Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
38. Ibid., 22-24.
39. See Roger Shattuck's wonderful discussion of Faust and Frankenstein in
For-
bidden Knowledge
.
40. John Paul II,
Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book
of Genesis
(Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1981), 23.
41. Karol Wojtyla,
Sign of Contradiction
(New York: Seabury, 1979), 24, 124.
42. This discussion in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's
Ethics
(New York: Macmillan
Company, 1965) appears on pages 143-186, and all quoted matter is drawn
from those pages inclusively.
43. This is an area that deserves more treatment than I can give it here. Fortu-
nately, and at long last, there are texts in English on Nazi euthanasia as part of
its general biopolitics. Of especial note is Michael Burleigh,
Death and Deliver-
ance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). This is a tremendously dis-
quieting topic for a contemporary U.S. reader. So much of the language of our
own genetic engineering and “assisted suicide” proponents echoes National
Socialist propaganda. The Nazis covered the waterfront, so to speak, justifying
their programs of systematic selective elimination of the “unfit,” of life unwor-
thy of life (congenitally “diseased,” handicapped, and so forth) on a number of
interrelated grounds, including cost-benefit criteria, perfecting the race, and com-
passion. The Nazis also controlled the media on this issue (it goes without
saying), producing short propaganda films and full-length features, lavishly pro-
duced and starring German matinee idols, to promote their euthanasia efforts.
44. In a longer work, the death penalty would come under critical scrutiny here
as an act of such radical excision.
