Over half German Doctors joined the Nazi Party

I am seeking to explain in this series of essays, how otherwise nice people — and indeed Western people, who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms about human rights and the rule of law — can be doing evil now, with whole hearts.

I am asking how they can be suppressing the respiration of children intentionally; how they can be consigning friends and colleagues to eat in the street like outcasts, or sending cops to arrest a woman and terrify a nine-year-old child, whose crimes were that they tried to visit the Museum of Natural History in New York without “papers”?

How could “nice” people in the humane West, can put on the agenda in Washington State just recently, plans to detain those exposed to a “contagious disease” in forcible quarantine, without charge or trial, and dependent on a court order and good behavior to get out?

All of this is happening right now in America -- in the land of people who, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have had the principle of equality governing human relations as a matter of law; a nation that had passed laws against the abuse of or corporal punishment of children in public schools in the 1970s in virtually every state; and a people who have been raised in a culture of freedom and civility compared with lawless or totalitarian regimes, that led them, for the most part, to be, on the scale of decency to cruelty, until two years ago, very decent people.

How could good people be going along with this?

People are asked to join a cult and offer up their bodies; if they don’t, they are ostracized and denied social life and professional advancement.

Small businesses, restaurants and movies theaters; small hotels and venues, small real estate holdings, entire livelihoods, are being crushed by arbitrary dicta, by the unrestrained powers of Boards of Health and the CDC to crush whole sectors, and thus to destroy, or in effect to transfer, entire classes of assets from one targeted group into the hands of another group: to institutional investors, or shall we say, to allies of the current oligarchs.

In Washington State, as noted above, proposals were put forward — similar to those that have been enacted in Australia and elsewhere — to detain Americans, and turn the Boards of Health into entities with police powers; to establish militias, in effect, in the service of unelected, unaccountable Boards of Health. US “fact-checkers” claimed that this was not true, but it was true.

Reports are proliferating of the unvaccinated treated abusively in hospitals, and therapeutics have, it is becoming clear, been withheld via government agencies’ pressure, from an entire population, leading to countless avoidable deaths. A class of therapeutics, monoclonal antibodies, have just been withdrawn by the FDA from ill people’s access. Medical entities such as the formerly respected Mayo Clinic are being sued because they are refusing treatment to a dying man, for which his wife is begging.

What do you call all of this, if not an early Nazi-like set of practices?

In the early years of Nazi policy, as Robert Proctor’s magisterial 1990 Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis points out, it was doctors who were tasked by the State, and given special status and authority, with singling out “life unworthy of life” and elaborating racially-based policies that separated the “clean” and privileged, from the “unclean,” or “degenerate,” and restricted.

In 1933, doctors began to sterilize the unfit. As Michael A Grodin, MD, Erin L Miller, BA, and Jonathan Miller, MA, point out, in “The Nazi Physicians as Leaders in Eugenics and ‘Euthanasia’: Lessons for Today”:

A series of recurrent themes arose in Nazi medicine as physicians undertook the mission of cleansing the State: the devaluation and dehumanization of segments of the community, medicalization of social and political problems, training of physicians to identify with the political goals of the government, fear of consequences of refusing to cooperate with civil authority, bureaucratization of the medical role, and the lack of concern for medical ethics and human rights.

Half of Germany’s physicians joined the Nazi party.

Calypso Jones wrote:how is that story FUBAR.