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Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Auschwitz and Penicillin put the fatal post into Modernity

Who stuck the fatal post into Modernity ?


Was the doctors of Auschwitz alone, with their horrific experiments on living human guinea pigs, with all their fatal injections and monitoring of mass gassings ?

Not on the evidence.

The agreed Allied lie in 1945 was that the Nazis were an outlier, dedicated to destroying civilization and science and returning us all to a savage and more primitive age.

It sounded good - at least it sounded good to the people so far up the top of the Allied world that they had lost touch with the greater reality below.

But the billion or so ordinary people at the deeply suffering edge of WWII weren't so sure.

No, Auschwitz helped a lot - as did Naking, Hiroshima and the Katyn Forest killings.

But they altogether still weren't enough -  all dismissed as either horrors done by non-civilized evil-doers or regrettable actions done in the course of winning a great moral crusade.

What really put the fatal post into Modernity was the contrast provided by the fact that while the best of human civilization's chemists had totally failed to produce a lick of life-saving penicillin throughout the whole war, the much despised primitive basement slime produced scads of it - effortlessly.

Advanced German medicine - the best in the civilized world - gave us Auschwitz while the despised Lovecraftian slime gave us a priceless lifesaver.

Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?

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