Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

731

I just caught the tail-end, on the radio, of a report dealing with medical experiments conducted in Britain by the military. The person being interviewed (obviously a military representative of some kind) persistently avoided the question of who was responsible for the records of the experiments that have subsequently been lost. The interviewer, his voice dripping with justified sarcasm, said at one point, "So you poison people, and then you 'lose' the records?"

As I say, I only caught the tail-end, but I imagine the story must be connected with Porton Down, apparently "the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world". We British have so much of which to be proud. I wonder if Porton Down has a plaque outside saying "Est. 1916".

Cunts.

Anyway... one reason amongst many that I was interested in this story was that, just yesterday, digging through episodes of Monkey Dust on Youtube (which I've been getting into again recently), I came across a sketch which looks like a reference to Porton Down. I'll see if I can find it again now. Ah, here it is, in the thing inset below, right after the first sketch about complete wankers:



Well, I could go off on a tangent about synchronicity, but I won't.

I'm not suggesting that the animated sketch above is a realistic depiction of what has gone on or goes on inside Porton Down, or, well, I certainly did not expect it to be, and I don't wish to find out first-hand, either. I noticed that the sketch mentioned the ebola virus, and did a quick search based on 'Porton Down' and 'Ebola'. From this article, we have the following:

[Porton Down] still sits among 7,000 acres of rolling Wiltshire countryside, with scientists working with the deadliest known disease agents - including bubonic plague, anthrax and even the ebola virus.

Opened in 1916 in response to Germany's use of the deadly mustard gas in the French trenches, Porton Down's history is filled with secret projects, whose real scope and intention were rarely explained to those on whom they were tested - which included servicemen and even travellers on the London Underground.

Scientists at Porton Down have always denied that they are engineering deadly new germs and chemicals for use against humans. They say their intention is only to understand how the weapons work, in order to forestall their effects.

But that has not stopped some shocking experiments from taking place. In the 1960s Porton Down scientists released harmless bacteria on the London Underground to simulate a biological attack. At about the same time they tested LSD on soldiers to investigate its "tactical battlefield usefulness".

Now, what I heard of the radio programme and what I have read suggests that the claims made of the exclusively defensive nature of the research at Porton Down are distinctly dubious. I wonder what will come out in years from now - I mean information rather than deadly epidemics, though I suppose it could be either.

The mention of the LSD tests reminds me of a documentary I saw some time back about the genesis and history of LSD. Of course, mention was made of the military experiments. It was hoped that LSD would be effective as a truth drug. I seem to recall some footage from these experiments. I do remember that the drug was finally considered useless (for military purposes, of course) and that in the notes taken from the experiments it was written that LSD causes paranoia in the subject. This is a prime example of what geniuses we're dealing with here. If I'd been administered LSD in a fucking military research base in a brightly lit room, surrounded by men in white coats and armed guards, I can tell you, I'd be pretty fucking paranoid, too.

Anyway, good to know that our future is in such hands.

I actually have a passing interest in military medical experiments, anyway. I've even been considering volunteering for (non-military) medical experiments, for a number of reasons, although, well, there are also plenty of good reasons not to. Probably the most famous of military medical experiments were those conducted by Dr. Mengele. (Incidentally, my favourite part of the Wikipedia article on him is the line, "Not all of Mengele's experiments were of scientific value". It makes him sound like an upstanding pillar of society who happened to get carried away now and then with his hobby. Which is probably similar to how he thought of himself.) However, perhaps the military experiments that most stick in my mind are those conducted in Unit 731, in Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo). It always seems like we're never taught the most interesting parts of history at school, don't you think? I mean, I wonder why, at school, I was never taught about the Opium Wars. That would have been illuminating. Our curious and eager young minds, seizing upon this information, would have been able to see the stereotype of the Chinese opium den in a wholly new light after learning it was mainly us that was selling the drug to the Chinese, not to mention all the authoritarian 'drugs war' line of bullshit taken by the British government more recently. Similarly, but even more so, I feel like the existence of Unit 731 is one patch in the patchwork of history that has been unnecessarily and too often passed over.

I first learned of Unit 731 whilst studying East Asian history at university. I believe I came across the story more or less by accident whilst reading up for something else. I won't give a detailed account of that story here. It is a vile and plotless story, not to mention senseless. An exploitation film, called Men Behind the Sun has even been made based on events taking place within Unit 731. I haven't watched it because, despite my interest, and amongst other reasons, I am actually squeamish and don't enjoy the prospect of vomiting. If you're feeling strong of stomach at the moment, you could read a general list of the kind of 'experiments' that were conducted.

Of course, this kind of gruesome detail is 'memorable', and for some reason I have not actually analysed, I find the details (perhaps simple because there seem to be more of them) more memorable here than with the experiments of Dr. Mengele. However, I think the thing that really made me remember this story was the way that it ended. Since I'm lazy, I will quote from the Wikipedia article, which is succint enough:

At the end of the war, MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare. The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The U.S. also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research.

Labels: Porton Down, Unit 731