Who do you blame for the sick human experimentations in Block 10? Dr. Josef Mengele or Germans?
What about the countrywide famines and massive death count in the Soviet Union? Joseph Stalin or Russians?
The logical answer to each of these is the former.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized last Friday on behalf of the United States for experiments conducted in the 1940s, when government researchers purposefully infected unknowing Guatemalan citizens with syphilis in order to test the effects of penicillin.
Now, if she wants to apologize on behalf of whoever was involved with the United States government during the 1940s, that’s fine with me. But why is the Guatemalan government considering taking the case to international court? Do they expect the bones of Dr. John Cutler to take the stand and testify?
Maybe if we still abided the Code of Hammurabi — an eye for a (now figurative) eye. But it doesn’t make sense for me to compensate Guatemalan victims’ families, if I had nothing to do with it.
But making Americans pay the Guatemalan victims’ families is something our government is considering.
These experiments weren’t just recently revealed to the public because everyone’s really good at keeping secrets. They were just recently revealed because no one knew about it except for the government.
I’m sorry the experiments happened, and I’m sorry for a past president’s foreign policy toward Japan at the end of World War II, but I won’t take any responsibility for either.
You may very well notice that the State is present in each of these examples. It is the machinist handling all unsupervised public funds at the expense of the to-be-decided. I’m sick of hearing people say, “We treated third-world countries so terribly!”
No. We did not do anything. We were born far after this mess spilled on the floor, and there are only two things we can do now: de-fund all research involving public money so people can actually track the actions for which they’re paying, and, perhaps most importantly, make a mental secession from the State.
Granted, Germany just paid reparations promised to Israel in 1924, for WWI. But we had no such promise with Guatemala.
You are not responsible for an uncontrollable entity unless you blindly throw money at its feet.
To every victim of every government wrongdoing, I apologize on behalf of the State. I cannot control it, and I realize that you cannot either. It is this realization that will unite mankind in the future. We are meant to be free to choose, to learn, to love and to live. And, right now, we are not.
In the words of George Orwell, “I wasn’t born for an age like this. Was Smith? Was Jones? Were You?”
Blame Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
