It is Happening Again, Not in Nazi Germany: The Campaign Against “Life Unworthy of Life”

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I am reflecting about the present in light of the past, and how policy wise, the Social Darwinist policies of the Trump Administration, and the words of his cult propagandists about the value of human life during the Coronavirus 19 Pandemic since it first began. Throughout the pandemic President Trump and his ruthless enablers have done all tat they can to ensure that the pandemic has killed and infected more people in the United States than any nation in the world, and for a nation that represents barely 4% of the world population with one of the most advanced medical systems in the world that is saying a lot. The only answer for such a disaster is that Trump and his Cult want this to happen. Why else would he first deny the infection, then minimize it, then issue a series of contradictory guidance, leave the states to determine their own way through, and then sign a one time bill that provided some relief, but has not been followed up on. The answer to Republicans is that the people helped by it really are not worthy, while the hundreds of billions sucked up by Wall Street and major corporations is worth it. The program is so much like the Nazi economic plan that it defies the imagination.

Then there is the President’s continued resistance to testing, tracing, passive preventive measures such as cloth face masks, social distancing, and closing down the places where the infection spreads most effectively, bars, churches, discos, and sadly Schools too. He has sacked or marginalized many of the best immunologists, virologists, and public health officials in the country and has in the past few weeks appointed political hacks to key positions in his Coronavirus Task Force, who now argue for the Discredited and inhuman concept of Herd Immunity, which if it was employed in the United States would result in at least TWO MILLION MORE DEATHS, and countless more infections. That any President or Administration would even consider such measures places them in the realm of a criminal regime bent on the mass murder or American citizens without even having to fire a bullet or resort to poison gas. All they have to do is let the virus run rampant, which seems to be their plan. As of yesterday the United States reported 187,736 deaths, and 6,211, 796 total cases, 24% of the world’s infections and 22% of the world’s deaths. The American totals are no doubt serious undercounts due to the Trump Administration’s orders to minimize testing and reporting of Coronavirus 19 infections and deaths to minimize the political fallout of the catastrophe that Trump and his Cult Followers not only seek to minimize but pretend that it didn’t happen at all. Instead of reporting the truth the report the false narrative that Trump has saved the country, and the Coronavirus Pandemic was defeated by him even as it rages.

But regardless, the actions of Trump and his followers direct me to the Eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, Weimar Germany, and other European nations, as well as Japan. But the eugenics movement was nowhere more malevolent, evident and active than it was in Hitler’s Germany. Likewise it is hard to believe that members of the administration as well as its supporters seem to believe, if you take them at their word that the elderly, disabled, mentally ill, and poor, especially those who are not white or Christian are a burden on the State, and are as the Eugenicists of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Hitler’s Nazi Party believed, were ”Life unworthy of life .” 

It seems hard to believe for anyone born after the mid 1960s, that government through its laws, decrees, and policies could deem certain people to be “life unworthy of life.” The most malevolent of such governments was the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, but individuals and institutions in the United States promoted the same ideology in the 1920s and 1930s but, in spite of actions like the the Tuskegee Experiments, could not carry it to its logical conclusion because most Americans of the time couldn’t go along with it. But the moral, social, religious and ideological barriers to its implementation then no longer exist today.

In Nazi Germany life that was unworthy of life included the physically and mentally handicapped or disabled, those with Downs Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Polio, and people with other neurological conditions. Likewise the mentally ill, those suffering clinical depression, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses were considered to be life unworthy of life. Even the deaf were included, as well as veterans suffering from what we would now call PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury. Also included were people labeled as “asocial” a very loose definition that could include almost any metal disorder or criminal act, including being a homosexual. Sadly, the President himself has made statements that show that he has no regard for the lives of such people, his policies, especially his executive orders, and the men and women he nominates to the Federal Judiciary have similar views to him.

I have been to Hadamar, I have walked it’s grounds, toured its wards, and stood in its gas chambers and crematoria. Tens of thousands people deemed “Life unworthy of Life” were liquidated at the T-4 Euthanasia centers, most located in former hospitals, psychiatric institutions, or sanitariums.

Once the Nazis decided to eliminate them the same day as they invaded Poland in 1939, most of these people gassed with carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust of trucks or Diesel engines, and their remains were cremated. Others, especially children were either starved to death or given a lethal injection while they slept. In every case the next of kin of each victim was sent a standard form letter telling them that their relative had died of influenza, typhus, or some other disease while being given the best of care. The next of kin were then given the option of paying for an urn that may or may not have contained the ashes of their loved ones for inurnment near their home town. If they could not afford an urn the ashes were disposed of in the cemetery nearest to where they were killed. At Hadamar, it was on the grounds of the institution.

Despite the Nazis attempts to disguise their crime they could not be hidden, and after over 70,000 Germans were Euthanized the official T-4 Euthanasia program was ended in Germany.  The gas chambers, cremation ovens and facilities were disassembled by SS experts, and sent east to Poland, where they and their experienced technicians became key components of the Holocaust of the Jews at Soribor, Belzec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. 

But the Euthanasia program, despite Nazi lies to senior clerics and officials of neutral countries didn’t stop, it simply moved eastward as the SS Einsatzgruppen killed the patients at every mental hospital, sanitarium, old folks home, or orphanage they came across. Inside Germany at the four T4 centers over 80,000 were gassed. At Hartheim in Austria a Party was held on the gassing of the 10,000th victim. Richard Evans wrote:

“At Hartheim the staff held a party to celebrate their ten-thousandth cremation, assembling in the crematorium around the naked body of a recently gassed victim, which was laid out on a stretcher and covered with flowers. One staff member dressed as a clergyman and performed a short ceremony, then beer was distributed to all present. Eventually no fewer than 20,000 were gassed at Hartheim, the same at Sonnenstein, 20,000 at Brandenburg and Bernburg, and another 20,000 at Grafeneck and Hadamar, making a total of 80,000 altogether.”

The tolls in Poland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union were much higher, but were conducted outside the auspices of the T4 program which “officially” ended in 1941, but continued in a more clandestine manner throughout the war.

Now in Trump’s United States of 2020 the laws guaranteeing health care to people are being challenged, the Secretary of Education has removed funding from the Department’s funding request for the Special Olympics, programs for the physically and mentally disabled under the SSI are being cut to the bone, and even care for disabled veterans is being threatened as not being economical because none of them are economically valuable to an administration for which profit is the bottom line of the insurance industry. Likewise, most supposedly pro-life Christians have no problems in cutting such programs because many have bought into the materialistic, Prosperity Gospel, whose fawning preachers have anointed President Trump if he were King Cyrus.

To Trump’s Cult of Evangelicals no criticism of the President can be tolerated, no matter how factual it may be, even if it involves the lives of the least, and most most vulnerable members of our society. Thus, for these supposedly “pro-life Christians” the  sick, the weak, the infirm, or mentally ill, who are not productive have no place in society. Inside the womb they are a remarkably powerful political issue; but once outside the womb they might as well be dead if you listen to Trump’s clique of Reichsbishofs, according to who cannot produce for the economy should not eat, get medical care, or live. They are life unworthy of life. This is even worse than the Nazis, for there is not even the Darwinistic idea of producing superior human beings, but rather to kill and let die for profit. The Nazis did that too, with the life of every human being that the considered sub-human, but the overriding the goal of the Nazi true believers, the idea of a perfect Aryan Germanic Master Race was always the ideal to be pursued.

Thus the propaganda directed at German citizens as to how much these men women and children cost the German taxpayer in order to get them to acquiesce to something they would never consider. Now today’s Republican leaders use the same arguments to justify cutting taxes and let the social contract we have with our fellow human beings collapse, because the to poor, the sick, the infirm, the disabled, prisoners, the mentally ill and the elderly simply cost more than they are worth, that also applies to infants and young children suffering any expensive chronic but treatable conditions.

You see, in the authoritarian world in which we live; a world where an uninhibited and unhinged executive backed by cult followers, profit minded billionaires, and greedy preachers, such lives; the old and infirm, the disabled, the mentally ill, the young but physically disabled, those with neurological issues, and birth defects stand in the way of profit, stand in the way of a “perfect” society. They have no value to them because they cost too much, and burden real Americans.

If you directly challenged such people may not advocate euthanasia per say, they would not advocate for gas chambers, or firing squads. Instead they would turn a blind eye to depriving their victims of citizenship, starving them, depriving them of medical care, and turning them out of care facilities knowing that their families lack the capability of caring for them. and if they have any capacity for work, work them until they die, so long as they Confess Christ before they die.

How do we know that life does not matter to them? One way is to note the many times that pharmaceutical corporations have increased the costs of previously inexpensive yet vital life saving medicines by thousands of dollars a dose all for profit with little to no pushback from the White House, or the FDA, much less the Senate GOP majority, or the Evangelical supporters of Trump.

Please understand, this dystopian future need not happen if people of any faith, or no faith at all make a stand against a twisted idea of dictatorship backed up by billionaires and corporate entities that suck billions of dollars from the taxpayer and pay almost nothing themselves. Of course they couldn’t do it on their own in not supported by a de facto State Media, and a cult like legion of followers who would follow Trump even if he shot someone on 5th Avenue. His words, not mine.

I am now 60 years old, and I have served in the military over 39 years, and this does bother me enough to speak out. As a senior military officer facing the end of my career and retirement amid multiple physical and emotional issues, it does matter. I keep two things in mind today. First is that of my own responsibility to my Oath, and to fellow citizens.  In that I am reminded of the words of German General Ludwig Beck who wrote:

“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees his duty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”

And like Beck’s compatriot, Major General Henning Von Tresckow stated: “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.” Or in my case, Trump’s America.

Historian Timothy Snyder reminds of a certain truth, which should we forget, as I imagine a large number of Trump supporters have:

“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

Those are all hard truths to comprehend. As Americans we always presume that we are the good guys, when in fact many times we have acted in means contrary to the ideals of the Declaration as well as the Constitution, and other laws enacted by Congress. But our republic has survived, but its institutions are both resilient and fragile. History has proven this, we have even survived a civil war, but we may not survive an increasingly vindictive and unstable President, his compliant majority in the Senate, and the 35-40% of voters who are in effect no longer Republicans, but a Trump Cult which is largely buttressed by Conservative Evangelical Churches, and inspired by a President who uses force, legal, and extralegal alike to secure his rule. That my friends is what a Fascist Authoritarian does.

We live in extraordinary times which call for extraordinary strength if our Republic is to continue in any form that resembles the intentions of the founders and their liberal enlightenment beliefs. The German Pastor, Theologian, and Martyr to the Hitler regime wrote:

“The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of a Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him. The eternal law that the individual stands alone before God takes fearful vengeance where it is attacked and distorted. Thus the Leader points to the office, but Leader and office together point to the final authority itself, before which Reich or state are penultimate authorities. Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish.”

If we do not want to see the return of a full fledged government and industrial sponsored campaign to eradicate life unworthy of life, we have to fight. It is a fight that we did not chose, but if the Republic is to survive without becoming a criminal dictatorship we must speak up, and we must do so now. If we do not we have no one to blame but ourselves.

As Yehuda Bauer said: “Thou shall not be a perpetrator, thou shall not be a victim, and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.”

The choice is ours, and the time is now. As Bonhoeffer noted: “The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” and also“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Likewise he wrote: We in the resistance have learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the excluded, the ill treated, the powerless, the oppressed and despised… so that personal suffering has become a more useful key for understanding the world than personal happiness.”

If I as a Christian and an American officer sworn to uphold our Constitution cannot do that, I am worse than Trump and his cult. Over the past few years I have come to understand what Bonhoeffer wrote in prison:

“During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity.  The Christian is not ahomo religiosus, but simply a man, as Jesus was a man…I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one.  By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.  In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian.”

“I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.”

In the midst of all the lies of Trump and his cult. In the midst of their attempt to kill as many people as possible, and to bring about a dictatorship I can only say as did Marin Luther at the Diet of Worms: 

“Since your most serene majesty and your high mightinesses require of me a simple, clear and direct answer, I will give one, and it is this: I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the council, because it is as clear as noonday that they have fallen into error and even into glaring inconsistency with themselves. If, then, I am not convinced by proof from Holy Scripture, or by cogent reasons, if I am not satisfied by the very text I have cited, and if my judgment is not in this way brought into subjection to God’s word, I neither can nor will retract anything; for it cannot be either safe or honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me! Amen.”

I double dog dare any Trump Cultist who calls themselves a Christian to refute that.

I am tired of the so called Evangelical Christians who damn Christ and his Gospel for their political gain and shit upon their evangelical forefathers like the great Virginia Baptist John Leland who in defense of religious liberty for all wrote:

“The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever. … Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”

I will fight for the truth, I will fight for the rights of every American. But I will not ever concede ground to a murderous group of thugs masquerading as Christians whose only goal is the continuation in power of a man who will give them anything in exchange for his unbridled power and authoritarian rule.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+