20 ms·

Dr. Mengele, USA Style: Lessons from Human Rights Abuses in America [pdf] (2022)

91 points by brandonlc 3y ago

brandonlc 3y ago
Abstract: This paper explores U.S. government activities related to human experimentation after World War II. We emphasize how a proactive foreign policy, even in the pursuit of liberal ends, can undermine the rights and liberties of members the domestic populace. The typical primary justification for a strong military and proactive foreign policy is to protect the person and property of domestic people while reinforcing liberal values. But preparing for and engaging in war and foreign intervention, even if defensive in nature, often does the opposite in unseen and underappreciated ways. We discuss the implications of these tendencies and consider three responses offered by liberals—liberal empire, interstate federalism, and citizen-based defense.
- hulitu 3y ago
  The US learned a lot from Japanese and Germans.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    It adopted all kinds of German rocket tech and scientists for the space program and millitary uses. And it co-opted both states post-war, complete with ex-fascists in positions of power and everything.
  - washadjeffmad 3y ago
    The US pioneered social darwinism, eugenics, and commercial genocide. Andrew Jackson's ruthless campaigns of extermination against Native Americans a century earlier was a cited inspiration and model for the Holocaust. If we are our histories, the US are, as a people, still moral and ethical infants.
    - peteradio 3y ago
      If we are only our histories then I'm not sure what is the point of attempting to change. Surely we are not our histories.
  - tpm 3y ago
    Did they really need to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
- throwrqX 3y ago
  The paper says it makes a connection between human experimentation and foreign policy but I don't really see it. Scientists were interested in how these chemicals or biological agents worked and I don't think it would have made a difference to them whether they worked for the military, or a civilian health agency, or a corporation. Similarly for nuclear materials post WW2 the thinking at the time was that nuclear energy was going to become widespread and so there was plenty of reason to study the effect of nuclear material on the human body without taking into consideration anything foreign policy related.
SiempreViernes 3y ago
> Many had been told the cocktail contained some combination of vitamins meant to benefit them and their children—a bald lie (Thomas 2007, p. 39). In fact, the drinks given to the pregnant women contained various doses of the radioactive isotopes iron-55 and iron-59. In their study with the pregnant women scientists hoped to determine if the radioactive iron would cross the placenta—it did. Not long after the women drank the “vitamin cocktail” they thought would help with fetal development, radioactive material began circulating in the blood of their children (Welsome 1999, p. 221). Like Helen, many of the other women and their babies experienced disastrous health effects—fatigue, hair loss, bruising, and swelling were common. Both the women and their children developed cancers. Research conducted years later found a causal relationship between the women’s radiation exposure and the subsequent health problems that plagued their children That's ... uh, I guess medical ethical reviews were invented sometime in the late 50's then?
- sammalloy 3y ago
  > I guess medical ethical reviews were invented sometime in the late 50’s then. In the late 1970s, actually, and yet they weren’t put into standard practice across the board in every medical field until the 1990s in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research_legislation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research_legisla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    As TFA states, this was all explicitly against the Nuremburg code signed in 1947. > The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. > It should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
p-e-w 3y ago
So American doctors knowingly gave radioactive cocktails to hundreds of pregnant women while telling them the lie that they were actually vitamin drinks. Those cocktails caused cancer in both the women and their babies. This wasn't an experimental treatment or anything, they just wanted to know whether iron-59 was capable of crossing the placenta. There was never any possible benefit for the victims. And all of that was orchestrated and funded by the government. Think about that for a second. Yet in just a few decades, the medical establishment has managed to convince the vast majority of people and public officials that distrusting them is equivalent to claiming the Earth is flat or that the world is ruled by a secret cabal of lizardmen. That surely has to be the greatest PR coup in human history.
- lynx23 3y ago
  I am not surprised. I was abused for a medical experiment at the age of 6, around 1985. This stuff still happens, but if you talk about it, people tend to not want to believe you, for their own peace of mind.
- trasz4 3y ago
  It's not the "medical establishment" that sanctioned it - American society did.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    Can you explain your reasoning there? Like - was American society aware of this? This all seemed pretty secret to me. Did it sign the papers authorizing this? Did we vote on all that and I somehow missed it? Were the people crafting these horrors and delivering these cocktails Licensed Doctors, or random American society folk?
- kybernetyk 3y ago
  >Think about that for a second. Don't need to. Once you realize that the biggest mass murderers in the 20th century were all governments you should know what to think of those organizations.
trasz4 3y ago
tl;dr US government doesn't only protect their war criminals, but also other kinds of criminals. And US public either doesn't care, or can't do anything.
- andrepd 3y ago
  And other countries' war criminals, from Nazi officers to Unit 731.
noduerme 3y ago
It seems there's a bit of confusion about "liberalism" being the problem - although the paper does attempt to explain that defense experiments were actually conducted on behalf of a distorted claim of liberalism and a militarized, illiberal state version of it. Much like the illiberal state socialism of the USSR and the illiberal state racism of Nazi Germany.
frankfrankfrank 3y ago
The constant invocation of Nazi this and Nazi that really not only undermines the issue, but it’s also racist in that it centers everything only about a single event and only one single instance of similar awful things that only happened in Europe. The opposition to human rights abuses should be a universal one, not something that is cheapened by narrowing everything down to a comparison to a single event. Guess what, there are atrocities that have both happened to and were committed by other people and also in different parts of the world besides Europe. It ignores the awfulness of what has happened and is happening to other people too and other people also matter, not just one group at one time frozen in place.
- boffinAudio 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - frankfrankfrank 3y ago
    Thank you for saying that, because that is precisely the narrowing of perspective I am referring to, which puts everything into a comparison and measure of how and to what degree something is “Nazi”. But you’re clearly in good company, we’ve seen it play out in grand style over the last couple years especially where everything someone doesn’t like is “Nazis”. insert circular accusation meme here Fact of the matter is that it is an unhealthy illusion that “the Nazis” were some kind of anomaly or extraordinary thing, and that perspective that they were is precisely being peoples minds up to the point that they cannot think clearly, let alone properly classify, order, and structure things in order to solve problems or even just deduce the underlying logic. Nothing about ethnic unity standing in opposition to a perceived enemy is in any way unique to any parameters. The plains tribes of what we call America would unite and overrun other tribes that they perceived as threats and resource competitors, and they would mercilessly slaughter and brutalize, rape, pillage, and kill. Genghis Khan may have been the single worst genocidal maniac in all of human history, even just by rough guesstimate (I don’t recall “the Nazis” launching rotten corpses full of botulism and thereby also causing the plague that killed hundreds of millions), and he also did it with what is effectively “national socialist”, i.e., unitedly working among and for one’s own nation, i.e., ethnicity. Or consider the Spanish who conquered and eradicated essentially all indigenous cultures on all of the Americas, largely including the ones the English are blamed for, even though it was the Hispanics, i.e., Spanish and Portuguese, who also eradicated and plundered and conquered the Americas for their own race/ethnicity/nation. Am I at all getting thought about the fact that “everything is Nazis” is a stunting mentality? “Nazis” didn’t somehow overtake and become imbued in America through “operation paperclip”, what the Nazis did for a relatively few years that was really not even nearly as awful as what had been done at that point and arguably since, considering we were supposed to have known better. We should have known better since “the Nazis”, correct? Never again auch atrocities, right? So how is it that not only has no one been held accountable for the destruction of Iraq under obvious and over lies, murdering somewhere around probably one million people and causing untold misery and devastation in people’s lives, but Assange, who exposed the atrocities is rotting in prison and very few people even care? People can’t see the atrocities and the awful people and their atrocities in front of them for all “the Nazis” occupying their minds … I argue, intentionally, by constant focus on “the Nazis”.
leashless 3y ago
Seems like I read that entire thing without hearing any mention of the race of the experiment's victims? Did I miss something in the OP, or did they really make it through the entire way without referencing that? I'm assuming it was much like Tuskegee in this respect?
- f1refly 3y ago
  How is that relevant in any way?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - leashless 3y ago
    Do you know about Tuskegee Airmen?
    - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
      checked the wikipedia article. don't see how those two subjects relate. care to elaborate?
      - leashless 3y ago
        In that instance the victims of the highly damaging no-consent medical experimentation were all African American. This is likely true of the radiation experiments, but is not indicated in the article.
        2-718-281-828 3y ago
        what have the Tuskegee airmen to do with that except for being also black?
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > This is likely true of the radiation experiments It's not, in fact, quite the opposite is true: the subjects were all white, by express design.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
slowhand09 3y ago
"Its for the greater good." https://www.facebook.com/reel/988486965857313/ https://www.facebook.com/reel/988486965857313/
Haga 3y ago
[dead]

91 points by brandonlc 3y ago

Abstract: This paper explores U.S. government activities related to human experimentation after World War II. We emphasize how a proactive foreign policy, even in the pursuit of liberal ends, can undermine the rights and liberties of members the domestic populace. The typical primary justification for a strong military and proactive foreign policy is to protect the person and property of domestic people while reinforcing liberal values. But preparing for and engaging in war and foreign intervention, even if defensive in nature, often does the opposite in unseen and underappreciated ways. We discuss the implications of these tendencies and consider three responses offered by liberals—liberal empire, interstate federalism, and citizen-based defense.

hulitu 3y ago
The US learned a lot from Japanese and Germans.
- coldtea 3y ago
  It adopted all kinds of German rocket tech and scientists for the space program and millitary uses. And it co-opted both states post-war, complete with ex-fascists in positions of power and everything.
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  The US pioneered social darwinism, eugenics, and commercial genocide. Andrew Jackson's ruthless campaigns of extermination against Native Americans a century earlier was a cited inspiration and model for the Holocaust. If we are our histories, the US are, as a people, still moral and ethical infants.
  - peteradio 3y ago
    If we are only our histories then I'm not sure what is the point of attempting to change. Surely we are not our histories.
- tpm 3y ago
  Did they really need to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
throwrqX 3y ago
The paper says it makes a connection between human experimentation and foreign policy but I don't really see it. Scientists were interested in how these chemicals or biological agents worked and I don't think it would have made a difference to them whether they worked for the military, or a civilian health agency, or a corporation. Similarly for nuclear materials post WW2 the thinking at the time was that nuclear energy was going to become widespread and so there was plenty of reason to study the effect of nuclear material on the human body without taking into consideration anything foreign policy related.

SiempreViernes 3y ago

> Many had been told the cocktail contained some combination of vitamins meant to benefit them and their children—a bald lie (Thomas 2007, p. 39). In fact, the drinks given to the pregnant women contained various doses of the radioactive isotopes iron-55 and iron-59. In their study with the pregnant women scientists hoped to determine if the radioactive iron would cross the placenta—it did. Not long after the women drank the “vitamin cocktail” they thought would help with fetal development, radioactive material began circulating in the blood of their children (Welsome 1999, p. 221). Like Helen, many of the other women and their babies experienced disastrous health effects—fatigue, hair loss, bruising, and swelling were common. Both the women and their children developed cancers. Research conducted years later found a causal relationship between the women’s radiation exposure and the subsequent health problems that plagued their children That's ... uh, I guess medical ethical reviews were invented sometime in the late 50's then?

sammalloy 3y ago
> I guess medical ethical reviews were invented sometime in the late 50’s then. In the late 1970s, actually, and yet they weren’t put into standard practice across the board in every medical field until the 1990s in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research_legislation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research_legisla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report
- mandmandam 3y ago
  As TFA states, this was all explicitly against the Nuremburg code signed in 1947. > The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. > It should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

p-e-w 3y ago

So American doctors knowingly gave radioactive cocktails to hundreds of pregnant women while telling them the lie that they were actually vitamin drinks. Those cocktails caused cancer in both the women and their babies. This wasn't an experimental treatment or anything, they just wanted to know whether iron-59 was capable of crossing the placenta. There was never any possible benefit for the victims. And all of that was orchestrated and funded by the government. Think about that for a second. Yet in just a few decades, the medical establishment has managed to convince the vast majority of people and public officials that distrusting them is equivalent to claiming the Earth is flat or that the world is ruled by a secret cabal of lizardmen. That surely has to be the greatest PR coup in human history.

lynx23 3y ago
I am not surprised. I was abused for a medical experiment at the age of 6, around 1985. This stuff still happens, but if you talk about it, people tend to not want to believe you, for their own peace of mind.
trasz4 3y ago
It's not the "medical establishment" that sanctioned it - American society did.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  Can you explain your reasoning there? Like - was American society aware of this? This all seemed pretty secret to me. Did it sign the papers authorizing this? Did we vote on all that and I somehow missed it? Were the people crafting these horrors and delivering these cocktails Licensed Doctors, or random American society folk?
kybernetyk 3y ago
>Think about that for a second. Don't need to. Once you realize that the biggest mass murderers in the 20th century were all governments you should know what to think of those organizations.

trasz4 3y ago

tl;dr US government doesn't only protect their war criminals, but also other kinds of criminals. And US public either doesn't care, or can't do anything.

andrepd 3y ago
And other countries' war criminals, from Nazi officers to Unit 731.

noduerme 3y ago

It seems there's a bit of confusion about "liberalism" being the problem - although the paper does attempt to explain that defense experiments were actually conducted on behalf of a distorted claim of liberalism and a militarized, illiberal state version of it. Much like the illiberal state socialism of the USSR and the illiberal state racism of Nazi Germany.

frankfrankfrank 3y ago

The constant invocation of Nazi this and Nazi that really not only undermines the issue, but it’s also racist in that it centers everything only about a single event and only one single instance of similar awful things that only happened in Europe. The opposition to human rights abuses should be a universal one, not something that is cheapened by narrowing everything down to a comparison to a single event. Guess what, there are atrocities that have both happened to and were committed by other people and also in different parts of the world besides Europe. It ignores the awfulness of what has happened and is happening to other people too and other people also matter, not just one group at one time frozen in place.

boffinAudio 3y ago
[flagged]
- frankfrankfrank 3y ago
  Thank you for saying that, because that is precisely the narrowing of perspective I am referring to, which puts everything into a comparison and measure of how and to what degree something is “Nazi”. But you’re clearly in good company, we’ve seen it play out in grand style over the last couple years especially where everything someone doesn’t like is “Nazis”. insert circular accusation meme here Fact of the matter is that it is an unhealthy illusion that “the Nazis” were some kind of anomaly or extraordinary thing, and that perspective that they were is precisely being peoples minds up to the point that they cannot think clearly, let alone properly classify, order, and structure things in order to solve problems or even just deduce the underlying logic. Nothing about ethnic unity standing in opposition to a perceived enemy is in any way unique to any parameters. The plains tribes of what we call America would unite and overrun other tribes that they perceived as threats and resource competitors, and they would mercilessly slaughter and brutalize, rape, pillage, and kill. Genghis Khan may have been the single worst genocidal maniac in all of human history, even just by rough guesstimate (I don’t recall “the Nazis” launching rotten corpses full of botulism and thereby also causing the plague that killed hundreds of millions), and he also did it with what is effectively “national socialist”, i.e., unitedly working among and for one’s own nation, i.e., ethnicity. Or consider the Spanish who conquered and eradicated essentially all indigenous cultures on all of the Americas, largely including the ones the English are blamed for, even though it was the Hispanics, i.e., Spanish and Portuguese, who also eradicated and plundered and conquered the Americas for their own race/ethnicity/nation. Am I at all getting thought about the fact that “everything is Nazis” is a stunting mentality? “Nazis” didn’t somehow overtake and become imbued in America through “operation paperclip”, what the Nazis did for a relatively few years that was really not even nearly as awful as what had been done at that point and arguably since, considering we were supposed to have known better. We should have known better since “the Nazis”, correct? Never again auch atrocities, right? So how is it that not only has no one been held accountable for the destruction of Iraq under obvious and over lies, murdering somewhere around probably one million people and causing untold misery and devastation in people’s lives, but Assange, who exposed the atrocities is rotting in prison and very few people even care? People can’t see the atrocities and the awful people and their atrocities in front of them for all “the Nazis” occupying their minds … I argue, intentionally, by constant focus on “the Nazis”.

leashless 3y ago

Seems like I read that entire thing without hearing any mention of the race of the experiment's victims? Did I miss something in the OP, or did they really make it through the entire way without referencing that? I'm assuming it was much like Tuskegee in this respect?

f1refly 3y ago
How is that relevant in any way?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- leashless 3y ago
  Do you know about Tuskegee Airmen?
  - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
    checked the wikipedia article. don't see how those two subjects relate. care to elaborate?
    - leashless 3y ago
      In that instance the victims of the highly damaging no-consent medical experimentation were all African American. This is likely true of the radiation experiments, but is not indicated in the article.
      - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
        what have the Tuskegee airmen to do with that except for being also black?
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > This is likely true of the radiation experiments It's not, in fact, quite the opposite is true: the subjects were all white, by express design.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

slowhand09 3y ago

"Its for the greater good." https://www.facebook.com/reel/988486965857313/ https://www.facebook.com/reel/988486965857313/

Haga 3y ago

[dead]