Coronavirus week 94: About that Nuremberg Code

First, antivaxxers, given that last week today was the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was formalized, it's offensive as hell, odious and disgusting to be comparing immunologists, virologists and vaccine administering doctors and nurses to Josef Mengele, which is essentially what you're doing.

Second, it's a lie, twice over.

First of all, none of the above modern health care professionals is deliberately harming anybody.

Secondly, as the US, and I believe all other major countries backing the Nuremberg Code, had some sort of vaccine (and quarantine) mandates in their laws, the Nuremberg Code obviously doesn't include that. Burden of proof is on you to show me wrong, per what I just stated above.

In fact, it's probably mis-cited in general. And, with that, I'll tackle all 10 points.

• First, it applies to research. Administration of a vaccine is NOT research. That said? The vaccine trials? All subjects were willing and informed. 
• Second, hells yes it yielded fruitful research. COVID is real, and the vaccines are helpful. (No, not perfect, but I'm not going to argue with antivaxxers who claim Pfizer said its was, who strawman #COVIDZero, etc. GFY.)
• Third, the vax development and trials were based on just such knowledge.
• Vax trials avoided unnecessary suffering.
• There was no a priori reason to believe the vaccines would cause death or disablement. When the Johnson and Johnson vax showed an increased risk of some blood clots, in fact it was put on hold for further study.
• Sixth, the degree of risk was not out of proportion to the obvious humanitarian impulse.
• Seventh, vax trials were conducted in ways such that medical intervention was ready if needed.
• Yes, the development, and the trials, were conducted by scientifically qualified people, as compared to most the antivaxxers being unqualified.
• Yes, test subjects had the right to leave a vax trial, as they do on research trials in general.
• Tenth, scientists were indeed ready to terminate the trials if necessary.

Oh, by the way, it's codified into Health and Human Services regulations.

Beyond THAT? Vaccine administration is NOT research. And, there was no mandate on any vaccine until after the Pfizer vax moved past EUA to full authorization.

Related to that, whether you're a MAGAt, a Greenwald-type libertarian, or a horseshoe theory Green? Bodily autonomy is NOT absolute, and it exists only in the constraints of society. That's why the old joke about how your rights end when your fist meets my nose (or in states with separate assault and battery laws, when your fist comes too close to my nose) is not just an old joke, it's the truth.

Per this Atlantic story, your right to smoke in a public place ended decades ago, for example. Related? Politico notes that low levels of conscientiousness, especially among people who tilt conservative politically (and I'm lumping L/libertarians there) is a leading marker of spreading fake news, including but not limited to COVID vaccines, of course.

Oh, also? Antisemitism still exists, just as it does in antivaxxers wearing Stars of David and trivializing the Holocaust. A person assuming I am a Jew engaged in it when I raised the Wannsee issue a week ago. And, it was a horseshoer.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr., although not mentioning the Nuremberg Code, did do the more general Nazis = vaccination claim at his DC rally over the weekend, and tried to piggyback on Anne Frank. AND? Maybe he didn't mention it, but signs at the rally DID say "Nuremberg Code."

And horseshoe theorizers among Greens (more and more, I realize that the Venn diagram overlap between "Green" and "lefist" is not huge, and is fuzzy, but Noah Berlatsky is still wrong on denying horseshoe theory exists) are more odious than wingnuts on this issue.

Besides, none of this is based on science. Antivaxxer groups were talking blather about COVID vaccines even before the first was created, or even before we had an idea we could create one.

Under the varieties of #denialism, some commonalities

Whether it's climate change denialism, or evolution denialism (Paul Braterman's alternative for creationism), or vaccine denialism (an alternative for antivaxxers), are there some commonalities among denialists?

Well, climate change denialists deliberately took over tactics, and even some spokespeople, from Big Tobacco. Beyond that, Massimo Pigliucci has much more to say, based on a one-day seminar on the issue he attended. Besides him, Brendan Nyhan was among participants, so it was a good one.

I've already dropped one comment there myself.

An excerpt:

Money and/or power drives much of this. Climate denialism is funded by Big Oil. Antivaxxers are driven (outside of emotional parents) largely by the money, and the power of fame, of certain members of Hollywood. Genocide denials are driven most by the power of governments, and their money. The power of tithing-type donations is behind creationists. 

They can buy the PR, the advertorial, the softball media interviews. We should be under no pretense that combating this will be easy. And, that’s not even counting the power of made-up minds engaged in group-reinforced motivated reasoning.

I suggest environmental friends, especially, drop over there and take a read.

Did FDR do all he reasonably could to save the Jews?

FDR and the Jews by Richard Breitman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An excellent, balanced book that shows that, on trying to save Europe's Jews, FDR was neither calloused and indifferent nor a saint.

The authors divide his presidency into four, roughly but not exactly matching his four terms in office, and look at what he did in each period. They also refute a number of myths, including one medium-sized and one big one.

The first roughly matches his first term. The second runs to about the time of the St. Louis liner in 1939. The third runs to about the time Nazi Germany overran Hungary in spring 1944. And, the fourth from there.

The authors note that the US economy was the first FDR's main concern. Even so, they say that he probably could have done a little bit more in chiding Hitler or more. That said, no country wanted to take in a lot of refugees in general during the Great Depression. That's not to mention anti-Semitism in the US, which was at roughly the level of pre-Vichy France, on average, I think we could say. If I were to give a grade, it would be a C-minus.

On the refugees, post-1924 immigration law had strict country quotas, and an anti-immigrationist Congress, not even counting hardcore segregationists, was in little mood to lift those quotas. This is something to remember later on.

Reassured of re-election, FDR II did challenge the Germans more, and did work, within in the system, to work around those quotas, and to pressure the British to do all they would and could to open up Palestine. FDR was also the only world leader to recall his country's ambassador for consultations after Kristallnacht. A solid B-plus, maybe higher, if I'm giving grades.

The St. Louis liner incident, while leading to FDR III, is more complex than many histories appear. Cuban strongman Bautista did not have absolute control of his country's wheels of power, and Cuba's president and foreign minister rejected the backdoor deal he had cut with Americans with some connection with FDR.

Myth says that all of the passengers went back to Germany and most died in the Holocaust. Reality is that while all went back to Europe, none went to Germany and almost 3/4 survived.

That said, why didn't FDR do more? Because, at this time, he was trying to get Congress to loosen up the Neutrality Act. He was afraid that intervening in the St. Louis would make the desired Neutrality Act changes look too narrowly pro-Jewish.

As the authors note, FDR III was about having the US ready for war, helping Britain be ready for war, and fight the war after September 1939, etc. Jewish issues in Europe were focused through this prism.

At the same time, FDR was already working around the anti-Semites among career staff in the State Department to do something to keep Jewish immigration hopes alive. At the same time, this is when Breckenridge Long, anti-Semitism at State personified, was appointed to one of the top political, non-careerist positions there. The authors don't make clear if this was part of solidifying his in-party stance before officially running for a third term (which he seems to have decided on after Kristallnacht) or what; that's a minor missing point.

After war started, it became harder to do much about Jews still in occupied Nazi territory. But, there was Vichy, before the North African invasion, Spain, and the moral voice of the Vatican. FDR did a moderate job with all.

Grade for FDR III? Flat C?

FDR IV, as noted, was at the tail end of the war. Here we run into the big myth, one that the authors note President George W. Bush perpetuated on a visit to Auschwitz: FDR decided not to bomb Auschwitz, or rail lines from Hungary.

After the Nazis took over Hungary, they did all they could, with Admiral Horthy slowing things for a while in the summer of 1944, to kill its 800,000 or so Jews. Why didn't FDR order bombing of the train lines to Auschwitz or even, even at the cost in Jewish life, Auschwitz itself? (Even some Jews supported this.)

First, FDR himself never heard about this. The idea of doing this got killed in upper levels of the War Department and Army. The authors note that John McCloy's late-life comments otherwise are highly self-serving and unreliable. (After April 1944 or so, the rail lines themselves were very reachable, and Auschwitz itself barely so, by bombers from Italy.)

Possible anti-Semitism of military folks aside, they were already overloaded with targeting requests for their bombers. And both they and FDR felt that winning the war was the surest way to save Jews.

Beyond that, the Nazis quite likely would have found some other way to kill Jews. Pre-Auschwitz, they used guns and mobile CO2 vans in the USSR, after all.

(As for the myth of bombing Auschwitz? Bibi Netanyahu also made that claim, in part to try to justify an attack on Iran. With both him and Bush, the specter of pre-emptive war was in the background.)

The Nazis then thought about negotiating over Hungary's Jews. But the price in US military material plus ideas of a separate peace with the West were far too high to pay, and were otherwise shady.

After that, Hungarians themselves tried some negotiations, but the Nazis ultimately quashed them. As any Jews set free would have to cross German-occupied territory, that was the end of that.

Otherwise, FDR's War Refugee Board, created at this time, did have regular contact with Raoul Wallenberg and helped him with his mission. The authors say that 100,000 Jews may have been saved from Hungary, and 200,000 overall.

Yes, a small amount out of 6 million, or even 800,000. But not negligible. Yes, FDR needed a nudge or two to create this board. But, he did so, he stood by it, and the nudges weren't that hard.

The fourth FDR gets a solid B.

In all of this, FDR continued to run the multiple gantlets (that's the right spelling, folks) of anti-Semitism in general, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrationism in Congress, and the fractiousness of various Jewish organizations, all while pushing against what seemed like the rock of Sisyphus, the anti-Semitism at State. A lot of people don't understand how deep this was. It was the traditional WASPs' anti-Semitism, one that sympathized hard with Britain and tried to get Roosevelt to agree to back a British white paper that would have officially retreated from the Balfour Declaration.

This isn't a whitewash by the authors; it's an honest evaluation of what FDR did, and didn't do, and why, and whether he could have done more.

Over all four terms, within the realities of American politics, the Depression and war, he probably gets a B, no lower than a B-minus.

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As for FDR's alleged anti-Semitism? This is largely not true, but rather, people who want to guilt-trip FDR for not doing much, much more to save European Jews, and who pick certain comments of his out of context and distort them. Many of them use Peter Bergson, who comes off in this book as having a tiny following within Palestine and being generally untrustworthy, as a "foil" to show just what FDR could have done. Hogwash. Bergson did help push for the War Refugee Board. He did show other American Jews that they could perhaps be more vocal. Otherwise, he was regarded as an irritant by Jews in both the US and Palestine.

For a good refutation of all of these claims, see this excellent piece in The Nation, that came out at about the time of this book. In general, per this review, be wary of any piece by, or favorably touting, Rafael Medoff.

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As for one-star reviewers of this book, on either Goodreads or Amazon? Well, there's Holocaust deniers everywhere. There's also ultra-Zionists everywhere, per the link to The Nation. You'll find other lowball reviewers, that aren't Holocaust deniers, are ultra-Zionists.



View all my reviews

A new Godwin's Law — Holocaust analogizing needs a name

With a hat tip to Ed Brayton, I note that Michelle Bachmann has compared raising taxes to the Holocaust, and now Mike Huckabee has compared raising the debt ceiling to that.

So, whether we call this a corollary to Godwin's Law or a whole new law, it needs a name. Hit me up in comments with your suggestions.

The one possible consolation? Israeli Jews, including even the most Christian-tolerant among the Zionists, say "enough" to Religious Righters who keep up the Holocaust comparisons.

That said, not all inane Holocaust analogies are by political wingnuts. Hardcore antivaxxers apparently do the same.

Shimon Peres, hypocrite?

Contra Simon Wiesenthal, who emphasized all 11 million the Nazis killed for reasons of ideology, the former Israeli prime minister seems to be telling Ukranians "fuggedaboutit" on the idea that something happened in 1932-33 at the hands of Joseph Stalin that could be called genocide or more.

(Scholars' support for calling Stalin's actions genocide) raise some troubling questions. After all, if Stalin committed genocide, then the individuals who executed, supported, and condoned it must be considered his collaborators. Russians need to ask whether the Russian Federation’s status as successor state to the Soviet Union entails moral responsibility for Stalin’s crimes. Is a formal apology necessary? Might reparations be in order? They also need to ask why and how Russians, and their language, culture, and identity, came to be so deeply implicated in, and supportive of, Soviet institutions of oppression.

Both Russians and non-Russians need to ask who among them pulled the triggers, ran the concentration camps, and starved the peasants. Most post-Soviet states have avoided “lustration” — exposing crimes and barring perpetrators from office — on the grounds that it would be destabilizing. The case for not rocking the boat was plausible when the crime wasn’t genocide. If it is, can silence still be justified?

Communists, Soviet sympathizers, and fellow travelers in Western Europe and the United States need to ask whether they bear some moral responsibility for Stalin’s genocides. They knew of dekulakization, the Holodomor, and the murderous campaigns — and did nothing. Worse, they defended Stalin and the Soviet Union. Are mere mea culpas enough?

Finally, Western policymakers need to explain just how they can justify turning a blind eye to the Kremlin’s rehabilitation of Stalin. Reset buttons and cheap gas are important, of course, but perhaps mass murder masquerading as Armageddon matters, too.

Or should one just forget? Too bad President Peres didn’t say how.

The whole article is well worth reading.

Benedict XVI defends lies about Pius XII

I don’t care WHAT Benedict says now or John Paul II said in the past — Pius XII undertook NO special “silent action” to save as many Jews as possible.

And, if Nazism had established long-term domination of Europe, Catholics would have been marginally better than under Communism and nothing more.

New light shed on Raoul Wallenberg mystery

Wallenberg, as World War II buffs know, was the Swedish diplomat who saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz. But, after he and his Hungarian driver drove off from Budapest in early 1945 with a Soviet escort, he disappeared from the pages of history.

Did he die in 1947, as has long been believed, or did he live on for years or even decades? Was his rescue mission financed by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency? If so, was he spying on the Soviets as well as rescuing Hungarian Jews?

Some of those questions are starting to get answers attached to them.

In the 1990s, the CIA acknowledged that the OSS recruited Wallenberg. It would seem he was an operative for the Pond, a supersecret agency unknown to all but President Franklin D. Roosevelt and select War and State Departments insiders.

About the Pond, little is known. But later this year the CIA is to release a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the National Archives in College Park, Md. …

The Pond relied on contacts in private corporations and hand-picked embassy personnel. It worked closely with the Dutch electronics company N.V. Philips, “which had access to ‘enemy’ territory as well as a far-flung corporation intelligence apparatus in its own right,” said former CIA analyst Mark Stout, who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.

The Swedish government has posted 1,000 pages of Wallenberg documents on government websites, which should also help.

As far as what happened to him inside the USSR, outside research suggests he lived until the 1980s, and not dying in 1947 as the Soviets claimed. He probably was in gulags, psychiatric hospitals and other Soviet custody situations.

n 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified archives about Wallenberg.

“I think I found all the existing documents,” Nikonov e-mailed The Associated Press last month. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.

Nikonov’s conclusion: “Shot in 1947.”

Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.

The 2001 Swedish report said: “There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg,” and listed 17 unanswered questions.

The Russian report bluntly said, “Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947.” It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the “Smersh” counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case “resolved.”

Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging, analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to release missing files.

That said, Sweden admits it had chances to at least try to regain Wallenberg’s freedom in the two years between his arrest by the Soviets and their claimed date of his execution, but that it had a “passive” attitude.

That then leads to the question: Did Stockholm know the OSS had recruited Wallenberg? Was it forced to take a more passive attitude on trying to win his release?

In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, the story notes. That prompted a memo from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier. Note how that contradicts Nikonov’s claim he was shot.

Here’s why the Soviets feared and mistrusted Wallenberg:

Wallenberg's very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust. Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.

The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him excluded — a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold War.

There’s plenty of additional fascinating stuff at the link, enough for somebody to start thinking about a great movie. There’s also more testimony from Russians who claim to have seen him alive after 1947, and links to websites with more about Wallenberg and his humanitarian deeds.

I think Wallenberg lived; I think Stalin would not have been stupid enough to execute him. And, how could his name be brought up in post-1947 spy swaps?

Assuming he did live, or even if he was shot in 1947, it’s time for post-Soviet Russia to do the proper things. Repatriate his remains, and open all the archives.

Ditto for the U.S. Beyond Wallenberg, World War II historians would love to learn more about the Pond.