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Medicine and psychiatry often seem to be at the center of these regimes. Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together? Maybe it's the pretext the regimes to suspend rules and rationality. German doctors began a "euthenasia" program several years before the war broke out, and no governing body of theirs seems to have historically been above using prisoners for medical experiments. 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?

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Radical ideology craves credibility. I would suppose that for that reason, the regimes interested in treating a subset of people as inferior would look for experts who could testify to that fact. These end up being doctors and psychiatrists, since they are considered authorities on the human body and mind respectively.

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.

I think what twigged me is the expectation that doctors are supposed to be better than that. Doctors are explicity not like any other group of people. The whole point in giving them the immense powers we do comes with the expectation that when it falls to them to be brave or noble, they are willing to take that responsibility. Otherwise, there is no reason not to have barbers do most surgeries, apothacaries prescribe drugs, and nurses make treatment decisions, especially given the technological advances of even the last 30 years.

These are people who explicitly must not be seized by mass political hysterias, and it's not a right/left thing, as they seem like a necessary constituency in every totalitarian movement. Other professions, like judges and guards you can just appoint from the ranks of true believers, most professors can be relied upon to be complicit, and their institutions can tell whatever legitimizing story you bully them into. Doctors (and perhaps armed police) are the only ones with leverage, which means it is their personal responsibility to guard against this stuff, imo.

In an ideal world yes, but in the real one they are just normal people like you and me. Some are good, some bad, some in the middle. My personal experience has been the overwhelming majority have been kind, intelligent people. But even if 5% are bad, that is still enough for any despotic regime to make use of.

I would agree with the small minority argument, but it still understates their impact. They aren't like you or I either, because when you spend an extra decade in school, their life experiences are essentially alien to people outside it. Cops are similar, where at a point, you have to ask how good the rest of a closed loop and gated network could be if they haven't isolated the worst ones. Doctors as a profession lost a lot of public trust over the pandemic because of the few who gave up their integrity to become political actors, and then the colleges punished doctors who stood up to them. The problem is that the 5%-bad minority just happen to be in the professional governance and administration, similar to how police union/associations were responsible for the worst abuses.

Perhaps you could go a step further and say that, whatever the regime, these institutions that decide who is healthy and who is sick, who is sane and who is insane, can never be neutral. They are always also instruments of (social) control. Michel Foucault is probably the go-to guy if this topic interests you[1].

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

I was going to say the Catholic Church often seems to be at the center of these regimes, but I guess we all see things through our own lens.

Do you have rationale supporting the hand of the Church in fascist regimes? The Catholic Church expressed its rejection of fascism via the strongest possible channel: an encyclic written by Pius XI in 1937, _Mit Brennender Sorge_, was read during the Sunday mass in all churches of Germany although the Nazis were already repressing opponents.

Even more: according to statistical studies, out of many socioeconomic variables, being Catholic had the strongest positive correlation with _not_ voting for the Nazis [1].

[1]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

An encyclic is just a marketing material. What matters is what they actually did.

The Vatican was gifted to Church by… fascists.

>In Weimar Germany, the Catholic Church vehemently warned ordinary parishioners about the dangers of extremist parties.

Is that doing something?

Nah, that’s just talk. Doing something is cooperating with fascists (Lateran Pacts), supporting Catholic-Nazi regimes (Franco, Tiso, and many others), and helping Nazis evade justice (ratlines).

It's no different than the current day catholic church saying "oh gays are people too we should treat them nicely" and then remind you that the bible says sinners spend eternity in hellfire and sort of wink at the American evangelicals that spend their time screaming that the bible says gay people are an abomination.

Regardless of what the encyclic said, the truth is that in Spain the Church closely colaborated with the fascist Franco regime, to the point that in many practical respects they were one and the same.

There is ample evidence that you can find with some obvious Googling, but I think this image is a good visual summary:

https://www.gettyimages.es/detail/fotografía-de-noticias/gen...

This is how the Catholic Church treated Franco (not sporadically, but as a custom, you can find plenty of images like that): under a canopy, like they do with images of Saints or the Virgin.

I think in the face of that, anyone will agree that encyclic was not worth the paper it was written on.

You also has Ustasě in Croatia and Josef Tiso in Slovakia. On the other hand - although Catholic higher-ups were generally spared, not the same could be said about other priests in Poland (like Kolbe) . During 2 WW, it's hard to treat Catholicism as a one religion, because it was very important to put it into national-ideological context of the country. Most often church was supporting more conservative, right-leaning groups, as a contra to socialist, who were much more anticlerical then.

Sorry, I should have made it clear from the start that I was regarding nazy Germany and fascist Italy as the "fascist regimes", Franco's Spain being fascist is debated (seems to have changed throughout time, see [1]). Interesting point for Spain though, direct religious implication in governments always seems to go wrong.

Coming back to the encyclic, I think it did have an impact, judging by the measurable refusal of Nazism in Catholic counties as mentioned in my previous comment. The Catholic Church had strong moral authority, and this kind of condemnation was rare: the Red Cross for instance did not raise any [2].

[1]: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5263342 [2]: https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/6ayg86....

Edit: grammar.

Germany had issues with Catholics long before III Reich. Check the Kulturkampf under Bismarck - it had a stong national element, as Catholicism was tied to Poles, and Poles and their interest in Silesia weren't exactly liked by German authoroties.

Never heard of clero-fascism? Most Catholics haven't. I guess they don't mention it often in our history books here in Europe.

You can start your education here, I know of it because its my country, but I'm sure its only the tip of the iceberg.

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

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

The Catholic Church worked parallel to some of those regimes, and in cooperation with others. Or completely independent in other cases.

Well, it was the biggest there at the time. Not much option for smaller religions to enforce their atrocities.

Even in democratical societies leaders tend to want to please the church so their brainwashes masses vote for them.

Doctors used to be viewed with (justified) suspicion. That suspicion is mostly still justified, but doctors are riding the coattails of several significant medical inventions in the last 100 years, especially antibiotics. This gives them a lot of credibility (justified or not), and the political consequences of this are not ideal. Hopefully this will eventually return to equilibrium and people will stop treating doctors like they're a couple stddev smarter or more trustworthy than they actually are.

Just look up for the amount of deaths for medical malpractice in most developed countries.

Not all doctors and nurses are that technically good to justify that we don't keep a sensible amount of suspicion, or when receiving a diagnosis shouldn't look for a second, or even third opinion.

What do you call the person who came in last in the class in medical school? Doctor.

I like the joke, but in truth it is often failed to secure residency. What do you call the resident who did worst in his residency? just doesn't role off the tongue as nicely :)

There's bad doctors, just like there are bad people in every profession. How many software engineers does it take to make a dystopian spy state or spy company? You probably need many more than you would need doctors for unethical experiments. What's wrong with software engineers that they would knowingly do such a thing? I suspect the motivations for wanting to push the technological limits in advertising or spying are the same as the ones for pushing the limits of medical science.

No. It's not "just like". People with Cluster B personality disorders, especially the ones at the end of the spectrum with ASPD/psychopathy crave power over others. They enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering. They like, crave direct contact. It is VERY different to cause suffering in a dispassionate way through software and hear about it on the news, or do it yourself in person 1on1.

So, no. Besides, it has been shown that there are professions with disproportionately much more psychopathic people than others. Which makes perfect sense, considering what I just said, even though there's more to be said about this subject.

Do you have any research about other Cluster B personalities that "enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering" ? Or you just want to write about APD, but want to add some science-based words?

Also, the "APD-prone" positions are often higher management. Which are causing every possible type of pain, from 1 to 1, to massive downsizing on the other part of the world, but more of the second type - one would assume they would choose something closer to victims, if their only motive is causing pain. There is also their tendency for risk-taking and ease with making "hard decisions (due to lack of empathy and mentioned tendency for risk-taking), which also explains such high positions in companies.

You're onto something - the roots of totalitarian-authoritarian desire can be traced back to the impulse to be free of the "disease and infection of others".

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

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

I don't feel there is anything "fundamentally wrong with many of them", but the role medicine plays in our lives makes it susceptible to exploitation by both messianic and psychopathic personalities.

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.

I think you should probably limit it to psychology. The whole point of psychology is social control. Making society into what someone wants it to be instead of what it needs to be (from the perspectives of individuals who are trying to survive/do well, whatever that means to them).

Changing individuals while doing only things to the individual, not touching the problems their behaviour is trying to solve. Pointing out that only a house solves homelessness, there's nothing a therapist can do. And research points out that therapists are destructive rather than helpful as soon as they go further than giving information or providing practical help.

So psychology/criminology/orthopedagogy/sociology is a fraud. The basic promise of these sciences is simple: that they can, through talking and "interventions" change the behaviour of unwilling humans (especially children). Time and time again research shows: they can't. It just doesn't work. They can cause extreme trauma, using some combination of violence, isolation and 24/7 stress, which results in specific behaviour patterns that can be summarised as long-term fear and extreme aggression, which, to put it mildly, isn't a recipe for a successful fulfilling life. Aggression by the psychologists is usually masked, by pretending locking up kids, or forcing isolation up to and including the use of isolation cells, "isn't violence".

Currently, the popular technique is called "applied behaviour analysis". Lock up kids, in isolation (no contact allowed), and cause 24/7 stress. But variants have many names: "New authority". "Non-violent resistance". "Rock and water". All have essentially been exposed as not changing behaviour, "not sticking", and the like. Not that practitioners actually follow these techniques particularly well.

https://elan.school/

If you think that the elan school and where it got its teachings were genuinely psychiatric best practice at the time those projects were created, then you know nothing of the field of psychology.

I think people should be judged by what they DO, not what ideal picture they put forward of themselves.

And as mentioned, the majority of kids were sent to elan school ... by youth services. Not by parents.

Was it "psychiatric best practice"? Probably not. Was it "psychiatry IN PRACTICE"? Yes, absolutely, for thousands of kids. It's far from the only such institution, or even the worst.

By the way, the very large majority of people who "help" kids aren't psychiatrists, a bigger part are social workers, and an even bigger portion don't have any training at all. That too defines what they do, what happens in practice. This sector doesn't follow any method or rules, they just randomly try things, whatever the individual randomly assigned feels appropriate.

>Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together?

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.

Medicine? It's racism and classism. People with racist views can become medical drs and other racists can become powerful heads of state to order genocide.

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_...

Or religion. Actually, probably mostly religion.

> 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.

If the postwar trials have any integrity—and I believe they had some if certainly not enough—you could say the same of people organizing rail schedules. And you’d be right if your ire is directed at Eichmann, but probably wouldn’t be able to reasonably generalize it to rail operators. I can’t imagine a similar extrapolation being reasonable to any doctor whose field isn’t directly implicated in the “race science” and various other explicit fascist ideological ideas.

> German doctors began a "euthenasia" program several years before the war broke out,

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?

Eugenics was all the rage in the early XX century. A lot of countries practiced mass sterilizations and other niceties to the "unfit", and the catholic church was among the few that opposed to it. Nazi Germany (and others) just pushed it to the limit.

You could still see some eugenics going on around the workd after II WW for some time.

The T4 program started in September 1939, same time as the war (in Europe), but the pilot was run in the summer. Considering the Nazis didn't think their invasion of Poland would turn into a general war, it's highly unlikely there's any relation between the two.

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