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In a time when the voices of neurodivergent individuals are only beginning to be heard and valued on their own terms, it is deeply disturbing to witness public figures—especially those seeking high office—revive narratives that dehumanise and diminish them. Recent comments by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggesting that autistic individuals are a “burden” on society due to their inability to “work” or “pay taxes,” warrant not just outrage—but reflection. These are not merely careless remarks; they are emblematic of a deeper, more insidious problem: the resurgence of a logic that history has already exposed as deadly.

To understand the gravity of such rhetoric, we must revisit one of the most chilling ideological and bureaucratic programmes of the 20th century: Aktion T4 in Nazi Germany. Between 1939 and 1945, this state-sanctioned “euthanasia” programme targeted individuals deemed “Lebensunwertes Leben”—“life unworthy of life.” The victims were not soldiers, criminals, or political opponents; they were disabled children, neurodivergent individuals, people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities—those who, in the regime’s cold estimation, failed to meet a standard of economic or biological “fitness.”

Before the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Sobibor, before the industrialised murder of millions, came the sterilisation clinics and “mercy killings” in German hospitals. These early atrocities were justified not on the grounds of hatred or vengeance, but on economics. The Nazi regime framed the existence of disabled and neurodivergent people as a financial burden on the state. In internal documents and propaganda, their continued care was described as wasteful, inefficient, and unfair to the productive majority. The German term Ausmerzen, meaning “to eradicate,” was used to describe this policy of quiet, systematic elimination.

The machinery of death began not with bullets or gas—but with ideas. With speeches. With normalised conversations about who “contributes” to society, and who does not. And now, nearly a century later, we are hearing faint but unmistakable echoes of that same logic.

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/life-unworthy-of-life-historical-amnesia-ausmerzen-and-the-rhetoric-surrounding-autism/