Format: video with audio
Running time: 1 min 36 sec.
Summary: Pinky tells a story about a smart student who used his knowledge for not so good things.
Transcript
Pinky: I was doing some research and came across an old newspaper article, written during the Vietnam War.
It's about a guy who had studied agriculture in college. His special area of study was how to help underdeveloped countries improve their crop yields. Well, fast forward a few years to 1965, and now this guy is in the U.S. Air Force using his expertise to help U.S. war planners identify which rice fields in Vietnam are the most productive ones, so that they can be bombed and destroyed with chemical warfare. The idea here, of course, was to maximize starvation and suffering among the Vietnamese, so as to give the occupying U.S. military a strategic advantage.
Reading this story made me think about medical doctors. When you become a doctor, you're asked to take an oath - the Hippocratic oath - that requires that you respect life, serve human kind with conscience and dignity, stuff like that.
It made me wonder though... wouldn't it make sense if everybody who has the privilege of studying and learning things in school - not just doctors - be asked to use the knowledge they acquire for good, and not evil? Or would that just make too many people unemployable?
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Credits
writing: Pinky
research: Pinky
bibliography:
Vietnam: A Matter of Perspective. Howard Zinn. From The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (1997).
narration: Pinky drawings & illustrations: Pinky
titles: Pinky
[ image credits ]
