Pages

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 ....

No comments:

Post a Comment