SALVAGING THE GOOD PARTS OF THE HOLOCAUST:

I agree: the BBC favours ‘the right to die’. But watch out. That’s a phrase with a sinister history: The German medical profession accepted ‘assisted dying’ for compassionate reasons in the 1920s. Then came the 1930s (William Oddie, 16 June 2011, Catholic Herald)

It’s all, of course, a very reasonable-sounding explanation of what he called in a contribution to the Newsnight discussion his “right to death”. When I heard him use that phrase, however, I shuddered, for it has a sinister history: it recalls vividly the entire reasonableness of the successful campaign in Germany during the 1910s through to the 20s and 30s to convince the medical profession that “assisted dying” or “sterbehilfe” for those with an impaired “quality of life” (to use a modern expression which also has sinister historical overtones) as morally acceptable: a book published 13 years before Hitler took power, The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, Binding and Hoche’s Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens, together with Jost’s Das Recht auf den Tod (The Right to Death) [remember Sir Terry’s “right to die"?] had a huge influence on the German medical profession and without doubt paved the way for the Nazi euthanasia programme.

These authors were far from being Nazis themselves. Professor Binding was an authority on constitutional law; Dr Hoche was a leading psychiatrist. They made it clear that “sterbehilfe” had to be voluntary. But we know what happened then. What happened was that the Nazis didn’t justify “sterbehilfe” for those they decided were unfit to live by declaring its basis in Nazi ideology: what they did instead was to use precisely the language of reason and compassion that underlay the arguments that had so influenced the medical profession that they were in no intellectual condition to resist the Nazi programme on moral grounds.

Nazi propaganda films portrayed euthanasia as essentially compassionate. In I Accuse! (Ich klage an!) (which I have seen: it’s very well made, and would actually be deeply moving if one didn’t know where it had come from) a woman with multiple sclerosis, a musician who is losing the power to play her instrument (the cello: that somehow makes it more poignant) asks her husband to give her a merciful death. He gives her a lethal injection of morphine while peaceful music is played on the piano in a neighbouring room (remember Sir Terry’s plan to put Thomas Tallis on his iPod?). He is tried for murder: at his trial he argues that this was not murder, since his motives were wholly compassionate. He is, of course, acquitted: and the bourgeois moralists are routed.

Well, you may say, that couldn’t happen again: we’re not going to become Nazis, are we?

At its core, Terry Pratchett's argument is not that he has a right to die because he's a human being but that he should be killed because he's no longer human.

Posted by oj at June 17, 2011 6:02 AM
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