Like 'Paperclip', only different

[Ian Livingston]

Spot on.

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 3:37 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> In his autobiography ("Wisdom, Madness & Folly. The Making of a
> Psychiatrist", pp. 69-70) Ronald
> D. Laing reports:
>
> "As a teaching aid in our anatomy course, Hamilton had us shown films of
> prolonged X-rays of the
> body, showing joint movements, and movements of the digestive tracts,
> peristalsis, etc. They were
> unique. Hopefully they still are. For exposure of the body to such prolonged
> X-rays produces massive
> X-ray burns and tissue devastation, and an agonizing death unless the human
> experimental animal
> is promptly put out of its misery. These were Nazi films of experiments done
> to Jews, purloined by
> the British at the end of World War II and now being used as teaching
> material.
> It took a little while for what was going on to sink in. I saw one showing.
> I walked out with a friend of
> mine, John Owens. The other 200 or so students remained to sit and watch
> with apparent interest.
> We were sickened and outraged. We went to Professor Hamilton and
> expostulated with him. 'We are
> watching people burned to death! How can you use this as teaching material?'
> 'Yes, I know. I agree with you. But it is unique teaching material. If we
> don't use it now, their deaths
> will have been in vain.'
> Most of the students agreed with him. There was no 'movement' to boycott or
> ban these films. They
> were interesting. Just to indulge that interest (to hell with the 'interest'
> of 'science') for one second,
> made me feel I had caught the plague.
> This incident intensified my terror of human beings, terror at the films
> themselves, at the minds
> behind the making of them, at the minds behind the bureaucratic and
> scientific efficiency that
> sustained with such blandness and blindness towards evil the social
> machinery of their distribution
> as well as their making.
> How had we all become so docile? Why did we take so much for granted? Why
> did most of us believe
> what we were told by those we believed, and almost nothing else? HOW were we
> such conditioned
> creatures?"
>
> Laing's questions belong to the 'right questions' THEY do not want us to
> ask, because if more people
> could care about these issues in their physical, mental, social and -
> perhaps - metaphysical
> dimension, THEY indeed would have to worry about the answers ...
>
> KFL
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."