Creepy Clowns

courtesy of http://farewellsweetnicotine.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/pennywise-the-clown.jpg

When I visited the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz some thirteen years ago, a question kept ticking in my head while I marveled at the monstrous monuments of human evil:  how was it possible for these gas chambers to stand in the middle of Europe in the middle of the 20th century? While it is still mind-boggling, one can understand it better when considering that the Holocaust did not happen overnight and it did not start with the building of the gas chambers. It didn't even start with the deportation of the Jews, or the passing of the anti-Jewish decrees. The ground had to be plowed since people don't easily depart from their moral convictions so they need to be mentally prepared to accept views that go against their morality.

5 years before Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (1925) and13 years before he became chancellor of Germany (1933), established the Third Reich and passed the first anti-Jewish decrees, a book was written by two prominent scholars of the time, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche. Binding, a jurist, was a Rector of the University of Leipsizg, while Hoche was the director of the psychiatry department at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. The title of their book was  Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens, (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) (1920). The term 'lebensunwerten lebens' (life unworthy of life) became a pivotal concept of Nazi eugenics and referred to those who were 'deviant', who had a 'low quality of life' or were the 'source of social turmoil'. The 'deviant' category included, but was not restricted to, the mentally ill, the disabled, homosexuals, and intermarriage partners. The author of Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, describes the progression of the principle the following way:

"Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of "life unworthy of life", coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the killing of “impaired” children in hospitals; and then the killing of “impaired” adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to “impaired” inmates of concentration and extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings in the extermination camps themselves." (1)

When I read about bioethicists advocating involuntary euthanasia and lawyers writing up documents about redefining personhood, it freaks me out. It's not because I think that they are wicked Nazis  who are weaving malicious plans about the recycling of gas chambers and the extermination of babies and disabled people while periodically letting out a villainous laugh. It's not the people and their intentions so much that I am worried about, but their ideas and views that they are spreading. Ideas and views can take on their own life and can get adopted by all sorts of characters. Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche were prominent scholars of their times who were probably not brewing plans to exterminate 6 million people. They merely constructed ideas, wrote them down and let them loose into the the consciousness of contemporary society. Similarly, the advocates of the American eugenics movement probably never dreamed about their ideas being adopted and used by a German nationalistic group as an excuse for systematic genocide.  But that's just the intrinsic nature of ideas. Once you create them and let them loose to freely wander, anybody can catch them and adopt them. Once you come up with ideas such as 'certain human beings are nonpersons' or 'the sanctity of life doesn't apply to every human being' or 'certain lives are less worthy of living', you can't control  who will use it for what purpose or agenda.

And this is why bioethicists advocating involuntary euthanasia and lawyers writing up documents about redefining personhood freak me out. Even more than creepy clowns.

1. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton (holocaust-history.org)