Saturday, April 29, 2017

Nazi view of Slavs parallels contemporary Allied view of aboriginals

The Nazis are best known for killing peoples they felt were actively seeking to harm them and civilization's road to progress.


Where to begin - or end - the list ?

Jews, Communists, Romas, socialist trade unionists, partisans.

Undeservedly less well known are the countless millions they intended to kill who even the fervent Nazis admitted displayed no such acts of hatred.

Peoples like the tens of millions of disabled they planned to kill under Aktion T4.

Or, my subject today, the tens of millions of Slavs they intended to watch starve to death through their Hunger Plan for occupied Soviet territory.

The Nazis collectively sighed and agreed that their deaths were regrettable - but necessary.

Even as inevitable, with civilization simply passively watching as those unfit to survive in the battle of the fittest meet their grisly fate.

The Nazi inaction were merely helping speed up the inevitable.

Chillingly, this does not differ a jot or a tittle - intellectually - from how most of the Allied world, before during and immediately after the war years, viewed their own aboriginal ('Native'/'Savage') peoples.

Even if (some) members of the Allied Nations sometimes referred to the aboriginals as 'Noble' Savages, they were generally united in seeing the aboriginals' deaths as inevitable in the face of encroaching civilization --- unless they wholeheartedly adopted the White Man's ways and disappeared into the general population.

Death by starvation and disease and social disarray (drink) could only be delayed - not stopped - by more food and better housing, medical care and job prospects - so why bother ?

No need to actively shoot or gas them - as you would your 'evil' enemies : just a plan of Benign Neglect and letting Nature take her inevitable course.

On an ultimately similar scale in terms of numbers affected, was the collective Allied medical decision to deny SBE patients worldwide their only hope for survival (penicillin).

This was done on the grounds that wartime efforts to save youthful SBE patients was a misuse of scarce wartime resources, as it was not a disease of military priority.

Against this, wartime research on saving youthful Polio patients was allowed to go on on consuming scarce medical resources.

Perhaps I hardly need to add that Polio was seen as a disease particularly common among the suburban white Protestant middle class - families very much like those of the Allied medical elite - while Rheumatic Fever and the resulting SBE was seen very much as a disease of poverty - one mostly found among the minorities and the immigrants crowded into inner city tenements.

In the end, National Academy of Science Committee (NASC) death panels and NAZI death panels - intellectually - did not seem to differ much ...

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