Prejudice Spillover

[chaoticidealism]

I have lately been doing some historical research on the Holocaust. I wanted to find some profiles of people who had died in Hitler's involuntary euthanasia program, which targeted primarily children, and primarily the disabled and mentally ill. My best estimate, taking into account the prevalence of autism and the number of dead, was that over

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[fishlivejournal]

When studying human cruelties, it's worth taking a breather and remembering the heroes. Frex you will find comfort in the opposition to the murder of the disabled by people such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Galen, Professor Creutzfeldt and others.

Action T4 was the only one of the Nazi atrocities to trigger widespread public protests.

[chaoticidealism]

Yeah. Some of the most amazingly badass people in history were the people who kept right on helping their neighbors when the government started trying to kill them off. I'm German by birth, a naturalized US citizen now, and if I'd been born fifty years earlier I would've had to make that choice too. I've always wondered what the difference was between people who helped and people who didn't. They didn't seem to be any more heroic or any more good. It was more that they just didn't, or couldn't, look the other way.

Anyway, turns out that no matter how much you try to label a child "unworthy of life", they're still someone's child. We didn't get to be human beings without a hefty dose of protective instincts to devote to our children. The church in Germany was a force to be reckoned with, even during the height of Hitler's power.

[ext_2448137]

And we see rhetoric from so-called charities such as 'Autism Speaks' that explicitly supports the notion that we're a subhuman tragedy. And don't get me started on the anti-vaxxers...

[chaoticidealism]

Yeah, that really scares me. Autism Speaks is using practically the word-for-word reasoning that they used to use during the eugenics movement. They can't realize they're doing it; they seem sincere. They're probably just going for the emotional appeal that raises the most money. The trouble is that, no matter how much money you raise, you can't do any good with the money if you get it at the cost of separating autistics from the rest of humanity and painting us as a tragic, helpless group whose existence is a problem for everyone involved.

Thankfully, this kind of attitude is not universal. Many autistics, and plenty of parents of autistic children, aren't buying into it. Add momma-bear fierceness to tenacious self-advocacy, and I really think we'll have them beat eventually. I don't think we'll actually convince the hardcore people, but after a while it'll get less and less popular to exclude us and treat us like problems, and they won't be able to get away with it any longer.