Science is the most objective of all spheres of human knowledge – isn’t it? Not when blinkered dictators like Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin march headlong into the laboratory it isn’t. Then, it becomes every bit as governed by lies, prejudice and the twisting of facts as everything else under quasi-religious dictatorial faiths like Nazism or Communism is. So as contemporary science becomes ever more ensnared within a web of competing political ideologies, perhaps we should look to the past for cautionary evidence of just where such processes can lead. Could such horrors unfold again today? They already have.
Here, I explore three strange cases of science being abused to suit contrasting extremist political ideologies: one each from the Third Reich, USSR andVladimir Putin’s Russia. It’s happening here in the West, too, but you’ll have to read my book to find out about all that…
RED BLOOD
One of Lenin’s main leadership rivals amongst the early Bolshevik elite was the polymath Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928), the man who discovered life on Mars. Bogdanov unearthed the amazing fact that in 1905 – long before Yuri Gagarin – a pioneering Russian Cosmonaut named Leonid had been abducted in an atom-powered, egg-shaped spacecraft dubbed an ‘etheroneph’ and treated to a guided tour of the socialist utopia already long established up there on the appropriately Red Planet. After admiring Mars’s famous canals, true marvels of State engineering, the awe-struck abductee was given a guided tour of an ET NHS hospital by a friendly alien physician, Dr Netti, their comprehensive free-at-point-of-use healthcare system being one of the Marxist Martians’ proudest achievements. The healthy life spans of his superhuman species, Dr Netti explained, were much longer than those of their primitive cousins on Earth, due to the fact that Martian medicine did not merely treat illness when it arose, it acted pre-emptively “to renew life” by the following methods, which were “actually very simple”, once devised. In Dr N’s own words:
“Of course, you are acquainted with blood-serum transfusions and the way mutual blood-transfusions
