First, Wagner discusses the merits of Western governments becoming involved in the humanitarian effort to reclaim the identities of the dead. Wagner discusses how the identification of missing persons through DNA testing provided a means to attempt social repair in postwar Bosnia. Wagner states that their incentive to develop the scientific technology that would enable such a feat was twofold. First, it would be a case in which science could be used to serve "truth," transcending politics and religion. Second, it was a task that seemed truly humanitarian.
When reading this, I could not help but see these efforts as an attempt to assuage guilt stemming from the West's lack of response to the massacre when it was actually occurring. In the preceding pages, Wagner discusses the US and their use of satellites to witness, but not intervene to stop, the atrocities committed. Here, DNA technology is created and science furthered sfor the good of humanity, but only because of moral failing in the past. It seems that the forced realization that crimes did occur forced action on the part of the West just as much as the identification of victims forced the realization of their absence in Bosnia (page 92).
A second interesting point, though small, is Wagner's inclusion of a quote from Dr. Servatius at the War Crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann:
"The moment, one of the few great moments in the whole trial, occurred during the short oral plaidoyer of the defense, after which the court withdrew for four months to write its judgement. Servatius declared the accused innocent of charges bearing on his responsibility for "the collection of skeletons, sterilizations, killings by gas, and similar medical matters," whereupon Judge Halevi interrupted him: 'Dr. Servetius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that the killing by gas was a medical matter.' To which Servetius replied: 'It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is medical.' (page 85; originally Arendt 1994:69)"
Of course, to attempt to justify the atrocities of the Holocaust is unthinkable. Even more perverse is to use medicine as a cover for cruelty and murder. But what I find to be truly terrifying about Dr. Servetius' statement is the cold logic that it embodies. Sterilizations are medical procedures and the Nazis use of gas to kill innocents was indeed very procedural and scientific. However, is the cold and methodological nature of such deeds enough to make them a science? (I would say yes, for the ending of life is often the topic of technology and scientific study, an example being any one of the thousands of innovations arising from war). Is the fact that they had input from physicians enough to make them medicine? I would say no, considering the purpose of medicine is to do no harm. Medicine is clearly both a technical and empirical practice, but a great component of medicine that distinguishes it from biology or chemistry or physics is medicine's humanity. But it is easy to see that the argument can be made from a clinical perspective that the ending of life is as medically based the to protection of it (consider the current debates on medical euthanasia; for more on the detached nature of the physician, see several of this class' earlier posts). What is terrifying, enough to cause a judge to double-take and any reader of the quoted passage to recoil in horror, is that at some level the argument can be made and can be persuasive (enough to allow the Nazis to recruit doctors, the British to plan an eugenics program, and the United States to take cranial measurements on non-white, i.e. non-anglo saxon protestants, immigrants skulls). Such logic, though flawed, adds an element of danger to science. This example illustrates how science without morality can be a powerful force for evil.
Wagner places this disgusting justification of the Nazis' war crimes within the broader context of the Bosnian Serb forces' use of bulldozers and relatively "primitive" machinery to create a new force of innovation and "technology" in dehumanizing victims. The army used large machinery to remove corpses of the massacred from primary mass graves and move these to secondary mass graves, often leaving victims' remains scattered throughout several areas. This method was an attempt to cover up the killings by creating confusion No doubt the idea that the loss of identity of victims would serve as a means of forgetting that they even existed, let alone were murdered. What is special about this technique is that it served to truely dehumanize the victims. Furthermore, similar to Servetius' use of scientific logic to justify crimes, the use of a new "technology" further detached the killers from their actions and set the victims apart, even in the aftermath, as mere objects. New DNA technology was later used to restore the identity stolen from the dead by the armies technology and sadistic methods.
Finally, the last point I found compelling and would briefly like to comment on was Wagner's statement that she was struck by how she and others working to identify victims from their remains knew more about the deads' current conditions than the people to whom it mattered to the most, their loved ones (page 149). This simple sentiment truly shows the power of the scientist, and, more specifically, the humanitarian-scientist. The differences in levels of knowledge between scientists and non-scientists can be profound. It can also serve as a great burden (again, see previous posting on this matter). It is easy to imagine how such harsh kinds of knowledge serve to isolate those who possess it. Yet, at the same time, these same individuals do a great and very much necessary service for humanity. The identification of the victims was morally just and necessary, yet it required certain individuals to take the weight of knowing on their shoulders. Such a burden is only second to the weight of not knowing carried by the victims families.
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