The passing of the UK’s Nazi-like euthanasia bill is Parliament’s most shameful day
The UK’s new “assisted dying” bill has been passed despite concerns and objections from various people and organisations. It’s comparable to the Nazi’s Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, which normalised and accepted the killing of innocent lives by healthcare professionals for the perceived greater good.
In the following, Jonathan Engler draws parallels between the new bill, the Nazi programme and other events, such as the euthanasia of patients in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, highlighting the dangers of diminishing the value of life and accepting killing as a legitimate part of healthcare.
What Connects the UK’s New “Assisted Dying” Law With the Nazi’s “Aktion 4” Euthanasia Programme?
(If in a hurry – skip to and listen to the 14-minute conversational podcast at the bottom.)
I last wrote about the UK’s “assisted dying bill”1 the evening before the vote (HERE), when I retained some hope that it might be defeated. This was not to be. It was passed last week, despite the manifest issues with the proposed new law.
It did this after around 150 hours of debate, including the committee stage. By way of a yardstick, the bill to outlaw foxhunting (The Hunting Act 2004) was debated for around 700 hours over several years.
THIS is an excellent “A to Z” thread by Dan Hitchens outlining the many things wrong with this bill.
THIS brief article in Unherd describes the vote as “Parliament’s most shameful day,” and I am inclined to agree.
My own objections to the bill are multi-layered. One of them centres around the capacity of such laws (and systems) to diminish the value of life, to weigh it up in a utilitarian manner against what it contributes to, or what it costs, society.
That is then the first step on a path along which it becomes acceptable to do unspeakable things “for the greater good.”
In discussions with friends and colleagues, Jessica Hockett made me aware of this 56-minute video, which is well worth watching.2 It describes – in excruciating detail – how the Nazi euthanasia program caused the taking of innocent lives by healthcare professionals to become normalised and accepted by society:
(A short description of this program – known as Aktion T4 – can also be found HERE.)
One of the most chilling moments for me in the above video is at around timestamp 17:30, when one interviewee says:
I became intrigued by how they could come to believe that killing was a legitimate part of their caring role which they did.
The propaganda around the whole idea of killing people for the good of the state was profound, even down to children doing exercises in their school books on how much it costs to keep people with a disability.
In thinking this over further, I recalled the article I wrote with Jessica Hockett about the events in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (below), during which there is no doubt that patients were euthanised. Justifiable or not, the point is that because of the circumstances, society made the collective decision to bend its legal framework to ensure that those culpable escaped conviction for what undoubtedly amounted – in law as it stood at the time – to homicide.
Read: Ethical boundaries in medical decision-making can be blurred by circumstances, Jonathan Engler and Jessica Hockett, 12 November 2024
In that article, we discussed similarities between the post-Katrina event and the way some people were treated during the “pandemic” years, a subject about which I wrote extensively here: ‘Did testing and euthanasia protocols help create the appearance of a sudden-spreading deadly novel virus?’
Anyway, I realised that I had in total considered seven videos and articles (all linked within this piece) which, together, could convey an important message.
As you will know, I have been experimenting with NotebookLM-generated audio conversations, so I thought I would feed it these 7 sources and see what it came up with. This is the output – a 14-minute conversational podcast [click on the image below to got to Engler’s Substack and listen to the audio]:
This does a much better job than I was expecting. Scarily, I think it pretty much reflects what I have been thinking.3
Notes:
- 1 Official title: Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill
- 2 THIS video contains a Q&A session with several experienced nursing professionals and academics, which follows a screening of the above.
- 3 Which is not to say that I think AI should be trusted to do anything truly important. The biggest danger of AI is that people will come to regard its output as some sort of unimpeachable “truth”.
About the Author
Jonathan Engler, MB ChB DipPharmMed LLB, is a British healthcare entrepreneur who is medically and legally qualified. He initially trained in medicine, moving into the pharmaceutical sector where he worked on an international programme for a heart failure drug, designing and analysing clinical trials. He then established a business which became a world leader in using IT to coordinate and automate several clinical trial processes. Having sold that business, Jonathan then retrained as a barrister, where he worked for a few years before moving back into business.
He publishes articles on a Substack page ‘Jonathan’s Substack’ which you can subscribe to and follow HERE.
Featured image: Boys with Down Syndrome who are being held at the Heilanstalt Schönbrunn sanatorium near Dachau concentration camp on Feb. 16, 1934. Children like this would soon fall victim to the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme. Source: Aktion T4, The Nazi Program That Slaughtered 300,000 Disabled People
