What the Heil?

(Disclaimer:  This is very disjointed ... but I am letting it stand anyway!   I just figure what the Heil, Hitler.)

  

I didn't want to -- read the book The Secret History of the War on Cancer: Devra Davis  but I couldn't help myself.  It jumped into my hands and so I read a few chapters.  It's about all I can take though, before that totally overwhelming feeling overtakes me and I have to close the book and process.

I am no longer shocked or horrified to read things like many of the basic causes of cancer were identified hundreds of years ago.  Mining, painting, smelting, forging, distilling, curing, smoking, grinding and cleaning were portrayed in literature and excellent medical accounts -- some dating from the Middle Ages -- as risky enterprises.

In 1936 more than 200 of the world's top cancer scientists convened in Brussells to attend the Second International Congress of Scientific and Social Campaign Against Cancer.  Here, the best minds available came together with no government or industrial secrets to keep.

They had no secrets to keep, but the government and industry was not going to lay down and let this fantastic information come into the light.  It is a little disconcerting to wonder, if you have lost anyone to cancer, that they might still be here if the things that these eminent men and women of science knew about the causes of cancer in 1936 had entered mainstream medical practice.

In 1556 a geologist and physician named Georgious Agricola spent years preparing De Re Metallica -- a massive report on mining that included detailed information on the ailments of miners.   Please note that date again, it was 1556 -- and Agricola stated that those who entered the mines, if they did not perish in gruesome accidents, would eventually die from lung diseases and tumors.

The fact that people still mine today -- and die of gruesome accidents or black lung disease or cancer -- goes to yet another aspect of humanity that I find difficult to grasp.  I am not even sure what the proper word is to describe it -- but for lack of a better word, I will call it Sheeple-ism.  You believe that something is your lot in life, and therefore you enter the mines daily until you die in order to put food on the table for your children who will also probably endure this same fate.  

Then there are those researchers, like Marie Curie, who died from her own research with radiation.   For years after her death her notebooks were too "hot" to handle.  Their radioactivity was measured in units, the "curie." the term was all that was left behind of the Curie's (her husband Pierre was struck and killed by a carriage that he was unable to see or hear due to his ailments).  Was that their purpose in life?  Is it the coal miner's purpose in life to mine coal until they die?

Does a society need sheeple in order to survive?

I may be reading a 500-page book on the secret history of the "war" on cancer, but cancer is only one layer of a society, nay, a planet that is focused on greed and neglect of its occupants.  (It took me a long time to come up with that sentence!  I am not sure where the nay came from, but we shall let it stand!)  In my head there is this chorus of chanting amoebas circling about screaming "do you get it?"  do you get it? DO YOU GET IT?  Do you see? do you see? DO YOU SEE?

I do.  But boy, it sure is hard to put it into words.  Not without sounding like a text book, or a nut job, or the anti-sheeple!

But I will try.

I could go on and on and on and on about how the government and industry have screwed us countless times by covering up proof that certain things cause cancer.  But I think that ultimately we all know this.  The bottom line is our health reflects the sum of our life experiences and cancer is not caused by anything genetic -- but what happens after we are born.  Where and how we live and work, what we eat, how we spend our time, how we move about.

By 1938, the world's top scientists from around the world understood that cancer came from the workplace, nutrition, hormones, sunlight, radiation and tobacco.  We, the people, did not know this.  Maybe some people still think that cancer is just bad luck, I don't know.

Everything is connected -- and that really comes into stark clarity when things that have never made any sense start to make a lot of sense.  As a student, I was completely drawn to the Holocaust.  In a college course in Humanities, I had a professor who was this beautiful woman (not sure what that has to do with anything, but she was a working mother and I remember feeling her struggle) and I used to ask her, HOW could this happen?  We'd watch these movies in class, and I couldn't understand, how could people stand by and let this happen?  

I can see her smile now, her shrug, the look she would give me.  And now that I think about it, I received such reactions a lot through life.  From people who'd stopped questioning and had replaced that drive with acceptance.  I think the look was tinged with pity -- and I could be completely making this up in my head, but it makes sense.    I felt sorry for people who had no answers, and they felt sorry for me because I was looking for them!  Interesting.

Anyway, enough self-analysis for the moment.  I really want to try to get this out.  So I had this Holocaust thing going ... and did for years.  I devoured books on the subject and I would think time and again, if **I** was around at that time, I would have done something!  I could never have sat back and watched people be gassed.

Well, of course there were people who did something, and now, with a war in Iraq something I can't personally stop and a president who stole the presidency and no one even really remembers that (or even worse, thinks he is a good president) the passage of time brings understanding to me -- perhaps understanding I'd rather not have, but do nonetheless.

But ... here's the thing ... Hitler couldn't have acted on his own.  And his idea of an Aryan Nation was not just his vision.

By the end of World War I, racial hygiene was a respected field of medical science in Germany, England, France and AMERICA.

Racial hygiene is the selection by the government, of the most physical, intellectual and moral persons to raise the next generation, otherwise known as selective breeding, and used with animals all the time.  The U.S. government used deportation, segregation, compulsory sterilization and even genocide of those with mental disabilities, ethnicities, handicaps, criminal backgrounds, etc. etc. to weed out the bad.

I'd actually forgotten about this (can't imagine why) and remember reading about a southern family who were all sterilized because their father was an alcoholic.

In 1910, the United States created a eugenics record office whose job was to be sure that deficient persons didn't get a chance to transmit their defects.  And based on this offices "research" that the populations of southern and eastern Europeans, Mediterraneans and Russian Jews were rife with defects and should be kept out of the American gene pool, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed act in 1924, banning immigrants from the "weaker" stock and forcibly sterilizing citizens deemed deficient.

This is getting way too long and probably too boring for anyone to want to read, so I'll stop without even getting to the part where Hitler was basically using an American-devised theory,  or that there were many, many Jews who believed that selective breeding was a great idea (until it was turned on them of course) or how I see a direct connection between all the ills of history and where we are now and where we are going.  Oh, and why for the first time I understood Hitler -- or at least the gist of the phenomena that was the Holocaust.  I am sure the guy just thought, WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING?  WHY do they let this happen to them?  I just don't understand how 11 million people couldn't figure out how to save themselves.  Or do I?

If you end this thinking that I am a nut, off my rocker or just plain crazy ... then GOOD!  Because the way I see it, all the people who got it, who knew in their bones things were very, very wrong and tried to do something to stop it -- are the people who lived their lives as crazy people, but emerged in history as heros and heroines.