As has been reported recently, officials of the US government issued an official “apology” for a scientific experiment done in the 1940s, in which 1500 or so Guatemalans were deliberately infected with syphilis and/or gonorrhea without their knowledge. Of course this is not the first time such experiments were conducted. There was the infamous “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment” that began in 1932 and ran for 40 years, in which 339 African-American sharecroppers were infected with syphilis after being lied to by the US Public Health Service.
If you look at the Wikipedia article titled “Human experimentation in the United States,” you’ll find a long list of other experiments performed on human subjects without their knowledge and/or consent. In many of these studies, the scientists, if you wish to call them that, often referred to their victims as “material.” In the Tuskegee experiment, which ended only after a whistleblower called it to the attention of the press, after the experiment was exposed Dr. John R. Heller of the Public Health Service said “The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.” They were sick, and they were people, but I guess Heller had a different definition of those words.
There’s two major things we can take away from all of this. First, the state and its lackeys dehumanize those they would victimize. It’s much easier for a doctor to play with the lives and health of “clinical material” than of “sick people,” psychologically. As Stalin reportedly said “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” They see us at most as “citizens” or “voters” but never as people, never as equals.
Secondly, that when you can act with impunity, irresponsible behavior will take place toward those whom you have this sense of impunity. “Mistakes will be made” — to paraphrase the old cliche that officials often use when they speak about their atrocities. Maybe not always, maybe not all the time, but over a large enough sample, over a long enough time, it will happen, over and over. And the state is very large, and has been around for a long time. You only need to take a cursory glance at the news to see some sort of story about police brutality almost every day.
“Sorry” or “Oops, my bad!” isn’t going to cut it any more. In order to create responsibility, in order to reclaim our humanity, we are going to have to make sure that behavior like this has serious repercussions. And the only way we can do that is to remove the impunity that the state has over us. When we do that, we are essentially on the way to a stateless society, where everyone is responsible for his or her own actions, and no one has the authority to commit scientific, military or any other atrocities.
Citations to this article:
- Anna O. Morgenstern, Apology for experiments not accepted, Alexandria, Louisiana Town Talk, 14 Oct 2010
Actually, in that case (unlike the Guatemalan one), they weren’t infected with syphilis, they already had it and were chosen for the study because of that. The actions and omissions relating to that ethical failure didn’t consist in infecting them, but in failing to treat them once they were identified and in withholding their diagnoses to make them less likely to seek other help, turning them over to the researchers instead. By my reading, the ethical failure lay directly with the doctors who turned them over instead of doing what they had undertaken to do (because they owed a duty of care, in turn because they implicitly promised care), and indirectly with those who conducted the study by their actions leading to treatment being withheld (by knowingly contributing to poor health by actively recruiting for non-treatment), but much less so if at all with those who actually did the work of the study – precisely because they didn’t owe a duty of care, wearing that hat; theirs was like the ethical failure of joining the SS as such, as opposed to carrying out atrocities. On the other hand, those doing the work on the Guatemalans actively infected them, and were in the wrong for that.
Well, if they did that they wouldn't have time to write apologies for bombing Guatemala, overthrowing President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 (leading to the deaths of 200,000 civilians), backing the assassination of South Vietnam president Diem, trying to kill Charles De Gaulle, for overthrowing the Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 and instituting the dictator Shah, killing 400,000,000 people from 1963 to 1973 in Southeast Asia, murdering Chilean president Alende and instituting (via a staged coup) Dictator Pinochet (with a resulting 5,000 murders to make it stick), the backing of military rulers in El Salvador in 1977 (leading to 70,000 dead Salvadorians and four dead American nuns), apologizing to the PEOPLE OF AMERICA for training Osama bin Laden (giving them $3,000,000,000) which was later used to kill 3,000 people on 9/11, for funding the Serbian genocide, for turning Bosnia into a giant terrorist base, for helping along the Kosovo genocide, for using money they got in the crack-cocaine trade to train and fund the Nicaraguan contras and killing 30,000 citizens as a result, giving weapons to Iraq in 1982 to kill Iranians with, giving weapons to Iran in 1983 to kill Iraqis with, invading Panama in 1989 because Noriega refused to go with the plans (leading to 3,000 civilian casualties), apologizing to Kuwait because in 1990 Iraq invaded them with weapons the US gave them… and then reinstating the dictator of Kuwait, for bombing a "weapons factory" in Sudan in 1998 (and by weapons factory, I mean aspirin factory), for bombing Iraq consistently since 1991 on a weekly basis, for the economic sanctions and bombing on Iraq that killed around 600,000 children ALONE (more than the children deaths in Hiroshima… which, like Nagasaki, is also left without apology), giving the Taliban ruled Afghanistan $245,000,000 in "aid" in 2000 and 2001, for invading Korea in the fifties, Vietnam a decade later, for all the people they tested in Operation Midnight Magic and Project MKULTRA…
Not even done, but I mean. See how long it took to even write out all that? Imagine writing an apology for each one!
Wait, what do you mean they aren't apologizing for all of those things?…