Taken under fascism, Spain’s ‘stolen babies’ are learning the truth

As a counter-example of medicine going hand-in-hand with despotism, there's Stalin's Doctors Plot, though there was a a lot of antisemitism there as well.

What became Germany's eugenics program began in the United States and it was blatantly racist.

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

As for doctors themselves, I would think they are exactly like any other group of people: when a radical regime establishes itself, some will embrace it, some will be bullied into compliance, and others will be violently opposed. You can find examples of all of those in any historical regime.

My understanding is the German “euthanasia” program didn’t start until after after the war began. Not in big numbers anyway.

So you have a source?

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-infectious-disease-linked-auth...

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

Have you met many doctors? Some are amazing, hard-working people really doing their best to help humanity, but a non-trivial number are just arrogant jerks who only went into the profession for money and social status. It's natural that a profession seen as particularly "high status" will attract a lot of soulless status seekers.

> Even recently, doctors even consult on enhanced interrogation techniques, and seem to favour some pretty heavy handed public health policy. As a profession, is there something fundamentally wrong with many of them that we tolerate for their expertise?

Why you want to blame it on a profession and assume the distribution of crazies is not uniform?

Only difference is that doctor can pretend it's for medical reasons, while say, a plumber, wouldn't be able to fabricate plausible evidence to support their derangements.

And as usual with large groups the extremes are loudest and most noticeable.

I think (and hope) your intent is to draw the parallel so similar programs targeting natives in the US (and Canada, I’ll add, they seldom diverge very far) can be viewed in the same light. I’m not adding much nuance besides noting that your wording could be misinterpreted as a dismissive “nothing new under the sun, happened openly in the US well after too” rather than what I think (and hope) you mean as a more inclusive “these programs which continued in the US very closely resemble fascist programs, and that’s important too”.

The more appropriate description is taken by STATE. These and more issues come from state bureaucracies irrespective of any other trappings.

Otherwise decent people will do terrible things when given a bureaucratic goal, just to achieve said goal, and then will say they were only doing their job or following orders.

notice that it does not say that the children didn't need to be removed from their family situations, just that a new policy was put in place to place them in foster care within Native American culture, contrary to what had been happening, so the extremely high percentage of children to whom this was happening which you refer to seems to be a serious problem in its own right.

How will large-scale abduction of babies and deceiving of the parents by telling them that their baby died can happen without the cooperation of the state - openly or clandestinely. Especially considering how a lot of those related to these incidents belonged to the Catholic church and they were not only protected by the fascists but were an actual appendage of the regime...

"But one of the most lasting abuses of the era was borne by children. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, a leading psychiatrist in the regime who was trained in Nazi Germany, promoted the idea of a Marxist “red gene” carried by the children of Franco’s left-wing opponents. The gene, he said, might be suppressed by removing children from their mothers and placing them with conservative families. Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun."

the transfer of the babies, predominantly from low class families to high ranking Catholics, allies of Franco's regime of course makes the ideological connection clear.

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera was explicit about the political/eugenic character of these transfers:

"Vallejo’s conclusions were that the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of the Spanish was to take away the red children from their mothers in places "away from democratic environments and where the exaltation of bio-psychic racial qualities is encouraged". By 1943, 12,043 children had been taken from their mothers and handed over to orphanages or Francoist families"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Vallejo-N%C3%A1jera

I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a connection between this and the fascist principle of individual subordination. Particularly when Franco's government directly controlled the church and mandated its omnipresence[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Catholicism

It wouldn't have happened as often if the people being executed were usually racially distinct from the executioners, such as in South America, because of the difficulty of integrating that child into the family, and the relative ease of killing children of a different race.

It's interesting to compare the institutions being compromised by putting idealogues in hierarchical power with Hitler and the SA / SS. It seems that is the "playbook".

It seems understandable, to not pour yourselve into 15 years of trouble for nothing.