- In 1949, just three years after participating in the
prosecution of 16 German Nazi officials for their role in the mass extermination
of those considered "useless eaters" during the Hitler era, Dr.
Leo Alexander put his finger on the core "philosophic principle"
which led to those atrocities.[1] He called it "rational utility,"
a Hegelian, Benthamite doctrine which led to the designation of increasingly
large portions of the population to be treated as animals, and slated to
be killed, because they took up too many resources of the society, or were
otherwise undesirable. Hundreds of thousands of German citizens, not to
mention millions of foreign nationals, were sent to their death according
to this "principle."
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- This belief in utilitarianism-would Obama call it "pragmatism"?-has
been encroaching for decades in the United States, and is now writ large
in the health care policies of the Obama Administration. Obama has adopted
Hitler's health program.
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- We are at the proverbial 11th hour. Anyone who opposes
Nazi mass murder, must act now to stop Obama's Nazi health care program
from being put in place in the United States.
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- The British Created Hitler
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- The ideological preparation for Nazi mass extermination
began many decades before Hitler took power-and it didn't begin in Germany.
Not surprisingly, the home base for Nazi medicine was Great Britain, home
of the fraud called Malthusianism, and the Eugenics movement, which claimed
that mankind's nature was genetically determined. The leading theoretician
was Sir Francis Galton, a dropout from British medical school who wrote
his manifesto, Hereditary Genius, in 1869. By 1907, Galton had established
the Eugenics Education Society, and had spread his filth about weeding
out the "genetically inferior" around the world, including the
United States, where it was particularly popular with the Harvard, Boston
Brahmin set, including the Harriman family.
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- This fascist propaganda spread like wildfire during the
1910s and 1920s in the United States, resulting in forced sterilization
laws, and ugly immigration and racial restrictions. Such U.S. laws were,
in fact, models for those picked up in Germany in subsequent years. The
draconian austerity imposed on that nation by the Versailles Treaty, and
British-dominated finance, spurred the support for such bestial thinking
among the desperate population.
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- It is no exaggeration to say that the only reason such
fascist programs were not implemented by the Federal government in the
United States, is because the American people elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
who fought to his last breath against the British fascist financiers and
ideologues, and brought the United States out of the Depression.
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- In Germany, however, the British were successful in bringing
Hitler to power, through the aid of their leading financiers, and U.S.
collaborators such as Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush. Not surprisingly,
Hitler was prepared to ram through their program-mass murder of the "unfit."
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- Thus, the movement for "treating" the unfit
through sterilization and euthanasia accelerated during the 1930s. Mass
propaganda idealized "mercy" killing, as well as cost-accounting
considerations. According to Dr. Alexander, a widely used high-school mathematics
text, "Mathematics in the Service of National Political Education,"
included problems stating how the cost of taking care of "the crippled,
the criminal and the insane," took money away from social programs
of housing and family allowances. At the National Socialist Party Congress
in 1934, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, leader of the Nazi Doctors group, was also
explicit: "The economic burden represented by people suffering from
hereditary diseases is a danger for the State and for society. In all,
it is necessary to spend 301 million Reichsmarks per year for treatment,
without counting the expenditures for 200,000 drunkards and about 400,000
psychopaths."
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- With the accession of Hitler to power, a whole set of
"racial purity" laws, with their consequent restrictions and
sterilizations, was put into place. These laws resulted in the first waves
of mass killings of the "unfit," estimated to have run into the
hundreds of thousands.
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- A Shift in Attitudes
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- The Nazis carried out most of these murders in secret:
most Germans were not ready to accept the brutal truth. But through the
course of propaganda, and the hardships of Nazi rule, the population's
attitude toward human life began to subtly shift. What Dr. Alexander explains
as a shift in physicians' attitudes, was paralleled in that of the population
as a whole.
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- Whatever proportions 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 attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance
of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a
thing as a 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, and finally all
non-Aryans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedge-in
lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the
attitude towards the non-rehabilitable sick.
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- It is, therefore, this subtle shift in emphasis of the
physicians' attitude that one must thoroughly investigate....
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- 'Lives Unworthy of Life'
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- The first direct order for euthanasia in Germany did
not come until the Fall of 1939, when the pressures of the war mobilization
brought the cost-cutting element of the program very much to the fore.
Until then, the ruse was that euthanasia was a "blessing" for
those suffering, and special permission for such a "mercy death,"
allegedly by the Fuehrer himself, had to be given for it to be carried
out.
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- In the Summer of 1939, Hitler had called in the Secretary
of Health, plus State Secretary Dr. Hans Lammers, to tell them that "he
considered it to be proper that the 'life unworthy of life' of severely
mentally ill persons be eliminated by actions that bring about death."
In this way, he continued, "a certain saving in hospitals, doctors,
and nursing personnel could be brought about."
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- Hence the Top-Secret Euthanasia Decree of October 1939
(backdated to September 1). Under the title "The Destruction of Lives
Unworthy of Life," the order, handed to his doctor Karl Brandt, read:
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- Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with
the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated
by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the
best available human judgment of their state of health, can be accorded
a mercy death.
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- According to Dr. Alexander, from that time forward,
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- all state institutions were required to report on patients
who had been ill five years or more and who were unable to work, by filling
out questionnaires giving name, race, marital status, nationality, next
of kin, whether regularly visited and by whom, who bore financial responsibility,
and so forth. The decision regarding which patients should be killed, was
made entirely on the basis of this brief information by expert consultants,
most of whom were professors of psychiatry in the key universities.
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- Under that order, according to the Chief of Counsel for
War Crimes for the U.S. at the Nuremberg Tribunal, at least 275,000 German
nationals were killed. The best available breakdown is: 70-80,000 patients
in medical and nursing homes; 10-20,000 invalids and disabled people in
prisons; 3,000 children between 3 and 13 who needed special care. In addition
to all this, were the millions and millions of Jews, Gypsies, and other
"undesirables" who were killed, or worked to death, in concentration
camps.
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- The Nuremberg Tribunal
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- It was the United States that insisted on bringing the
perpetrators of the Nazi Doctors' crimes against humanity into the dock
after the conclusion of World War II. Twenty-three persons, 20 of them
doctors, were put on trial in late 1946. Count III read:
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- Planning and performing the mass murder [of Germans],
stigmatized as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed, and so on, by gas,
lethal injection, and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals,
and asylums during the Euthanasia Program and participation in the mass
murder of concentration camp inmates.
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- Among the means identified as causing the "murder
and ill-treatment of Civilian Populations" was the "inadequate
provision of surgical and medical services."
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- The Nuremberg Tribunal heard the defenses of Dr. Karl
Brandt, et al., of course, who argued passionately that "I am fully
conscious that when I said 'yes' to euthanasia, I did so with the deepest
conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death
can mean deliverance. Death is life-just as much as birth. It was never
meant to be murder."
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- The Tribunal nonetheless ruled:
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- We have no doubt that Karl Brandt-as he himself testified-is
a sincere believer in the administration of euthanasia to persons hopelessly
ill, whose lives are burdensome to themselves and an expense to the state
or to their families. The abstract proposition of whether or not euthanasia
is justified in certain cases of the class referred to is no concern of
this Tribunal.... The Family of Nations is not obligated to give recognition
to such legislation when it manifestly gives legality to plain murder and
torture of defenseless and powerless human beings....
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- Seven of the doctors received death sentences, including
Dr. Brandt.
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- The Path to Mass Murder
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- In his 1949 article analyzing the road to medical mass
murder by the Nazis, Dr. Alexander found plenty of warning signs that American
physicians (and he would have said society as well) are infected with he
called "Hegelian, cold-blooded, utilitarian philosophy," and
what we would rightly call Nazi ideology. He noted that increasingly:
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- Physicians have become dangerously close to being mere
technicians of rehabilitation. The essentially Hegelian rational attitude
has led them to make certain distinctions in the handling of acute and
chronic diseases. The patient with the latter carried an obvious stigma
as the one less likely to be fully rehabilitable for social usefulness.
In an increasingly utilitarian society, these patients are being looked
down upon with increasing definiteness as unwanted ballast....
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- Hospitals like to limit themslves to the care of patients
who can be fully rehabilitated, and the patient whose full rehabilitation
is unlikely finds himself, at least in the best and most advanced centers
of healing, a second-class patient faced with a reluctance on the part
of both the visiting and the house staff to suggest and apply therapeutic
procedures that are not likely to bring about immediately striking results
in terms of recovery. I wish to emphasize that this point of view did not
arise primarily within the medical profession, which has always been outstanding
in a highly competitive economic society for giving freely and unstintingly
of its time and efforts, butwas imposed by the shortage of funds available,
both private and public. From the attitude of easing patients with chronic
diseases away form the doors of the best types of treatment facilities
available to the actual dispatching of such patients to killing centers
is a long but nevertheless logical step. Resources for the so-called incurable
patient have recently become practically unavailable.
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- The trend of development in the facilities available
for the chronically ill outlined above will not necessarily be altered
by public or state medicine. With provision of public funds in any setting
of public activity the question is bound to come up, 'Is it worth while
to spend a certain amount of effort to restore a certain type of patient?'
This rationalistic point of view has insidiously crept into the motivation
of medical effort, supplanting the old Hippocratic point of view.
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- In emergency situations, military or otherwise, such
grading of effort may be pardonable. But doctors must beware lest such
attitudes creep into the civilian public administration of medicine entirely
outside emergency situations, because once such considerations are at all
admitted, the more often and the more definitely the question is going
to be asked, 'Is it worth while to do this or that for this type of patient?'
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- Evidence of the existence of such an attitude stared
at me from a report on the activities of a leading public hospital unit,
which stated rather proudly that certain treatments were given only when
they appeared promising.... If only those whose treatment is worth while
in terms of prognosis are to be treated, what about the other ones? The
doubtful patients are the ones whose recovery appears unlikely, but frequently
if treated energetically, they surprise the best prognosticators. And what
shall be done during that long time lag after the disease has been called
incurable and the time of death and autopsy? It is that period during which
it is most difficult to find hospitals and other therapeutic organizations
for the welfare and alleviation of suffering of the patient.
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- Under all forms of dictatorship the dictating bodies
or individuals claim that all that is done is being done for the best of
the people as a whole, and that for that reason they look at health merely
in terms of utility, efficiency and productivity. It is natural in such
a setting that eventually Hegel's principle that 'what is useful is good'
wins out completely. The killing center is the reductio ad absurdum of
all health planning based only on rational principles and economy, and
not on humane compassion and divine law. To be sure, American physicians
are still far from the point of thinking of killing centers, but they have
arrived at a danger point in thinking, at which likelihood of full rehabilitation
is considered a factor that should determine the amount of time, effort
and cost to be devoted to a particular type of patient on the part of the
social body upon which this decision rests.
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- At this point Americans should remember that the enormity
of a euthanasia movement is present in their own midst. To the psychiatrist
it is obvious that this represents the eruption of unconscious aggression
on the part of certain administrators alluded to above....
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- The case, therefore, that I should like to make is that
American medicine must realize where it stands in its fundamental premises.
There can be no doubt that in a subtle way the Hegelian premise of 'what
is useful is right' has infected society, including the medical portion.
Physicians must return to the older premises, which were the emotional
foundation and driving force of an amazingly successful quest to increase
powers of healing and which are bound to carry them still farther if they
are not held down to earth by the pernicious attitudes of an overdone practical
realism.
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- Genocide Again?
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- President Obama's repeated statements that he intends
to make the "tough choices" of slashing medical costs, including
by means known to rule out medical treatment for those very old (like his
grandmother), or incurable, or simply poor, leaves nothing to the imagination.
The Administration is gripped by a utilitarian Nazi mentality, and it will
move inexorably toward mass murder unless you move to stop it now.
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- nancyspannaus@larouchepub.com
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- [1] Dr. Alexander's quotes in this article come from
his July 14, 1949 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, entitled
"Medical Science Under Dictatorship."
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- his article appears in the May 22, 2009 issue of Executive
Intelligence Review.
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