Reply by Robert N. Proctor to Pierre Lemieux's "Fascism and the Campaign to End Smoking", and Pierre Lemieux's response, both in National Post, October 7, 1999.
Author's Protest
by
Robert N. Proctor
Dear Editor,
I was sorry to see Pierre Lemieux using my book, The Nazi War on Cancer, to attack the sensible steps now being taken in many parts of the world to combat tobacco; this was a danger I explicitly warned against in my book.
Tobacco apologists have been trying to equate the right to smoke with the right to free speech for quite some time, though the analogy is flawed on two counts: 1) because most smokers are addicted, and find it extremely difficult to stop -- even when they want to, and 2) people are harmed by tobacco who do not smoke, primarily from so-called "second-hand smoke."
The fact that the Nazis recognized most of the dangers long before anyone else is interesting for what it tells us about Nazi ideas of health, but it does not mean that present-day smoking is "fascist," any more than autobahns or rockets are "fascist." My point in drawing attention to this hidden chapter of history was not to say that modern policies are fascist, but rather to say that Nazism was more "modern" and therefore more chillingly familiar than we are often willing to admit. Tobacco has killed in excess of a hundred million people this century, and you don't have to be a dictator or a fascist to think this is a sorry state of affairs.
State-supported public measures can play a vital role in a free society; libertarians who associate all such measures with "fascism" or "a frontal attack on individual choices" simply don't understand that injuries and disease can also pose a threat to freedoms. Balancing public health and freedoms is sometimes difficult, but the black and white picture Prof. Lemieux paints is surely a dramatic oversimplification. Tobacco is a far greater threat to health -- and therefore basic freedoms -- than any tobacco-control has ever been.
Prof. Robert N. Proctor,
Max-Planck-Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte,
Berlin
Pierre Lemieux Responds
(National Post, October 7, 1999)Replying to my review of his book, Prof. Proctor claims that I drew social and political implications that he did not see. Indeed.
A historian of science, Prof. Proctor appeared mystified by the fact that the bad Nazis had such good, "modern," public health policies, so similar to our own. As I explained, I picked up the analysis where he had left it, and considered the possibility that Nazi health policies were as bad as the regime itself, the implication being that ours should be questioned too. (The logic is perhaps clearer in my original Independent Review article, at http://www.pierrelemieux.org/artproctor.html.)
We might forgive Prof. Proctor, who is not a social scientist, for neglecting the logic of political institutions. But why does he insist so much on considering National Socialism as a black box with mysterious outputs that fall outside the range of both economic modeling and black-and-white moral judgments?
Even if secondhand smoke were not the hoax of the 20th century, private property arrangements could solve the problem better than legal apartheid. And anybody who is not addicted to the state realizes that the risk of dying prematurely (whatever that means) from one's own chosen lifestyle and pleasures is not a limitation on individual liberty. Coercive diktats are.