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The other article I picked up on in the actual paper News Tribune that was in yesterday’s mailbox was an opinion piece by Sharman Apt Russell, titled Lessons on hunger linger 80 years after Minnesota experiment
When I started attending Glen Avon Pres 45 years ago I met Ed Cowles. There is much more information about the experiment on Wikipedia here. The list of the participants includes Ed.
In case the Trib story is behind a paywall here are the beginning paragraphs:
“Housed and studied at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the men ate normal American food and a daily average of 3,500 calories for three months. After that, they got two daily meals averaging about 1,570 calories. The menus were a monotonous rotation of potatoes, wheat bread, cereal, cabbage, turnips, and rutabagas, with occasional small portions of meat, sugar, milk, or butter.
Within a few weeks, the dreary gnawing sensation of hunger was constant. The men became possessive about their food. They developed obsessions around cookbooks and restaurant menus. One man had dreams of “eating senile and insane people.” Eventually he succumbed to a psychotic episode and was released from the experiment. Another ate secretly, had self-described “mental blackouts,” and was also released.”
It was hard not to think of the ongoing starvation being enforced on Gaza Palestinians who had already suffered 40 deaths per each Israeli victim of the Hamas attack a year ago. The Nazi’s only killed ten innocents when Dutch and French and Polish resistance fighters killed a German soldier. Netanyahu’s Old Testament policies are turning Palestinian children into the same sort of living corpses that brought tears to my eyes in photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto in Yad veshem, Israel’s Museum of the Holocaust. I mentioned this in the column I wrote about my visit to the Holy Land with Claudia for her Peace Studies. I know Ed Cowles would be as outraged as I am.
You see, the column by Sharman Apt Russell makes clear how the patriotic volunteers suffered to the point of psychosis. One man cut off three of his own fingers. It doesn’t explain that these men were conscientious objectors. In our foolish Vietnam War there were a lot of them but believe me it was not popular in the Second World War. As the movie Sergeant York makes clear it was no more popular in the First world War either. Some churches were pacifistic in nature and their young parishioners had already been excused by the Supreme Court from military service. Still, those not putting on the fighting uniform were looked down upon. Neither did it relieve them of other duties. Many ran onto the battlefield weaponless under enemy fire to retrieve wounded soldiers.
What these men taught us should make us all the more unforgiving of the brutal and stupid actions taken by some of “God’s Chosen People.”
