Not enough has been said about how Axis and Allied in WWII were motivated - first and last - by fears of the dysgenic consequences of another WWI style war.
To Germans, WWI was lost by the British blockade starving an undefeatable (militarily) Germany into surrender.
Not that Germany hadn't tried to remain well fed by starving the peoples of the lands it occupied - but clearly, as civilian Germany had still gone hungry and lost the war, they hadn't been nearly rapacious enough.
That wasn't about to happen in WWII ---- the Hunger Plan against the Slavs and the Holocaust against the Jews were proof of that.
The Allies saw WWI as an event where the fittest sons of the fittest families had disproportionally died in combat while the unfittest stayed well fed and safe at home - safe at home to multiply endlessly.
Conventional human-oriented (infantry and land battle oriented) war was thus not eugenic but dysgenic - killing the fit and preserving the unfit.
A new long range mechanical war directed at the enemy's civilian-operated war factories and their workers was the alternative.
Fit middle class men no longer crawled through the mud - they cooly pushed buttons at the complex command centre of large machines of war : battleships, submarines, bombers, tanks, long range rockets.
They aimed to hit hard and accurate from a long - safe - distance away.
By war's end, tanks could penetrate a half foot of hardened armour from a safe mile away and submarines had torpedoes that could travel 25 miles as could battleship shells.
In the air, bombs were routinely dropped from 25,000 or more feet up and rockets travelled up to 250 miles away to hit cities.
Morally, they were all just stand-off weapons for the squeamish.
Now naval and aerial blockade campaigns could ensure that hundreds of thousands of babies starved slowly to death 2500 remote miles away --- so as not to offend any (diminishing) middle class sensibilities.
German 1A troops were kept fit and fed by starving to death the 4Fs of Eastern Europe.
Britain and America had hoped to never have their 1A troops directly engage 1A Axis troops on German and Japanese home territory.
Killing enough 4F Germans and Japanese by direct civilian bombing and indirect naval blockades should cause the enemy 1A army to surrender first without any need for your own 1A army to be bloodied.
It didn't work in Germany but it sort of did in Japan - after the American A-bomb, in combination with an old-fashioned infantry-led direct land assault by the Russians, tipped the scales.
My stance ?
If you have to defeat an evil-doer by extreme force ( and Hitler, Stalin and Tojo fit that bill) and you have greatly superior population numbers - as the Allies ALWAYS did , the answer is clear.
The means that produces the least deaths among your side and the enemy's side of conscripted soldiers and conscripted civilians is a massive infantry led direct assault on the enemy's home territory on simultaneous multiply fronts.
Britain ,France - even America - were not willing to overwhelm the Axis by large armies - if much/most of the people in those victorious large armies were their colored colonials.
(Let remind you that the largest volunteer army history has ever seen yet was the WWII Indian army.)
If Indian concerns had been addressed and India conscripted at WWII (let alone WWI) levels , the Indian Army might have cowed even Hitler into a negotiated peace rather than be overwhelmingly defeated by 10 million dark Indian infantrymen on German soil.
In WWII, we would rather have lost to fellow white racists than to win by means of a multi-colored armed forces that would give those coloreds the moral means to demand independence or basic human rights.
If the war had to be won by means of people we considered unfit - we'd rather just lose --- the unfits' role in the war were simply to be pliant blockade and bombing victims on the other side.
Luckily , one group of unfits - Dawson's unfits - rejected that role.
Instead these 4Fs repeatly rescued dying 1A soldiers with big needles of cheap, plentiful "Penicillin-for-All" ....
Showing posts with label unfit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unfit. Show all posts
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Oh Oh , Diversity & WWII : have I said a bad word ?
My claim that Martin Henry Dawson championed diversity in both microbiology and in humanity during WWII strikes many as simply incredible and non-credible.
They see concern for promoting 'diversity as a good thing' not arising until the mid 1970s , thirty years later.
It is true that a wide public concern for the rights of all sorts of minorities did not become general until the 1970s and is still being harshly contested even today.
But this does not prevent early pioneering concerns for protecting diversity such as the one that led Dawson and his small band of fellow 'unfits' to champion "Penicillin-for-All" thirty years earlier.
Above all, everyone agrees that 1945 marks the year that postmodernity first started emerging.
And nothing separates postmodernity from the preceding modernity more decisively than the former's welcoming of wide diversity set against modernity's obsession for creating a smothering normalcy based only on hetrosexuality, WASP values and skin color.
So what on earth was it that led to 1945's sudden upswing in postmodernity ?
We do know that contrasted with the revelations about the Nazis' Holocaust (and the results of the A-Bomb), the hopeful possibilities offered up by penicillin and its kin was easily the brightest news story of that year.
And why not ?
What people saw was , one hand, a postmodern-like effort to provide life-saving penicillin for 'unfit' and 'fit' alike and on the other hand a fully modern program designed to kill all the unfit so that the fit could rule a 'perfected' world.
People who had always accepted modernity's promises look again at them - hard - and blinked....
They see concern for promoting 'diversity as a good thing' not arising until the mid 1970s , thirty years later.
It is true that a wide public concern for the rights of all sorts of minorities did not become general until the 1970s and is still being harshly contested even today.
But this does not prevent early pioneering concerns for protecting diversity such as the one that led Dawson and his small band of fellow 'unfits' to champion "Penicillin-for-All" thirty years earlier.
Above all, everyone agrees that 1945 marks the year that postmodernity first started emerging.
And nothing separates postmodernity from the preceding modernity more decisively than the former's welcoming of wide diversity set against modernity's obsession for creating a smothering normalcy based only on hetrosexuality, WASP values and skin color.
So what on earth was it that led to 1945's sudden upswing in postmodernity ?
We do know that contrasted with the revelations about the Nazis' Holocaust (and the results of the A-Bomb), the hopeful possibilities offered up by penicillin and its kin was easily the brightest news story of that year.
And why not ?
What people saw was , one hand, a postmodern-like effort to provide life-saving penicillin for 'unfit' and 'fit' alike and on the other hand a fully modern program designed to kill all the unfit so that the fit could rule a 'perfected' world.
People who had always accepted modernity's promises look again at them - hard - and blinked....
Other than as victims, does a successful WWII book actually NEED women, blacks, Jews, the handicapped, the poor, gays, civilians ?
The Fox News-ization of WWII : history as re-written by talk radio ...
To answer my title's question : of course not.
The most prominent woman leader in WWII - almost the only one - was Eleanor Roosevelt - and her little bit of influence came mostly from her nation-wide newspaper column, not from being inside the corridors of actual decision making.
Ditto goes almost all of the small/weak/unfits/misfits I earlier mentioned.
Sure Jews and gays were plentiful in corridors of power in most Allied nations - but powerful acting as representatives of the Jews and of the gays --- no, no ,no , a thousand times not.
If you want to distort history, satisfy your aging male writer's ego and make lots and lots of money, you can happily focus on the WWII that was all about Modernity and the good old days when male middle class still dominated the lesser breeds and genders.
But 1945 did not just mark the Apogee of Modernity, Big Science and the hegemony of the big Western Powers - it also is taken - by general academic consensus - to be the year that marks the start of the Nadir of Modernity and the rise of our present Postmodern era.
Because, underneath the Boy's Own World of virtually all of today's most popular WWII books , there were an awfully lot of unfits taking FDR's Four Freedoms and the Allied Atlantic Charter very seriously indeed.
Which is to say, a lot more seriously than did the guys who originally wrote them ...
Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"
We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
Friday, July 11, 2014
Morally and metaphorically, my book is about the 97 pound weakling who sticks a needle into the guy who once kicked sand in his face - saving his life !
In every book I have ever read about WWII , the small (4F)(unfit) (weak) get deadly sand kicked in their face by big bullies --- at home* as well as abroad --- for six long years.
Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.
(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)
But I think there is one exception:
All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.
It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .
Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.
(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)
But I think there is one exception:
The unlikely triumph of a small group of American 'unfits' who defied both Allied and Axis Eugenicists (and their own physical failings) to bring us the blessings of cheap, abundant Penicillin-for-All .
All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.
It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .
Sunday, July 6, 2014
The three types of humanity in the early 1940s --- at least as people 'at the top' saw it
In 1940, those people with all the cultural hegemony and economic power found it intellectually easy to divide the world into just three groups.
Type A (themselves) were the smallest group : male and middle aged (generously if vaguely defined as lying between the immature young adult and the senile/impoverished elderly) and from their culture's dominant (and usually majority) ethnicity & religion and middle class or well educated and physically, mentally and morally 'fit' .
Type C , always a poor and repressed minority (and forming a majority only of history's victims of witch-hunts and scapegoating), were all those who fitted in none of these five categories.
Members of Type B , by far the largest group, fitted in at least one of these five categories and so could share , at times, the feeling that they were some small way part of Type A's in-group --- this is how the tiny Type A group maintained its social hegemony over the vast majority of people outside it.
Ie all whites, no matter how poor and uneducated, were in some sense were usually judged superior to even well educated blacks.
But equally , some in Group B could possess three or four of the five characteristics of the the top group and thus possess considerable social and economic power but because they failed in one or two categories could chose to side, at times , with Type C.
I label these people as "inside agitators".
I have pointed to five of The Seven who led the battle to rescue "Penicillin-for-All" as being "inside agitators" --- because I think their physical handicap heightened their innate sensitivity to the plight of the handicapped in a time of utilitarian Total War.
I hope my definition is broad enough to include societies like Japan where the in-group was not white but still found ways to lord it over the small Japanese minorities , along with Koreans, Chinese et al.
And that it adequately covers societies like the USSR where being from the old middle class society was a bad thing but where the educated new middle class of party bureaucrats (or engineering graduates) from working class families ruled the roost over the poorer less educated working class in practise, if not in official rhetoric.
The Type A people were united world wide in treating Type C people badly - basing their actions upon the popular belief in scientific eugenics as their justification for ignoring age old religious beliefs in the essential equality of humanity.
But various people in the Type A group differed widely in just how badly to mistreat them.
So that WWII was not at all a battle between absolutely opposing philosophies but rather a matter of various sides differing over the degrees of their discrimination against 'the unfit'.
Everyone agreed there were already too many Jewish in their nation's universities and professions.
But America tended to merely limit their numbers by formal or informal quotas while Germany started by firing them all , then denied them any other form of work or education, next forced them to emigrate and finally determined to kill them all in gas chambers.
Similarly Germany and America both disliked blacks but while the Nazis killed them, only some in America killed blacks and then only sometimes.
The rest were content to merely treat them as second class in a vast varieties of ways , sometimes even unconsciously while consciously feeling prejudice free.
FDR's 1941 Four Freedoms speech and the subsequent Atlantic Charter tended to queer this pitch - because those documents did (albeit in vague terms) set the Allies absolutely against both Axis rhetoric and practise and much of the Allies' current practise.
(For example, FDR's Freedom from Want included 'the right to adequate medical care' - something that Dr Dawson welcomed even as the Anglo-American medical-scientific elite opposed it.)
So now the Allied leadership were pointing to The Four Freedoms as the cause for which they wanted the ordinary people of the world to go off to die to defend - at the same time that they themselves were not practising those high-sounding ideals.
No playwright of fiction could have better designed the conditions to ensure the resulting grand dramatic moral conflict.
Enter now Dr Martin Henry Dawson, stage left , to set that moral conflict into play ...
Type A (themselves) were the smallest group : male and middle aged (generously if vaguely defined as lying between the immature young adult and the senile/impoverished elderly) and from their culture's dominant (and usually majority) ethnicity & religion and middle class or well educated and physically, mentally and morally 'fit' .
Type C , always a poor and repressed minority (and forming a majority only of history's victims of witch-hunts and scapegoating), were all those who fitted in none of these five categories.
Members of Type B , by far the largest group, fitted in at least one of these five categories and so could share , at times, the feeling that they were some small way part of Type A's in-group --- this is how the tiny Type A group maintained its social hegemony over the vast majority of people outside it.
Ie all whites, no matter how poor and uneducated, were in some sense were usually judged superior to even well educated blacks.
But equally , some in Group B could possess three or four of the five characteristics of the the top group and thus possess considerable social and economic power but because they failed in one or two categories could chose to side, at times , with Type C.
I label these people as "inside agitators".
I have pointed to five of The Seven who led the battle to rescue "Penicillin-for-All" as being "inside agitators" --- because I think their physical handicap heightened their innate sensitivity to the plight of the handicapped in a time of utilitarian Total War.
I hope my definition is broad enough to include societies like Japan where the in-group was not white but still found ways to lord it over the small Japanese minorities , along with Koreans, Chinese et al.
And that it adequately covers societies like the USSR where being from the old middle class society was a bad thing but where the educated new middle class of party bureaucrats (or engineering graduates) from working class families ruled the roost over the poorer less educated working class in practise, if not in official rhetoric.
The Type A people were united world wide in treating Type C people badly - basing their actions upon the popular belief in scientific eugenics as their justification for ignoring age old religious beliefs in the essential equality of humanity.
But various people in the Type A group differed widely in just how badly to mistreat them.
So that WWII was not at all a battle between absolutely opposing philosophies but rather a matter of various sides differing over the degrees of their discrimination against 'the unfit'.
Everyone agreed there were already too many Jewish in their nation's universities and professions.
But America tended to merely limit their numbers by formal or informal quotas while Germany started by firing them all , then denied them any other form of work or education, next forced them to emigrate and finally determined to kill them all in gas chambers.
Similarly Germany and America both disliked blacks but while the Nazis killed them, only some in America killed blacks and then only sometimes.
The rest were content to merely treat them as second class in a vast varieties of ways , sometimes even unconsciously while consciously feeling prejudice free.
FDR's 1941 Four Freedoms speech and the subsequent Atlantic Charter tended to queer this pitch - because those documents did (albeit in vague terms) set the Allies absolutely against both Axis rhetoric and practise and much of the Allies' current practise.
(For example, FDR's Freedom from Want included 'the right to adequate medical care' - something that Dr Dawson welcomed even as the Anglo-American medical-scientific elite opposed it.)
So now the Allied leadership were pointing to The Four Freedoms as the cause for which they wanted the ordinary people of the world to go off to die to defend - at the same time that they themselves were not practising those high-sounding ideals.
No playwright of fiction could have better designed the conditions to ensure the resulting grand dramatic moral conflict.
Enter now Dr Martin Henry Dawson, stage left , to set that moral conflict into play ...
Friday, July 4, 2014
Misfittin' : despite the Allies, delivering Penicillin-for-All
Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
The MORAL miracle of WWII's Penicillin-for-All
In the context of WWII's values (on both sides) , the reality* of wartime Penicillin-for-All truly was a miracle - a moral miracle.
Correspondingly, it really is no surprise that this miracle could only have been conceived by a bunch of 'misfits' doing a moral end-run around the 'normal' elite of America and Britain.
For scientifically (sic) dividing the world into the healthy and fit versus the misfits and unfits was simply the normal way of thinking, in the era of modernity, for almost anyone with an education.
Luckily - and incidentally decisively refuting the idea of the worthlessness of the 'abnormal' - a few people outside the blessed circle of normalcy could see inside it and see its flaws.
They then laboured to successfully expose them.
With the acceptance of the reality of wartime Penicillin-for-All (marked above all by the critical and popular success of 1949's The Third Man and by the 1945 defeat of the anti-penicillin-for-all British Conservatives) our own era of post-modernity and its privileging of diversity and variety began ...
* The Atlantic Charter talked the same talk of Penicillin-for-All but that's all it was - just talk - the various Allies on various issues had absolutely no intentions of taking it seriously - during or even after the war.
That the moral concept of Penicillin-for All was put into practise during a total war in 1943-1944 truly is astounding - spelling the death knell of Modernity's values even before the revelations of Auschwitz in 1945-1946 ....
Correspondingly, it really is no surprise that this miracle could only have been conceived by a bunch of 'misfits' doing a moral end-run around the 'normal' elite of America and Britain.
For scientifically (sic) dividing the world into the healthy and fit versus the misfits and unfits was simply the normal way of thinking, in the era of modernity, for almost anyone with an education.
Luckily - and incidentally decisively refuting the idea of the worthlessness of the 'abnormal' - a few people outside the blessed circle of normalcy could see inside it and see its flaws.
They then laboured to successfully expose them.
With the acceptance of the reality of wartime Penicillin-for-All (marked above all by the critical and popular success of 1949's The Third Man and by the 1945 defeat of the anti-penicillin-for-all British Conservatives) our own era of post-modernity and its privileging of diversity and variety began ...
* The Atlantic Charter talked the same talk of Penicillin-for-All but that's all it was - just talk - the various Allies on various issues had absolutely no intentions of taking it seriously - during or even after the war.
That the moral concept of Penicillin-for All was put into practise during a total war in 1943-1944 truly is astounding - spelling the death knell of Modernity's values even before the revelations of Auschwitz in 1945-1946 ....
Misfits Acting Up : despite the Allies , Penicillin-for-All
What many call Eugenicide I call Plenticide.
That is because I think the same mass impulse among the educated of past years to cleanse the world of misfits (culminating in the mass murder of Slavs, Jews and Romas) also sought at the same time to rid it of all types of non-human "pests".
It was all part of the complex and unconscious reaction formed by a truly unfortunate coincidence thrown up in the late Victorian Era.
The 1870s' arrival of the machine cum chemical age seemed to negate the age-old need for human, plant and animal slaves - the sort of slaves the US Civil War had just been fought over.
Particularly as new strides in public health was greatly reducing death rates and thus visibly making the world an increasingly overcrowded place : lots of both 'first-rate' (masters) and 'second-rate' (slaves) people.
Yet in the same period, new advances in global transportation and communications also overwhelmed the affluent and educated with a vivid new sense of the plenitude of the world's cultures, languages, species, strains , habitats --- too too much way too too soon.
The machine world suddenly seemed to have far too many species and cultures - most of them seemingly inefficient as compared to the new Scientism Man.
Too many people at the same times the world seemingly could get by on a lot less - thanks to machines powered by the energy of fossil plants and animal 'slaves'.
Eugenics was thus born - at this exact time, in this exact place - as a result of this unconscious reaction among the affluent.
As was born the Gospel of Germs and the Gospel of Soap/Cleanliness, and new interest in Scientific Pest Control.
Immigration controls, culturalization campaigns against minorities and immigrants in schools, campaigns for greater purity in food and chemicals, synthetic replacements for everything natural - starting with food.
I could pile up the connected list of reactions for days at a time - but not today !
But note that they all started up right after the 1870s to blend together to produce what we now call the streamlined* age of Modernity.
*Streamlined = Eugenics = Plenticide = tidy up = clean up = purify, all basically meaning the same thing in this context ...
That is because I think the same mass impulse among the educated of past years to cleanse the world of misfits (culminating in the mass murder of Slavs, Jews and Romas) also sought at the same time to rid it of all types of non-human "pests".
It was all part of the complex and unconscious reaction formed by a truly unfortunate coincidence thrown up in the late Victorian Era.
The 1870s' arrival of the machine cum chemical age seemed to negate the age-old need for human, plant and animal slaves - the sort of slaves the US Civil War had just been fought over.
Particularly as new strides in public health was greatly reducing death rates and thus visibly making the world an increasingly overcrowded place : lots of both 'first-rate' (masters) and 'second-rate' (slaves) people.
Yet in the same period, new advances in global transportation and communications also overwhelmed the affluent and educated with a vivid new sense of the plenitude of the world's cultures, languages, species, strains , habitats --- too too much way too too soon.
The machine world suddenly seemed to have far too many species and cultures - most of them seemingly inefficient as compared to the new Scientism Man.
Too many people at the same times the world seemingly could get by on a lot less - thanks to machines powered by the energy of fossil plants and animal 'slaves'.
Eugenics was thus born - at this exact time, in this exact place - as a result of this unconscious reaction among the affluent.
As was born the Gospel of Germs and the Gospel of Soap/Cleanliness, and new interest in Scientific Pest Control.
Immigration controls, culturalization campaigns against minorities and immigrants in schools, campaigns for greater purity in food and chemicals, synthetic replacements for everything natural - starting with food.
I could pile up the connected list of reactions for days at a time - but not today !
But note that they all started up right after the 1870s to blend together to produce what we now call the streamlined* age of Modernity.
*Streamlined = Eugenics = Plenticide = tidy up = clean up = purify, all basically meaning the same thing in this context ...
Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't
An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.
'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.
In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.
And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.
But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.
And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.
We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.
But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?
I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....
'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.
In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.
And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.
But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.
And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.
We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.
But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?
I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
the fit warring upon their opponents' "unfit" : WWII in a nutshell
Eugenically speaking, WWII was a Proxy War.
Opposing groups of the high tech 'fit' warred mostly upon their opponent's low tech 'unfit' population.
All in the hopes this would cause their opponents to surrender without much direct (dysgenic) combat between the opposing 'fits'.
So - for example - German civilians on German soil were bombed for six full years before British troops* finally fought a badly faded German Army on German soil, in the dying moments of WWII.
The wealth needed for the fit to be able to undertake these high tech 'proxy fights' was disproportionally taken from the politically weak on each side.
In the case of Germany it was the Jew ,Slav and Western European in that order of severity.
Great Russia took all resources , below a very low minimum, from its entire population ,below a tiny elite.
In terms of severity : first, above all , the peoples of its westernmost dependencies --- the result of Great Russia's decision to limit the fighting to there.
They did not just go hungry and cold the most - they also died the most - by far.
Then, on the Great Russia home front -- those with low technical skills and the elderly and unwell.
For the Japanese elite, the peoples of the occupied lands (the Chinese always getting it worst) and then the Japanese working class : rural, urban and soldier.
The politically powerful German working class ate well right into 1945 while Jew and Slav slowly starved to death and even Frenchmen went around hungry all the time.
The equally politically powerful working class people of the UK always ate well during WWII - many ate much better than during the best years of the Depression, let alone the worst.
So the people of the British Commonwealth (sic) who ate worse (admittedly not all did and not all the time) were the native darkies of their colonies.
Being far wealthier, the British didn't need to steal as ruthlessly as the desperately inefficient food-producing Germans did.
But when things did get tough (Bengal and in parts of Africa) they proved to be as amoral as the Nazis in spirit, if not in letter of application.
And when it came to starving Occupied Europe, the British were as unbending as the Germans --- if not more so - as the case of the Greek and Dutch famines can attest.
Lesser known is their deliberate starving of Channel Ports held by the Germans and occupied by tens of thousands of trapped French and Belgian civilians.
Not just food and fuel in short supply was diverted to the fit away from the unfit - so too was medicine and medical care.
The politically weak were subjected to dangerous medical experiments without genuine informed consent.
None of the young healthy doctors who performed these experiments upon them thought to do the experiments upon themselves as some of an earlier generation of doctors had done.
Nor did these healthy 1A doctors go into combat zones.
As I say, eugenically it was a Proxy War designed to ensure that win or lose, the fit survived.
My blog posts have laboured long on just who got and did not get penicillin - I needn't remind faithful readers of just how unfair to the politically weak the whole process was.
In terms of death and suffering those judged unfit died out of all proportion to their percentage of the world's population - the eugenicists won this battle.
But they lost the war -- because none of the fit got at the end of the war what they expected to get at the beginning of the war.
Instead the will of the fit was blunted over and over by the wild and the weak ....
* The number of British Commonwealth army troops who died combat deaths on German soil was a tiny tiny percentage of the total British Commonwealth military and civilian dead.
Opposing groups of the high tech 'fit' warred mostly upon their opponent's low tech 'unfit' population.
All in the hopes this would cause their opponents to surrender without much direct (dysgenic) combat between the opposing 'fits'.
So - for example - German civilians on German soil were bombed for six full years before British troops* finally fought a badly faded German Army on German soil, in the dying moments of WWII.
The wealth needed for the fit to be able to undertake these high tech 'proxy fights' was disproportionally taken from the politically weak on each side.
In the case of Germany it was the Jew ,Slav and Western European in that order of severity.
Great Russia took all resources , below a very low minimum, from its entire population ,below a tiny elite.
In terms of severity : first, above all , the peoples of its westernmost dependencies --- the result of Great Russia's decision to limit the fighting to there.
They did not just go hungry and cold the most - they also died the most - by far.
Then, on the Great Russia home front -- those with low technical skills and the elderly and unwell.
For the Japanese elite, the peoples of the occupied lands (the Chinese always getting it worst) and then the Japanese working class : rural, urban and soldier.
The politically powerful German working class ate well right into 1945 while Jew and Slav slowly starved to death and even Frenchmen went around hungry all the time.
The equally politically powerful working class people of the UK always ate well during WWII - many ate much better than during the best years of the Depression, let alone the worst.
So the people of the British Commonwealth (sic) who ate worse (admittedly not all did and not all the time) were the native darkies of their colonies.
Being far wealthier, the British didn't need to steal as ruthlessly as the desperately inefficient food-producing Germans did.
But when things did get tough (Bengal and in parts of Africa) they proved to be as amoral as the Nazis in spirit, if not in letter of application.
And when it came to starving Occupied Europe, the British were as unbending as the Germans --- if not more so - as the case of the Greek and Dutch famines can attest.
Lesser known is their deliberate starving of Channel Ports held by the Germans and occupied by tens of thousands of trapped French and Belgian civilians.
Not just food and fuel in short supply was diverted to the fit away from the unfit - so too was medicine and medical care.
The politically weak were subjected to dangerous medical experiments without genuine informed consent.
None of the young healthy doctors who performed these experiments upon them thought to do the experiments upon themselves as some of an earlier generation of doctors had done.
Nor did these healthy 1A doctors go into combat zones.
As I say, eugenically it was a Proxy War designed to ensure that win or lose, the fit survived.
My blog posts have laboured long on just who got and did not get penicillin - I needn't remind faithful readers of just how unfair to the politically weak the whole process was.
In terms of death and suffering those judged unfit died out of all proportion to their percentage of the world's population - the eugenicists won this battle.
But they lost the war -- because none of the fit got at the end of the war what they expected to get at the beginning of the war.
Instead the will of the fit was blunted over and over by the wild and the weak ....
* The number of British Commonwealth army troops who died combat deaths on German soil was a tiny tiny percentage of the total British Commonwealth military and civilian dead.
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