Eluana Englaro may well be murdered in the next few days or weeks because of her father's desire to see her dead. She would not want to live in her current state of diminished consciousness, he says, and Italy's high court agrees. So this young woman faces the looming threat of dying from dehydration, an agonizing death despite the honeyed and consoling words of the death peddlars who claim it is a gentle way to die. Ask a woman who's experienced dehydration during her pregnancy because of excessive vomiting how gentle it is. Dr. David Stevens, a doctor who has worked in Africa where the leading cause of death is dehydration from gastroenteritis describes it. "As dehydration begins, there is extreme thirst, dry mouth and thick saliva. The patient becomes dizzy, faint and unable to stand or sit; has severe cramping in the arms and legs as the sodium and potassium concentrations in the body goes up as fluids go down. In misery, the patient tries to cry but there are no tears. The patient experiences severe abdominal cramps, nausea and dry-heaving as the stomach and intestines dry out.
By now the skin and lips are cracking and the tongue is swollen. The nose may bleed as the mucous membranes dry out and break down. The skin loses elasticity, thins and wrinkles....The person stops urinating and has severe headaches as their brain shrinks from lack of fluids. The patient becomes anxious but then gets progressively more lethargic....Some patients have hallucinations and seizures as their body chemistry becomes even more imbalanced. This proceeds to coma before death occurs. The final event as the blood pressure becomes almost undetectable is a major heart arrhythmia that stops the heart from pumping."
These symptoms explain why feeding tubes are left intact so sedatives and anti-convulsives can be given, not only to reduce the pain of the victim, but the distress of staff doing the killing.
The threat to Eluana heralds a black stormcloud looming over the world and not for the first time.
I invite readers to look back to 1939. Germany was already immersed in social Darwinism's doctrines of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Since about 1920 propaganda for eliminating those whose lives were "devoid of value" flooded the German marketplace led by the views of Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, a doctor and a jurist, not unlike those leading the culture of death today. When the Nazis came to power they continued and expanded propaganda for cleasing the gene pool producing films and novels that promoted "mercy killing" and stressed the expense of maintaining these useless lives. Catholic institutions for the incurably sick and mentally ill, which were likely to resist euthanasia, were sytematically closed.
The euthanasia program in Germany was coded T4 which stood for Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of a villa in Berlin where the Nazis administered the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care. It was managed by Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler's private chancellery and Hitler's own doctor, Karl Brandt.
The euthanasia order was written by Hitler in October of 1939, but backdated to September 1st. It read: "Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod)." From this quiet beginning grew a monstrous program of killing, not by Nazi thugs, but by doctors and medical staff in white coats.
Hitler believed that killing handicapped children would be accepted by the German people with little objection. The preceding May, parents of a severely deformed infant born in February (Gerhard Kretschmar), petitioned the Reich to have the child killed. A local pediatrician had refused because it was illegal so the parents sought an exception to the law. Hitler authorized not only the murder of the child, but a systematic program to register all defective children. Like the midwives in Pharoah's time, ordered to identify all the baby boys so they could be eliminated, the doctors and midwives of Germany were ordered to report all children born with severe disabilities: hydrocephaly, mongolism, spastic conditions, any kind of malformation including cleft palate, etc. the program initially targeted children under three but the tentacles soon reached out for older children including those designated juvenile delinquents as well as adults, especially the mentally ill and retarded. According to Fredric Wertham's A Sign for Cain, the Reich murdered 300,000 Aryans before they turned their final solution on the people they considered a defective race.
All evil starts with the first act. The Reich's euthanasia program began with one father, Richard Kretschmar, eager to kill his poor little handicapped son. And so it goes today. A father who cannot see beyond his daughter's physical impairment insists on dehydrating her to death. Despite the fact that the order of nuns caring for her wanted to continue, he denied their compassion and moved her to a killing center in northeast Italy more amenable to his monstrous intent. That the killing, if it is allowed, will take place a stone's throw from where the holocaust began chills the heart. Eluana's father is the spiritual twin of the ardent Nazi farm laborer, Richard Kretschmar. It is an evil history that should not repeat itself and a victory for another father, the father of lies himself.
May the Father of us all and His Son Jesus Christ protect Eluana and all those threatened by the Nazis of the present age.
P.S. Look carefully at the picture at the top of the page. Little Gunther and his two brothers had a degenerative disorder. The three little boys were gassed at Brandenburg, one of the facilities for eliminating imperfect children, but only after being studied by doctors. After their deaths, the ghouls in white coats studied their brains - all in the name of science.
Please contact the Italian Ambassador:
Ambassadors's Office Tel.: (202) 612-4401/4/5/6 Fax: (202) 518-2156 and ask for Eluana's immediate protection.
Email: (press and public affairs offices) Tel. 202- 202- 612-4440/4
politici.washington@esteri.it and stampa.washington@esteri.it
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