Posted on 06/01/2002 6:10:12 AM PDT by rubbertramp
Evil usually follows the same modus operandi. Genocide, never again.
You are juxtaposing atrocities. Muddying the water (no matter how well intentioned) never helps to get to the bottom of it. Evil does not always follow the same modus operandi, and therein lies one of the reasons for its continued reign. The end result is always the same, but the road traveled in order to get there often, of necessity, varies. Evil assumes many faces/tactics/allies (otherwise we would all readily recognize it and rail against it).
Genocide is generally understood to be the systematic, planned elimination of a group (be it racial, cultural, or political). This story, as horrendous as it is, has nothing to do with genocide. Instead, it vaguely reminds me of the premise at the outset of Stevenson's 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (the desire to use the mentally ill in experimentation which would presumably result in the betterment of mankind).
Assuming the story to be true (which would represent an enormous leap of faith), the presumed reasoning behind the gruesome and unnecessary deaths of these people is that they were sacrificed for the sake of 'research' (the necessity and morality of which is admittedly questionable, at best). There is not even a hint here of a desire to exterminate the mentally ill. So the mention of genocide is a little misplaced.
I posted this because I want people to investigate.
If you (as do I) want to alert people to the abomination that is genocide, might it not be more effective to talk with your neighbors, and post articles here on this forum, about the atrocities that have taken, and in some cases are still taking, place in the Ukraine, Cambodia, Armenia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Macedonia, Kosovo, the Sudan...?
None of us (even those of us who are fervent in our desire never to see a repeat of such holocausts, and never to be among the 'onlookers' to such travesties) have enough hours in the day to 'investigate' every story that seems to smack of government involvement in illegal and/or immoral actions which involve the death of human beings. When we hear of such an occurrence, it might be preferable to first do our own personal research into it. If and when we have decided that it may have merit and credibility, then we should shout it from the rooftop. Calling attention to a story that appears to be created out of whole cloth serves no useful purpose. Instead, it serves to de-sensitize people, so that when genuine stories of man-against-man atrocities do surface, people don't react with the outrage that they should (it's kind of the boy who cried wolf syndrome).
p.s. Some of the remarks directed at you above take me back to my ('sticks and stones') kindergarten days. Nothing like a bit of nostalgia to go along with one's afternoon coffee. (I hope you'll remain above responding to them).
Despite our different outlook, we appear to be on the same side. :)
~ joanie
What? Changing their targets?
But...but...but... I saw a thread on Chemtrails just yesterday.
Sorry, all that noise gives me a headache.
A quieter version for you.
They like noise. MOTRONS AND PISTOLS.
Were there speakers in the backs of the vans?
Great to hear from you as always, joanie. I agree with you, this story's a little thin to say the least.
I was just trying to be a little provocative and make a larger point. There's a lot more to say, but will wait for another time. This thread has degenerated.
You’re too kind to those who promote or sanction genocide. Land is not their treasure. That kind of evil lives to seek out and destroy something much more eternal and precious.
If you're trying to imply that the doctors stopped murdering adults and children after Hitler signed a piece of paper under pressure from the public, you are SERIOUSLY misrepresenting the facts, and you're misrepresenting Robert Lifton, because he certainly never said that. Kinda makes me wonder what the heck your motives are.
While there may be some disagreement over the nuances of why Hitler issued the so-called "stop" order, there is no disagreement among serious historians that the medical killings of the mentally ill, handicapped and others deemed unfit not only continued apace, but became more widespread after the "stop order" was issued in 1941. The only difference was the means by which the slaughter was carried out.
Although Lifton's account is not nearly as detailed as the one in Henry Friedlander's book, here's what Lifton himself had to say about it on pp. 97-98 of his book:
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What was discontinued was only the visible dimension of the project: the large-scale gassing of patients. T4 officially ceased as a program, but that turned out to be still another deception. Widespread killing continued in a second phase, sometimes referred to in Nazi documents as "wild euthanasia" because doctors-encouraged, if not directed, by the regime-could now act on their own initiative concerning who would live or die. While the regime ordered most of the gas chambers dismantled (to be reassembled, as it turned out, in the East), it did nothing to stop the ideological and institutional momentum of medical killing. The regime's clear message, in fact, was that the killings were to go on, but more quietly. And more quiet killing meant more isolated, individual procedures. Doctors acted on their personal and ideological inclinations, along with their sense of the regime's pulse. That pulse emanated no longer from the Chancellery, which bowed out along with T4 itself, but from the Reich Interior Ministry and its national medical subdivision. There were changes in geographical location, but the regime continued to make transportation arrangements, required that patients' deaths be recorded centrally, and in some cases maintained T4 experts in a partially supervisory role. Patients were now killed not by gas but by starvation and drugs, the latter method in particular rendering the killing still more "medical."The children's program was not included under the T4 "halt." Killing methods did not have to be changed: drugs and starvation, and not gas, had been employed from the beginning. The killing of children had been considerably less visible, taking place as it did on wards in smaller facilities without the telltale evidence of noxious smoke and odors that stemmed from large-scale gassing. The program had been based more on presumed eugenic and scientific grounds than on direct economic ones (the children did not work and ate less) and had not created the degree of public controversy that adult killing did. If anything, the reporting methods for ostensible abnormalities became more systematic. Research efforts, mostly post-mortem studies, also became more systematic, as sometimes happened in adult "wild euthanasia." Not only did the regime remain closely involved, but the greater part of the killing of children took place after the official ending of the "euthanasia" project. What did become more "wild" was the method of deciding which children should be killed. Now even the pretense of review boards of "expert opinion" was abandoned: any child considered in some way impaired, and sent through the administrative system to any of the "special pediatric units" of the original project, was still fair game. Beyond that, institutional doctors could proceed according to their own inclinations. Adult "wild euthanasia" involved more radical changes for psychiatrists. No longer operators of gas chambers, they returned to the familiar terrain of syringes, oral medications, and dietary prescriptions for achieving the same end. From the regime's medical bureaucracy came the continuing message that mental patients were "useless eaters," burdens on the state and its war effort, "life unworthy of life." Permission to kill was clear enough, even if a little indirect. As one psychiatrist later testified, "In conversation with other participants in the program I learned that there would be no fuss if some physician or other in an institution stood ready to kill a patient by injection or overdose, if he was convinced that the patient's extinction was desirable." And there was a partial merger of child and adult "euthanasia" programs as the age limit of the children's program was raised to sixteen years: "to some extent this expansion was to offer a substitute for the cancelled program." There were, in fact, documented cases of patients of about that age who had managed to survive the official end of the adult "euthanasia" program only to be fatally reclassified as a child. |
Indeed, as both Lifton and Friedlander point out, the medical killings continued throughout the war, and some few even after Germany surrendered. As Lifton points out, "there are stories of Allied troops liberating surviving patients at gunpoint."
When I was small, I had friends of many faith. My family disapproved, so my friends and I told our parents that we weren't playing, we were converting each other.
If it were about religious beliefs or ideology, people could sit down at a conference table and convert each other.
This is about greed and power, that is why all the world's mafia's are involved....at the UN.
the original article is implying the second. It is nonsense. Most institutions have staff dedicated to protect such people, and it would have come to the attention of the press and Justice department.
Now, if you have a senile or retarded relative who becomes sick, I too would actually worry if they go to some modern hospitals, since PC medical schools are teaching that they are better off dead. One advocate for retarded people actually has a book on how to protect your loved ones in hospitals from neglect and other forms of deathmaking. However, like the post T4 nazi program, such murders would have to be done in stealth, and if the killing is proven will be proescuted.
LOL. If you think the two are separate in the case of the Nazi T4 program, you are living in fantasyland. The T4 program office continued in existence and went full speed ahead after Hitler ordered the gas chambers dismantled and shipped to Auschwitz.
Please don't cite Lifton's book if you continue to make that assertion, because he doesn't believe that. Nor does Henry Friedlander, who wrote the definitve book on the subject.
ROFLMAO!! Alex Jones qualifies to be a patient at the Austin State School. His life is one wild story after another.
While all of the suffering and death which occurred as a result of the Nazi euthanasia program was an abomination, it is the suffering and death of the children that is in some ways a double tragedy, in that so often they were placed in death’s hands innocently (their parents either (1) believing that their children were in need of specialized care that would be offered at places such as Spiegelgrund (only one of thirty or forty child euthanasia clinics set up by the Third Reich to carry out the doctrine of the eradication of the pathological genotype), or (2) being threatened with the idea that, because they were ‘neglecting’ their children by not offering them the best care possible, their children would be taken from them anyway). Little did many of the parents know that the hospital staff considered their children (some of whom were simply slow learners) to be ‘inferior….worthless…and useless eaters’ because they were deemed racially, physically, or mentally unfit, and therefore worthy of extermination.
I’ve often read stories of parents who survived the war intact, only to live out their lives crushed under a burden of indescribable grief as a result of the fact that their children were placed in the care of doctors whom they trusted, only to be tortured, experimented upon and killed. Therein lies the double tragedy where the children are concerned. Not only did they suffer, but their surviving parents often carry the guilt to their graves.
And, as Lifton points out in your excerpt, much of the suffering of children took place well after Hitler signed the T4 stop order.
The children's program was not included under the T4 "halt." Killing methods did not have to be changed: drugs and starvation, and not gas, had been employed from the beginning.
The atrocities perpetrated on children clear on through 1945, well after the T4 stop order was signed, at places such as Spiegelgrund are well-documented. Both before and after ’41children were killed simply through starvation and neglect, and the administration of drugs (which often brought on fatal conditions – pneumonia and the like -- so that deaths could be listed as occurring from ‘natural causes’. Not that anyone was really monitoring, mind you).
I believe there are two methods by which we are allowing modern holocausts to continue to take place (The evil which brings about such atrocities will always be with us. It’s just a matter of the degree to which we allow it to succeed. Vigilance was not a priority during the time of the Third Reich):
We either (1) turn our eyes away from that which is happening right before them (as was/is being done in Ukraine, Cambodia, Armenia, Macedonia, Rwanda, Kosovo, the Sudan….), or we (2) allow ourselves to accept the almost subliminal messages (regarding the need to preserve societal quality of life) that we are being programmed to swallow (and we subsequently allow the realization of covert agendas that we are often too lazy to ‘notice’) that will provide us with the ability to look euthanasia (or ‘lesser’ crimes against humanity) right in the eye and accept it as being perpetrated for the betterment of mankind.
I don’t know which one (the turning away from it, or the looking it in the eye) is worse (are there definite degrees of human callousness?). I suppose the former implies that we have at least not abandoned our conscience, but are simply too lazy to allow it a voice. The latter implies a collective hardness of heart that forebodes utter blackness over the horizon.
I agree with you that it has nothing to do with religious belief or ideology. Religion, when it comes to enslaving or killing other people (for whatever ostensible reason), merely serves as a smokescreen. And those who use religion (or whatever other concealment of their choosing) always have the subjugation (both physical and spiritual) of other men as their aim (your greed and power).
The power of the UN, and the power of the subjugators throughout mankind’s history (of which the leadership and mission of the UN is merely the most modern example), is inversely/directly proportional to the vigilance/laziness of those who are not infected with their particularly virulent brand of evil.
Unfortunately laziness appears to be on the increase, and vigilance (with the exception of the post 9/11 anomaly) is temporarily out of fashion.
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