An Absence of Ethics

The Journal of Medical Ethics isn't something that most of us would read on a regular basis, but when it starts publishing peer-reviewed papers calling for 'after-birth abortion' of disabled babies, maybe it's time to make an exception.

The Giubilini and Minerva paper 'After Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?' is every bit as stomach-churning as you might expect, but what makes it worse is an editorial blog by Julian Savulescu not just defending the decision to publish, but deliberately setting out to portray those who object to the paper as solely ascientific, racist, right-wing thugs.

The authors, Giubilini and Minerva, have now published an open letter on the JME blog, apologising if people have found the arguments offensive and saying that's because it was only intended to be read by  'fellow bio-ethicists'. Oddly enough I don't find that particularly reassuring, if you want to argue that disability makes me inherently less, then I'm going to find that offensive no matter where you make the argument. Even if you keep it completely to yourself it still demeans every disabled person out there.

Potentially even more disturbing (there's an awful lot of not very effective post-facto covering your backside going on at the JME) is the assertion in a blog by the JME's Associate Editor, the Reverend Professor Emeritus Ken Boyd, that "It has subsequently been suggested to me that people whose lives might have been ended by ‘after-birth abortion’ were this legal, might be deeply offended by this paper. If that is the case I am sorry, but I am also confident that many of these people are equally capable of mounting a robust academic reply to the paper which, again subject to peer-review, the Journal of Medical Ethics will be very willing to consider for publication." I'm sorry? You're a Reverend Professor Emeritus, the editor of a scientific journal covering a particularly esoteric area of philosophy, which has just argued that a disabled life is inherently a lesser life, and you a) needed someone else to tell you that it is incredibly offensive, and b) are convinced there are many of us capable of writing a counter-argument that will pass peer review? I doubt that we can find enough people of any description capable of writing at that standard in that sub-speciality to meet most people's definition of many, never mind among disabled people. There's a deeply unpleasant double standard at play here, it's all right for ethical specialists to claim that our life is not worth living, but for us to have a right to reply we have to jump through their professional hoops?

Getting back to the paper, let's be clear before going any further, some of the comments addressed at the authors are abusive, racist, and they even stretch as far as death threats, there can be no justification for abusive attacks of that nature. Yet those objections are not the only objections; I am proud to proclaim myself a bleeding heart liberal, I certainly have no truck with racism or discrimination in any way, shape or form, and my scientific/engineering background pretty much defines me, and there are plenty of similar responses, so seeing the editor seeking to dismiss anyone who objects as universally right-wing thugs and racists seems a little, well, unethical.

The paper starts from the explicitly Medical Model presumption that a disabled life is a lesser life and proceeds from that to define a disabled person as a non-person. Imagine the firestorm if it had argued a non-Caucasian life is a lesser life, a non-person. I am disabled, for me there can be no difference between the two positions. This is a frightening time for disabled people, we see a hardening of attitudes towards us, we face harassment in the streets if not outright assault (I'm into double figures myself with hate crime incidents), we are increasingly portrayed as fakes, frauds and scroungers by media and our own governments, and, perhaps most chillingly of all, we see a resurgence of eugenics within the bio-ethics community, and that community attempting to justify and defend those who spawn such hateful views (the authors and the editors can object to the emotive language once they have faced physical assault in the street from utter strangers simply for walking while disabled).

Disability hate crime in the UK has reached the point that rabbis are now drawing explicit parallels with Germany in the 1930s, any bio-ethicist should be well aware of what came next. I imagine the authors might argue that such things could never happen again, they certainly seem to have no clue about the constant threats disabled people are living under, but the entirety of Aktion T4! sprang from the argument that the life of a single baby was not worth living, doctors took away that child's name, made him a non-person, killed him, but we know now that his name was Gerhard Kretschmar, and that that one death opened the floodgates for a pogrom directed at Germany's own disabled people, serving as a prototype for all the horrors that are better known from the later Holocaust against Jews, Gypsies and others. Is the paper's position really any different to that put forward by Hitler's personal doctor when tasked to create a plan of action? The authors argue once more that disabled babies are non-people, and where that argument might lead in the current hostile environment towards disabled people is a prospect we are fully entitled to find very frightening. The authors don't even have the courage to call infanticide infanticide, labelling it instead 'post-birth abortion'. If their logic is flawless then it should hold whatever the name, yet to hide the reality of what they propose they obfuscate it behind a smokescreen of changing names and vaporous pseudo-logic. What does that tell us?

There are two differences this time around. Disabled people have a voice now and we will not go gentle into that good night. If ethicists argue that we are less, or defend those do, then they must expect to be regarded as the disablists their views reveal them to be, to be treated with the contempt they deserve and challenged for it, just as racists are challenged whenever they rear their ugly ideologies into the view of civilised people. The second difference is that bio-ethicists have been down this path before, they know the risks and where it might lead, they know that a disabled life is almost without exception a full and fulfilling one, but that the acceptance of disabled people into society as true equals is deeply problematical, with disability hate crime a very real threat. They have the professional responsibility not to set either of those points aside when debating the issue, and to demand a full and frank discussion of all of them as a minimal standard of any peer-reviewed paper. Ethics demands no less, but Ethics was failed by the decision to publish the paper, most especially by the decision to publish unchallenged and uncondemned.

My assessment, one I doubt I'm alone in within the disabled community, is that the leadership and rank and file of the bio-ethics establishment have been consistently failing at these tasks for the past decade or more, that they have neither actively argued the equal value of disabled life, nor adequately challenged those who try to advocate eugenics based euthanasia to justify the risks they raise for disabled people. To argue that disabled life is a lesser life is no different to racism, to defend the right to those views at a time when disabled people face a rising tide of harassment and hate is no different to defending racism in a racially charged environment. Will they rise to the challenge and stand alongside disabled people to do what is right, or are they condemned to repeat the lessons of history?

Time to clean house.

Why the PCC Has to Go

The Leveson Inquiry into the press is drawing a fightback from the media, trying to claim, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that the Press Complaints Commission is an adequate body to police the press from within.

@Latentexistence has just blogged the reply he got from the PCC into a complaint he made over a recent attack on people with ME/CFS and a bunch of other disabilities by the attack columnist Rob Liddle writing on the Spectator's website.

Liddle claimed that ME is not a 'real' disability. The PCC admit this is inaccurate, but claim it is an acceptable view to publish because it is clearly his opinion. By extension journalists can get away with any kind of offensive assertion by making clear that it is their own opinion. The problem here is that people read columnists like Liddle precisely because they consider their opinions to have weight. Effectively the PCC have granted journalists complete immunity from telling the truth.

The PCC then looked at whether the claim was discriminatory, and their justification why it isn't just beggars belief. They don't deny it is discriminatory, they just say that only individuals are protected from discrimination by the Code and that groups are fair game. Because discriminating against the group someone belongs to is clearly nothing like discriminating against them.... Again the PCC are granting immunity to journalists by creating a simple way for them to work around the Code.

Nor is this the only instance where the PCC have articulated similar views. A stream of complaints from disabled people about the concerted attacks on disabled people over the past year have drawn near identical responses. Essentially the PCC's view is that minorities can legitimately be abused in any way, shape or form, using any made-up fact, just so long as it isn't directed against a named individual. When the only arbiter of press standards openly considers minorities to be fair game for press bigotry, then it is clear that it not just time to get rid of the PCC, but to impose regulation on the press from outside, because clearly they are not fit people to impose it from within.

On Being an Uppity Crip

"Mong-gate" rumbles on, with people now taking positions for and against Ricky Gervais' latest TV series 'Life's Too Short', which revolves around a talent agency for actors with restricted growth run by Warwick Davis, himself a dwarf. Friday's Guardian featured an article in the Comment is Free section interviewing Kristina Gray, mother of a child with one of the several forms of dwarfism, about her opinion of the programme. It's probably fair to say she's seriously less than impressed.

Now I haven't watched 'Life's Too Short', I'm not a fan of Gervais' style of humour, and my personal opinion is that whether he does a good job of it or not, the attitudes of the audience will overwhelmingly interpret it as just another message that people with dwarfism, and other disabled people by extension, are perfectly legitimate targets for attack. So essentially I think the idea is fatally flawed, even if he has done all the research needed, unfortunately 'mong-gate' makes it clear he hasn't.

The first I knew of the article was a tweet on Friday linking to it, with a comment that the trolls were out in force. So I went over to read the article and picked my way through the comments replying to some of the more egregious ones, particularly those which didn't seem to have any understanding of the level of disability discrimination out there. I was looking at the Guardian website again this morning and noticed I'd gotten a couple of replies after my last visit. Comments on the article are now closed, so I can't reply to them there, but I think one of them is interesting for the attitudes it reveals. Particularly as it got 11 recommendations, more than most comments in the thread.

"In a series of posts you have made a number of vague and tantalising claims about the physical and verbal abuse you claim to have suffered at the hands of the general public and organisations. If your claims are true"

Why the 'if'? Why report something if it isn't true? Is the reality that disabled people are being abused on the street so horrendous that it must be denied? Perhaps a more open interpretation would be 'I don't like your point, so I'm going to imply you're making it up.'

"If we are to have a worthy debate and if you want to be taken remotely seriously start giving detail."

So that would be strip yourself bare or be held a liar?

"Let's hear exactly what the nature of your disability is and a bit of substance on the attacks you claim are so frequent."

Again with the implication I'm a liar, and there's that attitude, so prevalent in modern society, that every detail of our disabilities is public property. It's an example of the way in which society interprets us as less than fully adult; because we're disabled, society believes that we haven't earned the right to privacy, but must instead be treated as small children, whose every thought can be pried into by any passing adult.

"I myself am not disabled but someone very close to me, my girlfiend, is disabled (wheelchair) and as such through her I have a pretty good knowledge of the day to day realities of disabled life in this country. And guess what? While there are often struggles that she faces on a day to day basis they in no way tally with your depiction of a nation where verbal and physical abuse against disabled people is a daily occurence. Not even fucking close."

Well that's me told. Or maybe not, maybe my friendly troll isn't so well informed as he would like to think. I mean it's not as if I was one of the disabled people asked to front a major report on the rise in disability hate crime with our personal experiences - oh, wait a minute, yes I was.

"Could it be that instead of sitting on the internet being a professional victim and whining on message boards she just gets on.and enjoys life and has a sense of humour? Perish the very thought."

So if I campaign then I must be a whinging professional victim. And if my disability means I have to do it online it's clearly because I don't have any real life or sense of humour. Or maybe I just don't like the attitudes I see in society and think that behooves me to do something about it. As for sense of humour, I'm afraid I prefer my biting social commentary to come from Pratchett, not Gervais.

"Oh and while you're at it perhaps you would like to substantiate the thinly veiled insinuation you made that a show like LTS could potentially increase backward attitudes towards the disabled. I can't wait to hear that one."

Thinly veiled? Damn, I thought I was being bitingly obvious. As for substantiating my views, I would have thought that was the last thing I needed to do when our acceptance in society has slid back so desperately far through the constant attacks on us as scroungers and frauds in the tabloid press, and with my critic being so closely connected surely he must have noticed too? Or maybe not.

What makes the post so striking is that in one of the posts he takes issue with I'd already talked about disabled people being attacked for daring to make themselves heard, clearly the inherent irony of his reply went straight over his head. I'm not sure I can say it any better here than I said it there:

Attacking the campaigners is always the first response in a campaign for equality - Afro-Americans were written off as 'uppity n&**^s', Suffragettes as demonstrating ‘the explosive fury of epileptics’, and so on. Dismissing us as failing to understand the humour, as having a chip on our shoulder, as being bitter over our disabilities, we've heard them all. We do understand the humour, we campaign precisely because we have accepted our disabilities don't make us any different, and if there is a chip on our shoulder, then it's there because the actions of non-disabled people have put it there, and isn't that something any decent person should take action over?

And if that makes the trolls on Comment is Free think I'm an uppity crip, then clearly I'm doing something right ;)

Disabled People, Betrayed By 38 Degrees?

You may detect a slight hardening of my language since Friday's blog, that's because I've been looking into the matter in more depth, and the more I look, the uneasier I become about attitudes within 38 Degrees towards disabled people.

Shortly after publishing Friday's blog, a friend tweeted and pointed out that disabled people had actually won the previous campaign vote, but that 38 Degrees had then shelved that vote and staged another at which the NHS won. Obviously that's a very serious allegation, the problem is that the facts seem to back it up.

If you go to 38 Degree's Campaign Suggestion forum, and order all suggestions by popularity, which this link will do, you'll find a list of the most popular campaign ideas.

Sitting at number 6 is "A campaign to stop the abolition of Disability Living Allowance - the measure of civilised society."

Sitting at number 9 is "The coalition "are considering" assessing children in their DLA shake up." But attached to that is this note:

• "We're looking into a technical problem with the suggest a campaigns system. Last night we merged this with another DLA campaign after being asked to by the people who had originally created the suggestions. This follows on from previous problems we had with merging campaigns.  Unfortunately last night there was a problem with the system and when we merged the campaigns thousands of votes were removed from the total. I'm really sorry this happened. We're looking into this and trying to sort it out."

If we assume the minimum possible value of 'thousands', i.e. 2000 votes, then that would have been sufficient to boost this to just over 4000 votes, making it at a minimum the 4th most popular campaign suggestion.

But 'that's okay' you say, 'the problem just happened last night, 38 Degrees will fix it on Monday'. Which would be fine if it was true, but I know for a fact - having seen it myself - that that message has been there for months with no action being taken, and all but a handful of the comments attached to it are 8 months or more old. Months with no action, months of wasted inactivity during which the Welfare Reform Bill has been trekking through Parliament side by side with the NHS Bill. Look at everything 38 Degrees have achieved in trying to stop the NHS Bill, look at everything 38 Degrees haven't done to stop the Welfare Reform Bill. The suspicion that disabled people, and the votes and activities of the 38 Degrees membership, have been sacrificed to concentrate on the NHS Bill is impossible to shake. In fact I can't find any sign that 38 Degrees have lifted a finger to oppose the Welfare Reform Bill or defend disabled people.

There's a word for treating disabled people as second class citizens, that word is disablism, or two words if you aren't familiar with the one, disability discrimination.

I don't want to believe that of 38 Degrees, but their own polls show opposing the disability related provisions of the Welfare Reform Bill at numbers 4 and 6 in their own members lists of suggested priorities, combine them together and they are the 2nd most popular suggestion with a minimum of 7,243 votes, within 350 votes of the most popular suggestion and nearly 1,500 votes ahead of the 3rd most popular suggestion.

Sitting down at number 18 is opposing badger culling, and yet that's currently splashed all over the 38 Degrees front page as one of their successful campaigns?! I can't help wondering if the problem is 38 Degrees HQ thinks crips aren't as cuddly as badgers.

So, opposing DLA changes has got more votes on the 38 Degrees website than any idea but fairness and equality for pensioners (and we all know the strength of the pensioners lobby), but when 38 Degrees put out 17 suggested campaigns, including issues as diverse as powerstations, tax avoidance, the Murdochs, and benefits for pensioners living abroad, disability issues don't feature at all? Forgive me, but something's not just rotten in the state of Denmark, but stinking to high heaven of disablist discrimination.

If you think I'm writing this to shine a light on 38 Degrees and shame them into treating disabled people as the equals this government is determined to ensure we aren't, then you're damned right I am.

So what's it to be, 38 Degrees? Do you really believe in democracy and equality, or is it just a sham to trick people into campaigning for your own hobbyhorses? Are you for disabled people, or against us?

30 Pieces of Silver - The International Paralympic Committee and ATOS Origin

The following is the text of a letter I have just sent to the International Paralympic Committee (info@paralympic.org) regarding their partnership with ATOS Origin - they of the appalling record for disability assessments and cavalier attitude toward disability rights, not to mention freedom of speech. If you aren't familiar with ATOS, you can read the full and unpleasant story of my encounter with them here, and mine was a relatively positive example in comparison to many of the tales of abuse out there. I literally cannot think of a worse company for the International Paralympic Committee to partner with, yet there they are, taking their 30 pieces of silver, kicking disabled people and everything the Paralympics movement stands for in the teeth.

If you don't think this is good enough, if you think the IPC should know better than to partner with a company that promotes the perception of disabled people as scroungers, refuses to meet our most basic access needs and rolls out the lawyers when disabled people complain, then I urge you to write to the International Paralympic Committee at info@paralympic.org and copy it to your national paralympic committees (see here). Feel free to borrow from what follows, but the message will be stronger in your own words and experiences.

Dear Sir,

  As a disabled person I have no option other than to write and express my utter disgust that the International Paralympics Committee have entered into a partnership with ATOS Origin. With less than a year to go to London 2012, the worldwide disability community is increasingly focused on the United Kingdom, but it is in the United Kingdom that ATOS Origin are known to every disabled person for their disablist activities. Awarded the contract to assess disabled people for disability related benefits, ATOS Origin have left a massive trail of distress and a string of suicides behind them, as their contempt for disabled people results in assessment after assessment at which not even the ‘facts’ reported by their assessors can be taken at face value

I can perhaps best illustrate the repellent attitudes of this company towards disabled people by describing my own experiences with them, and I write as someone who passed their assessment rather than as someone who failed it, meaning I have no axe to grind for being rejected. Their first attempt at an assessment for me got no further than the door to the assessment room, they had failed to provide the reasonable adjustments to my disability needed to get me through the assessment – adjustable seating, nothing too outré – adjustments that they were required by law to provide. When questioned over this, the ATOS doctor admitted ‘We have complained about the seating before, but regional management just tell us to make do with what we have’. This clearly indicates an utter contempt for the needs of disabled people existing at higher levels of management within ATOS Origin. ATOS then proceeded to tell the Department of Work and Pensions that I had failed to attend the assessment, resulting in my benefits being frozen. I leave it to you to judge the attitudes to disabled people this less than honest report reflects. The stress this caused led to a massive flare-up in my disability that lasted for months. When I was finally able to challenge the decision DWP immediately accepted my points, they had heard them far too often before, and a second assessment was arranged.

The second assessment was a clash of wills, between an ATOS doctor who clearly wasn’t prepared to listen to yet another disabled person annoying him with facts and my own refusal to be browbeaten. I was criticised for not giving ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, even when neither would have been true, I was criticised for knowing the structure of the assessment, I was criticised for insisting on giving the information that indicated I automatically qualified for my benefit, even though he had failed to ask for it, even though the information to say he needed to ask for it was on the form in front of him, I was even criticised for my description of the effects of my disability, a description shown to be completely accurate just a few minutes later when the still inadequate seating left me unable to continue other than by balancing on one leg in the middle of the room, hanging desperately onto the back of the chair. I was even criticized for being unable to bend my knee so that he could test my reflexes. I have met bad doctors before, but only at ATOS have I met doctors who criticised me for my disability. Surprisingly I passed the assessment, but many, many disabled people would not have been able to override the opinions of an abusive, close-minded doctor in the way that I did. As an engineering professional I understand the legal duty of care when acting professionally, in each of my two assessments ATOS Origin aspired to a level of professional competence and care that was utterly farcical.

And yet my assessments were far more professional than many that are reported. Outright falsehoods in assessments seem positively common, while ATOS personnel have been caught in homophobic rants, abuse of their patients as scroungers and a whole range of other abuses that would seem absurd if they weren’t demonstrably true. Even if we disregard the many, many reports of outright disablist behaviour, their true attitudes towards their disabled patients (though their staff are urged by ATOS management not to think of disabled people in those terms, even as they conduct medical assessments and delve into the most intimate details of their disabilities) can be illustrated by the fact that many of their assessment centres, centres whose entire clientele will be disabled, do not have on-site disabled parking, are not wheelchair accessible and lack even such basics as accessible seating.

The statistical results of ATOS Origin assessments demonstrate that their professionalism towards disabled people is clearly questionable, in any other industry a failure rate of 1 in 8, as demonstrated by successful appeals at independent tribunals, rising to almost 1 in 4 with representation from advocacy groups, would be an utter catastrophe, never mind in an industry where each of those failures represents an individual disabled person put through intolerable stress at considerable risk to their health, but ATOS Origin continue merrily onwards, not just refusing to acknowledge that they have a problem, but actively trying to stifle debate by bringing legal actions against disabled people who dare to complain publically.

ATOS Origins have demonstrated their attitude towards disabled people in tales of abuse stretching from one end of the UK to the other. If they chose to associate themselves with the IPC, it is not to demonstrate that they care for disabled people, that they do not is demonstrated by their refusal to admit that they have a problem, but because they see the goodwill that people around the world hold for the Paralympics Movement and hope to leech away some of that for themselves, hiding their disablism by wrapping it in the Paralympic Flag. Is the IPC really willing to sell the reputation of the Paralympic Games to whitewash the abuse of disabled people? Are ATOS Origin's 30 pieces of silver really worth the betrayal of everything the International Paralympic Committee stands for?

As a disability rights activist, if the IPC choose to retain their connection with such an actively disablist firm as ATOS Origin then I will have no option than to throw my weight behind the protest campaign at London 2012 and stand in line with other disabled people saying ‘Not in our name’. Disabled people picketing the Paralympics in a stand against disablism, could any sight be more disturbing?

Yours in sadness,

David Gillon

Attack of the Flying Monkeys

I've just had a flying monkey call me 'a spineless cunt'.

Yes, really, though I should point out that these aren't the pro-Wicked Witch flying monkeys of Wizard of Oz fame. Flying Monkeys are what Nicola Clark (@MrsNickyClark on Twitter, and one of the good guys of the disability rights movement) calls the rabid fans who attack her on-line when she criticizes their heroes for using disablist language.

The latest celebrity she has challenged is Ricky Gervais (@RickyGervais), who has set out to single-handedly repopularise the use of 'mong', a word disability groups have spent a long time trying to eradicate from the language of abuse. In many ways 'mong' is Britain's 'retard', the disablist insult that's an all purpose term of abuse for disabled and able-bodied alike. But at the heart of it, the source of its power, is the implication that to be a 'mong', to be born with Downs Syndrome, is to be reduced to some kind of sub-human village idiot, worthy of nothing but being the butt of jokes, a figure of fun, and hate.

Gervais tries to claim that 'mong' no longer has this meaning, but its sole power comes from the abuse of disabled people, and that abuse continues to this day, with many, many disabled people having faced it on the streets for no reason other than their disability. I actually haven't, 'scrounger' seems to be the term of choice when complete strangers confront me for daring to be disabled in public, but that's close enough to tell me how deeply that assault on your identity, your equality, your basic membership of the human  race, cuts, and to teach me how easily those words can turn into physical assault. So when I hear that someone isn't just using the term, but is encouraging others to use it, and that man is someone with 400,000 followers on Twitter, then I understand exactly why @MrsNickyClark needed to challenge him.

Nicola Clark can make her argument better than I can, and she does it eloquently in her Guardian article, but Gervais's response hasn't been to sit back, think about the issue, and admit that he was being unwise. No, instead he's upped his use of the term, complete with gurning pictures that make his real intent very clear, and urged his followers to rally against (and I quote) 'the haters and mentals' - by their words shall you know them....

Earlier this evening I saw one of his followers post a tweet "Let's try to get 'mong' trending" - for the non-Twitterati, this means having a notably high number of occurrences in current tweets and it can draw a lot of attention beyond those who follow the original poster. Not wanting that kind of post to go unchallenged I put up a counter-tweet, pointing out that he was calling for an attack on disabled people. It rapidly became obvious that hadn't even occurred to him, and that illustrates the danger of what Gervais is trying to do. By popularising the use of the word, he makes it socially acceptable, which means firstly that disabled people are being regularly demeaned by people who don't even know they're doing it when they use it against non-disabled targets, and secondly it gives aid and succor to those who do use it as disablist abuse by robbing their crime of any social sanction. Disabled people lose on all fronts, Gervais laughs all the way to the bank.

I'd barely managed to convince the first poster that what he was calling for was wrong, when a flying monkey arrived and, as flying monkeys are wont to, demonstrated his outrage with a display of faeces-flinging, amongst which was the choice accusation I opened with, that I'm a 'spineless cunt' for wanting people not to abuse disabled people - which apparently also makes me 'an aggressive bully'. Not being one to shrink from an argument, I tried to give as good as I got without resorting to faeces-flinging. I think the thing that came through most (and this went on most of the evening, ending with him swearing he's not done with me) was the sheer inability to empathize with someone with a disability. Challenged for protesting on-line, not in person, I pointed out that on-line campaigning is the only kind of activism open to me, only to be repeatedly taunted that real activists are out in the streets, the implication seemingly that those who can only take issue on-line are some kind of dilettantes without any real right to protest.

That's actually worrying beyond the Gervais issue because it suggests there are a lot of people out there who don't value anyone whose disability restricts them to non-traditional roles (not really a surprise, but it's not nice to have it confirmed to your face), but it's specifically worrying over the Gervais issue because it demonstrates just how dangerous the ability of celebrities to manipulate their fans can be, and that's why Gervais can't be allowed to go unchallenged. So kudos to Nicola Clark for having the resilience to go head to head with people like him, knowing full well that the flying monkeys are out there and ready to unleash a shit-storm of hate.

If you aren't already one of @MrsNickyClark's followers, I thoroughly recommend her for sensible comments on disability rights. If, on the other hand, you're a follower of @RickyGervais, why are you siding with the person who wants to make the lives of disabled people worse?

Returning to the opening faeces-flinging of 'spineless cunt' to close, if that's the cost of challenging disablist language then I'm happy to embrace being spineless (not to mention that it would likely mean being in a lot less pain!), but when it comes to being a cunt, sorry, I just haven't got the right equipment for that one.

A Day of Infamy

(This is the piece that should have gone up yesterday, 1st of September, and prompted my move to Blogger. I deliberately haven't changed anything to reflect the delayed post as it is talking about the specific day)

LatentExistence wrote an excellent piece yesterday for Where’s The Benefit, entitled Godwin’s Law Must Die, discussing how people’s horror at Nazism actually gets in the way when 1930s Germany really is the only historical parallel for the situation you are experiencing.

It had slipped my mind what today is the anniversary of until I was reminded by someone else’s tweet, but it is an anniversary that brings that post by LatentExistence into sharp focus and reminds me of the things we must never allow ourselves to forget, whether disabled people or not.

Today is September 1^st. Although in Great Britain we usually remember the start of WWII as the 3^rd of September, based on our own declaration of war in support of Poland, it was on the 1^st that Germany executed Fall Weiss, the invasion of Poland, having used commandos the night before to manufacture an incident of ‘Polish’ provocation. Attacked from three sides - Slovakia invaded with Germany, while Russia stabbed Poland in the back on the 17^th - organised Polish resistance soon collapsed, although many Poles slipped away, coming to Britain and France to continue the fight. The end of organised resistance did not bring an end to the killing, it just provided freedom for the massacres and the men of Einsatzkommando 16 moved through the mental hospitals of Western Poland, slaughtering the disabled patients: 7,000 at Gdansk, 10,000 at Gdynia, and hundreds at Poznan in the first example of mass gassing, a process Himmler came to see in December of 1939. The organised extermination of disabled mental patients then spread back into Germany itself, clearing the hospitals of the ‘useless’ to free them for war-wounded: 1,400 in Pomerania, 1,600 in East Prussia, 8,000 of their own people in this wave, killed for the crime of being disabled.

The organised killing of disabled Germans had actually started before this, with children, or, perhaps more precisely, a single child. Part of Nazi Party ideology, a creed which in some cases literally became a religion, was a fetishizing of racial purity, the cult of the inherent superiority of the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryan German, destined to rule over the untermensch, eugenics taken to its ultimate conclusion. That some Germans might be less than ‘perfect’, might actually be disabled, was problematic for the Nazi Party’s racial purity zealots, and in the confrontational politics of 1930s Germany problems were simply something to actively pour your hatred onto. They took the passive concept of racial purity and developed it into the active concept of racial hygiene, planning to purge the German Volk of undesirable elements, such as people with disabilities.

Eugenics run rampant wasn’t actually unique to Germany at that time, both the US and Sweden had programmes for sterilizing those with disabilities considered inheritable or who were judged to show anti-social behaviour, but Germany turned to sterilization with all its national fervour for efficiency and in June 1933, almost as soon as the Nazis were in power, passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which mandated sterilization for disabilities such as epilepsy and ‘social deviances’ such as alcoholism. Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte), conducted a witchhunt through the German mental hospitals, asylums and other institutions, choosing those to be sterilized, a number estimated to have run to 360,000 Germans by 1939. Perhaps the only reason the programme did not progress to physical disabilities was that the senior Nazi Joseph Goebbels had a club foot. And all the while the Nazi propaganda machine was churning out films and posters intended to portray disabled people as a drain on the state and worthy only of euthanasia.

In 1939 Hitler asked Brandt, his personal physician, and Bouhler, head of his chancellery, to look into the case of a disabled baby, Gerhard Kretschmar, whose parents wanted him killed – the father’s letter to Hitler apparently referred to his son as ‘this monster’. In July 1939 the killing was carried out and Brandt was instructed by Hitler to proceed on the same basis in other cases, leading to the systematic classification of disabled German children by the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness, authorised on 18^th August 1939, with doctors and midwives required to report all births of disabled children and preparatory measures being made to extend the process to adults. With the outbreak of war the need to proceed cautiously diminished and in October 1939, Hitler issued the Euthanasia Decree, bypassing the Health Ministry in favour of Brandt and Bouhler, his own men:

Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death.

And so Aktion T4 was born, a programme that ultimately killed over 200,000 disabled Germans and started a full two years ahead of the Wannsee Conference and the decision on the extermination the Jews. But the killing had already started, and so Hitler backdated the decree to ‘legalise’ the actions that had already taken place.

The date he chose was September 1^st, 1939, a day of infamy.