‘WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE’
PART THREE - EUTHANASIA
 |
| ‘Your papers, sir!’ Idsy endorses the dreadful ESA-50 form, which
summons doctors to pronounce their cancer patients fit for work. |
Raking
up the ashes ...
They said it could not happen here, but Coalition Britain is
beginning to resemble Nazi Germany. New-Labour
and Coalition governments have persuaded their supporters to approve of ‘mercy
killing’. They have slyly instructed the
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to cull sick, disabled, and elderly
people. The DWP obediently cuts those
people’s benefits, but then it denies responsibility for their suffering and
for their deaths. Everybody ignores what
is going on because the ‘quiet killing’ is going on out of sight and therefore
out of mind.
The Nazis were slightly less insidious and
slightly more veracious than their British counterparts. They devised a three-part plan which would legally
allow them to liquidate the weakest members of their society. The first part of their programme would change
people’s attitudes towards euthanasia. The
second part of their programme would create a bureaucratic infrastructure which
would administer euthanasia. The third
part of their programme would actually execute euthanasia. It became an open secret which they
code-named ‘Aktion-T4’.
The Nazi
Experience - Preparation
The Nazis revered Darwin ’s theory of natural selection because it seemed to justify their own barbaric theories on eugenics, which is the science of selective breeding. They believed some people’s lives were not worth living and, for instances, they pointed at severely disabled people and chronically sick people.
The first
part of the Nazi plan had to persuade the common Germanic people or Volk that a remote governmental agency
had the right to decide whose lives were worthless. That was a difficult task. Although the Volk trusted their government, whose euthanasia policies reflected a
widespread international trend, they cared about their own families and friends
and they wanted to protect them.
The Nazis filmed invalids whose lives they estimated to be ‘unworthy of life’. Their films were presented in cinemas as axiomatic public information and they were accompanied by insincere narratives which pretended to pity their subjects.
The Nazi tenet or ‘backdrop’ which hung behind
that dissemination was the embodiment of the
mythical Aryan Volk (common Nordic
and Germanic people) in the form of Übermensch (supermen). Nazi populists, who ironically included some
of the intelligentsia, tried to persuade the ‘common people’ to countenance
euthanasia by appealing to their selfishness and to their conceit. The Nazis wanted euthanasia to become commonplace
so they argued it made common sense and it was for the common good. The racial purity of the Aryan Volk could be
condensed and medical resources could be assigned preferably to them.
Doctors,
nurses, and midwives willingly applied for jobs on the T4 Programme. They were attracted by relatively high
wages. Some of them already sympathized
with Nazi ideals. Their co-operation made both infanticide and the forced
sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ seem credible to the Volk, who began
to tolerate the noxious principle.
The
Nazi Experience - Administration
Hitler and
other senior Nazis authorized the Aktion-T4 Euthanasia Programme in 1939.
It required the establishment of a dedicated office, which would operate
in a similar stolid fashion to all of the other Nazi governmental
departments. The Reich Health Ministry
set up the Realms Work Committee (RWC) which would be responsible for
administering the programme.
The RWC
headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin ,
(T4) was a ‘clearinghouse’ which collected information on ‘malformed’ children from
questionnaires which it sent to hospitals and to mental institutions.
Doctors and midwives had to report every new-born child that had mental
or physical disabilities to the authorities.
The
questionnaires were returned to the RWC and a panel of three medical experts
reviewed the results. They all had to
agree, but they trusted their colleagues who worked in the hospitals and in the
institutions, and they usually agreed to ‘euthanize’ their patients. Death Warrants were issued for their patients,
who were then transferred to special hospitals for ‘treatment’. Borderline cases that received
split-decisions were kept under observation until further attempts could be
made to get unanimous decisions.
T4’s bureaucrats and medical experts worked securely
within a closed system which contained ‘feedback loops’ and ‘safety nets’, and which
fostered ‘plausible deniability’. The
system ensured none of its victims would escape their doom, and it protected
its perpetrators who could act without compulsion. It distributed the blame for murdering
innocent people, so bureaucrats and medics could disavow responsibility; they
could protest: ‘I just work here. I
didn’t invent the system.’
The T4 Programme was dissembled as a welfare
programme. The Nazis tried to create the
impression that patients were being assessed fairly and that they were being
given benefits of doubts and necessary second chances. Families believed their sick and disabled
relatives were being bussed away to sanitaria to be nursed, but the bus drivers
were SS men dressed in white coats.
Families were not allowed to visit their children; they never again saw
them, but they did receive letters of condolence and falsified death
certificates.
The T4 Programme was designed to dispose of sick
and disabled children, but the Volk and the Church strongly opposed
it. The Nazis officially cancelled it in
1941, but they secretly expanded it to include adults who had similar symptoms;
they considered those people to lead “burdensome” lives and they labelled them
“useless eaters”. They stretched their
dragnets farther afield and then they ‘kick started’ a new euthanasia programme. It was given a new code name, "14 f
13", which was the title of its new questionnaire form. It was less regulated than before and it was
described as ‘wild’.
The Nazis started
to assess the economic value of other types whom they considered to be ‘asocial’
or ‘wayward’ or ‘undesirable’. Those
types included political dissidents, homosexuals and several ethnic
groups. The Nazis considered them to be
mentally or genetically defective and they considered them to be liabilities. Those
who could work were sent to slave labour camps, but those who were incapable of
work were processed for euthanasia.
The
Nazi Experience - Execution
The T4 Programme
predated the Holocaust. Both terrors
overlapped and used similar extermination methods, but T4 was supposed to be
concerned with euthanasia, and the Holocaust was supposed to be concerned with
eugenics.
The Nazis
experimented with rudimentary methods of ‘mercy killing’. They crowded invalids into small, air-tight
rooms and then they tried to pump in vehicle exhaust fumes through rubber
hosepipes. They decided that method was
too slow and it killed too few people.
The Nazis then
converted some hospitals and prisons into killing centres, which could process
larger numbers of people. Those centres
had built-in gas chambers and crematoria.
The gas chambers were disguised as showers, which could be hermetically
sealed; they were then filled with the gasses carbon monoxide or hydrocyanic acid
which was branded Zyklon-B.
The ‘mercy
killing’ routine was generally the same at every centre. Invalids were drugged, stripped naked, re-dressed
in paper shirts, and then they were led to the gas chambers. Dead bodies were placed on conveyor belts
which transported them to furnaces. Their families
were sent mixed-up ashes.
When the Volk and the Church
complained about the euthanasia programme, the Nazis stopped gassing patients and
they started poisoning and starving them.
The results were the same but the Nazis hoped their victims’ deaths would
be ascribed to natural causes.
An estimated 250,000-350,000 Germans were put to death under
the various Nazi euthanasia programmes. Around 5,000
‘malformed’ children were transferred to killing centres.
Special SS units murdered thousands of institutionalised patients in occupied Polish territories. They shot them or they gassed them in mobile chambers.
The Nazis established Heredity Health Courts to sterilize other targeted categories. An estimated 350,000 Germans were sterilised under that branch of the programme.
Special SS units murdered thousands of institutionalised patients in occupied Polish territories. They shot them or they gassed them in mobile chambers.
The Nazis established Heredity Health Courts to sterilize other targeted categories. An estimated 350,000 Germans were sterilised under that branch of the programme.
So-called ‘wild’ euthanasia continued until the war ended in 1945. Some higher ranking
doctors were charged with war crimes and they were put on trial at Nuremberg , but many lower
ranking medics escaped punishment and lived happily ever after.
The British
Experience - Preparation
European attitudes towards euthanasia are again changing. A Swiss clinic now offers to kill chronically
sick and terminally ill patients before they die naturally. That kind of intervention goes on tacitly in
hospitals all over the world, but well-meaning doctors usually seek consent
from their patients or their relatives before they ‘pull the plug’. That is a separate issue, but it spreads the
viral idea that euthanasia is sometimes acceptable.
Although most decent British people feel disturbed by the thought of euthanasia,
British politicians seem to feel relaxed about it. They seem to think disabled people are ‘basket-cases’
that ought to be strangled at birth, and they seem to think chronically sick
people ought to be put out of their misery, and they seem to hope older people will
drop dead at work before they claim their pensions.
British politicians want to find a simple solution to their economic
problem of welfare costs. They reckon invalids
are too expensive to keep. Their answer
is to attack invalids with a two-pronged strategy. Invalids must be prevented from becoming
fresh long-term incapacity or disability claimants, and stale long-term invalids
must be re-assessed and ousted. Their
machination succeeds by using
‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ tactics to purchase the compliance and complicity of one
group of people at the expense of another group.
The New-Labour government which won a Pyrrhic victory in the 1997
election tried to unite health care workers and common folk against invalids,
who could not fight back. It instructed its
twisted spin-doctors to market its welfare reforms as tough love. They wanted to persuade the common folk that
they had to be cruel to be kind.
New-Labour
spearheaded a full scale attack on invalids, while its Coalition rivals watched
and grudgingly admired its shock-tactics.
New-Labour whimpered that invalids did not deserve welfare
payments and it smeared all of them with the same putrid drivel. Invalids were receiving ‘free’ money for
doing nothing all day but lying on beds, sitting in wheelchairs, or hobbling on crutches. New-Labour whined that they
were ruining its ‘Cool Britannia’ make-over, and it warned them that it could
not continue to support them. It urged
them with treacherous humility to find jobs.
New-Labour administered more moral corruption to assuage the pangs of
guilt in the hearts and minds of General Practitioners, who had sworn
Hippocratic oaths to do no harm to their patients. Some GPs opposed welfare reform, but
New-Labour tried to bribe them with ‘sweeteners’; the government doubled their
pay and it halved their hours. The quid pro quo required GPs to re-examine
their attitudes towards vulnerable patients, who included the sick, the
disabled, and the elderly. Invalids, who
would ask their doctors for certificates or ‘sick-notes’, would just as likely
receive lectures on ‘over-burdened tax-payers’.
British governments utilize their puppet media to
persuade common folk to countenance welfare reforms. Their ‘psychological preparation’ gets
channelled through sensational newspaper reports and startling television
exposés about ‘benefit cheats’. Such
reports are factual but they are not objective; their subject matter is carefully
selected and edited. Readers and viewers
who trust their authorities turn cynical about their welfare system; they
become resentful of its claimants; they give most of them short-shrift.
The
British Experience - Administration
New-Labour
had been planning welfare reform since its election, but in 2008 it introduced
the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) programme, which was designed to provide
false evidence against sick or disabled welfare claimants. It threatened to cut the numbers of people
who were claiming benefit by one million.
New-Labour also planned to gradually increase the state pension age for
both men and women to 68; it moaned Britain could not afford to pay
their pensions.
Anyone who
was claiming long term sickness benefits such as Incapacity Benefit,
Severe Disablement Allowance, or Income Support paid on the grounds of illness
or disability, came under governmental scrutiny, re-examination, and possibly
surveillance. New-Labour huddled those
disparate benefits into a new ‘one size fits all’ benefit called Employment and
Support Allowance (ESA).
The WCA is not concerned with welfare. It is a multi-stage Psychological ‘Warfare’
Programme, which is designed to sap the strength of its victims and reduce
their will to live. Look at this ‘carry
on’.
The DWP sends ESA-50 questionnaire forms to
existing invalids who must return them before a deadline. A private firm, which is currently called
ATOS Healthcare, then invites invalids to attend one of its centres, where they
are subjected to mock medical assessments by its own Professionals. DWP bureaucrats eventually inspect all the evidence,
and then they make their decisions. Their
verdicts are bankable; an estimated 66% of all examinees are found ‘fit for work’.
The whole process is completely unethical; it
would be farcical but it is deadly serious.
It indicates profound depravity, which has not been witnessed in Britain since
the superstitious witch hunts and trials of the 16th-18th centuries. Politicians of those times wanted to find
‘scapegoats’ whom they could blame for famine, poverty and any other social problems. They pointed at people who were different such
as sick people, disabled people, and elderly people, and they accused them of
witchcraft. Many of those poor beggars
were tortured, tried, burned, or hanged, but all of them were innocent. Ignorant common folk trusted their
authorities and they sucked-up every scrap of nonsense which was spat out by
them.
ATOS is a big
foreign company, and every year the DWP pays it £100 million to process ESA-50 questionnaires. Much of that money gets ‘trousered’ by generously
remunerated company executives. The Chief
Executive of ATOS gets £800,000. ATOS is
nearing the end of its contract with the DWP, but it will be replaced by another
big foreign company, which will promise to accelerate the WCA programme.
ATOS ‘clearinghouses’
may be situated in regional DWP premises, and invalids have to go to
them. ATOS Healthcare Professionals, who
do not bother to wear white coats, ask invalids questions about how their
illnesses and disabilities affect how they do day to day things; they ask about
their physical functions and they ask about their mental, cognitive and
intellectual functions. The Professionals
then award points to invalids for each of their health problems. Invalids must score 15 points to escape from ATOS's meddling and to survive the rest of their dreary lives on benefits.
When ATOS’s
Healthcare Professionals return their completed reports to the DWP, Decision
Makers glance at the points totals, and they give the invalids the ‘thumbs up’
or the ‘thumbs down’.
A ‘thumbs
up’ decision places an invalid in either the Support Group or the ESA Work Related
Activity Group (WRAG).
The
Support Group does not require invalids ‘to
participate in work related activity’, which means ‘get a job’, because it admits they are ‘unfit for work’, and it tosses £125 per week or £6,500 per year
into their hats. That is the equivalent
of a part-time wage, but able-bodied workers might need two or three part-time jobs
to avoid the breadline; many part-time
workers rely on food-banks.
The WRAG is
a ‘trapdoor’ benefit for invalids who are deemed ‘fit for work with support and preparation’, which means ‘invalids who might be malingering’. It tosses £76 per week or £3,952 per year
into their hats, but that is limited to just twelve months, and invalids may be
reassessed by ATOS during that same year. That ominously worded ‘with support and preparation’ phrase means
those same downtrodden people will be kept in a continual state of limbo and oblivion; they will be given abject subsistence money, but they will be re-educated by sham-training-agencies, which will teach them life-skills.
A ‘thumbs
down’ decision means an invalid is ‘fit
for work’, and he or she will be ousted. The
DWP sends bundles of notes and Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claim forms to them. JSA amounts to the same miserable £76 per
week, but invalids are likely to miss a month’s payments because of built-in administrative
negligence which creates backlogs and delays.
JSA demands that invalids compete with fit and healthy people in the
jobs market.
Neither
the DWP nor ATOS has put much intellectual effort into the WCA programme. The bureaucracy is rickety; the procedures
are performed like amateur street theatre; the ESA-50 form looks like it has
been designed by a student. The
following patronizing, impudent, and distasteful extracts are taken from the
ESA-50 form, which casually interrogates GPs, hospital doctors, or clinical
nurses.
‘The information
you provide on this page is important as it will help the Department for Work
and Pensions to make a rapid benefit decision for your patient.’
‘This page concerns
patients who are having, waiting for or recovering from (post completion of
treatment) chemotherapy or radiotherapy.’
‘In your opinion,
is it likely that the impact of the treatment has or will have work-limiting
side effects? Yes No’
‘In
your opinion are these side effects likely to limit all work? Yes No’
‘In
your opinion how long would you expect these side effects to last?’
Who was
responsible for writing that? GPs,
hospital doctors, and clinical nurses who have one drop of decency in their
veins ought to answer those questions in favour of their patients every time,
regardless of what they really believe.
They must not collaborate with the DWP and its hired assassins.
The
British Experience - Execution
Seventy three people die every week in Britain after having their benefits
stopped. The DWP could not care
less. Its ‘secret’ euthanasia programme strives
to ‘boot out’ invalids from the welfare system completely. It destroys their benefits, their homes, and
their protected workspaces. Its message
to them is: ‘Get a job or crawl away or die’.
It expects most of them will survive on reduced benefits and charity,
but it knows thousands of them will die of ‘misadventure’, which means
malnutrition or hypothermia or melancholia.
The DWP wants to transfer most invalids from ESA to JSA. It can then impose stringent and impractical
conditions on their receipt of benefit money.
Invalids who cannot meet those conditions get ‘sanctioned’. The DWP prefers to use innocuous words like
that because words like ‘punish’ and ‘axe’ are too frightening. It is sardonic prose, which is intended to
soften the blow, condition the observer, and deliver a subliminal message:
‘It’s alright to laugh at someone else’s misfortune.’ It is an example of life imitating reality
TV. One of Britain ’s favourite TV programmes
is called ‘You’ve Been Framed’; viewers are expected to laugh at films of other
people who are having accidents.
In the ‘juvenile court’ of the DWP, the accused are believed to be
guilty until they are proven innocent.
The accused may be invalids but the DWP treats them like ‘delinquent’
malingerers. It cannot beat them or
thrash them but it can try to make their lives unbearable.
A typical WCA appointment is an irksome experience. ATOS ‘clearinghouses’ are usually located
around the backs of regional DWP office blocks. Wretched invalids have to shuffle, limp, and
hop from pillar to post across puddles, pot-holed tarmac, and cracked concrete
pavements until they find some shabby doors which are marked ATOS
Healthcare. They totter cautiously past
bored security guards; they report hesitantly to nonchalant receptionists; they
plod in to plain waiting rooms; they rest
gratefully on wall-to-wall plastic chairs.
A typical ATOS waiting room can accommodate about one hundred
people. The invalids may be held upright
by their companions or they may be propped up by their sticks or crutches. They are not ‘unwashed’; they make an effort
to look presentable. Most of them
display the regulatory ‘stiff upper lip’, and they wait attentively, but some
of them weep and wheeze. The atmosphere has a whiff of Zyklon-B about
it.
ATOS tries to schedule its assessments to keep its ‘conveyor’ moving,
but its own staff shortages often cause uncomfortable delays. Refreshments and medical facilities are not
provided but invalids are permitted to use the toilets.
The invalids are eventually called in to the examination rooms where
they are tried and tested by ATOS's Healthcare Professionals. All of their Professionals are docile
‘cardboard cut-outs’, who have been trained to go about their dirty business
with fixed expressions of false
geniality on their faces. The invalids
try to explain why they cannot work, and the Professionals pretend to listen
intently. Some invalids might leave a ‘clearinghouse’
feeling optimistic, but most assessments result in negative ‘fit for work’
verdicts. Most invalids eventually
realize they have been ‘taken for a ride’.
Over one
million people were receiving Incapacity Benefit; two thirds of those have been
pronounced ‘fit for work’. Invalids who
fail to ‘actively seek work’ get punished and axed. Loss of benefits causes invalids terrible anxiety,
because they cannot buy food, and they cannot pay bills. The postman delivers more demands, threats,
and summonses every morning.
Bloated
politicians tuck-in to their subsidized lunches and listen to choirs,
instrumentalists, and quartets playing soothing music, while emaciated invalids
scrape up their boiled rice and listen to sheriffs, bailiffs, and
debt-collectors drilling-out their door locks.
British governments encourage their local authorities to join in the
‘feeding frenzy’ by unleashing ‘dog-eat-dog’ savagery. Many town halls are allowed to lavish up to
£50,000 pay rises on their council chiefs, along with other ‘back door’ gratuities,
perks, and ‘comforts’ which include bonuses, expenses, allowances, cars and
pension contributions. About 61 per cent of councils in the UK pay
their biggest earners more than the Prime Minister, who receives £142,500. If local councillors and council bosses want to
maintain their luxury lifestyles, they have to trim the benefits of unemployed
people in general and of invalids in particular.
The Coalition government struck unemployed home owners by reducing its
support for means-tested Council Tax benefit by 10%, and it struck unemployed
social housing tenants with the Bedroom Tax.
Those people who were previously exempt from Council Tax suddenly had to
pay an average bill of £247 a year.
Those people who lived in social housing, which is council or
association owned housing, would lose 14% of their housing benefit if their
property contained a spare room.
The Bedroom Tax is levied on people between the ages of 16 and 61. Nearly two thirds of those affected are
invalids. Extra bedrooms for medical
reasons are not allowed even if spare rooms have been specially adapted or are
being kept ready for carers. A severely
disabled child might be allowed its own room if it would seriously disrupt the
sleep of another child.
Over half a million vulnerable people have not been able to pay those
extra taxes. They have been summoned to
court and they have been forced to pay costs, which may be over £100, on top of
their original debts.
If invalids do not pay their bills, their creditors bombard them with
postal reminders, demands, or threats.
The usage of sham-debt-collection-agencies, which are usually gangs of
thugs or organized criminals, to extort money or goods from invalids is
comparable to brutal Nazi looting and plundering.
The Disabled Persons Employment Corporation was set up in 1945 to
provide employment and support for disabled people. It soon became known as Re-employ or
Remploy. It provided a protected
workspace for disabled people which was operated and subsidised by the
taxpayer. British governments wanted to
cripple it along with the rest of the welfare state; the Coalition withdrew its
support for all 54 Remploy factories and it told them to stand on their own two
feet; most of them collapsed.
Many invalids want jobs, but their mental or
physical health conditions make work difficult or impossible, and neither firms nor
sham-employment-agencies want to hire them. Job application
forms contain lengthy medical questionnaires which demand answers to intimate
questions. Most employers insolently threaten
to contact applicants’ GPs. Invalids who
do not disclose their full medical conditions may be dismissed later; they are
expected to tell all their business to
untrustworthy rascals, rogues, and scoundrels who work at sham-agencies.
Personal information is supposed to be held secure under the Data
Protection Act, but sham-employment-agencies share their data with each other
over the telephone. That allows them to screen
applicants invisibly and without trace, and to blacklist or filter-out undesirables
like trade unionists or invalids.
Aftermath
...
German people do seem to be morally superior to
British people. Ordinary German volk protested against Nazi euthanasia
programmes, but ordinary British folk, who are led by the English, cheer-on
their government’s persecution of invalids.
Thousands of sick, disabled, and elderly people have died unnecessarily
in Britain .
German people can now breathe sighs of
relief. The British can no longer
single-out Germans and accuse them of institutionalized murder, because the
British are allowing their own governments to copy the Nazis.
Martin Niemöller was an
anti-Nazi theologian who wrote a famous warning about indifference and apathy. He wrote it for us who stand and watch while
others suffer annihilation.
‘First they came for the communists and I did
not speak out because I was not a communist.’
‘Then they came for the trade unionists and I
did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.’
‘Then they came for the Jews and I did not
speak out because I was not a Jew.’
‘Finally, they came for me and there was no
one left to speak out.’
The
Green Response
1) The Green Party must register the names of those
government ministers, bureaucrats, and medics who are responsible for the
British secret euthanasia programme. The
GP must accuse them of crimes against humanity and manslaughter, and it must demand
that they be tried for those crimes.2) The GP must demand the repealing of all shameful welfare reforms, and it must demand the reversal of all changes to the benefit system that have taken place during the last twenty five years.
3) The GP must demand the restoration of all welfare rights to sick, disabled, and elderly people. It must consult representative organizations to find out what sick, disabled, and elderly people need and what they want.
4) A huge chunk of housing benefit is paid directly to private landlords who charge excessive rents. They are the real scroungers who are 'ripping off' the taxpayer, because they know the state will pick up the tab. Controlling rents, as in Germany, would be a more effective and humane way of reducing the bill.
5) The GP must provide a moral compass to guide those British folk who have been led astray by evil British governments. It must rally all good-natured people who want to stop the culling of invalids.
WINDUP
Green Swipe thought this idea was original, but
others probably got here first. We
salute the pioneers and pathfinders at THE ANARCHIST WORKERS CO-OP and at
ORGANIZED RAGE. Everybody’s contribution
to this vital humanitarian effort needs to be acknowledged, so please tell us
about your resistance to the neo-Nazis, crypto-fascists, or other ‘kinky’
black-shirts who might be skulking in the corridors of Westminster .
We thank ‘The Life Resources Charitable Trust’ and
‘Disability Now’ for sharing their knowledge on the Internet.
For sheer anarchy go to:
Anarchist Workers Co-op - http://sabcat.com/
Organized Rage - http://www.organizedrage.com/
Don’t miss our next post –
‘The Seventh Enemy’ by Ronald Higgins
(What
happened to him and did anybody take any notice?)
‘peace man’ÿ☮[
