Unit 731
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Most interestingly:
The researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation... More reading at [0]
While further down the linked article is written:
There was consensus among U.S researchers in the postwar period that the human experimentation data gained was of little value to the development of American biological weapons and medicine. Postwar reports have generally regarded the data as "crude and ineffective", with one expert even deeming it "amateurish".
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanes...
Reading what they did, however, it really looked like the valued cruelty over science. The people they hired for that were not qualified (heh, turns out that sociopathic biologists who bought into nazi racist theories were not the brightest) and disregarded any kind of scientific method.
Also one of their goal was to prove the inferiority of some races. Many experiments only had this goal in mind.
I thought they experimented on humans like we do on animals. Animal experimentation may be cruel but cruelty is not the point, actually stress can impact the result in a big way.
I remember they made experiment to see what temperatures the human body can handle. So they subject prisoners to various extreme conditions and... do not even note the time they were exposed to it. It was THAT amateurish. I really feel it was just torture renamed. "Hey, let's burn some Jews! We'll call it science!" "Ok, I'm in." Experiment result: the untermenschen died.
He made a crucial mistake in an experiment that was supposed to gauge the amount of uranium necessary to make a bomb. He failed to take into account impurities in a material. It made him assume the crucial mass necessary was 10x what it is.
Ultimately nazi Germany, after several drawbacks, decided an atom bomb was too far away to pursue.
Exactly! In that light, these war crimes were doubly atrocious. They weren't even doing actual science.
In most cases they were doing actual science, just divorced from any recognizable morality. I'm less familiar with the Japanese case, but many of the Germans who did similar things were respected scientists (Carl Clauberg is an example). The desire to say "that's not real science" is emotional, but it's not accurate.
The truth is that these kinds of studies used to be not all that rare. The most famous is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, but there are others. In The US, in the 1920s, at least 800 prisoners were infected with Malaria. Joseph Goldberger similarly experimented on prisoners in attempt to understand pellagra (and refused to let them drop out when their symptoms became unbearable). Richard Strong famously injected people with plague. In some of these cases, subjects signed a waiver, but in others they didn't. Internees in camps could have been induced to sign a waiver if the Germans or Japanese had cared about that.
Morality constrains science. That's a good thing. But it requires us to admit that we could learn more and more quickly if we had no morality. Understanding how radiation affects human reproductive systems or what the human body can withstand is valuable information. It just isn't information that we can obtain while staying with the guidelines of our morality.
I thought that. I was like "OK, no one wants to touch this and they are right, but there has to be some valuable insights!" IIRC the only thing that they learnt was that the human body can survive longer than they thought in very cold water, but even that was hinted by tons of anecdotal evidence.
Really, the lack of protocols and basic measurements looks like it was sub-highschool level. Go read some of the reports, it was mostly about cruelty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
So the CIA had no other way to get that data, whereas the Soviets did.
covered in part by this errol morris(!) documentary miniseries:
The history of how the book was created is so disgusting that it’s no surprise that it’s no longer in print (that I know of).
I find it very hard to decide what I think about that. I’m glad that any personal opinion I have has no weight.
They also really don’t like discussing this topic and will answer with much hesitation and only if pressed. So it appears to be a wound that didn’t quite heal yet.
Comfort women [0] is another one. Before I immigrated as a kid, HK victims were still trying to sort that out with Japan. South Korea is also a victim, among other SE Asian countries.
I don't dislike the people. I dislike the successive administration that wants to ignore what their country have done to many different groups around that time.
And seeing how the West is complicit, is it that hard to understand there's still mistrust there?
The Rape of Nanjing episode is particularly interesting since he goes over the book "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" by Iris Chang in the first part, following that up with readings from "The Woman Who Could Not Forget" by, Dr. Ying Ying Chang which goes over how researching the Nanjing Massacre affected her daughter Iris deeply enough to the point of ending her own life.
Usually this is stuff that people avoid, but I feel that knowing what people are capable of doing gives some perspective in my life.
Any speculative fiction about the horrors of runaway AI or the supernatural or some form of extraterrestrial life pale in comparison to what our species has done to itself over the years.
Any horror you could possibly imagine, some wanker has probably already done it to someone else for real.
As documented as the material is, the current state is basically just a pile of descriptions of attrocities committed. With many duplicated.
Compare to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
I'd guess because no one wants to spend their time reading primary sources about something so terrible, and straightening it out.