User talk:Otolemur crassicaudatus/Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany

Comments and a pertinent item

As per your {{db-author}} request, I deleted your user subpage yesterday (log). I found it interesting and was glad to see today that you're still working on it.

The following text is transcribed from a clipping which has been in my files for 14 years:

[p.] 3   THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN • FRIDAY, JANUARY 19, 1996

GUEST COLUMN

BROOKS ALEXANDER

Forward to the Past

Smoking isn't good for you. Everyone knows it's true (even smokers), and some forward-thinking politicians finally decided to do something about it. The decade of the '90s has seen the growth of anti-smoking laws and ordinances around the country. Berkeley has led the way in discouraging smoking by means of public policy. In doing so, Berkeley has closely followed the lead of the FDA and the "regulatory lobby" in their activism against smoking in general and the tobacco industry in particular.

Their long-range purpose is to stigmatize tobacco and eliminate smoking in public altogether — confining die-hard smokers to the refuge of their own domiciles (at least until the neighbors complain). Given the medical certainty of the harm that smoking causes and the "addictive" grip of the habit itself, the agenda seems more than justified. Reason and sanity finally seem to be finding some expression in the public arena.

Or are they? For starters, "sane" and "rational" are not necessarily the same thing. For an example of their divergence, consider these "rational" benefits of the anti-smoking policy, then consider their relationship to social "sanity."

In a model anti-smoking policy,

• The military would be forbidden to smoke on the streets, on marches or during off-duty periods on base.

• Restaurants would be forbidden to sell cigarettes to women.

• Anyone under 18 would be forbidden to smoke in public.

• Smoking would be forbidden in most public places for everyone and advertising of tobacco strictly controlled by law.

Does this sound like a Berkeley bureaucrat's dream come true? It does (except for the part about women), but it also happens to be the brainchild of a Berlin bureaucrat — Adolph Hitler. He despised tobacco (among a great many other things), apparently as a part of his fastidious personality. He hated smoking and sought to discourage it throughout Germany by means of aggressive political policies. Under Nazi direction, German scientists launched a series of major research studies that sought to discredit smoking by linking it to lung cancer. Smoking was discouraged in every possible way as part of the Nazi vision of a pure and healthy Aryan society. In pursuit of that vision — eminently rational, but totally insane — the policies above had become law in Germany by 1943.

Let's bring the discussion back to the present day. Would a new Hitler feel at home in the FDA — or on the Berkeley city council? A new Hitler would certainly find support for his movement (whatever he called it) in the prevailing assumption that the government should use its political power to correct social ills. With the mandate of that assumption in hand, a new Hitler would be off and running, just as he was in his original version.

If you think "it can't happen here" (to borrow Sinclair Lewis's phrase), then think again. The agenda of control never loses its allure. New excuses for extending power are always being invented, but some excuses never change.

The evils of tobacco and smoking are a tempting target for the Ministry of Meddling. They have the weight of medical evidence with them, and their motives are plainly "high-minded." But the Hitler connection is more than a little worrisome. It should bother us to find that our own policies resemble the Nazis' policies so closely. Exactly what does that mean?

Let me make a suggestion. Perhaps it means that we should fear therapeutic witch-hunts as much as we fear "religious" or "political" ones. Maybe it means that personal freedom should always carry more weight than any current wisdom about what we all "ought" — or ought not — to do. Liberty is always under threat from "what everybody knows." That conflict isn't new. What is new these days is that "everybody" is having his "knowledge" manipulated to support political agendas that he doesn't understand and probably wouldn't agree with if he did.

This is not a trivial issue. If you think your freedom to make decisions in personal matters is a small price to pay for some utopian vision of social health and harmony, then Hitler has a deal for you. And so do our contemporary Nazis. Just because they aren't wearing swastikas doesn't mean they aren't totalitarian. They want the same things now that such people have always wanted — power and control and the authority to enforce their own attitudes. What's remarkable is that the bureaucratic imperialists of today still use the same tired rhetoric to justify extending their authority. They haven't bothered to change their strategy or their scapegoats.

Today's fascists of hygiene promise a healthy society. They can't deliver. They can and do gather political power in their own hands while they're trying. Only the terminally naive will be surprised at that outcome. Government control is not an act; it is a process. Like a plant, it either grows or withers. The one thing certain in such matters is that official intrusions will not end where they begin.

Who can save us from Hitler if Hitler is ourselves? The spirit of Nazi arrogance didn't commit suicide in a bunker in Berlin. That same spirit comes to us in a modern disguise (a clean white lab coat) and it musters bureaucrats, not brownshirts, for its enforcement muscle. Today's Nazis don't wear jackboots, but they still expect the rest of us to do the goose-step.

Today is the time to learn from history. Tomorrow's lesson will be easier to understand, but it will come too late to do us any good.

I don't know whether Alexander's column can be used as a reference, but I thought you might find it interesting.

This page is on my watchlist now, so I'll see your reply here if there is one, and please tell me if you want me to delete my post this talk page — it is your user space, after all.

I look forward to seeing your article in the mainspace. — Athaenara ✉ 09:09, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for bringing this reference. This column is good and informative, however the information have been already covered in other references, so I will put it in the Further Readings section. Otolemur crassicaudatus (talk) 09:35, 1 June 2008 (UTC)