Late night war movies and little children : a cautionary tale

My parents always liked to put us small ones to bed at an ungodly early hour, right up into High School age.

One exception, for no reason I could ever discern, was when I was a small child (between the age of six to almost ten) when our family was living in 1950s Victoria and Vancouver and owning a reliable TV.

I was the eldest child, but obviously still not very old, when my parents made me sit up late with them and watch late night TV, ie the TV movies presented between 9pm and midnight.

(Made me , I repeat, because as a life long scaredy cat, I was not begging to watch scary war movies, believe you me.)

My takeaway lesson, as a wee child, was that WWII consisted mostly of armed uniformed men strafing civilian refugees on the road, bombing civilian homes, torturing civilians in POW concentration camps, torpedoing without warning civilian liners or blockading and starving civilian cities.

That is when they weren't putting hapless civilian hostages up against walls to shoot as reprisals for civilian resistance action.

I wasn't just a tiny child, I was tiny even for a six year old child and as a constant newcomer to my schools was often the bullies' target.

I saw WWII as a lot like elementary school, but with guns; big guys beating up little people.

Natural penicillin, made by the sort of tiny slimey no counts you might see on dank basement walls, was the only hero this tiny child could see in these war movies, saving kids like me here there and anywhere from deadly infections, be they from bombing injuries or simply brought on by hunger and fatigue.

If my book on WWII (Upending) sounds more than a little familiar to this tale from almost sixty years ago, blame it on my parents....

WWII : High School, with machine guns, writ large

Years and years of the preppie jocks (the somebodies) dropping bombs on the losers, misfits, dorks and nobodies after class in the school yard, while most of the rest of us just looked on, bystanders ...

Environmentalism : HOPE, as well as fear ...

It is easy - too too easy - to credit fear, fear of Fifties nuclear war and fallout in particular, as the main reason for the Early Seventies worldwide rise of the Environmental Movement.

As one of those young 1950s Boomers who did join the formally organized environmental movement early in the 1970s and who now has a great interest in the history of the early days of the Environmental Movement,  may I beg to differ?

Not seeking tenure, I offer up only my memories as the primary archival source for my historical thesis.

I was an unusually small and skinny kid, very nearsighted, hated formal sports and loved books.

This might have been alright - I boldly loved to physically explore my neighbourhood and was a bit of a wiseapple in class,  but for the fact that we moved frequently, or so it seemed.

( I attended three different schools in both Grade Three and Grade Eight.)

I got bullied as a result.

My dislike of the big and the strong and my sympathy for the weak and the small developed right there on the playground.

I enjoyed the stories my teachers told of how the antibiotic medicines that had saved the lives of kids like me that had come (could only come) from small and primitive weak microbes living in sewer water, basement slime and the jungle mud of primitive lands.

microbial davids vs Chemist Goliaths

I really enjoyed this unlikely triumph of these microbial davids over the Chemist Goliaths of smug modern science.

For while the salad days of the Chemist and Chemical Synthesis had faded by time I first went to school, their unaltered hubris has merely transferred out to another school - that of the physicist.

So while our Fifties collective motivation was rather shallow and utilitarian (we valued Mother Nature's other beings only from the fear that their extinction might rob us of our rightful access to something useful and profitable) I joined in to the general view that we must treasure - not destroy - even the smallest and most slimy of beings.

I hope I went beyond that .

Beyond that to a belief that the smart aren't always as smart as they seem nor the dumb as dumb as they seem and that all life has a form of high intelligence merely by being able to survive and flourish so long and had a right to exist on its own terms.

WWII as a study in the smart humbled and the humble exalted 

 I know for a fact this was the reason I so enjoyed all the franker, more revisionist, books about WWII that had been coming out in a flood by the mid 1960s - books I dearly loved as a pre-teen.

Mostly by accident, they were much less 'rah rah' than the first wave of postwar military histories.

They still thought they were celebrating bravery but , unconsciously, by providing many new details, they tended to reveal the unflattering sides of military operations the propaganda  ministries had earlier successfully concealed.

I saw WWII revealed as six long years of the supposedly smart nations and leaders humbled and the supposedly dumb nations and leaders exalted.

In 2004, I stumbled upon the little known WWII tale of the supposedly smart chemists' synthesized penicillin humbled and the supposedly dumb natural penicillium exalted ---so given my history,  how could I resist making it much better known ??

WWII: Bullies and Bystanders vs Innocents and Intervenors

NYC-based Dr Henry Dawson in 1941 was clearly an intervenor with his 'inclusive' penicillin (and may I point out that adult intervenors (as I well know) were often bullied themselves as children).

 SBE patients , such as his patients Charlie and Miss H were clearly the innocents.

NYC-based Dr Foster Kennedy in 1941 was clearly a bully, particularly telling that he would use the excuse of the shortage of staff and resources during an upcoming war as an excuse to finally implement his long held plan to kill all the deformed children.

Shades of Adolf Hitler in an exactly similar setting.

His active verbal supporters at the very top of the world's largest and most influential mental health body, the American Psychiatric Association, were clearly the stone-hearted bystanders a bully needed to get away with his deeds.

In the wider world of WWII, one can easily spot the bullies, the innocents and stone hearted bystanders (aka Neutrals)  as individuals and as (almost) entire nations.

But sadly, no one nation stands out as a whole hearted intervenor.

That noble task is left to a few in all nations, to try and heal the hearts of the stone-hearted majority by rousing their consciences  to the sad and unfair fate of the small and the weak in face of bullies.

Bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and sometimes even people like Churchill and others on the Allied and Neutral side.....

So I am a punster , is that such a crime !?

Stone-heartedness : physical or moral affliction or both ?

I am sure a gene is responsible.... or its early neural damage while a child-to-be is still resting on the placenta.

Whatever.

Punning can't be cured - only endured.

So my 'stone-hearted' : a play on the stone-like calcined formations on the heart valves that defines the SBE disease that Henry Dawson eventual cured with his 'inclusive' penicillin ?

Did Dawson merely want to see these teenagers and youth enjoy all the courting and dancing that all the others their age enjoyed : 'dancing' over stone (hearted valves) ?

Did he merely hate to think of the SBEs slowly dying inside mentally and emotionally as well as physically, as their medical condition forbade them doing anything vigorous and youth-like , in case it hastened their inevitable early end ?

Or is my title a broad hint that Dawson's real target was much bigger than the few dozen lives he saved directly : was his inclusive penicillin really aimed at curing all of the morally stone-hearted ?

That is to say, the majority of us between 1931 and 1945.

The us who were so determinately indifferent to doing anything concrete to save our weaker and smaller neighbours when they were under attack by big bullies like Hitler , Stalin and Tojo ?

The same morally stone-hearted of us who refused to allow any live-saving penicillin go to the physically stone-hearted SBEs ?

Or all of the above .......?

Bystanders make Bullies : in schoolyards or in World Wars

When Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler first crawled out from under their rocks and set to work, the nations they led were relatively weak and ally-less, particularly compared to the combined 'rest of the world', a world that professed to oppose them root and branch.

But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.


Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.

The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.

In  bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango :  one active bully and many in-active bystanders...