David Price at Counterpoint: How US Anthropologists Planned “Race-Specific” Weapons Against the Japanese
I haven’t had time to read this yet, but neither have I seen it mentioned anywhere else in the anthropologosphere, and it struck me as the sort of thing others out there might be interested in. Before PRISP, there was… well, there was a lot of stuff: administrative assistance for colonial governments, spying in times of war, and now, apparently, race-specific weaponry. Say what? Let David Price (author of Threatening Anthropology) tell you all about ‘How US Anthropoligists [sic] Planned “Race-Specific” Weapons Against the Japanese’ over at Counterpunch.
One Harvard Medical School professor was by OSS [the Office of Strategic Services] to:
‘think aloud’ on the possibility of introducing some disease among enemy troops that might catch them by surprise, but against which our own troops were well protected. Most ailments caused by flukes or protozoans he dismissed as impractical; plague virus he thought could be introduced by dropping infected mice or rats, possibly by parachute; typhus might be spread by the device of having louse-covered but immune volunteers submit to capture; and ticks infected with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever might be released among our opponents, but this would scarcely be effective since the disease is not transmitted from man to man by contagion. The professor then launched into a spontaneous discussion of anthrax, whose introduction he regarded as entirely practical and highly effective, despite the fact that anthrax, too, is not contagious… Furthermore, it is possible to raise highly virulent strains of Bacillus anthracis and to spread them widely throughout any enemy concentration, as the spores of the bacillus are virtually indestructible and could even be distributed in bombs. In addition, the effects of anthrax are very rapid and dangerous since the bacilli enter into cuts, or abrasions, prevent wounds from healing, and induce pneumonia.
A little later in the piece:
the OSS report contemplated destroying the Japanese rice supply, observing that next to eliminating access to fish,
equally important would be a planned attack on our opponent’s rice supplies. Since stored rice tends to lose much of its Vitamin B the Japanese cannot readily build up large reserves, so that our energies should be directed towards the object of destroying growing crops that are about to mature. Furthermore, it would be more rewarding if rice fields in Japan proper were attacked whenever possible as this would force the enemy to rely more and more on imported rice, thus adding materially to his increasing shipping problems.
After getting past the shock of reading US academics proposing genocidal measures on a level with smallpox blankets (Happy Thanksgiving!), it’s interesting to step back and look at how these people thought: The sorts of strategies proposed were not foreign to Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, but there’s definitely a very anthropological spin on the proposed assault on Japanese modes of production and food sources… Our amazing powers are not the exclusive demesne of the forces of Good.
6 December 2005 at 08:27
Good entry.
One of the threads weaving its way through your blog is your contemplation of the ethics of matters arising in your field.
This is important in my field (psychology). In fact, the crossovers and parallels are significant in something like the above.
We have to consider the ethics. We have to. Have to.
People cannot go ahead and do something just because it can be done. Should it be done? is always one of the questions that must be asked.
We have to hold others to their ethical imperatives, too, even if they try to refuse to do that for themselves or do something less mindful than “refuse” just skip it because that is the shortest distance between 2 points.