About that Holocaust so many think "never happened" We offer you PANDORA REVISITED.......

DRA 2005-12-11 06:52:31

A Canadian Book Review by, Wesley J. Smith

>From the National Review

PANDORA REVISITED

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a
Master Race ,

by Edwin Black

Edwin Black has written what may well be the best book ever published
about the American eugenics movement and the horrific events it
spawned. Combining exhaustive research, a very readable style, and just
the right touch of moral outrage, Black splendidly conveys the evil
depth and breadth of eugenics philosophy, the pseudo-science and social
theory that unleashed a half-century of war against society's most
vulnerable citizens.

Eugenics (the name means "good in birth") originated with an
English statistician named Francis Galton. Influenced by the
evolutionary theories of his cousin Charles Darwin, and also by Gregor
Mendel's genetic experiments with peas, Galton hoped to improve the
human gene pool through "positive eugenics," that is, encouraging
those he deemed to have the best genetic stock, i.e., people like him,
to marry and procreate bountifully. This may sound to some innocuous at
first blush, but, as history repeatedly has demonstrated, once we
accept the pernicious premise that some people are "superior" to
others - the core principle of eugenic thinking - we open the door
to great evils. The eugenicist who was first to move through that open
door was not Galton himself but Charles Benedict Davenport - one of
the true villains of the 20th century. As director of the Station for
Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., from its founding
in 1904 until his retirement in the mid 1930s, Davenport energetically
promoted eugenics. For three decades Cold Spring Harbor was
command-central for forces striving to "redirect human evolution,"
a euphemism for the war waged by the strong in America and other
countries against people with developmental and physical disabilities
and those with allegedly inheritable moral failings such as
criminality, alcoholism, promiscuity, and pauperism. (Cold Spring
Harbor was made possible by generous funding from the Carnegie
Institute. Carnegie realized the error of its ways only after Davenport
retired; it pulled the plug on its eugenics funding in 1939.)

Involuntary sterilization was the primary weapon that practicing
eugenicists wielded against those whom they judged "unfit." Indiana
in 1907 became the first state to legalize forced sterilization;
several other states followed suit. But it took a ruling by the U.S.
Supreme Court, the infamous Buck v. Bell (1927), to whip the winds of
eugenics into full hurricane strength. Black's 15-page rendition of
the profound injustice done to Carrie Buck by the very people in
medicine and law who should have protected her is heartbreaking. The
daughter of a prostitute, Carrie became pregnant, allegedly after being
raped by her foster cousin. After the baby's birth, her foster
family, who appear to have been exceptionally cruel, had Carrie
declared "feebleminded by the laws of heredity" and forcibly
institutionalized.

Virginia had just legalized eugenic sterilization. Here was a splendid
case for eugenic action: A woman whose prostitute mother was also
institutionalized for feeblemindedness had given birth out-of-wedlock
to an infant who would undoubtedly also be feebleminded. This was
precisely the kind of down-the-generations history that eugenicists
were determined to halt. But Carrie's tormentors saw an even greater
opportunity in her plight: They decided to make Carrie a federal test
case to gain explicit constitutional sanction for eugenic-sterilization
laws. Toward that end, they picked a well-known eugenicist to serve as
her lawyer: a man with close ties to Carrie's institution who had
himself approved many eugenic sterilizations.

Unfortunately, these predators got precisely what they were looking for
when the misanthropic Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for an 8-1
Supreme Court, eagerly ruled in favor of sterilizing Carrie Buck: "We
have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best
citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon
those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser
sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to
prevent our being swamped with incompetence . . . The principle that
sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the
Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

As we have seen many times in our history, Supreme Court decisions play
an important role in social leadership - toward moral redemption or
moral ruin, as the case may be. In this case, it was the latter: The
Supreme Court's imprimatur opened the eugenics floodgates. There had
been about 6,000 eugenic sterilizations in the U.S. between 1907 and
1927. By 1940, the total had climbed to nearly 36,000. By the time
eugenic sterilizations ended in this country in the 1970s, nearly
70,000 Americans had been sterilized, all under the color of law.

One of Black's most interesting sections details Margaret Sanger's
close ties to eugenics. Black is a fan of Sanger, believing her to have
been a "visionary reformer." He also unequivocally states his
support for Planned Parenthood (apparently ignoring that
organization's support for late-term eugenic abortion). Thus, he
clearly has no "pro-life" ax to grind, no desire to besmirch
Sanger's memory. This renders his clear and impeccably documented
recitation of Sanger's heartless eugenic beliefs and her tight
embrace of social Darwinism - she opposed charitable efforts to
assist the poor and downtrodden - all the more devastating.

"Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist," he writes, who
turned "her otherwise noble birth-control organizations into a tool
for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called
defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit, and draconian immigration
restrictions." Not only that, but Sanger engaged repeatedly in what
today would be labeled hate-speech, referring "to the lower classes
and the unfit as 'human waste' not worthy of assistance," and
proudly spouting "the extreme eugenic view that human 'weeds'
should be 'exterminated.'" Sanger apparently never shed these
odious beliefs; Black quotes speeches and comments she made in favor of
eugenics as late as 1953. Such attitudes - basically, a rejection of
the sanctity and equality of human life - led Sanger and many other
eugenicists to embrace euthanasia of the unfit as another means of
eugenically improving society, an approach that Black labels
"eugenicide." Some (although not Sanger) went so far as to advocate
the use of "lethal chambers" for the mass killing of the unfit.

Unfortunately, Black's chapter about the deep and abiding connections
between eugenics and euthanasia is his weakest. A man of distinctly
modernist instincts, Black strives to separate eugenic euthanasia from
mercy killing for reasons of pain and illness. But that is far easier
said than done: Permitting euthanasia of the seriously ill in the
Netherlands has led directly to the legitimization and legalization of
eugenic infanticide of babies born with disabilities. (According to a
1997 article in the British medical journal The Lancet, 8 percent of
all deaths of Dutch infants result from lethal injections by doctors.)
In Canada, Robert Latimer became a hero of the international euthanasia
movement - and of many in the Canadian general public - when he
murdered his 12-year-old daughter Tracy because she had cerebral palsy.
The trial judge even called Tracy's murder "altruistic." (For
those interested in a deeper exploration of the many ties between
eugenics and euthanasia, I recommend the recent book A Merciful End:
The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, by Ian Dowbiggin.)

Thankfully, the U.S. balked at implementing eugenic euthanasia. But, as
every reader knows, Germany did not: More than 250,000 disabled Germans
were systematically murdered between 1939 and 1945. What is less known
is that much of the inspiration for the Nazis' eugenic euthanasia did
not derive from Hitler's ideology; rather, he and other German
euthanasia advocates derived their inspiration from American
eugenicists - who provided their German counterparts with what Black
calls "the inspirational blueprints for Germany's rising tide of
race biologists and race-based hate mongers."

The result was the Holocaust - and Black does not shrink from it,
taking us on a harrowing journey through the eugenic horrors of the
Third Reich and into the very bowels of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It is
difficult reading, but it is a subject we must repeatedly engage if
"never again" is to remain more than a slogan.

For obvious reasons, eugenics faded from view after World War II. But
it was only hibernating. It has reawakened, Black warns, in the guise
of a utopian "newgenics," advocated by "self-ordained experts"
in bioethics and bioscience who urge that we harness the
nature-changing power of genetics and the energy of entrepreneurial
enterprise to once again chase in vain after the mirage of human
perfection.

Black's warning is well worth heeding. Over the last 30 years,
academics and bioethicists have espoused beliefs and attitudes that are
eerily reminiscent of those of Charles Davenport and his ilk, ideas
that now, like then, threaten the most weak and vulnerable among us. As
with the old eugenics, the new eugenics is led by the intelligentsia
and academic elite. Once again, the most respected foundations are
funding it. Today, the belief in the inherent moral equality of all
human life has been badly undermined by advocates who would judge human
moral worth upon subjective "quality of life" criteria. There is
even a nascent social movement called transhumanism, which advocates
seizing control of human evolution and creating a utopian
"post-human" future through genetic engineering, nanotechnology,
and cyber-modification of the human genome.

Many advocates of the new eugenics hubristically believe they can avoid
the horrors of the old eugenics. But the acorn does not fall far from
the tree. As Black's powerful history demonstrates, once the odious
notion that some of us are better than others of us achieves a critical
mass of legitimacy, inexorable forces are set in motion that drive
society with the implacable force of gravity toward the abyss.

-Mr. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and an
attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted
Suicide. His current book is the revised and updated Forced Exit: The
Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder.

URL Source Canada National
Review:http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/offSiteArchive/www.nationalreview.com/

Excerpt from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
URL Source: http://www1.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/deadlymedicine/

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE
NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE DISABLED: MURDER OF "The Unfit"

The Nazi persecution of persons with disabilities in Germany was one
component of radical public health policies aimed at excluding
hereditarily "unfit" Germans from the national community. These
strategies began with forced sterilization and escalated toward mass
murder. The most extreme measure, the Euthanasia Program, was in itself

a rehearsal for Nazi Germany's broader genocidal policies. It is
estimated that 275,000 adults and children were murdered because of
their disabilities.

Play video
Robert Wagemann
Describes fleeing from a clinic where, his mother feared, he was to be
put to death by euthanasia [1990 interview]

See more photos
Smoke rising from the chimneyt Hadamar, one of six facilities which
carried out the Nazis' Euthanasia Program. Hadamar, Germany, probably
1941. [Dioezesanarchiv Limburg (DAL), Papers of Father Hans Becker].
Dioezesanarchiv Limburg/UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM #86721a

>From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to "cleanse"

German society of individuals viewed as biological threats to the
nation's "health." Enlisting the help of physicians and medically
trained geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, the Nazis
developed racial health policies that began with the mass sterilization

of "genetically diseased" persons and ended with the near
annihilation of European Jewry.

The ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for
the destruction of the "unfit" was also applied to other categories of
"biological enemies," most notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies).
Compulsory sterilization and "euthanasia," like the "Final Solution,"
were components of a biomedical vision which imagined a racially and
genetically pure and productive society, and embraced unthinkable
strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within that vision.

Throughout this Special Focus page and its related links, you will see
translations of terms used during the Nazi regime; please note that
although many of these terms are unacceptable or offensive today, they
are included here as examples of Nazi terminology and the propaganda
campaign used to justify mass murder.

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE

Links:
Euthanasia Program

Gassing Operations

Mosaic of Victims

The Handicapped
(USHMM Library bibliography)

The Mentally and Physically Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era
(USHMM brochure)

Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany
(USHMM Library featured item)

The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
(USHMM Library featured item)

The Nazi Persecution of Deaf People
(Panel Presentation, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, August
2001)

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE

Helene Melanie Lebel
Born Vienna, Austria
September 15, 1911

The elder of two daughters born to a Jewish father and a Catholic
mother, Helene was raised as a Catholic in Vienna. Her father died in
action during World War I when Helene was just 5 years old, and her
mother remarried when Helene was 15. Known affectionately as Helly,
Helene loved to swim and go to the opera. After finishing her secondary

education she entered law school.

1933-39: At 19 Helene first showed signs of mental illness. Her
condition worsened during 1934, and by 1935 she had to give up her law
studies and her job as a legal secretary. After losing her trusted fox
terrier, Lydi, she suffered a major breakdown. She was diagnosed as
schizophrenic, and was placed in Vienna's Steinhof Psychiatric
Hospital. Two years later, in March 1938, the Germans annexed Austria
to Germany.

1940: Helene was confined in Steinhof and was not allowed home even
though her condition had improved. Her parents were led to believe that

she would soon be released. Instead, Helene's mother was informed in
August that Helene had been transferred to a hospital in Niedernhart,
just across the border in Bavaria. In fact, Helene was transferred to a

converted prison in Brandenburg, Germany, where she was undressed,
subjected to a physical examination, and then led into a shower room.

Helene was one of 9,772 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg
"Euthanasia" center. She was officially listed as dying in her room of
"acute schizophrenic excitement."

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE

Play video
U.S. soldiers inspect Hadamar. Hadamar, Germany, postwar
[Silent]

Patricia Heberer
Museum historian and subject matter expert [2002 interview]

Play audio
"...political and medical authorities began to divide their community
between its "fit" and "unfit" members."

Play audio
"...an idea that human heredity was fixed and immutable."

Play audio
"...the program would be a secret one and at first would target infants

and toddlers."

Play audio
"...within hours of her arrival she had perished, in the Hadamar gas
chamber, in May 1941."

Play audio
"...the medical community closed rank."

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE

AN OPEN SECRET

On July 14, 1933, the German government instituted the "Law for the
Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases." This law called for
the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered
hereditary, including mental illness, learning disabilities, physical
deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With
the law's passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda
against the disabled, regularly labeling them "life unworthy of life"
or "useless eaters" and highlighting their burden upon society.

The term "euthanasia" (literally, "good death") usually refers to the
inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill
individual. In Nazi usage, however, "euthanasia" referred to the
systematic killing of the institutionalized mentally and physically
disabled. The secret operation was code-named T4, in reference to the
street address (Tiergartenstrasse 4) of the program's coordinating
office in Berlin.

Ashes from cremated victims were taken from a common pile and placed in

urns without regard for accurate labeling. One urn was sent to each
victim's family, along with a death certificate listing a fictive cause

and date of death. The sudden death of thousands of institutionalized
people, whose death certificates listed strangely similar causes and
places of death, raised suspicions. Eventually, the Euthanasia Program
became an open secret.

On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a
decree compelling all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report
newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of

severe mental or physical disability. At first only infants and
toddlers were incorporated in the effort, but eventually juveniles up
to 17 years of age were also killed. Conservative estimates suggest
that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled children were
murdered through starvation or lethal overdose of medication.

DRA:file:///C:/DRA/Documents%20and%20Settings/%20Documents/Nazi%20era%20Holocaust/Disabled.htm

___________________________________________________

The Disabled Rights Alliance is a Canadian NGO, dedicated to the
support and empowerment of People With Disabilities. (PWD) People who
have suffered and continue to suffer under the weight of the world's
denial, of what happened to 275,000 PWD in Nazi Germany BEFORE they
murdered so many of Europe's Jews, it was called......A Holocaust.

D_R_A@telus.net