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:

"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....

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 ....

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....

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 ????

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....

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....

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...