http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11091.shtml
Harvard Fellow calls for genocidal measure to curb Palestinian births
The Electronic Intifada
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:30 EST
Here's Martin's schizoidal idea: if we kill enough surplus Muslims, then there'll be less of them around to become radicals. Genius, no?
A fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Martin Kramer, has called for "the West" to take measures to curb the births of Palestinians, a proposal that appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide.
Kramer, who is also a fellow at the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), made the call early this month in a speech at Israel's Herzliya conference, a video of which is posted on his blog ("Superfluous young men," 7 February 2010).
In the speech Kramer rejected common views that Islamist "radicalization" is caused by US policies such as support for Israel, or propping up despotic dictatorships, and stated that it was inherent in the demography of Muslim societies such as Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Too many children, he argued, leads to too many "superfluous young men" who then become violent radicals.
Kramer proposed that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would "happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status."
Due to the Israeli blockade, the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are now dependent on UN food aid. Neither the UN, nor any other agencies, provide Palestinians with specifically "pro-natal subsidies." Kramer appeared to be equating any humanitarian assistance at all with inducement for Palestinians to reproduce.
He added, "Israel's present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim -- undermine the Hamas regime -- but if they also break Gaza's runaway population growth, and there is some evidence that they have, that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men." This, he claimed, would be treating the issue of Islamic radicalization "at its root."
The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, defines genocide to include measures "intended to prevent births within" a specific "national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
The Weatherhead Center at Harvard describes itself as "the largest international research center within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences." In addition to his positions at Harvard and WINEP, Kramer is "president-designate" of Shalem College in Jerusalem, a far-right Zionist institution that aspires to be the "College of the Jewish People."
Pro-Israel speakers from the United States often participate in the the Herzliya conference, an influential annual gathering of Israel's political and military establishment. This year's conference was also addressed by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and, in a first for a Palestinian official, by Salam Fayyad, appointed prime minister of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
Kramer's call to prevent Palestinian births reflects a long-standing Israeli and Zionist concern about a so-called "demographic threat" to Israel, as Palestinians are on the verge of outnumbering Israeli Jews within Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories combined.
Such extreme racist views have been aired at the Herzliya conference in the past. In 2003, for example, Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, an Israeli government armaments expert, called on Israel to "implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population," a reference to the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The nazis' idea of murdering Jews, Gysies and communists in gas chambers was an American idea
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/02/nazis-murder-of-jews-communists-and.html
Washingtonblog.com
Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:29 EST
Believe it or not, the Nazis' murder of Jews, communists and gypsies using gas chambers was actually an American idea.
As the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2003:
the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle Blood of a Nation, in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
n 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
Comment: For more information about the concept of "Lethal Selection" see the following here and here.
In light of the above, one might question whether the motivation behind the global financial meltdown was deliberately engineered for just this purpose.
Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "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." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."
During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions.
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade a spade."
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."
Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
As Michel Crichton wrote in 2004:
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded --- Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks --- and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.
Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Theodore Roosevelt said that "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." Luther Burbank" "Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.
Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)
Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where "mental defectives" were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.
Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and of killing ten million undesirables.
After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.
The scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, "Scientists, including those who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state." Deichman speaks of the "active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy ... where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine ... no external pressure can be documented." German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.
Washingtonblog.com
Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:29 EST
Believe it or not, the Nazis' murder of Jews, communists and gypsies using gas chambers was actually an American idea.
As the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2003:
the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle Blood of a Nation, in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
n 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
Comment: For more information about the concept of "Lethal Selection" see the following here and here.
In light of the above, one might question whether the motivation behind the global financial meltdown was deliberately engineered for just this purpose.
Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "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." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."
During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions.
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade a spade."
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."
Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
As Michel Crichton wrote in 2004:
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded --- Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks --- and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.
Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Theodore Roosevelt said that "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." Luther Burbank" "Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.
Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)
Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where "mental defectives" were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.
Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and of killing ten million undesirables.
After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.
The scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, "Scientists, including those who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state." Deichman speaks of the "active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy ... where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine ... no external pressure can be documented." German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
What Britain’s Assisted Suicide War Should Teach Us
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/17/what-britains-assisted-suicide-war-should-teach-us/
Ann Neumann
February 17, 2010
Culture wars do nothing to correct social problems and, by distracting from the underlying challenges and focusing on one contentious issue, actually exacerbate social ills and prevent practical solutions from gaining traction.
This should be common knowledge; under the weight of the abortion debate in the U.S., delivery of women’s reproductive services beyond abortion remain uncertain, erratic, and regional.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed the deafening calls against abortion drown out all discussion of other reproductive health needs. Contraception, sterilization, condom use, sex education, tubal ligation and other reproductive services like basic testing, check-ups, and pre- and post-natal care have, for women’s choice advocates, had to take a back seat in the defense of abortion rights. Yes, some improvements have been made but after a disappointing summer of health care reform defeats, women’s rights groups have had to admit that new strategies are necessary.
A resonant scenario is playing out in the U.K. over the legality of assisted suicide. Since multiple sclerosis patient Debbie Purdy won a case during the summer that would allow her husband, Omar, to legally accompany her to Switzerland should she choose to end her life, the country has been mired in an emotional, star-studded, increasingly strange war over assisted suicide.
In Britain, “assisting suicide” is prosecutable, but supporters, like Purdy, have successfully argued that assisted suicide is not the same as aid in dying. Those who are sentenced to death by a fatal disease, they say, are not committing suicide – they’re already being killed by cancer, MS, or other illnesses – but ending the unbearable suffering that their disease has caused. But in the midst of all the noise, such distinctions are hard to make.
Since July, Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier I-wouldn’t-characterize-myself-as-a-bleeding-heart-liberal Starmer has been working to revise the prosecutorial guidelines on assisted suicide. It’s been a resoundingly thankless job. ”Anti-euthanasia” and/or “pro-life” organizations have successfully dogged his efforts to the point of standstill. He can do no right, as the situation stands. Into the debate maw have jumped countless well-meaning but colorful and high-profile individuals.
Sir Terry Pratchett, one of Britain’s most acclaimed authors, publicly voiced his support for assisted suicide in August. Noting that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Pratchett said:
‘I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish should be allowed to be shown the door,’ he said. ‘In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be in the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.’
Another author got into the act in January. Swaggering Martin Amis suggested that the best way to deal with the encroaching “silver tsunami” of elders would be to make assisted suicide legal and convenient. ”There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal,” he said.
And just this week, famed British broadcaster Ray Gosling (pictured above) admitted in a BBC special that he had smothered his suffering lover decades ago with a pillow. His partner was dying of AIDS and the two had made a pact that should the suffering become unbearable, Gosling would do whatever was necessary to spare him from that suffering. Gosling now faces legal questioning. (UPDATE: Gosling was arrested for questioning today.)
Even the BBC, seemingly accustomed to accusations of bias, is not exempt from getting drawn into the assisted suicide war. They are promoting “euthanasia” say the accusers, many of whom are MPs.
All this attention on the issue of assisted suicide has made for some widely-read and sensational news. But, as Peter Beresford blogs at the Guardian today, the war over assisted suicide has done little to address the practical, non-contentious issues surrounding assisted suicide.
Beresford asks, “Why isn’t the same political and media interest given to palliative and end of life care, carers and social care generally as to assisted dying?” At first it’s a naive-sounding question. Isn’t the purpose of a culture war to drown out subtleties? But his asking makes patients’ rights advocates again face the fact that they haven’t yet learned their culture war lesson.
Un-nuanced debate has pitted organized, emotional, resource-rich “pro-life” groups against the legalization of assisted suicide, leaving supporters of end of life choice to run around flapping their hands. As we saw in the U.S. over the summer, however ridiculous it may sound to accuse government of wanting to kill the vulnerable in society, such accusations have traction when grasped by the busy-body media and dished to the uninformed public. Beresford continues:
We know that the former [palliative and hospice care, caregivers] all are under pressure and have inadequate support. Specialist palliative care services are underfunded and unequally distributed. Much-valued hospices are increasingly at risk of closure, rather than blossoming in number, while carers are still treated by the government as a resource to be exploited, rather than as family members to be supported.
The failure to bring social care policy, provision and funding into the 21st century is at last making the front pages, but what the headlines make clear is the failure of all the political parties to work for any sustainable consensus for the future.
Beresford’s solution?
The appalling lack of skilled advocacy services in England is a major problem. Policy-makers and politicians are happy to talk about providing more information, but when it comes to the ongoing guidance, support and advice that people want – and that can only really be provided by an independent, trained advocate – there is much less political will. Such advocacy has serious cost implications, but in the long run can save lives and money.
What is most needed now is a safe space for an inclusive discussion about social care, including palliative care and assisted dying, which truly involves the widest range of experience and opinion. Then we may begin to get somewhere.
Wishful thinking! When you’re in a culture war, there is no DMZ. And everybody is an “independent advocate.” Who do you ask for that safe space? The government? The media? The church? The medical profession? Because other end of life care issues have been framed into the assisted suicide debate, they can’t be addressed in a rational, meaningful way. Is the solution increased public education? A broader coalition for patients’ right?
I don’t necessarily have an answer but neither does Beresford. Clearly the same ineffective strategies of old – like interjections from high-profile advocates, and raising volume and tone to match one’s opponents – don’t work. The lesson from Britain is this: what patients’ rights advocates are doing now to win the discussion back from the war on assisted suicide isn’t working. New thinking is necessary in both Britain and the U.S.
Ann Neumann
February 17, 2010
Culture wars do nothing to correct social problems and, by distracting from the underlying challenges and focusing on one contentious issue, actually exacerbate social ills and prevent practical solutions from gaining traction.
This should be common knowledge; under the weight of the abortion debate in the U.S., delivery of women’s reproductive services beyond abortion remain uncertain, erratic, and regional.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed the deafening calls against abortion drown out all discussion of other reproductive health needs. Contraception, sterilization, condom use, sex education, tubal ligation and other reproductive services like basic testing, check-ups, and pre- and post-natal care have, for women’s choice advocates, had to take a back seat in the defense of abortion rights. Yes, some improvements have been made but after a disappointing summer of health care reform defeats, women’s rights groups have had to admit that new strategies are necessary.
A resonant scenario is playing out in the U.K. over the legality of assisted suicide. Since multiple sclerosis patient Debbie Purdy won a case during the summer that would allow her husband, Omar, to legally accompany her to Switzerland should she choose to end her life, the country has been mired in an emotional, star-studded, increasingly strange war over assisted suicide.
In Britain, “assisting suicide” is prosecutable, but supporters, like Purdy, have successfully argued that assisted suicide is not the same as aid in dying. Those who are sentenced to death by a fatal disease, they say, are not committing suicide – they’re already being killed by cancer, MS, or other illnesses – but ending the unbearable suffering that their disease has caused. But in the midst of all the noise, such distinctions are hard to make.
Since July, Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier I-wouldn’t-characterize-myself-as-a-bleeding-heart-liberal Starmer has been working to revise the prosecutorial guidelines on assisted suicide. It’s been a resoundingly thankless job. ”Anti-euthanasia” and/or “pro-life” organizations have successfully dogged his efforts to the point of standstill. He can do no right, as the situation stands. Into the debate maw have jumped countless well-meaning but colorful and high-profile individuals.
Sir Terry Pratchett, one of Britain’s most acclaimed authors, publicly voiced his support for assisted suicide in August. Noting that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Pratchett said:
‘I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish should be allowed to be shown the door,’ he said. ‘In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be in the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.’
Another author got into the act in January. Swaggering Martin Amis suggested that the best way to deal with the encroaching “silver tsunami” of elders would be to make assisted suicide legal and convenient. ”There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal,” he said.
And just this week, famed British broadcaster Ray Gosling (pictured above) admitted in a BBC special that he had smothered his suffering lover decades ago with a pillow. His partner was dying of AIDS and the two had made a pact that should the suffering become unbearable, Gosling would do whatever was necessary to spare him from that suffering. Gosling now faces legal questioning. (UPDATE: Gosling was arrested for questioning today.)
Even the BBC, seemingly accustomed to accusations of bias, is not exempt from getting drawn into the assisted suicide war. They are promoting “euthanasia” say the accusers, many of whom are MPs.
All this attention on the issue of assisted suicide has made for some widely-read and sensational news. But, as Peter Beresford blogs at the Guardian today, the war over assisted suicide has done little to address the practical, non-contentious issues surrounding assisted suicide.
Beresford asks, “Why isn’t the same political and media interest given to palliative and end of life care, carers and social care generally as to assisted dying?” At first it’s a naive-sounding question. Isn’t the purpose of a culture war to drown out subtleties? But his asking makes patients’ rights advocates again face the fact that they haven’t yet learned their culture war lesson.
Un-nuanced debate has pitted organized, emotional, resource-rich “pro-life” groups against the legalization of assisted suicide, leaving supporters of end of life choice to run around flapping their hands. As we saw in the U.S. over the summer, however ridiculous it may sound to accuse government of wanting to kill the vulnerable in society, such accusations have traction when grasped by the busy-body media and dished to the uninformed public. Beresford continues:
We know that the former [palliative and hospice care, caregivers] all are under pressure and have inadequate support. Specialist palliative care services are underfunded and unequally distributed. Much-valued hospices are increasingly at risk of closure, rather than blossoming in number, while carers are still treated by the government as a resource to be exploited, rather than as family members to be supported.
The failure to bring social care policy, provision and funding into the 21st century is at last making the front pages, but what the headlines make clear is the failure of all the political parties to work for any sustainable consensus for the future.
Beresford’s solution?
The appalling lack of skilled advocacy services in England is a major problem. Policy-makers and politicians are happy to talk about providing more information, but when it comes to the ongoing guidance, support and advice that people want – and that can only really be provided by an independent, trained advocate – there is much less political will. Such advocacy has serious cost implications, but in the long run can save lives and money.
What is most needed now is a safe space for an inclusive discussion about social care, including palliative care and assisted dying, which truly involves the widest range of experience and opinion. Then we may begin to get somewhere.
Wishful thinking! When you’re in a culture war, there is no DMZ. And everybody is an “independent advocate.” Who do you ask for that safe space? The government? The media? The church? The medical profession? Because other end of life care issues have been framed into the assisted suicide debate, they can’t be addressed in a rational, meaningful way. Is the solution increased public education? A broader coalition for patients’ right?
I don’t necessarily have an answer but neither does Beresford. Clearly the same ineffective strategies of old – like interjections from high-profile advocates, and raising volume and tone to match one’s opponents – don’t work. The lesson from Britain is this: what patients’ rights advocates are doing now to win the discussion back from the war on assisted suicide isn’t working. New thinking is necessary in both Britain and the U.S.
“There will be casualties”
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/there_will_be_casualties/
Michael Cook | Friday, 19 February 2010
Euthanasia activists in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands have lost touch with reality.
Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke loves publicity. But whenever he opens his mouth, even the most progressive journalists avert their eyes in squeamish embarrassment. This week’s gaffe was to defend his barely legal promotion of a suicide drug for the elderly and terminally ill. It turns out that nearly two-thirds of the Australians who died after quaffing Nembutal – at least 51 over the past 10 years -- were under 60, and quite a few were in the 20s and 30s. This suggests that mental illness or depression, not unbearable pain, was the reason for the suicide. So how did Nitschke respond?
''There will be some casualties,” he said with the tenderness of General Haig sending troops over the top at the Somme, “but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' [about suicide drugs].
The notion that young people are just collateral damage in a war to defend their grandparents’ inalienable right to make a quick getaway outraged many Australians. There were calls for Dr Nitschke to be hauled into a court for putting lives at risk.
But after tracking the increasingly outrageous suggestions from advocates for assisted suicide and euthanasia, I feel that jail is not the place for people like Nitschke. They belong in a straitjacket. It is becoming increasingly clear that euthanasia advocacy is an illness characterised by an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s actions, an inability to empathise with normal people, and a morbid desire to help others die. Like mad cow disease, it lies dormant for years. Its victims look normal, but eventually the spongy degeneration of the brain becomes evident.
Nitschke is a classical case. An intelligent man with a PhD in physics and a qualified doctor, he entered the public debate by decrying the cruelty of forcing the terminally ill to die in excruciating pain. Autonomous adults should have the right to die at a time and place of their choosing, surrounded by their loved one, he argued. It sounded vaguely plausible to the media and to his doddering but increasingly numerous groupies, it was a new gospel. But bit by bit, it became clear that his goal was death-on-demand, even for troubled teenagers. He seems incapable of grasping that most of us want teenagers to stick around for a few more years rather than kill themselves over a cruel Facebook post.
In England, the latest case of euthanasia madness is a 70-year-old veteran BBC broadcaster and gay rights campaigner, Ray Gosling. He confessed in the middle of a TV show that he had smothered an unnamed gay lover suffering from AIDS some 20 years ago.
“In a hospital one hot afternoon, the doctor said ‘There’s nothing we can do’, and he was in terrible, terrible pain. I said to the doctor ‘Leave me just for a bit’ and he went away. I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. The doctor came back and I said ‘He’s gone’. Nothing more was ever said.”
Mr Gosling sobbed a bit, but was adamant that killing someone and concealing the murder was the right thing. “If there’s a heaven and he’s looking down, he’d be proud of me,” he told the BBC. He was oblivious to all the safeguards promised by euthanasia advocates. A right to smother someone, anywhere, anytime, without consulting doctors, without notifying the police, without proving your disinterestedness, and without even consulting the victim raises questions in most sane minds about the possibility of widespread collateral damage. Perhaps only BBC journalists would be allowed to do mercy killings, but some sane people might even object to that.
In the Netherlands euthanasia loopiness has become epidemic. It is legal there and every year about 2,500 acknowledged cases of doctor-administered death take place.
But amongst the numerous Dutch victims of spongy-brained euthanasia syndrome some are more affected than others. Recently a distinguished group called “Out of Free Will” has complained that there are too many restrictions on euthanasia in the Netherlands. Even in the mercy-killing heartland, people are required to have some sort of terminal illness. But the new lobby group wants the right for to anyone sane over the age of 70 to die with a professionally-trained expert’s assistance. They have already begun collecting signatures to lobby for improvements to the legislation.
Part of their scheme is a completely new profession: specialist suicide assistants. These people will need to pass a “Completed Life” training program and to join a professional association which will maintain standards of professional, transparent and safe conduct.
The age limit of 70 is arbitrary. “Whether it should be 65 or 90 is a good question,” says legal scholar Eugene Sutorius. “We think that once someone has reached old age, he has proved abilities at living. He can then choose to leave this life in a procedural, medicalised manner.”
Three spokesmen told the NRC Handelsblad that collateral damage by “angels of death” in nursing homes – rogue doctors and nurses who enjoy killing people -- was unlikely to be a problem, especially in view of the country’s positive experience with euthanasia. “It was thought to be the first step on a slippery slope that would lead the medical profession to lose its integrity,” says Mr Sutorius. “But I have seen nothing of the kind happen.”
That last sentence is a tell-tale symptom of spongy-brain euthanasia disease. Before euthanasia was legalised, Dutch doctors were already doing it enthusiastically. It was legalised for consenting adults in pain from a terminal condition, and now it is permitted for non-consenting infants. Dutch doctors routinely lie on their official reports. If they are squeamish about lethal injections, they kill patients through the lingering death of terminal sedation – which is not counted as euthanasia. All these facts are well known. Yet Mr Sutorius sees no slippery slope, no loss of medical integrity. Mr Sutorius belongs in a straitjacket, not in a comfy chair giving interviews. (If you speak Dutch, he explains his position here in a YouTube video.)
What is happening here? How can intelligent, well-educated people be so obtuse about the dangers of legalising the killing of innocent, infirm human beings? Perhaps the conviction that some killing is permissible is so morally corrupting that it infects the intellect and distorts reality. And arguing with them is futile. As Chesterton wrote:
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
Michael Cook | Friday, 19 February 2010
Euthanasia activists in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands have lost touch with reality.
Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke loves publicity. But whenever he opens his mouth, even the most progressive journalists avert their eyes in squeamish embarrassment. This week’s gaffe was to defend his barely legal promotion of a suicide drug for the elderly and terminally ill. It turns out that nearly two-thirds of the Australians who died after quaffing Nembutal – at least 51 over the past 10 years -- were under 60, and quite a few were in the 20s and 30s. This suggests that mental illness or depression, not unbearable pain, was the reason for the suicide. So how did Nitschke respond?
''There will be some casualties,” he said with the tenderness of General Haig sending troops over the top at the Somme, “but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' [about suicide drugs].
The notion that young people are just collateral damage in a war to defend their grandparents’ inalienable right to make a quick getaway outraged many Australians. There were calls for Dr Nitschke to be hauled into a court for putting lives at risk.
But after tracking the increasingly outrageous suggestions from advocates for assisted suicide and euthanasia, I feel that jail is not the place for people like Nitschke. They belong in a straitjacket. It is becoming increasingly clear that euthanasia advocacy is an illness characterised by an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s actions, an inability to empathise with normal people, and a morbid desire to help others die. Like mad cow disease, it lies dormant for years. Its victims look normal, but eventually the spongy degeneration of the brain becomes evident.
Nitschke is a classical case. An intelligent man with a PhD in physics and a qualified doctor, he entered the public debate by decrying the cruelty of forcing the terminally ill to die in excruciating pain. Autonomous adults should have the right to die at a time and place of their choosing, surrounded by their loved one, he argued. It sounded vaguely plausible to the media and to his doddering but increasingly numerous groupies, it was a new gospel. But bit by bit, it became clear that his goal was death-on-demand, even for troubled teenagers. He seems incapable of grasping that most of us want teenagers to stick around for a few more years rather than kill themselves over a cruel Facebook post.
In England, the latest case of euthanasia madness is a 70-year-old veteran BBC broadcaster and gay rights campaigner, Ray Gosling. He confessed in the middle of a TV show that he had smothered an unnamed gay lover suffering from AIDS some 20 years ago.
“In a hospital one hot afternoon, the doctor said ‘There’s nothing we can do’, and he was in terrible, terrible pain. I said to the doctor ‘Leave me just for a bit’ and he went away. I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. The doctor came back and I said ‘He’s gone’. Nothing more was ever said.”
Mr Gosling sobbed a bit, but was adamant that killing someone and concealing the murder was the right thing. “If there’s a heaven and he’s looking down, he’d be proud of me,” he told the BBC. He was oblivious to all the safeguards promised by euthanasia advocates. A right to smother someone, anywhere, anytime, without consulting doctors, without notifying the police, without proving your disinterestedness, and without even consulting the victim raises questions in most sane minds about the possibility of widespread collateral damage. Perhaps only BBC journalists would be allowed to do mercy killings, but some sane people might even object to that.
In the Netherlands euthanasia loopiness has become epidemic. It is legal there and every year about 2,500 acknowledged cases of doctor-administered death take place.
But amongst the numerous Dutch victims of spongy-brained euthanasia syndrome some are more affected than others. Recently a distinguished group called “Out of Free Will” has complained that there are too many restrictions on euthanasia in the Netherlands. Even in the mercy-killing heartland, people are required to have some sort of terminal illness. But the new lobby group wants the right for to anyone sane over the age of 70 to die with a professionally-trained expert’s assistance. They have already begun collecting signatures to lobby for improvements to the legislation.
Part of their scheme is a completely new profession: specialist suicide assistants. These people will need to pass a “Completed Life” training program and to join a professional association which will maintain standards of professional, transparent and safe conduct.
The age limit of 70 is arbitrary. “Whether it should be 65 or 90 is a good question,” says legal scholar Eugene Sutorius. “We think that once someone has reached old age, he has proved abilities at living. He can then choose to leave this life in a procedural, medicalised manner.”
Three spokesmen told the NRC Handelsblad that collateral damage by “angels of death” in nursing homes – rogue doctors and nurses who enjoy killing people -- was unlikely to be a problem, especially in view of the country’s positive experience with euthanasia. “It was thought to be the first step on a slippery slope that would lead the medical profession to lose its integrity,” says Mr Sutorius. “But I have seen nothing of the kind happen.”
That last sentence is a tell-tale symptom of spongy-brain euthanasia disease. Before euthanasia was legalised, Dutch doctors were already doing it enthusiastically. It was legalised for consenting adults in pain from a terminal condition, and now it is permitted for non-consenting infants. Dutch doctors routinely lie on their official reports. If they are squeamish about lethal injections, they kill patients through the lingering death of terminal sedation – which is not counted as euthanasia. All these facts are well known. Yet Mr Sutorius sees no slippery slope, no loss of medical integrity. Mr Sutorius belongs in a straitjacket, not in a comfy chair giving interviews. (If you speak Dutch, he explains his position here in a YouTube video.)
What is happening here? How can intelligent, well-educated people be so obtuse about the dangers of legalising the killing of innocent, infirm human beings? Perhaps the conviction that some killing is permissible is so morally corrupting that it infects the intellect and distorts reality. And arguing with them is futile. As Chesterton wrote:
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Nitschke unapologetic about collateral damage
I thought collateral damage was about civilians getting killed during wars not euthanasia!
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8851/
Nitschke unapologetic about collateral damage
posted by Michael Cook | 16 Feb 2010 | Comments
Finally, a key performance indicator for Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke! In Australia, after recent legislation, it is illegal to promote assisted suicide in print or on the internet, so it is hard to measure how successful he has been. However, recent figures from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine show that 51 people throughout the country have died after taking Nembutal, his drug of choice, in the past 10 years.
Somewhat embarrassingly for Dr Nitschke and his organization, Exit International, six people in their 20s and eight in their 30s had died of Nembutal poisoning. Because this drug is illegal in Australia for human consumption, Dr Nitschke has been encouraging people to smuggle it in from overseas, mostly from Mexico, or to manufacture it themselves. The most pessimistic interpretation of the figures is that 14 young people who were not terminally ill discovered how to obtain lethal doses of the poison from Exit members.
However, the figures, which were generated for The Age newspaper in Melbourne, are difficult to interpret, because only 38 of the 51 cases were thoroughly examined by a coroner. And the total could be higher, as it includes only those which emerged from a search of a national database. Of the 38, only 11 were suffering from a serious physical illness. Of the 51, nearly two-thirds were under 60. Without a more detailed knowledge of the cases, the data strongly implies that most of the people who used Nembutal to kill themselves were either mentally ill or just weary of life.
Typically, Dr Nitschke was unapologetic about possible collateral damage from his campaign for euthanasia for people suffering from terminal illness and loss of autonomy. ''There will be some casualties… but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' he said. ~ The Age, Feb 15
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8851/
Nitschke unapologetic about collateral damage
posted by Michael Cook | 16 Feb 2010 | Comments
Finally, a key performance indicator for Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke! In Australia, after recent legislation, it is illegal to promote assisted suicide in print or on the internet, so it is hard to measure how successful he has been. However, recent figures from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine show that 51 people throughout the country have died after taking Nembutal, his drug of choice, in the past 10 years.
Somewhat embarrassingly for Dr Nitschke and his organization, Exit International, six people in their 20s and eight in their 30s had died of Nembutal poisoning. Because this drug is illegal in Australia for human consumption, Dr Nitschke has been encouraging people to smuggle it in from overseas, mostly from Mexico, or to manufacture it themselves. The most pessimistic interpretation of the figures is that 14 young people who were not terminally ill discovered how to obtain lethal doses of the poison from Exit members.
However, the figures, which were generated for The Age newspaper in Melbourne, are difficult to interpret, because only 38 of the 51 cases were thoroughly examined by a coroner. And the total could be higher, as it includes only those which emerged from a search of a national database. Of the 38, only 11 were suffering from a serious physical illness. Of the 51, nearly two-thirds were under 60. Without a more detailed knowledge of the cases, the data strongly implies that most of the people who used Nembutal to kill themselves were either mentally ill or just weary of life.
Typically, Dr Nitschke was unapologetic about possible collateral damage from his campaign for euthanasia for people suffering from terminal illness and loss of autonomy. ''There will be some casualties… but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' he said. ~ The Age, Feb 15
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Report: No crime wave among Hurricane Katrina evacuees
Ironic this coincides with something my friend Judyth and I are writing in our Book on political ponerology! The media reported hell on earth so they could get it for the puppet masters! It was a third-person way to kill off a bunch of 'useless eaters'!!! I'm thinking of starting my 104th blog and call it 'The MADNESS of IT ALL'!!!
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-02-12-hurricane-katrina-crime_N.htm
Report: No crime wave among Hurricane Katrina evacuees
Dan Vergano
USA Today
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:47 EST
Hurricane Katrina didn't lead to a massive crime wave in evacuee cities, report criminologists, despite news reports and police warnings at the time.
In the current Journal of Criminal Justice study led by sociologist Sean Varano of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., the authors look at statistics for robbery, rape, murder, car theft and other violent crimes in Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix before and after Katrina evacuees arrived in those cities. The 2005 storm, which killed about 1,800 people and caused more than $80 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, led to the relocation of more than one million people.
Houston received about 240,000 evacuees (a 7% population increase); San Antonio, about 30,000 (a 3% increase); and Phoenix, about 3,000 (less than a 0.5% increase). The cities were selected for the study due to their spread of evacuee impact. "Public officials and news reports suggested a criminal class was arriving in these places," Varano says. After welcoming evacuees, Houston handles spike in crime, was a 2006 headline in The Washington Post.
"But if there was any effect, it was a modest one," Varano says, after his group weighed police crime data from the three cities to look for trends for each crime from 2004 to 2006. The study found a slight rise in murder and robbery in Houston, when adjusted for the long-term crime patterns, but no increase in other crimes (and suggested drops in rape and aggravated assaults); no effect at all in San Antonio; and another slight statistical rise in the murder rate in Phoenix. "Any increase in murder is intolerable," Varano says, but a lack of increase in crimes such as car theft and robbery, where economic motives most clearly would tempt so many displaced people, argues against a crime wave driven by evacuees, he says.
Meanwhile, "Many communities across the United States ... also reported increases in violent crime between 2004 and 2006," notes the study, including a 30% increase in aggravated assault in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.
A crime wave spawned by evacuees is typical of "disaster myths" seen after catastrophes, such as the mythical Superdome riots reported in the days after the hurricane, says disaster management scholar Joseph Trainor of the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study. "This is a very strong study showing long-term effects and (showing) people's resiliency after a disaster."
Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti almost always spawn fears of riots or criminality, seen in some early reports from Port-Au-Prince. But on Jan. 18, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, told a news conference, "we have seen nothing that suggests to us that we have widespread disorder; no sense of widespread panic."
"Fifty years of social science show people are not victims of disasters, they are survivors," Trainor says. "People are adaptive and altruistic, mass rioting and mass looting are just disaster myths for the most part."
The crime data study, gathered from public police records, can't indicate whether Katrina evacuees were perpetrators, victims or uninvolved in the increased murders. And it can only talk about the three study cities, not the situation elsewhere, Varano acknowledges. But he suggests there are some lessons raised by the findings.
"One lesson is that after disasters we have to think about where evacuees land, and not just the disaster site itself," Varano says. He argues that crime rate changes after displaced people arrive in a city like Houston or Phoenix tells us more about the conditions at the arrival location than about the displaced people themselves. Strong communities undoubtedly handle influxes of evacuees better than already weak ones, he says.
"Another is that public officials, and news organizations, have a responsibility to speak very carefully about the reality of disaster situations," Varano concludes. "There's a danger of host cities not wanting to accept people in desperate straits because of false perceptions."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-02-12-hurricane-katrina-crime_N.htm
Report: No crime wave among Hurricane Katrina evacuees
Dan Vergano
USA Today
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:47 EST
Hurricane Katrina didn't lead to a massive crime wave in evacuee cities, report criminologists, despite news reports and police warnings at the time.
In the current Journal of Criminal Justice study led by sociologist Sean Varano of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., the authors look at statistics for robbery, rape, murder, car theft and other violent crimes in Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix before and after Katrina evacuees arrived in those cities. The 2005 storm, which killed about 1,800 people and caused more than $80 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, led to the relocation of more than one million people.
Houston received about 240,000 evacuees (a 7% population increase); San Antonio, about 30,000 (a 3% increase); and Phoenix, about 3,000 (less than a 0.5% increase). The cities were selected for the study due to their spread of evacuee impact. "Public officials and news reports suggested a criminal class was arriving in these places," Varano says. After welcoming evacuees, Houston handles spike in crime, was a 2006 headline in The Washington Post.
"But if there was any effect, it was a modest one," Varano says, after his group weighed police crime data from the three cities to look for trends for each crime from 2004 to 2006. The study found a slight rise in murder and robbery in Houston, when adjusted for the long-term crime patterns, but no increase in other crimes (and suggested drops in rape and aggravated assaults); no effect at all in San Antonio; and another slight statistical rise in the murder rate in Phoenix. "Any increase in murder is intolerable," Varano says, but a lack of increase in crimes such as car theft and robbery, where economic motives most clearly would tempt so many displaced people, argues against a crime wave driven by evacuees, he says.
Meanwhile, "Many communities across the United States ... also reported increases in violent crime between 2004 and 2006," notes the study, including a 30% increase in aggravated assault in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.
A crime wave spawned by evacuees is typical of "disaster myths" seen after catastrophes, such as the mythical Superdome riots reported in the days after the hurricane, says disaster management scholar Joseph Trainor of the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study. "This is a very strong study showing long-term effects and (showing) people's resiliency after a disaster."
Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti almost always spawn fears of riots or criminality, seen in some early reports from Port-Au-Prince. But on Jan. 18, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, told a news conference, "we have seen nothing that suggests to us that we have widespread disorder; no sense of widespread panic."
"Fifty years of social science show people are not victims of disasters, they are survivors," Trainor says. "People are adaptive and altruistic, mass rioting and mass looting are just disaster myths for the most part."
The crime data study, gathered from public police records, can't indicate whether Katrina evacuees were perpetrators, victims or uninvolved in the increased murders. And it can only talk about the three study cities, not the situation elsewhere, Varano acknowledges. But he suggests there are some lessons raised by the findings.
"One lesson is that after disasters we have to think about where evacuees land, and not just the disaster site itself," Varano says. He argues that crime rate changes after displaced people arrive in a city like Houston or Phoenix tells us more about the conditions at the arrival location than about the displaced people themselves. Strong communities undoubtedly handle influxes of evacuees better than already weak ones, he says.
"Another is that public officials, and news organizations, have a responsibility to speak very carefully about the reality of disaster situations," Varano concludes. "There's a danger of host cities not wanting to accept people in desperate straits because of false perceptions."
Friday, February 12, 2010
US babies mysteriously shrinking
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18434-us-babies-mysteriously-shrinking.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn18434
26 January 2010 by Ewen Callaway
Magazine issue 2745.
Birthweights in the US are falling but no one knows why, according to a study of 36.8 million infants born between 1990 and 2005.
A 52-gram drop in the weight of full-term singletons – from an average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms – has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads. It can't be accounted for by an increase in caesarean sections or induced labours, which shorten gestation. What's more, women in the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy, which should make babies heavier. Oken suggests that unmeasured factors, such as diet or exercise, could explain why babies are being born lighter.
"For your average baby, 50 grams probably makes no difference at all," she stresses. But those born substantially lighter could be at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.
Journal reference: Obstetrics & Gynecology, DOI: 10.1097/aog.0b013e3181cbd5f5
26 January 2010 by Ewen Callaway
Magazine issue 2745.
Birthweights in the US are falling but no one knows why, according to a study of 36.8 million infants born between 1990 and 2005.
A 52-gram drop in the weight of full-term singletons – from an average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms – has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads. It can't be accounted for by an increase in caesarean sections or induced labours, which shorten gestation. What's more, women in the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy, which should make babies heavier. Oken suggests that unmeasured factors, such as diet or exercise, could explain why babies are being born lighter.
"For your average baby, 50 grams probably makes no difference at all," she stresses. But those born substantially lighter could be at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.
Journal reference: Obstetrics & Gynecology, DOI: 10.1097/aog.0b013e3181cbd5f5
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