March
23, 2005
The Palm Sunday Rescue
By
Patrick Buchanan
Had
Congress and President Bush not returned to Washington on
Palm Sunday, America would have sent this message to the
world:
Ours
is a nation where a judge may not sentence Beltway sniper
John Malvo to death, because he is too young to die, but
can sentence Terry Schiavo to death, because she is too
severely handicapped to live.
Before
the Palm Sunday rescue, Schiavo was scheduled to die by
starvation and dehydration, a method of capital punishment
most would consider criminal if done to a pet.
This
was the method used at Auschwitz to murder Father Maximilian
Kolbe, the priest who volunteered to take the place of a
Polish father of a large family, who was one of 10 the camp
commandant had selected for execution in reprisal for the
escape of a prisoner.
After
being starved and dehydrated for days, Kolbe was injected
by his Nazi captors with carbolic acid. He died a martyr's
death, said the church that canonized him. That is what
would have happened to Terri. Only she would have been denied
the lethal injection by those watching her die.
That
there arose a national outcry at the execution of Schiavo
-- so loud Congress and President Bush heard it and came
to the rescue -- is a sign America is not morally dead ...
yet. But a culture of death has taken deep root in America's
soul.
One
wonders if our young, so many of them cheated of a knowledge
of history in schools they are forced to attend, are aware
of how closely our elites approximate, in belief and argument,
the elites of Weimar and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
In
1920, Dr. Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at the University
of Freiburg, and Karl Binding, a law professor at Leipzig,
authored "The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life."
They urged a national policy of assisted suicide for those
"empty shells of human beings" -- the terminally ill and
mentally retarded, and those with brain damage and psychiatric
conditions.
In
October 1933, The New York Times quoted the Nazi minister
of justice as saying that ridding Germany of such poor creatures
would make it "possible for physicians to end the tortures
of incurable patients, upon requests, in the interests of
true humanity." "If we desire a certain type of civilization,"
said George Bernard Shaw, "we must exterminate the sort
of people who do not fit in."
In
researching "The Death of the West," I discovered that the
first episode of publicized "legal" killing of an innocent
was the case of "Baby Knauer." The father of the little
boy, who was blind, retarded and missing an arm and a leg,
appealed to the Fuhrer for permission to have his son put
to death. Hitler referred the matter to his physician, Karl
Brandt. In 1938, permission was granted.
When
war came in 1939, a program code-named "Aktion 4" went about
systematically eliminating all "life unworthy of life" in
the Reich. By 1940, scores of thousands had been put to
death. Then, Bishop Clemens von Galen took to the pulpit
of Munster Cathedral to damn Hitler's regime for "plain
murder" and direct German Catholics to "withdraw ourselves
and our faithful from their (Nazi) influence so that we
may not be contaminated by their thinking and their ungodly
behavior."
"Aktion
4" went underground. One of its graduates, Franz Stangl,
would turn up two years later as commandant of Treblinka.
After
the war, the German doctors who had carried out Hitler's
orders in violation of the Hippocratic Oath were judged
guilty of "crimes against humanity." The Dutch doctors who
refused to cooperate in the Nazi program of eliminating
"life unworthy of life" during the occupation of Holland
were placed among the moral heroes of an immoral era.
Ironically,
as the protest to save Schiavo built up steam over the weekend,
The New York Times in its "Saturday Profile" warmly featured
another Dutch doctor. Dr. Eduard Verhagen has, said the
Times, become famous in Europe for having "presided over
the medically induced deaths of four extraordinarily ill
newborns."
"For
his efforts to end what he calls unbearable and incurable
suffering," wrote reporter Gregory Crouch, "Dr. Verhagen
has been called Dr. Death, a second Hitler and worse --
mostly by American opponents of euthanasia."
Verhagen
describes himself as a bearer of peace and happiness to
children. When these suffering little ones die, he says,
"the child goes to sleep. ... It's beautiful in a way. ...
They're children who are severely ill and in great pain.
It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first
time. You see their faces in a way they should be for the
first time."
Franz
Stangl could not have put it better. Hitler's doctors may
prove to have been the medical pioneers of 21st century.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
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