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Erazmus
03-25-2010, 12:31 PM
So I was browsing the web about historical healthcare involvement by government, and I stumbled across this fantastic November 1993 article, posted on thefreemanonline.org.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/national-health-care-medicine-in-germany-1918-1945/

It is an incredible article, with disturbing insights. It is also an incredibly timely read given our own government's complete takeover of medicine in this country. I highly recommend it.


In the United States the medical profession operates in a mixed (not a national socialist) economy which does not yet have the institutionalized mechanisms of control and regulation of Weimar Germany and in a democratic political system which thankfully does not have the political ideology of the Third Reich. But the “banality of evil” described by Hannah Arendt in the Third Reich may stem largely from a government bureaucracy in which 90 percent of the people think 90 percent of the time about process—not purpose. Does the modern bureaucratization of medicine hold any real risk for a possible return with new health reforms and new medical technologies—to some of the horrors of National Socialist medicine? Removal of personal responsibility (“I was only following orders”), personal authority, and personal choice in a bureaucratized system may leave less and less room for individual ethics in the conduct of medical science and practice.

Politicized medicine is not a sufficient cause of the mass extermination of human beings, but it seems to be a necessary cause. The Nazi Holocaust did not happen for some inexplicable German reason; it is not an event that we can afford to ignore because we are not Germans or not Nazis. The history of Germany from 1914 to 1945 is a telescoping of modernity from monarchy, war, and collapse to democracy and the welfare state, and finally to dictatorship, war, and death.

Medical ethics is the responsibility of all members of a society, not just doctors and scientists. Medicine and science alone do not have the answers to such questions as: When does life begin? When should it end? Are humans just the sum of their genetic parts or genetic programs? While bioethicists debate, individual medical choices are made a million times a day among doctors, patients, their families, and increasingly the government. The product of all these choices ultimately constitutes the ethical, legal, and social framework in which the practice of medicine and of medical research are conducted. In the end it is the preservation of freedom that will guide us to the best application of new health reforms and technologies in the future.

tpreitzel
03-26-2010, 11:15 AM
So I was browsing the web about historical healthcare involvement by government, and I stumbled across this fantastic November 1993 article, posted on thefreemanonline.org.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/national-health-care-medicine-in-germany-1918-1945/ (http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/national-health-care-medicine-in-germany-1918-1945/)

It is an incredible read, with disturbing insights. It is also incredibly timely read given our own government's complete takeover of medicine in this country. I highly recommend the read.

bump

Dunedain
03-26-2010, 11:35 AM
I read it. I find it difficult to believe much of what I've read about that time period anymore. Anything negative that can be said about Germany and Germans is considered the truth no matter how vile or evil.

I'm surprised they didn't mention creating bars of Jewish soap.

Erazmus
03-26-2010, 11:44 AM
Just to add a little depth. Here is a bit more on the phrase Banality of Evil, for those that have never heard of it.


6. The Banality of Evil

In 1961, Hannah Arendt attended the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem as a reporter for The New Yorker. She attended the trial to discover what motivated a somewhat average citizen to become an agent who assisted mass murder by transporting persons to the death camps. The most famous concept from her work Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)is the“banality of evil.” She does not suggest that the evil perpetrated by the Nazis was banal or insignificant, but maintains that evil is not committed strictly by sadistic monsters plotting demoniacal ends.

Evil can occur though extreme thoughtlessness and insensitivity by persons who are not particularly evil at the start. She thinks that it may be comforting to understand Eichmann’s behavior as being that of a monster, but this would allow persons to excuse Eichmann’s behavior easily, as an isolated incident. What is truly frightening is that Eichmann was “…terrifyingly normal” (Eichmann in Jerusalem 253).

Particularly, she believed that Eichmann lacked the ability to think for himself and engage in any rigorous moral questioning of the state. Eichmann spoke in clichés of Nazi propaganda and he clung to codes of conduct given by the state. She does not think that everyone would have reacted like Eichmann did, or that there is an Eichmann lurking behind each of us, as some have interpreted her view.

Arendt rejected the idea of the “collective guilt” of the German people because she thought it excused individuals of their responsibility and she maintained that Eichmann was completely responsible for his behavior and deserved the death sentence. Yet, the source of Eichmann’s failing is an extreme form of shallowness and the inability to imagine another person’s perspective. This allowed him to believe that he was following his moral duty by following Nazi orders, but what he failed to acknowledge is that it made him complicit in mass murder. iii

Source:
http://www.women-philosophers.com/Arendt.html