The worst part about this comment is that I can't dispute the fact that the government tends to experiment on these populations. Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it.
About the only rebuttal I can give is that it's not just the US. I'm sure every nation has some population that they treat like dirt.
Whatabout-ism? Yes, but that's pretty much all I got.
The people doing these things think they're the 'good guys making hard decisions for the greater good.' It's not done with animosity or antagonism. They deserve the most severe of consequences for their actions, but without understanding the motivation, perspective, and rationale for these things - we're doomed to repeat them in the future, and indeed it's entirely possible we are at this very moment.
This article has been hugged to death, but I assume they're referring to Operation LAC. [1] "We" weren't spraying these neighborhoods because they had black people, but because they had 'the projects' - poor urban housing buildings. These densely populated areas with large sprawling concrete prison-like apartment buildings, were extremely similar in design to the areas in the USSR we might attack with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. And so we wanted to see how such an attack would play out.
It's the same thing with Tuskegee. The people involved likely envisioned themselves saving millions of lives, and gaining invaluable information that could be used to treat not only syphilis but any other sort of other diseases which might manifest similarly. The exact same logic people use today to experiment with gain of function with ever more dangerous diseases, even as diseases escape from labs at a frighteningly high rates. [2] So why only black people with Tuskegee? Because syphilis rates in black Americans were pushing near an order of magnitude higher than in other groups.
This 'greater good' rhetoric is rhetorically appealing, because it sounds reasonable. But the outcomes are scarcely desirable, because the ends people seek with their means very rarely ever comes to pass. But the horrible things they do in the interim trying to get there, all most certainly do happen. If somebody starts talking about the greater good, it should be a major red flag. One needs not justify good and just actions, and those are the sort we ought pursue.
'good guys making hard decisions for the greater good.'
I don't know man?
'Experiment on the blacks, I mean they can't vote anyway!' Sounds like a pretty easy decision to me for a scheming group of politicians and generals.
Greater good might hold up if we experimented on them only in times of war, but that hasn't been our history. The experimenting is why they have such high disease rates in the first place. Similar socioeconomic populations do not. For instance, Brazilian blacks. Or Peruvian or Colombian blacks. The projects were probably even built, in part, specifically with an eye to these kinds of tests.
Occam's razor. "Who should we run the human testing on sirs?"
"Marginalized group that's not allowed to vote sounds good to us son!"
It wasn't just on black Americans, even for LAC (let alone the countless other experiments carried out on civilians). This paper [1] has a lot more details. Just quoting it:
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"Other test locations were selected to simulate other Soviet cities (such as San Francisco, CA and Panama City, FL), forests (such as Chippewa National Forest, MN), flatlands (such as Fort Wayne, IN, and Corpus Christi, TX), deserts, and unpopulated areas (Dugway Proving Ground, UT)."
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The paper includes extensive details on the other reasons the areas that were chosen was chosen. It has nothing to do with who lived there, let alone voting trends. For things like this, the government simply comes up with a cover story, and most people simply believe what they're told. In this case, they told people that they were testing a harmless aerosol clouding system to protect areas from the Soviets bombers. And people simply unquestioningly believed them.
As for the projects, they were built in a similar way to Soviet apartment buildings because they had the exact same goal - reliable and comfortable housing made as affordably as possible. Wiki has a great picture of the projects that were experimented with here. [2] The city tore down some old deteriorating slums and created that complex under designs from the same guy who designed with World Trade Center.
> Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it.
I think all humans suck, just like all humans have the capacity to be kind, considerate and "good". It depends on the circumstances.
Most importantly, I think the somewhat common notion that inhabitants of Germany during the 30s and 40s were intrinsically evil is a very dangerous belief—if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.
The Milgram experiment, for all its faults, shows how evil can manifest from the banal.
It is not enough to defer to authority. It is not enough to go with the flow. It is not enough to support the status quo. ALL of these things can lead to extremely evil end results.
An individual must stand up and explicitly say "No. This is wrong. I will not do this. I will not promulgate this."
> if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.
Germany was/is a central power. Geo-politically, you always have problems with your neighbor, where they are your ally in war or your enemy. Being a central power means all your neighbors are your allied enemies.
When you find yourself feeling so limited in valid rebuttals to use, it's OK to sometimes think "I agree, so this doesn't actually need a rebuttal" and just upvote someone without needing to comment with the whataboutisms.
