Just a beginning note on a big big subject:
WWII's proponents of 'War Medicine', citing their utilitarian philosophy of 'the greatest good for the greatest number' forced some humans to undergo horrific and even fatal medical experiments and also refused to give some other humans the medicine needed to keep them alive.
Their moral claim for doing all this horrific stuff was that these relatively few people would only endure short term (fatal) pain while the vast body of humanity would benefit from this painfully necessary research , now and into the future.
Unstated in all this was their rhetorical claim that their overall medical vision was a collectivist one, where some would willingly give their lives for the medical good, like fit young soldiers, so that their grandfathers, mothers and little baby brothers would go on living.
But in fact the people behind War Medicine oppose peacetime's collectivist Social Medicine with all their individualist, libertarian, heart and breath.
Social Medicine's vision was truly collectivist - it said wealthy people should be taxed so that no human, no matter how poor, would be denied lifesaving medical care.
But War Medicine proponents - to a man - felt that individually one should only get the medicine one could pay for - case of every individual for themselves.
But against this was their 'collectivist' vision for War Medicine that included injecting metallic plutonium into sick people - without telling them why - so we could learn the effects of internal radiation and heavy metal poisoning from metallic plutonium and how to reduce its dire effects.
But - a tremendously BIG but - these sick civilians did not and would not ever benefit from suffering this horrific treatment.
They would never even come into contact with metallic plutonium in their daily lives - not even during an atomic attack.
The only people who would benefit from this horrific research were the fit young doctors and scientists who ordered up these horrible experiments.
They were all fit and young enough to be real gun-toting soldiers , but who were living safe at home during a war andfearful lest they ingested any of the plutonium they were experimenting with as part of the Manhattan Project.
In this revised scenario we see grandfather and baby brother dying horrible deaths ---- all to keep young healthy soldier boy away from harm.
That has to be the sick sick sickest version of how war sacrifice normally plays out - in the long history of the abusive use of American medicine , this shameful episode has to be the moral low point ....
Showing posts with label utilitarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label utilitarianism. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Monday, October 18, 2010
Laconia: DELIBERATE friendly fire is modernist utilitarianism
I do not find it at all impossible to comprend why so many Germans found it easy to cold-bloodedly murder millions of 'useless' outsiders, whom they hated and feared, after learning that they first killed hundreds of thousands of their 'own kind of people', kinfolk that they regarded as 'useless mouths' impeding an all-out total war effort.
While these numbers killed dwarf any other killings during the last War, they do not seem to me to plump the depths of the evil that modernist utilitarianism proved capable of during Modernism's big war.
As just one example,German soldiers east of Berlin, near the end of the war, followed orders to blow up a river bridge to stop the Russians coming over it, despite the fact that the bridge was loaded with hundreds of German civilians.
I call this 'deliberate friendly fire' (and I do not consider fragging as friendly fire at all).
My definition of deliberate friendly fire : "you know there are people from your side - soldiers or civilians - in the very small area you are accurately aiming your weapons at, and you fire away anyway and kill many of your own side while attempting to kill the enemy".
It is fairly well known that naval escorts were routinely under orders to never stop to pick up convoy survivors in the freezing North Atlantic waters but rather to abandon them (to likely die), while they chased subs instead.
Sometimes they had to be even more brutal - dropping depth charges in among survivors ,knowing many would die from the blast.
In September 1942, the converted Cunard liner LACONIA, which had frequently docked in Halifax during the war,
was sunk by a U-boat off Africa.
She was an armed warship, so this was fully allowed under the rules of war, though the U boat thought she was a troop carrier, not an armed naval vessel.
The U boat captain got a shock when he heard the survivors in the water speak Italian and learned that there were 1500 Italian POWs on board, along with Allied women and children.
He told Berlin he was going to signal his position in clear language and try and arrange a rescue trip, under the flag of the Red Cross, to a neutral (Vichy) port.
The British ,suspecting a trap, didn't fully inform a near by
American fighter bomber base, who decided to bomb the U-boat, even though it would mean the death of many near-by allied sailors and families - as it did.
The ultimate decision was apparently made by one plane's bomb sighter's adamant eagerness to drop bombs on civilians, if needed to record a u-boat kill.
His personal decision led first the Germans and then the US to create a formal and public "sink everything without warning or rescue" submarine policy worldwide - leading to hundreds of thousands of extra civilian deaths - many of them being innocent people 'from their own side'.
My partner Rebecca, without giving it much thought, said things like this happen - 'sometimes you must kill a few to save the many' .
I told her I rejected utilitarianism absolutely and decided to write this blog entry to try and explain why to her.
World War Two was many kinds of war.
After all, it was the same war that saw Americans unwilling to send healthy young fathers off to fight till forced to in late 1943.
They also rejected using the one in ten Americans who were black in combat roles and they rejected a wider use of women to replace men to go off and fight.
They objected to almost every rationing rule with real bite.
This unwillingness to fully engage their national resources, if doing so led to inconveniencing civilian lifestyles and upsetting prewar civilian norms, meant that America couldn't put up enough military resources to stop the relatively small number of U boats wrecking havoc all over the Atlantic.
This, in turn, led to these brutal 'kill our own side if need be to kill the enemy' orders as Allied commanders tried everything to try and keep the U boats from winning the war on their own.
Everything? Did I say that ?
I didn't mean that Allied commanders were willing to put a serious number of their longest range bombers on U-boat patrol - the one thing needed to stop the U boats cold.
No, those were saved for the glamorous (but mostly useless) high tech bomber war against Germany itself - not the boring but useful patrols over the Atlantic.
I say that utilitarianism is never moral - even if we ( literally all of we - from child to grandmom) all agreed to draw straws.
Straws to see who goes off to die in the infantry and who gets to stay home.
This total utilitarianism without limits would end up consuming itself until we, on all sides, would literally fight to the last person.
But we haven't seen - Thank God ! - this kind of utilitarianism - yet.
What we got in World War Two was selective use of total utilitarianism, almost always invoked by the higher-ups and almost always inflicted upon those lower down.
In 1942-1943,during the same time as the Laconia Incident, thsat same US government also decided to deny penicillin to the SBEs that Dawson championed.
The small supply of penicillin would go instead to quickly cure GIs in Italy who had deliberately incurred cases of VD to get out of the constant killing zone that was the American front line.
Once quickly cured in a day or two by penicillin, (the old protocol took months to get a full cure), they could be ordered back to fight - to fight until they died thanks to the American 'no rotation' rule'.
This was all decided so that American civilians back home won't have to be called up to fill out their depleted ranks.
This penicillin decision likely meant death for both SBE and GI.
A selective, lethal, slice of 'total war' was applied there, on these few people, so that a less lethal slice of total war did not have to be applied here, among many people.
I find it a horrifically cynical policy but it has its defenders, even today.
The right policy would have been to issue the threat of a government factory to supply this miracle drug, if the private drug companies proved too slow.
The fear that a Democrat government factory would have ended up getting the credit for "supplying the miracle", rather than private enterprise, would have lit a fire under the backside of Republicans like George W Merck as nothing else could.....
While these numbers killed dwarf any other killings during the last War, they do not seem to me to plump the depths of the evil that modernist utilitarianism proved capable of during Modernism's big war.
As just one example,German soldiers east of Berlin, near the end of the war, followed orders to blow up a river bridge to stop the Russians coming over it, despite the fact that the bridge was loaded with hundreds of German civilians.
I call this 'deliberate friendly fire' (and I do not consider fragging as friendly fire at all).
My definition of deliberate friendly fire : "you know there are people from your side - soldiers or civilians - in the very small area you are accurately aiming your weapons at, and you fire away anyway and kill many of your own side while attempting to kill the enemy".
It is fairly well known that naval escorts were routinely under orders to never stop to pick up convoy survivors in the freezing North Atlantic waters but rather to abandon them (to likely die), while they chased subs instead.
Sometimes they had to be even more brutal - dropping depth charges in among survivors ,knowing many would die from the blast.
In September 1942, the converted Cunard liner LACONIA, which had frequently docked in Halifax during the war,
was sunk by a U-boat off Africa.
She was an armed warship, so this was fully allowed under the rules of war, though the U boat thought she was a troop carrier, not an armed naval vessel.
The U boat captain got a shock when he heard the survivors in the water speak Italian and learned that there were 1500 Italian POWs on board, along with Allied women and children.
He told Berlin he was going to signal his position in clear language and try and arrange a rescue trip, under the flag of the Red Cross, to a neutral (Vichy) port.
The British ,suspecting a trap, didn't fully inform a near by
American fighter bomber base, who decided to bomb the U-boat, even though it would mean the death of many near-by allied sailors and families - as it did.
The ultimate decision was apparently made by one plane's bomb sighter's adamant eagerness to drop bombs on civilians, if needed to record a u-boat kill.
His personal decision led first the Germans and then the US to create a formal and public "sink everything without warning or rescue" submarine policy worldwide - leading to hundreds of thousands of extra civilian deaths - many of them being innocent people 'from their own side'.
My partner Rebecca, without giving it much thought, said things like this happen - 'sometimes you must kill a few to save the many' .
I told her I rejected utilitarianism absolutely and decided to write this blog entry to try and explain why to her.
World War Two was many kinds of war.
After all, it was the same war that saw Americans unwilling to send healthy young fathers off to fight till forced to in late 1943.
They also rejected using the one in ten Americans who were black in combat roles and they rejected a wider use of women to replace men to go off and fight.
They objected to almost every rationing rule with real bite.
This unwillingness to fully engage their national resources, if doing so led to inconveniencing civilian lifestyles and upsetting prewar civilian norms, meant that America couldn't put up enough military resources to stop the relatively small number of U boats wrecking havoc all over the Atlantic.
This, in turn, led to these brutal 'kill our own side if need be to kill the enemy' orders as Allied commanders tried everything to try and keep the U boats from winning the war on their own.
Everything? Did I say that ?
I didn't mean that Allied commanders were willing to put a serious number of their longest range bombers on U-boat patrol - the one thing needed to stop the U boats cold.
No, those were saved for the glamorous (but mostly useless) high tech bomber war against Germany itself - not the boring but useful patrols over the Atlantic.
I say that utilitarianism is never moral - even if we ( literally all of we - from child to grandmom) all agreed to draw straws.
Straws to see who goes off to die in the infantry and who gets to stay home.
This total utilitarianism without limits would end up consuming itself until we, on all sides, would literally fight to the last person.
But we haven't seen - Thank God ! - this kind of utilitarianism - yet.
What we got in World War Two was selective use of total utilitarianism, almost always invoked by the higher-ups and almost always inflicted upon those lower down.
In 1942-1943,during the same time as the Laconia Incident, thsat same US government also decided to deny penicillin to the SBEs that Dawson championed.
The small supply of penicillin would go instead to quickly cure GIs in Italy who had deliberately incurred cases of VD to get out of the constant killing zone that was the American front line.
Once quickly cured in a day or two by penicillin, (the old protocol took months to get a full cure), they could be ordered back to fight - to fight until they died thanks to the American 'no rotation' rule'.
This was all decided so that American civilians back home won't have to be called up to fill out their depleted ranks.
This penicillin decision likely meant death for both SBE and GI.
A selective, lethal, slice of 'total war' was applied there, on these few people, so that a less lethal slice of total war did not have to be applied here, among many people.
I find it a horrifically cynical policy but it has its defenders, even today.
The right policy would have been to issue the threat of a government factory to supply this miracle drug, if the private drug companies proved too slow.
The fear that a Democrat government factory would have ended up getting the credit for "supplying the miracle", rather than private enterprise, would have lit a fire under the backside of Republicans like George W Merck as nothing else could.....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...