Multiculturalism is the 'token hippie' variant of Monoculturalism

Seventy five years after WWII should have taught them better, all nations remain de facto monocultural but have learned to put up with some token multiculturalism, just as long as it restricts itself to a few street festivals with dancers in colourful 'ethnic' costumes and lots of spicy dishes.

But as the grandson of grandparents who came to Canada as young adults from England and Hungary, I have no one 'old country' ethnic culture to fit into under this multiple but strictly separate cultures model.

Instead I am fully polycultural - sharing a mix of Canadian, British, Hungarian and even American cultures within myself.

I don't think I am alone --- because even those of us who don't have mixed parentage still grow up in a vast globe-wide inter-related mix of cultural influences that simply were unavailable to the pre-war generation.

So, for example, the chances of a draft age American teenager enjoying a sub-titled Japanese monster-from-the-deep movie (and thus gaining some insight into the shared humanity of American and Japanese culture) was less than zero in 1940, but a commonplace event today.

If I had to think of the most visible prewar symbol of monoculturalism I would think of the Isolationism movement in the USA ( a movement shared most of the rest of the world between 1938 and 1941).

But to find a fitting symbol of the new postwar polyculturalism, I can think of nothing better than the growing coalition of the United Nations in place by the Fall of 1945.

But that massive global change first had to happen inside the minds of millions of individuals over the six years of WWII --- a conflict and a battle that remained all mental, internal and private.

Not easy then to write about.

I have chosen to focus, instead, on a largely unknown conflict within the Allied world over just who (or what) would make wartime penicillin and just who would get it.

Because, I believe it to be the best possible example of that internal mental conflict looked like when it was made external, physical and visible ...