The Humane Holocaust (Evil is always done under the appearance of goodness.)

The American Prowler ^ | 4/1/2005 | George Neumayr

[nickcarraway]

The initial event that disabled Terri Schiavo didn't end up killing her. But in her obituary notice, what will the cause of death read? Will it read: murder? It should. The heart attack that disabled her didn't doom her; a husband without a heart did.

Under judge-made law, euthanasia has become America's most astonishing form of premeditated murder, a cold-blooded crime in which husbands can kill their wives and even turn them into accomplices to it through the telepathy of "their wishes." To wonder if we're on the slippery slope sounds like an obtuse moral compliment at this point. The truth is we're at the bottom of the slope and have been for quite some time, standing dumbly as the bodies of innocent humans pile up around us. As we sift through them -- puzzling over how they got so numerous -- we're reduced to mumbling sophistries about compassion and consent.

This is the "humane holocaust" of which Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, a culture that kills the weak, from deaf unborn children to mute disabled women, and calls it mercy. Those responsible for this humane holocaust look into the mirror and see Gandhi, but it is Hitler who glances back. If someone had taken the passages of Mein Kampf that speak of euthanizing "unfortunates" and inserted them into the columns from newspapers and magazines cheering Schiavo's death, would anyone have known the difference?

In the humane holocaust, murdering undesirable unborn babies at the beginning of life, the elderly at the end of it, and the disabled in between, forms the final solution in the quest for the perfect, burden-free society. In the humane holocaust, one generation's crimes become another generation's compassion.

Could a liberal humanism which sanctions a million-plus abortions a year and presses for a widening culture of euthanasia be Hitlerite? No, many in our society would scoff. But read the words of Leo Alexander, a doctor who assisted the chief American counsel at the Nuremberg Tribunal, about the beginnings of Nazi society and he is describing our own:

Whatever proportion these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitudes of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which the entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude towards the non-rehabilitative sick.

Then as now, doctors, judges, and politicians threw the stone that turned the slope into an avalanche. And that stone was the utilitarian rejection of an inviolable right to life for the innocent -- a right to life that no innocent human can lose because it is based not on their utility but their humanity, a humanity which no chronic illness, disability, or weakness can eradicate.

With Hitler the advocates of the humane holocaust say that the value of a human being derives not from his humanity but from his activity, and hence inactive humans possess no value worth preserving. With Hitler the advocates of the humane holocaust accord power to the strong but none to the weak: Michael Schiavo could kill Terri Schiavo simply because he was stronger than her. With Hitler the advocates of the humane holocaust conceal mercilessness in the language of mercy.

Evil is always done under the appearance of goodness. But evil renamed is still evil. And injustice to which our society has manipulated the aged and disabled into consenting is still unjust. If a man consents to slavery, does slavery cease to be wrong? If patients don't mind violations against the Hippocratic Oath, are doctors free to flout it? The engineers of the humane holocaust uses this lie of consent as moral absolution of evil, but if it can't collect the lie from its victims (as in the case of abortion where no killed child gives consent) it keeps churning anyways.

Terri Schiavo is its latest victim. May she find in God the real compassion the vile imposter gods among us denied her.

[OpusatFR]

Our local rag, The Virginian Pilot carried a report about how "peaceful" and transcendent starvation/dehydration is. I suppose all those souls at Belsen Bergen and Auschwitz felt the spiritual uplifting peaceful transcendence of their deaths.

I've read accounts of sailors in the 18th C dying of starvation and dehydration. It isn't pretty.

My mother stopped eating and drinking for the four days prior to her death, but she was in full system failure unlike Teresa who was healthy and young.

God have mercy on those who call evil good and good evil.

[TheDon]

It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.

Many people believe this, even among our FRiends.

[RightWhale]

the severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans.

If we want to point to the German example or the Stalinist example, we ought to find out what actually happened.

[Grampa Dave]

History of Eugenics and the left


Below is an excellent history of Eugenics with the left of America and the tie ins with the Hitler Eugenic pushers.

The elite lefties aren't the only ones who push Eugenics, the pseudo conservatives who hate God, push Eugenics as hard as the lunatic left does.

http://geocities.com/jonjayray/lefteug2.html

EUGENICS AND THE LEFT



John J. Ray

Hitler's American inspiration

Everybody now knows how evil Nazi eugenics were: How all sorts of people were exterminated not because of anything they had done but simply because of the way they had been born. And we have all heard how disastrous were the Nazi efforts to build up the "master race" through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women -- the "Lebensborn" project. Good Leftists today recoil in horror from all that of course and use their "Hitler was a Rightist" mantra to load those evils onto conservatives. But Hitler was a socialist. As he himself said:


"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)

So it should come as no surprise that Hitler's eugenics were an intergral part of his socialism and that the great supporters of COMPULSORY eugenics worldwide in Hitler's day were overwhelmingly of the Left. Left-influenced historians commonly blur the distinction between a belief in eugenic or dysgenic processes and actually advocating a State-enforced eugenics program but we can find the facts if we look carefully. And it was American Leftists upon whom Hitler principally drew for his "inspiration" in the eugenics field.

In the USA, the great eugenicists of the first half of the 20th century were the "Progressives". As it says here:


A significant number of Progressives -- including David Starr Jordan, Robert Latham Owen, William Allen Wilson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Latou Dickinson, Katherine Bement Davis, and Virginia Gildersleeve--were deeply involved with the eugenics movement

And as we read further here:


The second stage in the development of the eugenics movement extended from 1905 to 1930, when eugenics entered its period of greatest influence. More and more progressive reformers became convinced that a good proportion of the social ills in the United States lay in hereditary factors....

An educator, biologist, and leader of the American peace movement, Jordan's main contribution as a major architect of American eugenics was to bridge the gap between eugenics and other reform groups. Like other progressives, Jordan subscribed to the Populist-Progressive criticism of laissez-faire capitalism. Jordan had faith in progress and in a new generation. Yet, this optimistic environmentalism of Jordan's contradicted his Darwinian-hereditarian outlook of the world. Ironically, a similar ambivalence - - a "love-hate" attitude toward environmentalism - - ran through most progressive ideology.

For Jordan, the first president of Leland Stanford University, education permitted society's better members to outlive inferior peoples. Jordan believed the twentieth century had no place for the weak, the incompetent, and the uneducated. In addition, Jordan urged an end to indiscriminate and sentimental charity, a major factor he believed in the survival of the unfit. Jordan, like most progressives, viewed the urban setting as detrimental and destructive to human life. He held the general progressive belief in the social goodness of the small town or farm. The progressive's romantic attraction to the countryside can be partly explained by the alien character of the urban population. An increasing number of city dwellers belonged to the "undesirable foreign element".


And who were the Progressives? Here is the same writer's summary of them:


"Originally, progressive reformers sought to regulate irresponsible corporate monopoly, safeguarding consumers and labor from the excesses of the profit motive. Furthermore, they desired to correct the evils and inequities created by rapid and uncontrolled urbanization. Progressivism ..... asserted that the social order could and must be improved..... Some historians, like Richard Hofstadter and George Mowry, have argued that the progressive movement attempted to return America to an older, more simple, agrarian lifestyle. For a few progressives, this certainly was true. But for most, a humanitarian doctrine of social progress motivated the reforming spirit"
.
Sound familiar? The Red/Green alliance of today is obviously not new. So Hitler's eugenics were yet another part of Hitler's LEFTISM! He got his eugenic theories from the Leftists of his day. He was simply being a good Leftist intellectual in subscribing to such theories.

Both quotes above are from De Corte (1978). Against all his own evidence, De Corte also claims that the Progressives were "conservative". More Leftist whitewash! Unless it was glaringly obvious that someone was of the Left, just believing in eugenics MADE that person conservative in De Corte's view. Other evidence of their conservatism was not needed or cited. There is a detailed discussion of what the "Progressivism" of the time actually was here. Whatever else it was, it was clearly not conservative.

But the book by Pickens (1968) sets out the connection between the Progressives and eugenics far more throughly than the few quotes here can indicate.

Eugenics, however, was popular science generally in the first half of the 20th century. As a scientific idea it was not confined to Leftists. But note the difference in the IMPLEMENTATION of eugenic ideas (again from De Corte):


Even early social crusaders held similar illiberal views. Josephine Shaw Lowell, a leader in asylum reform, stated in 1884 that "every person born into a civilized community has a right to live, yet the community has the right to say that incompetent and dangerous persons shall not, so far as can be helped, be born to acquire this right to live upon others. Thus, strands of eugenic-style racism not only found their way into conservative philosophy represented by Sumner and other Social Darwinists but so did progressive reform ideals. Consequently, reformers began viewing the criminal, insane, epileptic, retarded and impoverished as more products of their heredity than of their social surroundings.

Whereas Social Darwinists desired to let nature take its course in eliminating the "unfit," eugenicists, on the other hand, felt Social Darwinism had not accomplished the task of guaranteeing the "survival of the fittest" quickly enough. For eugenicists, the "vigorous classes" should be encouraged to have more children, while the "incompetent classes" should be compelled to have fewer. Consequently, eugenicists in their distrust of laissez-faire concluded that "natural selection" must be helped along.

So conservatives, in their usual way, wanted to leave well enough alone. It was the LEFTISTS, in their usual way, who actually wanted to start compulsion in the matter.

And in Britain too the Leftists of the first half of the 20th century were outspokenly in favour of eugenics. As just one instance, that famous philosopher, peacenik and anti-nuclear camapaigner, Bertrand Russell spoke in favour of it. Writing in "Icarus Or the Future of Science" in 1924 he clearly approved of it though he did voice doubts about it falling into the wrong hands. And in a letter to his first wife, feminist Alys Pearsall Smith, about socialism and "the woman question," he wrote of eugenics in words that could well have been Hitler's -- even echoing Hitler's bad grammar:


"Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child -- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways."

(Quoted from here)

Even when Russell came to realize that State-sponsored eugenics could very easily fall into the wrong hands -- a realization he expresses in Icarus he still clearly saw it as desirable at least in theory.

And Russell was not alone in Britain. As it says here:


The fact is that eugenics was popular across the political spectrum for many years, both in England and in North America (e.g., Paul, 1984; Soloway, 1990). In England, many socialists supported eugenics. Even those viewed as critics, such as J. B .S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley were not against eugenics per se, but came to believe that eugenics in capitalist societies was infected with class bias. Even so, some (see Paul, 1984), accepted the idea of upper class genetic superiority.

Not only were R. B. Cattell's eugenic beliefs commonplace in that milieu, but he was influenced by prominent socialists who supported eugenics, men such as Shaw, Wells, Huxley and Haldane, some of whom he knew (Hurt, 1998). Jonathan Harwood (1980) actually cited the example of Cattell to demonstrate that British eugenics was not a right-wing preserve in the inter-war years (although Keith Hurt, 1998, has noted that Harwood later characterised Cattell's 1972 book on Beyondism as a "right-wing eugenic fantasy").

Oppenheim (1982) claimed that American eugenicists were opposed by those in the Progressive Movement, juxtaposing the hereditarian reformism of the former with the environmental reformism of the latter. Actually many progressives were also eugenicists and incorporated the idea of eugenic reforms into their larger agenda (e.g., Burnham, 1977); there was a great deal of cross-over between the two movements (e.g., Pickens, 1968).

The few real critics of eugenics in the early 20th century were mainly conservatives and Christians like G.K. Chesterton who saw eugenic planning as just another arm of the wider campaign to impose a "scientific" socialist planning. In fact Chesterton subtitled his anti-eugenics tract "Eugenics and Other Evils" as: "An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State".

So, as we see from all the quotes above, the racialist thinking of the eugenic socialists was quite "scientific" and progressive in it's day, much as 'global warming' is seen as scientific and progressive today. And many of the eugenics true believers continued on postwar moving into campaigns for legalised abortion, planned parenthood and population control. In fact some modern-day pro-lifers have highlighted the racist roots of much of the liberal pro-abortion movement.

And eugenics of a sort IS back on the Left: The Zero Population Growth brigade are back with their "people are pollution" attitudes! Only this time they want to HALVE our population! And it does seem to be the old gang from the 1960's again -- including Paul Ehrlich. The abject failure of their earlier prophecies -- e.g. that we would all be doomed by the 1970s -- has not dampened them down a bit.

The Feminist connection

And are feminists conservative? Hardly. And feminists are hardly a new phenomenon either. In the person of Margaret Sanger and others, they were very active and prominent in the USA in first half of the 20th century, advocating (for instance) abortion. And Margaret Sanger was warmly praised by Hitler for her energetic championship of eugenics. And the American eugenicists were very racist. They wanted to reduce the black population and they shared Hitler's view that Jews were genetically inferior -- opposing moves to allow into the USA Jews fleeing from Hitler. So if Hitler's eugenics and racial theories were loathsome, it should be acknowledged that his vigorous supporters in the matter at that time were Leftists and feminists, rather than conservatives.

The Greenie connection

As in America, Hitler's eugenics were in fact just one aspect of a larger "Greenie" theme -- a theme that continues, of course, as the Red/Green alliance of today. The Nazis were in fact probably the first major political party in the Western world to have a thoroughgoing "Green" agenda. A good short summary of that has been written by Andrew Bolt. Excerpts:


Hitler's preaching about German strength and destiny was water in the desert to the millions of Germans who'd been stripped of pride, security and hope by their humiliating defeat in World War I, and the terrible unemployment that followed.

The world was also mad then with the idea that a dictatorial government should run the economy itself and make it "efficient", rather than let people make their own decisions.

The Nazis -- National Socialists -- promised some of that, and their sibling rivals in the Communist Party more.

The theory of eugenics -- breeding only healthy people -- was also in fashion, along with a cult of health.

The Nazis, with their youth camps and praise of strong bodies and a strong people, endorsed all that, and soon were killing the retarded, the gay and the different.

Tribalism was popular, too. People weren't individuals, but members of a class, as the communists argued, or of a race, as the Nazis said. Free from freedom -- what a relief for the scared!

You'd think we'd have learned. But too much of such thinking is back and changing us so fast that we can't say how our society will look by the time we die.

A KIND of eugenics is with us again, along with an obsession for perfect bodies.

Children in the womb are being killed just weeks before birth for the sin of being a dwarf, for instance, and famed animal rights philosopher Peter Singer wants parents free to kill deformed children in their first month of life. Meanwhile support for euthanasia for the sick, tired or incompetent grows.

As for tribalism, that's also back -- and as official policy. We now pay people to bury their individuality in tribes, giving them multicultural grants or even an Aboriginal "parliament".....

People need to feel part of something bigger and better than ourselves -- a family, or a church, or a tradition or a country. Or, as a devil may whisper, the greens.

The greens. Here's a quote which may sound very familiar -- at least in part. "We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. "Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . .

"This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.

HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.

This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men.

The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913.

In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned.

Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party.

Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."

Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals.

We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god.

We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers"....

The "big government" connection

As they do today, the Leftists of the 1920s and 1930s captured most of the intellectuals and much of the educated class of the day and this gave them access to the levers of government power -- which is of course what Leftists want above all. Leftists never tire of finding reasons for big government. But once something gets into the hands of big government, it can turn out to be very destructive indeed. And the American eugenics laws of the first half of the 20th century are a very good example of that. As it says here:


"President Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey's sterilization law, and one of his deputies descended to greater fame as a Nazi collaborator at Buchenwald. Pennsylvania's legislature passed an 'Act for the Prevention of Idiocy,' but the governor vetoed it .... Other states, however, joined the crusade. ... Eventually, the eugenicist virus found a hospitable host in Germany. There... it led to the death chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized."

And someone from the past who is still something of a hero to the Left is the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who famously said: "When you pay taxes you buy civilisation". This was quoted approvingly recently by Simon Crean, Federal Parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor party. Crean somehow failed to note that Holmes was also known for ordering compulsory sterilizations of the supposedly mentally ill: Yet another forgotten American inspiration for Adolf.

And California was one of the earliest supporters of Eugenics laws and in fact provided the model for Hitler's laws. -- as it says here:


Under the banner of "national regeneration," tens of thousands, mostly poor women, were subjected to involuntary sterilization in the United States between 1907 and 1940. And untold thousands of women were sterilized without their informed consent after World War II. Under California's 1909 sterilization law, at least 20,000 Californians in state hospitals and prisons had been involuntarily sterilized by 1964. California, according to a recent study, "consistently outdistanced every other state" in terms of the number of eugenic sterilizations....

California not only led the nation in forced sterilizations, but also in providing scientific and educational support for Hitler's regime. In 1935, Sacramento's Charles M. Goethe praised the Human Betterment Foundation for effectively "shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler." In 1936, Goethe acknowledged the United States and Germany as leaders in eugenics ("two stupendous forward movements"), but complained that "even California's quarter century record has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany." In 1936, California eugenicist Paul Popenoe was asking one of his Nazi counterparts for information about sterilization policies in Germany in order to make sure that "conditions in Germany are not misunderstood or misrepresented." .....

California's eugenicists could not claim ignorance that Germany's sterilization program was motivated primarily by racial politics. For example, in 1935, the Los Angeles Times published a long defense of Germany's sterilization policies, in which the author noted that the Nazis "had to resort to the teachings of eugenic science" because Germany had been "deprived of her colonies, blessed with many hundreds of defective racial hybrids as a lasting memory of the colored army of occupation, and dismembered all around." Not only did California eugenicists know about Nazi efforts to use sterilization as a method of "race hygiene" -- targeted primarily at Jews -- they also approved efforts to stop "race-mixing" and increase the birth rate of the "Northern European type of family." The chilling words of Progressive reformer John Randolph Haynes anticipated the Nazi regime's murder of 100,000 mentally ill patients: "There are thousands of hopelessly insane in California, the condition of those minds is such that death would be a merciful release. How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane, and murderous degenerates. . Of course the passing of these people should be painless and without warning. They should go to sleep at night without any intimation of what was coming and never awake."

And a country that is to this day a model and inspiration to Leftists everywhere is Sweden -- with its all-embracing welfare State. So what happened in Sweden? As we read here:


During the Nazi era in Germany, eugenics prompted the sterilisation of several hundred thousand people then helped lead to antisemitic programmes of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps. The association of eugenics with the Nazis is so strong that many people were surprised at the news several years ago that Sweden had sterilised around 60 000 people (mostly women) between the 1930s and 1970s. The intention was to reduce the number of children born with genetic diseases and disorders. After the turn of the century, eugenics movements--including demands for sterilisation of people considered unfit--had, in fact, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Europe and in parts of Latin America and Asia. Eugenics was not therefore unique to the Nazis.


So what exactly did happen in the USA? I am indebted to one of my fellow bloggers for a useful summary of one of the cases. Some extracts:


In the 1920's, the eugenics movement was ... popular. So popular in fact, that mandatory sterilization laws were passed in 34 states from the mid-1920's to mid 30's. Basically, these laws stated that sterilization was mandatory for socially undesirable persons. "The socially inadequate classes, regardless of etiology or prognosis, are the following: (1) Feeble-minded; (2) Insane, (including psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitues)..." [etc]. So basically, if you were hyperactive, promiscuous, an alcoholic or drug addict, had cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome, were epileptic, (etc., ad nauseum), or exhibited ANY socially undesirable behavior at all, you were eligible for mandatory sterilization. And not you, nor your parents (if you were a minor) had any right to say "No".

In the mid 1920's, Carrie Buck, at the ripe old age of 17, fought the state of Virginia's mandatory sterilization statute. She was classified as a socially inferior woman, having born a child out of wedlock and her foster parents stated that she was "a handful". Carrie's mother had also been incarcerated in a state institution as a 'promiscuous woman'. And at the age of 7 months, Carrie's child, Vivian, was 'certified' as being 'deficient', based on the 'history' of Carrie and her mother.

Carrie lost her case at the state court level, and it wound up in front of the Supreme Court in 1927. The prominent Supreme Court jurist, Oliver Wendel Holmes, wrote the opinion in Buck v. Bell. The decision was 8-1, Justice Butler dissenting. Here's what the majority opinion boiled down to:

"In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." ...

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.Three generations of imbeciles are enough." - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., (Bucck v. Bell, 1927)

Five months after this decision, Carrie was forcibly sterilized. It later came out that her promiscuity was nothing of the sort. She'd been raped by the nephew of her foster parents, himself a violent (unsterilized) little scumbag. And her daughter's school records show that Vivian was a B student, receiving an A in deportment (behavior), and she was on the honor roll. Genetic tests later showed that neither Carrie nor her daughter had any genetic defects.


Conservative eugenics?

I should note that economist Steven Levitt's work suggests that the old Leftist eugenics program of reducing the birth rate (via abortion) among the "lower classes" was not totally misconceived. Levitt's findings seem to show that making VOLUNTARY abortion available to poorer mothers reduces the crime rate years later. He is at pains of course to indicate that his empirical findings are not an endorsement of either eugenics or abortion. Slate featured a 3 day correspondence between him and Steve Sailer dealing with the issue.

Given the traditional conservative regard for individual liberty, it seems to me that the only eugenics programs that conservatives could justify would be voluntary ones -- such as the large material incentives to reproduce that the Singapore government offers to highly educated Singaporean women. Christian conservatives, however, tend to regard all reproduction as God-given so would oppose even voluntary eugenic programs that limited reproduction -- such as the Woodhill Foundation programs that pay crack-addicted mothers to undertake contraception.

Leftists, however, oppose the Woodhill programs because they are voluntary and privately-funded. They like such matters to be in the hands of the State (i.e. under their control).

And the problem of a self-perpetuating and substantially criminal underclass does not need to be addressed by eugenics. It can be addressed by addressing its major causes -- such as the over-generous welfare system that the Leftists have created in their hunger for praise.

And despite everything, there ARE useful and non-coercive Eugenics programs in operation right now. Genetic screening in the U.S. Jewish community has now all but eliminated an awful hereditary disease -- Tay-Sachs -- from that community.

Shifting the blame

Modern-day Leftists hate it when you point out that it was THEY who were the inspiration for Hitler. So what do they do? They try to shift the blame -- to even the most unlikely targets. A recent book has tried to lay the blame for the Leftist eugenicists of the early 20th century at the door of someone who opposed ALL compulsion. As the book reviewer says:


"It has long been open season on Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Perhaps because he was the 19th century's most prominent defender of individual liberty and critic of the violence of the state, Spencer has always been the object of hatred and distortion; indeed, it sometimes seems that no accusation is too bizarre to be leveled against him...

What common ground could there be between Spencer and the eugenicists? Both, to be sure, were 'Social Darwinists,' if that means that both thought there were important sociopolitical lessons to be drawn from evolutionary biology. But Spencer and the eugenicists drew opposite lessons. For the eugenicists, the moral of evolutionary biology was that the course of human evolution must be coercively managed and controlled by a centralized, paternalistic technocracy. For Spencer, by contrast, the moral was that coercive, centralized, paternalistic approaches to social problems were counterproductive and so would tend to be eliminated by the spontaneous forces of social evolution ..."

It is a good comment on the dismal minds of Leftists that they think that nothing can be accomplished except through compulsion.

Hitler's Marxist inspiration

It may be objected, however, that comparing Hitler with the fashionable eugenicists among Western Leftists of the 20s and 30s is rather beside the point. Western Leftists surely did not contemplate anything as extreme as Hitler's genocide. Given some of the pitiless utterances of Western Leftists already mentioned, that is a fairly feeble protest but it should be noted that Hitler did not get ALL his ideas from the West of his time. He got some of them from none other than Marx and Engels. And if it can be argued that Western Leftists did not condone genocide, the same cannot be said of Marx and Engels. They in fact vociferously ADVOCATED genocide. Note this quote:


"In January 1849, months before he migrated to London, Karl Marx published an article by Friedrich Engels in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung announcing that in Central Europe only Germans, Hungarians and Poles counted as bearers of progress. The rest must go. "The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."

Genocide arose out of Marx's master-theory of history -- feudalism giving place inevitably to capitalism, capitalism to socialism. The lesser races of Europe -- Basques, Serbs, Bretons and others -- being sunk in feudalism, were counter-revolutionary; having failed to develop a bourgeoisie, they would be two steps behind in the historical process. Engels dismissed them as left-overs and ethnic trash (Voelkerabfall), and called for their extinction.

So genocide was born as a doctrine in the German Rhineland in January 1849, in a Europe still reeling from the revolutions of 1848. It was to become the beacon light of socialism, proudly held and proudly proclaimed."


The above is a quote from the latest article by George Watson -- a literary historian specializing in the early history of socialism (I have an earlier article of his posted here and there is a review of his major book here). The quote is taken from an article in the December 2004 issue of Quadrant, Australia's premier intellectual conservative magazine. I have posted here a PDF of the first page.

The fact that Hitler's genocidal ideas largely originated with Marx and Engels themselves has of course been hidden from public awareness with almost total success by a Left-dominated media and academe. It would be too embarrassing to admit. But if we look at all the historical materials available to us, there can be no doubt of the Leftist origins of Hitler's genocidal "eugenics".



References:

De Corte, T.L. (1978) Menace of Undesirables: The Eugenics Movement During the Progressive Era. University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Pickens, D. (1968) Eugenics and the Progressives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Toland, J. (1976) Adolf Hitler Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday.

[Grampa Dave]

Soros's Death in America link. ($oro$= Eugenics/Euthanasia for the everyday Americans.)

Once again we see the work of George $oro$ in the Eugenics of America or as he has labeled it: "Project on Death In America".

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Open Society Institute Examines Impact of $45 Million Press Release OSI's Project on Death in America published a special report, Transforming the Culture of Dying, which reviews nine years and $45 million devoted to improving care available to patients and their families at all stages of serious illness. more Project on Death in America: January 2001–December 2003 Report of Activities This final three-year report describes the 2001–2003 grantmaking program of OSI's Project on Death in America.  more more publications

About This Initiative The Project on Death in America completed all grantmaking in December 2003, having distributed $45 million to organizations and individuals working to improve care for dying patients and their families. PDIA's mission was to understand and transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement. more International Palliative Care Initiatives International Palliative Care Initiatives focus on enhancing hospice and palliative care programs in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. more more focus areas

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OSI-New York and OSI-Budapest are separate organizations that operate independently yet cooperate informally with each other. This website, a joint presentation, is intended to promote both organizations’ interests while maintaining their respective transparency.

[Grampa Dave]

Reflections On Death In America A speech given by George Soros on November 30, 1994 for the Alexander Ming Fisher Lecture Series at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center

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Reflections On Death In America A speech given by George Soros on November 30, 1994 for the Alexander Ming Fisher Lecture Series at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center

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I am somewhat embarrassed giving this speech because I am not an expert on dying. Many people connected with my Project on Death in America are much more qualified to talk about dying than I am. But there seems to be a kind of strange attraction on the part of professionals and academics to hear from men of the world like myself -- businessmen, the doers, the actors on the public stage. At the same time, of course, many businessmen have an exaggerated esteem for academics. And I may well be one of them. So I approach this audience with some trepidation.

The first question I must answer, why have I sponsored a Project on Death in America. There are two reasons: one is very abstract, the other very personal.

The abstract motivation derives from a basic insight which has been at the root of both my money-making and my philanthropic activities and which I have elaborated into a not-yet-properly-understood philosophical theory. The insight is that there is always a divergence between the views and ideas that guide people in their actions and the actual state of affairs. I call the divergence the participants bias. Since the participants actions help shape reality, there is a two-way feedback mechanism between the participants bias and the events in which they participate. I call this two-way feedback reflexivity.

Sometimes the participants bias is quite small and there are forces at play which tend to bring the participants views and the actual state of affairs closer together. But at other times the bias can be quite enormous without any tendency to correct itself. On the contrary, the two-way feedback mechanism may help validate and reinforce the bias until the situation becomes untenable and there is a reversal in the self-reinforcing process.

Everybody has experienced such far-from-equilibrium situations in his life, but I have specialized in them. I lived through Nazi persecution in Hungary as an adolescent; then I had a taste of communism and when I went to England I cam under the influence of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, and began to develop my theory of reflexivity. When I became involved in the financial markets I specialized on boom/bust sequences and did rather well out of them. And when I made more money than I could use for my personal needs I set up a foundation devoted to the idea of an open society. Without going too deeply into it, open society is based on the principle that we all act on imperfect knowledge and nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. A society based on the recognition that we may be wrong is preferable to a society which denies that its leaders may be wrong.

I set up foundations which tried to help open up closed societies and I become rather intimately involved in the revolutionary process which led from one kind of far-from-equilibrium situation to another; from the rigidity of the Soviet System to the chaos of its collapse. For the last five years, I have been very busy because one can do many things in the heat of the revolutionary moment which would be impossible in normal times, but as the revolution began to cool off I began to think what I could do to make our own open society more viable; because according to my theory, open societies also suffer from deficiencies which need to be recognized and corrected for open societies to remain viable. I focused on two problem areas where misconceptions played a particularly important role, making the problems worse than they would be if they were better understood.

One is the problem of dying which I will talk about tonight. The other is the problem of drugs where the remedy is worse than the disease.

Due to our imperfect understanding, our actions have unintended consequences. Nowhere are they more glaring than in the war on drugs. By treating drug abuse as a crime we have created crime, corruption and violence which are much more destructive than drug abuse by itself. I should like to see the false identification between drug and crime broken without necessarily advocating the legalization of drugs. A third problem area I should like to do something about, but I dont yet know how, is the distortion of our electoral process by the excessive use of TV advertising. All three areas have one thing in common: Distortions and misconceptions aggravate the problem.

I chose the problem of dying as one of the areas because of some very personal experiences in connection with the death of my parents, both of whom I was very devoted to and loved dearly.

My father died at home in 1963. He was terminally ill. Although he agreed to an operation, he didnt particularly want to survive it because he was afraid that the combination of the illness and the operation would invade and destroy his autonomy as a human being. Unfortunately, that in fact is what happened. After the operation he had very little time left. Im afraid I kind of wrote him off at that point. I was there when he died, yet I let him die alone. I could see him, but I wasnt at his bedside. The day after he died I went into the office. I didnt talk about my fathers death. So I kind of denied hi dying, I certainly didnt participate in it. Afterwards, I read Kubler-Ross and learned that I might have maintained contact with him if I tried. Had I read Kubler-Ross earlier I would have probably held his hand, because I did love him. I just didnt know that it might make a difference. I forgave myself because I did not know any better.

My mothers death was more recent. She had joined the Hemlock Society and had at hand a means of doing away with herself. I asked her if she needed my help; I offered it, although I wasnt particularly keen to do it. But I would have helped her because I felt that I owed it to her. At the point of decision, however, she did not want to take her own life, and I'm glad she didn't. Her decision gave the family a chance to rally around and be there as she prepared to die. And this time we did maintain good contact right to the end.

She had this experience, which is described in Kubler-Ross, of walking up to the gates of heaven, and I was accompanying her. She told me she was worried that she might drag me with her. So I reassured her that I was firmly ensconced on this earth and she should not worry. Her dying was really a very positive experience for all of us because of the way she handled herself and the way the family, not just me but particularly my children, could participate in it.

These two personal experiences made me realize that there is a need to better understand the experience of dying. In my initial research in the issue I was assisted by a friend, Patricia Prem, who as a social worker had dealt professionally with dying. She brought together the people who helped create the Project on Death in America. She is on the Projects advisory board now, as are:

* Susan Block of Harvard Medical School

* Robert Burt of Yale Law School

* Robert Butler of Mt. Sinai

* Joanne Lynn of George Washington University

* Velvet Miller of the New Jersey State Department of Human Resources

* David Rothman of Columbias College of Physicians and Surgeons

* Attorney William D. Zabel

* Kathleen M. Foley who is the chief of pain service at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Director of the Project on Death in America.

The mission of the Project is to promote a better understanding of the experiences of dying and bereavement and by doing so help transform the culture surrounding death. To do this, the Project will support initiatives in research, scholarship, the humanities and the arts, as well as innovations in the provision of care, public education, professional education, and public policy. I have committed $5 Million a year to the Projects work for the first three years. The board has decided to use the money in two ways: by developing its own programs and by holding itself open for grant applications.

The first major program is to establish a number of faculty scholarships. We hope to identify outstanding faculty and clinicians who are committed to the Projects goals and to support them in their work of developing new models for the care of the dying and new approaches to the education of health professionals about the care of dying patients and their families. The scholars, who will receive two- to three-year fellowships for projects that explore critical aspects of the care of the dying, will become the academic leaders on this issue, the role models, and mentors to future generations of health professionals. Each year the project will select ten faculty scholars. In three years we will have a leader and role model in place in one-fourth of the countrys medical schools.

In opening up for grant applications our areas of interest are broad enough to cover every aspect of the culture of dying. They include the epidemiology, ethnography, and history of dying and bereavement in the U.S.; the physical, emotional, spiritual, and existential components of dying and bereavement; new service-delivery models for the dying and their family and friends; separate educational programs for the public and the health care professionals; and the shaping of governmental and institutional policy. Personally I hope that the ratio between research and action will be heavily weighed toward action.

Now, let us look briefly at what we want to transform and why. We will begin with a small matter, the name of our project. It took a considerable amount of discussion to rid ourselves of clever euphemisms and settle on a name that states our purpose directly, even starkly: the Project on Death in America. In America, the land of perpetually young, growing older is an embarrassment, and dying is a failure. Death has replaced sex as the taboo subject of our times. People compete to appear on talk shows to discuss the most intimate details of their sex lives, but they have nothing to say about dying, which in its immensity dwarfs the momentary pleasures of sex. Only our preoccupation with violence breaks through this shroud of silence. Killing yes; dying no.

Even doctors, especially doctors, dont like to think about death. A recent federal pamphlet for physicians on HIV infection never even mentions that AIDS is a fatal disease. It recommends making arrangements for the care of the children when the patient becomes sick, but says nothing about the need for long-term plans for when the patient dies. It is easier to find descriptions of the way people die and what can be done to ease their death in the medical textbooks of the turn-of-the-century than in todays voluminous literature on the treatment and cure of diseases.

This emphasis on treating disease, instead of providing care, has altered the practice of medicine. People live longer, surviving four or five illnesses before dying. But the health care bill grows with every illness. Our success has also brought other unintended consequences. We have created a medical culture that is so intent on curing disease and prolonging life that it fails to provide support in that inevitable phase of life -- death. Advances in high technology interventions have contributed to this weakness in our medical system, deluding doctors and patients alike into believing that the inevitable can be delayed almost indefinitely.

The reality of death and the perceptions of the participants -- the dying person, the doctor, the family members -- are separated by a wide gap. We need to bring the two into closer alignment. Doctors who are on a first-name basis with disease must re-acquaint themselves with the patient. They must recognize that, by focusing exclusively on conquering disease and prolonging life, they abandon the dying when, in their own words, there is nothing more to be done. They must come to terms with their own death in order to provide proper care for the dying.

Eighty percent of people die in hospitals, yet, for most people, hospitals are not a good place to die. Hospitals are set up to take care of acute illnesses, and dying is not an illness. It doesnt belong to an official medical category, it has no DRG that would permit reimbursement for the hospital and the physician. If you go to a hospital to die , the doctors have to find something wrong with you, something to treat, like pneumonia or dehydration, or they cannot admit you. They hook you up to tubes and machines and try to fix a condition that isnt fixable. The need to arrive at a reimbursable diagnosis changes the reality. The doctors and nurses are working to prolong life, instead of preparing a patient for death. The ideal of a peaceful death is impossible in such an alien setting, under such extreme conditions.

A peaceful death is more likely to be achieved at home in familiar surroundings that are more conducive to the comfort and ritual of leave taking from family and friends. Both my parents died at home. In my mothers case, after I accompanied her to the gates of heaven and left her in good hands, she lost consciousness and lingered for another seven to ten days before dying. I visited her regularly to see if there was any sign of communication or consciousness, but there wasnt. She died at home, because we could afford to keep her there with round-the-clock nurses attending to her. We werent forced by lack of financial resources to put her into a hospital where medical intervention may well have kept her much longer in a state of limbo between living and dying. Just by giving her food, the process could have been unnecessarily prolonged.

Only twenty percent of people die in their own home, in a nursing home, or in a hospice. Hospices offer the kind of palliative care that should be routine procedure in every institution that cares for the dying. Proper care includes the control of pain and other symptoms as well as attention to the psychological and spiritual needs of the patient. To provide this care, hospices employ teams of doctors, nurses, social workers, and bereavement counselors. But the hospice alternative, unfortunately, is not available to the majority of dying patients. Medicare coverage is limited. As a result, most hospice programs deliver care to the dying in their own home, restricting custodial services to only four hours a day. This requires the presence of a family member who doesnt work, who is physically able, and who is willing to assume the responsibilities for care the rest of the time.

The recommendations that follow from these observations are obvious. First and foremost, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals need better training in the care of the dying, especially in the relief of pain. Health professionals also need training in alleviating the psychological, emotional, and existential suffering that may accompany dying. Physical pain is what people fear most about dying. A dying person in pain cannot think about anything else, leaving no room for coming to terms with death, for reviewing ones life, putting ones affairs in order, for saying good-bye. Therefore, pain relief must come first. Doctors often under medicate their dying patients for fear of turn in them into drug addicts.

Second, hospitals must be required to develop and adopt a comprehensive DRG for terminal care. This single change would go a long ways toward removing the hypocrisy that now surrounds a hospitals treatment of the dying and freeing doctors and nurses to provide the kind of care that doesnt rely on technology -- such as the simple act of paying attention to a dying person, holding their hand, listening, and comforting them.

Third, we must increase the availability of hospice services for terminally ill patients removing restrictions on admittance and enhancing reimbursement regulations. We should consider laws that permit next of kin to decide to forego life sustaining medical interventions even when a patients wishes are not known. The government may have to help family members financially so that they can take care of dying persons at home by the least expensive means. These are only a few of the approaches to transforming the culture of dying that our project will be exploring in the months to come.

How much will all this cost? Can we afford to care for the dying properly? The number of people dying in the United States currently stands at 2.2 million annually. Increases in cancer and AIDS deaths and the aging of the baby boomers will cause this figure to climb faster than the population. Today 1 in 8 Americans is 65 years or older. In 30 to 40 years, 1 in 5 will be in that age group. The average life expectancy for those reaching age 65 is already 81 for men and 85 for women. The fear is that the dying of the elderly will drain the national treasury. Like most fears, this one is based on a myth, the popular perception that elderly, terminally ill patients consume enormous amounts of resources shortly before they die.

It is true that nearly half of all medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of peoples lives. But it is also true that medical expenditures in the last year of life are lower for people 80 years and older than for those in younger age groups.

Aggressive, life-prolonging interventions, which may at times go against the patients wishes, are much more expensive than proper care for the dying.

This brings me to that hotly debated subject, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. This is the one aspect of dying that is talked about everywhere -- on television, in public forums, in newspaper headlines, and serious journal articles. Voters in Oregon just approved a law that makes it the first state to lift the prohibition against physician-assisted suicide.

As the son of a mother who was member of the Hemlock Society, and as a reader of Platos Phaedra, I cannot but approve. But I must emphasize that I am speaking in my personal capacity and not on behalf of the Board of the Project on Death in America. There are members of the Board who take a different position and the Board as a whole wants to steer clear of the issue because it feels it has plenty to do before opening that Pandoras box. Instead of getting embroiled in the debate on physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, they want to support the training of health care professionals, enabling them to provide humane, compassionate care to the dying, including improved physician-patient communication, patient-centered care, better physician judgment on withdrawing or withholding care, and familiarity with the principles and practices of palliative care.

As founder of the project, I respect their judgment. I believe in personal autonomy; I believe people should be allowed to determine their own end. But I also recognize that legalizing euthanasia could have unintended consequences, leading to all kind of abuses. The issues need to be carefully weighed, but I accept that this is not the first priority of the Project. Very few terminally ill patients would avail themselves of the opportunity even if euthanasia were legalized. After all, my mother refused my help and I am glad she did. The Project on Death in America concerns itself with the vast majority of people who are not looking for physician-assisted suicide and they have their work cut out for them.

In conclusion, let me tell you how I came to terms with my own death -- a subject I gave a lot of thought to in my youth. I spent years thinking about it. Building on my insight that there is always a divergence between ideas and facts I came to the conclusion that it is the idea of my death which I cannot accept because it is a total denial of my consciousness. The fact of dying, when it comes, may be much more acceptable, especially if it comes at the end of a long life. The insight that the idea is not the same as the fact, made the idea more bearable.

I am sure that I would not find the argument persuasive if I had to confront the fact of my death here and now but as an idea I find it both convincing and comforting. I wonder whether it has the same effect on you when you hear it for the first time.

As people come to terms with death, recognizing it as a fact of life, then the demand for physician-assisted suicide, as well as for unnecessary medical interventions, will drop. That is one way I hope our efforts will influence the culture of dying.

Recently Retrieved Project on Death in America Link contains above speech

Center for Bioethics at Columbia University

Alexander Ming Fisher Lecture

2004 - Arthur Caplan, Ph.D.,Director, Center for Bioethics Emanuel and Robert Hart Chair of Bioethics Chair, Department of Medical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania

2004 EVENT TITLE: From Karen Quinlan to Terry Schiavo Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. Unable to find transcript of speech

The time has come to let Terri Schiavo die Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. Commentary MSNBC contributor 3-18-05

[yellowdoghunter]

You got that right.

[Grampa Dave]

Euthanasia and Abortion = Official Seal of DemonicRats, the party of death, financed and guided by George $oro$.

IN THE NAME OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE, YOU'RE DEAD

[sheik yerbouty]

"..who call darkness light, and light darknes..."

[veronica]

BTTT...

[FormerACLUmember]

Absolutely magnificent essay. I appreciate the post.

[lainde]

bump and thanks!