Those who can make you believe absurdities...

The Royal College of Nurses' new policy contains dim echoes of the Third Reich

In 2013, Islamic extremist brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonated two homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and seriously injuring dozens more, including 17 people who lost limbs. A multi-day manhunt ensued, during which the entire city was terrorized. The suspects eventually exchanged gunfire with police, killing one officer and seriously wounding two others (one of whom died a year later.) One of the terrorist brothers was also killed in the shootouts. The other, Dzhokhar, was critically injured and taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where the doctors and nurses, with full awareness of what he had done, worked diligently to save his life.

People may assume that doctors have a duty to treat such individuals because they’ve taken the Hippocratic Oath—but this is not the case. In fact, nothing in the Hippocratic Oath requires us to treat people we don’t like and, contrary to popular belief, most doctors don’t take this oath anyway, at least not in its original version*. (*If we did, we would be prohibited from participating in abortion and expressly forbidden from providing euthanasia—even at the request of the patient—but I digress.)

Many medical schools do maintain some type of oath at graduation. Some still use a modernized version of the Hippocratic Oath—eliminating the now controversial parts about abortion and euthanasia—while others use the “Declaration of Geneva,” a pledge created in the aftermath of the atrocities committed by doctors during World War 2. The latter contains a clause that reads:

“I WILL NOT PERMIT considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient.”

Many nursing schools have similar pledges and oaths. The “Nightingale Pledge” and the International Council of Nurses Pledge, contain much the same language as the doctors’ oaths.

In general, whether a doctor or nurse has taken an oath or not, there are legal and ethical obligations imposed on them by provincial and state licensing bodies (and, one would hope, by their own conscience) which severely limit the circumstances under which they can refuse to treat a patient. Even the worst of the worst individuals—even a known murderer of innocents like the Boston Marathon bomber—must be treated humanely and professionally. It is expressly not the medical professional’s job to make moral (or legal) judgements as to the patient’s worth. If there is a prime directive of medical ethics, this is surely it.

Which is why it came as such a shock recently when the UK’s Royal College of Nursing advised its members that they could refuse to treat patients they deemed to be “racists.” The College updated it’s guidelines for “refusal to treat” on Aug 6th of this year to include patients exhibiting “discriminatory behaviour, including racism.” (Elsewhere they helpfully describe “making racist jokes” as an example of discriminatory behaviour.)

The guidelines were updated in the aftermath of violent riots that swept across parts of the UK in early August. The anti-immigration riots—and similarly violent counter-protests—erupted in response to knife attacks that left three young girls dead at a Taylor Swift themed dance party.

The riots were described by the British government and mainstream media as “far-right thuggery” — and some of the protestors were, in all likelihood, abominable racists and not very nice people at all. But serial killers and terrorists also tend not to be very nice people and, absent threats to our personal physical safety, we’ve always been expected to treat them to the best of our ability.

So why has the self-described “world’s largest nursing union and professional body” chosen to single out racists for non-treatment as opposed to, say, axe murderers or sadistic paedophiles?

It will not surprise you to learn that, like our own Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, The Royal College of Nurses is saturated with “woke” ideology and deeply committed to such concepts as “anti-racism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI—or in the case, maybe, DIE—as in DIE racists! We have declared ourselves judge, jury and executioner! In the name of inclusion we are excluding you! Go ahead and bleed to death!)

Life not Worthy of Life?

It has always been assumed that our job, as doctors and nurses, is to save lives—not to make moral judgements as to the worth (or lack thereof) of these lives. But do you know who did make judgements about which lives were worth more and which less? The Nazis. I know you’re not supposed to compare people you don’t agree with to the Nazis—and I’m not doing that, at least not directly—but I can’t help but see some uneasy parallels.

We’d be wise to remember that, far from being dragged kicking and screaming into the Holocaust, doctors and nurses were at the forefront of it—and the whole thing started when the professions became ideologically captured. Specifically, it started with nationalist propaganda combined with the “science” of eugenics—and the related idea that some lives were “not worthy of life.” Through the early 1930’s, this idea gradually began to replace the longstanding Judeo-Christian idea that all human beings are created in God’s image and that, consequently, human life—any human life—is sacred. This led at first to the “mercy killing” of severely handicapped individuals—and eventually down a long slippery slope to the wholesale slaughter of Jews and others in the death camps.

Josef Mengele - the name that’s become synonymous with a failure of medical ethics

But here’s the scariest part. It’s not that the Nazi doctors and nurses ignored medical ethics. It’s that most of them thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were on the “right side of history.” They saw their primary responsibility as being to “the people” or “mankind” rather than to the patient in front of them, and they saw some people as being bad for the health of “the people.” Once you bought into the underlying assumptions of this ideology—which was being pushed relentlessly—it all made a twisted kind of sense. One of the Nazi doctors, Fritz Klein, even mentioned his Hippocratic Oath in justifying his participation in the atrocities:

"My Hippocratic Oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human body,” he said. “The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That's why I cut them out."

The doctors and nurses of Nazi Germany did not, for the most part, start out as monsters. They were people who’d gone into helping professions because they wanted to help. We all like to think we would have acted differently under the circumstances but, as far as I’m aware, the level of psychopathy is no higher in Germany than anywhere else and the average IQ is no lower. The fact that the vast majority of German doctors and nurses were either true believers or simply “went along to get along” should, to say the least, give us pause.

Propaganda Poster from Occupied Poland: “Beware of Typhus. Avoid Jews” (1941) Public health was just one of the justifications the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust

You may think I’m over-reacting. You may think that a nursing college saying it’s okay for its members to withhold care from patients deemed “racist” is just a trivial (and temporary) virtue-signalling aberration that won’t lead to any real world harm. But I’m not so sure. To me it’s a troubling sign of something bigger and more ominous lurking under the surface. It’s part of the larger ideological capture of our medical and nursing schools and regulatory colleges. It’s part of our ethical principles having become unmoored from their Judeo-Christian foundations.

The level of indoctrination—with absurdities like critical race theory (which is just another way of saying anti-white racism) and horrifically unscientific gender-woo—is beyond what I would have believed possible even a few years ago. Science and traditional ethics seem to have faded into the background. We are teaching our healthcare trainees—relentlessly and with no opposition permitted—to believe absurdities. And as Voltaire famously said: “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

Absurdities like the examples below are being taught at almost all major medical schools. (Sadly, this kind of thing doesn’t even surprise me anymore):

Remembering the Oath of Maimonides

One wonders whether students indoctrinated into this kind of absurdity will be capable of becoming ethical health care professionals, or whether the absurdities will grow ever more absurd until they once again end in atrocities. You could argue, I suppose, that they already have, in the irreversible sterilization and butchery of many thousands of gender-confused children. Are we going to stand by and say nothing—are we going to “go along to get along” and hope that someone else sticks their head above the parapet to fight back against the Lysenko-level madness that seems to be taking over healthcare?

Ethical healthcare professionals must all stand up and speak out. And we should remind ourselves of the Oath of Maimonides which reads, in part: ‘May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.’