Political Quotes

“every Member should read the editorial in the Washington Post called ``Holocaust: The China Parallel.'' It is by Walter Reich, the director of the Holocaust Museum and the chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Human Rights. What does he say? According to the reports provided by Human Rights Watch, the starved children in the Chinese orphanages look very much like the starved children in the German ``Children's Specialty Institutions''; the Chinese institutions, too, administer sedatives to some children selected for death; they, too, use false diagnoses as coverups; they too, cremate the remains of starved children; and they, too, employ physicians, many of whom probably tell themselves that the children dying under their care would have died anyway, and in any case are useless eaters in a country challenged by scarce resources. The parallels between the Chinese orphanages and the Nazi programs to kill disabled children are alarming. These parallels remind us that human beings, including physicians and other caregivers, are extraordinarily vulnerable to inhuman acts and extraordinarily capable of justifying their behavior on what they see as rational grounds. And they remind us that countries in which democratic institutions are forcibly forbidden and human rights systematically quashed are ones in which human life becomes, quite simply, expendable.”