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Kill the Disabled – They Are Unworthy of Life

Posted by: candyekane October 6, 2006 in Uncategorized

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Thirty-five bodies were found earlier this week in a western German town. The Catholic cemetery in Menden, near Dortmund, was long rumored to be a mass gravesite of Nazi victims. Another hundred and sixty-five bodies are expected to be unearthed as excavation continues at the Catholic Church site. Most of the innocents were children, believed to have been victims of Hitler’s program of forced “euthanasia” that killed tens of thousands of people with mental and physical disabilities.

Around 70,000 people, deemed “unworthy of life” because of their disabilities, were murdered between autumn 1939 and summer 1941 and tens of thousands were murdered in the following years, usually by injections and drug overdoses in hospitals and sanatoriums supposed to protect them.

This grisly discovery begs the question; What took them so long to investigate? The burial site was the subject of more than sixty years of rumor from surviving eyewitnesses who remember bodies being transported daily. Some of the victims may have come from nearby Wimbern hospital built on the orders of Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt, who was in charge of the euthanasia program. Was it because these victims were disabled adults and children, that no one cared enough about them to investigate these heinous rumors? They had little or no voice in life and now they have had no voice in death, after more than sixty years! Astonishing!

For me, this story is especially compelling, as I get ready to embark on my tour of the Netherlands. This tour features the amazing talents of several special needs people who will sing and dance onstage with me in a star studded musical line up. These are Dutch young adults, with various levels of disabilities, yet they will take the stage with American blues musicians, singing in their second language of English, many performing original songs that they have composed themselves. How many disabled Americans could sing and compose songs in Dutch? How many so-called “normal” Americans could perform onstage in anything other than their native tongue? How many Americans can even remember the words to an entire song, all the way through, much less perform it, in front of hundreds of strangers?

I have been astounded at the capabilities of these so-called “disabled” people. They speak better English than many of my peers and the joy and spontaneity they experience through music clearly shows them to be more evolved than the average person. I know now that the words “special needs, disabled, handicapped and retarded” need a thorough re-evaluation.

As a Jew, I have long known of the horrific history of Nazi Germany and the ruthless cruelty that was imposed on six million innocent people. But too often, it is forgotten how many others were brutally murdered simply because they were old, gay or gypsies, or simply because they were born with a different looking body or another invisible obstacle. Now, with the United by Music tour days away, it makes this an especially poignant story. Knowing that these courageous and exceptional people may have been put to death during WWII simply because they saw the world through a different set of eye glasses, makes me feel even more honored to be part of the United by Music tour.

Next week, I will take the stage with gifted human beings who will share their talents with grateful audiences. I will take the stage in memory of the tens of thousands of people who were murdered just because they were different; The tens of thousands of victims who died without a voice. And the 200 special needs people who were discarded like so much rubbish in the mass grave behind the Catholic Church in Menden. May they all, finally, rest in peace.

discussion by Sidelines.

About candyekane

Baronius

Candye, I’d only add one qualification to your excellent comments. I hesitate to add it, because I’m sure it’s unnecessary in your case. The thing is, lauding the handicapped for their abilities can encourage the same kind of thinking you hate. The disabled person’s value is from his personhood, not his intact or hidden abilities.
http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/index.php?content=handicapped Disabled Rights Alliance

Kindly get your facts right before talking about the disabled. On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan “master race,” called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as 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. Incidentally it was more like 250,000 PWD who were murdered by the Nazis,not 70,000 as you reported. Steven Palmer ~DRA Advocate
http://giftedadults.wordpress.com Catana

Baronius, it seems that the only alternative, from your point of view, is total silence. Why should the handicapped be less entitled to praise for their abilities than anyone else? Of course, some people will look at them as not much more than performing monkeys, but why give that kind of mentality more importance than it deserves by denying praise to talented people?
candye kane

steven, my blog was an opinion piece not a news story. I guess according to you, I shouldnt have even written anything since I didnt have the right figures. whose side are you on?????
i guess i shouldnt have expressed an opinion about innocent people being murdered nor should I have talked about my project with the special young adults in holland. Youre right. I should have just shut up about the whole thing since my figures were way off base. whats your point? My figures came from an article in the UK daily news. perhaps I should have said “according to the UK daily news” but I am on the road in finland and felt it was more important to write the opinion piece and bring the issue into focus.
candye
candye kane

BTW steven , if you read my blog carefully it says “70,000 were murdered between the years 1939 and 1941″ and tens of thousands more were murdered after that. There really is no way to know exactly how many were murdered if mass graves are still being discovered decades later.

candye
Nancy

We don’t tolerate imperfection with animals or any other life forms; why should we then consider it such a sin to try to breed only the “best” qualities in humans, by allowing or encouraging those with severe disabilities or hereditary diseases to reproduce their conditions? By all means disabled persons who are born should not be discriminated against, let alone killed – that’s horrible – but I see no harm & only good in aborting a fetus that will result in a deformed or retarded individual. Most persons are not capable of the kind of special abilities necessary to raise such a child, and frankly the ones I’ve known have indeed been a drain on both their families and the increasingly scarce resources of society, which is a fact that needs to be recognized. In fact, it is for those very reasons that I myself decided not to marry or have kids, because I deemed it the better thing for me not to pass on inherited adverse genes – and I’m not alone, as I know at least 4 other people who have bypassed breeding for the same reasons.
Donnie Marler

Nancy, such selective breeding, had it been practiced through the ages, would have deprived the world of the contributions of some of the most brilliant people in history that suffered from mental illness, including Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Vincent Van Gogh, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, and Michelangelo.
As for this article, the correctness of the numbers is less important than the intent of the writer. Nicely done, Candye. Best wishes for the tour.
Clavos

Nancy # 6,

Actually, since we have abortion on demand, we CAN have selective breeding de facto; and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already going on.

The only diiference from what you’re proposing is that, right now it’s the parent’s, rather than the state’s call. Personally, I think it’s better that way.

If you empower the state to decide who gets to be born and who doesn’t, you’re opening a real Pandora’s box of ethical questions, not to mention the very real possibility of abuse.

Would you give GWB that power?
Nancy

No, and I wasn’t proposing state power to do so; just the wisdom of someone carrying to term a deformed or defective fetus, which they know will never be a “normal” child, or will have to endure terrible consequences from genetically inherited diseases.

Two of the sub-normal examples I had in mind that I know of personally, the defective children (two separate families) not only drain the families’ financial & emotional resources, but also take up the lion’s share of attention so that the other kids get little or nothing by way of attention, quality time, or financial resources from the parents, who have to spend all their time concentrating on the retarded/disabled one(s). The kids resent it, it’s obvious, but they also are made by parents & society at large to feel guilty for that resentment, and for wanting their fair share of attention & affection, which is grossly unfair to them. Neither of the defectives is ever going to be productive, socially or by any other measure; they exist strictly as a drain on all concerned, both the immediate families and society at large. While I certainly would not force the parents to have aborted, I do wonder at their concept of what having these defective children would entail, & the emotional havoc they’re creating with the other kids, to which they seem to be oblivious. It doesn’t seem right for them to have insisted on having these defectives, all things weighed and considered.
Nancy

I take that back: I propose both the state & individuals have the right to shoot & kill on sight all spammers like the one(s) currently messing up this blogsite.
Baronius

Catana – I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. My concern is that, by applauding the accomplishments of the less-severely handicapped, we’re only adjusting our criteria for “useless eaters”. I think of the Special Olympics as a model of right behaviour. They acknowledge everyone who does his best. The extent of the effort is rewarded, not the relative success. If I had do give an example of the worst possible thinking on this issue, it’d be Nancy (or at least what Nancy has posted; I’m hoping that she’s making some kind of tasteless joke).
http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/index.php?content=handicapped Disabled Rights Alliance

From: Disabled Rights Alliance
Kill That Cripple
by Ken Davis
from Mouth magazine
copyright 1995, Free Hand Press

And here we go again.

China’s rulers are soon to impose laws to “stop the prevalence of abnormal birth.” This is not about stopping the birth of able-bodied people capable of performing massacres in Tiananmen Square. No, apparently that is quite OK. By “abnormal,” they mean disabled people.

“China,” says the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing, now has “10 million disabled people who could have been prevented through better controls.”

This desire to get rid of mentally and physically different people runs like a thread through human history. The Alaskan Inuits killed impaired kids at birth, as did the Masai of Africa and the Woggeo of New Guinea. Greeks in the fourth century BC used to expose (leave out in the weather to die) their disabled infants.

The Bible doesn’t help much either. In Leviticus 21:18 for example, some twelve impairments – from restricted growth to ruptured testicles, are listed as being unacceptable to God whilst in 2 Samuel 5:8 He orders that those who are blind and lame “shall not come into the home.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest gave these ancient attitudes a new lease on life. In the capitalist jungle of Victorian England, social Darwinism and eugenics were soon invented to scientifically prove that, if the weakest went to the wall, such was the inevitable price of progress. Why bother to change society for the better when you had a scientifically legitimate way of getting rid of those who couldn’t keep up, who fell by the wayside?

Soon enough, dozens of organizations such as the National Association for the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded (1896) and the British Social Hygiene Council (1914) were set up in Britain to protect society from being polluted by undesirable elements. But it was the Eugenics Society which fought for legislation in Britain to eliminate racial poisons, to increase the better stocks, and to promote the purity of the race.

You get an idea of the pollution in the heads of these non-disabled ghouls when you look at the kinds of things they used to say. In 1931 the Eugenics Society Secretary, C.P. Blacker (cited in Jones, 1986, p.95) wrote to the Medical Research Council about the challenge to research presented by “four million persons (the 10% subcultural group in England and Wales) who are the purveyors of inefficiency, prostitution, feeble-mindedness and petty crime, the chief architects of slumdom, the most fertile strain in the community. Four million persons forming the dregs of the community and thriving upon it as the mycelium of some fungus thrives upon a healthy vigorous plant.”

Of course by “purveyors of social inefficiency,” they didn’t mean nice, upright people like themselves who propped up an unequal, discriminatory society hell-bent on the pursuit of profit and the exploitation of natural and human resources. No, they meant people like us disabled who were made dependent and unproductive by people who had created the kind of society which served and perpetuated their own non-disabled interests.

In England, the Eugenics Society failed to get enough members of Parliament to support their 1931 Voluntary Sterilisation Bill, but elsewhere in the world the message was getting through. In 1907 Indiana was the first of 30 American states to legalize the sterilization of a variety of disabled people and other “undesirables,” and similar laws were passed in Germany (1933-4), Canada (1928), Denmark and Sweden (1929), Finland (1930) and Iceland (1930).

It was of course in Germany that the lust for our blood was taken to its logical conclusion. Under the National Socialist Party, the 1933 Law on the Prevention of Congenitally Impaired Progeny and the 1935 Marriage Health Law legalized involuntary sterilization and required doctors to report known disabled people to the Sterilization Courts.

But it was Hitler who really set the ball rolling to sweep us off the face of the earth. On September 1, 1939, he issued a directive which gave authority to “certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgement, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.”

In effect, this legalized the so-called “euthanasia programme” under which, by 1941, some 200,000 disabled Germans had been systematically exterminated by doctors in six killing centers across the country, by a variety of means including poison gas, starvation and lethal injections of morphine or scopolamine. The bodies were incinerated; some centers installed conveyor belts to permanent on-site coke- or oil-fired furnaces, others used mobile furnaces later mobilized for use in the Holocaust. Disabled people were thus the guinea pigs which enabled eugenic “science” to find its fullest expression in genocide.

But it wasn’t the killing of disabled people that temporarily energized public morality, it was the larger-scale Holocaust, the murder of Europe’s Jews. Eugenicists have ever since had to tread very carefully in pursuing their ambitions. Nowadays, they manipulate language to make their ideas more palatable. Their Eugenics Quarterly has been renamed The Journal of Social Biology. The Annals of Eugenics has become The Annals of Genetics .

For “human stock” we now read “gene pool” and “genetic hygiene” is now known as “genetic counselling.”

Doctors today dress up methods of selecting out crips, methods like amniocentesis or ultrasound screening, as a form of reproductive choice for parents, even as being for our welfare. So-called sex selection techniques offer parents the choice of whether to bring males or females into their world.

Eugenicists are becoming more confident; some have suggested that genetic screening should be made compulsory before marriage. This is clearly less to do with reproductive choice, more to do with the eugenic control of certain types of people.

Disabled people are always at risk of fancy scientific ideas which allow old prejudices to strut around in the clothing of compassion, of new and desirable social advances. China’s recently-announced sterilization laws are just an old way, nicked from the West, to shift attention away from social, economic and political problems. Such problems, coupled with “scientific advances” and the general drift to the right in world politics, create the climate where the morally upright can openly campaign for the morally repellent.

This can be seen as much in the freedom with which pressure groups campaign for the legalization of euthanasia – as recently in the states of Oregon and Washington – or in judicial rulings permitting the switching off of food, water, and air to people in coma, and in the impunity with which Parliament feels that it is able to sacrifice disabled life in the form of potentially impaired fetuses in the passage of laws governing abortion.

Ten years ago the Derbyshire Coalition of Disabled People [DCDP] wrote the following into its Policy Statement: “The Coalition affirms the value of individual human life and the right of all impaired people to lead a full and satisfying life. To this end the Coalition opposes any attempt to legalise the withholding, on the grounds of a person’s impairment, of anything necessary to support the continuation of life. We will endeavor to identify the social causes which devalue life, and to find the means to remove these causes.”

We stand by it today. Today DCDP has affiliated with the Anti-Nazi League and the Anti-Racist Alliance. The rise of neo-nazism, the increasing numbers of disabled people being attacked on the streets of European cities, and the reversion to nationalism and territorial hostilities, show how easily the political climate essential for the re-emergence of the most extreme eugenic policies has come round yet again.

This article reprinted with permission from Info, the newsletter of the Derbyshire Coalition of Disabled People, and through the grace of Coalition, the magazine of the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, both of England.

DISABLED RIGHTS ALLIANCE
A Non-Government Organization
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
E-mail:

“Nothing About Us, Without Us…In The Internet Global Village”

The Disabled Rights Alliance is committed to providing a community focus of support, intervention and empowerment for people with disabilities.
The One Truth

Adults and children that have disabilities through their whole life will be viewed as “Disables” or “not normal people”. The PWD should live till death but I also agree with nancy, the embryos should be aborted if detected disabilities.
The One truth
http://thingsalongtheway.blogspot.com/ Cindy

Normal people suck. There appears to be something wrong with their ability to think clearly. For example, some people who wrote here make a good case for retroactive abortion. If everyone had the heart of any retarded person I have met, the world world be a loving place. Guess a loving heart isn’t valuable considering some of these comments. More like people prize brains which result in a more psychopathic personality. I’d think a pill for the likes of people like Nancy would be a good idea. They could call it the ‘decades after pill’.
candye kane

hello all,

I just came back from the world congress for down syndrome in Dublin, Ireland where I performed with my http://www.United by Music .eu project. We featured two down syndrome performers – Sujeet Desai of Syracuse, NY who plays clarinet, violin, piano and a host of other instruments and Hayley Rehbock of Capetown, South Africa who dances and emceed articulately. Both are down syndrome individuals. Both are amazingly bright and engaging as people and it was a privilege to see and hear them perform.

I am a pro-choice American and vehemently support a womans right to choose but in the case of the subject of my blog, the mass graves of the disabled in Germany, these people were already living human beings, outside of the womb, and were euthanized because of their disabilities. I do not want to engage in an abortion debate here on this blog. That is not the subject here. But I will say that seeing the amazing achievements of some of the down syndrome attendees at the conference made me appreciate the agonizing choice that a mother to be would have to make when faced with the decision of whether to abort or keep her down syndrome child. Seeing the contributions musically and personally of Sujeet and Hayley makes me ponder the pro choice question more closely. They are amazing human beings who made us laugh and cry with their humor and talent. They enrich their parents lives and the lives of those who know them. Their parents agonize over who will care for them, when the parents pass on, as Sujeet and Hayley will always stay emotionally and intellectually younger as the years go by and that is a real fear for many parents of disabled children. But being at the down syndrome congress and witnessing so many productive people begs the question “When is one human life more sacred than another?” and certainly, once that child is born and viable, outside the womb, he or she should be treated with dignity and justice as should every other human creature.
http://takeitorleaveit.typepad.com/ roger nowosielski

Great point, candye. Who are we to say what lives are more valuable than others?
Sindoor Desai

Dear Candye,

With your beautiful music but more than that your kind heart you touch thousands around the world every day . However with this article # 15 you in particular touch parents like me .Parents who are crying out loud to accept their children for their abilities rather than counting their disabilities and to judge where their place is in this world ?
If one human being cannot understand another human being who was created by one creator to name us “HUMAN with emotions ( Limbic system) and feelings “to differentiate us from” Animals without emotions ” then we really did not understand the message our creator has sent with us “of Equal Human rights” ………

Thank you Candye for being such a beautiful Human being to recognize human being like Sujeet & Hayley .

Sujeet’s MOM
http://ruvysroost.blogspot.com Ruvy

Candye,

Good to see you writing here again. There is a young lady in our village who has Downs Syndrome, the daughter of a neighbor of ours. She will always be a dependent on someone. Her health is fragile. Sometimes her comments just do not make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes one has to “consider the source”. But reading comments here, I wonder sometimes if “considering the source” is more applicable to people who are allegedly normal.

Our neighbor’s daughter is very artistic and her parents encourage her in any way they can. Love fills this girl, and she gives love whenever she can. Her soul, her neshamá, shines like that of an angel. I see her and comprehend why S’faradí Jews will often wash the feet of a retarded person in a synagogue, to honor the pure soul within. If only all Israelis had that much sense. If only everybody had that much sense and lovingkindness, what a wonderful world we would live in.

shabbát shalóm, u’sukkót saméaH;
g’mar Hatimá tová

Ruvy
Unconvinced

“Normal people suck,” humor me… what makes disabled people any better? If mentally disabled people could share the cognitive ablilites of the average human being, what says that they would act in way so much more wholesome and ethical than those who are deemed “normal.”

Anway isn’t the whole point to break down conceptions of the “pathological” and the “normal” at least to a point where you can’t drag abraham lincoln and beethoven into every argument about disabled people? I mean what happened to Foucault and the antipsychiatry movement?

Lets also not forget to celebrate the mothers and fathers and relatives of retards who suffer psychologically to pretend not to suffer in the face of the public. (however to simply suffer a retard is totally livable. It’s just one of those countless obscene aspects of life.)
Michael

Unconvinced, I guess my epilepsy and cerebral palsy make me unworthy of life in Nancy’s and your estimation? Because we all know that people with epilepsy and cerebral palsy are automatically classified as “retards”, as you put it sooo eloquently. In my case, my retardation is a 140+ IQ, which may very well be far less than it was going to be before the invetro stroke caused brain damage that led to the epilepsy and cerebral palsy. Give us all a break with you diatribe of hate of the disabled, and go spew your hate elsewhere. If only we could detect such hate like yours before birth so we could abort your sorry hide!
Peter Q Wolfe

I’m a twenty-five year old college senior in the states and mind you I’m legally blind as well. What would be the harm in us disabled people of not having genetical children to prevent a further drain on limited resources on the government? Mmmm, why not adoption or just not having children all together for that matter not just the disabled though but everybody for that matter? I ask this cause I firmly believe that our world Earth as we know is in peril from over population that I’d rather not see another Malthusian tragedy occur cause of global warming, arms race, extremism, etc. Attacking organized religion at its core that they cannot prove what is beyond this world can be for good starters. Another way of mentioning this is that taxing a source from dated technology or resources to renewable and cheap resources is the way forward as well just a thought
Leonardo de la Paor

America has slaughtered 50,000,000 young Americans in Abortion Camps since 1973!
LIAR

Peter Q Wofe is a liar. this is how I know. He is not living in the USA because nobody, nobody 0% of the population calls it “the states” only canadians/british people. Nice try with your fake comments.
N3R01211

I think it’s right to kill the disabled so that we can sustain life an not kill a many animals so that they can reproduce and not go extinct. With less people the world would be much better. All hail Hitler!!
dell

omg
- http://www.RoseDigitalMarketing.com/ Christopher Rose
  
  What a wonderfully insightful and moving comment; you have profoundly deepened my understanding of this. Thank you so much…

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Kill the Disabled – They Are Unworthy of Life

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