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. --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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