Disabled part of neo-Nazi hatred

Nazism’s first mass murder victims were children and others with disabilities, contrary to Martin Niemuller’s poem beginning “First they came for the Socialists.… ”

One of the first German laws passed under Adolf Hitler was eugenics-inspired, requiring forced sterilization of people thought to have had defective genes causing epilepsy, alcoholism and mental illness.

In America, states had been pioneering such laws upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell. In his decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The eugenics philosophy fit neatly in Nazi pure race ideology and Hitler grafted it to it.

During the 1930s, Nazi propaganda coined two phrases to use against the disabled, “life unworthy of life” and “useless eaters.” The purpose of these was revealed in 1939, when Hitler personally approved the T4 program, which established “euthenasia centers,” death camps, for adults and removed children from care if they had disabilities.

Altogether T4 killed 270,000 people with disabilities, nothing compared to the number of Jews, Poles and others slaughtered by the Nazis.

But contempt of people with disabilities was just as important as racial and religious hatred to Nazism.

I recall this every time I see neo-Nazis give the Hitler salute and chant “blood and soil” and other slogans. These slogans are as much anti-people with disabilities as they are anti-Jewish, anti-Hispanic and anti-black.

They don’t say that they want us, the disabled, put in our place but given Nazi Germany’s history and the alt-right’s worship of it, we must assume they do.

We must ask those who say battles of Confederate monuments are just about Southern heritage not to let neo-Nazis march with them. We must ask them to publicly avow that all people, including the disabled, are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This must start with the president.

But we, the disabled, have responsibilities, too, to groups such as African-Americans, Sikhs and Jews. When these groups are physically and verbally attacked, when their houses of worship are burned and they suffer other injustices, we must speak out.

There are two reasons.

First, if these things can happen to them, they can happen to us. In 2014, the FBI reported 90 hate crimes against people with disabilities. Again, compared to crimes against other groups, it’s small potatoes but it shows we aren’t immune. We are also bullied and discriminated against every day, though usually not by fascists.

But these facts are enough to show our lot is much the same as others’.

Even if that weren’t true, even if neo-Nazis accepted us, we’d still have to reject them and their sick ideology. It’s just the moral thing to do.

We must speak out against the hatred infecting out country to save our independence and perhaps our lives, yes, but more importantly, to save our honor.

This story was originally published August 27, 2017 at 4:08 AM with the headline "Disabled part of neo-Nazi hatred."