The Secret Histories by John Friedman - Essay Example

BOOK REVIEW - The Secret Histories Order No. 236057 No. of pages: 4 Premium 6530 John Friedman in his book “The Secret Histories” has compiled works which expose the dangerous nexus between governments, industry and scientific bodies, all geared towards bringing about changes desired by the regime in authority. Thus, we have IBM, the solutions giant aiding and abetting Nazi Germany in their program of Jewish extermination, the US government drugging its own citizens in order to study the effects of mind-altering drugs, and the most gruesome of all, feeding plutonium to children and the sick, in order to gain more knowledge as to how radiation affects human beings. These documents are tangible proof of the manner in which governments and titans of the industry have harmed their own people. What is most shocking is the tendency of investigating agencies to later help in the cover up operations mounted by these industrial giants and the so-called protectors of the citizens of the nation. These accounts of governmental apathy and disregard for innocents raises the troubling question of how safe are we, the populace of a nation. In this summary, we shall be discussing this hand in glove attitude of people in power, who treat common individuals as guinea pigs in their quest for control over the world. Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust is a painstaking episode delving into the convergence of technology and the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1945. It is a powerful documentation of how Thomas J. Watson’s (Chief of IBM at the time) greed and his desire to monopolize the emerging market of technological possibilities led him to make covert deals with Hitler’s government. Hitler was not the first man to hate the Jews, but his terrifying objectives of wiping out Jews from Europe was aided by the “solution providers” at IBM. The IBM Hollerith D-11, card sorting machine, which identified the Jews during the 1933 census, in a way sealed their fates forever. Edwin Black lays the blame for the condition of Jews as much on Hitler as the card machines provided to the Third Reich by Thomas J Watson’s company. These machines helped in cross indexing government, church and communal records. Edwin Black juxtaposed the movement of machines from one Nazi occupied territory to another and uncovered that it was these machines, using punch cards, all provided by IBM, which helped in the systematic slaughter to Jews. These lists can be termed as glaring instances of corporate misconduct, because the greed of one company fed the vicious ambitions of one individual, resulting in the death of millions of people. It is not to say that Hitler would not have been able to achieve his objectives of wiping out Jews, but what cannot be denied is that technological aid supplied by IBM speeded the process. Eileen Welsome’s “The Plutonium Files” is a chilling expose of how the US government used their own citizens as guinea pigs in order to study the effects of radiation poisoning. Scientists involved with the US atomic weapons program laced food given to disabled children at a Massachusetts school with plutonium, while women were injected with plutonium and radioactive materials under the guise of new medicines. Not only did the scientists flout medical ethics, but the government also turned a blind eye to these potentially fatal experiments, all in the name of scientific research and advancement in medicine. Welsome’s search for these nameless victims were met with roadblocks at all government departments, but armed with the Freedom of Information Act, Welsome uncovered the gruesome truth. Welsome’s book is a scathing indictment of not only the government but also doctors, who in this case endangered the lives of those they were sworn to protect. Here too, the power of government machinery directly led to an assault on the well-being of its citizens. “The search for the Manchurian Candidate” by John Marks is again an expose of how the CIA, a government agency, put at risk the life of citizens whom it claimed to safeguard. The CIA had a keen interest in the development of psychoactive or mind-altering drugs in order to enable it to brainwash people, help in interrogation and induce amnesia. These mind control procedures needed to be tested first and once again innocent citizens were made the scapegoat. MKULTRA, a CIA program for conducting tests of mind altering drugs used unsuspecting civilians as guinea pigs. This program received notoriety not only for this aspect, but also because, in those days of scarce research funds, CIA conduits created many bogus front companies to allow unhindered flow of funds for their nefarious research. Another off-shoot of this research program was the “depatterning” process through which the CIA hoped to reconstruct a person’s identity for operational purposes. The most chilling aim of this program was to render human beings into some kind of automatons. The idea was to have a set of people with a mindset totally controlled by the government. These automatons were to do the bidding of the powerful agency and in case of being found out they could not incriminate the agency since they had supposedly acted on their free will. These programs were an extension of the communist policy of “brainwashing” which had been very successful. These three books, based on real documents, records from government agencies and interviews of ordinary people, encompass a much larger conspiracy theory, one in which the lives of ordinary mortals are being put to risk everyday by people in power. While Hitler’s “final solution” for Jews was the skewed vision of a single man, made possible by technology and governmental support, the other two books paint a very graphic picture of citizens being covertly put to danger. If these books had been categorized as fiction, we would have marveled at the cleverness of the author, but being non-fiction, real stories, these works send a chill down the spine. We do not know whom to trust and what to believe in anymore. These cases serve as a grim reminder of how vulnerable we are in the hands of those in power. Word Count-1005 REFERENCES H-Net Review: Robert Wolfe on IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic…. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=272881002133636 Democracy Now! | Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed ... www.democracynow.org/2004/5/5/plutonium_files_how_the_u_s Vankin & Whalen: The Seventy Greatest Conspiracies http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/Conspiracies.html Read More