Ralph Northam: Still Your Governor

Two months after a blackface photo from his med school yearbook nearly ended the political career of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, the Governor seems to have survived, and his racism seems to be embraced across the state. Given the open anti-Semitism within the national Democratic Party, this is probably just business as usual.

WAVY news has reported that the Democratic governor is cracking jokes at almost daily public appearances around Virginia. State lawmakers who called on him to resign are now all smiles, standing beside him at news conferences. The Twitter mob has moved on to other things, and the antifa-led protests outside his house have stopped.

At a century-old black church in Richmond over the weekend, Northam was warmly received as he helped unveil a historic marker for civil rights matriarch Dorothy Height.

Republicans have called Democrats hypocrites for standing by Northam’s side again as this year’s legislative elections approach.

The blackface episode, while it indicates an above average level of racism is still not as embarrassing as the insipid groveling that Northam has exhibited to clutch power.

“Democrats are willing to sacrifice their morals and values to stay in power,” – Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Jack Wilson.

The more troubling aspect of the Governor is his support of abortion up to the moment of birth and even after–as a pediatric neurologist, one has to wonder if he has renounced the Oath of Hippocrates, as was noted by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

In taking this Oath, physicians promise to be healers, not killers, avoiding all deliberate harm to patients. The Oath specifically proscribes abortion and euthanasia.

How do you “keep an infant comfortable” when it is gasping, choking, crying, and kicking, without giving it what it needs to live—or killing it?

Can a doctor wash his hands of responsibility for a tiny newborn by shifting it to an exhausted, emotionally distraught woman, who is pressured to make a choice within a few seconds that will affect the rest of her life?

The historical significance is not lost on the Mirror, especially given the anti-jew rhetoric seeping out of Congress.

Aktion T4

Starting as a euthanasia program that eliminated disabled infants and children deemed unfit to live and expanding in time to cover disabled adults and the elderly, the program ended in 1941 amid a welter of protests from many quarters of German society.

But the machinery for mass killing that this program developed would not lie idle for long. These victims — as many as 300,000 of them in total — helped the Nazis refine the methods they’d soon use to carry out the Holocaust.

This “rehearsal” for the Final Solution had no official name and was known in Germany only by the address where it was headquartered: 4 Tiergartenstraße, Berlin, which inspired the name Aktion T4.

In early 1939, a letter arrived at the office of the Nazi Party Chancellery from a German man and Nazi loyalist named Richard Kretschmar. He was trying to contact Hitler directly in hopes of gaining clearance to legally euthanize his own son, Gerhard, who had been born just a few months earlier with severe and incurable physical and mental disabilities including missing limbs, blindness, and convulsions (the original medical records are lost and secondhand accounts vary).

Kretschmar asked Hitler to let them have this “monster” put down. Hitler then sent his own physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, to look into the case. On inspection, Brandt decided the diagnosis had been correct, that he was an “idiot,” and there was no hope for improvement. Thus Gerhard was killed by lethal injection on July 25, 1939. His death certificate stated the cause of death as “heart weakness.”

Hitler had authorized the creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses, led by Brandt and Nazi Chief of the Chancellery Philipp Bouhler, among others. Within weeks of killing Gehard, these men then put the Aktion T4 system into place.

Upon the occasion of every birth, an official would have to fill out a form that included a section for describing physical or other observed defects that the child might have. Three doctors would then review the forms – without any of them actually examining the patient themselves – and mark it with a cross if they thought the child should be killed.

Two-out-of-three crosses were enough to warrant the removal of the child from their home under the guise of helping them get medical attention and then killing them.

By the summer of 1939, hundreds of infants and young children had been removed from homes and healthcare facilities across Germany and were transported to one of six sites: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. These were working asylums, so there was nothing unusual about new patients arriving and being housed in secure wards at first.

Once there, the children would typically be given fatal doses of luminal or morphine.

One doctor, Hermann Pfannmüller, made a specialty of gradually starving the children to death. It was, according to him, a more natural and peaceful way to go than a harsh chemical injection that stopped the heart.

In 1940, when his facility in occupied Poland was visited by members of the German press, he hoisted one starving child over his head and proclaimed: “This one will last another two or three days!”

Aktion T4 was expanded to include older children and adults with disabilities who couldn’t care for themselves. Gradually, the methods of killing became more standardized.

Eventually, victims were sent directly to a killing center for “special treatment,” which usually involved carbon monoxide chambers disguised as showers. Credit for inventing the “bath and disinfection” ruse goes to Bouhler himself, who suggested it as a means of keeping the victims quiet until it was too late.

High-ranking Nazis took note of this efficient method of killing and later put it to much wider use.

Our Town, Our Times

As a note, in 2015, 638,169 induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas.  It is impossible to rationalize Aktion, yet we seem to have no trouble rationalizing this number of abortion deaths.

We so easily make monsters of men like Hermann Pfannmüller, but really, how much does Northam’s rhetoric differ?

So it goes.

Note: History.com and Wikipedia were used as the source for Aktion T4 data and details.