The danger of denying history

In all, between 200,000 and 250,000 mentally and physically handicapped persons were murdered from 1939 to 1945 under the T-4 and other "euthanasia" programs.

This was referred to as murder of the unfit.

Forced sterilization of persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation ("congenital feeble-mindedness"), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism was the forerunner of eugenics. Killing those who were a burden on society was used to justify " the systematic killing of the mentally ill and the handicapped. In October 1939, Hitler himself initiated a decree which empowered physicians to grant a "mercy death" to "patients considered incurable," not to alleviate suffering but to cleanse the Aryan race by eradicating those considered to be genetically defective.

After I read Meredith Gould's blog over the past week and what she refers to as the Williamson snafu, and the "toxic, pernicious and woefully durable nature of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism", I spoke to her about my need to join in solidarity and speak up about how this is a larger issue, one about how we treat human beings.

When Meredith writes that Williamson has said out loud what far too many others think privately relative to the Shoah and Jews , I think of the reactions I get when I write about disability and eugenics and disability and laws for assisted suicide. There is a great deal of denial about what is going on.

Stephen Drake over at Not Dead Yet writes that the worldwide euthanasia movement doesn't have an interest in limiting "eligibility" for euthanasia or assisted suicide to people who are "terminally ill," but typically introduce legislation as a "door-opening" strategy. In fact, here in the U.S. the latest move - in New Hampshire - is an attempt to redefine "terminal condition" to encompass any "incurable" condition that will result in "premature death."

The word "incurable" was applied to disabled people during the Holocaust. As Stephen Drake points out, having any kind of spinal cord injury lowers one's life expectancy so yours truly would be included, and this language would include many disabled people.

Those who deny the Holocast deny the history and the truth of those who suffered and died. Worse yet, they deny the ongoing and "woefully durable" anti-Semitism and - yes - ableism that dehumanizes people and devalues their lives.


[image description: Taken from Chewing the Fat, it shows the symbol worn by those with disabilities in the concentration camps. It is a ' black triangle (for asocial) with a white strip of cloth with the word BLOD (stupid) written on it'.]