these people who were seen as inevitably and permanently defective, unfit, degenerative ---- unable to really do useful work or fight in a war --- were still seen as able (thanks to the power of romantic love) to steal the bride/groom intended for your loutish ultra-fit children and then proceed to breed lots of new degenerate offspring, like defective rabbits.

Love - romantic love - led to sexual intercourse between the unfit and fit, which was really a 'genetic infection' and thus led to race suicide

The only weak people the powerful of Modernity didn't fear were those who were certifiably unable to conceive children - those unable to 'genetically infect' the strong - those who had been sterilized by a doctor. 

The important thing to realize is that the strong feared the weak more than they fear other strong people, because they saw the weak has having a "weakness" that was both inevitably successfully infectious (rather like a germ-borne disease) and inevitably inheritable (based on the overly simple - and simply untrue - picture of genetic inheritance still taught to all school kids).

It was a story that always played out as a one-way downhill contest : the mildest of weakness genes would inevitably beat out even the strongest of strong genes.

(Recall the widely held beliefs that even a one time one drop of negro or jewish blood would be enough to ruin the strongest of Aryan families forever on into eternity.)

One sees here the perhaps half unconscious creation of a 'total exclusion' taboo, really designed to ensure that no child never ever ever tries out marrying a Jew or Black , only to find out that the world didn't suddenly end in blood and fire, as their parents had always warned.

The danger with this sort of total exclusion taboo barrier is - as always - that even one exposure of a parents' cry of 'wolf' as being a total lie can lead to a equally total rejection of all those parents' values.

I believe an example of this happened, just after WWII.

Boomer kids, such as myself, soon learned that the previously much hated 'parasite' fungus produced the wonderful lifesaver penicillin while the previously much honored chemists of Germany produced only Auschwitz's horrific killer Zyklon B...

Teddy Roosevelt : 4F &1A, fit and unfit, defective, degenerate --- and heroic

When Theodore Roosevelt was a young adult, he was told by his doctors that because of his many serious chronic diseases, he should take up a soft indoor occupation if he wished a normal lifespan.

Instead, Teddy self-consciously took up his famous 'vigorous life'.

(However, partly due to his excessive vigour, he in the end only lived to age sixty, which he might also have reached if he had taken up the soft life !)

He lived in an age when most scientists considered that humans had a very, very, limited ability to alter the health their genome gave them at birth ------ except to drive it downhill and then inevitably pass that bad health on to their descendants.


As such, he should have been written off from childhood as defective, degenerative, unfit, 4F.

If he was born poor, black or foreign, he probably would have been --- but he was born instead into one of the most famous of old families and wanted for little all his life - good health aside.

So Teddy got to display the incredible plasticity that lifeforms are truly capable of, when driven hard enough by sheer need and strong will.

Roosevelt was the US president during the formative years of Canadian-born Martin Henry Dawson and I often wonder whether his very well known story influenced Dawson's contrary attitude to his chronically ill charges written off by most of the world.

My 'wonder' matters because however it was formed, the dying Dr Dawson's unwillingness to let other chronically ill die by government benign neglect during WWII kickstarted the systemic use of naturally-made penicillin and thus made life better for ten billion of us (and counting) ever since October 1940....

Racial purity hedges assets, Racial diversity hedges risks

The two geographies of pure Auschwitz and impure Manhattan (those opposing antidotes to each other) nevertheless shared the concept of 'hedging', in its metaphorical sense.

Modernity re-invented nations away from being historically based on a common voluntary citizenship among a diversity of languages and ethnicities and religions.

Now they were to become entities striving to become ever more biologically pure as race-nations, based on the supposedly common genetic origins of the majority group religious-language-ethnicity within them.

Now you were to either be born a citizen-for-life (your choice removed) based on your putative ethnicity or never-can-be-a-citizen (again your choice removed) based upon your putative ethnicity.

The main way all nations adopting this scheme used to become ever more racially pure was a migration control 'hedge' around the national borders : let no foreigners in as citizens and 'ethnic cleanse' internal minorities out, never more to return, by denying them all sorts of civil rights, such as access to jobs and education.

Ultimately, this led to the ultimate means to purify a biological nation : killing centres like Aktion T4's Grafeneck and the Holocaust's Auschwitz to remove defectives from the majority ethnicity and then go after minority populations, seen as all defective.

This hedge shielded what the promoters considered their nation's best asset : its original majority ethnic group, no longer to be diluted by in-migration of strangers (and often, not to be diluted by out-migration of the majority group membership, which was made as difficult as politically possible.)

Negative eugenics having eliminated much of the unwanted impurities, positive eugenic measures like state support for mothers and children of the majority group further protected the main asset.

It was K-selection among the human nations : deliberately work to drain your gene pool, put all your eggs in one basket, bet the farm on carefully raising a relatively restricted number of offspring as best you can.

Microbes don't operate this way and neither does impure Manhattan, the original home of human diversity.

Because instead of hedging assets, they hedge bets/risks.

Striving to survive and flourish in a complex and dynamically changing environment, they choose to spread their risks by containing within a wide number of different phenotypes, all in the expectation that at any given moment, a few types among many will be ideally suited to surmount current difficulties and seize any current opportunities.

These r-selected nations (or microbe species) take all the risks that they collectively expect to face over time and space and 'hedge off' (limit the damage of) each individual risk by coming up with a phenotype that may be inefficient most of the time but when this particular risk arises, they excel in efficiently surmounting it and even taking advantage of it as an opportunity, not a danger.

To surmount as many unknown future risks as possible, they eagerly seek in advance of any such threats to fill, not drain, their gene pool.

I argue that based on the historical facts, K-selection like pure Auschwitz is not successful in the long run, while r-selection like impure Manhattan, is.

History shows that the r-selected family of life par excellence, the microbes, surviving all that reality can throw at them, for almost four billion years.

The K-selected lifeforms often do very well, for a time, but then are usually quickly killed off whenever a big asteroid drops by for a visit.

Martin Bader was 39 when he died, a skilled craftsman (master shoemaker) with much street smarts --- and with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic, murdered by the Nazis at Grafeneck's industrially organized death factory.

Charles Aronson was also 39 when he died, also a skilled craftsman (holding a demanding teletype operator's job at the world's largest newspaper and news agency flagship) with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic.

But his life was prolonged, as long as possible, by a doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) who literally gave up his own life to see that life's useful variations, called 'defectives' by the middle class intellectuals of Modernity, enjoyed as much out of life as possible.

In Charles' case, Dawson kickstarted the stalled systemic impure penicillin project and in so doing so, also made life better for ten billion and counting of us since 1940 ....

Henry Dawson reviews the microbial evidence that 'out in Nature' defectives quickly die out and finds it faulty, with gratifying results for all humanity

One of the most popular bromides among penny-pinching middle class intellectuals of the era of Panic Modernity (circa 1860s to the 1960s) was that without humanity's regrettable humanitarian social safety net, human 'defectives' would quick die out, as always happens 'out there' with Nature's defectives.

Dr Henry Dawson, born in 1896, had imbibed this certitude growing up but from his earliest days of independent scientific research he seemed to have doubted its validity.

Instead, he chose to focus on closely studying microbial 'defectives' and both studying and trying to help human 'defectives'.

And ten billion of us (and counting) since 1940 have had better lives because he choose to do so.

When questioned why harsh Evolution hadn't already weeded out all the defectives among homo sapiens during the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years before the modern social safety net emerged, Darwin's bulldogs pointed out that Evolution worked very gradually and the numbers of individuals in the human species until quite recently was very low indicated that earlier, most defectives had indeed failed to reproduce.

But Dawson's lifelong fascination with microbial variation was really a study of surviving minority mutations, among wild populations that had been around for billions of years, and in numbers of actual defective individuals easily approached hundreds of thousands of billions of individuals.

Thus the maxim that 'Nature abhors Defectives' was hardly born out in the case of the microbes.

Evolution had greatly favoured the microbes over all other types of lifeforms as they survived all the 'die offs' that had continually wiped out almost all life over the four billion years of life on Earth.

Could the great width and depth of genetic diversity in the collective microbial gene pool have actually helped, rather than hurt, microbial survival in tough times ?

Consider that the relatively few individuals among the penicillium molds who actually produce penicillin in appreciable amounts are clearly 'defectives' in every sense of the word.

Secondary metabolites, biological products made that don't directly contribute to ongoing existence or reproduction, such as penicillin, are always an inefficient waste of scarce resources needed for basic survival.

Any individual that makes them instead of devoting all the raw resources consumed in doing so towards reproduction is thus usually going to dwindle in numbers among the wild population and thus usually become a minority.

But when times suddenly become tough and bacterial competitors edge in to eat the scarce bits of food the penicillium molds need for basic survival, those few mold individuals exuding deadly bacteria-killing penicillin suddenly have at better, not worse, chances to survive and reproduce.

Deadly ?? Did I say deadly ?? Because, as Dawson's lab first demonstrated, actually penicillin is a highly selective killer - only killing rapidly reproducing bacteria - which are ipso facto, the biggest competitors to starving molds.

Thanks to them, the overall penicillium mold species thus never totally die out.

But when abundant food returns, the metabolical extra drag of producing penicillin instead of more mold 'babies', again makes the penicillin-producing penicillium molds a minority again.

At least until the next crisis.

Another example --- again first demonstrated in Dawson's lab --- some defectives in the bacteria clan opposing the penicillium molds, also ensure the bacteria's survival when crisis - a stiff dose of penicillin - hits.

These defectives, the 'inverts' of the microbial world, perversely fail to fully honor God's command to go forth and multiply - rarely and very slowly reproducing.

Thus they remain a tiny minority in any wild population, less than 1%.

But why do they, the 'persisters' survive at all ?

Because when penicillin hits, it kills all the normal bacteria happily reproducing and only these few persisters survive to live another day.

When the penicillin treatment is over, they begin to reproduce - slowly - again and the disease reemerges.

The classic example is SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis, the hitherto invariably fatal heart disease that Dawson gave his life to cure.

As the word 'sub acute' suggests, this disease is hardly a raging killer, but kill it did, in 100% of all cases, by being slow but steady - by being persistent, thanks to persisters.

The few persisters hiding out in the biofilm attached to our vital and delicate heart valves always remerged to give the disease another bite at the apple - and another and another.

Only a long hard course of penicillin finally got all the persisters - because like them, the dying Dawson was equally a persister.

Now on a more personal note, some of my in-laws have too much iron in their blood and need to have it removed periodically to survive a healthy long life.

'Defectives'.

Yes, 'out there' in Nature, they would indeed die sooner than others - though they had already successfully reproduced two children before the disease was detected, a hint that many defectives from all species do survive long enough to do so.

Other in-laws have too much iron in their blood, but not enough to need treatment to survive a full life.

Tendencies to have retain too much iron from our diet only hurt us when we have too much (iron-bearing) food but when we have too little food and little of that meagre amount has much iron, it helps ensure survival.

Another example, again personal, I have another 'defective' relative, one prone to get genetic-related childhood leukemia.

Now our extensive social safety net in fact does not 'simply keep her alive, sucking off the public tit'.

The disease until recently was fatal, net or not.

But some scientists and doctors, like Henry Dawson a half century earlier, denied the nihilistic conclusions that all defectives should be simply left to die, as out in Nature, and worked hard to find a cure instead.

Now she will grow up, work and pay taxes, maybe even find a cure for some other hitherto fatal disease.

'Defectives' broaden, deepen, strengthen the ultimate human social safety net : the human gene pool.

Pro-Brexit voters should have known that helping political firemen to put out the UK's economic fires was never going to start by their referendum decision to 'drain' the UK gene pool, by clamping down hard on letting in any strange new immigrants.

Because weird immigrants, like weird defectives, bring us the totally new ways that we sometimes need to survive a totally new crisis .....

Henry Dawson's microbial complexity --- vs civilized simplicity

Whenever I tell someone that my book in set during WWII and contrasts microbial intelligence versus civilized stupidity, this often quickly leads to an argument over whether anyone but humans can show true intelligence.

(I suppose this is progress, of a sort - we are long past people claiming that only middle class protestant white males are capable of exhibiting true intelligence.)

But as a consequence, I am recasting my book's main theme as the contrast between 'microbial complexity' and 'civilized simplicity'.
People are now quite willing to grant microbes complex behavior, based I suppose on constant news reports of wily microbes quickly rendering the best of humanity's new medicines useless.

But now the questions shifts to how dare I claim that advanced civilizations are 'simple', when really they are the most complex ?

I try to explain that while microbes and humans (and indeed all of life and reality) are of course incredibly complex, western civilization, particularly between the 1860s and 1960s, quite deliberately chose to believe that the underlying core of reality was quite simple and that western civilization alone was creatively complex - and further, chose to act as if that belief had been confirmed.

I go on to explain that while science's technological probes (newer more sensitive instruments) tends to reveal an ever more complex Reality, the theoretical thrust of Science continues to claim that there is a much simpler reality, hidden somewhere underneath all that surface complexity.

This has been a claim of Natural Philosophy/Pure Science for thousands of years and far from being proved up, has been constantly refuted, but as an article of faith rather than facts, the scientists holding it are completely unbowed.

Hard 'reductionism', basically the claim that the scaled up behavior of incredibly tiny sub atomic particles is all that is needed to explain the behavior of entire vast Universes, is a good shorthand for this vision of reality.

In practical terms, it is the firm belief that the highly simplified explanations of reality produced by lab experiments that deliberately leave out most of the real world's messy variables and unknowns, while only a fuzzy approximation to reality, are both 'good enough' and yet somehow superior to messy reality, particularly being so simple to follow.

In the particular case of my book, I argue that the simple-preferring scientism of the era of Modernity (1865-1965 approximately) was the unconscious reaction by the western middle class against the unexpectedly complex consequences of the processes of modernization, a process that they themselves had set in motion.

Modernity, in particular, deliberately cast out as much evilness as possible from advanced western civilization and attached it instead to the lowest, smallest, weakest, oldest (and supposedly simplest) forms of life.

Meanwhile advanced western civilizations, at the very top of the hierarchy of Life, was supposed to hold all the morality and all the creative complexity.

I argue that the real objective of the separating all Life into two opposing extremes of the white hats versus the black hats, was to smear by implication all of humanity just below the most 'advanced' civilizations.

Dawson, by contrast, in effect credited all lifeforms (microbes and 4Fs humans, as well as 1A humans) with having various forms of complexity (intelligence), in a horizontal based vision of Life and that all this complexity refuted the simple model of reality held by faith by middle class Modernity.

This viewpoint decidedly clashed with Modernity's claim that the earliest smallest lifeforms had almost no complexities and that rising in a strictly vertical hierarchy of Life, most lifeforms and most races of Humanity had very few complexities, until we come to the European white race....

Eugenics' individuals can be measured but Racism's 'human germs' can not --- and that was its appeal to Modernity

Try to imagine this sentence - even once - ever being written or spoken out loud :

"It is an indisputable fact that any white with an IQ of 80 is in intellectually far superior to any black with an IQ of 140."

Highly specific small entities like a particular individual can be measured, more or less accurately, but a vast entity like a 'race' with fluid ill-defined and hotly contested boundaries can never be.

Eugenics' problem for Modernity was that it was a science, all about fussily precise measurements which usually didn't reveal what its promotors (and people like Hitler) wanted to hear .

By contrast, Racism was pure poetry, all about vague metaphors, and so was custom made for Hitler's well-tuned rhetorical skills...

Brexit unites Left and Right in their mutual dislike of the Poles : rather like August 23rd 1939 in fact

The poor old Poles get it in the neck, again.

The Brexit question eventually turned over multi-partisan fears of unlimited numbers of immigrants wanting to come and live in Britain.

(Apparently being a nation extremely popular with foreigners seeking to migrate is a very bad thing --- while being a nation no foreigner ever wants to migrate, like ISIS or North Korea, is a very good thing !)

And whenever the question of immigrants to the UK arises, dire urban legends of the problems created when male Poles construction workers 'moved in next door' is sure to come up.

Left wingers in the rustbelt North of England and right wingers in stockbroker South rarely agree on anything, but Polish migrants are an apparent exception.

It all reminds one -  at least, it all should remind one - of August 23rd 1939, when BFF Molotov and Ribbentrop bonded over their mutual dislike of the Poles...

WASPs are always ex-pats and never 'illegals' while darkies are always immigrants and 'illegals'

left and right media agree on at least one thing --- their subtle racism

The far right mainstream media in the UK were oh so careful to portray a WASP terrorist who recently killed a Labor MP as a gentle soul who did the gardens of his elderly neighbours (who are all voting to Brexit).

They deliberately left out the fact that the man was also a member of both British and American (quasi nazi) racist organizations.

I doubt this would have happened if he had been a British born Moslem --- their kid glove treatment of this WASP killer was pure racism.

To their considerable credit, at least they put this terrorist and his successful effort to kill MP Jo Cox into their news columns.

In America by contrast, the mainstream press (both left and right) conspired together to barely mention that an illegal British immigrant (sorry, ex-pat) had for over a year planned to murder Donald Trump and recently finally attempted to do so.

Would they have downplayed this story, if the would-be murderer had entered the country illegally from a non-white country?

I doubt it.

In Canada last night the CBC TV's The National, usually seen as moderately left wing, was equally guilty of this sort of subtle racism --- referring, as always, to British immigrants as ex-pats in a story about the Brexit vote - while they always refer to the Syrians coming to live in Canada as immigrants.

I plan to file a complaint with the CBC but in my experience they give you an official-seeming long file number and then never call you again.....

shelter of a universally-superior English 'race' first rate idea to third rate Englishmen who would otherwise lose out if evolution pitted individuals against each other

Darwin and his cousin Galton, founder of Eugenics, saw evolution primarily as involving a competition between individuals within a species sharing the same environment in the same geographic space.

Not as a competition between species (or sub-species) occupying different environments in different geographic spaces.

"In Evolution, all the Apples don't compete with all the Oranges."

Bad news then for most of us, who could be described as second and third rate and thus certain losers if Darwin, Galton and all the eugenists are actually right.

That is why the far more popular idea - particularly among the second and third rate (aka Trump and Brexit voters) - was that the very worst of an entire superior race was far far better than the very best of an entire inferior race.

Thus was the (1865-1965) Era of Modernity based upon an entirely new theory of racism.

'The races' were now redefined from the original four, based largely on the color of skin, to about four hundred races based on every sort imaginable of major or minor ethnicity, religion and would be nation.

But since the Era of Modernity had already proven (at least to itself) that God's Providence, along with the magic of the Devil and witches didn't exist, it was hard to then account for the existence of evil and bad times in this Modernity world.

Sir Charles Lyell had also 'proven' that global catastrophes couldn't exist and the repeating rifle and Koch's serums and vaccines were already rapidly removing tigers and tetanus from the lists of evil.

But it was dangerous, as all second/third raters and bullies know, to blame equal sized rival superior races for evil --- much safer then to scapegoat a weak 'race' for all of your problems.

But if you are so obviously superior and they so obviously inferior how could they pose a realistic threat ?

Enter human Germ theory : invisible, weak, innumerable, these germ-like inferior races threaten to defeat superior races by a plague of un-sporting-like sly, sneaky, stealth.

The Race Card is still around, always will be around

Every generation is going to throw up second and third rate children from families, classes, ethnicities, religions, nations, races seen by themselves at least as clearly superior to others.

When, therefore hard-working talented individuals from the 'lesser' groups succeed well beyond the level of these third raters from the supposedly superior groups, the third raters are always going to need to seek weaker 'others' as scapegoats for their own personal failure and then try to play the race card and purity card.

And vote for Trump and vote for Brexit....

nothing is, has, or will be pure : no man is an island - no island is an island

Pollsters given edge in today's vote on Britain's future to Isolationists, Appeasers ---and the 'pure' delusions of Auschwitz...

The same sort of people - in some cases, the very same people - who let Hitler roll all over Europe while they repeated their dismissive mantra that 'the Wogs start at Calais' - are at it again.

Supposedly its a vote among all the residents of the UK but headlines in the right wing Leave newspapers are all about 'England, England, England'.

Heavens know what their many UK readers outside of England make of this distain of not just Europe's wogs, but of the English internal empire's very own 'wogs' : the conquered Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, the Manx etc.

We do know how most these internal wogs are voting -- and now why.

For most, remaining in the EU's multi-national home is safer for their small minority than entrusting in an isolated and chauvinistic England's traditional hardly-tender mercies.

But if you are a wavering non-wog-hating voter in England today, please vote to stay : for no man and no island is ever an island, nothing is ever pure, everything and everybody is always impure and interconnected....

surely everything that Humanity, a mere animal of Nature, does is natural

It was the hallmark of the non-God-fearing members of Panic Modernity (1865-1965) to believe that (a) 'Man' was but an animal of Nature and yet (b) almost everything that 'Man' did was not natural.

Even while the God-fearing members of that era persisted in believing that humanity were not mere animals, they were at least consistent in also denying that anything humanity did was 'natural a la Nature'.

So, back to the no-God-fearers : to them, if the beaver-the-animal built a big lodge for its family that was natural ---- but if humanity-the-animal built a big lodge for its elderly members that was un-natural.

And humanity putting its elderly in comfy lodges was not natural but humanity putting its elderly at the chilly edge of the snowy woods was natural.

Even when the highly natural fox, bear and beaver all put their elderly in comfy cosy lodging when winter approached.

Their ideas seems incredibly daft - and if they had ever actually been carried, they would have been incredibly daft.

But in practise, the only elderly ever put out to die at the snowy edge of the deep dark woods, a la Nature red in tooth and claw, were the poor whose publicly-funded institutional care the well-to-do objected to paying for.

So if a poor German family could somehow afford to keep old granny alive at home, on their own meagre tick, even the most vicious WWII SS members weren't about to break the door down and haul her off to the gas chambers.

Its only a glancing blow,then, to condemn Hitler and all the rest of middle class Panic Modernity for being incredibly heartless and cruel.

A more accurate and devastating blow is to dismiss them as just a small-minded bunch of penny-pinching bastards, rather like some of our councillors at most town halls even today ...

we have never been Eugenicists

Have we been collectively guilt at taking the eugenicists at their word ---- and not their deed ? Have we offered up to each other the wrong explanations for WWII's horrors ?
Eugenic theory always claimed it was a highly precise science.

A science that set its goal as accurately detecting those individuals in a particular 'population' who are (a) more than ordinary biologically fit or (b) those more than ordinarily biologically unfit and encouraging more children from the former and discouraging less children from the latter.

But in practise, and in every single nation, eugenicists were never willing to legally encourage a 'biologically superior' working class individual from a population's minority ethnic and religious groups to marry into that population's majority ethnic and religious group ruling class.

Nor were eugenicists ever eager to legally prevent a 'biologically unfit' member of that ruling class from marrying whoever they choose.

In practise it was, a group, not individuals, were denied the legal freedom to marry or to live : the powerless group.

Usually powerless meant simply being poor but sometimes it was extended to even some of the middle class, if they were members of the most despised minority ethnic and religious groups.

In practise, Eugenics might be more accurately described as a common variant of xenophobia ---- and always an example of Human Germ Theory.

And described even more accurately, depending on its actions at various places and various times, as a variant of racism, nationalism, nativism, classism, prejudice against women, as a long term attempt at geographic ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was not involved in every form of xenophobia or we would find that tiny 1920s Estonia preferentially sterilizing the poorer members of its Russian minority.

I don't think we'd ever find that solution carried out --- not in Estonia or in any similar situation.

The Estonians did greatly fear the Russina 'other' living right next door, but with the Estonians being a hundred times smaller in military power than the USSR, they were unlikely to do too much to rouse their Russian neighbour.

No, I think we will find that 'practical' Eugenics was always directed against picking on weak, not strong, minority 'others'.

Thus America could safely picked on its black minority, eugenically, knowing that the world's other black populations won't intervene, being both far too weak militarily compared to the USA and far too distant.

No, I believe that we can see that Human Germ Theory always lurking behind supposed Eugenics, because practised Eugenics' most characteristic emphasis is on preferring 'racial purity' over 'national/population biological fitness'.

All eugenicists always preferred the inbreed (purified gene pool) genetic depression of ethnic racial purity over the biological fit and vigour produced in a population that breed from a much larger - impure - gene pool.

In every nation from the 1890s to the 1940s, ensuring racial purity (via by tough immigration barriers and strict miscegenation ('one drop') laws) against groups seen as outsiders trying to sneak in or swamp the majority group was always very popular.

Far far more popular than the truly eugenic quest of sterilizing physically, mentally and morally handicapped people from within the majority ethnic/religious group because they were unfit.

This despite the fact that these were the children of poor parents; children judged never able to contribute to the national economy and expensive for the middle class taxpayers to look after.

Fallowing from this, I am prepared to argue that WWII was, above all, 'human germ' warfare.

That is between 1939 to 1945, there was a quiet, very large and persistent war (on both sides, depending on the military theatre) directed against weak, almost invisible 'Human Germs', as well as the more celebrated war against large powerful visible military enemies from each group's own racial grouping.

In the Pacific that Human Germ war was directed against the Japanese and all colored races, by the Americans and all other European whites --- in Eastern Europe that war was directed by the Germans and some members of most other white Europeans against Slavs and Jews....

The NON-thriller literary qualities of extremely 'fixed' Eugenic danger

The book-reading equivalent of watching paint dry is trying to imagine an eugenic thriller based upon a debate among eugenists over when to sterilize a 'defective' child before they can reproduce more 'defectives'.

Sterilize them at birth or age one or age thirteen or even wait till age sixteen ?

Yawn !

Because Eugenics is supposedly about extremely 'fixed' 'unmoving' 'known' hereditary qualities, by definition it is hard to build up a good Moral Panic around it.
Moral Panics need to have a reasonable fear about the seemingly unearthly speed, hiddenness and dynamic fluidity of the social activity it so fears.

But we have all our genes ('defective' or not) from the moment of conception to the moment we dies - so where then is that 'race against time', that much beloved fundamental plot device of the thriller genre ?

Eugenically, proponents of sterilization of the unfit have to admit that it matters not whether the child is 'nipped' at birth or at age thirteen.

But Germ Theory, by contrast, provides a free-floating metaphor from a real world example of a sudden, massive yet invisible and always mutating danger --- a metaphor almost perfectly designed to feed intense Moral Panics.

For nothing is both sudden, massive and yet invisible than a (Germ Theory) pandemic like Europe's Black Death or the global Spanish Flu.

To then say that a Jewish 'bankster' virus has invaded the German soul or that a secret Yellow Peril/Red Commie/Black Power/Brown Wetback plague is ready to take over the American government then has an immediate surface credibility....

'conspiracy of infectious invasive (germ like) miscegenation weakens the eugenics of the racial germline' Phew !

When scientists and medical doctors talk of germ cells, what do they mean ?

Are they talking about infectious bacteria germ cells or are they describing the human egg and sperm that contain the human germ line ?

Obviously they are talking about both.

The root of the word "germ" has a variety of meanings and perhaps surprising to most of us, that meaning for thousands of years was a highly positive one.

In fact, at a time when most people met the Spring sun basically near starving, perhaps the most hopefully positive word in the whole human lexicon.

The word originated in the Latin term for germination and then starting in the 1600s, the shorter word 'germ' came to mean those wonderful little green buds and shoots that meant a new generation of a plant (aka "food") were on their way.

Late in 19th century, this sense of the word was extended to the small number of cells of a multi-celled being that uniquely held its genetic material needed for the germination of new life.

The few (but very precious) germ cells versus the much larger number of somatic cells that ('just') made up the physically active part of that being.

It thus had a meaning close to kernel, core, seed, essence, saving remnant.

Think of the future disaster implied when a people are forced to eat their 'seed crop', just to ensure immediate survival.

Then, also late in the 19th century, people were very surprised to learn that the originating 'germ' of massive body-wide serious disease was found to be the invisibly tiny (seed-like) microbe.

Think of the well known Bible parable of the incredibly small mustard seed, so tiny yet soon growing into a giant tree to see how the common meaning behind both uses of the term "germ" is basically the paradox of 'from incredibly tiny and weak into big and strong'.

This paradox, I propose, allows me to logically connect the moral panics that surrounded late 19th century Germ Theory and late 19th century Germ Line Theory, panics actually arising from the unconscious reaction against the unexpected and unintended consequences of the late 19th century modernization process ----- by the people most responsible for inventing and distributing that modernization process.

Its obviously a very big subject but let me leave you with this real life example of the two moral panics co-mingling (and isn't that in itself an ironic image ?!)

In the 1920s, the British public was half convinced that there was a secret Chinese conspiracy to take revenge on the British introduction of Opium into China by introducing opium (and worse) back into the British elite in the very heart of the British Empire , the London society set.

The belles of that particular ball, in an opium-induced dream like state, would then have kinky sex with large 'limbed' colored men and produce their mongrel spawn, instead of producing the empire's future colonial administrators, thus directly threatening the postwar Eugenics Project.

It remained credible to many that the large population of the badly divided Chinese nation, so apparently weak in the 1920s, could pull this coup off against the world's largest and most advanced civilization because, after all, the weak but many germs, microbes, could do the same against the advanced state of current British science and medicine.

And in the other sense of germ, germ line, the sex act is always highly invasive, penetrative, rather like the common and incorrect understanding of how germs invade humans.

Couple that thought (!) with the view of miscegenation as a literal infection rotting the race and weakening the pure white germ line.

Now Eugenics is usually promoted as being a way for 'us' to promote an increase in 'our' good genes and reduce the number of 'our' bad genes, to maintain and improve 'our' race.

In theory, this "us"-orientation of Eugenics leaves no room for concerns about "them".

But of course "our" bad genes need not just come into our racial germ line from defective degenerate members of "our" race.

Miscegenation leads to "bad" black genes being intimately mingled with the "good" white genes (they wear tall stetson hats so we can tell them apart) --- the 'one drop of blood' legal theory is thus considered to have emerged from eugenic theory rather than germ theory, but I argue the two co-mingle on this point with much of eugenic practise really being 'human germ' theory in guise...

Time to replace Eugenics with Germ Theory as the guiding metaphor of Modernity ?

None hated and feared progress more than Progressives - just as none hated modernization more than Modernists.

But if that hatred of and progress and modernization was the real reason for the birth of 'Modernity' and 'Progress', their avid proponents dared not say so.

They loved the direct -intended- consequences of all these new inventions and technologies, invented by themselves, so why not ?, but just couldn't handle what happened when their Genie slipped away from the Bottle.
So instead they picked a suitable-seeming metaphor, a similar seeming circumstance, as the stand-in scapegoat for their fear and revulsion against the inchoate spread of modernization.

Now unfortunately for the paranoid mind, modernization was not the self conscious actions of a global group of conspirators organized on a ideological, religious or ethnic basis.

Rather it was just the 'felt effect' of the sum ("the web") of a whole variety of the unintended consequences, all resulting from a sudden multitude of important inventions in technology and instrumentation that began occurring more and more rapidly, beginning in the 1870s.

Those consequences tended feed back into themselves and the other inventions, cross-talking and re-enforcing each other and so multiplied forth yet more unintended consequences.

It wasn't really each new invention that they opposed, on its own.

In fact, everybody tended to praise each additional new invention to the hilt.

But taken together, the results flowing from all these inventions seemed to produce an incredibly powerful dissolvent of long standing cultural certitudes.

Let us start with the key inventions, the ones in transportation and communications, to seek the nature of this cultural dissolvent.

Steam steel ships (together with improvements in shipboard safety, port facilities, rail connections,navigation aids and weather reporting, refrigeration, telegraphy and radio telegraphy) made the transportation and communication of people, material and ideas across oceans, continents & national lines much much faster, cheaper and safer than ever before.

Again the invention and improvement of the telegraph, railways, postal systems, steam printing presses, linotype machines, cheap abundant wood pulp paper, all worked to spread those ideas and life-like images (after photographic halftones and motion films were perfected) more rapidly and cheaply than ever before - not just between hitherto relatively sealed off nations, but to the furtherest corners of those nations.

The overall metaphor for modernization among those who hate and fear it might then be words 'dissolve', 'flood', 'invisibly seep', 'ubiquitous'.

Its effects are such as to intermix hitherto separate things together --- as if to turn hitherto pure dry soil and pure wet water into dirty, jelly-like mud.

It renders the pure into the heterogeneous - it renders the simple into the complex, into the flowing, the dynamic, the hybrid.

Perhaps a quarter to a third of us definitely likes lots of variety, diversity, change, flux but the other two thirds of us finds it only makes them mentally tired, frazzled and fearful.

Most all of us can tolerate - as opposed to love or hate - a fifty-fifty mix of brain-dumbing stability and fear-rousing instability.

By these lights, starting in the 1880s, the paranoid style of Modernity had a built-in permanent majority as that balance seemed to tilt suddenly well over into the dynamic new category.

'Stability' often just means borders, filters and walls : it half heartedly admits new things actually do exist, but uses some form of physical, legal and social barrier to avoid having to suddenly meet all these new people, new languages, new smells, new tasters, new colours, new textures, new ideas.

'New people' didn't just mean immigrants from distant lands either --- it meant suddenly having to share political, economic and cultural power with women, the working class or ethnic minorities from just down your street.

What made modernization so awkward to combat was that there wasn't actually any real organization promoting it openly and overtly.

It was thus not at all like the movements of Islam or evangelical Protestantism, western imperialism, liberalism, communism or socialism, anarchism.

Most people just left it at that.

But others, the paranoids among us, just felt there had to be invisible covert conspiracies pushing it --- and winning more often than not.

Now, previous to the 1880s, these thoughts would have been dismissed - in today's lingo - as those of out-to-lunch loonies with paranoid conspiracy complexes.

But the sudden acceptance of Germ Theory in that same decade bears serious examining.

There was long plenty of easy to find evidence linking microbes to disease but the scientific and general community declined to accept that evidence -----until a need arose for an apt metaphor/explanation for modernization.

Germ Theory was significantly different from the earlier Miasma Theory (bad smells) though both said that the plagues that destroyed even the strongest biggest most advanced ancient civilizations had come from tiny invisible ubiquitous particles.

Germ were different in being equally ubiquitous, invisible, small, weak, stupid but also 'alive' - they had 'agency'.

One can call a human scapegoat 'a bad smell' but it doesn't really have any impact - humans are alive and have agency, free will, can break laws --- but bad smells and rocks can't --- they can't really be condemned from pulpits or tried in court for 'breaking the law'.

Tiny, weak, stupid germs were granted, by scientists, just enough agency to be pure evil predators (well they did cause pandemics that killed tens of millions did they not  --- when did human evildoers ever do that much ?, said the 19th century.)

Now to call people of one ethnicity or social group a 'fungus, 'bacteria', 'plague' or  'disease' had a real sting - it said they were pure evil predators.

Weak, small, invisible,ubiquitous, all powerful - germs seemed a potent paradox to the teenagers of the Edwardian Age (the adult malefactors of WWII).

This admittedly was because the media popularization of Germ Theory decidedly oversold the argument - a chronic sin of too-generalist, jack & jills of all trades but masters of none journalists.

Germs simply weren't all that powerful - not even the worst ever pandemic in human history, the globe-wide Spanish Flu of 1917-1919 ever killed more than a few percent of the people infected.

But a headline like "98% survive flu attack" didn't sell newspapers --- and still doesn't.

These facts were ignored because beings that are both all powerful and tiny/weak and invisible and ubiquitous are such a wonderful metaphor for feeding unbridled paranoia.

Unconverted to Christianity Jews only a tiny 1% of the German population ( small), denied access to many economic and social activities (weak) really run the government cabinet and boardrooms of the biggest corporations.

'But they're not represented in either place, at all' --- 'that's because they're invisible,silly, just like microbes'.

Yes, they're everywhere and do their evil invisibly, all sneaky-like, eyes down sly: you can see how they converted to Christianity many centuries ago, just awaiting for their chance to final destroy the German Volk from within.

The process of modernization is all powerful, ubiquitous and invisible but it has no agency, no one (or everyone) is to blame for its successful penetration into any single society on earth, from the largest and most advance to the smallest and simplest.

Germ Theory is its closest equivalent in the real world.

This led to organized efforts to blame modernization effects as being 'caused' by the germ-like (in their moral behavior) scapegoats : Negroes, (Jews), (Chinese) by most the Americans, (Germans), (Japanese) of the Era of Modernity.

While Germany lynched six million Jews, America only lynched one - while America lynched five thousand blacks (and perhaps another five thousand through quasi-legal lynchings), Hitler did not systemically execute the mixed race black kids of the Ruhr and Hamburg.

Obviously there was nothing in the behavior of either ethnicity to make them universal scapegoats - each nation selected its victim based purely on local whim.

In 1933, the year Hitler came to power and began his reign of terror, the northern California mass media, together with most of the legal authorities, including the governor and the FBI, orchestrated a publicly broadcasted (newsreel and radio) lynching (of two white men), that was never equalled by even the worst of the Nazi mass killings orchestrated before the public in Eastern Europe.

Murderous Modernity

Democracy or dictatorship, Murderous Modernity didn't seem to care.

Mass (and massively sadistic) lynchings of ordinary black American families watched by huge crowds of ordinary white American families, the mass shootings of entire Jewish families by ordinary Germans, the mass and massively sadistic rapes and killings of ordinary Chinese families by ordinary Japanese soldiers ---- these are what really need explaining by something stronger than appeals to Eugenics Theory.

Eugenics in its theory used gene talk not germ talk and in its practises tended to actually sterilize only a tiny fraction of one percent of each national population in its most negative aspects and promote beautiful healthy babies in its most positive aspects.

Even Aktion T4, the  Nazi attempt to kill off of Germany's Aryan 'unfit' ceased (officially) when the German population indicated strongly that it didn't want its feeble grandparents killed.

Others' grandparents ? No problem and so the plan moved onto Jewish and Roma grandparents instead.

Killing of the innocence only worked if they had been confirmed first to the 'other', and you couldn't get any more other than the germ.

Genetics, as Darwin saw it (though Dawson's HGT disproved him), was the very opposite of infectious and invasive --- totally fixed --- unless you count miscegenation as an infection - some did, but it was a real metaphoric stretch.

Inflexible genetics was thus used to define modern 'ethnic' nationalism, to act as a firm bulwark against fluid modernization's sneaky invasive methods.

Jews were to be all murdered, like the smallpox virus, not because they were a genetic threat to Germans but rather an infectious moral threat to the German soul....

Preferring to inject pure patented synthetic penicillin into patients, medical community dismissed Dawson's natural penicillin as 'impure Manhattan' like it was a low grade of caribbean raw sugar

Unconsciously perhaps, the wartime  medical community seemed to have adopted the floor level lingo of the global sugar market to describe their vision of the sort of penicillin suitable (or not) to inject into the bloodstreams of patients dying for lack of it.

Their vision of the perfect penicillin , needed before ninety nine percent of them would do anything new to try and save the dying, was something crystalline, white and pure : rather like 100% pure table sugar with its top grade - and top price.

For table sugar is the only food humans eat that is actually a 100% pure compound (C12H22O11) rather than a very muddled mixture.


At least that is what people in the rich first world countries consume as sugar.

In the third world, the much less refined and much less expensive totally raw or crudely processed sugar is used - it is a dark dirty red-brown-yellow with an amorphous rather than crystalline structure.

But won't you know it, despite its origins on a much lower level of technology and its much lower price, it is actually much better for us.

Just filled with all those needed-to-survive vitamins and minerals that the corporations behind 100% pure sugar would rather we in the rich first world bought as expensive synthetic pills.

The kind of penicillin the wartime world's doctors didn't want to inject into their dying patients ?

It was a crudely refined amorphous dark dirty yellow-red-brown powder
 or even a thick liquid.

Ironically, it looked a great deal like the cheap raw low grade sugar waste it was made from.

This was the stuff that the pioneering Dr Dawson grew and then injected in his upper Manhattan hospital between 1940 and 1943 - the same stuff his colleagues, making a sort of pun, mockingly dismissed as 'Manhattan impure'.

That pun played off of both the market lingo for the cheapest crudest sugar, 'impure Antigua' by calling Dawson's Manhattan-grown crude penicillin  'impure Manhattan'  and off of the common term to describe Manhattan, among the many people who rejected its vision of a multi-cultural city and who preferred the tranquil small town world they'd grown up in.

I doubt Dawson felt their sting.

For Dawson loved the dynamic diversity of Manhattan.

He too had grown up in a small town like most of Manhattan's biggest critics.

But Dawson had always refused the easiest solution after graduating from med school, which was to return home with a bare MD degree and quickly set up as the prominent doctor son from a prominent family living in a quietly prosperous rail and market town.

Impure Manhattan you call it, yes ? --- Well, bring it on then, the impurer the better !

And as for the worth of his 'impure' Manhattan-made penicillin, he never had any doubts about its worth - far from it.

Dawson was dying through the war of a terminal case of Myasthenia Gravis .

However, long after his death, his closest colleague Dr Gladys Hobby convinced the very tight-fisted bosses of her company, Pfizer, to invest some expensive staff and lab time to dissecting crude penicillin for whatever extra ingredients  it contained to account for why it seemed to work better than pure penicillin.

Rather like the extra goodies, vitamins and minerals, in impure sugar over pure sugar!

Her bosses were already convinced, as it happens, as were doctors world wide who had tried both impure and pure penicillin on patients.

Hobby even published a lengthy paper on the results.

White French was as determined not to let France be liberated, humilatingly, by well trained, well equipped, well experienced black French troops as white America was determined not to let the world's best ever lifesaver, penicillin, be made by dark dusky negresses in some dark dank Molasses factory in Brooklyn, rather than by white upper class men in chemists cloaks in some shining white tiled lab...

it is easy to see unconscious racism here, as many have already done for impure sugar versus pure.

Dark dirty raw sugar harvested by raw-boned dark dirty Negroes in the dark green fields of the hot sweaty Caribbean.

Pure white, chemically pure, table sugar crystals (crystals being the ultimate totem of modernity !) chemically refined for refined White folks by other refined White folks.

Anyone reading descriptions of impure penicillin versus the later white crystal stuff should be struck by the latent racism.

Just read Ronald Hare's dismissive description of natural penicillin made in a Brooklyn Molasses plant by dusky, husky black maidens, 'Negresses', if you doubt my word ...

Pure Auschwitz : antidote to impure Manhattan

Try just peering out once through red-rage-rimmed eyes, to view the twentieth century world as Hitler saw it.

Given his well known mid-1920s hatred for mongrel Manhattan (that ever popular symbol of 'impure' modernization's propensity for 'invasive' intermixing) it then becomes clear that early 1940s Auschwitz, Hitler's ultimate riposte of 'pure' modernity against impure modernization, seems almost foretold.

Literally, ironically, paradoxically, call it what you will : impure Manhattan and pure Auschwitz were made for each other

Auschwitz was designed to be the literal antidote for Manhattan.

As it just so happens, in the early 1940s Dr Henry Dawson had similar thoughts --- but in the totally opposite moral direction.....

modernization as a form of Mary Douglas's dirt : as invasive non-natives 'out of place'

In the era on both sides of the 1880s, modernization was seen mostly as a particularly marked revolution in (externally-oriented) transportation and communication, rather than in (internally-oriented) manufacturing.

This modernization worked to greatly ease the former immense difficulties from the danger, time and expense of moving people, material and ideas from a safely distant there to an dangerously intimate here.

This lets us see why the 1880s was also the start of a time of Moral Panic, as a great many people feared this sudden and massive incoming as overwhelmingly disruptive to their hitherto staid lives.

They also came to see the products of modernization as literally 'invasive' and yet almost invisibly so - *expanding upon the equally brand new 1880s idea of invisible germs invading a body to cause fatal diseases.

Soon they chose to see modernization as dirt, dirty, impure in the Mary Douglas sense of those terms : the invasive injection of non-native peoples, ideas, material into their native space.

Modernity (racial purity, purity of food and drink, purity nationalism and its immigration restrictions, purity eugenics, et al) was thus a virulent reaction against modernization - yes it grew 'out of it' , as is always claimed - but it was a powerful revulsion to it, not a celebration of it......

* No accident that Hitler repeatedly publicly proclaimed himself as the modern day Robert Koch, the person most associated with 1880s Germ Theory, and that he chose to mark the centenary of Koch's birth in December 1943 with much fanfare - it serving as a veiled public justification for the semi-secret Holocaust, then nearing its depths of evilness.

Dawson & Hobby's commensals, in the Phony War between pathogens & civilization

Germ Theory, not Eugenics, lay behind Auschwitz

Rather like the ideal civilized white middle class male, to qualify as worthy of respect, a microbe had to be virile and virulent and thus labelled a pathogen.

By contrast, Dr Henry Dawson's first independent scientific paper was all about the activities of non-virulent, non-pathogenic microbes.

Not a good way to position oneself in the fast track - certainly not in 1926 --- and still not in 2016.


His young lab chief, Dr Gladys Hobby, later similarly focussed on a non-pathogen in her first important paper and was criticized for doing so by her senior male colleagues as a result.

Neither Hobby or Dawson were going to get ahead with that kind of behaviour !

But the real problem was/is that the educated world is consumed with the 'false idea' that tiny primitive pathogens posed the greatest threat to the bigger most advanced civilizations.

They made themselves believe - in the face of much hard evidence to the contrary - that the lower classes and more 'primitive' races were better able to fight off germs, based on nothing more than their supposed superior fecundity, as compared to the civilized middle class.

In fact, fecundity was a matter of choice, not of biology, and far fewer of the babies born to poorer people made it to age five than the children of well to do families with ready access to better housing, food, water and medical care.

The same went for their parents as well - being poor made one less likely to live to old age, not more so.

It is a 'Big Lie' that some microbes are pure people killers, pathogens, and thus worthy of attention and respect while others do not kill humans and should be discounted and ignored.

Dawson and Hobby saw disease as the occasional result of the constant intimate interaction between fellow commensals, the human-oriented microbes and humans.

So usually harmless skin commensal bacteria could be deadly, if a passageway was opened up to the interior of the body, past the barrier of the outer or inner skin.

Say by a post-operational wound or a catheter.

(Because remember all animals are built on the plan of  the little worm that is our ancestor.

We are all basically a piece of living garden hose, with a thick skin on the outside and a thinner skin on the inside, a direct tube from mouth to anus, with the "us" living inside the space between the two skins.

 The few bugs that can 'eat' our skin rarely can kill us - they have to get inside either skin to do that.)

Once inside, normally harmless bugs are usually easily fought off, unless the patient is still weak from the disease, the operation and the immune suppressing drugs they were receiving.

The result, all too often is patients dying from bugs harmless in all but these unique circumstances.

The older king of all virulent & virile pathogens, before penicillin, was Strep.

In particular, Hemo Strep, the dreaded Group A Strep (GAS) bacteria, a bug that used to annually kill millions of fully healthy people in literally dozens of widely different ways.

Yet, strangely enough, as Dawson and Hobby insisted over and over, this bug happily lives in all our throats at some times of our lives without usually doing us any harm and habitually lives all the times in the throats of 15% of us, again only occasionally doing us any harm.

Moreover, other than amoebas , all of the various microbes we call germs are not predators in the technical sense of that word.

They do not live by directly killing and then directly digesting their prey.

They live off of smaller biological molecules that drift by them in their liquid habitat , some of which are just small molecules of an inorganic nature, others the debris of other lifeforms and some of which is the debris of lifeforms killed by chemicals the bacteria or fungus exude into the liquid surrounding them.

Most of the time these chemicals simply break up larger molecules in the liquid so they can be more readily consumed but rarely they actually are toxins and poisons that will kill entire beings  and, over time, the decaying bodies of those killed will be consumed, in part, by these germs.)

(As always viruses are unique - they deliberately take over their victims and then work them as slaves until they die.)

So much of the time, perhaps 60% of the time, germs do not kill us but rather we die by our body's immune system's overreaction to a germ colony growing inside our body in a part of it where they are not normally living.

So instead of thinking of germs as predatory pathogenic killers leaping up from the soil to kill and eat us, we should regard them as bugs that live on us that occasionally make us sick and further we should ask,'why don't most of us get sick under these similar circumstances ?'

We then can see it is a combination of the current situations of both us
and them that makes normal semi-peaceful co-existence turn suddenly deadly.

Okay that's the medical side of the coin - I am not saying anything that many medical scientists couldn't have said better and in fact have been doing so, for more than a century.

My real interest is that, given the massive amount of facts supporting their cause, why are these brave souls still being ignored by the greater medical and scientific community and by most of us ?

What do we gain - and gain most of us do - when we believe a Big Lie ?

I think the answer lies in the extreme form this Big Lie takes.

It is uncontroversial to say that many of us are made sick or even die, from something to do that there are colonies of germs living inside us  ----and that these diseases can strike all of us.

But the Big Lie goes far too far when it claims that the smallest, weakest, stupidest beings at the very bottom of the tree of life pose an extraspecial threat to the biggest, strongest ,smartest beings at the very top of that Web of Life.

For that claims seeks to set up a deliberate paradox.


Why ?

It does so, I believe, as a implicit warning to the middle class and rich worldwide : never let down your guard for a minute, never give an inch for a second, or the very smallest being imaginable will inevitably kill all of you, regardless of all your medical walls and medical fortresses.

One doesn't have to read very far into the Holocaust to come across exactly similar thinking.

For even the worst Nazis had to remind themselves every once in a while why it was so necessary to kill every single Jew, even the babies, particularly the babies.

The Nazis commonly referred to the Jews as being human microbes, and so it should be obvious, they reminded each other, just how could quickly one (tiny baby) could turn into a million (grown adults).

Yes, yes, yes but back here on Planet Reality, even a colony with million bacteria might still be almost invisible to the aging naked eye and thus surely not a convincing physical threat.

Because unanswered in all of this is exactly why, if the big strong and smart are so obviously superior while the small weak and stupid are so obviously inferior, must we never let our guard down for a minute with them?

We have seen this sort of quasi-explanation as well with white interactions with black Americans over the last century and a half.

The explanation - if you even ever get one - basically boils down to posing two polar opposites ---- typical of most of what passes for modernity thought.

At the very top, the biggest and most advanced civilizations are morally smart while at the very bottom the least advanced, the microbial living fossils, are stupidly evil.

As yes.

Civilized Morality and Microbial Evil

For the polar opposites of evil and moral neatly sidesteps the parallel polar opposites of big/small and strong/weak and smart/stupid.

The good guys in white cowboy hats, Joe, Adolf, Tojo and Musso, always lose because they're men of their bond, too nice and too trusting while the bad guys, the microbes in their black cowboy hats, always win because they are sneaky and invisible and untrustworthy.

Cake and eat it too !

Negroes ( insert here the despised human minorities of your choice) are inferior but sneaky, eyes downcast but sly.

Etc etc etc.

Pretending, sneaky, sly,lazy, evil,phoney, invisible,saboteur, subversive, spy, fifth column, resident agent, traitor, guerrilla, terrorist, IED, turncoat -- every and all the traditional tactics of the weak - found in the humble microbe living off the generous welfare of the human body. Ingrates !

They were living amongst us, in our most intimate places, invisible or pretending to be friendly.

Dirt is the small out of place, in the space of the Big

Dirt, impurity personified ---- dirt and impurity being the tiny out of place, in the space of the big.

Now this might all lack credibility ---- but for the fact that the Big Lie "germs-as-invader-killers" was fabricated about the same time, circa 1870s or so, as its kissing cousins: eugenics, nationalism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, et al.

And unlike them, it had a seeming core of truth.

It had enough 'common sense truth' (or so it seemed) to make credible that the equally weak and 'inferior' Negro and Jew could , similarly, pose a credible threat to white civilization.

The germs being invisibly tiny, weak (basically a bag of water with usually no means of movement), seemingly stupid, assuredly ancient and supposedly unchanging through the ages (a barely living fossil), they should have been a total non-starter as a threat to a mouse let alone to advanced scientific Anglo Saxon civilization.

Be that as it may, the plain fact was that hundreds of millions died annually worldwide from diseases that scientists reliably connected to the presence of germ colonies in the bodies of the deceased.

Hundreds of millions still do - and it is a fact their deaths can all be connected to the presence of colonies of microbes in their body.

Connected to, but not directly caused by, those colonies of germs.

Human body has about as many microbe cells as it has non-microbe cells 

Because as Doctors Hobby and Dawson kept mentioning way back there in the 1920s and 1930s, trillions and trillions of 'deadly', quote unquote, bacteria live on and in us all our lives and they don't kill all of us.

Surely, they said, the fact that sometimes we are deadly sick with an 'avirulent' bacteria in our body while at other times we are healthy despite having lots of 'deadly' pathogens in our throat requires a more complex, a more horizontal, explanation.

A horizontal explanation that shared the reasons for human disease and non-disease between the intertwined activities of two commensals, human and bacteria.

In a sense it is taking seriously the traditional view of microbes on the human body as being a prime example of dirt and impurity and saying in response, "So what ? The whole world is intermingled and mixed, that's Reality, that's Life, suck it up."

Now any hint of horizontalism in the decidedly vertical hierarchical world of 1870s-1960s Modernity was total anathema.

It was like power-sharing, between negro and white, protestant and catholic, men and 'the girls', parent and child, owner and employees, homosexual and 'normal', white man and 'redskin', defectives and the fit.

Not gonna happen, not on my watch.

Microbial Intelligence and Civilized Evil

And it could all start at the bottom with germs.

For to accept for one moment what Dr Dawson was saying, that the tiny penicillium could easily make the lifesaver penicillin while millions of dollars and hundreds of the Universe's smartest chemists could not  ----- or that microbes could insert their genes horizontally into other beings, to share and spread their genetic wealth around, but horizontally-challenged humanity could not, was to face the abyss.

For if the smallest, weakest,stupidest at the bottom were sometimes superior to the middle class white males at the top, what about the slightly bigger, stronger, smarter negro, woman, aboriginal, handicapped, factory worker, eldest child etc in the middle of the tree of life ?

Where would it all end ?

Where life is today in the most advanced of human civilizations - where white middle class men must share power with many others.

And boy oh boy, man of man, don't they just hate it, eh Mr Trump......

Double V, Double V Too ! : the OTHER Manhattan Project

It took a hell of a long time - almost an entire war in fact, before the Allied leadership (at least the NEW DEALER portion of it) accepted that Allied and Neutral citizens weren't going to fully support the Allied military effort until they saw proof the Allies were actually as different from the Axis as they had long claimed.

I believe that moment began when the US government and military bombers began flying abundant amounts of naturally-grown penicillin all over the world, to save Allies & Neutrals "4Fs and quasi 4Fs" dying for lack of it.

The elites of Churchill's conservative dominated  government, backed by the American Republican dominated scientific-medical elite, thought only a small amount of (synthetic/patented) penicillin should eventually be made during the war.

Made in quantities just enough to heal any lightly wounded Allied frontline 1A combat troops, so they could be sent back into battle ----instead of the children of these elites having to take their place.

So, no penicillin for seriously wounded (and thus soon to be discharged from military service) Allied troops, none for Allied POWs, none for dying Allied citizens, none for the infected and wounded in the Occupied lands, or for dying Neutrals and Axis citizens and soldiers.

Instrumentalism and utilitarian thinking : 'okay, some penicillin for troops still potentially 1A but bugger all for the rest, 4Fs and quasi 4Fs'.

In contrast, Dr Henry Dawson since 1940 had said "No !" to these elites.

He argued instead  for cheap abundant natural (available now !) penicillin for all ----- particularly for the 4Fs and quasi 4Fs, for only by helping to save people of no immediate use to the war effort, could the Allies put real meat on the bones of all their claims that they were morally superior to the Axis.

Producing his 'Manhattan Impure' penicillin to try and save SBE patients condemned to death by heartless Allied scientists and doctors because the SBEs had no military value because Dawson's own private Manhattan Project.

Instead, for most of the war, Jews were lynched in Russian Georgia by Axis troops while Negroes were lynched in American Georgia by Allied troops.

But when the few remaining New Dealers still in the FDR government by late 1943 took up Dawson's cause, his project's aims went from local and private to public and international.

Because, starting in September 1943 and until the end of the war and beyond, American Penicillin Diplomacy (the flying of penicillin to the dying worldwide) made more friends for America than its sabre-rattling over its better known Manhattan Project ( the atomic bomb) ever lost ....

DOUBLE V, DOUBLE V, TOO wasn't exactly Archie Bunker's war

Does one American in a hundred know what I'm talking about when I mention the DOUBLE V campaign ?

Does one Canadian or European, Asian or African in a thousand understand ?

I doubt it.

Full respect for all beings, at home as well as abroad ?

Didn't we start down that glorious road when we took up walking out with that great democrat, Uncle Joe ?

Didn't we achieve that victory fully when we defeated the Nazis ---- and then gave them big jobs ?

No, we did not....

we're STILL fighting for the second Double V victory, yes we are, yes we are

I don't remember the first of WWII's DOUBLE V victories, the fight against Axis, because I was born a few years after the guns stopped.

But I do remember the battles towards the second DOUBLE V victory, fighting the quiet prejudice against our fellow beings, hidden deep in the hearts of so many Allies and Neutrals.

For those battles are ongoing still.

In a small way, I was even part of them.

Because the middle level frontline managers of WWII's hatred machine , the teenagers of the Edwardian Era, were far too young to simply retire when the bullets stopped.

They carried on their own war, albeit in a more private and muted fashion, until death took most of them off the stage by the mid 1980s.

As a child and young teen, I got to know some of their kind, heard how they still thought about those they regarded as their lessors, in their private unguarded moments.

That's why I fought back.

2004

Then in late 2004, quite by chance, I discovered that one of the biggest of the battles towards that second DOUBLE V victory actually happened during the shooting war and it was won by the good guys.

More specifically it was won by one good guy, a dying doctor who gave his all to save humanity from its worst impulses.

And a victory is still a victory, even if it is only known onto God.

But an awesomely inspiring victory can't truly be awesome or inspiring, not if it is so unknown that it inspires nobody and induces awe in none.

This is why I write the story of the unknown Dr Dawson and his demand that the Allies provide natural-penicillin-for-all, this is why I research the archives, this is why I rack my brain for the who, where, what when and above all, the why .....

WWII a battle between militaries far less divided, ethically, that they should have been

All the militaries involved in WWII were segregated.

Full stop.

All ignored the fine talk of the Allied Atlantic Charter, all treated some fellow human beings as lesser beings.

In all, upper class males from the dominant ethnic religious group ran the show and all the rest of us followed their orders ---- or felt the lash.

If we were allowed in the military, its combat units or its high-paying weapons factories at all.


Women barely were, ditto men from the the non-white races.

Even though only a small minority of any military ever held a rifle and crawled through the mud with fifty pounds on their back in real combat, all recruits was expected to be able to do so.

So many of what they then called (in public) the handicapped (in private : defectives) were denied any chance to help defeat Hitler by releasing a more 'fit' individual from their cushy job in some rear echelon base.

And if you were 'out' , forget it.

If let in at all, their numbers were set by very low 'political' quotas that military commanders (or union leaders) chaffed against and tried to negate.

The lesser beings served in low prestige non-combat roles.

They were strictly segregated, physically, from the dominant ethnicity males in the 'regular' military units.

Segregated from entry into even the lower ranks of the officer corp.

Segregation was compounded, joining prejudice against gender to that of 'race' , such that there was almost no black women officers in any military.

Our common humanity was denied when even the military's blood transfusions had to be segregated by race and ethnicity.

Its a wonder that badly wounded protestant male soldiers didn't refuse blood from Catholics or women, preferring death to dishonouring their race and gender.

There was a muted attempt to try and achieve a "Double V" victory in WWII, to stop Allied, as well as Axis, hatred against our fellow beings.

It didn't succeed, but it also didn't stop when the guns stopped firing.

Dawson largely succeeded, in his sphere, to win his Double V victory, with his idea of cheap abundant natural penicillin for all becoming a reality in the last year of the war and immediately afterwards.

But is a victory really a victory, in the human sense, if it goes un-saluted, if it is a victory known only unto God ?

That is why I write of Dawson's wartime Manhattan Project - because the dying doctor's victory is only 'awesome' and 'inspiring'  if it actually inspires and induces awe in others......

WWII's ethnic prejudice never really changed - just died of old age

The global aura of ethnic prejudice that spawned and fuelled WWII's violence and hatred didn't stop simply because the guns stopped firing.

Instead it became less publicly assertive and moved underground and into private conversation.

If you love country music, you revere the names of Canadians Dominic Guarasci, James Amadeo and Myrna Petrunka.

No ?

Your tastes more All-American and totally WASPish ?

How about Loretta Lynn record producer Don Grashey and those two sweethearts of the rodeo,  Buddy De Val and Myrna Lorrie ?

Same folks, guys.

Yeah it was still routine when I was growing up for non-WASP Canadians in all walks of life to change their names to something more Anglo to get along -  and it continued to happen until at least the 1980s.

Only when most of the older folks, raised at teenagers in the Edwardian Era's hothouse atmosphere of casual Anglo imperialism,eugenics and racism, finally died or withdrew from the public sphere did the need eased off...

The Long 1950s : from the death of Stalin to the death of Kennedy ?

Historians are always aware that human events don't swivel on a dime every time the decades change.

And by the way, I am one with the math experts who insist a decade should be marked in the same way we normally count numbers, (1,2,3) , that is 1951-1961 rather than 1950-1960 for the Fifties.

Fat chance we'll ever be taken seriously though.

But we also have the historians' concept of the Long Forties, the Long Sixties etc.

So I offer up 1953 to 1963 as one way to see the Long Fifties, from the easing of tension after Stalin's death until the later easing of tension after the Atomic Testing Ban was approved. The two events being a good way to bookmark both ends of the Long Fifties....

not all movers & shakers of WWII died at war's end

In fact most didn't.

That was because most of those movers and shakers had come of age in the Edwardian Era and thus were born between about 1890 and 1905, so in 1945, they still had a long way to go before retirement.

In addition, the frightened cautious period between 1945 and 1965 was a time in human history when the postwar power elite, in almost all aspects of life, were almost unbelievably old ---- as a check on most nations' top leader in that period will quickly confirm !

It was a situation so very unlike today, when being over fifty five can seriously hurt your chances of becoming a national political leader, CEO or university president.

I was conceived five years after Martin Henry Dawson's death in 1945 so I never knew him, but I certainly knew his generation of the wartime powerful.

Not just as national and international prime ministers and talking heads know only via the TV but intimately - in person - as teachers and professors, employers, newspaper customers, reporters and columnists, neighbours, local politicians, local association presidents.

As an unusually observant and knowledgeable child, I was initially puzzled by turns of phrases they used, so alien to the way my parents' generation or my own talked.

But starting at the age of ten (don't ask me why - just the books we happened to have in the house !), I had read deeply in Edwardian Era literature and got to recognized the origin of their turns of phrase and the source of their easy and unconscious, if now muted, racist and eugenic thinking.

Listening closely and quietly, effectively invisible to these adults, I got a good earful of the way they had expressed their thoughts in the years before 1945's revulsion against public expressions of eugenics and racism, ---the way they still thought and even spoke in their private unguarded moments.

Those movers and shakers are all dead now and their final influence on public opinion has been gone for a good twenty years.

Now only the teenagers of WWII, those who followed orders rather than gave them, are left.

But my childhood and youthful knowing of WWII's movers and shakers in their postwar apogee of influence, has been incredibly helpful in writing my account of penicillin's wartime history....

The material artifacts of war linger longer after its mental atmosphere evaporates

I was conceived five years after WWII ended so I have, of course, no direct memories of the war, above all of its unique mental atmosphere.

(I, after all, already knew that 'the good guys won'.)

But my recollections of actual wartime physical artifacts is excellent.

Most of the world of the 1950s was very far from rich enough to casually tear down old buildings, junk old cars or telephone receivers or warships, toss out old children clothes and adults' books.

Other than the food that I ate, a few TV shows that I watched and the grass that I rolled in, virtually everything I could touch or see as a child in the mid 1950s was dated from the war years or earlier.

Since my only window to the greater world in those years before I could read was the TV movies, this applied in spades.

TV and Film were at serious war in those years , a new war, and so the only movies seen on TV were old movies, old war movies particularly.

As a six year old comparing the world around me to the world as seen in inside those war movies, it didn't really seem all that remote.

Yes the 1950s world was, in theory, in full color, even if many of its barely painted building and machinery seemed not - nevertheless 1940s B&W war images smoothly matched the B&W-ness of all of contemporary TV and most newspapers, magazines, books etc.

As a matter of fact, my first memories of seeing the world in strong distinctly coloured tones didn't happen till July 1956.

I can still distinctly recall memories of looking down and out over a sparkling strong blue ocean and vivid green cow fields and admiring the intense contrasts, on that particularly beautiful summer's day, from the steps of our Seaforth home.

That is almost three years after my first visual memories !

My father being in the Navy and we living in communities with the naval base the main employer, we couldn't help but see lots of the overt military side of WWII all around us.

Some admittedly had been quickly sold at low prices, as scrap, post 1945 but almost as quickly hastily bought back, as high prices, as the Cold War opened up.

 I do recall a particular family car ride in 1957, taken with my family, all the way from placid Denmead in rural middle Hampshire County right down to the waterfront of Portsmouth UK and seeing (bombed out) areas of rubble, even then, 12 years after the Blitz stopped.

Saw them, as if for the first time (I had lived in Portsmouth in 1953 when there were more bombed out areas), only because my mother remarked to my father about them as bombed out areas.

That bomb rubble, combined with me seeing men with horribly plastic frozen faces from war burns and being with my dad when he picked up and talked to hitchhiking veterans from sunken ships, was an even closer taste of WWII.

If I can remember this much, I can only imagine that 1950s children memories were much much stronger for kids in Europe and South East Asia, places where the war had been fought its hardest.......

Reductionism is Darwinian inheritance, but for atoms (or is it the other way around ?)

For the last twenty million years or so, Darwinists believe, giraffes have looked like today's giraffes ---- and also like the very first ma and pa giraffe.

But the giraffe-like creatures the five million years before that ? Not so much so.

Those particular and precise giraffe-making genes, say the Darwinists, have been passed down generation from generation, unbroken, over all those millions of years, from the first two giraffes to then four giraffes then eight giraffes all the way up to their peak population at an estimated one million plus  giraffes.

That's a rigid Darwinist's take on the giraffes, anyway.

A  rigid Reductionist from chemistry or physics might explain it all this way:

'Think of giraffe making genes as being like atoms of a particular element, say gold.

Once you know how a gold atom acts as a single atom, Reductionism says you can accurately predict how it will act when it is in a group of two gold atoms, or four or eight gold atoms, a million or a trillion gold atoms.

Ditto the giraffe-making genes : when you see how they act on one giraffe, you can predict how they will act in a one million plus sized herd of giraffes.'

I say that both concepts tend to foster a belief in their true believers that at some time in the past there evolved a perfectness of quality that became fixed, was unbrokenly passed on and could smoothly and unchangingly scale up from one to a trillion or more.

Gould's suddenly punctuated evolutionary equilibrium was as foreign to this kind of rigid thinking as was the idea of sudden changes in an element's behavior as it scaled up in size and passed through different phases...