Easy “E’s”: Eugenics, Euthanasia and Extermination (A Message from the Past to the Future)

 

With technological advances leading some analysts to conclude that the future will feature a largely  “employment-free” world, the concept of a “universal basic income” has taken hold in some circles. Concluding that all people will be given a “workable” sum with which to live, adherents of the concept envision a quasi-utopian world.

We fear the development of something far more dystopic. With the continued popularity of the austerity agenda, despite strong evidence that it is counter-productive, we fear that a largely “employment-free” environment will lead to the elimination of human beings seen as “superfluous.”

The Third Reich’s extermination programs have been popularly viewed as aberration, an occurrence that was separate from “normal” political and historical events. This is not the case. Murderous Nazi racial and social policy were the outgrowth of mainstream intellectual trends that are very much with us today.

At the epicenter of the intellectual nexus underpinning the Nazi extermination programs are the overlapping international eugenics and international mental hygiene movements. Seeking to promote the “right kind” of mental development, the international mental hygiene movement promoted the elevation of the right kind of genetic makeup as a means of realizing its goals. In turn, terminating people born with disabilities, people who were old and poor, sterilizing those with psychological disorders and those with chronic illnesses, advocates of euthanasia paved the way for the Third Reich’s T‑4 extermination program.

In time, the T‑4 program yielded the broader-based Nazi extermination programs, as those trained in the euthanasia institutions “graduated” to positions in the extermination camps, having acquired the necessary skills and demeanor.

Josef Mengele’s Auschwitz work with twins in many ways highlighted the evolution of mainstream eugenics research. Long preoccupied with the study of twins, eugenicists celebrated the Nazi dictatorship for its ability to use coercion to achieve their objective of detailed, intensive research of the subject.

Lavishly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation well into the tenure of the Third Reich, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were the primary focal point of eugenics research on twins. Mengele conducted his brutal, lethal research at Auschwitz in conjunction with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and his intellectual mentor at that institution, Dr. Freiherr Otmar von Verschuer, filling out paperwork for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for each of the sets of twins on which he experimented before proceeding with his work.

With physician-assisted suicide legislation gaining in many places, at the same time as the austerity agenda continues to be popular in elite economic and social planning circles, we should be on the alert for lethal, and altogether “final” solutions to the problem of large numbers of economically displaced people.  (more...)

Easy “E’s”: Eugenics, Euthanasia and Extermination (A Message from the Past to the Future)