What connects the UK's new "assisted dying" law with the Nazi's "Aktion 4" euthanasia program?

If not a direct line, certainly an ideological thread.

(If in a hurry - skip to and listen to the 14 minute conversational podcast at the bottom.)

I last wrote about the UK’s “assisted dying bill”¹ the evening before the vote (here), when I retained some hope that it might be defeated. This was not to be. It was passed last week, despite the manifest issues with the proposed new law.

It did this after around 150 hours of debate - including the committee stage. By way of a yardstick, the bill to outlaw foxhunting (The Hunting Act 2004) was debated for around 700 hours over several years.

This is an excellent “A to Z” thread by Dan Hitchens outlining the many things wrong with this bill.

This brief article in Unherd describes the vote as “Parliament’s most shameful day”, and I am inclined to agree.

My own objections to the bill are multi-layered. One of them centres around the capacity of such laws (and systems) to diminish the value of life, to weigh it up in a utilitarian manner against what it contributes to, or what it costs, society.

That is then the first step on a path along which it becomes acceptable to do unspeakable things “for the greater good”.

In discussions with friends and colleagues,

Jessica Hockett

made me aware of this 56-minute video, which is well worth watching². This describes - in excrutiating detail - how the Nazi euthanasia program caused the taking of innocent lives by healthcare professionals to become normalised and accepted by society:

(A short description of this program - known as Aktion T4 - can also be found here.)

One of the most chilling moments for me in the above video is at around 17:30, when one interviewee says:

I became intrigued into how they could come to believe that killing was a legitimate part of their caring role which they did.

The propaganda around the whole idea of killing people for the good of the state was profound, even down to children doing exercises in their school books on how much it costs to keep people with a disability.

In thinking this over further, I recalled the article I wrote with

Jessica Hockett

about the events in New Oreans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (below), during which there is no doubt that patients were euthanised. Justifiable or not, the point is that because of the circumstances society made the collective decision to bend its legal framework to ensure that those culpable escaped conviction for what undoubtedly amounted - in law as it stood at the time - to homicide:

Ethical boundaries in medical decision-making can be blurred by circumstances

In that article, we discussed similarities between the post-Katrina event and the way some people were treated during the “pandemic” years, a subject about which I wrote extensively here:

Did testing and euthanasia protocols help create the appearance of a sudden-spreading deadly novel virus?

Anyway, I realised that I had in total considered seven videos / articles (all linked within this piece) which, together, could convey an important message.

As you will know, I have been experimenting with NotebookLM-generated audio conversations, so I thought I would feed it these 7 sources and see what it came up with.

This is the output - a 14-minute conversational podcast:

This does a much better job than I was expecting. Scarily, I think it pretty much reflects what I have been thinking³.

1. Official title: Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

2. This video contains a Q&A session with several experienced nursing professionals and academics, which follows a screening of the above.

3. Which is not to say that I think AI should be trusted to do anything truly important. The biggest danger of AI is that people will come to regard its output as some sort of unimpeachable “truth”.