[WSMDiscuss] article: "Dr. Mengele in the Whitehouse?"

[kolya abramsky]

Dear all,

As the pandemic in the US worsens it becomes harder and harder to attribute the looming US disaster to mistakes and bungling. For all intents and purposes, unbelievable as it is, it appears as if Trump is actually deliberately trying to maximise the numbers of death and destruction caused by the virus.

With this in mind, I would like to share with you this article that I have just written:

“Dr Mengele in the White House? Disturbing Parallels Between Donald Trump’s Proposal to Inject Disinfectant into Coronavirus Patients’ Lungs and the Nazi’s Use of Lethal Phenol Injections”

The article is disturbing, and no doubt controversial, but I believe it is nonetheless making an important point.

Please find the full article attached. Below is a brief summary from the introduction to the article.

Thanks
Kolya

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Summary

In April 2020, Donald Trump, 45th President of the USA, advocated injecting disinfectant into the lungs of coronavirus patients, during the worst global pandemic in a century. He encouraged his senior medical advisors and medical practitioners throughout the country to experiment with this venture. Trump’s utterances, which he later claimed were merely sarcastic , came just days before the world celebrated the 75th Anniversary of ‘Victory in Europe’ against the Nazis.

On 2nd April 1947, Rudolf Hӧss, the commander of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp, was sentenced to death by hanging. He was hanged on a gallows constructed specifically for that purpose, at the location of the camp's Gestapo building. The message on the board that marks the site reads: “The first commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, who was tried and sentenced to death after the war by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal, was hanged here on 16 April 1947.”

 What, if anything, do these two events, separated by nearly 75 years, with one event taking place in a global pandemic, and the other taking place following the post-World War Two Nuremburg Trials against the Nazis, have in common?

Amongst many other crimes, Hӧss’ sentence acknowledged his responsibility for using lethal injections of phenol on prisoners. This should sound the alarm bell. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, phenol is widely used in disinfectants.

While I believe it is not appropriate to directly compare Trump’s proposal with the Nazi lethal injections, I also believe it is not completely groundless to draw attention to the fact that some similarities exist at the phenomenological level. As such, I believe it is useful that when evaluating Trump’s proposals people are at least aware of what the Nazis did in the past. By writing this article, I am categorically not trying to say the two circumstances are identical or even substantially similar. They were not. Nor am I trying to say that Trump is as bad as Hitler. He is not. History will judge whether at some point he does reach this level, but he has certainly not got their yet, and hopefully never will.

What I am trying to say is that Trump’s proposals should raise many serious alarm bells, both for society and also for the teams of medics working around him and in the US more generally. And, in order to think through these alarm bells, it is important to be historically informed.
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