Koochers Narcissistic Kooks: Accessories to Heinous Crimes, which they should, and, will be held accountable for, if I have my way. :-)
indomitable2
Criminal Accessories
The Suits and Lab Coats Behind the Front Lines
by Zbignew Zingh / October 29th, 2007
The History of Dirty Work
Pharaohs did not build the pyramids with their own hands. No generals
dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Kissinger did not personally murder Salvador
Allende nor did Nixon napalm kids in Vietnam.
What distinguishes these types of "great" leaders is their ability to get
dirty jobs done by getting others to do the job for them. History's dirty
work has always been done by others, like the slaves who hewed stones for
Egyptian mausoleums. But the overbearing will of "great" leaders and the
manipulation of mass labor does not explain how monumental tasks, especially
monumentally dirty tasks, get done. For pharaohs, like contemporary
presidents and prime ministers, not only did not build their own edifices,
they lacked the basic talents to do the work themselves. "Leaders" typically
have no specific "know-how", just wealth, the luck of birth, the confidence
of con men, and the psychopathology necessary to dominate others. Pharaohs,
like the leaders of today's world, employed engineers, managers, social
architects, scholars, designers and craftsmen - skilled professionals who
did the technical and creative work before anything of historical proportion
could be undertaken.
It is no different in our own times. Our age's "historical monuments" are a
mixed bag of good, bad and indifferent. Nevertheless, some of our more
remarkable "accomplishments" - aerial bombardment, "shock and awe," Little
Boy and Fat Man, ICBM launch silos, stealth avionics, nuclear reactors,
aircraft carriers, Los Alamos, depleted uranium munitions, psychological
torture, mass media propaganda, Enron, disaster capitalism, chemical and
biological warfare agents, digital eavesdropping, computerized data mining,
transgenic hybridization of species, retina scans, and satellite guided
missiles - are more the brainchildren of our professional classes than of
our own pharaonic leaders. Indeed, without professional accomplices, most of
the more heinous acts perpetrated in the past two centuries could not have
been thinkable, let alone possible.
The Crossroads of Power and the Professions
This is not an indictment of science or technology or of the professions,
nor is this a Luddite's lament. There is much that is positive in our world
due to the real progress of science. We simply recognize that no oligarchy
in any hierarchical society can stand except on the foundation stones laid
by that society's knowledgeable professionals.
There is no such thing as "pure science," any more than there is "art for
art's sake" or an idealized "rule of law." All "professional" human
endeavors - especially science, technology, economics, law and medicine -
intersect with politics or commerce, and usually both simultaneously.
Sometimes the connection is only dimly perceived; typically, today, the
intersection is blatant, immediate and inseparable.
We already know about the attorneys who split hairs over the definition of
torture, who plead for indefinite detention without charge or trial, who
argue for retroactive immunity for those who illegally monitored our
communications, or who plead "state secrets" as a bar to the redress of
government crimes. These lawyers (and the judges who approve their specious
arguments) might themselves be accessories to crime. It is not a defense to
argue that every party is entitled to zealous representation when that
misguided zeal facilitates the crime itself.
We already know about the so-called doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists
who help keep kidnapped captives "alive" so that they can be tortured and
interrogated again and again. These are not health care professionals but
accessories to crime. They have not sworn a Hippocratic Oath, but a
Hypocritical Oath, and they should be held accountable.
We already know about the economists and the money managers who boost
profits by devising schemes to break unions, curtail jobs, cut wages, cut
benefits and "externalize" the detritus of private enterprise. These
professionals, as criminal enablers, share the responsibility for the death
and pollution and despair caused by their principals.
We rarely think, however, about the other professional facilitators, the
ones in white lab coats, that is, the engineers, medical researchers and
scientists. They have a special responsibility for their work because what
they do can affect especially large numbers of people in particularly
horrific ways. Those who design nuclear, chemical or thermobaric weapons;
those who weaponize diseases; those who conduct genetic engineering for
profit; and those who develop machines for the remote delivery of war, are
not mere employees, not just intellectual workers - they are accessories to
some of humanity's most horrific acts of criminality.
I champion the pursuit of knowledge. I applaud that which makes dreams real.
But not since Einstein scribbled equations in his spare time at the Swiss
patent office has there been any solitary "scientific research" conducted
purely for science's sake. Today, nearly all "science" is conducted in only
three environments: the university, the corporate or the government research
laboratory. In all three, with few exceptions, directly or indirectly, the
funding for the research comes from or serves the interests of the military,
big business or homeland security. And because he who pays the piper calls
the tune, directly or indirectly, the scientific research that makes dreams
real also makes nightmares real.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Should scientists and engineers be held to account for the dire results of
their work? Absolutely. The research community thinks of itself as working
within the insular and mythical cocoon of "pure science." But no scientist,
no engineer, no computer programmer, no technician has the right to his or
her comfortable isolation simply because he or she would rather not think
about how his or her work will be used.
There is no excuse for not thinking. If you give your car keys to a drunk,
you have to think about the ramifications of what you have done because you
have enabled a drunk driver. When you hand a knife and a gun to a
psychopathic killer, you have enabled the psychopath's murders and share the
guilt for the carnage he wreaks. When you help design a new missile or
bomber technology; when you help develop new means of inflicting physical
pain, fear or death; when you help program computers to violate Asimov's
First Law of Robotics1 or to snoop on people's phone calls or emails; when
you research science for the sake of killing people; then, simply put, you
have enabled criminal behavior. When you do so, you share the responsibility
for the crimes that others commit with the technology that you helped to
create.
Science has always dazzled the majority who regard it with simultaneous
feelings of ignorance, awe and fear. Perhaps that is why we have customarily
given a free pass to everyone who wears a white lab coat, regardless whether
the scientist/doctor/researcher is a genius, a saint, a mediocrity, a
charlatan or a maniac. We should be less automatic in our simple reverence
for scientists and researchers, reserving adulation for those who genuinely
benefit humankind, and healthy skepticism for all the rest.
Knowledge has always been a sweet and a poisonous fruit. Galileo advanced
the science of mass and acceleration. but he was also a paid ballistics
consultant for the armory at Venice. Wernher von Braun was the heart and
soul of the early American space program, but he cut his aeronautics teeth
at Peenemünde in Nazi Germany designing rocket bombs. Sure, he dreamed of
reaching the stars, but Von Braun's V2s killed thousands in London long
before their progeny ever launched into space. German chemist Fritz Haber
invented an efficient process to create ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen,
thereby permitting the production of modern fertilizers needed for
industrial farming. Fritz Haber also invented and personally supervised the
first use of battlefield poison gas used to asphyxiate French soldiers in
1915 at Ypres. Is Robert Oppenheimer a hero or a cur for shepherding the
Manhattan Project from laboratory experiment to Hiroshima, even after it was
known that Nazi Germany's nuclear weapons program had failed and after it
was known that the Japanese were prepared to surrender?
Medicine and Mendacity
Medical scientific research has its heroes, and its villains. Jonas Salk,
the inventor of the polio vaccine, was a hero. So was Louis Pasteur, the
inventor of pasteurization and the rabies vaccination. By contrast, Dr.
Josef Mengele, the sadistic Nazi "researcher" of eugenics, was an example of
"science" perverted. Mengele's counterpart in the Pacific was the Japanese
Army's Section 731 which performed inhumane medical experiments on live
Chinese prisoners. At war's end, nevertheless,there was no compunction on
the part of the US military community about taking advantage of this
ill-gotten "knowledge."
Within the United States, doctors have conducted "research" on Black
Americans by deliberately not treating their syphilis infections. American
medical researchers have secretly released clouds of infectious agents on
San Francisco in the name of science. In one of the most notorious criminal
acts of the last century, American doctors participated in decades of
surreptitious "medical research" that consisted of injecting toxic, highly
radioactive plutonium into large numbers of unsuspecting patients, feeding
radioactive cocktails to unwitting pregnant women and deliberately exposing
large numbers of American soldiers to radioactive fallout.2
While the Democrats and Republicans blather indignantly about Iran's nascent
nuclear ambitions, the United States has embarked on an equally pernicious
and subtle arms race: biological weapons. There are laboratories in the US -
"biosafety labs", as they are euphemistically called - where some of the
world's most deadly pathogens are being "studied." According to the
Government Accountability Office's (GAO) testimony on October 4, 2007 before
the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations,
Committee on Energy and Commerce, much of the research conducted at the
various BSL laboratories involves recombinant DNA experiments.3 Depending on
their ratings and containment capabilities, these laboratories may house
highly dangerous and infectious pathogens such as Ebola, Marburg Virus,
Avian Influenza, SARS, Small Pox, Q Fever, Tularemia, Lassa Fever Virus,
Foot-and-Mouth Disease, and Anthrax, among others.
In 2001, before the events of 9-11, there were only five BSL 4 laboratories
in the United States conducting the most dangerous type of research
involving the most virulent pathogens. By 2006, however, that number had
tripled to fifteen BSL 4 laboratories, with more on the way. And that only
includes the known BSL 4 laboratories. At the present time, there are more
than 1,350 known BSL 3 laboratories spread throughout the United States on
university campuses, at hospitals, at government research facilities and in
private institutions. Forty-six states have at least one BSL 3 laboratory
within their borders and some states have multiple laboratories, often on
university campuses or near densely populated cities.
There have been an alarming number of incidents that have compromised the
safety of people who work at these laboratories. And, by extension, the
history of past incidents portend huge risks to the unaware communities in
which these laboratories are located.
Obviously, medical research is a good thing, as is the prevention or cure of
disease. Unfortunately, most of the money for medical research focuses on
the cure for diseases, rather than the prevention of them. That is because
people will pay good money - indeed, they commonly are willing to fork over
all of their money for medical treatment so that they or their family
members may live. But people are far less willing to pay to prevent disease
in others or in future generations. So it is inherent in genetically selfish
human nature and inherent in that selfish human nature's economic
counterpart - capitalism - that disease research focuses primarily on
expensive cures, rather than on inexpensive prevention. Cure, not
prevention, is where the money is.
Research into how to cure disease also can teach how to make that disease
more deadly, more infectious or more selective in, for example, which
ethnicities or racial groups it affects. It is precisely in that murky
ambivalence of good and evil where the interests of commerce, the military
and homeland security are intertwined.
We Are Who We Work For
Why would someone choose to work on biological issues with military
implications? A young, curious and talented researcher might hesitate to
research the purely military applications of, say, the 1918 influenza virus,
but would feel exalted to research a cure for the illness, should it ever
resurrect itself in nature or ever be used as a weapon of terror.
Unfortunately, research into the cure for a dormant disease necessarily
involves resurrecting it or creating the very terrorist weapon in order to
design its antidote. Thus, creating the silver bullet also requires creating
the monster that the bullet has to kill. The danger is that the monster will
get out or will evolve into something immune to silver bullets; or that the
monster itself will be fashioned into a real bullet as an instrument of
biological warfare.
Another motive force for biology workers could be simple "patriotism."
Although Samuel Johnson said in 1775 that patriotism is the last refuge of a
scoundrel, a scientist could genuinely and enthusiastically support a nation's
policies. Such a person might psychologically share the sense of power that
the state expresses when it uses a new technology to exterminate its
opponents. For example, the eminent German chemist, Fritz Haber (referred to
above as the father of modern fertilizer) was proud of his poison chlorine
gas. By contrast, Haber's wife, Clara Immerwahr (also a scientist with a
Ph.D in chemistry) was absolutely appalled by her husband's chemical
weapons. Upon learning about Fritz Haber's involvement in the production of
poison gas, she borrowed her husband's service revolver and shot herself
through the heart. Haber, after his wife's suicide and undeterred in his
"patriotism", then proceeded from the Western Front to the Eastern Front to
supervise the "patriotic" use of poison gas by the German army against
Russian soldiers.4
A more prosaic reason why someone might become a weapons researcher is that
s/he simply needs a job. One of the most powerful reasons why American
professionals are so politically docile is because they leave graduate
school chin deep in debt. Debt makes you malleable because debt makes you
timid.
This is the result of decades of social planning that has sucked money out
of all public schools and institutions of higher learning. The goal of this
social planning was to make college and post-graduate education more
expensive and, thereby, make students more dependent on loans, corporate
largess and military research grants. A second policy goal was to leave
newly graduated professionals desperate for employment to pay off their
loans - employment that now mostly is provided by large corporations, the
military or universities that are funded by the military or large
corporations. The net effect is the same: there are very few work
alternatives for an intelligent scientist with a family to support and piles
of student loans to pay off.5
Someone might get involved in scientific military research simply out of
curiosity or, because like playing a video game, it can be fun. Although
amoral curiosity is essential to scientific inquiry, mere curiosity detached
from empathy and a sense of consequences can be no less destructive than the
curiosity of a kid who pulls the wings off a fly. As for the infantile joy
some might experience from playing with highly lethal weapons, I can only
suggest self-trepanation as a cure.
The Noble Prize or the Nobel Prize?
Although we think of fundamental change as emanating from the top, the whole
edifice of power and control actually rests on the participation of those
that possess the knowledge and skill to let it function. In short, we get
the State that we ourselves have created. We are inmates in the prisons we
built for ourselves.
Adolf Eichmann was charged with scheduling the trains that delivered
millions to death camps.6 He protested that he was merely doing the job that
he was employed to do. He claimed that he was unaccountable as a mere
instrument of an irresistible state power.
No one is merely doing a job. Short of a general strike, there is always -
always- the personal option of simply withholding one's services. No one
makes any scientist or researcher, technician or programmer create anything
that one does not want to create. No power is irresistible. No one is
unaccountable.
In modern society, the problem of accountability is too often "solved" by
bifurcating it: the acts of innovation and creativity are separated from the
responsibility for those acts. The concept of responsibility is removed from
the scientist and researcher and allocated to the professional "ethicist."
This kind of offloading of responsibility is precisely what led to cadres of
otherwise brilliant scientists working day and night on the Manhattan
Project to create a nuclear bomb while the ethical consideration whether it
was right to devise such a weapon (let alone use it under the circumstances)
was wrongly delegated to others. The "others" were the leadership elites,
the politicians and the generals who, history has proven, are too often the
most egoistical, the most fraught with ulterior motives, the most
psychologically unfit and the most ethically challenged.
In addition to separating responsibility from creativity, the intense
secrecy imposed by the state or commercial interests shrouds scientific
research and engineering, thereby further isolating creativity from its
ramifications. Segmenting and compartmentalizing and making confidential the
individual pieces of weapons research tends to further divorce the scientist
and engineer from seeing any picture bigger than his or her "job." This, in
turn, diminishes the sense of personal responsibility. It enhances the power
of those who fund research and who coordinate the professional classes to
accomplish our epoch's monumentally dirty tasks.
If we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, then we are also endowed
with certain inalienable responsibilities. The weapons that exist today, and
those that are currently under development, are immensely more destructive,
more nefarious than what was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Therefore,
the responsibility for what they create is accordingly that much greater for
the 21st Century researcher, engineer and scientist than for those who built
the first nuclear bombs. Certainly, any bright mind that is capable of
creativity on this scale must be responsible for thinking through the
consequences. The unburdening of the engineer or researcher from the
ramifications of how their works will be used makes life easier for them,
but only in the sense that they have become Pharaoh's slaves who work merely
for the aggrandizement of lesser and not quite honorable men.
I have twice mentioned the chemist Fritz Haber. Ignoring the fact that he
was the father of gas warfare, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Haber the
1918 prize for chemistry for his work on ammonia fertilizer. Nobel Prizes
are a mixed bag and this particular award tells us a lot about the mythology
of the foundation and the folks who run it. Nobel peace prizes have been
awarded to Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi , but also to the likes of
Henry Kissinger (who bombed Cambodia to smithereens), Theodore Roosevelt
(who was responsible for the bloody American colonization of Cuba and the
Philippines), and to Muhammad Yunus (who pioneered the capitalist model for
very high profit, very high interest micro-lending to the poor and
downtrodden).
Alfred Nobel endowed his foundation at his death. The money came from the
profits from his invention of dynamite and gelignite and other concoctions
that go bang. In short, the most "prestigious" awards on earth, including
the so-called Nobel Peace Prize, are funded by the profits of an arms
manufacturer. Some say that Nobel created his foundation out of remorse
because his own brother had been blown up in an explosion at his dynamite
factory. Others say that Nobel was moved to salve his conscience because a
premature newspaper obituary he read had damned him as a merchant of death
who became wealthy from inventing new ways to kill more people.
Alfred Nobel's remorse gave the world a very nice foundation. It could have
been a "nicer" world, however, if, before his death and during his
productive years, Mr. Nobel had paid greater attention to the ramifications
of his work. That is all we should ask of the scientists, researchers,
engineers and technologists of our own times. To think about and take
personal responsibility for the ramifications of what they are doing. To
think about and take personal responsibility for how their work actually
will be deployed. To think more responsibly and more nobly than as mere
employees or slaves of pharaohs.
Asimov's First Law of Robotics is that a robot may not injure a human being
or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. ?
Eileen Welsome has written the definitive book on this subject, The
Plutonium Files. ?
The data in this paragraph is derived from the GAO report available as a
pdf. ?
Fritz Haber's career was totally conflicted. His process for creating
ammonia aided agriculture world-wide. It also facilitated large scale
production of explosives. Haber was also instrumental in the development of
the insecticide Zyklon A. which the Nazi regime ultimately "refined" into
Zyklon B to gas concentration camp victims (among whom were some of Haber's
relatives). Ultimately, Haber was exiled from the Germany about which he had
felt so "patriotic". He died a stateless man. ?
I highly recommend physicist Jeff Schmidt's book Disciplined Minds: A
Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that
Shapes Their Lives. ?
Hannah Arendt was, and remains the most insightful interpreter of the
Eichmann phenomena, notwithstanding the smear campaign mounted against her.
Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. ?
Zbignew Zingh can be reached at Zb...@ersarts.com. This Article is CopyLeft,
and free to distribute, copy, reprint or repost in full with proper author
citation and with the "Copyleft" designation. Find out more about Copyleft
and read other articles at www.ersarts.com. copyleft 2007 Read other
articles by Zbignew, or visit Zbignew's website.
This article was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 5:04 am and is
filed under Health/Medical, Education and Science-Tech. Send to a friend.
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Polly
am so sick of coming here and reading your crap. Take it to a group that
gives a rat's ass. I don't see how it is wanted here. This junk has nothing
to do with this group's name. Apparently, you do not have much of a life,
do you?
"indomitable2" <indomi...@somewhere.net> wrote in message
news:13icmd0...@corp.supernews.com...
indomitable2
"Polly" <Purb...@limes.com> wrote in message news:fg7ppk$lio$1...@aioe.org...
> I am so sick of coming here and reading your crap
Rhetorical Question:
If you are so sick of coming here and reading articles which, in your
opinion, are crap, then, why do you *chose* to continue coming here and
reading articles which, in your opinion, are crap?
marcia
She's hoping the person posting the crap articles will someday get a
clue and post them somewhere more appropriate, like alt.flame,
alt.flame.psychiatrists, or alt.usenet.kooks.
mrhelp...@gmail.com
>
> read more »
shut the fuck up, Linda the headcase
Frank
>
> Criminal Accessories
> The Suits and Lab Coats Behind the Front Lines
>
Spam and totally off topic. Poster will be dealt with.
Frank
You are a spammer, publish illicit articles and are totally off topic.
Poster will be dealt with.