Time For The Ice Floe, Pop

In the name of rationality, Kevorkian makes dying--and killing--too easy

I was born a few days after Hitler marched into Poland, and as a boy I absorbed, by moral osmosis and overheard conversation, some of the lessons of the time--for example, lessons taught by Auschwitz and Josef Mengele.

So when I hear about euthanasia and Jack Kevorkian, sirens go off in my mind. Maybe I'm working with an old paradigm, like Munich, but I can't help it. I think of the case of Franz Stangl, a perfectly conventional Vienna policeman and good citizen who after the Anschluss became a security officer at hospitals for the aged, infirm and imbecilic, and helped--humanely...

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