ATOS kills – the words that sank a website.

As reported on the Void recently, ATOS have been trying to censor websites carrying content that criticised them. Here’s the article that they don’t want you to read:

Atos Macht Frei – Atos Origin Team Up With Gas Chamber Firm!

Atos Origin, the poverty pimps currently pocketing hundreds of millions harassing people who are claiming sickness or disability benefits have teamed up with manufacturers of the holocaust’s gas chambers Siemens.

Siemens will contribute its Siemens IT Solutions & Services for €850-million to Atos Origin and become a shareholder of Atos Origin with a 15% stake.

Siemens are most famous for their use of slave labour during the holocaust.  Prisoners were utilised by Siemens to build the gas chambers in which they would eventually be murdered.  Siemens ran factories at Ravensbrück and in the Auschwitz subcamp of Bobrek, whilst the company supplied electrical parts to other concentration camps.

Atos Origin should fit right in with these former eugenicists as they carry out there state funded program to strip both benefits and dignity from those in society deemed to be unproductive.

Some have criticised the use of nazi imagery by some disability and claimants activists recently.  However the parallels between the current Government’s attitude to disability and the early days of the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany are increasingly hard to ignore.  The above poster is directly based on Nazi propaganda at the time which attempted to use fears about the economy to stigmatise disabled people (the original poster can be viewed here along with many other examples).

The present day smear campaign against those with disabilities or illness is relentless.  The right wing press spew out daily lies about benefit fraud and scroungers whilst Disability Minister Maria Miller has claimed the cost of disability benefits (and therefore presumably disabled people) is ‘unsustainable’.

As early as 1933 the Nazis passed a law passed ordering enforced sterilisation of the disabled and long term sick, something that today might be seen as many Daily Mail columnist’s greatest fantasy. Later came the infamous Aktion T4 euthanasia programme when hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities were murdered.  The medical profession notoriously facilitated many of these deaths.

Atos Origin are currently recruiting healthcare workers and doctors across the UK.  Plans to retest everyone on sickness benefits and apply similar tests to those currently claiming Disability Living Allowance will require a lot of doctors.   GPs, consultants or other experts with an in depth knowledge of their patient’s condition will be ignored however.  These health professionals are not trusted to make a decision on their patients ability to work (yet strangely are going to be trusted to control the NHS budget).   Only Atos doctors,  nurses and other unspecified ‘healthcare’ workers are involved in the decision, which is based on a short test and interview.  With huge numbers of those denied benefits having them re-instated on appeal it appears that in a ‘target driven environment’ Atos doctors simply work to rule, regardless of the long cherished medical idiom of ‘first do no harm’.

Disability message boards and blogs have been inundated with people threatening suicide due to these plans.  It is impossible to know how many suicides have happened already as a result of Atos Origin’s medical tests.  Enforced euthanasia may not be the intention of this government’s policies, but in many cases it is likely to be the result.

In Nazi Germany the disabled and sick were seen as surplus to the task of building a mighty Reich.  In Cameron’s Britain the disabled and sick are seen as surplus to the task of ‘bringing down the deficit’.  What counted in Hitler’s day was whether you were a good soldier, industrialist, scientist or labourer.  Under Fascism people were judged purely on their ability to contribute to the goal of German imperialism and genocidal savagery.  Under capitalism we are judged purely on our ability to create wealth for those at the top.  If you ain’t making the rich money, then they couldn’t care whether you live or die.  Nazism it ain’t, we’re a long way from that.  But if it takes being a little bit nazi to continue to line the pockets of the filthy rich, well then it takes being a little bit of nazi.  Now fuck off and get back to work.

Note: personally, I don’t actually think that comparing people to the Nazis is very helpful. What’s truly shocking and upsetting about companies like ATOS is that their persecution of the disabled isn’t something so extreme that it can only be understood by comparing it to the exceptional atrocities of the Nazis; the sheer contempt for human life displayed by ATOS is actually perfectly within the accepted standards for a large institution in a liberal democracy like 21st century Britain. But whether or not it’s appropriate to compare ATOS to the Nazis isn’t the main issue here – the real issue is whether you think they should be able to censor criticism using legal bullying. If you don’t think they should, please reproduce the article above, along with a few of these images:

If you like reading things that powerful people don’t want you to read, I can also recommend reading the article that Paul Dacre wants censored, and the article that the Met wanted censored.