Princeton University Press has published a truly great book about the Nazis. With the current health care debate in swing, and Nazi metaphors being slung around it's time to look at some of the facts. Author Robert Proctor:
began this book after discovering documents showing that the Nazis conducted the most aggressive antismoking campaign in modern history. Further research revealed that Hitler's government passed a wide range of public health measures, including restrictions on asbestos, radiation, pesticides, and food dyes. Nazi health officials introduced strict occupational health and safety standards, and promoted such foods as whole-grain bread and soybeans. These policies went hand in hand with health propaganda that, for example, idealized the Führer's body and his nonsmoking, vegetarian lifestyle. Proctor shows that cancer also became an important social metaphor, as the Nazis portrayed Jews and other "enemies of the Volk" as tumors that must be eliminated from the German body politic.We'll quote to you from the first chapter:
One of the more arresting features of the Nazi anticancer effort was its emphasis on prevention. Prevention fit with the Nazi approach to many other problems: racial hygiene, for example, was supposed to provide long-term care for the German germ plasm, by contrast with more traditional social or personal hygiene. The emphasis was not, of course, entirely new: socialist and communist physicians had long stressed prevention, and Nazi physicians could even cite Plato's admonishment that "care of the body" was better than the healing art, since "the former makes the latter superfluous." The Weimar period saw several important moves in this direction, reflected in the establishment of statistical offices, propaganda campaigns to stress early detection, and legislation to protect occupational health and safety. What was new in the Nazi period were augmented police and legislative powers to implement broad preventive measures, and the much-touted "political will" to deploy those powers to strengthen the health of the nation.Does this remind you in any way of a certain administration that's for taking over student loans, GM, and other assorted goodies? Well, you can understand how some people may be troubled hearing any of this rhetoric. When MSNBC talking heads get rather upset with those who don't want to go along with state run health care consider an important historical fact. MSNBC's parent company ,General Electric, had a rather close financial relationship with Adolph Hitler. You might say GE has a past with fascism and government planning.
