Henry Dawson's tiny AKTION 4F team and his research into QUORUM BIOLOGY were hopeful first steps towards restoring sanity amid the horrors that Phaetopia released during World War Two.
I want to salute and critique other such worthy efforts - usually in the form of recommendations of books (or book-like objects such
as online PDFs of thoughtful articles ) .
Some may offer hope by (A) presenting alternatives to Phaetopia and some may offer hope by (B) simply making us more aware of the salient elements of Phaetopia, as it existed at its height and that still exist 'among us' .
This is NOT a 'book review blog'.
Book reviews only review ( ie sometimes praise, sometimes pan, sometimes only summarize) new books ,that are currently
widely available, for sale, in commercial outlets.
Which is to say they are very much a part of the book marketing world and play by its rules.
My books might not even be books, they usually won't be new, and if out-of-print and only available in a library, may not even be for sale.
I won't recommend my own books on this blog, but I will say they will all fail the conventual book reviewers' sniff test in at least one vital area : they will be widely and permanently available, but will be available free , not sold !
They are also intended to offer hope, After Phaetopia, by method A or B, as cited above...
Showing posts with label aktion 4F. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aktion 4F. Show all posts
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
If it feels like AKTION 4F's alter ego - that's because it is
This is new, additional, blog that will largely parallel the theme of my AKTION 4F blog.
So why yet another blog?
It is because I am 'test driving' my book series' title and subtitle which will appear on the books' front cover, website, posters etc.
Should it be:
The OTHER Manhattan Project
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
Aktion 4F
Or should it be :
AKTION 4F
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
the other Manhattan Project
I am inclined to favor option one , but I will have to await further reader feedback....
So why yet another blog?
It is because I am 'test driving' my book series' title and subtitle which will appear on the books' front cover, website, posters etc.
Should it be:
The OTHER Manhattan Project
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
Aktion 4F
Or should it be :
AKTION 4F
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
the other Manhattan Project
I am inclined to favor option one , but I will have to await further reader feedback....
Friday, January 14, 2011
Martin Bader and Charlie Aronson: different fates same disease
I had long suspected that there existed people who had exactly the same course of disease that Charles Aronson had, but who suffered an entirely polar opposite fate.
(Charlie was Martin Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F "posterboy", as it were.)
These would have been many people like Charlie in Germany , for example .
These would be people who had had a severe case of encephalitis lethargica (a form of sleeping disease) at the end of World War One but who had survived, albeit with obvious permanent stigmata of the disease's ravages.
This mysterious disease , a huge killer and crippler for the 10 years between 1917-1927, is only unknown to most of us because the Spanish Flu killed about 100 times as many victims in same time period.
Most of us first learned of its existence when Dr Oliver Sacks produced some incredible (but sadly short term) success with some of its long time catatonic victims, with a new drug called L-Dopa.
You may have seen all of this in the book and film called "Awakenings".
Germany covered up then, and still covers up today, the real names of the the 250,000 "disabled/unfit" people it killed in the Aktion T4 program between 1939-1945.
Lately the new excuse is "privacy laws concerns for the victims".
I know that game: Canada can do this squalid "privacy law" game far better than even the Germans could ever hope to - only a small percentage of Germans are self-suited to become ask-no-questions bureaucrats, aka lifers.
But in Canada, it seems to be bred in all of our bones. But I digress.
A German historian, Dr Petra Fuchs, has wormed herself deep into a cache of medical records of 60,000 or so of the T4 victims found in the HQ of the old East German secret police.
Strict privacy laws keep the names concealed - so German youth can not put a human face on these 250,000 dead and start asking grandpa and grandma why did they let it happen.
But by tracking down clues, Dr Fuchs has located some families who can tell the story of their dead relatives from the family end of the affair.
A elderly son named Helmut Bader got to put a face on one victim - his father, Martin Bader.
Martin had had the sleeping disease real bad - but not bad enough to kill him or stop him from running a business and earning a living afterwards.
But Hitler had a particular fear of this disease - based I suspect on the waxy catatonic features of its most severely affected survivors.
So Martin was swept up and killed and his family lied to.
Charlie also had the sleeping sickness bad, along with a half dozen other different Group A strep diseases ( this rare variant on sleeping disease is today felt to be a form of auto immune reaction to a highly particular variety of strep throat).
He had survived and he worked.
Prominent doctors here too wanted him dead - either directly with a needle (Dr Foster Kennedy) or indirectly by not-so-benign neglect (Dr Chester Keefer).
Dr Dawson felt differently - so differently he made Charlie, this 4F of the 4Fs, the very first success story of the penicillin effort - and did so on the very day dedicated , above all else, to exalting the 1A above the 4F.
If you ,or someone you know, has ever been saved by antibiotics -------- raise a glass to Charlie, to Aktion 4F, and to a life, like all life, totally worthy of life.
And raise a toast to Martin Bader who never got a chance to live out his life, thanks to Aktion T4 .....
(Charlie was Martin Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F "posterboy", as it were.)
These would have been many people like Charlie in Germany , for example .
These would be people who had had a severe case of encephalitis lethargica (a form of sleeping disease) at the end of World War One but who had survived, albeit with obvious permanent stigmata of the disease's ravages.
This mysterious disease , a huge killer and crippler for the 10 years between 1917-1927, is only unknown to most of us because the Spanish Flu killed about 100 times as many victims in same time period.
Most of us first learned of its existence when Dr Oliver Sacks produced some incredible (but sadly short term) success with some of its long time catatonic victims, with a new drug called L-Dopa.
You may have seen all of this in the book and film called "Awakenings".
Germany covered up then, and still covers up today, the real names of the the 250,000 "disabled/unfit" people it killed in the Aktion T4 program between 1939-1945.
Lately the new excuse is "privacy laws concerns for the victims".
I know that game: Canada can do this squalid "privacy law" game far better than even the Germans could ever hope to - only a small percentage of Germans are self-suited to become ask-no-questions bureaucrats, aka lifers.
But in Canada, it seems to be bred in all of our bones. But I digress.
A German historian, Dr Petra Fuchs, has wormed herself deep into a cache of medical records of 60,000 or so of the T4 victims found in the HQ of the old East German secret police.
Strict privacy laws keep the names concealed - so German youth can not put a human face on these 250,000 dead and start asking grandpa and grandma why did they let it happen.
But by tracking down clues, Dr Fuchs has located some families who can tell the story of their dead relatives from the family end of the affair.
A elderly son named Helmut Bader got to put a face on one victim - his father, Martin Bader.
Martin had had the sleeping disease real bad - but not bad enough to kill him or stop him from running a business and earning a living afterwards.
But Hitler had a particular fear of this disease - based I suspect on the waxy catatonic features of its most severely affected survivors.
So Martin was swept up and killed and his family lied to.
Charlie also had the sleeping sickness bad, along with a half dozen other different Group A strep diseases ( this rare variant on sleeping disease is today felt to be a form of auto immune reaction to a highly particular variety of strep throat).
He had survived and he worked.
Prominent doctors here too wanted him dead - either directly with a needle (Dr Foster Kennedy) or indirectly by not-so-benign neglect (Dr Chester Keefer).
Dr Dawson felt differently - so differently he made Charlie, this 4F of the 4Fs, the very first success story of the penicillin effort - and did so on the very day dedicated , above all else, to exalting the 1A above the 4F.
If you ,or someone you know, has ever been saved by antibiotics -------- raise a glass to Charlie, to Aktion 4F, and to a life, like all life, totally worthy of life.
And raise a toast to Martin Bader who never got a chance to live out his life, thanks to Aktion T4 .....
BIG MO goes south - sort of....
In response to many puzzled potential readers of my ebook project on the lost history of wartime Manhattan's OTHER Project, I have re-titled it.
Again.
Here is the post from my new blog, Aktion 4f, that tells more.
Republican bloggers opposed to Obama's new health program re-introduced the term Aktion T4 (Aktion 4F's older, evil, sibling).
Millions of North Americans seemed to have missed its first introduction during what so many of us foolishly still call "The Good War".
I have changed the ebook's title many,many times.
This is because while each title was good ( and usually good-er than the last one) none was capable of encapsulating a big, big, complex story and theme in a short catchy title.
This critical in today's world where most new books are first viewed from with a tiny, low resolution, 1 inch x 2 inch thumbnail photo online.
That is all that all online publishers and bookstores allow of any book's cover - from famous author or not.
With 1 million new book titles released in America alone, in just one year, we all do - and all must - 'judge books by their cover art and title' .....
Again.
Here is the post from my new blog, Aktion 4f, that tells more.
Republican bloggers opposed to Obama's new health program re-introduced the term Aktion T4 (Aktion 4F's older, evil, sibling).
Millions of North Americans seemed to have missed its first introduction during what so many of us foolishly still call "The Good War".
I have changed the ebook's title many,many times.
This is because while each title was good ( and usually good-er than the last one) none was capable of encapsulating a big, big, complex story and theme in a short catchy title.
This critical in today's world where most new books are first viewed from with a tiny, low resolution, 1 inch x 2 inch thumbnail photo online.
That is all that all online publishers and bookstores allow of any book's cover - from famous author or not.
With 1 million new book titles released in America alone, in just one year, we all do - and all must - 'judge books by their cover art and title' .....
my Aktion 4F posts are migrating - here's why
Read all about it in this post from my new blog.
I try to explain why I am re-titling my ebook project about wartime Manhattan's OTHER Project as "Aktion 4F" .
It is entitled thus because that term (a) accurately describes the bulk of the project's medical staff and of their patients.
In addition, (b) it reminds us that the project was begun to rebuke the Aktion T4 type of programs set up in Germany and throughout the Allied and Neutral worlds during WWII.
And it was changed because my readers and would-be readers are (almost) always right ...
I try to explain why I am re-titling my ebook project about wartime Manhattan's OTHER Project as "Aktion 4F" .
It is entitled thus because that term (a) accurately describes the bulk of the project's medical staff and of their patients.
In addition, (b) it reminds us that the project was begun to rebuke the Aktion T4 type of programs set up in Germany and throughout the Allied and Neutral worlds during WWII.
And it was changed because my readers and would-be readers are (almost) always right ...
Feedback back from would-be readers leads to new blog...
I had originally thought that the story of Dawson's "AKTION 4F" was a smaller story inside "MO goes po" (when Modernity suicided - and why) but my would-be readers disagreed.
They always immediately got the implications of something sub-titled "wartime Manhattan's other Project" because to them "The Manhattan Project" was a vivid shorthand for all that had gone wrong with the so called "Modernity Project".
Anybody who rose up as an alternative to, and rebuke of, the thinking behind the Manhattan Project was a hero in their eyes and someone well worth reading about.
But how and why and when Modernity became Post Modernity immediately seemed to evoke visions of french intellectuals speaking academic babble and my potential readers fled me as fast as they could.
They did want to hear about the decline and fall of Big Mo in a sense, but only if told through a 'life and times' biographical approach. I had thought I was doing that - I am doing that - but my title belied my claims.
Soooooooo - now the story of Big MO going postal (and postmodern) during WWII is inside Dawson's story - the minnow having succssfully swallowed the whale....
PS : A big thanks to Rebecca Mosher, my most ardent would-be reader of them all
They always immediately got the implications of something sub-titled "wartime Manhattan's other Project" because to them "The Manhattan Project" was a vivid shorthand for all that had gone wrong with the so called "Modernity Project".
Anybody who rose up as an alternative to, and rebuke of, the thinking behind the Manhattan Project was a hero in their eyes and someone well worth reading about.
But how and why and when Modernity became Post Modernity immediately seemed to evoke visions of french intellectuals speaking academic babble and my potential readers fled me as fast as they could.
They did want to hear about the decline and fall of Big Mo in a sense, but only if told through a 'life and times' biographical approach. I had thought I was doing that - I am doing that - but my title belied my claims.
Soooooooo - now the story of Big MO going postal (and postmodern) during WWII is inside Dawson's story - the minnow having succssfully swallowed the whale....
PS : A big thanks to Rebecca Mosher, my most ardent would-be reader of them all
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)