This bears repeating:

Diane Alden
Friday, Oct. 17, 2003

Termination by starvation and dehydration has been used many times before. Reports on elder abuse and news accounts from around the U.S. reveal that it is one of the most notorious ways to kill feeble elderly. It has also been used on disabled and brain-damaged younger people and babies.

It was also used in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka and the Soviet gulags. Stalin used starvation as a means of control. Nazi doctors experimenting on unwilling "patients" adopted all kinds of cruel techniques. One of those techniques was starvation and dehydration. It is recorded in the records of the Nuremberg Trials.

More recently, there were the deaths of other millions in the laogai, the Chinese gulag system. In North Korea reports of mass starvation have been rampant and it is used as a tool, a utilitarian political and demographic tool. The operative word here is utilitarian.

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Behind this devaluation of human life is the philosophy of utilitarianism and materialism. That philosophy is the heart of both Nazism and Communism: The value of an individual is measured by his or her usefulness to the group.

In the Netherlands, where euthanasia has become routine, it accounts for almost 10 percent of all deaths there; more than half of those people did not ask to be killed. Not only do physicians perform assisted suicide on terminally ill patients, but they also kill newborn infants and hospitalized seniors whose quality of life is judged to be too poor.

There is increasing concern about involuntary euthanasia among Dutch citizens with disabilities. Many of them are joining the Dutch Patients’ Association, which issues a wallet-sized card stating that it is "intended to prevent involuntary euthanasia in case of admission of the signer to the hospital." [www.pregnantpause.org/euth/compass.htm]

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Don't anyone write to me and say it can't happen here. Don't tell me about having to remove Uncle Sid from life support and what a difficult decision it was. I have been in that position, at the end of my mother's life. That is not what Terri Schiavo's case is about.

Death for those who are not terminal happens every day.

It is simply called something else: futile care, death with dignity, partial-birth abortion, rule of law, "choice," or elder abuse. It happens as the legal, intellectual and financial system finds reasons to continue to expand the death culture. Meanwhile, the establishment elite and dumbed-down, secularized, decadent culture looks the other way.

I am here to tell you we are in a very similar position to that of Germany during the Weimar Republic prior to the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. Problem is that left, right and libertarian, government, business, education, churches and associations, foundations and universities are greasing the slope toward that statist tyranny.

Contemplating those Nuremberg documents has convinced me that the bioethics departments in most universities are akin to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. The doctors and "scientists" at the Institute gave scientific legitimacy to one of the most grisly, evil barbaric rampages in the history of mankind.

That rampage is happening in America without the Gestapo and SS. We have the courts and our institutions willing to couch the horror in legalism and euphemisms.

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This appetite to snuff the unproductive, the disabled, the less than perfect, the inconvenient, the clinically depressed will gather steam as it has in the Netherlands and in the United States in states like Oregon, as the society ages.

Thus, in a few short years, we have gone from a nation believing it is a kindness to dispense with heroic efforts to keep someone alive, to a country that intervenes directly when someone's "quality of life" doesn't live up to certain standards. The various instruments and agents of death surround it in euphemisms like "futile care" theory.

Futile care theory controls many major health-care institutions, insurance companies, nursing homes, and even that paragon called hospice care.

Futile care theory will take on the same import as other perversions of the law in the United States and Europe. As the Boomers age, the fervor to send us to our Maker will grow. It will be gauged by how much we are costing the system, or whether or not our relatives want us out of the way, or if some committee of the anointed, doctors or HMOs, concludes we are a burden and don't fit the standard they set for "quality of life."

I guarantee the day is coming when Boomers will be coerced to end their lives or someone else will make the decision for them. Some tribes of American Indians used to send the old and feeble into 40-below weather. It was a kinder death than what the cultural, legal and medical elites have devised for us.

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The Aug. 11, 2003, video taken of Terri Schiavo by her father, Bob Schindler, shows a woman who is alive and aware. She knows her mother and she tracks a balloon from one point to another. Terri's father defied Judge George Greer's court order to take that video of Terri. Because of it he may face jail time.

Nonetheless, Terri's dad did what I would do in similar circumstances. There are instances when the only thing to be done is to defy authority, including the courts. There is, after all, a higher law.

	6:31 PM

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