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Comment by christmasity | Hacker News Reader

Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US. We've been experimenting on natives, blacks, minorities a long before the nazis. And we even tested nuclear fallout on pacific islanders long after ww2. I believe the "father" of unethical japanese human experimentation was trained in the US before ww2.

Not sure why canadians got involved in this mess though.

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Unethical human experimentation was almost certainly pioneered by the first human civilizations, not the relative late comer from the 18th century.

I know. It's really funny how people seem to have a knowledge of history that begins solely with the colonization of the new world. They have zero recollection of the horrors of past civilizations. As if, somehow, the founders of the USA, are responsible for all evils in the world and everyone else was just getting along and hugging up until 1776.

And I recommend those people ask for a refund from their history teachers, because anyone who tells you history is black-and-white, good-and-evil, is selling you something. Humanity is one long stream of moral ambiguity. Any moral lessons derived from it are done by omitting contradictory evidence. A simple cruise through a Wikipedia article offers plenty of moral ambiguity--and that should be the minimum starting point for considering yourself knowledgeable in a subject.

Even the archtype of evil himself, Hitler, (and likewise Stalin with Russia) still managed to re-vitalize broken countries into industrial titans that we still benefit from today. Russia was literally a pre-industrial society before WW2. And it's interesting how people who believe in rigid good-guys/bad-guys have no problem driving a VW Beetle, or a Mitsubishi--they made the Kamakazi Zeros, by the way. And both companies benefited from slave labor. It's not even hidden knowledge:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/07/world/volkswagen-s-history...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/20/mitsubishi...

If I remember right, Hitler left Germany pretty broken.

Look at the German economy before WW2, and after WW2. Then you will get your answer.

But like the parent poster said, some people can only think black and white.

Talk of thinking in black and white! So when you say "after WW2", do you mean the shattered, occupied Germany of early 1945, or the revitalized Germany of later years, after Europe and the US - and, to a lesser but still real extent, the Soviet Union - rebuilt it?

Yes, Hitler and his mad, failed quest for power ruined Germany. I don't know if maybe you've never seen them, but the Bundesarchiv has some pictures which seem pretty starkly clear on that score. And then more or less everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere provided the resources and a lot of the labor to unruin Germany, because everyone still remembered what happened the last time they'd had to deal with a ruined postwar Germany, and after what had come out of it that time, no one wanted to find out what would come out of it this one.

To add to what my sibling says: when you say "before WW2", do you mean the shattered, financially devastated Germany under the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 and the global Depression of 1929, or the industrialized welfare state of 1880-1910?

The brokenness of Germany was not Hitler's doing; rather, its brokenness is what gave Hitler his platform.

"Don't be snarky." Go somewhere else if you want to talk with that tone, thanks.

I can't believe you are getting downvoted for this.

Surely people on HN care more about real facts, right?

I think it is a reflection of the zeitgeist - things are once again either only good, or only bad. There is no space for bad people to also have done some good things, and vice versa.

Those real facts were mixed with opinions e.g. "As if, somehow, the founders of the USA, are responsible for all evils in the world"

And why all the downvotes?

Honestly, after a couple years here, it doesn't surprise me anymore.

There is no new thing under the sun, so to speak.

GM and Ford were also pretty deeply involved with Nazi Germany. Finding a car company with a clean record and a long history is surprisingly hard.

Well Donald Ewen Cameron lived in Montreal at the time and had the means, The CIA was interesting in his work on Psychic Driving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_driving .

His move to Montreal was funded by the Rockefellers, he was given Sir Hugh Allan's mansion, and he was endored by the pioneering neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield.

The unapologetic close-mindedness of Americans, even in the more intelligent parts of the web, never ceases to baffle me. Really? Human experimentation started in the US?

It's a facet of the American exceptionalist mindset filtered through a Biblical worldview. Good things become enshrined and eventually turn into unquestionable scripture (cf. the Constitution); bad things are whispered in conspiracy theories until they become the Original Sin ("nobody else could have been so evil as us").

On the other hand, we really did invent the eugenic concept, as implemented for example by the Nazi regime, and even that example wasn't enough to stop some states, such as California, forcibly sterilizing their own citizens for explicitly eugenic purposes until at least a couple of decades after.

You're not quite wrong about American exceptionalism in its negative application here. (You're far from wholly right, though - people question the Constitution, for example, all the time.) But the Progressive Era in the US really does have a hell of a lot to answer for. That's whence came the modern concept of engineering a society en bloc, and treating its members however harshly seemed necessary to fit them into the overarching structure of some notional greater good. That's what Huxley was satirizing in Brave New World. Where did you think he got the idea?

Sir Francis Galton (a Brit) invented the term "eugenics." The Wikipedia article on Eugenics notes that the concept of selective breeding of humans dates back to at least Plato.

Additionally the Wikipedia entry indicates that the modern Eugenics movement started in the UK before spreading to the US, Canada and most other European countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

> That's whence came the modern concept of engineering a society en bloc, and treating its members however harshly seemed necessary to fit them into the overarching structure of some notional greater good.

really? you should read some Egyptology.

I have. That's why I said "modern".

I've never heard anyone say that you can't change the Constitution, only that if you want to do something that is current unconstitutional, you have to change it first. See gun control, the belief in the hard-line pro-2A community is that if you want to restrict the right to purchase, own, and use firearms, you have to introduce another amendment either changing or clarifying (based on your viewpoint) the second amendment. Please don't start a[n anti-]gun control argument here, that's not the point.

I was thinking of phenomena like Originalism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism

If the Constitution were a living document, the Originalist viewpoint would not make any sense.

In many other countries, constitutional laws get semi-regularly rewritten and modernized, not just amended.

A couple of instances pre and post-ww2 of medical human experimentation:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

I was reading about this a long time ago, and remember the de-programming research experiments were initially proposed to be done in US, but was rejected based on ethical grounds. So they just took the project up north.

Not surprising, considering the history of residential schools and the treatment of Aboriginal people in Canada

Nothing the US hasn't done to our own territories' aborigines.

>Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US.

Have to guess the Aztecs and many other civilizations before that had it figured out before us.

They were religious about it, and offered no inspiration to modern societies. We were scientific about it, and inspired, among much else, many enormities of the Nazi regime. I get that American exceptionalism galls people, and I don't ask that they feel otherwise on the subject. But having inspired the 20th Century's greatest horrors - we had a strong, if still rather quiet, hand in the Soviet Union's origins as well - seems pretty legitimately exceptional to me.

I don't know. No one I've ever heard has argued other than that the British Empire bestrode the world as the titan of its age, leaving the places where its feet fell forever changed in its wake. Why is it "American exceptionalism", rather than simply historicity, to suggest that the inheritor of that empire, in its own now fast closing age, did the same?

> We were scientific about it

what makes you think that scientific rationalism isn't a religion, or that despite 'being religious about it', prevous experiments weren't done in a rational, controlled, repeatable way by practitioners?

Man, I don't know. Only the one of them having made it possible to build the technology by which we're communicating with one another right now? Assuming we are communicating with one another right now, a point on which I have my doubts. I mean, I'm placing the responsibility for eugenics and its consequent enormities squarely upon those who saw no reason to involve any concept of morality other than the most reductive utilitarianism in their development of the science of heredity into the technology of eugenics, and you seem to find that in so doing I'm saying something laudatory, so...

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