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I don’t watch
much network television these days. There are few programs worth my
attention. On Friday, January 18, 2002 CBS previewed its new
drama, First Monday, a series about the U.S. Supreme Court. Produced
by the folks who created J.A.G. (one of the few programs I watch
on TV) which preceded the new series starring James Garner, I decided
to devote a couple of hours to the idiot box.
What I didn’t anticipate was that
what would catch my eye and hold my attention over the weekend was not
a television program—it was a commercial. More precisely, it was
an anti-National Right To Life commercial sponsored by the NARAL Foundation (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League).
Between the liberal mainstream networks (i.e., ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN) I expect the ad may have run several times. I saw it
on CBS. It was the most frightening advertisement I’ve ever
seen in my life. What made it frightening was not what was said but
what was very subtlety alluded to with imagery of the elderly.
I realized when I saw the NARAL commercial the first time that Tuesday, January 22 was Roe v. Wade
Day and that the National Right to Life march would take
place in Washington, DC with pro-life, family values Americans quietly
marching from the White House to the steps of the Capitol Building.
But as I watched this commercial message on “choice” I realized
the commercial was concerned with much more than abortion “choices.”
The National Abortion and Reproductive
Rights Action League stepped far beyond the abortion rights issue
and, using imaginary of the elderly well beyond child-bearing age, their
message raised the spector of “choice” at the other end of
the corridor of life: euthanasia.
The text of the commercial message did
not suggest that NARAL had become an advocate of the termination
of life at both ends of the age corridor. The female announcer, in a
calm, pleasing, almost serene voice said, “I believe there’s
a reason we are born with free will. And I have a strong will to decide
what’s best for my body, my mind...and my life. I believe in myself.
In my intelligence, my integrity, my judgment. And I accept full responsibility
for the decisions I make. I believe in my right to choose—without
interrogations, without indignities, without violence. I believe that
right is being threatened. The greatest of human freedoms is choice.
And I believe no one has the right to take that freedom away. What’s
life without choice?”
Based on the timing of the commercials,
most of those who saw the spot would likely have consciously thought
it was a pro-abortion choice ad. And, consciously, it was. But it was
the deliberate subliminal message within it that was frightening because
that message was telling the elderly that they also had the right to
chose. Subliminally, the NARAL commercials were telling the
elderly that if their lifestyle was so substandard that life did not
provide sufficient satisfaction to merit its continuation, or if they
were chronically (and not necessarily terminally) ill, they should also
have the right to end their own lives painlessly, and with dignity in
order—one imagines—so that they would not become a burden
either on their families or on an already overburdened society that
would have to care for them.
The NARAL message was very clear. The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League appears
to have assumed the role of “hall monitor” at both ends of
the Age Corridor. NARAL has become the advocate of death at both
ends of the corridor of life. Throughout the past decade there have
been several attempts at State level to enact laws that would theoretically
protect the right of the elderly to “die with dignity” when
they are faced with degenerative terminal illnesses that will eventually
turn them into human vegetables before they die, or when they are faced
with painful chronic illnesses that will greatly reduce the “quality”
of their lives. Many of those with diminished “quality” are
simply confined to wheel chairs; others must carry portable oxygen canisters
in order to breathe. Some are bed-ridden or home-confined for one reason
or other.
Others, after experiencing the loss of
lifelong mates, suffer from deep depression and loneliness. Many of
them contemplate suicide on a daily basis not because they are suffering
physically, but because they cannot mentally cope with the loneliness
suffered from the loss of their mate. Each of them have one or two things
in common that has triggered the opening phase of what will become a
major debate on the merits of “allowing” the elderly to “take
charge of their lives” if they want, and to provide them with painless
methods (if not actual medical assistance in some cases) to prematurely
end their lives.
The reason?
The elderly, particularly those who are
infirmed, have ceased to be “productive” members of society.
Instead, they have become “consumptive” members of society,
consuming far more than they produce. The utopian “Eden” of
the 21st century cannot afford citizens who consume more than they produce.
That is going to be the reality experienced shortly by the welfare class
not only in the United States but in all of the industrialized nations
as the tenets of Karl Marx are woven into the fabric of the free
enterprise system to create the political system known as “the
third way.”
Tragically the utopians behind the encroaching
world government who are advocating euthanasia as a “personal choice”
through grassroots advocacy groups like NARAL and Planned
Parenthood which they fund, know that the programs they are attempting
to create that would provide the elderly with the “right”
to terminate their own lives at the onset of the program are actually
designed to ultimately allow government health care officials to decide
when society can no loner afford to provide health care for the terminally
ill by requiring them to sign living wills as a condition of treatment
in all medical facilities in America.
The first nation in the modern world to
offer its elderly a voluntary program of euthanasia was Hitler’s
Third Reich. German citizens who were aged, infirmed or suffering
from painful, debilitating chronic conditions or terminal illnesses
that would ultimately result in painful deaths were afforded the right
to die “with dignity”—without pain. Most German hospitals
included “transitional” wards where the elderly could seek
“terminal assistance.” In many instances, sons and daughters
were persuaded to allow their aged and sometimes senile parents to be
placed in “transitional care” units where they would eventually
die. In some cases the children were not aware that they were sentencing
their parents to death by allowing them to be “cared for”
in those state institutions.
Slowly, the legalized voluntary program
in Germany was expanded to include mandated euthanasia. Anyone with
Downs Syndrome or any form of mental illness was removed from the institutions
in which they were confined and sent to “advanced treatment centers.”
After a brief period, the families of the mentally disabled received
form letters from the Reich Minister of Health informing them of the
unfortunate death of the family member.
Germany’s voluntary euthanasia program
of the early 1930’s slowly evolved into the Third Reich’s
extermination camps of the 1940s. What began as a humanitarian gesture
that purported to offer the aged a humane, painless escape from an endlife
of horrible, debilitating pain and suffering, slowly evolved into the
state-sanctioned execution of several ethnic groups: Jews, gypsies and
Slavs as well as the cultural misfits: homosexuals and lesbians. In
the beginning, the concentration camps like Dachau, Belsen, Treblinka,
Auschwitz and Birkenau were used to house “slackers”
who refused to earn a living and chose to be a burden on society. The
concentration camps were forced labor camps. Those confined there were,
at least in the beginning, sentenced to confinement by a lawful court
for a specified period of time—anywhere from six months to one
or two years.
After spending even a month in a concentration
camp, those confined had little trouble finding employment—and
never felt any job was beneath their dignity. Slowly the slackers were
replaced with the aged and those physically or mentally handicapped.
Out of the public view, their passing went all but unnoticed.
The Third Reich now controlled life at both ends of the age corridor.
Between 1934 when Hitler assumed
power and legislated the legal right of the aged to “...make their
own decisions about their lives...” and 1939 when the Third Reich
assumed that right for the State, Hitler’s Germany exterminated
over six million people—state-mandated “ethnic euthanasia.”
Today that type of euthanasia is called genocide.
Of course, most people who read this article
will quickly dismiss the concept of forced euthanasia as something that
could not happen in the world’s greatest democracy—particularly
in a society that offers its citizens a constitutional Bill of Rights.
Shocking as it may seem, the Clinton-Gore
Administration actually contemplated initiating a program of forced
euthanasia to deal with AIDS. The White House meeting in which the discussion
transpired occurred on November 12, 1993.
According to the White House protocol,
attending the November 12 meeting were Bill Clinton, Gene
Sperling, Joshua F. Steiner (the Treasury official who, when called
upon by Congress to testify against Bill Clinton based on entries
in his personal diary, declared under oath that he “lied to his
diary”), and presidential advisor David Gergen. The topics
under discussion that day was “the Iran Problem,” “the
Pollard Case,” the “Federal Banking Project,” “the
Information Highway,” “media issues” and “the AIDS
Crisis.”
In reading the segment (below) it is important
for the reader to understand that the “plans” discussed by Bill Clinton on November 12, 1003 were uniquely the private contemplations
of William Jefferson Clinton and not the other participants of
the meeting, nor were they the views of the Congress of the United States.
It is chilling to think that any President would discuss, even privately,
the idea of creating a series of “AIDS centers” in sparsely
populated areas of the country where all citizens with AIDS would be
confined until such time they were deemed to be “terminal.”
At that time, with the consensus of the center’s physicians, that
person’s life would be extinguished. If Clinton’s “plan”
had materialized, it would have been only a matter of time before those
“terminal decisions” would have been advanced to include other
chronically or terminally ill people—or perhaps others who are
a “consuming” burden on society. Fortunately for the American
people, the Clinton Health Security Act failed to pass, and the
imperative to devise a “final solution policy” for AIDS was
never formulated by the Clinton Administration. Nevertheless,
those gay community which fought hard to elect Clinton in 1992
and to re-elect him in 1996 will never realize how close they came to
finding themselves confined to Bill Clinton’s rural Auschwitz “...which [w]ould contain all of the amenities.” I guess that’s
why they called him Slick Willy.
Keep in mind that when the Nazis began practicing their own brand of ethnic profiling by seizing Jews,
Poles, gypsies and Catholics and interning them in concentration camps
in the mid to late 1930s, the Jews were initially viewed as the personal
property of the camp administrators (i.e., human capital) who “rented”
them out to wealthy industrialists. It was such a profitable venture
for both the camp administrators and the industrialists that many of
them relocated their factories near the concentration camps in order
to capitalize on the cheap slave labor. In the beginning, the Jews—the
world’s first human capital—were allowed to live as long as
they produced more than they consumed. Ultimately, even though the Jews
had a monetary value to the camp administrators, the Nazi Party embarked
on a bold plan to rid the world of Jewry, and the mass extermination
of the Jews—involuntary euthanasia by mass genocide—began.
(Note: it is important for the reader to note that the protocol quoted
below, and two others in the possession of the author have been disavowed
as “legitimate documents” by the Clinton White House in 1996. One of the protocols, dated November 11, 1993 is contained,
in its entirety, in this author’s book, Whatever Happened To
America? which was published by Hallberg Publishing last spring.)
In the section of the White House protocol
dealing with the “AIDS Crisis,” the meeting notes reveal that
the “...President g[ave] an overview of the AIDS situation and
its relationship to the Health Security Act. Based on position
papers submitted to the President by various organizations [sic] include
the WHO and the CDC, it is evident that AIDS is an epidemic
in the United States. Juggling figures to show that only those who have
the diseases of opportunity which strike individuals who are HIV positive
has kept the figures artificially low. More recent surveys indicate
that the number of those in this country who are HIV positive are at
least 50% to 60% higher than generally reported. The President states
further that a person who is HIV positive will, sooner or later, fall
victim to one of the diseases that proves fatal. Therefore, in considering
the actual number of AIDS victims, the entire picture has to be taken
into account, not merely those who have contracted various diseases
that the destruction of the immune system leaves them open to.
“The President now believes that
it would impossible to include any so-called AIDS patients with those
citizens covered by the Health Security Act. The figures for
end-care in these cases are so high as to surely bankrupt the funding
for the Act. With a growing number of patients developing fatal illnesses
due to their HIV positive condition, it will be necessary to find alternative
solutions to this coming health system disaster.
“The President has several position
papers in hand and has seriously considered all of them in addition
to further input on the subject he has received from many diverse sources.
It is the accepted position that AIDS is caused by a retrovirus and
it is impossible for medical science to develop any kind of vaccine
for it. Many drugs have been produced but these only treat the symptoms
and do not address any kind of care for the actual AIDS virus. He agrees
fully with the insurance companies view that if their firms were compelled
to extend health insurance coverage to all who apply without first instituting
a nationwide testing for AIDS, bankruptcy would be the inevitable result.
This attitude is also applicable to the inclusion of AIDS sufferers
in the Health Security Act and for the same reasons.
“The President outlined a possible
course of action for discussion.
“All private and public funded research
into a cure for AIDS will be phased out. In place of this, the President
proposes that a special AIDS task force be set up. Its public purpose
would be to gather all of the existing information and medical experimentation
under one roof, controlled entirely by the federal government. This
can be presented as a positive move to the general public and the gay
community. Of course some research could continue but funded on a more
reduced basis than heretofore. Also, and most important, an experimental
system, an AIDS center, can be set up in a thinly-populated area of
the country. This would address several problems. In the first place,
no major urban center would wish a large number of dying AIDS patients
in their neighborhood. In the second place, the more remote the area,
the better the security could be. Patients could receive visits from
family and friends but it would be far more difficult to do this than
if the initial center was located in an accessible urban center.
“One of the criteria for admission
to the center, which should contain all the amenities, would be for
the patient to sign a living will form upon admission. Then, at a future
time, which would be determined by a panel of our physicians, when it
is evident that the patient is approaching the final stage of the disease,
the staff is able to exercise the option granted to them by the patient
earlier.
“The President has been assured that
the staff would be entirely able to ease the final moments of the terminal
patient. He proposes that a special letter on his letterhead and with
machine-signed signatures of both himself and his wife be sent to the
family or other survivors upon the death of the patient.
“If the center should prove successful,
others could be instituted on a regional basis. The President stresses
that visitors to this center should be warmly treated by staff members
and every evidence of comfort and support for the welfare and treatment
of the patient be evidenced. Outgoing mail, of course, can be monitored...”
Had the Health Security Act of 1993 been enacted into law by the Democratically-controlled Congress, it
is very likely the radical program to deal with the rapidly escalating
cost of treating AIDS would have been surreptitiously employed—or
at least the public relations campaign needed to convince the public
it was a good idea would have been launched.
Without legislation to legally provide
American citizens with the “right to die on whim,” the Clinton Administration would have been hard-pressed to get their AIDS
“treatment” centers funded by Congress—particularly after
the GOP took over both the House and Senate in 1994. The important consideration
here is not whether or not such a program was, would or could be, implemented
by the Clinton Administration in 1993, but that any contemporary
national leader could even contemplate such Hitler-era solutions to
a pandemic problem. The Clinton plan had a draconian “touch of
Auschwitz” about it. The “test” center would be placed
in a sparsely populated area. The centers would be one-way facilities—all
patient traffic would be incoming. Like Auschwitz, which greeted
its newcomers with a classical orchestra, Clinton’s AIDS centers
would, according to the former President, “have all the amenities.”
But its primary task would be to “fool” both the patients
and their visitors by taking care “...that visitors to this center...be
warmly treated by staff members and every evidence of comfort and support
for the welfare and treatment of the patient be evidenced.” If
you will recall, the Nazis went through unbelievable pretense
to conceal what was happening in the deaths camps—even to the extent
of disguising mass gas chambers as bath houses where they introduced Zyklon-B pellets through the air vents or dispersed them through
the shower heads. The dead were then carted out by other inmates and
disposed of at the camp crematorium.
And, like the pretense used by the Nazis
in the 1930s when they practiced state-sponsored euthanasia to eliminate
Germany’s “unwanted,” Bill Clinton wanted the
families of each of the AIDS victims euthanized in his AIDS center to
receive “...a special letter on his letterhead and with machine-signed
signatures of both himself and his wife be sent to the family or other
survivors upon the death of the patient.”
Even though the industrialized nations
are now producing live births below replenishment levels, the utopians
at the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations still believe
the world will soon become overrun with too many new mouths to feed
and too many elderly people who require too many social services that
must be paid for by the rest of society. Since both are “consumers”
rather than “producers,” both groups appear to be expendable
in the utopians quest for fewer people on planet Earth.
The public relations campaign to sell
America on the notion that it is politically correct to grant the elderly
the right to decide what’s best for their bodes, their minds...and
their lives is in full gear. And, most people watching the very subtle,
sublimal spots used by NARAL don’t realize that images of
elderly people demanding the right to determine what’s best for
their lives have surreptitiously been burned into their brains. After
they view that commercial a half dozen times or more, the contemplation
will slowly become part of their thought processes, and such a contemplation
will no longer appear alien.
Americans, even those who are handicapped,
need to be very careful what they wish for. The graying of America is
in full bloom. We are living longer. And, if we keep our health, we
are enjoying the “fruits of our labors” much longer. The average
human life span in the industrialized nations in 1996 was 79 years.
In 1900 the average life expectancy in America was 48.9 years. While
utopian alarmists insist that by the year 2029 the average life span
in the industrialized nations will be 100 years, University of Illinois
Public Health professor Jay Olshansky poophahs the idea, saying
that “...everyone alive today will be long dead before a life expectancy
of 100 is achieved. There are no magic potions, hormones, antioxidants,
forms of genetic engineering or biomedical technologies that exist today
that would permit a life expectancy of 120 to 150 years as some people
have claimed.” Leonard Hayflick, an aging expert at the
University of California at San Francisco agreed. “Superlongevity,”
he said, “is simply not possible.”
Nevertheless, the utopians are convinced
that it is, or shortly will be, the case. They are already moving to
correct the problem. There is a growing fear among societal planners
that the federal government will be saddled with both the unanticipated
costs of advanced retirement incomes for the elderly as they go off
the actuarial charts, and the crippling medical expenses of America’s
“super old” that will threaten the solvency not only of the
country’s health insurers but the nation’s treasury as well.
The fear that this will soon be a reality in America makes it imperative
for Congress or the United States Supreme Court to address the “right
to die with dignity” issue—with an eye on legalizing voluntary
euthanasia in America. However, once the citizens of any nation are
legislatively granted right to die, they are only one step away from
giving their government the right to determine when their government
can no longer afford to “keep” them. At the onset of a legalized
euthanasia program, when the elderly are hospitalized they will be allowed
to complete a living will that stipulates that if, in the doctor’s
opinion, they cannot recover sufficiently to enjoy a reasonably normal
and active life, or if their condition deteriorates to the point where
they will be bedridden or require external stimuli of some sort to live,
that they will be painlessly sedated to the point where their respiration
ceases.
Once voluntary euthanasia is legalized,
state-mandated euthanasia “under some circumstances” will
be only a stone’s throw away.
Copyright © 2009 Jon Christian Ryter.
All rights reserved.