Tag: Nazis

The poisoned roots of German anti-vax sentiment

I’ve long thought it odd that Germany, where the politics is generally fairly rational, and science education in particular is generally quite good, has such broad acceptance of homeopathy and a variety of other forms of quackery, and a special word — Schulmedizin — “academic medicine” — to express a dismissive attitude toward what elsewhere would be called just “medicine”, or perhaps “evidence-based medicine”. I was recently looking into the history of this, and found that attacks on Schulmedizin — or “verjudete Schulmedizin” (jewified academic medicine) — were as much a part of the Nazi state science policy as “German mathematics” and “Arian physics”.

Medicine in the Third Reich remained a weird mixture of modern virology and pseudo-scientific “racial hygiene”. The celebrated physician Erwin Liek wrote

Es ist mein Glaube, dass das deutsche Volk berufen ist, nach und nach eine ganz neue, rein deutsche Heilkunst zu entwickeln.
(It is my belief, that the German people has a calling, gradually to develop a pure German art of healing.)

Liek was appealing for a synthesis of Schulmedizin with traditional German treatment. As with Arian physics*, and the Nazi state was careful not to push the healthy German understanding so far as to undermine important technology and industry. But the appeal to average people’s intuitive discomfort with modern science was a powerful propaganda tool that they couldn’t resist using, as in this 1933 cartoon “The vaccination” from Der Stürmer that shows an innocent blond arian mother uncomfortably watching her baby being vaccinated by a fiendish Jewish doctor. The caption reads “This puts me in a strange mood/Poison and Jews never do good.”

1933 Cartoon from Der Stürmer: Blond German mother looking concerned as a beastly Jewish doctor vaccinates her baby. Caption: "This puts me in a strange mood/Poison and Jews are seldom good."
1933 Der Stürmer cartoon “The vaccination”.

Today’s anti-vaxers fulminating against Schulmedizin and the Giftspritze (poison shot) are not necessarily being consciously anti-Semitic, but the vocabulary and the paranoid conspiracy thinking are surely not unconnected.

* Heisenberg was famously proud of having protected “Jewish physics” from being banned at his university, considering himself a hero for continuing to teach relativity theory, even while not objecting to the expulsion of the Jewish physicists, and agreeing not to attach their names to their work. Once when I was browsing in the science section of a Berlin bookstore in the early 1990s a man started chatting with me, telling me that he had worked for decades as a radio engineer in the GDR, and then going on to a long monologue apropos of nothing about how wonderful Heisenberg was, and how he had courageously defended German science during the Third Reich.

Boom times for crisis actors

While other creative professions suffer high unemployment, actors apparently are in consistently high demand for anti-conservative propaganda films. Even groups of actors that would usually have difficulty finding work — such as hispanic children — are now at full employment, presumably commanding high salaries from George Soros. At least, that is what we can infer from this remark of senior advisor to the president Kellyanne Conway in a recent television interview:

“These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now, do not fall for it, Mr President,” she said, staring directly into the camera.

Seriously, though, the Republicans have seemed to have stumbled their way toward a genuinely novel way of excusing crimes against humanity. This started with far-right conspiracies about “false-flag” operations to stage school shootings, as an excuse to disarm law-abiding Americans. For those who can believe it, it’s a perfect package for looking away from images that any psychologically healthy person must find disturbing — and, indeed, to transform that horror into even greater support for the policies that caused the horror.

Even the highly creative Holocaust denial industry with all their careful analysis of the capacity of gas chambers and crematoria, has never, to my knowledge, come up with the expedient of simply claiming that all those grisly photos and films of “Jews” being “shot” and “gassed” were actually just performing for political propaganda. Or maybe they were doing live theatre, entertaining the troops in a culturally unique way. I’m sure someone could come up with photographic evidence that two “corpses” in different photos look like they are the same person. Maybe they can even turn the narrative around, from Nazis massacring Jews to Nazis providing work to struggling Jewish actors.

Less than zero: A new reckoning

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about capitalism and the nature of wealth I learned from Donald Trump. And now I discover that I was entirely misled, at least as regards Trump’s particular role.

As I discussed in a post a couple of years ago, back in the 1990s I read a newspaper article about Donald Trump’s most recent bankruptcy, and was struck by the fact that, despite having vastly more liabilities than possessions, Trump was still treated as a wealthy man, and not worse than a pauper. And his creditors were willing to come to an arrangement that allowed him to live a rich-man lifestyle, if somewhat less opulent than before. I understood that to mean that modern capitalism makes debt almost as valuable as property, that the person with a billion in debt and the person with a billion in property are considered to be much more similar to each other than either is to the one who has neither debts nor wealth.

Now, having read several books on Trump, including most recently Seth Hettena’s Trump/Russia: A Definitive History, I see that this beautifully esoteric interpretation must yield — at least in the case of Trump — to a simpler and crasser interpretation: At various stages of his career Trump has been propped up by criminals who found the Trump Organisation, and its self-absorbed empty-headed chief, too useful as a cover for moneylending — first for the New York mob, then on a larger scale for Russian oligarchs and criminals from the former Soviet Union — to let it fail. In some sense, this is the value of debt: When there are large numbers in play, it’s easy to hide smaller numbers, just as long as you can come to an agreement to keep the flow going. And it does take a special kind of person to have managed to accumulate that amount of debt in the first place, making Trump’s debt truly a rare and valuable commodity.

I’m perfectly willing to accept a certain claim of innocence, that Trump believed all along that the fact that he kept managing to steer around failure demonstrated nothing but his unique genius. It reminds me of Hitler’s famous comment “Ich gehe mit traumwandlerischer Sicherheit den Weg, den mich die Vorsehung gehen heißt”: I follow, with the certainty of a sleepwalker, the path that Providence has laid out for me.

That narcissistic naïveté probably was, and remains, his most useful quality. First time tragedy, second farce.

The unexpected autocracy

One of my favourite logic paradoxes (does everyone have favourite logic paradoxes?) goes by the name of The Unexpected Hanging. There are numerous versions, but a standard story is: A man has been condemned to death for some crime. The judge tells him, “Today is Monday. You are to be hanged at noon some day in the next week, but you will not know until the morning of the day of the hanging which day it will be.” The man then reasons, it can’t be Sunday, because if I haven’t been hanged by Saturday noon, I’ll know it must be Sunday, which would contradict the judge’s order. Since it can’t be Sunday, if we get to Friday afternoon, I’ll know it must be Saturday. Again a contradiction. So it can’t be Saturday. Working backward in this way, he is confident that he cannot be hanged at all. But then Thursday dawns, and he is hanged, and he never anticipated it.

I was thinking about this, particularly in the light of this comment by Josh Marshall:

One thing we can say in Donald Trump’s favor, there was no bait and switch. They told us they would do all of this and more.

It’s true, and I’m not surprised. And yet… Trump did say he would ban Muslims. He would build a wall. He would ban abortion. He would revoke the Affordable Care Act. And yet, at the same time, he was saying over and over again, I’m going to be unpredictable. I won’t say what I’m really going to do. More than that, his whole demeanor suggested that you couldn’t believe the specifics of what he was saying. So, in the end, he does exactly what he said he would do, and it actually is somewhat surprising. Continue reading “The unexpected autocracy”

CDC works toward the president

Dem Führer entgegenarbeiten — Working toward the Leader — was one of the most important neologisms of the early Third Reich. No one really knew what Hitler wanted to do — not even Hitler himself — and the organs of state were in turmoil, certainly incapable of providing rapid guidance at the local level to the government’s plans. So everyone’s obligation was to surmise what the Führer’s ultimate objectives were, and work toward accomplishing it, without needing specific instructions.

Compare that to these recent decisions of the completely apolitical Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

CDC abruptly cancels long-planned conference on climate change and health

The Climate and Health Summit, which had been in the works for months, was intended as a chance for public health officials around the country to learn more about the mounting evidence of the risks to human health posed by the changing climate. But CDC officials abruptly canceled the conference before President Trump’s inauguration, sending a terse email on Jan. 9 to those who had been scheduled to speak at the event. The message did not explain the reason behind the decision.

CDC Indefinitely Postponed LGBT Youth Health Summit After Election

To be fair, the reason seems to be that they needed the resources to focus on their conference on disease transmission by refugees and illegal immigrants.

 

In the bunker

While accepting all the principles of the dangers of any political argument that involves Hitler, I couldn’t read this report from the NY Times about the desperate final days of the Trump campaign without thinking of Hitler in his bunker fantasising with his loyal paladins about being rescued by new rocket weapons:

On Oct. 28, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, announced that his agency would review newly discovered emails potentially pertinent to its investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mr. Trump was unsure how to respond.
“What do you think this means?” he asked the small circle traveling with him… To the assembled men sitting in white leather seats, the answer was simple: It could turn the election around.