"ipsa scientia potestas est" 'knowledge itself is power' - Sir Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597)
"scientia potentia est" 'knowledge is power' - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1668)
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)
"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history,” - Winston Churchill, House of Commons (1935)
National Review, June 28, 2023
A new Canadian Medical Association Journal article updates recommendations for doctors to apply when euthanizing and organ harvesting non-terminally ill patients. The article was published in the wake of Canadian law now allowing patients who are not dying to ask for euthanasia — called “Track 2” patients in the article. (Track 1 patients, those whose deaths are “reasonably foreseeable,” have even more relaxed policies than Track 2.)
We must learn from history. Knowledge is power
This piece excerpted below from Catholic Culture focuses on the Nazi's treatment of the handicapped and disabled using the medical profession. But it also acknowledges that political opponents and dissidents, non-conformists, the disobedient, etc were often declared mentally ill, dangerous antisocials, and met the same fate as others with disabilities...and Jews and gypsies. All deemed undesirable by eugenicists. The eugenics movement grew with the euthanasia movement, hand-in-hand, inseparable. This is article is very long, even my excerpts are very long. But when you read it the parallels to our world since March, 2020 are unmistakable.
Which is why the powers that be immediately try to mock, shame, are appalled, become angry when you make the comparison to Nazi Germany, and even in pre-war US when the eugenics was legalized, desirable public policy, and Fascism was portrayed as an enlightened desirable form of government. They don’t want us to learn from history; they don’t want us to have the knowledge that gives us our power; they don’t want others to dare to learn what this history teaches. Learn it anyways. Share it anyways. Don’t let Godwin’s Law dissuade you from sharing this historical knowledge. Thought-ending appeals to Godwin’s Law are intended to silence comparisons that are dangerously true to the powers that be. Read these excerpts. The whole, powerful piece if you have the time. Even when your eyes well up with tears. It’s not supposed to lead to a happy ending. But we must know this, recognize this, so we can become authors of a different, happier ending:
Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany
Catholic Culture, 2002
"Second, because many of those with disabilities were now more visible through outpatient programs, their infirmities and their sometimes inappropriate or undesirable behavior were often considered a threat to public decency and social order. Accordingly, inappropriate public behavior by people with disabilities was often dealt with in terms of legal action and through the criminal justice system, thus melding disability and criminality in the public mind. Professional and public debate had raised the imperative of social control to prevent the proliferation of asylum inmates, including those with disabilities, whose characteristic behaviors were now firmly perceived to be at best undesirable and at worst criminal.
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It was at this point that the seeds of genocide were sown among professionals and ordinary German citizens alike. The juxtaposition of severe economic constraints, crowded asylums, the attachment of levels of economic viability to human worth, and the sense that people with disabilities formed a burdensome and often criminal element in society all significantly added fuel to ethical debates concerning euthanasia and sterilization. By the late 1930s, there was open discussion among many asylum administrators about actually killing inmates.
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However, in the 1890s the meaning of euthanasia in Europe, and especially in Germany, came to include two other aspects. First, the notion of a voluntary "right to die" was extended to mean that in some instances the request for euthanasia could be made by persons other than the suffering patient. Second, the extraordinary levels of care accorded the terminally ill and asylum inmates again raised the issue of negative human worth and underlined the possibility of involuntary euthanasia
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The distinction between voluntary euthanasia and involuntary killing was thus effectively eradicated, and an ominous term was coined for the first time: "life unworthy of life."
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By the early 20th century, scientists had amassed a great deal of pseudodata portending to show differences between individuals, genders, and ethnic groups by rank ordering any population trait from superior to inferior.
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In addition, levels of socially appropriate behavior (law-abiding, self-regulating, restrained, and conformist) were judged superior to socially inappropriate behavior (criminality or antisocial behavior. These and other classifications soon precipitated both informal social changes and more formal legal measures.
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Second, an offshoot of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, held that not only biological traits but also social characteristics and their resultant behaviors were genetically determined. Social Darwinism's ideas of difference, therefore, in the form of eugenics, appeared to have immediate and effective application for a number of societal problems, such as "hereditary" social traits (e.g., socially inappropriate or criminal behavior). Here the rationale was simple: All visible traits of human difference were genetically determined. Thus, just as eye and hair color were genetically determined, so were drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and other socially inappropriate behaviors. A simple extension of these perceptions led to the idea that an effective way of controlling or eliminating these problems was by sterilization, incarceration, or death.
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Eugenics captured the imagination of researchers in Europe, England, and the United States. In the United States, politicians purportedly promoting the public good were quick to recognize eugenics as a powerful tool for shaping public opinion against people with disabilities. Such awareness fueled laws in many states for the involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities, the most famous case perhaps being that of a Virginia woman with mental retardation. Carrie Buck, named in the 1927 landmark Buck v. Bell case [Still US settled law today, in 2023, upheld as recently as 2003]
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Thus, eugenics asserted that the "feebleminded" (a generic, inaccurate term covering everything from mental retardation to alcoholism) were almost always so because of inherited inferior characteristics. From these assumptions, they "saw the cause of the social problems of their times, such as alcoholism and prostitution, as inherited feeblemindedness, and viewed the manifestations of poverty, such as intermittent employment and chronic illness, as a hereditary degeneracy"
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Also in 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals, a law that further blurred the distinction between bona fide criminal behavior and inappropriate social behavior that characterized many people with disabilities. The law stipulated that these criminal asozialen (asocials) could be committed to state asylums, held in indeterminate protective custody, and, in the case of sex offenders, officially castrated
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Hitler understood that state-sanctioned homicide would depend on other factors to severely curb public outrage until war became reality. The war, Hitler reasoned, would provide both a distraction and an excuse for officially killing those deemed undesirable. One such factor was the use of propaganda to convince the public of the desirability of some lives over others.
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To this point, Nazi involvement with mercy killing, while implicit, appears to have been muted and uninitiated by the state. However, social perceptions of disability had been radically modified, and requests for mercy deaths were increasing and were generally viewed as more acceptable, whether conducted by individual citizens or the state. Essentially, disability was widely acknowledged to be a legitimate justification for murder.
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Ironically, 1939 was the year designated by the Nazis as the year of "the duty to be healthy". The children's killing program was to report directly to Hitler's Chancellery through a front organization under the pseudoscientific moniker of the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illnesses. However, this impressive title belied its function, as it was headed by Hans Hefelmann, an agricultural economist. On August 18, 1939, prior to the German invasion of Poland, which began World War II, this committee produced a secret report, disseminated to all state governments, requiring all midwives and physicians who delivered infants with obvious congenital disabilities to register these children and the nature of the disability
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As added incentives, midwives were paid for every infant with disabilities so referred. Failure to report these cases resulted in substantial fines. This directive would also later require teachers to report these disabilities among their students in schools.
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Information on the registered children was returned to the Reich Health Ministry in Berlin, where a panel of three professionals — physicians, psychiatrists, or a disparate array of related professionals (such as ophthalmologists) — sorted the children's records into three groups....Children in the third group, designated by a plus sign on their records, were identified for "treatment", "disinfection," "cleaning," "therapy", or "selection", all Nazi euphemisms for extermination.
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Those designated for extermination were transferred to one of 28 facilities, among them several of Germany's oldest and most respected hospitals, where they were housed in specially designated killing wards. The Nazi authorities took great care to inform parents that their children would be safe in special wards at the clinics, which would "provide all available therapeutic interventions made possible by recent scientific discoveries". These assurances were always given with the caveat that such endeavors were also fraught with mortal risks.
There is little doubt that hospital staff were complicit in these endeavors.
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The methods of killing at the institutions varied. In some instances, children were simply starved to death, which was not considered ideal because it took too long. However, starvation did allow these murders less chance of detection. Other methods included allowing children to die of exposure in the cold German winters by turning off all heat in the institution. At several asylums, children perished after being administered chemical warfare agents. A more grisly approach involved a method reserved for children who were resistant to other poisons or, because of their disability, were unable to swallow the poison in pill form: fatal injections directly into the heart. The most popular lethal drug was Luminal, a barbiturate, closely followed by morphine for children resistant to the Luminal. These were usually administered in pill or liquid form. The genius of this form of homicide was the normally expected availability of these medications in hospitals. Also, some poisons killed indirectly over short periods of time by precipitating fatal medical complications that were then reported as natural causes of death. There is evidence that physicians exchanged information about the efficacy of various medications when they visited each other's institutions or met at the Reich Ministry of Health in Berlin.
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The murder of the children also followed a particular administrative and logistical course. As the condition of the child deteriorated following the fatal dose, the parents would be informed that their child was seriously ill, with a quick follow-up via a standardized letter announcing the child's death before parents could arrange to visit their sick child. This letter always noted that the child had died suddenly and unexpectedly of one of a number of diseases. Popular choices included brain edema and appendicitis. The favorite cause of death, however, proved to be communicable disease, which necessitated immediate cremation to avoid the danger of an institutional epidemic.
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In this action, patients from several asylums were rounded up, taken to nearby woods, and individually shot in the back of the head. Between 1939 and 1944, almost 13,000 Polish psychiatric patients were killed in this way. However, in such instances, it quickly became evident that the perpetrators' close proximity to the resulting gore exacted a heavy psychological toll that could be reduced only by using less grisly methods.
The logistical necessities involved in killing large numbers of asylum inmates were also problematic within Germany itself.
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A human experiment on the effectiveness of the gas was conducted in January 1940. A number of senior officials responsible for Aktion T-4, including many asylum directors and several others who would later make their names infamous at Auschwitz, gathered at a defunct prison near Berlin. Approximately 20 naked asylum inmates were herded into a prototypical gas chamber by psychiatric nurses. The enthusiastic onlookers watched closely as the inmates died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Eight further inmates were administered lethal injections, but when the poison had little immediate effect, these inmates were gassed as well. Buoyed by the dreadful success he had just witnessed, Viktor Brack, one of the top Aktion T-4 officials, victoriously declared the importance of using physicians to administer the gas through his oft-repeated motto: "The needle belongs in the hand of the doctor"
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Based on the logistical experiences of killing children with disabilities, similar administrative networks for registering the adult victims and the sham system of notification of next of kin were put in place. The euphemistically named Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums was the official unit responsible for hiring the killers and building staff, acquiring the gas, and later recycling gold teeth and selling jewelry from the dead. Another sham organization, the Community Patients' Transport Service, Ltd., transported asylum inmates from other institutions to the killing centers.
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Their identities were checked and they were closely observed by a physician, who attempted to match the size and appearance of the patient with a sham cause of death that was shortly to follow. Patients were then weighed, photographed, stamped with a number, and given a piece of cardboard with a corresponding number for retrieving their clothes later. Those who possessed gold dental work were further marked with an X on their backs. Others were also carefully marked if they were deemed appropriate for "scientific" autopsy after death. Most patients' fears were allayed by these seemingly routine medical procedures, which they had all undergone many times before.
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Concocted causes of death included the now familiar list: communicable diseases such as meningitis, which was possible in people of all ages; pneumonia, a common cause of death secondary to other serious diseases; and cases of stroke, a favored sham diagnosis among the elderly.
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There is little evidence that asylum directors openly opposed the killing of their patients. However, some questioned the legality of the program, and others deliberately avoided meetings that would have given them no choice but to become personally involved. Some quibbled with the accuracy and utility of the identification process. Scattered instances of delay, deliberate incompetence, and other forms of resistance also occurred. In spite of these efforts, reluctant asylum personnel were often reduced to making difficult choices of who would be taken to the killing centers and who would not.
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The Role of Science
A major impetus for Nazi ideology was its claim of legitimacy based on the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism, which drove perceptions of difference from benign recognition to active genocide. Not only was the pseudoscientific claimed as science (i.e., as established fact, data based, and replicated over time), but it was used as an instrument of deceit to perpetrate murder. On one hand, the appeal to "science" allowed the willing German intelligentsia to be more easily convinced to support and participate in brutality masquerading as research. On the other hand, the claims of Social Darwinism fed the public's long-held distrust of those who were different, whether racially or in terms of disability
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The enchantment of the intelligentsia with pseudoscience and the willingness of the public to seize pseudoscientific "facts" as legitimate knowledge remain problems in special education today, albeit in more benign forms. For example, the unfortunate history of facilitated communication (FC) eloquently demonstrates that fairly nonsensical ideas can be widely and enthusiastically embraced by people who should know better.
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The Power of Ideas
The events described in this article demonstrate the power of ideas and their consequences in the real world. In Nazi Germany, harshly prejudicial ideas toward people with disabilities replaced other, less extreme ideas. Eugenics, for example, did not appear in and of itself sinister, but it was quickly co-opted for nefarious ends. The idea of eugenics was dangerous to people with disabilities because it propelled action with scant regard for decency and compassion. In the marketplace of ideas, eugenics was embraced largely because it served a wider prejudicial purpose, namely, to control and then rid Germany of people deemed different, inferior, and asocial. The minority who resisted were soon silenced in the tidal wave of a demand for conformity to a master race superior to all others.
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Complicity of the Medical Professions
It is important to note that the enactment of prejudice against people with disabilities in Nazi Germany could not have succeeded without the complicity of the medical and adjunct professions. Power over life and death was placed firmly in the hands of physicians who became white-coated executioners, having long abandoned the "do no harm" clause of the Hippocratic Oath. Currently, there is evidence of the medical community's again being willing agents in hastening the deaths of people deemed not viable, including people with disabilities, through familiar methods for ending the lives of terminally ill people, such as starvation and death by thirst. Furthermore, there is evidence that "do no harm" is now viewed as a somewhat quaint throwback to a distant, less sophisticated era. For example, many physicians no longer take the Hippocratic Oath before beginning their careers, and many standard hospital treatment protocols now stipulate that staff physicians may override next-of-kin requests for patient treatment if the physician decides that treatment will likely be ineffective.
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Propaganda
The Nazis needed a means of influencing public opinion for more active perpetration of actions already planned. Propaganda became a useful tool. Nazi propaganda was created by many leading German artists, authors, and other creative persons impressed by the Third Reich, who lent their credibility and prestige to film, literature, and other public projects. Inexpert in matters of science, but eager to be on the cutting edge of issues of the day, many high-profile celebrities willingly embraced National Socialist dogma."
Hard stuff. And these are just excerpts. I encourage all to read the piece in its entirety. Tear-jerking. Real life experiences. Coming attractions?
In the definition of disability and undesirables, "useless eaters" from the piece above it included those who were non-conformists, asocial; disobedient, political opponents. Classified as mentally ill.
There's a new term in vogue amongst those self-imagined betters today known as "evidence-based reality." As in, the government's narrative. True or untrue as that may be. And challenging the government’s narrative is dangerous business. Getting more and more dangerous. As they’ve claimed our cognitive infrastructure, our ideas, as their legitimate space to control. Justifying their abusive censorship and propaganda campaigns, Twitter Files one of many recent reveals.
Aspen Institute on Information Disorder
About the Commission:
"3. How government, private industry, and civil society can work together in the short term to help protect underrepresented groups, and engage disaffected populations who have lost faith in evidence-based reality"
And these are the types of people who get to say what "evidence-based reality" is. A group of people who are impressive to each other and themselves. But not to anyone else.
So, if you engage in civil disobedience, oppose false government narratives about masks, jabs, elections, climate change, gender, etc. then you will be diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness. Because you've lost faith in evidence-based reality. You're dissociated from reality, e.g. insane. Maybe reeducation camps can help you with your illness? Or maybe not, and you'll be considered a useless eater.
Civilly disobey anyways. “Freedom isn’t free” isn’t just a slogan. Nor is “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.” Mankind doesn’t have freedom without bravery, there is a cost. If you believe in the promise of made by our forefathers, paid for with the price of blood throughout our nation’s (and the world’s history, heroes lying in national cemeteries, the precious gift we were handed by those who came before us, then this is our generation’s calling. The Greatest Generation. They didn’t seek the title. It was forced on them. When they were called to stand for freedom they stepped up and did what was needed. Now is our time to step up. Or forever hang our heads in shame, known as the most selfish and worthless generation that obediently placed ourselves into bondage. Our minds the yokes and chains of weaponized psychological jailers and tormentors promising they are here to help. (helpful links below)
Do not comply. Don’t fall for the conveniences of life that are bait for shackles like QR codes, digital implants, digital currencies, vax passports, none of it. Even if it means going without, missing fun events with friends, travel, etc. It’s a poor trade-off in the end. The stakes, like the Catholic Culture piece and the National Review piece show are far too great for humanity.
There are difficult times ahead. Times that mankind has endured many times in history. In my search for knowledge, my search for truth I have found my journey filled with many others coming from different origins, often with different destinations in mind. Many are on spiritual paths, guided by faith in God, his words as passed down through the ages in scripture. Truth-seekers and those seeking communion with God. Because God is truth, there is no deception in God. As our paths converge I see this truth coming into focus more and more clearly. As dire as these times are beginning to feel like, recognizing that biblical times are upon us will help lead us through the difficult times ahead. This is the most important lesson to learn from history of all.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/covid-imaginary-pandemic-of-the-brainwashed
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/sages-covert-coup-part-two-project-fear/
https://www.asianwarrior.com/2018/03/nudge-theory-and-the-pitfalls-of-behavioural-economics.html
https://obssr.od.nih.gov/sites/obssr/files/Social-and-Behavioral-Theories.pdf
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/MINDSPACE.pdf
https://behavioralscientist.org/executive-order-formally-establishes-us-nudge-unit/
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cass-r-sunstein/how-to-interpret-the-constitution/
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2953&context=lcp
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20200508.769108/full/
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2519&context=facpub
What a fantastic post, thank you so much!
Naomi Wolf wrote recently on what "Never Forget" should mean today. https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/this-jewess-says-rfk-jr-is-right