Josef Mengele, Eugenics and What Happens When Science Loses Its Moral Conscience

There is something unsettling about photographs of Josef Mengele.

He does not look like a monster.

He looks educated. He smiles. He looks kind, in some images goofy. A kind doctor, who I would imagine if I was a child and I walked into his chamber, he would give me a lollipop after a vaccine. Someone who looks benevolent. Someone who looks caring.

Because he was. Only the educated part. The rest, he was a monster. A monster more insidious because he didn’t look the part.

The physician who became known as the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz held doctorates in medicine and anthropology. He studied human genetics, worked within respected academic institutions and participated in the scientific culture of his age.

What nobody can deny is that many leaders like this exist today who are incredibly “seductive” in their speech. He or she will openly tell you – he or she is about to kill a few more 100s or 1000s of people – and have an eloquent justification for it.

And they have been able to consistently “slip under the radar” of enough people for long enough – that many people still revere him or her.

Many of these leaders have a firm stance on some moral issues. Hitler was a great orator as well, doesn’t change what he did. Stalin leapfrogged Soviet Innovation – doesn’t change what he did. Mao organised Chinese society – doesn’t change what he did. And I am going to go out on a limb and say Churchill was a great orator and a great leader. Doesn’t change what he did with regards to the Bengal famine. I am British, and my family comes from Bengal. I will never forgive Churchill for what he did to my part of India.

My reasoning for that is not that Churchill prioritised British life or WW2. It was that India, and Bengal, being the rice bowl of India, kept their social contract towards the empire. If they had caused strife, broken order, caused public rebellion – it’s a whole different issue. These were hard working, honest people, who were still left to die after their productive output was siphoned off somewhere else. And Churchill’s correspondence simply shows disdain for the people, not any moral reasoning.

On a personal note, my grandmother moved from what is now Bangladesh to India during partition, and was alive during the Bengal famine. She would often say, that people were “dropping like flies” on the street. People wouldn’t beg for rice – they would beg for the froth – the water when rice is being cooked. However, this is still an “unpopular opinion” in the UK. Because somehow, these societies still worship “power” and “might” more than “truth and justice”.

Nazism combined several dangerous forces: ancient antisemitism, racial ideology, propaganda, bureaucracy, technological organisation and pseudoscience.

The hallmark of these “institutions” – is there is apparently some “hidden great knowledge” which cannot be tested empirically, examined, but need to be taken at face value because some “great leader” told us so. Islam, Judaism and Christianity are different. They are held to account on standard which is transparent.

Indeed, there were times during the life of Prophet Muhammad saws when he was corrected by God.

ʿAbasa — Qur’an 80:1–10. The Prophet ﷺ was speaking to prominent Quraysh leaders when the blind believer ʿAbd Allāh ibn Umm Maktūm approached seeking instruction. The Prophet ﷺ frowned and turned away, and Allah corrected him: “He frowned and turned away because the blind man came to him…” The passage redirects attention from powerful people toward the sincere seeker.

These contemporary great leaders always wear a nice crisp suit, a tie, speak not saying “I will analyze the data”, “I will consult and try and come up with the best solution” but “this is the truth” and “you will follow me because I am protecting you”. No you are not – you are tanking the economy; and raising gas prices for everyone.

There’s 3 prominent such people (leaders) who I am not mentioning here due to political sensitivities – but we all know who these 3 are causing unnecessary bloodshed.

In Nazi Germany, Human........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)