The course of WWII : from fungophobia to fungomania ?

Hitler's Nazis described all the Jews as being a fungoid growth, a poisoned mushroom, and said the next war would see either the death of all the Jews or the death of all human civilization.

And Zyklon B was to be their fungicide of choice.

The Nazi's use of metaphors about fungoid growths spreading their invisible threads through national bodies, of slimy smelly molds found only in dark dank decaying places, and evil and deadly 'devil's fruit' mushrooming up everywhere overnight was not at all unusual for that inter-war era.

HP Lovecraft, as well as a host of otherwise ordinary writers, easily outdid the Nazis in their vivid descriptions of the ultimate evil as being fungoid in character.

And in 1945, when atomic bomb explosion clouds first emerged looking at least as much like cauliflowers as mushrooms - guess what species got overwhelmingly picked to describe this horrible new weapon of war ?

There was no doubt that fungophobia was the in-house mental illness for of all western civilization, be it Allied, Axis or Neutral.

All the more paradoxical then --- in the full G K Chesterton sense of that term --- that WWII also ended with much of the world in the throes of fungomania.

All over a small, smelly, slimy, blue green smear, a common household pest, that gave suffering humanity its best ever lifesaver : penicillin.

Ironic, isn't it ?

What if penicillin was a Paradox, rather than a miracle ?

Google penicillin + miracle together and you get over a third of a million references, in English alone.

So wartime penicillin was clearly one of God's miracles, n'est c'est pas ?

But what if it was one of God's paradoxes instead ?

We all recall how much GK Chesterton loved to talk about God's paradoxes and how freely he added many of his own.

Adolf Hitler love to 'talk' too - rants usually.

All too often about how Jews were fungoid growths and fungus ferments.

Adolf and German right wing culture of his era generally all had a real mania for seeing Jews as literally being cultural fungus pathogens bent dissolving the German organic society.

During WWII, the Nazis saw the entire war as being about a fungoid growth taking the world by storm ---- with the Aryan race resisting it all the way, in a case of it being either them or us.

That proved to be the case, because in 1945, the Nazi Aryan vision was totally defeated and penicillin did indeed take the entire world by storm....

"Isn't it ironic," sings Alanis M.....

Highest human activity (saving life of a child) married to the lowest of the low : poop from basement slime

One needn't be fans of Bakhtin and Rabelais, of Boy Bishops, Feasts of the Fools and Feasts of the Ass, of the time when fishes flew and forests walked, to see just how un-Progress-ive, how un-Civilized, how un-Modernity, how upside-down was the unlikely wartime success of primitive natural penicillin at a time when the chemists of advanced civilization and man-made synthetics were exalted above all else.

The foul smelling poo of basement slime saving the lives of innocent kiddies when the best of civilization (otherwise fully engaged in gassing or bombing kiddies) wasn't up to the task.

Let us recall, as well, the wirephoto images of precious penicillin ampules hiked up the mountains of Italy on the backs of balky mules and donkeys to save the lives of frontline soldiers and frontline civilians --- just to complete the picture.

Add the sight and smell of palm leaves, to taste, if required.....

until 1939-1945, MOdernity hadn't been tried and failed - it hadn't been tried

MOdernity might have lasted forever as a kind of boastful,idle, rhetoric ---- useful as a cover for what ever misdeed you wanted to defend.

If only, if only, if only it hadn't overreached itself - between 1939 and 1945 - by actually trying to do in practice what it had long claimed it could do in theory.

The MOdernist elites of the four leading MOdernist nations-cum-empires  (Germany, Japan, Britain and America) all promised far more to their more ordinary citizens than they proved able to deliver.

As a result, MOdernity took quite a kicking by September 2, 1945 .

Over what seems a very long period of time, that discontent over the methods and results of MOdernity during WWII has led to a widespread loss of faith in its tenets around the world.

All of us alive today have spent the majority of our lives in the era post 1945 ---- like it or not, we are all  'PO folk'....