Ooh! This is actually a bit of a passive, niche interest of mine. It should be noted I am not a professional historian. I just read a lot of material and watch a lot of interviews and documentaries.
The Nazis fell behind in atomic research for a variety of reasons, each with its own underpinnings. One of the most interesting in my mind was organizational failings. Although many different groups were working in this area, the regime leadership was rather disconnected and didn’t prioritize a coherent or integrated research effort. They didn’t provide much funding either. In some ways this created more room for unstructured scientific inquiry and creativity, but it also meant that no particular group could make any real progress toward usable reactors or weapons.
Contrast this with the Manhattan Project in the US (and the UK’s efforts at radar), which was supported and managed from the highest levels of government with a figurative blank check and despite immense compartmentalization also had a high degree of integration among disciplines and sites. There was one goal.
In my view this is an interesting manifestation of the foundation of the Third Reich. In Martin Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi, Davidson notes that the Nazi party was in many ways a child’s cosplay turned into a nightmare. Davidson writes that one of the key failings of the regime is that it was run by broken people who had more of an interest in catharsis than any real sense of society, advancement, or cohesion.
For radar, RV Jones' "Most Secret War" has an anecdote where the British raid a German coastal radar site (in France), nab the radar operator and are annoyed to discover that they know almost nothing about German radar. Pre-war Germany is already a fascist dictatorship so "ham" radio operators are enemies of the state because they're outside of your centrally controlled narrative. Whereas pre-war Britain has the usual amount of amateurs with radios. So when war broke out and they're conscripting towns at a time the British would see you're a ham and divert you from infantry training or whatever and make you a radar operator - which means the average British radar operator actually has some idea how radio works but the Germans are obliged to basically just pick a soldier and train him to operate the radar from scratch.
This apparently had significant operational consequences because if you don't know how it works all you can do when there's a fault is order spare parts. So German radar stations would be offline more often and for longer. Although Chain Home's transmitters were wildly more powerful than anything even a rich British amateur might have seen before, not to mention operating on frequencies unachievable with prior technology, the principles were familiar.
That is a fantastic contribution to the conversation. I think I’ve heard or read accounts that, if I’d thought long and hard about, might have led me to understand this, but this is new information to me.
I have seen Most Secret War recommended to me by basically every physical and ebook seller I have an account with, so I guess it’s time to take one of them up on the offer. Thank you!
Depends on the research. For some areas such as gender science, they swooped in and literally burned decades worth of research [1]. And fwiw, even medicine was considered political - the term "Schulmedizin" was popularized by the Nazis who preferred esoterics, homeopathy and other quackery.
IMHO, it's more than warranted to call out parallels between events back then and events happening right under our noses today [2], not to mention the increasing and worrying trend of book bans [3].
Realizing that the book burnings in the 1930s were not performed by the dumb Nazi brutes we know from movies like Indiana Jones, but by student organizations (e.g. what should be sufficiently smart people) was a bit of a shock to me (not really anymore from today's point of view seeing how easy otherwise smart people get themselves into a spiral of hate and fascist ideology).
So, it was smart and young German students that wanted to get rid of most or all of the material produced by one of the earliest institutions on the planet dealing with controversial topics like birth control, LGBT, fetishism, sadomasochism and venereal disease.
The founder and most of the researchers there were Jewish, so I wouldn't discard an antisemitic motive behind that as well.
As you say, I always bought the "dumb nazis burned books" story, but this context makes me think about the event in a much different way.
There's an ongoing and horrifically absurd witch-hunt against Chinese science grad students, led by MAGA FBI director Kesh Patel. He makes very popular Twitter threads for each one he arrests, drumming up a MAGA frenzy about how their insane conspiracy theories—the ones about an organized Chinese bioterrorism plot to kill Americans—were proven correct, again.
There are young PhD students who've been imprisoned for months without bail over these fictions.
The C. elegans PhD student at Univ. of Michigan was ordered held without bond[0], in June; and the Harvard Medical School researcher was freed by a judge after being—unlawfully—caged by ICE for 116 days[1].
Here's[2] the FBI director's Twitter thread about the C. elegans researcher, for a flavor of the MAGA sociology that's driving this. [edit]: His rhetoric in the case in [3] is even less hingèd.
[2] https://xcancel.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/19322140473000796... ("This case is part of a broader effort from the FBI and our federal partners to heavily crack down on similar pathogeon [sic] smuggling operations, as the CCP works relentlessly to undermine America’s research institutions.")
[3] https://xcancel.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/19300448842845230... ("This case is a sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply, which would have grave consequences... putting American lives and our economy at serious risk. Your FBI will continue working tirelessly to be on guard against it.")
>After being charged last month with trying to smuggle frog embryos into the United States, Kseniia Petrova, a Russian bioinformatician, was indicted on 25 June on additional charges by a grand jury in Boston, Massachusetts — including making a false statement to customs agents.
Well, that's ... something.
Honestly, when I first read your comment I got the impression that these students might have done something innocuous that got grossly misinterpreted (perhaps on purpose) and that's how they got in trouble ...
But the ones you showed so far did engage, quite clearly, in criminal behavior. I don't think ICE/Patel/Trump should be blamed for that.
Chinese scholar from UM Chengxuan Han expected to plead guilty in smuggling case
"During the secondary inspection, Han made false statements that she had not sent packages to members of the UM Lab," an FBI agent wrote in the court filing. "When pressed, Han admitted that she had shipped packages to members of the UM Lab. Han initially stated to (Customs and Border Patrol) officers that the packages were plastic cups (rather than petri dishes) and a book (omitting the envelope with suspected biological materials concealed in it)."
The FBI counterintelligence case against UM scholar Yunqing Jian, 33, and her boyfriend, 34-year-old Zunyong Liu, involves allegations that Jian received money from a Chinese foundation funded largely by the Chinese government to conduct post-doctoral work. That includes research on a fungus known as Fusarium graminearum, a biological pathogen that can cause devastating diseases in crops.
Maybe these students are getting overcharged, but they were clearly caught smuggling.
#3, regardless of intent, is definitely illegal shit. how can you possibly think its ok to smuggle pthogenic fungus into the the country in baggies, then lie about it.
it's also surprising there wasn't more scrutiny in the past. there are colonels in the PLA that have actively called for and published materials calling for agro and bio terrorism against the US, and all chinese nationals are required to debrief on return.
> Experts doubt that the smuggled fungus could be used effectively, since the logistics, as well as physical conditions, such as temperature and humidity, for creating a widespread infection with this pathogen are not straightforward. Furthermore, this fungal infection can be prevented and/or controlled with the use of pesticides and cultural practices, like harvesting early to stop fungal growth. Having said that, if the strain that Jian and Liu brought into the U.S is a new potent variant, there is a possibility of it being an effective weapon. Nevertheless, F. graminearum has been studied in the U.S. for more than a century, and it is a common factor to treat in food safety protocols.
You'd expect the CCP to be a little better at it if that were the intention.
The samples were completely common, the fungus is endemic to the US already and the PhDs are studying them for US institutions to lessen their impact on US crops.
Forgot to mention that the press releases make a critical typo that makes them seem extremely nefarious and implies they were planning on some sort of warfare when it’s extremely benign…
“While searching one of Liu’s cell phones, they found an article in PDF form titled “2018 Plant Pathogen Warfare under Changing Climate Conditions.” Authorities said the article specifically referenced Fusarium graminearum as “an example of a destructive disease and pathogen for crops” and is “responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year.”
But the actual article is about the ‘warfare’ between plants and pathogens in a world with a changing climate as denoted by the hyphen in the title..
“Plant-Pathogen Warfare under Changing Climate Conditions”
There is great need for future research to increasingly use dynamic environmental conditions in order to fully understand the multidimensional nature of plant-pathogen interactions and produce disease-resistant crop plants that are resilient to climate change.
what the actual fuck? you do not smuggle lab samples in baggies. that is suspicious behavior. you send it through the post and let authorities know you are doing it by declaring it.
The import process is a bureaucratic nightmare - you don’t send it through the post in any case, lest it get lost for long enough that your samples perish.
The more common route is you complete the paperwork, fly with it in your carry-on and declare it all at customs.
Having worked in a related field, it certainly wasn’t uncommon for scientists to skip some of the hassle and just not declare their research material. Definitely not ‘proper’ and certainly higher risk to their immigration/visa status if they were foreign nationals, but still not uncommon when the alternative is spending hours in CBP inspections before you spend hours in the normal immigration queue.
Eh, the most believable conspiracy is gain of function research accidentally escaped a lab because of poor controls and then was covered up.
Gain of function research can be done for lots of reasons, one of which is offensive biological weapons, but there are others. It's pretty irresponsible to do regardless of your justification. But these were chinese researchers in china, not grad students.
China has been using students to acquire US technology, but we don't need crazy bioterrorism conspiracies. They were students, they came here to pay to learn things, it is no conspiracy that people on student visas learned things at the universities they attended. On top of that there have been inappropriate, illegal, or otherwise undesirable things foreign students have done that look a lot like espionage.
The basic problem is that democrats pretend problems don't exist and republicans pretend the problems are existential threat devil boogey monsters that need to be solved by sending people to gulags.
There's an excluded middle here where people want reasonable responses to potential issues.
Personally, I never argued whether it was China or not. It wasn't pertinent.
Fox News didn't give a hoot about discussing the origins of viruses and preventing them in the future. They just wanted to sow doubt in science (vaccines) and make China bad comments and cough in people's faces.
Now that the crisis is over, it's a fair question to ask where it came from.
I think the larger announcements yet to come, will crumble the current religion we call Science. I'd like to get back to REAL science with a lower case s.
Both of you have a screw loose and need to stop accepting the premise of the loudest idiots on social media and assuming the people who speak the loudest are representative of the feelings of people at large.
> Four years ago you couldn't even remotely mention this as a possibility; even, and particularly, among "the most educated"™ and "the most tolerant"™.
> will crumble the current religion we call Science
Facts: people who talk like this are pontificating nonsense and are never worth talking to because speech like this indicates a person has zero interest in an actual discussion. I want to insult instead of debate because I truly believe people who talk like this need to be publicly shamed for discourse like this. It is a root cause of the destabilization of our society and needs to be stopped. You're talking like an AM radio conspiracy call-in nutjob. If you want to be taken seriously, don't channel the ghost of Rush Limbaugh in your rhetoric.
> I want to insult instead of debate because I truly believe people who talk like this need to be publicly shamed for discourse like this.
I will forever remember how charitable you and the white progressives have always been in their discourse, and will reflect the same demeanour to those who earnestly believe that child genital mutilation will transubstantiate the male flesh into female like some barbaric 21st century eucharistic rite.
I haven’t followed these cases, but are you anti due process? How do you know these are fictions? Are you on the inside? It sounds like the cases will be tried in court and we will find out what’s true. Are you saying that’s not the case?
