“Long” Live Capitalist Humanism
By Farooque Chowdhury
04 October, 2010
Countercurrents.org
The Empire has once again revealed its “human”-loving “humane” face, many faces at a time. It has reiterated its “concern” for humanity. It was the blacks in the Empire yesterday. Then, the Guatemala episode was created. It was followed by the Agent Orange touches over the Mekong delta, over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, among the Vietnamese and the Cambodian people. And, all the human rights reports issued every year by the Empire have confirmed their moral authority to be the guardian of human rights. And, all after these, it is not the end of history of capitalist humanity.
Media the world over reported: In 1946-1948, the US intentionally infected unaware people with sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala. The “holy” business of medical research encouraged the US in this job. Research by Susan Reverby, a professor of the history of ideas and gender issues, from Wellesley College has uncovered the Guatemala episode.
Tuskegee study began in the early-1930s with 399 African-American men followed by the Guatemala experiment. Both the studies were sponsored by the US government. In Guatemala, the focus was on the powers of penicillin while the Tuskegee “endeavor” searched the “natural history of syphilis”.
The Tuskegee Black subjects were denied treatment, and information about the study. The study provided free health exams, food and transportation to the Tuskegee Afro-Americans, but none of the patients having syphilis was told that he carried the condition. The patients were not sufficiently treated, and they were told that they would get treatment for "bad blood," a phrase that connoted a variety of illnesses including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.
In Tuskegee, the experiment made sure that the subjects with syphilis did not get treatment from elsewhere. They were continued to be excluded when other patients were treated with penicillin in 1943. By 1972, 28 men in Tuskegee died of syphilis and 100 others had died of related complications. As a result of the experiment, at least 40 wives contracted syphilis and 19 children had it from birth. Then there were congressional hearings in 1973 leading to overhaul of the health, education and welfare rules concerning work with human subjects, a lawsuit resulting an out-of-court settlement of $10 million, and the US government’s promise for lifetime medical benefits and burial services to all living study subjects. This program later expanded to include wives, widows and children. In 1997, President Clinton apologized to the Tuskegee victims.
In 1944, inmates in a US prison were injected with gonorrhea. That project was abandoned, and the US “initiative” turned to Guatemala. The Guatemalan government rendered permission for the tests.
The Guatemala episode involved more than 1,600 subjects, female commercial sex workers, prisoners, patients in the national mental hospital and soldiers: 696 with syphilis, 772 with gonorrhea and 142 with chancres. They did not give direct permission to participate. The authorities signed them up. The participants were infected with the diseases. The physicians used prostitutes with the disease to pass it to the prisoners and then did direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured onto the men's private parts or on forearms, faces, and spinal punctures.
The US apologized to Guatemala, more than 60 years after the experiments were closed. President Obama offered “profound apologies”, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius called the action “reprehensible”. The US government has ordered two independent investigations.
Director of the US National Institutes for Health has cited four primary ethical violations: study subjects “were members of one or more vulnerable populations”; there is no evidence that they gave informed consent; they were often deceived about what was being done to them; and they were intentionally infected with pathogens that could cause serious illness without their understanding or consent.
More than 40 other US-based studies were conducted, “where intentional infection was carried out with what we could now consider to be completely inadequate consent in the United States”, said a US official.
The US helped topple the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and backed a number of dictatorial governments in Guatemala in a 36-year civil war with a price of 200,000 lives. Today’s Guatemala story is known to newspaper readers and TV watchers.
These incidents once again raise fundamental questions raised by many for many a times. These are much, much old questions. These questions are related to capital, to its manipulation with science, ethics, and morality, to its relations with humanity, and with this planet, to its standards of judgment. The more powerful capital turns the more brutal way it behaves. Life was never an issue of consideration to it. It creates its own logic, own moral and ethical standards, and propagates a different one for others. The poor, the weak, the unaware, the subjugated are its first targets.
Science’s journey may now appear surrealistic as one compares the journey made by Copernicus in 1543 with his Six Books Concerning the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs, Bruno Giordano’s the seven-year long trial and burned to death at stake, his On the Infinite Universe and Worlds and The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Galileo’s trial, persecution, humiliation, house arrest, continuing research even after turning blind, his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the achievements made by Fidel’s Cuba in the area of medical science, and the profit-ventures against humanity capital makes with science.
Should not the world humanity question: What are the compulsions that make capital behave in the brutal, inhuman way? What it is character of this political-economy that creates logic, perceptions and drive which do not consider humanity and life as considerable? Why science in this particular political-economy stands against humanity? Have not its all standings been forfeited yet? Then, “slaves” tomorrow shall rise up in all corners and pronounce their distrust on all the values the Empire upholds as Spartacus asked a Roman soldier to convey to the Roman senate.
Farooque Chowdhury, a Bangladesh-free lancer, contributes on socioeconomic issues.
