Thread by @NikkoleHughes

As a disabled Jew, I am angry this #HolocaustMemorialDay. Angry that eugenics is alive and well, that antisemitism is alive and well.

In the past week, I have read and heard horrifying eugenicist and ableist comments that are torn right from the Nazi playbook.

Let’s learn. 🧵

“On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the ‘Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.’
ushmm.org/collections/bi…

“This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan ‘master race,’ called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy,

“blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law’s passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against people with disabilities, regularly labeling them ‘life unworthy of life’ or ‘useless eaters’ and highlighting their burden upon society.

“Just a few years later, the persecution of people with disabilities escalated even further. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of ‘mercy death’ code-named ‘Operation T4,’ in reference to the address of the program’s Berlin

“headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program, most via large-scale killing operations using poison gas.

“(This methodology served as the precursor to the streamlined extermination methods of the ‘Final Solution.’) Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the war’s end,

“resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities.”

The normalization of the categorical extermination of #HighRiskCovid19 people is aligned with Nazi ideology. This is why we call pandemic denialism “eugenics,”

why we called it eugenics when the Director of the CDC expressed relief that “only the eldery and immunocompromised are dying of Covid,”

why we call it eugenics when Zeke Emmanuel, a policy advisor on the Biden admin’s Covid response, tells us that life after 75 isn’t worth living, that the lives of the “feeble and ineffectual” aren’t worth living.

We have tried asking nicely, we have begged, we have tried appealing to empathy and reason, we have tried to echo the voices of history to learn from past mistakes, to no avail.

You want us dead, or silent.

And I, frankly, refuse to aquiesce.

This thread is resonating with folks and I’m glad, but I didn’t arrive here in a vacuum—among the disabled prophets who I look to and listen to is @Imani_Barbarin, who anticipated this years ago. Please give her a follow across your socials, if you don’t follow her already.

And I’m straight up not countenancing debate on this today, of all days, my G-d, and you will be blocked. Shabbat shalom and gut shabbes to disabled Jews and disabled Jews only.