Demonizações

Em tempos perderia muito tempo a explicar a diferença entre eugenia e eutanásia, atendendo à confusão (voluntária?) que se vai fazendo por aí para dramatizar o debate sobre a morte medicamente assistida (que existe já, com tantos mantos a fingir que não, sendo que quem conhece de perto a realidade dos hospitais só pode sorrir perante a hipocrisia). Mesmo se tudo pode remontar a conceitos gregos, os críticos da eutanásia decidiram focar-se na nazificação da questão, querendo estabelecer paralelismos entre quem defenda a eutanásia e o regime nazi. Parecem não perceber que a massificação e industrialização da morte que o regime nazi praticou, assim como as práticas eugénicas (de apuramento da raça, através da união entre os “bons espécimes” e a esterilização dos defeituosos), pouco têm a ver com tudo isto. Mas… podemos sempre ir ligeiramente além da superfície e dizer que, assim sendo, se calhar os defensores da eutanásia (na versão que se pretende confundir com eugenia) são apenas filhos do maior lutador contra Hitler, de seu nome Winston Churchill. O autor do artigo de que extraio o excerto seguinte é o historiador Martin Gilbert, não um qualquer articulista do esquerda.net.

“The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life,” Winston Churchill wrote to his cousin Ivor Guest on 19 January 1899, shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday. Churchill’s view was reinforced by his experiences as a young British officer serving, and fighting, in Arab and Muslim lands, and in South Africa. Like most of his contemporaries, family and friends, he regarded races as different, racial characteristics as signs of the maturity of a society, and racial purity as endangered not only by other races but by mental weaknesses within a race. As a young politician in Britain entering Parliament in 1901, Churchill saw what were then known as the “feeble-minded” and the “insane” as a threat to the prosperity, vigour and virility of British society.

The phrase “feeble-minded” was to be defined as part of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, of which Churchill had been one of the early drafters. The Act defined four grades of “Mental Defective” who could be confined for life, whose symptoms had to be present “from birth or from an early age.” “Idiots” were defined as people “so deeply defective in mind as to be unable to guard against common physical dangers.” “Imbeciles” were not idiots, but were “incapable of managing themselves or their affairs, or, in the case of children, of being taught to do so.” The “feeble-minded” were neither idiots nor imbeciles, but, if adults, their condition was “so pronounced that they require care, supervision, and control for their own protection or the protection of others.” If children of school age, their condition was “so pronounced that they by reason of such defectiveness appear to be personally incapable of receiving proper benefit from instruction in ordinary schools.” “Moral defectives” were people who, from an early age, displayed “some permanent mental defect coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment had little or no effect.”[1]

Há entre nós que faça lembrar Glen Beck e aqueles tipos que na Fox News não passavam uma hora sem chamar nazi ou socialista ao Obama por causa do seu “Obamacare” e de outras medidas na área da Saúde.

A contaminação do debate pelo argumento “ad hitlerum” é muito bem desmontada, nem de propósito, pelo muito judeu Jon Stewart.

Ver aqui também a desmontagem da forma como há quem use a nazificação como argumento para tudo e nada de forma incorrecta.