Manhattan Crude cures Pure Hate

What could possibly make ordinary Germans murder Jewish babies in cold blood  ?

Only a truly obsessive fear that even a single surviving Jewish baby would irretrievably pollute the purity of the the entire Aryan Master Race.

Modernity Science was the Science of Purity

A hatred that seems well beyond normal rational belief today but was inspired back then by a scientifically semi-respectable belief that if even a single drop of Jewish blood (the 'fungal growth' as Hitler called the Jews) was injected into the blood of the white race, it would render it all permanently impure.

Gresham's Law transmuted into 'blood talk' : 'bad blood inevitably drives out good blood'.

In America, and elsewhere in the world, it led to widespread and harsh miscegenation laws and the infamous 'one drop' rule : in Germany it led to the Holocaust.

Purity obsessed fear and hatred : literally 'pure hate'.

Chemistry's Gordon Gekko bested by Emily Lazarus

But now about its cure :

Natural penicillin, produced by the slimy little stupid little fungus, is still  (eighty eight years after the first attempts to synthesize it) the only base for almost all of our lifesaving antibiotics.

The concentrated and well funded efforts of the smartest humans in the Universe have totally failed to best the chemical work of these tiny weak stupid lifeforms.

Note well that impure natural penicillin (the penicillin of wartime) is basically the pee and poop of fungal growths and to work must be injected into the bloodstream to work its miracles.

This alone would have given the eugenically minded Allies and Axis plenty of 'one drop' nightmares.

But more importantly, the humiliating failure to synthesizing man-made penicillin spelt the death of a belief in the an German Master Race more certainly than anything else did .

Even - I argue - than the world's reluctant acceptance that the Holocaust happened when and just like Polish Jewish had always claimed it did.

As a schoolchild in the 1950s, I heard all about antibiotics being made by tiny stupid microbes not big small human chemists and I heard nothing at all about the Holocaust.

Check your own school day memories, if you are old enough, to confirm my memories - or consult the work of the many historians researching the postwar reception of the story of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was not big news until the 1980s.

Only then, when the guilt-free 'born after 1940' adult baby Boomers were finally in charge : the new ones now heading up TV news units, the new school administrators and the new newspaper/book publishing editors .

Now finally, the world could talk freely about the Holocaust (and the Boomers' parents & grandparents' collective failure to stop it.)

I claim Penicillin trumped the Holocaust because the true crowning glory of the White Aryan Master Race, back in the years before 1945, was that they were widely considered to be the world's best chemists.

They were going to totally replace Mother Nature and lead us into a wonderous Synthetic Autarky : the famous 'meal in a pill' etc.

(Best in the world : hey why stop there ? They were thought the best chemists in the whole wide Universe.)

They were the Gordon Gekkos of the chemical universe.

Re-assessing the Holocaust's impact on birth of Post-Modernity

Until Manhattan Crude.

This Emily Lazarus styled chemistry approach - created by the tired hungry huddled refuse of the biology world - destroyed the Aryans' & Modernity's whole basis of  belief.

The belief that the world was sorted into two and only two groups, the new big smart and the small ancient stupid.

That in turn led to a conviction that pure man-made synthetic penicillin had to inevitably best the offerings of the tiny stupid little fungal growths lifeforms that the Aryan chemists considered,  like the Jewish 'fungal growths', as 'life unworthy of life'.

The stupid doing what the smartest couldn't upended that comfortable belief system --- at least among the very young, who had no skins in the earlier game.

In time the young moved their suspicions into action - the mid 1965s rejection among many young of scientific racism and modernity science in general : cue the resulting battles for greater rights for blacks, jews, gays, women, children - on and on.....