Victims of American Medical Research
In the 1940's, Americans experimented on the inmates of Guatemalan jails and medical hospitals by infecting them with syphilis. Similar experiments were performed on black Americans. While I fully agree with the horror and disgust expressed by liberal politicians, journalists, and "bioethicists" like Arthur Caplan at such atrocities and would like to believe that they will never happen again, those same pundits and politicians--Caplan in particular at MSNBC--are the very people arguing for aggressive fetal stem cell research. These people are willing to grow fetus and harvest cells from innocent babies but they actually see something wrong in doing research on sexually transmitted diseases. I would wonder how creatures like Arthur Caplan sleep at night, but men and women without a conscience have no trouble nodding off. Indeed, it is hard to attribute to them a genuine conscious life.
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In the 1950s, Puerto Rico was the testing ground for the baby-preventing "Pill," back when it was even more dangerous to women than today. Many women died, and their birth rate was devastated. It was a major assault by the secularist regime and "private" foundations against Catholic people and their morality. Margaret Sanger herself, "Hitler in a Skirt" as John Lofton once branded her, visited to make sure her demonic schemes were being implemented. The "Pill" was successful, and soon destroyed sexual morality in America.
I just wish our religious leaders would lead us against such abominations.
I am outraged by the whole thing on three levels.
An apology after 60+ years is no real apology, because you are not apologising for anything you did, and all the people responsible are long dead, and without any punitive measures to be made against them.
Then, nobody so far has admitted that they want stem cell research (and other outrageous scientific experiments like this) out of pure greed. Well, it's not exactly greed, but we know the arguments - that those who oppose stem cell research are against saving lives of people in critical condition. Could it be that some part of their minds wonder that if they were in that condition, they would want the benefits of it? They need to say it and get it over.
Lastly, why do many government officials in America act like Guatemuala is their little fiefdom or their country? Recently, when riots broke out in Guatemuala, nobody was more outraged than the American embassy, as if the riots were an attack on them. Then the members of this embassy wrote a scolding letter on the various groups who have criticized the Guatemualan government for being responsible for the riots. And now we see that many other American officials in all those years back saw it fit to have power over life-and-death matters of Guatemualan patients and inmates. Such arrogance.
And now America is infecting Guatemala with Bible-thumping evangelicals and fundamentalists.
Don't be too hard on the Bible-thumpers. They are bringing the usual cash, nylons, coca cola and blue jeans to enlighten the natives.
Let's remember that "Tuskegee" is a myth: healthy Blacks were not infected; treatment was withheld from syphilitics; and the treatments available at the time were lengthy, painful, ineffective, and expensive.
http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA34A.htm
Let's assume that the discovery of the results of this experiment also yields information or new insights into the treatment of STDs or any other disease. What should be the right position for a scientist, or the scientific community to take?
It is also a great example to counteract all those people who put all their faith in science, and think that it will be able to erradicate the violence and ignorance that religion is supposed to foster.
Mr. Spencer: The Tuskegee experiments were started in the early thirties or perhaps late twenties. They sought to duplicate an experiment from the 1890's in Oslo Norway. The patients at the clinic in Oslo were given no treatment. The treatment used in the 1890's was not very good. By the early thirties there was a quite good treatment with a lot of positive and long lasting results. It was a long treatment and quite rough, like modern chemo-therapy. In fact the inventor of the treatment, Dr. Ehrlich, is called the father of chemo-therapy. The patients in Tuskegee were lied to, even after penicillin was discovered, and in wide use for syphilis. All I can say is too hell with all these Dr. Frankenstein's
Thanks to Jorge Fallas for making the larger point and to John Marino for correcting Mr. Spencer's misconstruction. I had deliberately referred only in the vaguest terms to the Tuskeegee experiment, because I was not talking about race and did not wish to have that red herring laid across the trail. But an ideologue can only see what his ideology permits him to see. Thus for Marxists, this tale would be about class struggle and the oppression of the poor, and there is that element; for the libertarian, it would be an unjust deprivation of the rights of the prisoners, and there is an element of that as well. For the materialist anti-Christian racialist, everything turns on the need to defend white people, hence Mr. Spencer's inability to appreciate the moral seriousness of these cases.
The political point is the willingness of an anti-Christian regime to subject the vulnerable to any indignity if one or another technocrat can find a justification. The victims may be Latino aliens, blacks, criminals, the mentally ill, or, in some radiation experiments, members of the US armed forces. Naturally, the ideological complexion of the regime undergoes some change or at least pretends to. Before WWII, these people tended to be eugenicists who favored compulsory sterilization of inferiors such as Negroes and Sicilians and criminals. After the war, these methods had been stigmatized by association with the Third Reich, so other methods--e.g., contraception had to be promoted.
But here is the point I was trying to make in my hasty screed. The anti-Christian materialist mindset of the American elite exposes all of us, potentially, to be used as so much inert stuff, as experimental subjects or genetic material to be eaten by rich sick people. The so-called pagans today, that is the racist neopagans, are captivated by exactly this same mindset. For them, their funny little pretensions to honor Thor or Odin are really so much window-dressing for the anti-Christian materialism that would deprive everyone alive of the dignity to which we should at least aspire and which as Christians we have received as a gift from our Creator. An ancient Egyptian or Greek would know what I am talking about. Mr. Spencer, alas, does not. I know I have ridiculed these people in the past, as they deserve, but honestly, they are also human beings made in the image of God, whether they acknowledge it or not, and as such they also deserve our prayers.
My comment actually wasn't meant as a criticism of the article, nor as a defense of stem-cell research or of White People in general, nor was it a call for anyone to embrace Odinism. It was more like a helpful footnote, with a link to a revisionary lecture. But I seem to have inspired Dr. Fleming to hop on his hobby horse. Ride on! I'll go elsewhere.
A man may only judge another man's goals by what he says and does. Mr. Spencer, riding his one and only hobby horse, has tried to turn a moral question into a racialist discussion. Then, having no counter-arguments to make--other than to plead guilty as charged--he picks up his marble--he only has one--and goes home. More evidence of the immaturity that these single-issue racialists are so often putting on display. Ideologues are al the same: single-issues cranks who measure the richness of all human experience by communist subversives in the academy, human rights, race, or fluoride in the water.
For the record, I have any number of hobby horses that I have ridden hard enough to bore thousands of victims, from the lyric meters of Greek tragedy to the study of primates (my family refers to my "monkey period") to Gilbert and Sullivan, Byzantine History, Charleston, St. Alphonsus, Italian wine and Tennessee whiskey, and pre-60s movies....In fact my most wearied hobby horse is the one I ride constantly by boring people to tears telling them about my hobby horses. And you, dear readers, have put up with it for so long.
RBS, do you expect kind & gentle treatment when you argue that Christianity is for wimps?
One thing about Christianity for whimps is that if you read enough whimpy poetry, listen to enough whimpy sermons, enough whimpy songs, or hang around enough whimpy christians, one could conclude .....
That is not the case on this blog. In fact Mr. Spencer reminds me of the lonesome coyote who will not enter the camp and allow the fire to warm his hungry soul, nor will he simply head north into the wilderness, leaving the poor, ignorant, christian, travelers to their corn-dodgers and whiskey. He wants to lurk around the edges, admire the fire from afar and see what scraps might fall from the wagons. Let him.
The amoral materialist views of generals, cabinet ministers, chiefs of scientific research, or any such member of the establishment are a basic reminder that nuclear weapons are not a deterrant, and in nuclear war, all our own lives will be at stake, including their own, but they shall not value it much either.
These Frankenstein-like experiments are proof of it.
It's a reflection of a disturbing truth that could have serious consequences.
The article that Mr. Spencer linked to in his next to last comment might, for all I know, have real merit. It is by an apparently distinguished anthropologist at the University of Chicago. If "Tuskegee" is a myth, as Spencer insists, it won't mean there are no legitimate fears about the evils of eugenics, then or now. It will only mean that certain reigning beliefs--as in the case of the Bard from Stratford on Avon, or the "justice" of the Civil War--can be based on the most solid-seeming social consensus and yet be essentially bullshnorsh.
I would wonder how creatures like Arthur Caplan sleep at night, but men and women without a conscience have no trouble nodding off. Indeed, it is hard to attribute to them a genuine conscious life.
Actually, one will find that sleep comes quite easy when one has resigned onesself, no matter what the resignation--even of going to hell.
I wish I were joking.