In the centuries since Machiavelli was writing, we have seen a vast expansion in the size and scope of the administrative state, and as thinkers from Francois Guizot to Anthony de Jasay have shown us, this great framework of government has come into existence largely on the basis of this caring aspect of raison d’Ètat. It is not that, as Nietzsche had it, the state is merely a ‘cold monster’ imposing itself on society unbidden. It is that a complex series of interactions has developed, with the state convincing society that it is in need of its protection, and gaining society’s consent for its expansion accordingly.
To return to Foucault (whose writings on the state are among the most important and insightful in the last 100 years), we can think of the state as having emerged as a series of discourses by which the population, and groups within it, are constructed as being vulnerable and in need of the state’s benevolent assistance. These groups (the poor, the old, children, women, the disabled, ethnic minorities, and so on) gradually increase in number such that they eventually make up more less the entire population.
The ultimate dream, of course, is for the state to find ways to make literally everyone vulnerable and in need of its help (for its status will then surely be forever secure) – and I hardly need to spell out for you why Covid-19 was seized upon with such gusto in this regard.
This, then, is the basic story of the development of the state since Machiavelli – essentially, legitimising the growth of state power on the basis of helping the vulnerable
The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine. Some say that “Nazi medicine” was not real medicine or science: We cannot even call what the Nazis did “medicine,” since medicine contains within it an assumption of rigor and beneficence.
This is an objection I hear from medical scientists, who point to safeguards such as the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), and the Belmont Report (1978) as proof of the radically different nature of science today. But this argument is circular. It defines science as “good science,” (relegating anything unethical to “bad science” or “pseudoscience”) when in fact these very safeguards were born out of abuses from what was then the most scientifically advanced country in the world. Medicine then, as now, is not somehow immune from this abuse, as the horrific postwar abuses at Tuskegee and elsewhere make clear.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis established a “biocracy,” which ultimately murdered millions of innocent persons. The notion that doctors were somehow “forced” to participate has been shattered as myth; Proctor’s (1988) unparalleled volume makes this vividly clear; Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (2000) meticulously traces both the medicalization of death, from eugenics to euthanasia to Auschwitz, and the stories of physicians who perpetrated genocide, were subjected to it, and resisted it. Thus, with a wealth of historical research on the subject, a full accounting of this progression from trusted healers to state-sanctioned killers is beyond the scope of this essay.’
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950
https://brownstone.org/articles/machiavelli-globalists-why-elites-despise-independent-thought/
In the centuries since Machiavelli was writing, we have seen a vast expansion in the size and scope of the administrative state, and as thinkers from Francois Guizot to Anthony de Jasay have shown us, this great framework of government has come into existence largely on the basis of this caring aspect of raison d’Ètat. It is not that, as Nietzsche had it, the state is merely a ‘cold monster’ imposing itself on society unbidden. It is that a complex series of interactions has developed, with the state convincing society that it is in need of its protection, and gaining society’s consent for its expansion accordingly.
To return to Foucault (whose writings on the state are among the most important and insightful in the last 100 years), we can think of the state as having emerged as a series of discourses by which the population, and groups within it, are constructed as being vulnerable and in need of the state’s benevolent assistance. These groups (the poor, the old, children, women, the disabled, ethnic minorities, and so on) gradually increase in number such that they eventually make up more less the entire population.
The ultimate dream, of course, is for the state to find ways to make literally everyone vulnerable and in need of its help (for its status will then surely be forever secure) – and I hardly need to spell out for you why Covid-19 was seized upon with such gusto in this regard.
This, then, is the basic story of the development of the state since Machiavelli – essentially, legitimising the growth of state power on the basis of helping the vulnerable
Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis?
‘Why is this important?
The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine. Some say that “Nazi medicine” was not real medicine or science: We cannot even call what the Nazis did “medicine,” since medicine contains within it an assumption of rigor and beneficence.
This is an objection I hear from medical scientists, who point to safeguards such as the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), and the Belmont Report (1978) as proof of the radically different nature of science today. But this argument is circular. It defines science as “good science,” (relegating anything unethical to “bad science” or “pseudoscience”) when in fact these very safeguards were born out of abuses from what was then the most scientifically advanced country in the world. Medicine then, as now, is not somehow immune from this abuse, as the horrific postwar abuses at Tuskegee and elsewhere make clear.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis established a “biocracy,” which ultimately murdered millions of innocent persons. The notion that doctors were somehow “forced” to participate has been shattered as myth; Proctor’s (1988) unparalleled volume makes this vividly clear; Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (2000) meticulously traces both the medicalization of death, from eugenics to euthanasia to Auschwitz, and the stories of physicians who perpetrated genocide, were subjected to it, and resisted it. Thus, with a wealth of historical research on the subject, a full accounting of this progression from trusted healers to state-sanctioned killers is beyond the scope of this essay.’
[link to www.tabletmag.com (secure)]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11945899/Covid-jabs-given-vulnerable-BABIES-Health-chiefs-recommend-two-Pfizer-doses.html
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950
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