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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Is Oscar Schindler proof that God has a sense of humour ?

The fact that the scoundrel Schindler personally rescued more Jews than did almost any canonized or beatified "Prince of the Church" is a particular vivid example of an ancient Bible claim.

The Bible repeatedly contends that God deliberately chooses to use the most weak, foolish and the broken of individuals to confound the Wise and Mighty, whenever these powerful beings fail to live up to their advance moral billing.

Almost all of the Princes of almost all the Faiths proved to be desk bureaucrats , rather than martyrs,  at this extreme junction of Good confronting Absolute Evil.

They were determined that their church structure survive as an institution, even if it had to be at the cost of emptying out all their church's ethical teachings.

Another example, perhaps, of God's sense of humour : the fact that some publicly avowed anti-semetics became leaders in the efforts to save Jews from Hitler !

Despite disliking these people individually and collectively, they still struggled to save them as fellow ( if "useless") beings.

Schindler, along with tens of thousands of others, broke Nazi laws and would have been executed if caught, because he operated inside occupied Nazi Europe.

In the rest of the world, probably only a few hundred in total risked, at most, their careers and social reputations when they broke or bent their country's immigration laws to bring out Jews ( or other refugees) from the fires of Hell.

One wants to ask two questions ; why so few when the risks were so much lower AND what personality features led them to become the rare exception ?

Despite death staring them in the face, many in Europe paradoxically had an easier opportunity to save Jews , for the potentially saveable Jewish family just lived next door.

Only a few in the rest of the world had the money, time and connections to be effective 'rescue operators' in the remaining Neutral nations that bordered Occupied Europe.

Today, millions worldwide can easily take to the nearest street to protest , before TV cameras, about an remote injustice - all doing their small bit to achieve an enormous result.

But in the 1930s and 19940s, street protests seemed something only Communists and Fascist-Nazis did : mostly  being deliberately staged street brawls between the two .

If potential protesters from any nations could have done it, culturally, even in wartime, it was Americans, yet even there any street marches on anything were extremely rare.

Street protests were not yet, culturally, a 'middle class' thing to do (and didn't become so until the mass European and North American protests against nuclear war in the mid-1980s , forty years later.)

The answer to the second question is that the people who put in extraordinary efforts to rescue all kinds of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, operating in the free world, are usually described by the academics who have studied their biographies as already being 'outsiders' , thanks to their ongoing resistance to some institution or other in their own countries.

This seems to have made it easier for them to contemplate breaking the national laws to get the refugees in.

This makes one wonder if Dr Henry Dawson's outsider status revolved around scientific differences he had over the validity of American  War medicine replacing American Social medicine in a time of crisis.

(Dawson rescued 'The 4Fs of the 4Fs', patients dying from SBE, from death by deliberate medical establishment neglect, during WWII : de-weaponizing penicillin in the process.)

War medicine's underlying scientific assumption was that Nature had shown that the Bigger were better than the small and the weak, so that the big replacing the small was not just inevitable, it was also beneficial overall.

War medicine just hastened a process that was not just inevitable anyway but was better for all.

Dawson, through his study of R,S,M,L and V forms of oral commensal strep bacteria, had perhaps grown to see that the most ancient form of life, the bacteria, hadn't died out over billions of years, despite being small and weak and simple.

They were surviving, nay flourishing , and it just might be because they did not evolve the ability to kill-off their chronically weakened and weirdly mutated mates.

In this horizontally-oriented Evolution, the avirulent and the weak bacteria were not second-rate, but rather were just another(equal) part of a vast potential genetic pool, to help bacteria instantly response to changes in an ever dynamic world via Horizontal Gene Transfer.

Somehow, he might have mentally transferred this sense of the value of retaining a bigger genetic pool over to the worthiness of keeping even SBE 4Fs alive inside a Total War.

Sickle cell humans are a mutation that has remained in the human genetic pool, because while it causes one weakening disease, it also reduces the possibility of another life-ending disease.

But in addition,we should, but usually don't, recognize that every human offers up not just more variety to the human gene pool, they also contribute more variety to the human culture and happiness pool.

Every male scientist in 1941 who claimed that severely retarded children with a permanent mental age of only one were suffering and caused their parents to suffer and so deserved a merciful death by lethal injection , had obviously never played with their own one year old children.

( In fact, many a normal parent happens to wish their kids remained forever at age one when they were at their most loveable and obedient behavior ! )

Dawson with his own new infant, might have been struck anew by the absurdity of this old chestnut and became determined to confound the Dr Foster Kennedys of this world.

At least, this is all food for thought....

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