For what he never knew

 

The failure to recognize other people as fellow human beings empowers violence across cultures. Such dehumanization enables instrumental brute force by weakening moral inhibitions that would otherwise restrain it, thereby making perpetrators apathetic to victims’ suffering.

Professor Shmuel Reis, MD, MHPE, Bar Ilan University and Brown University suggests, “Once you accept humans can be dehumanized, eventually you can engage in exterminating them.”

While we witness stark evidence of this on a daily basis, history has certainly paved the way for such cruelty.

After World War I ended in 1918, Germany saw the rise of different political factions and ideals. One group that emerged was Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party.

By 1933 Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party had taken control of Germany, and this began a period of totalitarian government and racial hygiene laws. Laws crafted by lawyers and “scientists” that would institute and define Nazi racial policy.

Hitler wanted to create the Master Race. What emerged was a powerful portrait of a nation—and ideology—gone awry.

Holocaust survivor, Anna Steinberger, PhD, recounts, “The Holocaust has been defined as the twelve-year period from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, until the end of the war, 1945. It was a government planned, government supported mass extermination or mass killing. And while it was targeted towards Jewish people, there were many other groups of individuals that suffered.”

Hitler convinced the German people that one particular race of people— the Jews—were their archenemy and the sole cause of all their problems. He then perpetuated an atmosphere of racial intolerance and hatred.

Sound familiar?

Author and Professor Susan Benedict, PhD, CRNA, FAAN, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Nursing: “Every genocide, whether it’s Rwanda or the Holocaust, begins with ‘we’ versus ‘them.’ Hitler used the Jews, and later other people, as scapegoats for all that was wrong in Germany. He set up the ‘we’ versus ‘them.’ He institutionalized that.”

Using inflammatory propaganda, Hitler and the Nazis began a campaign against the Jews.

Dr. Michael A. Grodin, MD, Professor at Boston University theorizes, “Hitler found a perfect meshing of his Nazi ideology with the eugenic Nazi medicine of the Racial Hygiene Movement.”

The sobering reality is, without the full support of physicians, scientists, and nurses, the Holocaust, as it unfolded, could never have happened.

Nothing much has changed.

“Propaganda is an extremely powerful way to convince people to their way of thinking,” testifies Holocaust survivor Steinberger.

If history has taught us anything, it is has taught us that most human atrocities are enabled. They do not happen apart from covertly orchestrated collaboration.

In the 1920s, German lawyer Karl Binding and German psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche co-authored the book The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. This book greatly influenced Hitler’s thinking about euthanasia.

After years of strong Nazi propaganda Germany’s doctors and nurses began to accept the belief that the murderous Nazi euthanasia program would be good for the nation.

“In Germany, the proponents of the eugenic movement were the most prominent, the most powerful, the establishment. The legal system became Nazified immediately,” authenticates Professor Reis.

“For a long time, nurses in Germany were agents of the physicians; however, the physicians in the Nazi period became agents of the State. Physicians were no longer asked to care for patients but to care for the state. What was good for the state was what was important, not what was good for an individual patient,” asserts Professor Grodin.

More than 70-years later, the question of how Germany’s physicians and nurses became involved in these killings still intrigues historians.

I repeat, “dehumanization enables instrumental brute force.” Once we choose to ignore the sanctity of each human life, created in the image of a merciful God, we numbly accept human beings as expendable pawns in “The Great Reset.”

In 1964 song writer Rick Evans composed a song that would chart number 1 in both the United States and England. The song became a one-hit wonder for the American pop-rock duo of Zager & Evans who recorded the song in one take in 1968, at a studio in a cow pasture in Odessa, Texas.

The foreshadowing lyrics:

In the year 2525, if man is still alive; If woman can survive, they may find …

In the year 3535, Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie;

Everything you think, do and say, Is in the pill you took today.

Now it’s been ten thousand years, Man has cried a billion tears

For what, he never knew, now man’s reign is through …