Alexander McKay
Dec 1, 2023
The question of medical experimentation, organ harvesting and other such ghoulish practices came up recently in a discussion and the question was raised as to why such things (along with torture) were hidden and why (more recently) they have been acknowledged and become standard practice. Both the question of medical experimentation and torture were affected very much by the Nuremberg trials and the revelations of the full depth of the Nazi depravity. We must remember though that those trials came about largely as a result of Soviet pressure the British imperialists certainly didn’t want most of the German high command to be put on trial because they knew very well that they fought wars in much the same way as the Nazis did, especially when it came to supressing revolts in the colonised nations. On the matter of medical experimentation the Nazi crimes (Mengele and co being the most prominent) that it forced these matters underground but it did not eradicate them. Forced sterilisation of those regarded as “undesirable” continued in the certain states of the USA was a practice that was carried out in California for many decades. The post war era and the revulsion against the crimes of the Nazis forced a change, again this is largely driven by the USSR and progressive movements that drew strength from it. The question of torture is similar in that it was always denied, even though it was practiced by many state agencies in the imperialist countries. The British certainly used torture to interrogate Irish republican prisoners though this was never “official” policy. The change to an open endorsement of torture was brought in with a great deal of cultural programming to justify it, think Jack Bauer in the “ticking bomb” scenario on ’24’.
What has occurred really since the 1970s is a regressive shift of ever greater justifications being made by the ruling class for deadly applications of state violence. The ruling class in the USA saw a war be lost and multiple domestic revolts in the 1960s and decided that they were not going to allow any further “drift” and so as part of their counter offensive since the 1960s they have been seizing every opportunity to increase the power of the state agencies and their ability to violate the rights of US citizens. This could not be done all at once however, it had to justified and support had to be built for it within the petit bourgeoisie especially and this is why you have the manipulation of public concern over crime waves to justify the creation of a vast prison complex (one of Bidens legacies) and the systematic demonisation of large segments of the US population (super predators as a failed Presidential candidate once said). The point of all this is to increase the ability of the US bourgeois state to effectively to carry out large scale repression. This relates to torture in the post 9/11 world as it is easier to justify the torture and even murder of those who have been legally deemed to be without rights. The purpose of the special regime constructed for “terrorists” after 2001 and the hidden prison systems the US operates across the world was to construct a legalistic way to remove rights from people. This was of course trialled on groups who large sections of the US population would be either indifferent towards or would be actively cheering for their physical destruction. As always though the trial of something that could be done to those outside of the imperial core is always going to be brought back into these nations as repressive measures to be applied to the domestic working class. The question of medical experimentation follows a similar trajectory in that the US has been forced to conduct a lot of its most criminal work outside of the USA, hence why you have a network of bio-labs in places like Ukraine.
These are placed in areas of the world where the US ruling class believes that it exercises such total control of the local comprador regime that it can do anything it like to the working class in these nations and no one will complain. The peripheries of the imperialist bloc also provide opportunities for such heinous trades as organ trafficking and there are many accusations of such operations being run in Kosovo, Ukraine and Israel. All of these follow the same principle in that they are places with “disposable” populations which can be abused without any question being raised domestically in the United States.Without constraint this is how the imperialist countries work because this is the nature of their systems. The working class is merely a commodity to be used and disposed of when no longer convenient and any concession that has been made has only been done when the ruling class were afraid of the consequences. They have already brought back many of the practices of the fascist period, they have just hidden them outside of the imperial core but make no mistake they will find ways to bring it right back into the homeland again if allowed to. Now that imperialism is rotting away it is in a much more dangerous phase and all manner of cruelties and crimes will be engaged in by the ruling class as they seek to defend their system.