Inevitable Comparisons

If the snuffers and hemlockers and Christophobes don't like their cheerleading of Terri Schiavo's murder to be compared to Nazi and communist mass-murders of the past, well, let them repent of their grievous sins.

In the mean time, if the shoe fits....

Remember that statement about politics making strange bedfellows? Perhaps such is the case with liberal activists who want Terri to die from starvation and the Nazis who killed 13 million people.

As it turns out, starvation was the primary means of killing unwanted peoples.

Shortly after World War II, a U.S. congressional committee investigated the Nazi Holocaust and found that starvation was the main instrument of torture in the concentration camps.

The Committee notes the prisoners' daily diet "consisted generally of about one-half of a pound of black bread per day and a bowl of watery soup for noon and night, and not always that."

The report continued: "Notwithstanding the deliberate starvation program inflicted upon these prisoners by lack of adequate food, we found no evidence that the people of Germany as a whole were suffering from any lack of sufficient food or clothing. The contrast was so striking that the only conclusion which we could reach was that the starvation of the inmates of these camps was deliberate."

But, according to the New York Times, starving innocent people to death isn't so bad after all - indeed, the victims can actually get off on it:

A Times article relating to Schiavo’s death cited several "experts” who offered the new view on starvation.

"From the data that is available, it is not a horrific thing at all," Dr. Linda Emanuel, the founder of the Education for Physicians in End-of-Life Care Project at Northwestern University, told the New York Times.

The Times also cites Dr. Sean Morrison, a professor of geriatrics and palliative care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who insists that starvation victims "generally slip into a peaceful coma."

"It's very quiet, it's very dignified – it's very gentle," he adds.

Funny, though, that the Geneva Convention, as well as many other "multilateralist" international institutions, don't hold that same benign, favorable view of involuntary starvation:

To begin with, there is the long-standing and internationally accepted Geneva Convention: "The prohibition to starve civilians as a ‘method of warfare’ is included in Article 54 of Protocol I and Article 14 of Protocol II."

According to the International Criminal Court, starvation as a means of killing is a war crime. The Court noted: "Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions' is a serious violation of the laws and customs of war [52]."

The liberal human rights organization Amnesty International has long cited starvation as inhumane.

In a report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, regarding the "Definition of the Right to Food," the commission recommended "the right to food and nutrition was a human right." The commission also advocated "the right to food in emergency situations" should "be taken into account," to "include the obligation of states to grant access to impartial humanitarian organizations to provide food aid and other humanitarian assistance."

Yes, yes, Terri Schiavo is only one woman. But so was "Jane Roe," and her lone case resulted in the massacre of over forty million unborn children since 1973. And, to close the loop, the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and others had their origins in the notion of society deciding unilaterally that some lives "weren't worth living." And then that category was expanded and expanded, from terminal illness to incapacitation to birth defects, and ultimately, to the "wrong" race, ethnicity, politics, and religion.

Even the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. That it happened at all is an indication that the cultural soil in which it sank its malignant roots had been cultivated to the point where the roots took hold rather than being rejected.

Lawrence Henry asked last week in the American Spectator if the Schiavo atrocity will be the long-anticipated tipping point past which an aroused American public will finally overthrow the imperial judiciary and reclaim their government and society from the left-wing extremist "elites" that have hijacked it against their will.

A good question. Perhaps it will.

But there's a reason why the frog in the pan of boiling water doesn't leap to safety. And it's the same reason why one should expect that we, the people, will shrug, forget about Terri Schiavo after a few weeks or months, and get used to state-sanctioned euthanasia just as we have state-sanctioned fetuscide.

And if we arrive at the point of an American "final solution" and trains running day and night shipping "undesirables" to the Alaskan gulag? Forget it - any who objected would be the first ones herded into the cattlecars. "For their own good," of course.

Maybe they'd call it "the Terri Schiavo Express."