Evil Men

[alice wellintown]

Dawes is profoundly sensitive to the militarist politics of his own culture
as well. No one is absolved of responsibility. After all, in the aftermath
of the war, the US government granted immunity from prosecution to 3,600
members of the notorious Unit 731. In this “research facility”, Japanese
researchers and technicians had conducted a vast programme dedicated to
developing biological weapons, including bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera,
smallpox, gangrene, typhus and typhoid. More than 10,000 prisoners were
experimented on. Prisoners of war and Chinese victims were frozen, placed
inside pressure chambers to see how long it took before their eyeballs
popped from their sockets, and tied to stakes and bombarded with test
weapons. Children as young as three years of age served as “experimental
subjects”. Some prisoners underwent vivisection without anaesthetic in
order to test the effects of poisonous microbes on their bodies.

After the war, the US military argued that the results of these experiments
were scientifically useful. They even paid the Japanese scientists for
their “data”. As one American researcher said in an attempt to justify this
decision, “such information could not be obtained in our laboratories
because of the scruples attached to human experimentation. These data were
secured with a total outlay of ¥250,000 ($695 today), a mere pittance by
comparison with the actual cost of the studies.” The suffering of the
victims was priceless.
Carefully, but with an underlying fury, Dawes explores the excuses and
explanations for atrocious behaviour.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/evil-men-by-james-dawes/2004132.article
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