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Wednesday, July 2, 2014

"Inside Agitators" : rebuking the Allies and Axis to bring us Penicillin-for-All

Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, together with leading industrialist Floyd Odlum and doctors Thomas Hunter and Dante Colitti were - socially - 'insiders' of a sort in the Anglo-American establishment running the Allied side of WWII.

But all five were also physically handicapped in some significant way and so had an empathy for what others - establishment outsiders with physical and intellectual handicaps - were experiencing as the Allies took on aspects of the Nazis' harshly utilitarian approach to winning a Total War.

Physical and more importantly moral misfits to the civilized world's eugenic consensus , they agitated and acted up on behalf of those judged as unfit and unworthy by Allied and Axis alike.

But as 'insiders' their 'outsider' criticisms was distinctly harder to refute than if they had been social outsiders as well.

It would make a better story to paint them as total outsiders and totally selfless but the facts don't allow it - they were selfless insiders and that is good enough...




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