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Posts filed under World War II

When the State gives doctors power over their patients, the doctors’ primary loyalty will be to the power of the State, not to their patients

(Via Cheryl Cline @ der Blaustrumpf 2008-12-02: Trusting Doctors.)

The first step is that the State grants legal privileges to doctors. Or, more specifically, to those doctors who practice medicine according to the approaches favored by the government and government-backed medical guilds like the American Medical Association. These privileges for officially-approved doctors to force their competitors out of business with threats of fines, jail, or death, and thus to force captive patients to seek their services. In many countries, these privileges include a large apparatus of government-subsidized healthcare, in which government-approved doctors are paid largely, or entirely, by funds that the government has taken from unwilling taxpayers. (Healers whose practices are not officially approved by the government, obviously, receive none of these subsidies.) In some cases, they also involve the power of doctors — especially psychiatrists, or other doctors treating children, or treating adults labeled as insane or feeble-minded — to force invasive treatment on unwilling patients through the use of deception, threats, restraint, and, if necessary, outright violence.

When the government gives doctors this kind of unaccountable, legally-backed plenary power to control or coerce their patients, it converts the medical profession into a class of legally elevated and legally regulated mandarins, who expect and enjoy considerable political power through their legally-privileged professional associations and through the State apparatus itself. Since doctors enjoy special privileges over their patients, and depend on legal force rather than on their patients’ judgment to get their way, the legal privilege helps foster a culture of arrogance and entitlement. And at the same time it creates a situation where doctors depend on government power for their wealth and cultural prestige, since they depend on it to create an artificial scarcity of medical services, and to keep patients captive to the doctor’s preferred regimen. Moreover, whenever medical doctors get special political privileges over their patients, politics defines what will be counted as legitimate medicine, and so medical doctors necessarily become politicians, acting a minor faction of the ruling class, just by establishing professional standards. When those professional standards are enforced by law, State-approved doctors’ professional associations are transformed from voluntary associations into a branch of the government, and medicine is transformed from a service to the patient into an arm of State policy.

And whenever, wherever, and exactly to the extent that the State gives doctors this kind of power over their patients, and makes them instruments of State policy, State-privileged doctors will owe their primary loyalty to power of the State, not to their patients.

The results of that shift in loyalty will depend on the nature of the State that claims their loyalty. When a State is relatively restrained, or simply incompetent, doctors will still help their patients, for the most part, rather than hurting them. When a State becomes more predatory, or lethal, politically-privileged doctors will be called on to be fine-tuned instruments of the predation or the murder. Since they depend on the State, politically-privileged doctors will usually answer the call, even if it means subjecting their victim-patients to malpractice, torture, or murder. Indeed, since a more powerful and invasive hygienic or therapeutic State means more power and influence for politically-privileged doctors, many of them will not only side with and collaborate with a predatory or lethal State, but will actively urge it onwards toward ever greater atrocities, and beg to be given the responsibility for carrying them out.



As Yoel Abells, a Toronto family doctor and medical ethicist, said of the experience in Germany under the Third Empire, and America under the United States government’s Global War on Terror:

One fact Abells found particularly disturbing was that doctors joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than other professionals.

Almost half of all doctors were members of the Nazi Party, he said, compared with only a quarter of lawyers or musicians, and to the 9 per cent of the German population as a whole.

Joining Nazi groups, he said, was intoxicating for many doctors because of the power over life and death it gave them.

Today, Abells said, a disturbing number of doctors continue to be involved in genocidal campaigns, terrorist organizations, torture and the interrogation of prisoners of war.

A report in the New England Journal of Medicine in September found that the U.S. Army continues to use doctors in its interrogation of suspected terrorists, despite every major medical association condemning the practice.

— Stuart Laidlaw, HealthZone.ca (2008-11-05): Medical atrocities did not end with Nazi era

As Cheryl Cline writes:

The collusion of the medical profession with the State is certainly nothing new. And sadly, it is not all that surprising. Intuitively, the public trusts its doctors and others perceived as public servants more than it trusts, say, its lawyers or ad men. (The popular TV show Mad Men is a perfect example of capitalization on our distrust of the capitalist-minded. Can you think of a show that would portray doctors in a similar light?) With so many people putting blind faith in government bureaucrats to foster the public good, it’s hardly surprising to see the two entities take advantage of the public's trust to merge and consolidate power.

— Cheryl Cline, der Blaustrumpf (2008-12-02): Trusting Doctors

When doctors have this unchecked power to wreak torture or death on patients — whether it’s thrust upon them by an aggressive State, or whether they collaborate with an ambitious State to get it — then you will always get atrocities. And that’s an outrage. But it should not be a surprise. It is not an abuse of power; the power itself is the abuse, and doctors will always and everywhere sweep aside their ethical obligations to patients in favor of political obedience to the State, as long as it is State power rather than patients’ consent that determines what counts as legitimate medical practice, and as long as State privilege transforms medical practice from a consensual service into a forcibly-wielded instrument of public policy — which is to say, an instrument of State power. Sometimes it happens in little, obnoxious ways (under little, obnoxious legal regimes), and sometimes it happens in big, deadly ways (under big, deadly legal regimes), but it’s been going on for a long time now, and there’s no way around it. No way, that is, except genuine freed-market medicine, the only thing that can free the medical profession from the influence of State power and to make doctors accountable to patients rather than to power. No way, that is, except to abolish all forms of political command-and-control over the practice of medicine and to let doctors return to providing nothing more, and nothing less, than a consensual, life-affirming service to willing patients.

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A brief history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the “Friend of Labor”

Because of the late unpleasantness, there’s been a lot of debate among a certain kind of Leftist as to what attitude the Left ought to take towards the Democratic Party’s big win at the polls, and the grassroots efforts by eager young Obamarchists to help bring it about. In the name of critical support, many state Leftists — particularly those who fancy themselves Progressives — urge other Leftists to hop on board the Democratic Party train; those who are a bit more skeptical, point out that, for people seriously concerned with peace, civil liberties, labor radicalism, anti-racism, ending bail-out capitalism,and so on, an Obama Presidency is an extremely limited victory at best, and those who know a bit of history point out that the Democratic Party has been the graveyard of social movements for over a century now, with one movement after another being diverted from grassroots action on behalf of their primary goals into the secondary or tertiary goals of bureaucratic maneuvering, party politicking, canvassing, fund-raising, or shamelessly apologizing for Democratic Party politicians. And once they go in, movements more or less never come out.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the current economic crisis, in discussions like these a lot of electoralist Progressives very quickly dig up the decaying corpse of Franklin Roosevelt, apparently in order to demonstrate a case where so-called critical support from the Left worked — that is, it supposedly worked because it supposedly got us the New Deal, and the New Deal supposedly represents a series of victories that Leftists should feel good about. The problem is that this picture is false in just about every detail. The New Deal was achieved in spite of the grassroots efforts of the American Left, not because of them. It was, in fact, put through largely as a means to co-opt or stifle the American Left. And what was put through ought to be considered a travesty by anyone for whom economic Leftism is supposed to mean an increase in workers’ power to control the conditions of their own lives and labor, rather than an increase in government’s power to make businessmen do what politicians want them to do.

So here is a brief history, contributed by a member of the Movement for a Democratic Society listserv (in response to a series of uncritical critical support apologetics and name-drops to Roosevelt), of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the friend of labor and patron saint of the American Progressive Left.

From: bob
To: MDS-Announce
Date: 5 November 2008 7:51 PM

Oct. 1933, 4 strikers killed in Pixley Ca. textile strike.

Early 1934, Roosevelt intervenes in the auto industry on behalf of company unions as opposed to worker organized unions.

In 1934, General Strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis began to threaten the capitalist order.

IN 1935, the Wagner Act was passed to regularize labor relations. The NLRB was set up to mediate between labor and capital ending the surge of general strikes.

In 1936-7, workers began to use the sit down strike to great advantage. In 1937, the Roosevelt appointed National Labor Relations Board declared them to be illegal. Later the Supreme Court in 1939, dominated by pro-Roosevelt judges, declared sit-down strikes to be illegal, taking the wind out of the sails of the labor movement.

When labor leaders tried to gain Roosevelt’s support in critiquing the killing of 18 peaceful workers in the steel strikes of ’37, Roosevelt refused, thus condoning the killings.

IN 1938 and 39 with rising unemployment, Roosevelt cut programs for the poor and unemployed.

The passing of the Social Security Act institutionalized the incredibly regressive payroll tax while postponing and benefits and establishing a retirement age beyond the life expectancy of workers so that payments would be minimal. Additionally, most women and Afro-Americans were purposefully not covered by the Act. At the time it was established the NAACP protested the racism inherent in the exclusions of most job categories employing blacks. The original act was also blamed for contributing to the economic downturn of 1937 because the government collected taxes from workers but paid no benefits to workers during this time period. Initially, no benefits whatsoever were to be paid until at least 1942. Amendments in 1939 changed that to 1940 but only encompassed a tiny minority.

Friend of Labor Roosevelt in 1940 signed the Smith Act which had been proposed by a Democrat and passed by a Democratic Congress. The first prosecutions were ordered by Roosevelt’s Attorney General Francis Biddle. Unfortunately, the split between the orthodox communists and the Trotskyists resulted in the persecution of the Trotskyists.

When the Federal Theater Project planned a musical production in 1937 attacking corporate greed, Roosevelt shut it down. He then had the theatre padlocked and surrounded by armed soldiers.

So much for the concept of political space under the Democrats.

One mistake rather consistently made by a good chunk of progressives is to frame an analysis based on the paranoia of the extreme right wing, taking their statements as if they were facts.

So if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk criticize some facet of American life or history (for example FDR as being some sort of left enabler), the progressives then want to disagree completely with Hannity et al and thus accept whatever BS he put forward but take the opposite point of view on it. So we then have progressives defending Roosevelt’s supposed progressive leanings or opening political space for the left or whatever phrasing suits their purposes. It’s not helpful to let the extreme right thereby define the nature of political discourse. It leads to an incredibly false and warped view of society and history.

Rather than helping to create an opening for the left in the 1930s, Roosevelt did what he could to shut off all openings that had been created by the workers themselves. He ended the surge of general strikes, then he ended the surge of sit down strikes. He put a stop to progressive artists. Clamped down on the radicals of the time period. Condoned the police and national guard killing of protesting workers. Collected regressive taxes from workers while promising them pension benefits at a point in the future for those fortunate enough to survive their employment and avoid an early death.. He continued racist and sexist policies especially relating to employment, government sanctioned discrimination and unfair dispersal of social benefits.

The main thing I would want to add to the analysis is that, unfortunately, I don’t think that the veneration of St. Franklin is solely due to the rush to take an equal-but-opposite reaction to the vilification of Roosevelt by plutocratic Right-wing hacks like Limbaugh or Hannity. The attitude is much older than Right-wing hate radio, and I think it is deeply rooted in the historical narratives and the self-conception of the Progressive wing of the Left. At the time Roosevelt went on a full-bore attack against the radical Left but enjoyed the support of the professional-class Progressive Left — whose influence he dramatically increased, and whose fortunes he subsidized on the taxpayer’s dime, with his massive expansion of the civil service and government planning bureaucracy. And he is venerated today by so many on the Left because so many on the Left continue allow their message to be set by the agendas of the political parties and by the nostrums of mid-20th century vital center corporate liberal politics. The counter-historical hagiography isn’t just a way of reacting to the Right; it’s also a way that the Establishmentarian Left keeps the radical Left in line, diverts all too many of us into the failed strategy of increasing workers’ power by increasing government power, and blinds all too many to the fact that their efforts within or on behalf of the Democratic Party are failing repeatedly, or when they succeed, inevitably succeed in increasing the power of professional government planners, without any significant gains for ordinary workers.

So it is really refreshing, at this historical moment, to see some folks challenging St. Franklin from the Left. And it’s deeply unfortunate, but not surprising, that it is refreshing to see that. It ought to be easy and common to make the Leftist case against a millionaire dynastic politician who officially kicked off his administration with a series of massive bank bail-outs, systematically attacked labor radicals, created a bureaucratic apparatus intended to buy off and domesticate labor moderates and conservatives, while sidelining or criminalizing labor’s most effective tactics, and presided over repeated physical attacks on organized workers. A millionaire dynastic politician who, in 1936, ordered J. Edgar Hoover to ramp up federal surveillance of questionable domestic political groups, and who aggressively dispensed with traditional restraints on unilateral executive power in order to pack the courts in favor of his own policies and to elevate himself to President-for-Life. A President-for-Life who conscripted millions of workers in the United States’ first ever peacetime military draft, who then spent a couple years deliberately wangling his way into a position where he could throw his new conscript army into the largest and most destructive war in the history of the world, who then, using the exigencies of a global war on tyranny as his excuse, drove Congress to create the House Un-American Activities Committee, imprisoned war protesters and political opponents on sedition and espionage charges, extracted no-strike agreements from the now-politically-controlled labor unions, commandeered virtually every good and imposed massive rationing and government-mandated wage freezes on American workers, created the modern military-industrial complex, ordered the firebombing of hundreds of German and Japanese cities, and, with a series of unilateral executive orders and military proclamations, summarily seized the property of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans, imposed arbitrary curfews on them based solely on their nationality, and finally sent in the military to roust them out of their homes and march them into concentration camps scattered across the American West.

Unfortunately, that kind of talk doesn’t square with the preferred historical narrative of Democratic Party politicians, and (therefore) it doesn’t much suit those who have ambitions that depend on currying favor with Democratic Party politicians. So it’s not the sort of thing that you hear much about. But it is the sort of thing that we can remember, and that we can talk about, whether they want us to or not.

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On class consciousness

Oh, Utne. What won’t you romanticize?

Fellow workers, I know that times are tough. Lots of people are losing their jobs. Lots of people are losing their homes.

But I’m sure that, as you hit the skids, or as you try to figure out how to feed yourself and your family without any income, you’ll be very glad to know that your economic pain is contributing to a national character correction, which might eventually lead to your city’s government adding a few more bike lanes, to penny-pinching high-enders shopping for their overpriced organic arugula at Safeway instead of at Whole Foods, and to some other high-enders, who had enough money in the bank to spend the past several years on a fossil-fueled consumerist binge that they need to be jolted out of, to possibly stop buying quite as much stuff as they used to buy. I am sure that you will feel grateful for your chance to play your part in this great national exercise in character-building and simple living. Right after you finish eating saltines for dinner.

By the way, in case you were wondering, other great ways of making a national character correction include a total-war command economy and blowing the hell out of a few million fellow workers in far away countries.

Do I need to mention what a special kind of professional-class Progressive self-absorption, callousness, and obliviousness it takes to write something like In Praise of Economic Pain — and then to pass it off as Leftist commentary, no less? Do I need to mention how very clear it is that the intended audience of an article like this are people who, as a class, are generally fairly secure in their own living situation and income, and so in no really great danger of ever feeling much of the economic pain that they are so quick to praise?

Well, if do, then I guess I just did.

Fellow workers, are these your allies? Do they speak for you? Have their methods worked for you? Is this the change you can believe in?

If not, then what we need to do is to get together — all of us who are small enough to fail — and cut through the seasonal noise and start talking about ways that we can unite amongst ourselves in order to take control of the conditions of our lives and our labor. We need to talk fighting unions and the victories that they can win. We need to talk mutual aid and how we can help each other, person to person, in our own neighborhoods and through our own efforts, through both bad times and good. We need to talk direct action, about organizing and taking control of the conditions of our lives in ways that don’t take ballot boxes or political parties or coalition partners who are too busy Believing in Change to bother themselves about whether we eat or starve, about the ways that we can do these things ourselves, with our own hands.

11:02am

YouTube: A date which will live in infamy

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8:15am

Here is a pocket watch, stopped at 8:15am.

Donated by Kazuo Nikawa
1,600m from the hypocenter
Kan-on Bridge

Kengo Nikawa (then, 59) was exposed to the bomb crossing the Kan-on Bridge by bike going from his home to his assigned building demolition site in the center of the city. He suffered major burns on his right shoulder, back, and head and took refuge in Kochi-mura Saiki-gun. He died on August 22. Kengo was never without this precious watch given him by his son, Kazuo.

— Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Sixty three years ago today, on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb over the center of the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Hiroshima was the first target ever attacked with nuclear weapons in the history of the world.

The bomb exploded about 200 yards over the city, creating a 13 kiloton explosion, a fireball, a shock-wave, and a burst of radiation. On the day that the bomb was dropped, there were about 255,000 people living in Hiroshima.

The explosion completely incinerated everything within a one mile radius of the city center. The shock-wave and the fires ignited by the explosion damaged or completely destroyed about nine-tenths of the buildings in the city. Somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 people–about one third of the population of the city–immediately died. The heat of the explosion vaporized or burned alive many of those closest to ground zero. Others were killed by the force of the shock-wave or crushed under collapsing buildings. Many more died from acute radiation poisoning–that is, from the effects of having their internal organs being burned away in the intense radiation from the blast.

By December 1945, thousands more had died from their injuries, from radiation poisoning, or from cancers related to the radioactive burst or the fallout. It is estimated that the atomic bombing killed about 140,000 people, and left thousands more with permanent disabilities.

Almost all of the people maimed and killed were civilians. Although there were some minor military bases near Hiroshima, the bomb was dropped on the city center, several miles away from the military bases on the edge of town. Hiroshima was chosen as a target, even though it had little military importance, because It is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focussing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage. 1. Hiroshima was also one of the largest Japanese cities not yet damaged by the American firebombing campaign. Military planners believed it strategically important to demonstrate as much destruction as possible from the blast.

Thomas Ferebee, a bombadier for the United States Army, was the man who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His commanding officer was the pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets. Tibbets and Ferebee were part of the XXI Bomber Command, directed by Curtis LeMay. LeMay planned and executed the atomic bombings at the behest of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry Truman.

Kengo Nikawa died on August 22nd, 1945 because of the bombing. This is his pocket watch.

We will never know the names of many of the 140,000 other residents of Hiroshima who were killed by the bombing. We have only estimates because the Japanese government was in a shambles by this point in the war, and countless records, of those that were successfully kept, were consumed by the flames, along with the people whose lives they recorded.

The late, great Utah Phillips called this one of the first songs he ever wrote that ever made any sense. It’s certainly one of his best.

U. Utah Phillips (1994), Enola Gay, on I’ve Got To Know

Enola Gay

Look out, look out
from your school room window
Look up young children from your play
Wave your hand
at the shining airplane
Such a beautiful sight is Enola Gay

It's many a mile
from the Utah desert
To Tinian Island far away
A standing guard
by the barbed wire fences
That hide the secret of Enola Gay

High above the clouds
in the sunlit silence
So peaceful here I'd like to stay
There's many a pilot
who'd swap his pension
For a chance to fly Enola Gay

What is that sound
high above my city
I rush outside and search the sky
Now we are running
to find our shelter
The air raid sirens start to cry

What will I say
when my children ask me
Where was I flying upon that day?
With trembling voice
I gave the order
To the bombardier of Enola Gay

Look out, look out
from your school room window
Look up young children from your play
Your bright young eyes
will turn to ashes
In the blinding light of Enola Gay I turn to see
the fireball rising
My god, my god all I can say
I hear a voice
within me crying
My mother's name was Enola Gay

Look out, look out
from your school room window
Look up young children from your play
Oh when you see
the war planes flying
Each one is named Enola Gay.

–U. Utah Phillips (1994), on I’ve Got To Know

As far as I am aware, the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center, in which forces acting on behalf of the United States government deliberately targeted a civilian center and killed over half of all the people living in the city at the time, remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world.

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