Ramzi Yousef - and the British - mustn't be allowed to forge the last word on Manhattan's wartime role

Yes, a thousand times yes, many of the events that birthed the Atomic Bomb that killed 250,000 did in fact occur on Manhattan and in the surrounding Greater New York City area.

But there was another wartime Manhattan project which has saved far far far more lives than the A-Bomb ever took : a wartime project a lot more from Venus than from Mars, a project more Emma Lazarus than Gordon Gekko.

Manhattan began by birthing the first ever use of antibiotics on October 16th 1940.

Moral equivalency : the Nazi Hunger Plan and Allied bombing of civilians

Not enough has been said about how Axis and Allied in WWII were motivated - first and last - by fears of the dysgenic consequences of another WWI style war.

To Germans, WWI was lost by the British blockade starving an undefeatable (militarily) Germany into surrender.

Not that Germany hadn't tried to remain well fed by starving the peoples of the lands it occupied - but clearly, as civilian Germany had still gone hungry and lost the war, they hadn't been nearly rapacious enough.

That wasn't about to happen in WWII  ---- the Hunger Plan against the Slavs and the Holocaust against the Jews were proof of that.

The Allies saw WWI as an event where the fittest sons of the fittest families had disproportionally died in combat while the unfittest stayed well fed and safe at home - safe at home to multiply endlessly.

An "Open Letter" to people who OPPOSE next year's celebrating 75 years of Antibiotics

While there are huge numbers of people out there who adamantly oppose vaccines flat out, most people only oppose the mis-use or over-use of antibiotics - as do all doctors and scientists.

But a few people quietly oppose antibiotics totally : those in the natural health field ,  who'd rather you'd spend your health dollars on healthy natural foods that keep your natural immunity at 100% efficiency.

Perhaps this lack of opposition to all antibiotic use, compared to the opposition to all vaccines, it is a measure of how stupid we humans can be at times.

Why else do we give a much greater weight to a drug that immediately cures us from an ongoing painfully fatal disease than we do to a vaccine that years earlier quietly prevented us from ever getting painfully and fatally sick in the first place ?

My mother, licking plates clean - and poor suffering Belgium

My only emotional link to Edith Cavell and Belgium is through my mother, back in the late 1950s.

My mother was born in Hungary and lived mostly on Windsor Ontario's public relief all during Canada's Dirty Thirties.

But she was an anglophile of a sort (read all of the Hornblower series at age ten !) and somewhere she had picked up that the starving-est people in the world - in the minds of middle aged Anglo Canada of the 1950s at least - were the Belgians.

"Finish all the food on your plate", she would constantly scold us , "Think of the starving Belgians."

So we did think of them - as best as our six year old minds could - and licked our plates clean.

To this day (my mother now dead) , I still think that not finishing your plate is akin to, but worse than , a war crime ...

Must we still CRINGE to London (and New York) ?

Must we in the backwaters of the former British empire still wait until London tells us its okay to mark the 100th anniversary* of the day that the news of nurse Edith Cavell's execution flashed around the world ?

And what if they forget and they don't - what then - must it go un-noted ?

And must we wait until New York tells us in the rest of the grateful world that it is okay to celebrate the 75th anniversary* of the birth of the Age of Antibiotics in their city ?

And what if New York forgets , like London , and does nothing - what then ?

Nova Scotia's glory days were actually during the cringing days when it was still a British colony  - its rapidly aging and declining population ensures it is ever faster becoming a global backwater.

But if I in backwater Nova Scotia want to join with other global backwaters to start the ball to mark Cavell's and Penicillin's big anniversaries , nothing should stop me.

And it won't !

* In both cases , the exact same day ---- October 16th 2015 

(The British have just announced Cavell will appear on a five pound coin)

Public Anniversaries linked to the exact same day : Edith Cavell's execution AND the Birth of Antibiotics AND the first peacetime Draft

Because Public Anniversaries tend to be marked in increments of 25 years after the event ( 25, 50, 75, 100 years later and so on) , big public events separated by a neat division of exactly 25 or 50 years apart tend to become quite linked in the public mind.

In Canada , because the two seminal events of nationality - Confederation in 1867 and the victory of the Canadian Corps at Vimy in 1917 - happened exactly 50 years apart , their celebrations always occur in the same year and are always mentally linked together as well.

Similarly , WWI (the war to end all wars) and WWII (its rematch) both began in the month of August exactly 25 years apart so these beginning anniversaries are always chronologically and mentally sadly linked together.

Like tens of thousands of young men and women world wide* , Dr Martin Henry Dawson symbolically started his military and medical career in high moral outrage on the morning of October 16 1915, when the newspaper story of nurse Edith Cavell's execution in Belgium first arrived on the world's breakfast tables.

The Axis/Allied plenticides of life and compassion

I see strong links between WWII and our current (human-driven) "Sixth Extinction" laying waste to the plenitude of Nature.

 The eugenic Nazis believed that the plenitude of humanity needed drastic pruning - starting with the Jews and Slavs.

 Their plenticidal crime was against the right of all humans to exist. 

The eugenic Allies/Neutrals told us to stifle our plenitude of compassion for the weak and the unfit - to limit our compassion to the fate of our own 'fit' .

 Their plenticidal crime was against compassion for strangers. 

My biographical subject ,Martin Henry Dawson ,("Manhattan Misfits") rebuked all three. His Manhattan Project ("Penicillin-for-All") originally hoped to save just a few strangers from an eugenic and heartless Allied medical establishment. 

It ended up rousing a nation and changed our whole world for the better -- forever.