Briefly Noted: Then And Now

Crimes Against Humanity

Perhaps sparked by recent post here as well as plenty of discussion elsewhere, yesterday I received two emails that bear upon the Crimes Against Humanity theme.

The first email is brief and raises the issue of the the involvement of the medical profession—specifically, at least in my view, the failure to speak out as a profession. The historical example raises the question: How could the German medical profession have given birth to these monsters?

Of course this degradation of the medical profession has been ongoing for a long time in our own country, as we have largely averted our eyes. It’s also true that this has also been the case with other professions—law, law enforcement (more below), and education come immediately to mind. All of these professions have become complicit to one degree or another in the modern form of the authoritarian administrative state with its dehumanizing goals. Individuals can do their best to protect their personal integrity, but it becomes more difficult the longer we, as a society, go down this road.

So the first email:

Hi Mark,

I've created an anonymous substack of my own where I'm going to serialize the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial (which began on this day 75 years ago) from now through August 20, 2022 (which will be the 75th anniversary of handing down of the verdicts).

https://twitter.com/doctorstrial

History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes, and today's Covid madness has some parallels to the 1930s & 40s. :(

I'd be very grateful for a plug to help bring awareness to this solemn anniversary

The second email is a book recommendation—as it happens, in an area that I’ve done a fair amount of reading. I’ll simply link to the book and paste in the blurb from the back cover:

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews―now with a new afterword and additional photographs.

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.  

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.  

The point isn’t necessarily original—it’s simply the setting described takes it to extremes that we rarely experience. Never say never—as in, it could never happen here. That’s becoming the lesson of the Branch Covidian Regime: the demonization of informed dissenters, the subornation of “science” to a cult-like craze, the drive to punish non-conformers, coerced participation in medical experiments. Where will it end? We have quarantine camps in Australia today, what comes next?