(March 24, 1903–November 14, 1990), was a well-known British author, columnist, philosopher and lecturer, known for his piercing wit. Educated at Selwyn College and at Cambridge, he worked as a journalist in Manchester, Moscow, Calcutta, London and Washington, and later became the editor of Punch, England’s best-known humor magazine. In his 1975 work, entitled Jesus, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote:
As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; as God alone, he would not; Incarnate, he could and did.3545
In 1980, in The Human Life Review, Malcolm Muggeridge first published his article, “The Human Holocaust,” stating:
The Barnard experience stayed in my mind, and as I thought about it, I realized that it amounted to a sort of parable illustrating a basic dilemma of our time, as between the sanctity of life as conceived through the Christian centuries, and the quality of life as conceived in a materialist society. Those doctors in the BBC studio rejoicing in the new possibilities in surgery that Dr. Barnard seemed to have opened up, saw human beings as bodies merely, and so capable of constant improvement, until at last perfection was achieved.
No more sick or misshapen bodies, no more disturbed or twisted minds, no more hereditary idiots or mongoloid children. Babies not up to scratch would be destroyed, before or after birth, as would also the old beyond repair. With the developing skills of modern medicine, the human race could be pruned and carefully tended until only the perfect blooms—the beauty queens, the mensa I.Q.’s, the athletes—remained. Then at last, with rigid population control to prevent the good work being ruined by excessive numbers, affliction would be ended, and maybe death itself abolished, and men become, not just like gods, but in their perfect mortality, very God.
Against this vision of life without tears in fleshly paradise, stands the Christian vision of mankind as a family whose loving father is God. Here, the symbol is not the perfected body, the pruned vine, the weeded garden, but a stricken body nailed to a cross, signifying affliction, not as the enemy of life, but as its greatest enhancement and teacher. In an army preparing for battle the unfit are indeed discarded, but in a Christian family the handicapped are particularly cherished, and give special joy to those who cherish them.
Which vision are we for? On the one hand, as the pattern of our collective existence, the broiler house or factory-farm, in which the concern is solely for the physical well-being of the livestock and the financial well-being of the enterprise; on the other, mankind as a family, all of whose members, whatever physical or mental qualities or deficiencies they may have, are equally deserving of consideration in the eyes of their Creator, and whose existence has validity, not just in itself, nor just in relation to history, but in relation to a destiny reaching beyond time and into eternity. Or, in simple terms, on the one hand, the quality of life; on the other, the sanctity of life.
The sanctity of life is, of course, a religious or transcendental concept, and has no meaning otherwise; if there is no God, life cannot have sanctity. By the same token, the quality of life is an earthly or worldly concept, and can only be expressed legalistically, and in materialistic terms; the soul does not come into it. Thus a child conceived in conditions of penury, or with a poor heredity, or against its mother’s wishes, or otherwise potentially handicapped, may be considered as lacking the requisite quality of life prospects, and so should not be born. Equally, if follows, at the other end of our life span, that geriatrics unable any longer to appreciate what this world has to offer in the way of aesthetic carnal and egotistic satisfaction, in other words, by virtue of their years losing out on quality of life, should be subjected to euthanasia and mercy-killing, and discreetly murdered.
On this basis, for instance, Beethoven would scarcely have been allowed to be born; his heredity and family circumstances were atrocious, a case history of syphilis, deafness and insanity. Today, his mother’s pregnancy would be terminated. Dr. Johnson, when he was born, was scrofulous, and already showed signs of the nervous disorders which plagued him all his life. He, too, under present conditions, would probably not have been allowed to survive. Indeed, a good number of the more notable contributors to the sanctity of life, like Dr. Johnson, would have failed to make the grade on the quality of life, the supreme example being the founder of the Christian religion. Imagine a young girl, unmarried and pregnant, who insists that the Holy Ghost is responsible for her pregnancy, and that its outcome, according to a vision she has been vouchsafed, would be the birth of a long-awaited Messiah. Not much quality of life potential there, I fancy, and it wouldn’t take the pregnancy and family-planning pundits long to decide that our Saviour, while still at the fetus stage, should be thrown away with the hospital waste. …
The origins of the holocaust lay, not in the Nazi terrorism and anti-semitism, but in the pre-Nazi Weimar Germany’s acceptance of euthanasia and mercy-killing as humane and estimable. And by one of those sick jokes which haunt our human story, just when the penitential holocaust was being shown on American, and then on German and other Western European TV screens, a humane holocaust was getting under way, this time in the countries that had defeated Hitler’s Third Reich, and, at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, condemned as a war crime the very propositions and practices with which the Nazi holocaust had originated, and on which the humane one was likewise based.
No one could have put the matter more cogently and authoritatively than has Dr. Leo Alexander, who worked with the Chief American Counsel at the Nuremberg Tribunal:
“Whatever proportion these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitudes of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which the entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude towards the non-rehabilitable sick.”
Surely some future Gibbon surveying our times will note sardonically that it took no more than three decades to transform a war crime into an act of compassion, thereby enabling the victors in the war against Nazi-ism to adopt the very practices for which the Nazis had been solemnly condemned at Nuremberg. Then they could mount their own humane holocaust, which in its range and in the number of its victims may soon far surpass the Nazi one. Nor need we marvel that, whereas the Nazi holocaust received lavish TV and film coverage, the humane one just goes rolling along, largely unnoticed by the media.
It all began in the early twenties, in the decadent years in the post–1914–18 war Germany which have been so glorified by writers like Christopher Isherwood, but which, as I remember them at first hand, were full of sinister portent for the future. All the most horrible and disgusting aspects of the last decades of the twentieth century—the pornography, the sadism, the violence, the moral and spiritual vacuum—were already in evidence there.
In this sick environment, the notion of mercy-killing was put forward in 1920 in a book entitled The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value by Alfred Hoche, a reputable psychiatrist, and Karl Binding, a jurist. The authors advocated killing off “absolutely worthless human beings,” pointing out that the money spent of spent on keeping them alive thus saved could be better used to better purpose—for instance, on helping a young married couple to set up house. Frederick Wertham, in his scholarly and deeply disturbing book, A Sign For Cain, says that the Hoche-Binding book influenced, or at least crystalized, the thinking of a whole generation.
From these beginnings, a program of mercy-killing developed which was initiated, directed and supported by doctors and psychiatrists, some of them of considerable eminence—all this when the Nazi movement was still at an embryonic stage, and Hitler had barely been heard of. Initially, the holocaust was aimed, not against Jews or Slavs, but against handicapped Aryan Germans, and was justified, not by racial theories, but by Hegelian utilitarianism, whereby what is useful is per se good, without any consideration being given to Judeo-Christian values, or, indeed to any concept whatsoever of Good and Evil. Subsequently, of course, the numbers of the killed rose to astronomical figures, and the medical basis for their slaughter grew ever flimsier; but it should never be forgotten that it was the euthanasia program first organized under the Weimar Republic by the medical profession, which led to and merged into the genocide program of 1941–45. “Technical experience gained first with killing psychiatric patients,” Wertham writes, “was utilized later for the destruction of millions. The psychiatric murders came first.”
Can this sort of thing happen in countries like Canada and England and the United States? In my opinion, yes; in fact, it is already happening. Abortion on demand has come to be part of our way of life; in the world as a whole there are estimated to have been last year something in the neighborhood of fifty million abortions—an appalling figure, which, however, with media help, did not loom very large, or throw any kind of shadow over 1979 as the Year of the Child. …
Euthanasia, it is true, has not yet been legalized except in some American states, but notoriously it is being practiced on an ever-increasing scale. Already among old people there is reluctance to go into government institutions for fear of being done away with. As for governments—hard pressed financially as they all now are … will they not look ever more longingly at the possibility of making substantial savings by the simple expedient of mercy-killing off the inmates of institutions for the incurably sick, the senile old, the mentally deranged and other such? With abortions and family-planning ensuring a zero population growth rate, and euthanasia disposing of useless mouths among the debilitated old, besides mopping up intervening freaks, the pursuit of happiness should be assured of at any rate financial viability.
In Christian terms, of course, all this is quite indefensible. Our Lord healed the sick, raised Lazarus from the dead, gave back sanity to the deranged, but never did He practice or envisage killing as part of the mercy that held possession of His heart. His true followers cannot but follow His guidance here. For instance, Mother Teresa, who, in Calcutta, goes to great trouble to have brought into her Home for Dying Derelicts, castaways left to die in the streets. They may survive for no more than a quarter of an hour, but in that quarter of an hour, instead of feeling themselves rejected and abandoned, they meet with Christian love and care. From a purely humanitarian point of view, the effort involved in this ministry of love could be put to some more useful purpose, and the derelicts left to die in the streets, or even helped to die there by being given requisite injection. Such calculations do not come into Mother Teresa’s way of looking at things; her love and compassion reach out to the afflicted without any other consideration than their immediate need, just as our Lord does when He tells us to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked. She gives all she has to give at once, and then finds she has more to give. As between Mother Teresa’s holocaust of love and the humane holocaust, I am for hers.
There is an episode in my own life which, though it happened long ago, provides, as I consider, a powerful elucidation of the whole issue of euthanasia—a study, as it were, in mercy-living in contradistinction to mercy-killing. Some forty years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the 1939–45 war, the person whom I have most loved in this world, my wife Kitty, was desperately ill, and, as I was informed by the doctor attending her, had only an outside chance of surviving. The medical details are unimportant; probably today, with the great advances that have taken place in curative medicine, her state would not be so serious. But as the situation presented itself then, she was hovering between life and death, though, needless to say, there was no voice, as there might well be nowadays, to suggest that it might be better to let her go.
The doctor explained that an emergency operation was essential, and, in honesty, felt bound to tell me that it would be something of a gamble. Her blood, it appeared, was so thin as a result of a long spell of jaundice that before he operated a blood-transfusion was desperately needed—this was before the days of plasma. As he said this, an incredible happiness amounting to ecstasy surged up inside me. If I could be the donor! My blood-count was taken, and found to be suitable; the necessary gear was brought in, very primitive by contemporary standards—just a glass tube one end of which was inserted in her arm and the other end in mine, with a pump in the middle drawing out my blood and sending it into her. I could watch the flow, shouting out absurdly to the doctor: “Don’t stint yourself, take all you want!” and noting delightedly the immediate effect in bringing back life into her face that before had seemed grey and lifeless. It was the turning point; from that moment she began to mend. At no point in our long relationship has there been a more ecstatic moment than when I thus saw my life-blood pouring into hers to revivify it. We were one, blood to blood, as no other kind of union could make us.
To give life—this was what love was for; to give it in all circumstances and eventualities, whether God creating the universe, or a male and female creating another human being; whereas to destroy life, be it in a fertilized ovum one second after conception, or in some octogenarian or sufferer from a fatal illness, was the denial of life and so the antithesis of love. In life-denying terms, as we have seen, compassion easily becomes a holocaust; garden suburbs and gulags derive from the same quest for quality of life, and the surgeon’s knife can equally be used to sustain and extinguish life.
Dostoevski makes the same point: “Love toward men, but love without belief in God, very naturally leads to the greatest coercion over men, and turns their lives completely into hell on earth.” We should never forget that if ever there was a killing without mercy, a death without dignity, it was on Golgotha. Yet from that killing, what a pouring out of mercy through the subsequent centuries! From that death, what a stupendous enhancement of human dignity!3546