1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini

Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:

"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."

But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.

However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.

In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.

But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.

So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.

But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.

Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.

Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.

Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg,  orthodox economics still daily  proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.

So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?

May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .

Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning  to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.

Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....

Earthlings versus the Sky Gods : 1945 and "THE FALL OF MODERNITY"

   Everyone agrees that Post-Modernity began after 1945 and that thus, in some muted --- pastel --- fashion, Modernity must also have began its slow decline in that same momentous year.
   Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
   So 1945, Year of Revolution.
   Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
  No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass  protests or barricaded streets.
   For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
  Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
   In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
  Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
  Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
   At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
   Or a mushroom - your taste......