Disability Day of Mourning
“TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Palestinian activist Ibraheem Abu Thuraya, 29, who lost his legs in an airstrike was shot dead by Israeli troops as he protested against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem (al-Quds) as Israel’s capital.” [Source]
Disability Day of Mourning is an international memorial held on the 1st of March to celebrate the lives and grieve the losses of individuals killed by care providers or family members due to their disabilities. We, Queers Undoing Ableism Care Kollective (QUACK) from Amsterdam, reject the status quo in which the family is expected to serve as the primary foundation of care. We reject the status quo that segregates disabled people into institutions, supposedly sites of care but often sites of harm. As a society we are all each other’s caregivers and we want to remember all the disabled people murdered for being disabled worldwide and not just those killed by their family and by “health professionals”. When we say disabled people we mean the physically disabled, mentally disabled, chronically ill, “mad” people, neurodiverse people, trauma survivors, “crips,” d/Deaf people, self-diagnosed people, people who think they’re not disabled enough to call themselves disabled, anyone with nonconforming bodyminds.
On this day, we mourn and we grieve innumerable losses. We remember all disabled people murdered for being disabled worldwide, not just those killed by their family and by “health professionals." Fascism and capitalism normalize struggle through suffering, convincing people that disabled lives are less valuable. These beliefs trap people within a murderous system and keep them from recognizing how they are being disabled by fascist ableism, and it keeps people from rising up against it. "Survival of the fittest" mentality was never truly gone, eugenics was never truly gone. Under capitalist structures that tie people’s worth to their productivity, where value is determined largely by how productive you are, ableism is used to frame disability, "non-productivity" as a terrifying identity to hold. Ableism therefore doesn’t only affect disabled people but affects everyone: we are all being judged on our ability/inability to be a good productive and obedient worker for the capitalists/fascists.
As disabled people, we embody the resistance against productivity culture, our bodyminds are literally on strike whether we want to or not, whether we have jobs or not, and we are being punished, oppressed, excluded and yes too often murdered for this. As more people experience poverty, more scapegoating towards those not able to work happens instead of attacking the rich. Due to an increase of poverty and oppression, more people will become disabled as well. We anticipate more oppression of disabled people, as well as other already marginalized peoples such as migrants, racialized people, queer people. And so;
“Person in wheelchair carries sign saying "I bring the revolution on my body" during a disability rights march. May 5th 2024” (Wikicommons)
We grieve the death and we fight like hell for the living! Let this text not only be a memorial, but also a call to action!
Our grief reaches the following people but is not limited to:
-The genocide of disabled people in Germany, Austria and Poland from 1939 to even after 1941 under the Aktion T4. Before the genocide of jewish, roma, sinti and queer people even began, the gas chambers were used to murder disabled people of all ethnicities. This happened after the genocide the German colonizers committed using gas chambers for the first time in Namibia. Due to the Aktion T4, an estimated 200,000 disabled people were killed. Jewish disabled people were not seen even worthy of the gas chambers, they were burned alive instead. (Nazis that became disabled because of the war were also killed by their fellow Nazis. Even Aloisia Veit, the disabled cousin of Hitler, was not spared and murdered. We mention the disabled Nazis being murdered, but we don’t actually mourn their deaths, just to be clear. We only mention it to show how easy it is for people to turn on you once you become disabled.)
We demand the acknowledgement that fascism is always ableist, we demand all Antifa’s (and everyone else too) to educate themselves on what ableism is. We demand of activists that the fight against fascism is made much more inclusive/accessible towards those most affected by fascism, meaning disabled, racialized, queer people. Of fellow disabled people, we urge you to join us in the fight against fascism.
-We grieve all the disabled people murdered by the police. We tell you that many people murdered by the police are disabled, but this goes largely undocumented. Imagine being d/Deaf and not understanding what a police officer is trying to tell you, imagine being mad, and a police officer thinks your everyday behavior of minding your own business is a dangerous threat. Imagine having a police officer sit on top of you and you have asthma. Imagine having a health crisis and the police show up instead of caregivers. These lives lost are innumerable, there are too many.
We grieve the loss of Sammy Baker who was murdered by police in Amsterdam on August 13th 2020 during a drug psychosis. We grieve the countless deaths of disabled people murdered in the so-called “USA." Many people murdered in the “USA” by police due to bias related to their race, ethnicity, gender, are also targeted due to their disabilities, or their death is blamed on their disabilities.
Kill the cop in your head, educate yourself on Mad Liberation and the intersections of being racialized and disabled. Abolish the police. We want a society based on care, not punishment.
-We grieve the queer people who were disabled by society because society said queerness is an illness and therefore murdered them. We grieve the murdered women who were disabled by society because society said women facing oppression and going mad and/or rebelling against patriarchy are ill and have hysteria. We grieve the people of color disabled by society because they were called sick for refusing enslavement and submission to white capitalist norms, and murdered.
In Atjeh, in the Indonesian Archipelago, people kept repeatedly killing Dutch colonizers as a form of resistance. The Dutch then thought they were sick, because, why else would they keep killing? So they build them a hospital.
“Drapetomania” is the disease Black people were ascribed to when they ran away from plantations in the so-called “USA”: if you run away, you must be sick is what was thought.
We use these historical examples, but present day racialized people are still being labelled as sick for resisting colonialism and white supremacy and therefore murdered or institutionalized in so-called “care” facilities. In the Netherlands, a lot of people getting diagnosed with anger issues or schizophrenia are black. Let us diagnose our society with ableist-racism instead. Ableism is always capitalist, sexist, racist, queer- and fat-hating. Whether an experience is labelled as a disability or not is a cultural decision, and the white, patriarchal, cishetero supremacy culture is making those choices incorrectly and violently.
We call for solidarity between queers, women, racialized and disabled people. We demand you educate yourself on how eugenics, Nazism, fascism is coming for us all, and recognize how our struggles are united. We demand that we do not let us be divided. We need each other, we need collaborative care that recognizes the unity in our diversity.
“Protest for the deaf in Ireland, 30 March 2017” (Wikicommons)
-We grieve the disabled people who got “euthanized” because healthcare was not accessible to them. We cost society less if we are dead, therefore euthanasia is being normalized at the same time as budget cuts happen in healthcare. Similarly, we grieve the disabled people who have taken their own lives due to ableism, whether from not being able to access healthcare, or from having become convinced that they were not worthy of care.
We urge everyone to start building mutual aid networks of anti-ableist care because the capitalist systems will do everything they can to keep us from the free and accessible healthcare we need. We demand you educate yourself on your own internalized ableism, for your and our sakes. To those who feel like their own needs or lives don’t matter because of their disability, we see you, and we tell you that you do matter. Please get help dealing with these feelings, you are worthy of care and love.
-We grieve all the disabled people who have been, and are, being murdered in Palestine. For many years now the Zionist IOF army has been disabling people, a main control tactic against Palestinian activists has been to shoot Palestinian people in the leg or foot so they need to get an amputation. War is always a mass disabling event, yet it is more common to speak of people getting injured rather than getting disabled. From an injury you can recover, from a disability you cannot. People become permanently disabled from war, whether it is because they lose limbs or because they get traumatized, become mad, all of those and more. Fortunately, once people become disabled they can still be a part of the resistance, we can still be activists, we can still run mutual aid networks.
We grieve the disabled people murdered in Sudan, Ukraine, Congo and all other war zones. Noteworthy is that Congo has had a horrifying number of amputees due to people working on plantations and having their arms or legs cut off by inhumane Belgian colonizers.
We demand full decolonization and reparations to the colonized from the colonizers. Disability Justice means a Free Palestine, a Free Sudan, a Free Ukraine, a Free Congo.
-We grieve the disabled people who got killed in war zones because due to ableism they were unable to flee. Where fleeing is not generally accessible to able-bodied people either, it is extra hard for disabled people. Due to ableism, people might leave you behind on purpose, or will prioritize helping other people flee instead. Pay special attention to how for disabled refugees it’s harder to get asylum, because the state might think you cannot work or because you actually cannot work in the country you are asking asylum at. Many disabled refugees get denied asylum because of their disabilities. Disabled Ukrainian refugees are largely able to access regular facilities for disabled people when refugees from other countries cannot in the Netherlands. We recognize the racism in that, while also acknowledging that Ukrainian people are still not seen as equals to Western white people.
Support disabled refugees in your surroundings, especially if they are underdocumented and cannot access shelters and healthcare. We demand asylum for disabled refugees, whether they can do paid work or not. Escape routes should be accessible to all, therefore all borders have to be abolished as well.
-We grieve the deaths of disabled people because the Medical Industrial Complex puts profit over people. Life-saving medicine could be widely and equitably available, but capitalism does not value human lives. The most profitable company in Europe is the Danish Novo Nordisk pharmaceutical. The most profitable company in Europe is making profit over the backs of our health, our lives, our disabled lives. Where more and more people are not able to afford healthcare, Novo Nordisk is getting richer along with other big pharma companies. Having a disability can make you poor, and being poor increases the risk of being disabled.
Medicine should be free for all. We demand an end to medicine patents. We demand an end to the criminalization of making your own medicine. This also means we demand an end to the war on drugs. Redistribute resources away from the rich to the (disabled) poor.
-We grieve the deaths of disabled people in Africa and other overexploited places in the world, because Western European countries and the USA are hoarding more vaccines, medicine and other medical supplies than they need. In 2024 fascist PVV minister Agema refused to give the Dutch surplus of mpox vaccines to Congo where they had an outbreak of mpox, leading to many deaths. This is not a one-time thing, systematically life-saving resources are being hoarded instead of shared.
Share resources wherever you can with disabled people if they are in need. Worldwide, disabled people make up the greatest amount of people in poverty. Make your mutual aid anti-ableist and decolonial.
- We grieve the deaths of disabled people in so-called “healthcare” institutions in the Netherlands and worldwide. Whether someone is actively murdered, or murdered through neglect of care, or because they got tortured under the disguise of so-called “care” and they decided to kill themselves afterward. Punishment culture is rampant in healthcare because even in healthcare institutions that are meant to serve disabled people, disabled people are seen as burdens all too often.
In the Netherlands it is still common for suicidal and depressed people to be put into isolation cells for example. It is still common for disabled people with down syndrome to be (sexually) abused by their caregivers within “care” institutions.
We demand an end to ableist violence and punishment culture in healthcare facilities by “care” workers. We demand an end to forced healthcare. We demand all abolitionists of prisons and police to educate yourself on how the answer to no more police and prisons does not mean to have more coercive healthcare institutions instead.
-We grieve the deaths of disabled people and previously-able people who died of corona because the people around them didn’t care to wear a mask and to social distance. The corona pandemic was a moment where inequality in many ways became more visible. The ableism in society has also become more visible, where there were and ARE still calls to just ignore corona and carry on as usual because it were only disabled and elderly people dying of corona. This is, first of all, not true, a lot of people died and are still dying who had no previous illness whatsoever. Secondly, anyone can become disabled at any given time (through for example long covid) and everyone WILL become disabled with aging, so maybe you don’t want to oppress disabled people too much since you will, hopefully, join our club later on in life by surviving until old age. Thirdly, disabled lives matter, and we demand you see us, the disabled, as full members of society. We demand you take extra efforts to not spread diseases, and please wear a mask when asked!
Please note that all the people we grieve mentioned were preventable deaths. They did not die because of their disability, they died because of violence and/or neglect of care. They died because of capitalism, they died because of fascism, they died because of ableism, racism, sexism, queer hate. Although, yes, some disabilities/illnesses are, of course, deadly, it is society that disables us, not our disabilities.
In solidarity,
Queers Undoing Ableism Care Kollective (QUACK) from Amsterdam