HUMAN BEINGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN EXPENDABLE

By Vincent Lyn

The definition of expendable is:

someone or something that is disposable or not necessary or important.

I doubt there is a person on earth who hasn’t stepped on a cockroach or sprayed a nest of ants without giving it a second thought. If you think we are more important than a cockroach or an ant you are very much mistaken. We are a commodity and useful for a time until our usefulness runs out. It’s like farmers that need to thin the herd by killing off ill pigs and cows that eventually would infect the healthy ones.

It is a common assertion that there is a part of humanity that is disposable: That we can do away with the elderly, the infirm, the unproductive, the socially and economically unfit. That is no exaggerated interpretation. There were many recent politicians from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, that COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.

In the early Philippine campaign of World War II. “Expendable” was the term applied to themselves by some of those who were sent upon missions from which they were not expected to return. Originally the expression referred to anything that would be consumed by use — it was not expected back. To the sensitive minds of those human beings involved, most of whom had hoped for a far different and more constructive destiny, this word had almost the force of an implicit slight, or a profound compliment, according to the way they took it. On the one hand, it implied that they could be spared, i.e., were not indispensable to the future; it gave them the ultimate in being thought nothing of: they could be written off and no one any the worse. On the other hand, it gave them the proud consciousness of having been chosen to carry out a mission which required uncommon heroism, endurance, and inner resource. Actually, after the first sinking of the heart, these men and women, who all the time were feeling for others more than for themselves, got on with the job assigned them and saw it through — and that was that.

To those who sat at home in their overstuffed armchairs and read about all this, the word expendable was strangely disquieting. It was like a branding-iron, marking us with an ineffaceable impression. If all those others were expendable, what about us? And from a deep inner compunction at our own inglorious security, we went into action on the home front and found a place in the ranks of the helpers.

The policy of killing those who are deemed not useful for society was, of course, most notoriously experimented with during the Nazis’ reign in Germany and beyond. Nazis started practicing direct medical killing, or euthanasia, for the supposed good of German society, long before the establishment of death camps. Nazi doctors, who practiced involuntary euthanasia in hospitals, justified their actions by the use of the concept of “life unworthy of life”. First, they deemed “impaired” adults and children with mental health problems and disabilities as “unworthy of life” and marked them to be euthanized. In time, they expanded the concept to include those they considered to be racially inferior beings, paving the way for the Holocaust.

In The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (1995), Henry Friedlander detailed the rise of racist and eugenic ideologies which led initially to the “mercy killing” of disabled people and eventually to the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies and anything that was undesirable to them.

Estimates for the total number killed in only the 20th century

• 167,000,000 to 175,000,000
• Including:War Dead: 87,500,000
• Military war dead:33,500,000
• Civilian war dead:54,000,000
• Not-war Dead: 80,000,000
• Communist oppression: 60,000,000

Historians of the idea of “life unworthy of life” tell us that such thoughts as euthanasia would not emerge overnight but would be contingent on developments in biology, the behavioral sciences, ethics, law, and of course economics, that would have to facilitate such heinous practices. And it is precisely in the condition of the current coronavirus pandemic that we must be vigilant about such pernicious thoughts and practices.

Let’s take a little trip back in time to Ukraine in the early 1930’s Holodomor. A term that’s been forgotten but also known as the Terror-Famine and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine, was a famine in Soviet Ukraine — 1932–1933 and killed between 7–10 million lives though the numbers will never be known for certainty.

Now, of course, diplomatic language is incapable of fully conveying the horror of what happened in Ukraine: the desperation of millions of people who escaped from their villages in search of some crumbs of bread in the cities, where eventually the hunger became even worse; the despair of the peasants forced to deliver to communist government warehouses the grain they had harvested and then vanished from their plates; the agony of the mothers who saw their children crying and languishing in hunger before their eyes. Worse still, the anguish of those who resorted to cannibalism in a last attempt to stay alive. And those Ukrainians were not the first cannibals forced by the Soviet delirium. Since the beginning and for decades, even in the Russian territory itself, there were so many confirmed cases that eventually the government had to launch a graphic campaign “against” cannibalism.

The gallery of horrors extends throughout the world, from the Russian famine of 1921 and the already mentioned Holodomor to the 70 millions deaths caused by the failed Great Leap Forward and the more than 20 million deaths of the Cultural Revolution in China. And also, there were those massive Soviet purges and the Gulag network of concentration camps. Elsewhere, the Khmer Rouge killed more than 20% of Cambodia’s population in less than five years (1975–1979), while the 1990's famine in North Korea killed up to 15% of that country’s population. Even yet, you’d still have to add the tens of thousands of murders and millions of deaths caused by the governments in Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar and much of post-colonial Africa and how can we forget the United States of America.

In the face of Ukraine’s Great Famine, as with all those terrible crimes committed under the mantle of socialism, the left has reacted first by denying the facts, and then, when it no longer has any other option, by presenting them as an unfortunate and isolated error. They are lying. These are not mistakes. It was a systematic and carefully-planned culling of the undesirable part of the population.

Mao the greatest killer numbers-wise in the history of the world, considered people, and I mean his own people, a renewable resource to be consumed as desired because there’d always be new ones to replace those who perished–and he essentially said that, no doubt as if it were the most normal thing in the world. It’s just eggs to be broken for the sake of the utopian omelet–only the omelet is never what was promised, but very, VERY different. Still, as long as it sounds good enough, any and all means are considered justified in pursuit of the DREAM. Alas, it’s beyond clear that there are fools aplenty, so the lie goes on.

“When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die, so that the other half can eat their fill”. — Mao Zedong

In the Great War soldiers were considered expendable but we can go so far to say all wars. No one likes to think that they’re expendable. Everyone is expendable. No one’s job is safe. Workers have become expendable parts for sale in the ordinary course of commerce. We are all merely expendable sacrifices to national economic development.

Vincent Lyn

CEO/Founder at We Can Save Children

Director of Creative Development at African Views Organization

Economic & Social Council at United Nations

Middle East Correspondent at Wall Street News Agency