File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0112, message 25


Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 10:46:17 +0000
From: Paul Bowman <paulbowman-AT-totalise.co.uk>
Subject: RE: AUT: Euthanasia


>===== Original Message From Benjamin Franks <benjfranks-AT-hotmail.com> ====>'Euthanasia' is certainly a bit of a misnomer. In the ethical sense it
>refers to killing a person, but done supposedly in the victim's best
>interest. Hitler's euthanasia policy, whilst originating in the
>'mercy-killing' of a child with severe handicaps spread out to include other
>economic, racial and political undesirables. But not even in the pretence
>that it was in the victim's best interest.
>
Euthenasia is still confused with Eugenics. In Eugenics the aim is to protect 
the "health" or best interests of "society", rather than the individual. 
Euthenasia (along with forced sterilisation) is one of the tools in the 
eugenicists toolbox. Obviously since WW2 eugenics has suffered a bit of an 
"image problem", however that doesn't mean that it had been in any way 
eradicated from society as the recent exposures of post-war forced 
sterilisation programmes in the US, Scandinavia and other "western" countries 
shows. There is an unbroken strand of eugenics and "scientific" racism that 
extends from those who gave the Nazis some of their ideas, through WW2 right 
up to the modern period and the Murray Bell's, etc. Quite a lot of decent 
research work has been done on this topic - the Institute for the Study of 
Academic Racism (ISAR) is as good a starting place as any - 
http://www.ferris.edu/isar/homepage.htm . As far as books go I recall "The 
Legacy of Malthus" by Allen Chase being pretty good.

Stepping back from eugenics and the extreme right's influence on public policy 
(important as it is), the every day practice of "selection" is mainly carried 
on in our health industries. In the UK's NHS, elderly and frail patient's 
cards are routinely marked with "DNR" for "do not resuscitate". Old people are 
rountinely denied treatment that younger and healthier people can expect as a 
matter of course (e.g. hip replacements, organ transplants etc.). In a public 
health system, health rationing is the application of capitalist logic as to 
who gets treatment, who lives and who dies. Of course the calculation is 
expressed ideologically in terms of potential for increased "quality of life" 
rather than "productivity" - but given that it is an accepted ideological 
truism that "a productive life is a happy life" it amounts to the same.



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