(This article was first published
in a London Community weekly ‘New World’ on the 15 May
1995. The discussion is still relevant for our times)
“Reichsfuhrer BOUHLER and Dr.
Med. BRANDT are responsibly commissioned to extend the authority of
physicians, to be designated by name, so that a mercy death may be
granted to patients, who, according to human judgement are incurably
ill according to the most critical evaluation of the state of their
disease.
(Signed) Adolph Hitler On 1st September
1939”.
“If a physician presumes to
take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not,
the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most
dangerous man in the state”
Dr. Christoph Hufeland (1762 –
1836)
A hospital physician, in England,
was convicted, some years ago, of attempting to kill a patient, suffering
severe pain from a chronic physical illness, by injecting her with
potassium chloride. No sooner had the judge’s voice, pronouncing
sentence, died down, when the mind-managers of Britain’s obsequious
media began preparing the ground for the proselytizing of the concept
of euthanasia, through calls for, what was euphemistically termed,
a “change in the law”.
Euthanasia has been defined as the
act or practice of killing individuals, who are judged incurably ill
or injured, for reasons of mercy. This article puts the case for those
who believe that there has always been a hidden agenda in the calls
for “mercy killing”.
Hitler’s directive as quoted
above this article’s headline was addressed to Philip Bouhler,
chief of Hitler’s Chancellery, and to Dr Karl Brandt, Hitler’s
personal physician at the time, and Reich Commissioner for Health.
This measure was aimed at the Germans themselves; it was quite separate
from those dealing with the extermination of “inferior races”.
At the end of the war, Bouhler committed suicide; Dr Brandt was later
sentenced to death and executed.
There are approved medical regimes
for the treatment of chronic, intractable or disabling pain. In severe
cases, pain relief is a team effort, drawing on the expertise of specialists
from different disciplines.
Over the years, the elderly disadvantaged,
especially, have become increasingly invisible in society. In the
earlier post-war decades, when the conscience of society had not yet
been so brutalized, the question of the social well-being and financial
security of old-age pensioners had always been a high priority on
the oligarchy’s political agenda. Much prominence was given
to the arguments over the adequacy or otherwise of the sums of money
allotted to the elderly on which they were to live out the last years
of their lives, after a lifetime of useful contribution to family
and society.
There is no doubt that in times of
what is known as an economic recession, itself a characteristic of
the capitalist boom-bust robber economy, Britain’s hegemonic
power elites consider the chronically ill and the elderly as a non-productive
embarrassment, if not a downright nuisance, scarcely entitled to their
tiny share of the nation’s grossly maldistributed wealth. However,
before euthanasia can be made respectable, considerable time and effort
must, of course, be invested in preparing the psychological ground
for its acceptance by the populace. And this is, of course, where
the media plays its role, its role, that is, in the manipulation and
preparation of packaged consciousness. Britain’s media managers
create, process and preside over the circulation of images and information
which determine our attitudes and, ultimately and sadly, our beliefs.
It was the anti-imperialist, Paulo
Friere, who said that the manipulation of human minds is an instrument
of conquest. It is one of the means by which the power elites try
to conform the populace to their objectives and secure popular support
for a social order that is not in the real interests of the citizenry;
all alternative social arrangements are excluded from consideration.
Friere went on to say that it is only when the people begin to emerge
from the historical process that the elites resort to manipulation.
Prior to the emergence of the people there is total suppression –
the total restraint and subjection of the individual – and there
is, therefore, no need for manipulation. The controllers of the social
order have, since colonial times, effectively manipulated the white
population at home, and suppressed the black and brown populations
both at home and in the captive lands abroad. It was a medical doctor,
Frederic Wertham, who said that fascism and colonialism are two sides
of the same coin: colonialism is fascism abroad and fascism is colonialism
at home.
The normal functioning of the market
system results in the permanent division of society into two broad
categories of “winners” and “losers”; these
divisions persist as the result of the recognition, maintenance and
sanctification of the system of private ownership of productive property
and the extension of the ownership principle to all other aspects
of human existence. And while we are on the subject of the market
system, let us identify some of the oligarchy’s newspeak/doublespeak,
for example:
“market economy” should read “robber baron, buccaneer,
piratical dog-eat-dog, devil-take-the-hindmost economy”.
“scarce resources” should read “gross maldistribution
of the country’s wealth”.
“no more money in the kitty” (of the NHS, that is) should
read “much of the funds have been spent in paying for the hidden
subsidies to the private sector and for the super-profits of the multinational
pharmaceutical and medical supply industries, respectively”.
“Britain is a multiracial society” should read “Britain
is a multiracist society”; reference will be made in future
articles to the British ruling oligarchy’s ferocious war of
attrition against the intellectuals of the racial minority communities.
“free choice” should read “the financial elites
make the choices, and you are free to decide whether you wish to care
for your health, or not”.
“service economy” should read “the master-serf society
of a new feudal order”, and so and so forth.
No central government think-tank or
cultural committee draws up secret instructions for the daily mental
programming of the British people. The process is far more elusive
and far more effective simply because it generally runs without central
direction. It is embedded in the unquestioning but fundamental socioeconomic
arrangements that first determine, and then are reinforced by, property
ownership, division of labour, racial stereotyping, the organisation
of production, and the distribution of income. These arrangements,
established and legitimised over a very long time, have their own
dynamics and produce their own inevitabilities.
Doctors would doubtless play a key
role in the implementation of euthanasia. This was indeed what occurred
in Germany during the grim days of the Third Reich. It would do, therefore,
to ask ourselves the question: what kind of men and women become doctors
in Britain today? British doctors tend to demonstrate the following
characteristics: academically, they end to show a predilection to
study subjects that involve a great deal of detail; they exhibit traditional
attitudes toward stratification in British society; they identify
with the powerful groups in society; they have a deep mistrust of
racial minorities, ( a few years ago, a common saying at a famous
London teaching hospital group was “ white children are born,
black children are bred”); and the doctors demonstrate a tough-minded
attitude toward people in general, with a lack of sensitivity to their
feelings. British doctors tend to favour corporal and capital punishment
and to reject attitudes of tenderness and displays of emotion. Hospital
consultants regard patients as an outgroup whose needs do not coincide
with those of the doctors. This pattern of attitudes and behaviour
is associated with a great deal of the dissatisfaction that patients,
especially racial minority patients, experience in their dealings
with British doctors.
Doctors may act on behalf of the state
apparatus either in a formal or in an informal setting. Furthermore,
many medical decisions may have important political or social implications,
even though the doctor himself may be acting as an “independent”
professional. A doctor may prescribe tranquilizing drugs as a means
of suppressing a person’s distress with an unjust social system;
a doctor may advise a person to undergo a brain operation that that
may permanently alter his mental state; or a doctor may commit a person
against his will to a psychiatric unit. Even in the National Health
Service of the 1990’s, the British medical profession is extraordinarily
powerful; self-preservation and the pursuit of power come before service;
and the even more privileged inner circle of doctors enjoys great
prestige, influence and affluence (total income in the region £300,000
per annum – ‘The Guardian 1 October 1992), without the
need to be accountable to either their patients or the public.
Dr Maurice Pappworth’s book,
‘Human Guinea-pigs’, is a classic on the experimentation
that has been undertaken on National Health Service patients in Britain.
Dr David Sanders in his book, ‘The Struggle for Health’,
states that “…..coercion has been employed in persuading
racial minority mothers both to have abortions and to be sterilized….”
The medical profession was also complicit in racist ‘virginity
tests’ carried out on Third World women arriving, for the first
time, at Britain’s airports.
‘Women’s Voice’,
March 1979, also quoted by Dr Sanders in his book, in describing the
personal experience of a Third World woman who arrived at Heathrow
Airport to meet her fiancé, wrote…
“ I was sent for a medical examination
by immigration officials. A woman told me to take all my clothes off.
I was given nothing to cover myself with – no dressing gown
or blanket, although I asked for one. I waited like that for twenty
minutes.
“Then a man doctor came in.
I asked to be seen by a lady doctor, but they said no. I was most
reluctant to have the examination, but I did not know whether it was
normal practice here. So I signed the consent form. I was frightened
that otherwise they would send me back.
“The doctor was wearing rubber
gloves and took some medicine out of a tube and put it on some cotton
and inserted it into me. He said he was deciding whether I was pregnant
now or had been pregnant before. I said he could see that without
doing anything to me. I have been feeling very bad mentally ever since.
I was very embarrassed and upset. I had never had a gynaecological
examination before”.
The test was carried out at a time
when the British government claimed to have banned it. Such tests
(‘virginity tests’) would be intolerable even if they
achieved what they had been claimed to do. In fact they would not
prove whether a woman was pregnant and might not even prove whether
she was a virgin. Their purpose could only have been to humiliate
Third World women. None of the medical miscreants faced either medical
disciplinary proceedings or administrative tribunals or the civil
or criminal courts. Medical professional bodies in Britain, themselves
bureaucratic machines with the function of enforcing monopolistic
practices, have done harm to the health, welfare and happiness of
the racial minorities in the country.
It is not entirely coincidental that
the subject of euthanasia often crops up during periods of economic
downturn when the allocation of supposedly scarce resources becomes
the main preoccupation of medical and health administrators. It would
appear that, despite the humanitarian context within which the deliberations
are pursued, consideration of the subject (euthanasia) has more to
do with maintaining, perpetuating and even augmenting the wealth differentials
of an unequal and acquisitive society, than it has to do with the
relief of human suffering.
In the inter-war years, one Dr W.A.
Gould, writing in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy
, defended euthanasia as one way of resolving economic difficulties;
he asked his readers to recall in this context the “elimination
of the unfit” in ancient Sparta. In 1935, Nobel prize winner,
Alexis Carrel (inventor of the iron lung) suggested in his book, ‘Man
the Unknown’, that the criminal and the insane should be humanely
and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied
with proper gases.
In the local debate on euthanasia
between 1936 – 1941, the British Medical Journal carried on
a lively debate over this question. A common view in this country
then was that euthanasia should be considered an option for the (otherwise
healthy) mentally retarded. The nets were widely cast over questions
of who should live and who should die. In his book, ‘Marriage
and Morals’ (1927), Bertrand Russell himself asserted:
“It seems, on the whole, fair
to regard negroes as, on the average, inferior to white men, although
for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination
(apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable”.
Racism in Britain lies at the core
of every issue relating to power, economic production, culture and
society.
Anyone who has worked in the medical
field in the Anglophone world may have had personal experience of
doctors, nurses and medical attendants colluding in the death of patients,
usually children, who have been extremely impaired physically or mentally.
But those practices have been restrained by legal limits and strong
public reaction
To kill patients, even if one were
sure that they are incurable, is bad enough. Any legislation on euthanasia
would not, of course, give an order to kill, but it would give the
power to kill. Legislation would not give a command, but it would
give an assignment of authority and responsibility to a particular
group of persons, such as physicians, psychiatrists and paediatricians,
for example, to kill certain types of persons. Also, the acts of evil
men could be cloaked in scientific terminology, mystification, academic
respectability and rationalization. It could open the door to the
merciless destruction of helpless people by those who are supposed
to help them. If enacted, the laws on euthanasia would supposedly
apply to the most vulnerable groups in society, such as the elderly,
the terminally ill and the disabled. The laws would be asserting that
the lives of the weak are of less worth than those of others. The
term reserved for this in the Third Reich was “lebenunwertes
leben”.
Colonialistic and fascistic violence
are much more solidly and insidiously set in the social thinking of
the imperialists than is generally believed. Before society seeks
“a change in the law”, it should confront the crucial
problems, in the relation of science and medicine to society and politics,
of the value of all human life versus national and social policy,
and it should remember that behind all the veneer there is still a
great deal of savagery in the heart’s core of imperialist and
genocidist cultures.
