Monday, December 3, 2012

Hitler smiles

From the place where Great Britain used to be comes this sickening news:
Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.

Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults.

But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.
Why would an NHS doctor admit to something so gruesome? Because the NHS pays a bounty for patients killed - killed not by removing medical treatment, but by removing food and water in an agonizing death by starvation and dehydration.  To date, the bounties paid are estimated as being £20 Million.

Now I am not a lawyer, but if a doctor did this in the USA he'd not just lose his license, he would be arrested.  Even after the implementation of the Obamacare "Death Panels" this would be a huge scandal - remember, this isn't a decision to withdraw expensive medication and care, this is withdrawing food and water from babies to cause them to die.

And it's done under NHS policy.  This is - there's simply no other way to describe it - a crime against humanity:
Recent international jurisprudence and the adoption of the ICC Statute have helped clarify the definition of crimes against humanity, which had been a matter of controversy since the Nuremberg Charter. It is now widely accepted that the following conditions have to be fulfilled: acts have to be committed against any civilian population and in a widespread or systematic manner, and must be based on a policy by a State, an organization or a group [62 ] . A connection to an armed conflict is no longer necessary, and a majority of sources indicate that a discriminatory intent behind every act is not required. [63 ]

The requirement that an act be committed against any civilian population will, in the case of humanitarian assistance, generally be fulfilled. “Widespread manner” is normally interpreted as meaning that acts must be directed against a multiplicity of victims. “It therefore excludes an isolated inhumane act committed by a perpetrator acting on his own initiative and directed against a single victim.” [64 ] The concept of “systematic” has been defined as “thoroughly organized and following a regular pattern on the basis of a common policy involving substantial public or private resources.
The Nurenberg reference is an interesting one, because it highlights that the NHS is by not the first governmental agency to engage in systematic infanticide:
By the end of 1938, the [NAZI] regime was receiving requests from the families of newborn or very young children with severe deformities and brain damage for the grant of a “mercy killing” (Gnadentod). In particular, a petition was received in respect of an infant named Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar, the so-called `Knauer’ child, who had been born on 20 February 1939, blind, with one leg and part of one arm missing, and who was described as an “idiot.” Hitler ordered Karl Brandt, his personal physician, to visit the child in a hospital at Leipzig. Brandt testified at his post-war Nürnberg trial he had been instructed that if the facts provided by the child’s father proved to be correct, he was to inform the physicians in Hitler’s name that ““euthanasia”” could be carried out – which it was, on 25 July 1939.

It is arguable that the `Knauer’ case was the catalyst for all that followed, although it could equally be argued that Hitler’s dedication to ““euthanasia”” was such that its introduction was inevitable at some point in the mercifully brief history of National Socialism.

On his return to Berlin, Brandt was authorized by Hitler to proceed in the same fashion with similar cases. Hitler did not wish to be publicly associated with what even he considered to be a delicate matter, and so Brandt was ordered to secretly organize a programme with the aid of Philip Bouhler, head of the Chancellery of the Führer (KdF: Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP), an agency created by Hitler in 1934, ostensibly to keep him in direct touch with the concerns of the population, but acting in practice as Hitler’s private office. Under the direction of Bouhler, the KdF was to acquire a more sinister purpose, for it was to be the conduit through which first the ““euthanasia”” programme and subsequently the planned mass extermination of Jews and others was to operate. Answerable to nobody except Hitler, in 1939 Bouhler seized the opportunity to acquire authorisation to administer the ““euthanasia”” programme through his deputy, Viktor Brack. 

In May 1939, Hitler had instructed Brandt to pave the way for the killing of children by setting up a body entitled the `Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses’. By a decree dated 18 August 1939, doctors and midwives were ordered to report all cases of “deformed” newborn. Even before war came in September 1939, the Nazis had thus established a government sanctioned process for murder. Two laymen made a preliminary selection of cases, which was then reviewed by three medical professors who determined the fate of the child. If selected for ““euthanasia””, the child was transferred to one of a list of special hospital wards for killing.
A note to commenters: Godwin's Law does not apply here.  I'm not saying that the UK NHS policy is like the NAZI policy, I'm saying that it's worse than the NAZI policy: at least the NAZIs were humane enough to euthanize the "unproductive mouths".  The NHS, by contrast, is pleased to starve the babies to death.  Readers can draw their own conclusion as to how that compares to the NAZI record of intentional starvation, but Adolph Hitler looks up from the glowing coals, and smiles.  The "nice" people in the NHS flinch from actual merciful euthanasia, and so condemn their victims to a gruesome, painful death.

And these people would harshly condemn the United States military if we starved terrorist prisoners in Guantanamo; they would be right to do so, as this would be a War Crime.  The fact that their Liverpool Pathway values the life of a terrorist captured on the battlefield higher than that of a newborn baby says all that you need to know about them.

This is the land of the Magna Carta, of John Locke, the land that traditionally has stood for decency and (as even the French will grudgingly admit) le Fair-Play anglais.  We fought shoulder to shoulder with the sons of that Scepter'd Isle who were led by one of the greatest orators in the history of the English languages.  One wonders what Sir Winston would say, looking down at his own progeny in the NHS.  It might be something very like this:



He had no sons.  He had three whiskered things, but no sons.

Sir Winston's Britain used to be Great.

10 comments:

Divemedic said...

Delivering food and water to patients using a tube is called enteral nutrition. In the case of patients that have no higher brain function, but are still capable of living without life support, enteral feeding is a routine procedure.

There are many cases where a person is brain dead to a point where they will never wake up, yet have enough brain tissue intact to breathe on their own. In those cases, the only way for them to be allowed to die, is to withdraw enteral support. This is done all the time here in the states. I have never heard of it being done in a pediatric case, but then again, I do not work around terminally ill children, thank goodness.

Look up Terry Schiavo. This is exactly what happened to her.

ASM826 said...

I think it should be more straightforward. If the humane thing to do is to assist in the dying process, we should be honest about it and help them die. There are situations I would not want to continue to be kept alive in, but I would want active assistance, not passive starvation.

Old NFO said...

+1 on both the above... Mercy vs. painful drawnout death...

Alien said...

I've been following this since it popped up on the internet.

I've been hoping that it is some sort of sick, fabricated, internet hoax. It appears that it is not.

I simply can find no words to describe my feelings. None at all.

Borepatch said...

ASM826, I wish they would have killed Dad. It would have been a mercy, there at the end.

Alien, word.

Matt said...

In a related note, tomorrow the Senate will ratify a UN treaty (CRPD) that will mandate the registering of children born with disabilities....

I called one of my two senators and he was all for it..... sigh. I won't bother with the other one.





Robert Fowler said...

There are no words. One good point about the NAZI method, there wasn't a lingering horrible death. I just can't fathom starving babies to death.

Anonymous said...

The fine print for Obamacare allows for the termination of children up to the age of 18 on the grounds of disbaility. It is so loosely worded that a teenager who acts up could be defined under this clause as can children who turn out to be gay. However no one ever believes you when you tell them that they passed legalising murder.

SiGraybeard said...

The fine print for Obamacare allows for the termination of children up to the age of 18 on the grounds of disbaility. In what sane society is it even remotely reasonable to terminate a child for anything, let alone "acting up" or who "turn out to be gay"??

We are constantly told by the left that "a society can be judged by how it treats the most vulnerable". By that measurement, we get a terribly low failing grade.

Goober said...

I suspect that there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth someday over all of this, as the people who supported cry out that "THIS ISN'T WHAT WE MEANT!" just like they did when they gave government control over everything in the form of Communism.

But the fact is, you don't even have to subordinate the needs of an individual to the needs of society at large, you just need to make the needs of the individual EQUAL to the needs of society and suddenly you've got cost to benefit ratios dictating whether you get to live or not being run by people who don't know you, don't care about you, and could give a shit less what your desires are.

Anytime you say that the needs of an individual are subordinate to the needs of society, all you are saying is that some people's needs are more important than other peoples needs, and you are giving the power to decide who's needs are more important to, historically speaking, the most corrupt, uncaring, and murderous of all human institutions.

When a bureaucrat in Washington gets to pick the winners and losers in the stock market based upon their pet causes, we get a never-ending 5 year depression/recession.

When a bureaucrat in Washington gets to pick winners and losers in the health care lottery, we get children being starved to death because they would be a burden on society.

(By the by, I think the concept of "society" being a entity that should have a say in it's own well-being is the root of 90% of the evils created in the last century, overriding the rights and desires of individuals int he name of the "common good" (for whom?) for far too long. Discuss.