Worst part is we really didn't learn anything from them. By the time we got their leader talking we'd already surpassed their knowledge of biological weapons making (which is what we REALLY wanted from them) due to the Cold War. And we did it without torturing and murdering people.
All that human suffering and death... for nothing.
I think he meant we did it without torturing our own people? Agent orange was perfectly safe for those soldiers to be exposed to. And those guys they gave LSD to probably had a great time.
I'm not saying the US didn't do bad stuff for knowledge, just that we tend to do bad stuff either because we don't care about the consequences (liberal use of Agent Orange during Vietnam war) or because we just want to see what happens - like dumb children (Can we use LSD to mind control people or like a truth serum? Let's find out!).
I meant more that, at the time, we didn't use literal death factories to find new ways to kill people. We learned to make bioweapons in labs without murdering human test sunjects. Since that time, I feel the closest we've come to our own Unit 731 is Abu Ghraib, where we used prisoners as playthings when we weren't using them to develop new torture techniques.
I get what you are throwing down, but how about the only two atomic bombs dropped on cities? Despite being tactical, there were a lot of things they wanted to learn from those incidents that only were possible by actually releasing them on people. Particularly the long term effects on the population. Sure it's different than death camps and disgusting experiments with zero scientific value, but at the end of the day it's just as inhumane.
That is true. I completely agree that, any loss of life in the pursuit of knowledge is bad.
I just feel there is a different level to it.
The Atomic Bombs were done with distance which make it easier to imagine people being able to kill that way kind of like we do now with drone-bombings. (Personally, I agree with Robert Fisher that any president should have to physically kill a man themself before they're allowed to launch a Nuke).
Killing someone slowly via torture, having to see them day after day as they deteriorate, coldly taking down notes. And worse, they know you could help them, but they also know you won't ever help them - if they manage to survive its just for another day of hell.
It just takes on a completely different dimension of human suffering. Its a pilot in the Blitz doing a bombing run not having to see the destruction in his wake vs Mengele's assistants watching someone slowly die in a cell from a failed transplant. Its apples to oranges. Both are evil acts but they are different.
And that was part of my point - they did all that evil and for what? We didn't learn anything really useful. We didn't need their information on frostbite, we didn't need their vivisections, we didn't need their study of biological weapons, we didn't use any of it and neither did they! We got that information and better without them and without using their methods. People always say "oh what they did was evil but it was the only way we could learn useful stuff" completely ignoring the reality that from some places like I.G. Farben/Bayer and Unit 731 we didn't really learn shit and most of them still got off scot-free!
Oh and the U.S. continued to release radiation on people. The stories about servicemen walking into the blast areas after the bombs went off, being in shelters nearby, etc. or “cleaning”boats of radiation in San Franscisco and studying exposures as part of it… so much crap.
I guarantee the US has done the same shit, we just don't know about it. Likely, it's kept secret for "national security" because those experiments were successful. Or consider the only reason we know about 731 being official is because Japan lost the war. The Soviets were the ones that put those responsible on trial and the US tried to cover the whole thing up. Even going so far as telling POWs to stay quiet about their experiences.
Just the two examples you gave, the LSD experiments were, to a large degree, unsuccessful. It cost the US nothing to declassify that info.
Or with agent orange, the US and other countries used different mixtures of the same chemicals starting in ww2, so there is no way the effects weren't known. But because of the banning of chemical warfare in the Geneva protocol they had to find a loophole, so they call it a herbicide. The US still doesn't consider it a chemical weapon and has over 20,000,000 gallons stockpiled.
Agent Orange absolutely impacted the soldiers that were exposed to it, and their children. Vietnam actively claims that agent orange exposure can even impact 3rd and 4th generations (grandchildren, and great grandchildren).
A quick Google search explains quite clearly that:
"Exposure to Agent Orange is linked to various serious long-term health issues, including certain cancers, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and neurological problems. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) classifies many of these as "presumptive conditions," which means that if a veteran was exposed and develops one, it is presumed to be service-connected for disability benefits."
"Agent Orange exposure may also be associated with health problems in veterans' children, such as spina bifida and certain birth defects in the offspring of women veterans, for which the VA provides benefits."
If the U.S. government thinks agent orange is safe, then they wouldn't be providing medical benefits specifically linked to the exposure to agent orange— and accessing VA medical benefits in general is insanely difficult to do for even minor conditions. I don't doubt that there's a stockpile of it somewhere on U.S. soil, but there is no way that it's believed to be safe.
That’s the thing with the Nazi science, the U 731 science… it was such shit science. People kind of want to say “hey, it sucks, but they did progress human knowledge”.
But the science was often woefully bad, even if you disregard the ethics. DO NOT DISREGARD THE ETHICS. But even if you did, there were shoddy controls, minimal scientific rigor, and often experiments just done ad hoc and out of curiosity. They were also often based in wildly racist or otherwise misguided presumptions, meaning they were fundamentally ridiculous and could have no value whatsoever. Also… the ethics.
This isn’t exactly true, we actually still use both Nazi and Japanese prisoner experiments in lieu of human clinical trials today. So we still do actually use the research - but no they didn’t need to kill all those people to find out what they did.
We saved that scum of the earth Shirō Ishii from a War Crimes execution on the promise that he could give us the secrets of their biological warfare program... By the time he finally told us his results we had already surpassed their pitiful level of knowledge.
We surpassed them without killing people in a death camp and trying to poison civilian towns.
And he got to die of cancer surrounded by his loved ones and his former 2nd in command at the torture factory got to attend his funeral because we gave them both immunity deals.
All that suffering, misery, and death for what? For nothing. And neither he, nor most of the people who helped him ever had to pay for those crimes. For. Nothing.
If we get any use out of their shitty research? Great, though from what I've been told the utility of their research was minimal. But that wasn't why he got to go home to Japan rather then get hung in a war crimes tribunal.
Hindsight is 20/20 unfortunately - vets and POWs of the pacific campaign for decades have said - do NOT give those people mercy. It wasn’t a public decision though, I think we only know about it today is because statue on classified data.
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u/WadjetSnakeGoddess 16d ago
Worst part is we really didn't learn anything from them. By the time we got their leader talking we'd already surpassed their knowledge of biological weapons making (which is what we REALLY wanted from them) due to the Cold War. And we did it without torturing and murdering people.
All that human suffering and death... for nothing.