Eugenics

Eugenics is meant to create healthier, stronger and more intelligent people, to save resources, and lessen human suffering. Sounds great on paper right? Eugenics is a sick social philosophy that is mostly based off of Charles Darwin's works. Learning about this topic in class put everything in a deeper perspective for me. It was almost depressing watch the people with a disability go through with that. I believe it is pretty messed up that it goes on today. I would expect for someone to realize how wrong this is and that everyone should have the right to life a life and reproduce.

The Nazi party use eugenics for human subject research. They would explore the world of their anatomy as if it was a frog in biology class. However, I wonder what medical research we wouldn’t have if Aktion T4 didn’t happen. I wonder if in the long run it saved more lives then it destroyed. This could be a false idea but it is plauseable nonetheless. If this never happened would we have the human genome project today? I think for what bad they did it did provide some good. Even though there is no way to describe in words how messed up it is. We shouldn’t just accuse the Nazi party for this however. Americans sterilized people with disabilities for years. 5 states apologized for doing such.

I don’t understand how one could do this with out a conscious. How can someone go dissect a disabled person and then just go have lunch and then get right back to work. That is so messed up. I can not get over the movie we saw in class though.

In the movie they showed the building. Tiergarten Strafe number 4, this is were T4 came from. They would drive black buses that the German kids would call buses of death. Could you imagine how traumatizing that would be knowing that there are people on that bus and they are going to a building to die and that’s it. That was their life and now its over. I would be absolutely terrified of those busses if I was a young boy in Germany at this period. I’m sure that many of them were in fear of the black buses.

In the movie they had people in wheel chairs giving the tour of the building. I couldn’t imagine how hard that must have been for them. They found people’s organs in jars, people hair in bails as if they were hay, and they had a room full of prosthetics. The people that were killed were used as animals. Using their hair for pillows stuffing. Stealing their gold fillings as if it were ivories in an elephant or a hippo.

I discover through my reading that it started with a woman wanting to kill her child. Her son had two missing limbs, blind, and possibly mental disabled. He became known as the Knauer baby. She talked to Hitler wondering if she could have her son killed for lack of purpose. They decided for the killing of the Knauer baby. This led to the T4 project eventfully.

They then created 6 hospitals devoted to the research and the elimination of this group of people. When a child was newly born, they would check the child for any sign of a disability. If there was, then the folks at Aktion T4 was notified. They would take the child to a kill chamber and their parents were reassured that the child was just taken to an asylum.

It is very obscure that it still goes on today without anyone actually being that concerned about it. There have been anti-discrimatory laws created for it yet it still continues. This is totally inhumane.

Murderball

Murderball is a sport that quadriplegics can play. It is also called wheelchair rugby and is a very competitive sport. Team USA and Team Canada have huge rivalry. The former all-star from America, Joe Soares, was cut from the team and went to coach the Canadian wheel-chair rugby team. They won the United States team in Gothensburg, Sweden.
The movie inspired me to believe them not be disabled. I could not imagine how much stress was they U.S team was under during the finals. I felt a lot of sympathy and pity on the American team, not because of them having a disability, but because they lost to the Canadian team rivalry. Joe Soares was a definite betrayer of America. He just need to be the center of attention and the best. Ironically enough at the end of the movie New Zealand was the victorious team in the Paralympics.
The movie problematized the concept of normality and ability through the whole movie numerous times. They are all competitive males all in a huge contact sport. “Normal” males do the same thing with other various sports. These men discussed sex and alcohol which, not to be stereotypical, but what “normal” males do. A shot was taking with the men pulling pranks and playing cards. If I told you this though you would just assume able bodied males just chilling. I really see no difference between these men and their doing and a non-paraplegic.
The creators of the film did a very good job by making the audience understand what people with a disability go through everyday life without making people with disabilities seem like they should be pitied. They made everyone real. They created an atmosphere that you will find in many other sport related movies with the same educational feel. It had real life drama. It gave a perspective of wheelchair rugby for a paraplegic that hasn’t played before. It also offered an intense sports game to sit on the edge with. The movie was made extremely well in the sense of it not being a depressing movie.