A new understanding of starvation

Dan Sernoffsky

Apologies are in order.

To the defendants at Nuremburg.

To the Stalinist regime.

To the Islamic government of Sudan.

To the government of Kim Il-Jung.

All have been condemned for their actions.

Now, all are being exonorated.

At Nuremburg, they were condemned not for leading a world into war, but rather for their actions in the Holocaust, where they purposely and deliberately allowed millions to die by starvation.

In 1932-33, Stalin’s collectivization in Ukraine led to a famine in which an estimated six to seven million died of starvation.

In Sudan, a famine has swept the country, and countless numbers of Christians and animists, targeted for ethnic cleansing, are starving.

Kim Il-Jung’s North Korea is likewise in the midst of famine, with hundreds of thousands perishing for lack of food while the Communist dictator continues to build his army and pursue a program aimed at making North Korea a nuclear power.

In Florida, a branch of the U.S. government has joined ranks with Hitler and Stalin and Kim Il-Jung and the Sudanese goverment by ordering the starvation of an American citizen.

Terri Schiavo has been deemed liebensunwerten Lebens, life unworthy of life, and condemned to death by starvation and dehydration. But starvation, we have been told, is a “gentle death,” a “peaceful death,” that it eventually creates an almost euphoric state that precedes the final end. George Felos, the lawyer for her husband, Michael, claims she looks “peaceful” and is “resting comfortably.” That others have claimed differently is inconsequential.

Terri Schiavo’s “peaceful death” has been a long time coming, but that, unfortunately, seems to be the way starvation and dehydration work. Which was why so many were able to survive for so long at Dachau and Auschwitz and Birkenau. And why Stalin’s enforced starvation in Ukraine lasted as long as it did. Now, as we have learned from the apologists who so embrace the court ruling that Terri Schiavo be executed by starvation, those who perished in the Ukraine and at Dachau and in Sudan and in North Korea perished in a state of near euphoria, peacefully and comfortably.

Terri Schiavo has been deemed liebensunwerten Lebens, and a culture of death has been accepted. The telling argument from the court has been that she would have wanted it this way, that she would not have wanted to continue an existence in which she was unable to function as she once did. And that the benefit of her drawn-out death throes has raised national consciousness about living wills.

But at what point does life actually become unworthy of life? Germany made that decision once, deciding that those afflicted by mental illness, by physical or mental handicaps or by the onset of age were unworthy. The Sudanese government has made the decision that those who do not adhere to the strict Islamic code it has instituted are unworthy. The Dutch have done the same. Scarcely more than a half-century removed from a time when doctors in the Netherlands courageously defied their Nazi occupiers in refusing to euthanize patients, doctors now lethally sedate citizens deemed terminally ill, citizens “with no free will,” the severely retarded. The Dutch government estimated a decade ago that nearly one in 10 Dutch citizens who died were killed by doctors.

There have been no heroic efforts made to spare the life of Terri Schiavo, no ventilator, no dialysis, no extraordinary measures aimed at keeping her heart beating, her organs functioning. Just a feeding tube. That tube has been removed, and the court has determined that no effort to provide her with sustenance or hydration orally will be permitted. A court has deemed her liebensunwerten Lebens. The next case will not generate nearly as much interest and eventually, it may even become commonplace.

And those who rewrite history will have the opportunity to apologize to Hitler.

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Dan Sernoffsky is an award-winning sportswriter and political columnist for The Lebanon Daily News in Lebanon, Pa. A career journalist, he is a graduate of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Ks., and attended graduate school at Central Michigan University. The father of four grown children, he and his wife reside in Lebanon.

dsernoffsky@yahoo.com