Jennie's Story, reviewed in the July 2 Gazette, concerns eugenics, a subject about which most people have heard but dismiss as unimportant or part of a distant, no longer relevant past.
But this attitude makes such ghastly travesties more apt to recur in a different form. The article refers to the widespread effects of this inhuman episode and its culmination in Nazi programs of elimination of mental and physical "defectives". Director Alex Hawkins rightly rejects the notion that such travesties can be rationalized or excused on the basis that they complied with norms of the time: this rather common view is illegitimate because, for one thing, they complied only to the norms of the people with the power to inflict their views and actions on the powerless, and equally importantly, because they are inhuman and immoral according to the dictum, "do to others as you would have them do to you".
Slavery is an unmitigated evil that still survives in Western utilized sweatshops and more directly in some parts of the world, and was very much a part of Western society until around 1832 in Great Britain and 1860-64 in the U.S. It was integral to the Roman republic and empire that is imitated in some ways even to the present day. In that system a slave had no legal rights and was a mere object with no recourse in law, no matter how treated.
But the system was not accepted by slaves, 70,000 of whom rebelled in 70 B.C. even though they well understood the consequences if caught. The great majority were and summarily tortured and killed, often by crucifixion. However, the historians of the past, as well-noted by more contemporary historians, usually reflected the biases of authority and the rich, and tended to interpret such evil as "accepted" values of the time.
The Edmonton Journal recently featured an article about the effort to identify the person who had a lifelong extreme fear of dogs because of the association of loud noise and dogs in a psychological experiment conducted when he was a young child. Inhuman experiments were performed on unsuspecting depressed people at the Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal in the '50s and '60s. I have seen these mad experiments by the psychiatrist Ewan Cameron defended in print by contemporary psychiatrists even though it is a well-known fact that they were funded by the CIA for their own use. The problem is that medical and other disciplines are reluctant to ever admit error and have often insisted on unquestioning compliance to their unproven diktats. That is the abiding problem with all agencies and authorities and can only be countered by constructive skepticism and open criticism.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
