The recent murder conviction of Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian, who has gone from assisted suicide to out-and-out killing, was front-page news.
But the biggest story may well have been what the media seems to have completely missed: The revealing use of the term “final solution” by Kevorkian during his trial on charges of administering a fatal injection, which he defiantly videotaped for TV viewing.
On March 25, Kevorkian testified at his trial that his “aim was a final solution to incurable agony.”
Sure, others might have used those unfortunate words that are so inextricably identified with Nazis’ policy toward their unwanted Jewish victims.
But we’re not talking here about “others.” This is the man who sought to mount an exhibition featuring paintings by none other than Adolf Hitler.
Indeed, Kevorkian’s own “art” should subject him to very special scrutiny for talking about “final solutions.”
In Royal Oak, Mich., a couple of years ago, 13 of Kevorkian’s paintings were exhibited, “depicting severed heads, moldering skulls and rotting corpses,” according to the New York Times.
In a painting titled “Paralysis,” “a man’s brain and the upper end of his spinal column have been ripped from his body and hang from chains.” In another, called “Coma,” “bony fingers pull a bedridden man into the maw of a giant skull.”
And in a painting Kevorkian titled “Very Still Life” — he obviously considers such morbidness cute — “a blue flower blossoms through the gaping eye socket of a skull with a twisted lower jaw.”
“He’s a sick person,” commented one viewer, a Detroit accountant. “How do I know he doesn’t do what he does because he enjoys killing people?”
Indeed.
Kevorkian has conducted experiments that evoke memories of the infamous Nazi doctors. As a pathologist in a Michigan hospital, he transferred blood from cadavers to “volunteers.” Before being dismissed, he infected one hapless subject with the dreaded hepatitis.
Even as a University of Michigan medical student a half-century ago, he was obsessed with cadavers and measured the pupils of their eyes on the bizarre premise that this would reveal the time of death.
And in 1960, he authored a book advocating the vivisection of condemned prisoners.
How does a man with such propensities blithely talk of “final solutions” without eliciting a peep of protest, let alone the firestorm called for?
Part of the answer may be that he’s shrewdly turned the tables by constantly slandering us as the Nazis. “Us” means virtually everyone who disagrees with his plans to turn doctors into killers.
“Us” also applies to Orthodox Jews and particularly the Council of Orthodox Rabbis of Greater Detroit. The latter was labeled “Nazis” by Kevorkian’s lawyer, Geoffrey Feiger, for the unspeakable atrocity of stating that assisted suicide went against the Torah.
These rabbis are “closer to Nazis than they think they are,” Feiger told the Detroit News three years ago. “Orthodox Jews are not different than the right-wing Christian nuts. If you’re a religious nut, you’re a religious nut.”
Detroit News columnist George Cantor — who, at least at the time, was ambivalent about assisted suicide — responded: “If a Louis Farrakhan or a Pat Buchanan had said something even approaching this degree of calumny, Jewish organizations would be hopping up and down in outrage.”
Obviously, no such hopping ensued. Indeed, we can consider ourselves fortunate when those “watchdogs” of ours aren’t gleefully supporting the Kevorkians and other annihilators of civilization.
Certainly Kevorkian is considered a savior by many of our ordinary brethren. Following his conviction, one Norma Horvitz of Fort Lauderdale bitterly complained in a newspaper letter about the loss of “freedom” to us all — ignoring the inestimably greater loss of freedom an acquittal would have meant to those who want to go on living.
For even without the legalized euthanasia she and Kevorkian long for, many are being swept up in this death movement against their will.
Another letter writer, in lauding this death-obsessed zealot, invoked the image of “the true prophet.” He happened to be a non-Jewish clergy — but his sentiments were doubtless praised and echoed by myriads of our brethren.
Four years ago, lawyer Michael Modelski, who as a district attorney had once prosecuted Kevorkian, gave a chilling assessment of the latter.
“He’s a product of a life of failure,” Modelski said. “He has always been a crackpot and a fanatic. The ‘Dr. Death’ thing started when he was [in medical school] and he thrived on it, but nothing he tried worked out. [Experiments with cadavers and the like were] all a failure. Now, at last, people are paying attention to him.”
Does that sound eerily familiar? A bit like another failed, despised individual — also an amateur painter — who went from an ignored Austrian alehouse malcontent to history’s greatest villain?
One shudders in speculating that there were doubtless more than a few Jews who, at least in the early stages, hailed him as a hero and prophet, too.