Lifton did a psychological study of the doctors who worked under Hitler's rule, and identified five steps by which they were seduced into silence, instead of protest:
First, there was coercive sterilization: Those who were to be sterilized included patients suffering from: mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic depressive insanity, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, grave bodily malformation, and hereditary alcoholism.
Second, killing of "impaired children" in hospitals.
Third, killing of "impaired" adults.
Fourth, killing of "impaired" inmates of concentration and extermination camps.
Fifth, mass killings.
Do we find eerie parallels to events in our own society? Consider: In the early to mid-1900s, forced sterilization was legal in sixteen states. Private individuals and prominent foundations supported the creation of the Eugenics Record Office to promote eugenics in American society. Eugenics is "the study of hereditary improvements of the human race by controlled selective breeding." Later, Jack Kervorkian assists over 100 people to kill themselves, Oregon institutes legalized physician-assisted suicide legislation. From 1998 to 2004, 208 persons with terminal illnesses have killed themselves. Eighty-seven percent cited the fear of losing autonomy as one of their concerns, and the death of Terry Schiavo in Florida is brought about through dehydration and starvation by discontinuing the administration of nutritional substances. Finally, New Jersey becomes the first state to legalize (and fund) human cloning experiments. The only reason for having these human cloned embryos is to terminate them in embryonic stem cell research experiments. Experience has shown that cloned animals are "impaired" and it is believed that cloned human beings would be just as impaired: "A review of all the world's cloned animals suggests that every one of them is genetically and physically defective. Ian Wilmut [lead scientist on the Dolly cloned sheep project] said, 'There is abundant evidence that cloning can and does go wrong and no justification for believing that this will not happen with humans.'" The Sunday Times of London reported that "gene defects emerge in all animal clones," indicating that anyone willing to make a human clone would be knowingly imposing a defect upon that human, and would be equally ready to exterminate that human for being defective.
Lifton comments: "The Nazis based their justification for direct medical killing on the simple concept of ‘life unworthy of life'. While the Nazis did not originate this concept, they carried it to its ultimate biological, racial, and ‘therapeutic’ extreme." Have these terrifying views, that human life has little value and can be terminated at will, crept into our culture?
