My book ( ebook? website? blog? series of the same? all of the above?) might seem a grimly dystopic account of WWII.
But I will also present an uplifting hopeful counterpose against the horrors of this essentially modest, restrained, sentimental modern war .
That is to say, it could have been much more modern and hence much much worse.
This counterpose is a 1940s green alternative, from the heart of Harlem ,that still offers the best way forward for all of us.
Of course I am talking about WWII's 'tiny green anomaly' : Dr Martin Henry Dawson's Vita Com Mensa project.
It involved microbes and man more or less working together commensal fashion , to bring wartime humanity the great boon of systemic, natural, penicillin for all ...
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
1939-1945: the promise of SYNTHETIC penicillin and the reality of NATURAL penicillin
Another failed promise from the mouths of Blowhard Modernistic Science.....
1939-1945's Apogee of Modernity :the promise of SYNTHETIC food pills and the reality of NATURAL mass starvation
For 60 years Modernity promised food for all in the form of little food pills, made artificially out of "air,water and useless coal tar".
The wonders of modern chemistry behold: the promises made at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 for the millionth time: food pills aplenty, for all.
But shortly after WWII started , severe hunger appeared throughout much of the world.
That was soon followed by mass starvation in so many places that ultimately lack of enough of the right sort of food killed more people during and after the war than did combat or execution could ever dream of doing.
Where was Modernity's magical little food pills when the world really needed them ?
Millions died in parts of the British,German,Japanese,Russian and American empires from starvation.
But these ignoble five, the leading lights of modern science, couldn't even invent enough food pills to save their own people.
The advantages of the little food pills was never claimed to be their taste - even their most ardent proponents admitted to that.
No, their ace in the hole was the claim they would be invulnerable to the vagaries of weather, pests and disease.
As well, everyone knew that war leads to harsh food blockades by the enemy and big demands on a country's agricultural sector from their own military.
Blockades lead to the end of imported foodstuffs, animals feed and fertilizers.
Your own military demands to take away farm labour to the army and to turn the tractor factories into making tanks and the fertilizer plants into making explosives.
But the chemists promised that just a few huge plants would quickly turn the very air and water, abundant and free, together with the equally abundant, useless, hills of coal waste into cheap, healthy, balanced meals 'in a pill'.
This would stave off death and lead to a military victory for the nation with the best pills.
But it never happened, not once, in all of the six long years of competing warfare between nations of battling Big Scientists.
Big Science ??? Big Mouth: All talk: No Action.
Blowhards.
Modern Science's boasts turned out to be as hollow and as wretched as its morality proved to be.
1939-1945 the Apogee of Modernity you say ?
Aye, and its Nadir as well ...
The wonders of modern chemistry behold: the promises made at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 for the millionth time: food pills aplenty, for all.
But shortly after WWII started , severe hunger appeared throughout much of the world.
That was soon followed by mass starvation in so many places that ultimately lack of enough of the right sort of food killed more people during and after the war than did combat or execution could ever dream of doing.
Where was Modernity's magical little food pills when the world really needed them ?
Millions died in parts of the British,German,Japanese,Russian and American empires from starvation.
But these ignoble five, the leading lights of modern science, couldn't even invent enough food pills to save their own people.
The advantages of the little food pills was never claimed to be their taste - even their most ardent proponents admitted to that.
No, their ace in the hole was the claim they would be invulnerable to the vagaries of weather, pests and disease.
As well, everyone knew that war leads to harsh food blockades by the enemy and big demands on a country's agricultural sector from their own military.
Blockades lead to the end of imported foodstuffs, animals feed and fertilizers.
Your own military demands to take away farm labour to the army and to turn the tractor factories into making tanks and the fertilizer plants into making explosives.
But the chemists promised that just a few huge plants would quickly turn the very air and water, abundant and free, together with the equally abundant, useless, hills of coal waste into cheap, healthy, balanced meals 'in a pill'.
This would stave off death and lead to a military victory for the nation with the best pills.
But it never happened, not once, in all of the six long years of competing warfare between nations of battling Big Scientists.
Big Science ??? Big Mouth: All talk: No Action.
Blowhards.
Modern Science's boasts turned out to be as hollow and as wretched as its morality proved to be.
1939-1945 the Apogee of Modernity you say ?
Aye, and its Nadir as well ...
All Life is commensal ; No Lifeform is an island...
If as modernists claimed, all matter and energy is fully convertable but eternal and indestructible, we could, in effect 'freeze' Time itself.
Time would continue to unfold but its effects would be invisible : our minds would live forever and nothing else outside the human mind what last long enough to show signs of aging - it would be constantly and aggressively broken down and transmutated into something ever newer, ever bigger, ever better.
We would live in the world of the First Law.
The first law of thermodynamics.
But in fact, there are at least two laws of thermodynamics and the second says Time's Arrow means that while energy and matter do live on forever and ever, they become less and less useful to us or themselves.
Eventually all matter and energy will be spread out evenly throughout the Universe as a form of tepid pudding, almost totally incapable of stirring.
The human mind whether it is trapped inside five pounds of porridgy brain or trapped inside some lines etched on a silicon chip, will be part of this long slow slide down to entropy.
In fact, life gives every appearance of being a highly fagile - hence rare - form of matter and energy.
That it continues to flourish - at least on this tiny blue-green planet - is a wonder.
Take away all the bacteria, as an example, and ALL life above them would cease.
Take away all the animals, and leave us humans together with all the other life forms and Life would go on, but it ways that might make our human life on earth very short matter.
get rid of all humans - just like that - overnite and a whole host of species, bacteria and others would vanish forthwith and many others would have to struggle hard to adapt without us.
WWII put into actions the then universal belief that we don't need most forms of life, not really.
Not all agreed - Dawson's tiny Vita Cum mensa project set out to prove this idea wrong.
Did he succeed ?
I think he did ...
Time would continue to unfold but its effects would be invisible : our minds would live forever and nothing else outside the human mind what last long enough to show signs of aging - it would be constantly and aggressively broken down and transmutated into something ever newer, ever bigger, ever better.
We would live in the world of the First Law.
The first law of thermodynamics.
But in fact, there are at least two laws of thermodynamics and the second says Time's Arrow means that while energy and matter do live on forever and ever, they become less and less useful to us or themselves.
Eventually all matter and energy will be spread out evenly throughout the Universe as a form of tepid pudding, almost totally incapable of stirring.
The human mind whether it is trapped inside five pounds of porridgy brain or trapped inside some lines etched on a silicon chip, will be part of this long slow slide down to entropy.
In fact, life gives every appearance of being a highly fagile - hence rare - form of matter and energy.
That it continues to flourish - at least on this tiny blue-green planet - is a wonder.
Take away all the bacteria, as an example, and ALL life above them would cease.
Take away all the animals, and leave us humans together with all the other life forms and Life would go on, but it ways that might make our human life on earth very short matter.
get rid of all humans - just like that - overnite and a whole host of species, bacteria and others would vanish forthwith and many others would have to struggle hard to adapt without us.
WWII put into actions the then universal belief that we don't need most forms of life, not really.
Not all agreed - Dawson's tiny Vita Cum mensa project set out to prove this idea wrong.
Did he succeed ?
I think he did ...
Manhattan's VITA COM MENSA project, 1940-1945
Dr Martin Henry Dawson's day job was not particularly successful .
His brief career as a full time medical employee (and not as a student) between 1929 and 1945 can be over-simplified down to
this : sixteen wasted years at Columbia University fruitlessly seeking to prove that Rheumatoid Arthritis was caused by a reaction to a previous bout of Strep Throat.
It is now felt that Rheumatoid Arthritis is neither 'caused' or 'cured' in the common sense meanings of those words ,but rather simply happens at random, as a piece of very bad luck.
ALL of its 'triggers' - previous bouts of many different types of infection, stress, genetics, age, gender, temporary hormonal imbalances, heavy smoking, low vitamin d intake,etc - all lined up together , still won't give you the disease.
Some of these triggers definitely make it worse and thus are avenues into reducing the effect of Rheumatoid Arthritis, once you have gotten it --- but nothing will stop you from getting it, if the cards of fate stack up wrong.
Yes, these triggers do seem to increase your chances of getting it - but very very moderately, in of themselves.
What seems to 'cause' Rheumatoid Arthritis is a whole long series of
random mistakes in our immune systems -- a series of random bad luck errors, all combined together.
Dawson was no better than at all his contemporary colleagues in foreseeing all this - which has taken 80 more years of worldwide research by thousands of researchers to even get us this far.
One might claim that his last day job - finding a cure for a hitherto
very common, completely incurable, fatal disease (SBE) by the pioneering application of systemic NATURAL penicillin was itself epoch-making.
I suppose, but I wonder if Dawson saw it that way - it might see so, well, small potatoes to him.
Dawson was really a biologist trapped inside a physician's body - just as his main rival ,Howard Florey, was really a chemist trapped inside a physician's body.
More accurately and more fairly, Dawson was a naturalist trapped inside a clinician's body : because naturalist and clinician are very much of one mind in philosophy and methodology.
The naturalist inside Dawson was seeking to demonstrate that if humans had commensal bacteria, bacteria - equally - had commensal humans - that in fact, all life was interdependent.
Ie we all lived together willy-nilly in a hapless muddle, sometimes loving sometimes fighting, but ultimately and indirectly dependent on each other for our continued mutual survival.
This was not some softy fuzzy line that claimed that all beings were natural co-operators, mutualistic or symbiotic with all other Life.
But nor did Dawson see Life only as 'red in tooth and claw' - the Darwinian claim that all Life was either innocent human victim or vicious pathogen cum parasite.
His commensal world had bits of both visions of Life's interactions.
What his world didn't have was Man floating serenely above and beyond the vissitudes of Nature.
That allows us to see Dawson's Pen "G" project of 1939-1945 as a fully successful working example of his view of how Life actually muddles along in a commensal world.
If penicillin was a surefire killer of bacteria produced by their micro-rivals the penicillium fungi , it clearly wasn't totally successful, at least as viewed by modernistic man.
After all bacteria are still living and doing very well thank you.
Modernistic man was sure that we could produce a better version of penicillin, cheaply, quickly, in bulk and then kill off all pathogens for all time.
'Soon' ,said hubris-filled Sir Edward Mellanby (Florey's mentor) speaking about sulfa drugs, 'very soon we can start closing down our infectious diseases hospitals for good'.
Dawson never doubted that pathogen bacteria would soon find ways to resist any new drug that came along.
He also knew that drug-resistancy came at a heavy cost to bacteria .
Anyway, no bacteria was resistant to everything - to do so imposed such a heavy burden on them that they were quickly outbreed by other bacteria that put more energy into reproduction than into protection.
(Basically more/smaller r-selected bacteria outbreeding fewer/bigger K-selected bacteria.)
More penicillin , then, in his view, would strike a heavy but not fatal blow to the bacteria causing disease in Man.
Like the penicillium, penicillin would help keep the bacteria a bit more at bay , at best.
But something is better than nothing.
Dawson also wasn't confident that Man COULD produce penicillin quicker faster cheaper netter than the green slime at the bottom of his test tubes.
He knew that the micro organisms, from his many pioneering observations, were very clever indeed - if only because they been at it for hundreds of millions of years, at least.
He simply dismissed people like Florey who planned to first synthesis penicillin before using it on 1A patients.
Dawson said, I will use both humans and 4F fungi to make my pen, and I will provide it to 4F and 1A patients alike.
WWII paralleled his efforts between 1940 and 1945 but its values were anything but commensal - in fact its very antithesis.
Dawson's little project can be seen as a successful attempt to suggest a small alternative to the big war and its values...
His brief career as a full time medical employee (and not as a student) between 1929 and 1945 can be over-simplified down to
this : sixteen wasted years at Columbia University fruitlessly seeking to prove that Rheumatoid Arthritis was caused by a reaction to a previous bout of Strep Throat.
It is now felt that Rheumatoid Arthritis is neither 'caused' or 'cured' in the common sense meanings of those words ,but rather simply happens at random, as a piece of very bad luck.
ALL of its 'triggers' - previous bouts of many different types of infection, stress, genetics, age, gender, temporary hormonal imbalances, heavy smoking, low vitamin d intake,etc - all lined up together , still won't give you the disease.
Some of these triggers definitely make it worse and thus are avenues into reducing the effect of Rheumatoid Arthritis, once you have gotten it --- but nothing will stop you from getting it, if the cards of fate stack up wrong.
Yes, these triggers do seem to increase your chances of getting it - but very very moderately, in of themselves.
What seems to 'cause' Rheumatoid Arthritis is a whole long series of
random mistakes in our immune systems -- a series of random bad luck errors, all combined together.
Dawson was no better than at all his contemporary colleagues in foreseeing all this - which has taken 80 more years of worldwide research by thousands of researchers to even get us this far.
One might claim that his last day job - finding a cure for a hitherto
very common, completely incurable, fatal disease (SBE) by the pioneering application of systemic NATURAL penicillin was itself epoch-making.
I suppose, but I wonder if Dawson saw it that way - it might see so, well, small potatoes to him.
Dawson was really a biologist trapped inside a physician's body - just as his main rival ,Howard Florey, was really a chemist trapped inside a physician's body.
More accurately and more fairly, Dawson was a naturalist trapped inside a clinician's body : because naturalist and clinician are very much of one mind in philosophy and methodology.
The naturalist inside Dawson was seeking to demonstrate that if humans had commensal bacteria, bacteria - equally - had commensal humans - that in fact, all life was interdependent.
Ie we all lived together willy-nilly in a hapless muddle, sometimes loving sometimes fighting, but ultimately and indirectly dependent on each other for our continued mutual survival.
This was not some softy fuzzy line that claimed that all beings were natural co-operators, mutualistic or symbiotic with all other Life.
But nor did Dawson see Life only as 'red in tooth and claw' - the Darwinian claim that all Life was either innocent human victim or vicious pathogen cum parasite.
His commensal world had bits of both visions of Life's interactions.
What his world didn't have was Man floating serenely above and beyond the vissitudes of Nature.
That allows us to see Dawson's Pen "G" project of 1939-1945 as a fully successful working example of his view of how Life actually muddles along in a commensal world.
If penicillin was a surefire killer of bacteria produced by their micro-rivals the penicillium fungi , it clearly wasn't totally successful, at least as viewed by modernistic man.
After all bacteria are still living and doing very well thank you.
Modernistic man was sure that we could produce a better version of penicillin, cheaply, quickly, in bulk and then kill off all pathogens for all time.
'Soon' ,said hubris-filled Sir Edward Mellanby (Florey's mentor) speaking about sulfa drugs, 'very soon we can start closing down our infectious diseases hospitals for good'.
Dawson never doubted that pathogen bacteria would soon find ways to resist any new drug that came along.
He also knew that drug-resistancy came at a heavy cost to bacteria .
Anyway, no bacteria was resistant to everything - to do so imposed such a heavy burden on them that they were quickly outbreed by other bacteria that put more energy into reproduction than into protection.
(Basically more/smaller r-selected bacteria outbreeding fewer/bigger K-selected bacteria.)
More penicillin , then, in his view, would strike a heavy but not fatal blow to the bacteria causing disease in Man.
Like the penicillium, penicillin would help keep the bacteria a bit more at bay , at best.
But something is better than nothing.
Dawson also wasn't confident that Man COULD produce penicillin quicker faster cheaper netter than the green slime at the bottom of his test tubes.
He knew that the micro organisms, from his many pioneering observations, were very clever indeed - if only because they been at it for hundreds of millions of years, at least.
He simply dismissed people like Florey who planned to first synthesis penicillin before using it on 1A patients.
Dawson said, I will use both humans and 4F fungi to make my pen, and I will provide it to 4F and 1A patients alike.
WWII paralleled his efforts between 1940 and 1945 but its values were anything but commensal - in fact its very antithesis.
Dawson's little project can be seen as a successful attempt to suggest a small alternative to the big war and its values...
In LATIN ,"Con" becomes "Com" before words beginning with "M", like MENSA
Ouch !!!
This may look almost exactly like my other, soon to be deceased, blog VITA CON MENSA and ..... it is.
But it turns out , in Latin, "Con" becomes "Com" before words that begin with "M" -- like Mensa : hence its commensal not conmensal in language based on Latin, such as modern day English...
Sigh - apologies.
This may look almost exactly like my other, soon to be deceased, blog VITA CON MENSA and ..... it is.
But it turns out , in Latin, "Con" becomes "Com" before words that begin with "M" -- like Mensa : hence its commensal not conmensal in language based on Latin, such as modern day English...
Sigh - apologies.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
WWII Starvation Diets of Nurse Lila Coolen and Doctor Valentin Falthauser : can you tell the difference?
Forget Robert "Willie" Pickton, considered to be Canada's most prolific serial killer.
He simply doesn't deserve that title.
I mean , by his own admission, he only killed 49 people - almost invisible people - prostitutes,many of aboriginal descent, who almost no one cared about when they went "missing".
('Missing': aka killed, ground up and used to feed pigs that were later sold as pork, Sweeney Todd fashion...)
No, Canada's and North America's most prolific serial killer was an intimidating mountain of a woman called Lila Coolen.
The infamy of her crimes should rival those of Lise Koch, the real life Shewolf of the SS , but they don't.
In fact ,among many older Nova Scotians,( but never of course on the record), she remains almost a saint, a martyr to the medical establishment.
They continue to feel that she did a lot of good, saved a lot of families and young women a lot of shame, rid the world of a lot of useless trash.
It is unknown how many hundreds of people she had killed --- because these people were well and truly invisible - the invisible of the invisible --- lacking even birth certificates.
Now Coolen is a very rare name in North American overall --- the USA has 1000 times more people than the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, but there are more Coolens in Halifax than in all of America.
Rare to the point of invisiblity in America, Coolen by contrast is a very old and very common name along the South Shore region ofNova Scotia.
To locals - and until the retirement boom, almost everybody there was a 'local' , she 'was one of us' , not a 'CFA' (Come from Away) ,like her Oregon-born husband William Young.
William was merely an appendage to his domineering wive, whose secret to staying out of prison all her long life was precisely that she operated her own personal vertically-integrated Auschwitz in her hometown area of Fox Point-East Chester along that South Shore region.
The South Shore was never a home to immigrants of any sort ; a place where almost all the local families had intermarried with each other, where everybody was relatives to almost everyone and all knew each other's darkest family secrets.
As a result it was a land of mutual, genteel, blackmail ensuring that everyone's family secrets remains forever secret.
The highly rational and modernist Willie Picton made sure to profit even from 'the squeal of the pig' of his crimes, by turning his victims into pig swill after he had sexually tortured and killed them.
Just as the modernist and rationalist Nazis first worked their victims to the skin and bone on a starvation diet,then
took all their property and valuables , next removing their hair and gold teeth and then using what little fat that was left in their bodies as fuel for their crematoriums.
Lila Coolen didn't miss a trick either.
Auschwitz is famous for neither being a killing camp or a work camp but rather being both - a fully vertically integrated modernist factory.
Lila Coolen aimed to be equally efficient in extracting money from the weak and suffering.
North American families were loath (are loath ?) to see their children raised by people of another faith: which meant that Jewish families, no matter how wealthy ,could rarely hope to get a child by legal adoption.
Well-mannered North American families also would do almost anything rather than admit one of their own had had a child out of wedlock.
Lila Coolen made money on both (all) sides of these social 'problems'.
She made women (and their families) pay a small fortune to have their out of marriage babies in the privacy of her East Chester Maturnity Home.
If the mother was too poor to pay much, she could slave away at the home as almost unpaid staff, till the debt was paid off.
If possible, Lila Coolen would try to have the mother give up the baby - she would then charge the mother money for looking after it for life.
In fact most of the babies, the lucky babies, were auctioned off, mostly to wealthy American Jewish families willing to risk an illegal adoption.
World War Two for Lila Coolen forever remained the happy memory of the fat years : at $6,000 a baby she was raking it in .
Remember, FDR started the process to build the
Atomic Bomb with a $6000 grant ---- that was big money back then.
To get equivalent buying power, 1940 income versus 2012 income, you might trying multiplying that by 30 to 1.
Between 1937 and 1947 ,Lila Coolen banked a cool $3.5 million on the sale of babies alone ---- don't forget she was also raking it from the unfortunate mothers as well.
But those profits were never enough - they never are for your modern modernist are they ?
More profits could be squeezed out of the living ---' there was no pressing need for real medical staff was there? ' , said this Seven Day Adventist missionary.
The rural poor in her community lapped up her digs at the expensive, uppity, urban-educated medical establishment.
Cleaners were rare on site too, --- but the nurseries weren't filthpits said Ms Coolen, 'we're just county basic, not big city fancy' .
But what to do with those babies born 'defective' and 'deficient' as we were wont to say in those happy pre-PC days?
And what about those darkish babies, born out of mixed race breeding?
Well a lot of North Americans thought both should be gassed to death by the State.
But they said so quietly, because most people won't quite go that far in their eugenic fervor.
How far they did go was far enough, in any case.
Lots of people thought that neither defective babies or babies of mixed race ( who they thought had the worse genes from both parents) had long to live anyway - an early death was inevitable.
So, the feeling was that if a defective or mixed breed baby was already dangling at the end of a long rope, what harm could it possibly be if some kindly medical
personnel tugged gently at their tiny ankles to ease them into the next world?
Our Seventh Day Adventist missionary Lila Coolen certainly agreed.
It is rumoured she might have killed a few of the spoiled merchandise outright - by placing a pillow over their tiny heads.
Yes, Lila Coolen did have a wicked temper and she might have occasionally have been merely trying to quiet a squalling/ hungry/ cold /dying/ baby by soothing them with the closest available pillow.
But that was too brutal and too obvious a process to employ en masse --- suffocated people - even babies - tend to show the means of their death upon their faces.
Better to merely 'freshen' the defectives, by putting them in unheated rooms with inadequate clothing and bedding and then feed them only on molasses water.
They'd usually be dead in a week or two - quick enough.
Then, quick as a bunny, into a nice butter box they went
for the brief but decent burial in a big field, right next to the Seventh Day Adventist cemetery in Lila Coolen's hometown of Fox Point a dozen miles away.
If she could the canny Lila, never one to miss a trick, also asked the greiving for money for attending the burial !
Why did Lila never go to jail - and why was she able to end her days gainfully employed by the government teaching the children of Fox Point her twisted,wicked, values ?
There are many, many reasons: none of them flattering to the ordinary, decent, Nova Scotians of her generation.
Most people wanted to know as little as possible about out-of- wedlock pregnancies and illegal adoptions --- her Home solved a messy social problem without forcing people to confront the real issues -- and importantly it kept mom and child off the taxpayer-funded welfare rolls.
Lila did society's dirty work and society was truly grateful.
Sometimes she literally did SOCIETY's dirty work: as in High Society.
A publisher who gets an employee pregnant and then watches as Lila makes the problem 'go away' isn't likely to turn his investigative hounds on Lila is he?
Ditto for politicians or bureaucrats or church fathers.
Like J Edgar Hoover, Lila collected a lot of secrets for both protection and profit.
She also played up her local South Shore working class roots against them there rich smart ass big city doctors.
Her Seventh Day Adventists community also held similar views about the medical community.
Above all, she relied on the quiet support for 'popular eugenics' that existed among almost all of the Protestant population of the world from the 1890s to the 1960s.
Rumours swirled that she was 'quickening' the useless babies by underheating their nursery and underfeeding
them, but this was a traditional practise of baby mills that far predated the rise of formal Eugenics.
Sure, she might be hastening the inevitable deaths of useless babies but so what (insert a Hegelian Shrug here), wasn't their early deaths were going to occur anyway?
So now, when we turn to another part of the Protestant world of the early 1940s and to Nazi doctor Valentin Falthauser, we must ask ourselves, was he in any different from Lila Coolen ?
Similarity number one: like her, he never had to pay for his mass murders.
Similarity number two: he, too, knew how to disguise murder in common local customs : this was a folksy/volksy, downhome, Heimat, sort of murder.
Just as Lila Coolen used the traditional food of rural Nova Scotians, molasses, in her death potions, so too did Dr Valentin advocate the very traditional German peasant foods of potatoes,turnips and cabbage for his 'sure death meals'.
His charges, those institionalized inmates too weak to do enough work to deserve a slightly larger ration (so that they still starved to death but not before putting out some useful work), got only these three vegtables in a watery soup, meal after meal, day after day - until death.
Without protein or fats and without enough trace minerals and vitamins this unrelentling diet usually ensured a death by disease in a few months.
Let the staff gossip to the world outside the Homes - how could Germany's favourite vegetables cause deliberate death ?
The German Aktion T4 program of 1939-1940 was far too industrial for Valentin : all those fatal needles and gassing and the foul-smelling sweet human smoke pouring out of the chimmeys.
Locals complained and gossiped ,until all Germany and all the world knew about it.
It had to be officially stopped but was encouraged to carry on in a decentralized, unofficial basis.
This process which went on even after the Allies ruled Germany, killed far more than the Aktion T4 effort.
Much attention - far too much attention - has focussed on the direct killing aspects of this process.
In a sort of 'Porn of the Holocaust', we learn much about the overdosing of patients with sleeping pills followed up by a big needle-full of morphine if needed.
These deaths were horrible but relatively quick --- much worse were the long slow very painful deaths by starvation on The Falthauser Diet, for two reasons.
I suspect this was the cause of the largest numbers of deaths- and numbers do matter in murder.
More importantly, unlike the relatively uncommon 'death by needle' practiced secretly by some doctors and some
nurses in every county in every time period, inmate death by slow starvation was common throughout all the world in times of war and want, as a more or less deliberate public policy.
The most common way was to issue piously inmates the same inadequate ration that all others in the nation got -- but unlike most other people, the inmates couldn't garden, buy or barter to get the extra calories between inadequate ration and death.
We must never forget that government leaders' deliberate decisions about food distribution (ie food triage) which lead to slow death by starvation for millions was what links war heroes Churchill & Stalin to the war villains Hitler and Tojo (and VALENTIN and LILA) and it is something we all need to talk about.....
Saturday, February 25, 2012
The Banality of Sulzberger's and Darwin's "Hegelian Shrugs"
The entire civilized world knew well about the WWII Shoah of the Jews while it was happening - even regretted it, but also saw it as something they were powerless to stop : they displayed 'The Hegelian Shrug' that:
Briefly reported these stories ,yes, but 'Buried Them In The Back Of The Times' : the very stones may have cried out in horror, but no NYT editorials ever did -- not on Arthur H.'s watch.
Darwin never advocated that civilized humanity go out and deliberately murder all the weaker bits of humanity as fast as they could.
He didn't have to --- all he had to do was observe what was already happening and lend his considerable scientific credibility to the claim that we can do nothing to prevent it.
Darwin merely shrugged his Hegelian shoulders in his widely-read books and sighed as he saw the inevitability of the "civilized races exterminating the savage races around the world".
Between the 1860s and the 1960s, millions of decent Canadians joined hundreds of millions of decent people all around the world in regretting the inevitable 'withering away' of the Noble Red Man in the face of advancing civilization and progress.
'Withering away' really meant death by slow starvation and hunger-diseases.
All this should make any of us cautious in taking too high a moral stance against the Schreibtischtater (desk killers) in the German Post Office, Railways,etc as they did their bit for The Final Solution.
For many of them, too, probably sighed a brief regret and gave a Hegelian Shrug about the inevitability of it all, before returning to stamping their papers and forms.
Bystanders and Banality and Evil are all intimately interconnected as Hannah Arendt discovered long ago in Jerusalem....
"When History decides to make omelettes, unfortunately some eggs must be broken, and while we sincerely regret this, we can do nothing to impede the inevitable progress of History but merely stand on the sidelines wringing our hands."This is why NEW YORK TIMES publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger reported , like any good reporter should , the credible claim that 3 million Polish Jews had already been killed by the Germans by the war's midway point and the equally credible report that a single American firebombing raid on Toyko had killed a million civilians.
Briefly reported these stories ,yes, but 'Buried Them In The Back Of The Times' : the very stones may have cried out in horror, but no NYT editorials ever did -- not on Arthur H.'s watch.
Darwin never advocated that civilized humanity go out and deliberately murder all the weaker bits of humanity as fast as they could.
He didn't have to --- all he had to do was observe what was already happening and lend his considerable scientific credibility to the claim that we can do nothing to prevent it.
Darwin merely shrugged his Hegelian shoulders in his widely-read books and sighed as he saw the inevitability of the "civilized races exterminating the savage races around the world".
Between the 1860s and the 1960s, millions of decent Canadians joined hundreds of millions of decent people all around the world in regretting the inevitable 'withering away' of the Noble Red Man in the face of advancing civilization and progress.
'Withering away' really meant death by slow starvation and hunger-diseases.
All this should make any of us cautious in taking too high a moral stance against the Schreibtischtater (desk killers) in the German Post Office, Railways,etc as they did their bit for The Final Solution.
For many of them, too, probably sighed a brief regret and gave a Hegelian Shrug about the inevitability of it all, before returning to stamping their papers and forms.
Bystanders and Banality and Evil are all intimately interconnected as Hannah Arendt discovered long ago in Jerusalem....
Friday, February 24, 2012
Vita Con Mensa: 1939-1945
Did anything else happen between 1939 and 1945 besides WWII?
Was there ever a possibility that the world could have gotten along more or less in peace, muddling through, between 1939 and 1945?
Is there a possibility of an alternative history for 1939-1945?
I think that Martin Henry Dawson's tiny natural
penicillin project(1939-1945) ,offered one such alternative.
An alternative approach for the civilized portion of Humankind to take to Nature and other weaker/poorer/darker Human Beings than the hostile approach they did take.
So then 1939-1945 offers the possibility of two intertwining, parallel, stories - the big (unsustainably evil) one that the Modern World did take and the alternative small (sustainably decent) path that Dawson's team chose to trod.
'Begin by Comparing and Contrasting' , says every teacher - and it seems a good approach to take here as well ....
Was there ever a possibility that the world could have gotten along more or less in peace, muddling through, between 1939 and 1945?
Is there a possibility of an alternative history for 1939-1945?
I think that Martin Henry Dawson's tiny natural
penicillin project(1939-1945) ,offered one such alternative.
An alternative approach for the civilized portion of Humankind to take to Nature and other weaker/poorer/darker Human Beings than the hostile approach they did take.
So then 1939-1945 offers the possibility of two intertwining, parallel, stories - the big (unsustainably evil) one that the Modern World did take and the alternative small (sustainably decent) path that Dawson's team chose to trod.
'Begin by Comparing and Contrasting' , says every teacher - and it seems a good approach to take here as well ....
Thursday, February 23, 2012
NON-RENEWABLE MODERNITY: R.I.P. 1873-1973
It was the Age of the Fossils ; it was the Age of the Moderns.
Non-Renewable Fossil Fuel powered Modernity and when the Fossils ran out the door, so did Modern Man.
Modernity, severely wounded in its own self-inflicted disaster of WWII , finally died during the Energy Crisis of 1973.
Modernity just ran out of steam and just ran out of energy : at least it ran out of endless amounts of nearly free energy - the given that Modernists seemingly took for granted.
Still isn't it a little jarring, maybe even a little ironic , n'est pas ?
This unexpected yoking together of Modern Modernity and Ancient Fossils: oil and water, chalk and cheese.
Well it seems that way to me, but the Modernists (cum Climate Change Deniers) are notorious for having no sense of the ironic.
Maybe they figure that's a job best left for the PO-MO crowd.
Non-Renewal Modernity had a best before due date and 1973 said it was well past due.
This era's energy will not just be renewable energy, it will also be highly dispersed and highly decentralized - it will be as SMALL as Modernity was characteristically concentrated & BIG.
The r-selected will inherit the K-selected Earth, so to speak.
I hope, soon ,to read some books that place Modernity's (economic) demise with the Fossils' departure in the Fall of 1973.
That would be a pleasant break from all those authors that simply repeat the old wheeze that Modernity died (morally) in the hellfires of Hiroshima and Auschwitz in 1945....
Non-Renewable Fossil Fuel powered Modernity and when the Fossils ran out the door, so did Modern Man.
Modernity, severely wounded in its own self-inflicted disaster of WWII , finally died during the Energy Crisis of 1973.
Modernity just ran out of steam and just ran out of energy : at least it ran out of endless amounts of nearly free energy - the given that Modernists seemingly took for granted.
Still isn't it a little jarring, maybe even a little ironic , n'est pas ?
This unexpected yoking together of Modern Modernity and Ancient Fossils: oil and water, chalk and cheese.
Well it seems that way to me, but the Modernists (cum Climate Change Deniers) are notorious for having no sense of the ironic.
Maybe they figure that's a job best left for the PO-MO crowd.
Non-Renewal Modernity had a best before due date and 1973 said it was well past due.
This era's energy will not just be renewable energy, it will also be highly dispersed and highly decentralized - it will be as SMALL as Modernity was characteristically concentrated & BIG.
The r-selected will inherit the K-selected Earth, so to speak.
I hope, soon ,to read some books that place Modernity's (economic) demise with the Fossils' departure in the Fall of 1973.
That would be a pleasant break from all those authors that simply repeat the old wheeze that Modernity died (morally) in the hellfires of Hiroshima and Auschwitz in 1945....
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Why are we all so 'POST' the modern civilization that beat the Nazis?
If it is as the mainstrean mythology says, that it was only Modern Civilization that stood between us and an eternal Nazi hell, why then has Modernity been tossed aside like a used condom ?
Why then has the blessed savior been replaced by what ? - the same sort of eco-anti-modern trash that the no-smoking, teetotalling, vegetarian Hitler himself peddled ?
Well of course there is always the alternative explanation : that Hitler and Stalin and Tojo et al were fully modern figures.
Unfortunately they were all too fully modern figures, people who took Modernity's values to their logical conclusions --- until the civilized world reared back in revulsion at the god they had cast up and worshipped.
In this explanation we got through WWII with our modernist hegemony all in one piece (more or less) but in the calmer post war waters we began a long slow reassessment of the values we had taken for granted for more than a century.
And, by the 1979, we were prepared to say that we are totally changed from what we had been in 1939, 40 years earlier.
We are post all the modernity stuff, past it ,well past it.
It was grandpa's stuff, not ours.
But if we were sure of what set of values we didn't hold, we seemed far less certain of what new values we now did hold.
Christ people,people : soon the world will have been post-modern longer than it ever was bloody modern !
What are we for people ?? We have got to stop defining ourselves by what we are against.
Small 'g' greens the world over aren't going to have any real impact until we greens sort this WWII thing out.
We'll get no where until we answer the really big question: was it Modernity that saved the day in '45 - or was it the sort of thing that got us into trouble in '39 in the first place ????
Why then has the blessed savior been replaced by what ? - the same sort of eco-anti-modern trash that the no-smoking, teetotalling, vegetarian Hitler himself peddled ?
Well of course there is always the alternative explanation : that Hitler and Stalin and Tojo et al were fully modern figures.
Unfortunately they were all too fully modern figures, people who took Modernity's values to their logical conclusions --- until the civilized world reared back in revulsion at the god they had cast up and worshipped.
In this explanation we got through WWII with our modernist hegemony all in one piece (more or less) but in the calmer post war waters we began a long slow reassessment of the values we had taken for granted for more than a century.
And, by the 1979, we were prepared to say that we are totally changed from what we had been in 1939, 40 years earlier.
We are post all the modernity stuff, past it ,well past it.
It was grandpa's stuff, not ours.
But if we were sure of what set of values we didn't hold, we seemed far less certain of what new values we now did hold.
Christ people,people : soon the world will have been post-modern longer than it ever was bloody modern !
What are we for people ?? We have got to stop defining ourselves by what we are against.
Small 'g' greens the world over aren't going to have any real impact until we greens sort this WWII thing out.
We'll get no where until we answer the really big question: was it Modernity that saved the day in '45 - or was it the sort of thing that got us into trouble in '39 in the first place ????
WWII: Modernity Bites. (Until Nature bites back...)
Most people who died because of WWII , died of hunger or the diseases caused by it.
That is more than (a) the number of soldiers and civilians killed in combat or (b) civilians and soldiers killed by execution.
None, or almost none, of these tens of millions who died from hunger would have died if their friends or enemies had had huge surpluses of food bursting their warehouses.
It was FOOD - bog ordinary, plain old food , that dominated WWII - from before the war, to after the war and all points in between.
Food - not Life, not Land, not Oil, not Power - dominated the war
and its decision making.
Food - in its very materialness - dominated a war and a world that had predetermined that in a Modern Age, the Mental Will dominated over a Material World.
The mind was over and above and beyond the material world.
If WWII established one thing , it was that this simply wasn't so.
Mother Nature - in the form of the annual weather - casually tossed the wartime ambitions of Humanity about like they were kids' toys.
Good weather/ good harvests and millions of those intended for deliberate death might get an additional lease on miserable life.
Bad weather/ bad harvests and governments found ever more diabolical ways to export hunger onto those less powerful .
And make no mistakes, ALL governments exported hunger onto the weak : Axis, Allied and Neutrals alike.
There were foodie heroes everywhere throughout the war; heroic individuals who never fired a gun to defend their land but who nevertheless ignored government callousness and worked to feed all , weak and strong.
We should honor them but we don't - not until more women write the big books about World War Two.
By big books, I mean those books that try to see the big picture of the war ; those works of synthesis that get at those overarching
issues that rise above all the individual incidents that made up the war.
Food - the largest motivating force animating WWII - simply doesn't interest many men : its just there; laid on by the womenfolk, like washing-up.
Most male historians prefer to write about guns rather than butter but if female historians won't write about butter, then who will ?
Adam Tooze and Lizzie Collingham for a start: two historians (one male, one female) who have ordered their global histories of
WWII around weather and harvest yields.
THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION and THE TASTE OF WAR are two books I recommend all read: Collingham's book is a much easier read but Tooze's book gives the dollar and cents figures to back up Collingham's more impressionistic claims.
Read them both and you will never again look at WWII through the eyes of the mainstream mythology.
They will make you very angry I hope - this is good - anger can lead to activism.
Time is short, we have a burning planet to save , to save from ourselves.
Because we must first change how we think and how we feel, before we can hope change how we can co-exist within the world....
That is more than (a) the number of soldiers and civilians killed in combat or (b) civilians and soldiers killed by execution.
None, or almost none, of these tens of millions who died from hunger would have died if their friends or enemies had had huge surpluses of food bursting their warehouses.
It was FOOD - bog ordinary, plain old food , that dominated WWII - from before the war, to after the war and all points in between.
Food - not Life, not Land, not Oil, not Power - dominated the war
and its decision making.
Food - in its very materialness - dominated a war and a world that had predetermined that in a Modern Age, the Mental Will dominated over a Material World.
The mind was over and above and beyond the material world.
If WWII established one thing , it was that this simply wasn't so.
Mother Nature - in the form of the annual weather - casually tossed the wartime ambitions of Humanity about like they were kids' toys.
Good weather/ good harvests and millions of those intended for deliberate death might get an additional lease on miserable life.
Bad weather/ bad harvests and governments found ever more diabolical ways to export hunger onto those less powerful .
And make no mistakes, ALL governments exported hunger onto the weak : Axis, Allied and Neutrals alike.
There were foodie heroes everywhere throughout the war; heroic individuals who never fired a gun to defend their land but who nevertheless ignored government callousness and worked to feed all , weak and strong.
We should honor them but we don't - not until more women write the big books about World War Two.
By big books, I mean those books that try to see the big picture of the war ; those works of synthesis that get at those overarching
issues that rise above all the individual incidents that made up the war.
Food - the largest motivating force animating WWII - simply doesn't interest many men : its just there; laid on by the womenfolk, like washing-up.
Most male historians prefer to write about guns rather than butter but if female historians won't write about butter, then who will ?
Adam Tooze and Lizzie Collingham for a start: two historians (one male, one female) who have ordered their global histories of
WWII around weather and harvest yields.
THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION and THE TASTE OF WAR are two books I recommend all read: Collingham's book is a much easier read but Tooze's book gives the dollar and cents figures to back up Collingham's more impressionistic claims.
Read them both and you will never again look at WWII through the eyes of the mainstream mythology.
They will make you very angry I hope - this is good - anger can lead to activism.
Time is short, we have a burning planet to save , to save from ourselves.
Because we must first change how we think and how we feel, before we can hope change how we can co-exist within the world....
WWII's more or less UNITED Front: Neutral/Axis/Allied ...
Books about WWII published in 1945 were eager to tell readers just how very different ,morally, the Allied , Axis and Neutral Nations all were.
Perhaps by 2025, authors will be more willing to tell us what shared values the civilized folks in the Axis, Allied and Neutral nations all had in common.
By then , almost all of the adults who ran WWII will be gone and we can be a bit more honest about the shared values that motivated all sides in the war.
Maybe then we can admit that it was only when those shared values saw their most extreme expressions, did differences and doubts start showing up among civilized humanity .
Most of WWII's civilized humanity had to be forced to rediscover their common embeddedness within Nature.
This only happened under wartime necessity ,when like puppies, they had their noses rubbed into it.
But others, like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his natural penicillin project, spent the war demonstrating that good things happen when Humanity works together with Nature .
Historians have grown ever more despondent about WWII.
They just keep discovering ever more extraordinarily evil things the Axis had intended to do, if they had been more successful
in combat, and they continue to encounter more and more evilly banal things the Allied and Neutral countries did do, during the war.
Fewer and fewer truly good news stories are emerging from the archives of this 'bad news war'.
But I believe Dawson's story truly is good news, for all of us and for all time.
Not because of his wartime act of heroism, no matter how extraordinary it was and how beneficial it was to suffering millions.
Now I think his real, continuing, value to audiences 75 years later, is how he achieved those heroic activities, by working with Nature, not against it.
As we prepare to contest those who, still, believe Humanity is above and beyond Nature , we need stories of pioneers to cheer our hearts and give us courage.
I believe Dawson's story will do just that....
Perhaps by 2025, authors will be more willing to tell us what shared values the civilized folks in the Axis, Allied and Neutral nations all had in common.
By then , almost all of the adults who ran WWII will be gone and we can be a bit more honest about the shared values that motivated all sides in the war.
Maybe then we can admit that it was only when those shared values saw their most extreme expressions, did differences and doubts start showing up among civilized humanity .
Most of WWII's civilized humanity had to be forced to rediscover their common embeddedness within Nature.
This only happened under wartime necessity ,when like puppies, they had their noses rubbed into it.
But others, like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his natural penicillin project, spent the war demonstrating that good things happen when Humanity works together with Nature .
Historians have grown ever more despondent about WWII.
They just keep discovering ever more extraordinarily evil things the Axis had intended to do, if they had been more successful
in combat, and they continue to encounter more and more evilly banal things the Allied and Neutral countries did do, during the war.
Fewer and fewer truly good news stories are emerging from the archives of this 'bad news war'.
But I believe Dawson's story truly is good news, for all of us and for all time.
Not because of his wartime act of heroism, no matter how extraordinary it was and how beneficial it was to suffering millions.
Now I think his real, continuing, value to audiences 75 years later, is how he achieved those heroic activities, by working with Nature, not against it.
As we prepare to contest those who, still, believe Humanity is above and beyond Nature , we need stories of pioneers to cheer our hearts and give us courage.
I believe Dawson's story will do just that....
Monday, February 20, 2012
NYC medical community , August 1943: Martin Henry Dawson's OPEN SECRET ...
Nothing does more to lower the normally high social prestige of all doctors, than a disease that is 100% incurably fatal.
You could argue that no disease is 100% incurable, technically ----
but you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong: dead wrong.
Yes, there is always a tiny number of people who survive even the worst diseases -- but they not 'cured' --- these people survived even if they never saw a hospital or a doctor.
They survived , yes.
But they were not 'cured' by human agency.
Give the credit to God or Mother Nature instead.
No doctor or nurse likes to have to tell patients and their families that there is nothing medically one can do and they should prepare for a tragic death.
Death is painful for all of us - but for medical professionals to have to admit to others that they are powerless and useless adds an extra sting to the unpleasant task.
Normally they get to say "Its Stage Four - the prognosis is very guarded but we will try radiation."
The patient still dies but the family respects the doctor for at least trying.
SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) was one such invariably fatal and uncurable disease during the war years.
In fact, it was the most common invariably fatal disease in the western world in those years - the invariably fatal form of brain tumors ran a very distant second.
It could hit anyone: anyone can get strep throat anytime in their life, and get it over and over --- from that they could get RF ((Rheumatic Fever) at any time in their life, and get it over and over.
That greatly increased, in turn, their chances of getting SBE, at any time in their life, - and get it over and over, if by some real Miracle, they survived the first bout.
Every medical single doctor came across cases of fatal SBE in their career in those days --- they hated it for what it did to patients and families ( particularly because SBE patients were on the younger side of life usually) and because it made doctors feel powerless.
Now: cue August 1943, and the medical community of greater New York City.
Throw in SBE researchers, ordinary ward nurses, SBE patients, their families and friends, - heck throw in all the patients and families of people with past bouts of RF, just waiting to be told they now have SBE.
On one hand, the government - your government - has publicly and officially said that regrettably Penicillin does not cure SBE.
But this is wartime - who totally trusts the government and media?
The wartime medical slash patient grapevine throughout greater New York City area is alive with a different story: a doctor named Martin Henry Dawson has gotten half a dozen cures off of penicillin for SBE .
"One patient got his SBE back in August 1940, that's three long years ago. And he's still alive !!!!"
Dawson's success, he tells all who ask, is only limited by the tiny amount of penicillin he can steal - that's right - STEAL from the government supplies, to give to his SBE patients.
Doctors from all over the area are visiting him, asking him to help with their SBE patients, promising to steal additional penicillin if he will only help.
Heavens ! One of them is even the President's personal doctor, yes FDR himself !!!!!
Mysterious bottles of bootleg penicillin keep on turning up at doctors' doors, provided by ladies in white --- taken presumably from the city's one pharma plant that is producing penicillin.
None of this is being reported in the local or national media ---strangely a cone of silence has descended on this good news story in the wartime media, which could use a little relief from having to report years of bad news stories.
That is until a young hunchback doctor named Dante Colitti and the purple-paged Hearst flagship newspaper decide to blow the story wide open.
In theory, its just a local NYC story --- but there is an old,old saying in the music biz : "In NYC, there is no such thing as a regional breakout: if a song is breaking in New York, its breaking wide stateside...."
Within days the story is all over North America - and then all over the world - even into wartime Germany and Japan.
I have always been very interested in the differences between knowledge that is private, that which is public and that which is popular.
For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan to kill 30 million Slavs during WWII to free up food was private during the war , the killing of 3 million Polish jews was publicly known during the war while the Nazi killing of 300 people in the little Czech village of Lidice was popularly known during the war.
Open Secrets are an unusual hybrid of the private and the popular - bypassing the public (aka the official/conventional/ mainstream media).
Lots of Nova Scotians (my estimate was 5%) knew, from gossip, the private knowledge that a high public official in Nova Scotia 'couldn't keep his pecker in his pants' when it came to women (particularly young women, unwilling young women).
About one person in twenty could tell me detailed details of the crime when I asked.
That may not sound like much, but I bet fewer than 5% of any given population could tell you much about the top news story in the land, despite it receiving wall to wall coverage in the conventional media.
So it was private, yet popular, yet not public - none of the semi-official media in Nova Scotia (aka the CBC, CTV and the Herald newspaper) had reported anything on it.
The stones may have cried out over the injustice, but no opposition politician, or theologian, professor of ethics, feminist group or police department had gotten exercised over the scandal.
This had a corrosive effect on how ordinary Nova Scotians viewed their supposed moral leadership when the population knew a crime but their leaders did nothing.
I often wonder what led young Dante Colitti to do what he did ---I can't help feeling he wanted to prick this cone of official secrecy as much as he wanted to help save the life of the baby girl in his care...
You could argue that no disease is 100% incurable, technically ----
but you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong: dead wrong.
Yes, there is always a tiny number of people who survive even the worst diseases -- but they not 'cured' --- these people survived even if they never saw a hospital or a doctor.
They survived , yes.
But they were not 'cured' by human agency.
Give the credit to God or Mother Nature instead.
No doctor or nurse likes to have to tell patients and their families that there is nothing medically one can do and they should prepare for a tragic death.
Death is painful for all of us - but for medical professionals to have to admit to others that they are powerless and useless adds an extra sting to the unpleasant task.
Normally they get to say "Its Stage Four - the prognosis is very guarded but we will try radiation."
The patient still dies but the family respects the doctor for at least trying.
SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) was one such invariably fatal and uncurable disease during the war years.
In fact, it was the most common invariably fatal disease in the western world in those years - the invariably fatal form of brain tumors ran a very distant second.
It could hit anyone: anyone can get strep throat anytime in their life, and get it over and over --- from that they could get RF ((Rheumatic Fever) at any time in their life, and get it over and over.
That greatly increased, in turn, their chances of getting SBE, at any time in their life, - and get it over and over, if by some real Miracle, they survived the first bout.
Every medical single doctor came across cases of fatal SBE in their career in those days --- they hated it for what it did to patients and families ( particularly because SBE patients were on the younger side of life usually) and because it made doctors feel powerless.
Now: cue August 1943, and the medical community of greater New York City.
Throw in SBE researchers, ordinary ward nurses, SBE patients, their families and friends, - heck throw in all the patients and families of people with past bouts of RF, just waiting to be told they now have SBE.
On one hand, the government - your government - has publicly and officially said that regrettably Penicillin does not cure SBE.
But this is wartime - who totally trusts the government and media?
The wartime medical slash patient grapevine throughout greater New York City area is alive with a different story: a doctor named Martin Henry Dawson has gotten half a dozen cures off of penicillin for SBE .
"One patient got his SBE back in August 1940, that's three long years ago. And he's still alive !!!!"
Dawson's success, he tells all who ask, is only limited by the tiny amount of penicillin he can steal - that's right - STEAL from the government supplies, to give to his SBE patients.
Doctors from all over the area are visiting him, asking him to help with their SBE patients, promising to steal additional penicillin if he will only help.
Heavens ! One of them is even the President's personal doctor, yes FDR himself !!!!!
Mysterious bottles of bootleg penicillin keep on turning up at doctors' doors, provided by ladies in white --- taken presumably from the city's one pharma plant that is producing penicillin.
None of this is being reported in the local or national media ---strangely a cone of silence has descended on this good news story in the wartime media, which could use a little relief from having to report years of bad news stories.
That is until a young hunchback doctor named Dante Colitti and the purple-paged Hearst flagship newspaper decide to blow the story wide open.
In theory, its just a local NYC story --- but there is an old,old saying in the music biz : "In NYC, there is no such thing as a regional breakout: if a song is breaking in New York, its breaking wide stateside...."
Within days the story is all over North America - and then all over the world - even into wartime Germany and Japan.
I have always been very interested in the differences between knowledge that is private, that which is public and that which is popular.
For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan to kill 30 million Slavs during WWII to free up food was private during the war , the killing of 3 million Polish jews was publicly known during the war while the Nazi killing of 300 people in the little Czech village of Lidice was popularly known during the war.
Open Secrets are an unusual hybrid of the private and the popular - bypassing the public (aka the official/conventional/ mainstream media).
Lots of Nova Scotians (my estimate was 5%) knew, from gossip, the private knowledge that a high public official in Nova Scotia 'couldn't keep his pecker in his pants' when it came to women (particularly young women, unwilling young women).
About one person in twenty could tell me detailed details of the crime when I asked.
That may not sound like much, but I bet fewer than 5% of any given population could tell you much about the top news story in the land, despite it receiving wall to wall coverage in the conventional media.
So it was private, yet popular, yet not public - none of the semi-official media in Nova Scotia (aka the CBC, CTV and the Herald newspaper) had reported anything on it.
The stones may have cried out over the injustice, but no opposition politician, or theologian, professor of ethics, feminist group or police department had gotten exercised over the scandal.
This had a corrosive effect on how ordinary Nova Scotians viewed their supposed moral leadership when the population knew a crime but their leaders did nothing.
I often wonder what led young Dante Colitti to do what he did ---I can't help feeling he wanted to prick this cone of official secrecy as much as he wanted to help save the life of the baby girl in his care...
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