Lies delivered fresh to your home TV screen, nightly.

Do you believe in the free press? Do you think that in 2008, a media outlet in the United States can get away with spreading infamous lies; lies so obvious and painful that anyone listening to them will turn away in disbelief and disgust? Or worse, perhaps subtle lies, that sound just unusual enough to potentially be true? Lies so small that they seem plausible, that we listen to and swallow as part of our daily information overload that we have no time to digest, so they just barely remain in the back of our brains as something we heard one day on TV and suddenly believe to be one of those semi-truths that we have heard someone say once and now repeat it over lunch, never having had any reason to question them any further.

Would it not appear obvious that with the availability of information on the Internet, editors of news shows would research carefully the content of the shows they air, in order to prevent total embarrassment and disgrace when it is discovered that what they present as valid information turns out to be nothing but fabricated propaganda?

This seems to be common sense. If the primary purpose of media is to inform, and it turned out that this particular information a media outlet offered was erroneous and misleading, then should viewers not turn away in masses, never to see again another word of misinformation voiced on said outlet? Should the media outlet therefore not have an interest in double-checking their information prior to airing it? That is, assuming they are not fully aware that the news they provide is fictitious and deceiving. In that case, they would consciously chose to provide us with misinformation and hope we would never be questioning it or simply have no time to do a full research of the topic.

Tonight, I came across a blatant example of all of the above elements: propaganda, lies, misinformation, presented so smoothly and arrogantly, so blended in with various facts and common knowledge, that the whole thing together could be swallowed in one easy-to-chew piece. Worse of all, presented with an impossible-to-question attitude of someone who knows to have the entire weight of history backing them, shielding them from any uncomfortable doubt. This is what Ben Stein has done tonight on Glenn Beck's nightly show.

Here he can be seen, covering various topics from his father, to his career, to his Hollywood movie stardom. All of this is of entertainment value of some questionable sort, but it is in Minute 7:22 that we need to open our ears wide and listen to Mr. Stein's unique mix of hear-say and opinion-making comments. The topic at this point in the show is socialized medicine, a big painful fear and cause of great sorrow for Mr. Beck and an element in Stein's upcoming movie "Expelled - No intelligence allowed". On this topic, the 2 gentleman turn their attention to Germany, where socialized medicine suddenly is mentioned in the same breath with Nazi eugenics.



Ben Stein: "And already in Germany, I am told, people are given this little pill when they get old and sick, and they take the pill and they go to sleep and don't wake up. Yes, that's happening a lot in Germany."
Beck: "What is the name of the pill?"
Stein: "I don't know"
Beck: "Is it prescribed by doctors?"
Stein: "Yes, yes. Apparently it's a super powerful barbituate and people take it and that's it for them."
[...]
Beck: "Doctors are prescribing this, killing people, in Germany.
Stein: "Well, again, you might say, yes. AGAIN. I mean, we've showed this, we've documented this in the movie, they've been doing this for a while."

The show then proceeds to show excerpts from the film, a visit of Stein's to the Hadamar clinic in Germany, a site of Nazi euthanasia war crimes. This excerpt is so intertwined with the topic that is appears, from watching the show, to be in fact a grimy hospital of horror, in current use by such death doctors in Germany as Stein has portrayed in his previous sentences.

If this were not bad enough, Mr. Stein finishes off by mentioned how horrible he feels knowing the cemetery of half-jewish kids was nearby the hospital (according to him, under constant watch by guards to protect it from crimes from Neo-Nazis). Thereby he reminds us of the heavy duty collective guilt weighing on Germany, and somehow manages to leave the viewer wondering if some of those death doctors don't sneak a couple of Jewish patients in their lists of patients - out of mercy of course - and economic need in order to maintain the socialized health care system. As he says, "Germans are killing again." - somehow it seems that these Germans are just a nation that condones killing in the name of the bigger good (1945: purity of race; 2008: socialized health care). And that after all those years, they just keep going back to it yet again, don't they...

Do they?

The problem is, all of the above is total and absolute propaganda.
Hadamar was closed in 1945, and its actors tried in court rooms.
There is no hospital currently administering euthanasia in Germany.
There is no such pill in Germany.
There are no doctors writing poor old fellas prescriptions for these pills so the working classes don't have to pay the heavy burdern of their expensive health care anymore. Euthanasia is not even legal in Germany, with certain exceptions. Germany protects the right of the individual to live and to do so with dignity as one of our most basic laws, laws that the United States have helped us to establish after a terrible war and crimes against humanity never again to be repeated on German soil. This right extends to the right to chose when to die. This might be an item of discussion. But, by German law, anyone assisting someone to exercise their right to chose their death will be prosecuted and punished with up to 5 years in prison.


Mr. Beck, if your intention is to blackmail socialized health care, please do so responsibly by providing your viewers with true data. As a hint, you could present the itemized taxes of a German working stiff who has to pay for an out-of-proportion health care offered in Germany to anyone from children, students, the unemployed,and the elderly. That should shock any American viewer into never voting for anything like it in this lifetime or the next.

But please, do not present falsehoods about one of the few countries in the world that is your true ally, that shares beliefs with the US about the freedom of the individual, the right to prosper and pursue happiness. Swallowing some death doctor's pill and being killed off for the next retiree in line is not part of that pursuit in our value and legal system. Conjuring up emotional-laden horrible images from days long gone by as factual, current data is morally wrong.

Let me clarify at this point that I also not not agree with the killing of any innocent human being, of any nation or race for any reason whatsoever. I am not anti-semitic. I, too, feel anger and guilt regarding to injustices committed in WW2. But, let's not confuse these emotions with the existence of the modern nation of Germany that we currently have in place, built thankfully on top of democratic principles and respect for human rights.

I demand in the name of my country you clarify all of the above in your next episode.