By DEXTER DUGGAN
The Associated Press distributed a story on March 7 about a former Army sergeant with heart problems at a large military veterans home in Yountville, Calif. He wants to commit legal suicide with drugs in the Golden State when the time comes that, as the story phrased it, “his disease becomes too advanced to bear.”
But rather than move to another location like a hospice, he reportedly wants to remain in that veterans home and thus kill himself with the complicity of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, even though the department is forbidden to assist under federal law. The federal government was portrayed in the story as an impediment to “a peaceful death.”
That does sound sweeter to the AP than, say, “suicide by poison.”
In an unrelated incident two days later at that very same Yountville home, a gunman took hostages, killed three staff members, then committed suicide. How’s that for “assisted death”?
That may be how a transition comes over societies. First a plea for those suffering to be able to end their lives. Then others are drawn in to assist with what some level of government had declared legal. This is followed by death administered to the unwilling or uncomprehending by someone who thinks they need to die. “Better off dead,” as the saying goes.
Perhaps the 20th century’s clearest example of such regression to barbarity occurred even before the empowerment of European National Socialism.
Germany developing into killing the innocent on an industrial scale was to arise not due to howling racist mobs, but after WWI beginning with socially well-placed men of medicine and the law, men of compassion in their own minds, who wanted to reject tradition and relieve others’ anguish with finality. It was their solution.
The distinguished man of law Karl Binding and man of medicine Alfred Hoche wrote an influential book whose title translates approximately as, Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living. Or…Life Devoid of Value.
Innocent people with significant mental or physical impairment, including babies, began to be given “mercy death.” After establishing the precept that people didn’t have an inherent right to live even though they excited the authorities’ sympathy, it became easier to extend and expand that legal system to terminate “unwanted” people whose lives the powerful didn’t value at all.
The National Socialists later produced a propaganda film to make Germans feel guilty about opposing “mercy death,” Ich klage an, meaning “I accuse.”
The “accusing” however, wasn’t done by the film’s prosecutor putting on trial the man who killed his suffering wife after she pleaded that she didn’t want to become “just a lump of meat.” Instead, the husband himself accused society for condemning the “mercy death” he extended to his wife.
After the Allies conquered Germany, they banned this film.
Back home in the U.S., a “new ethic” began to emerge in medicine and the law in the 1960s. Medicine’s historic ethical standard of the Hippocratic Oath, which forbade abortion and euthanasia and dated back to pre-Christian times, was slipped into the closet to gather dust.
The September 1970 issue of California Medicine, the California Medical Association’s influential magazine, carried an editorial, “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society.” It noted that Western civilization’s traditional emphasis on the worth of every human life was being eroded. This was notably so, as the 1970s began, with regard to abortion.
“Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced, it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent,” the editorial said, going on to call on medicine to prepare for a “new ethic,” to be applied “in a rational development for the fulfillment and betterment of mankind in what is almost certain to be a biologically oriented world society.”
As defined, of course, by the upper-crusters. Eugenicist Margaret Sanger couldn’t have said it better.
Less than three full years later, the U.S. Supreme Court, prodded by the immoral Bindings and Hoches of its own day, imperiously ripped away basic protection for every preborn U.S. baby, inciting decades of social and political turmoil that have yet to recede.
Many people feared that the majority justices, having gotten away with this, and with their heads stuck into the ghastly editorial page of the Culture of Death’s New York Times, would necessarily move on to imposing national mercy-killing, too.
However, as deficient as some justices were in understanding constitutional law and their responsibilities, they at least understood they didn’t want to stick their heads into another hornet’s nest of the same proportions.
So, when the High Court had the opportunity to mandate national euthanasia in 1997, it punted, saying this was an issue for individual states to decide.
If this was an appalling action to the extent that it opened the door for legal suicide-by-doctor, the court at least didn’t pretend — unlike regarding permissive abortion — that an alleged nationwide right simply had lain dormant for centuries in the Constitution, waiting like a sleeping princess to be kissed into awareness.
Thus, the current pecking and chipping away by pro-death activists to expand euthanasia how and whenever they can, with the skeletal Jerry Brown’s Democrat-controlled California being a ripe target, as noted above by the Associated Press.
Compassionate?
Barbara Simpson, a conservative commentator in northern California, warned of the similarities with National Socialist Germany.
In a March 13 interview, Simpson told The Wanderer: “Assisted suicide is legalized killing by requiring someone else to murder — kill — someone. Really is people wanting the government to agree to this murder.
“If we agree to this,” Simpson said, “we would be no better than Mengele or Hitler. But we are better. If someone wants to die, they should do it themselves. However sad and tragic that may be, don’t ask the rest of us to help kill you.
“We are inundated with the idea that we all have rights,” she continued, and the rest of the people must agree to one’s demands. “Now it’s the alleged rights of veterans to have assisted suicide in a federal facility.”
She likened this to the related issue of forcing people to assist with abortions.
As for the abortion issue, pro-abortion Ruth Marcus, deputy editorial-page editor at the leftist Washington Post, shouldn’t have surprised anyone — although she seemed to do so — when she declared on March 9 that she would abort a fetus — as she prefers to call a preborn baby — with Down syndrome.
Marcus was forthrightly callous on her reasoning about preferring to avoid giving “birth to a child whose intellectual capacity will be impaired, whose life choices will be limited, whose health may be compromised.”
This may seem at odds with the way leftists prefer to see themselves as powerfully compassionate and empathetic for the disadvantaged. But, as Marcus said, the Supreme Court had legalized abortion in 1973 even to satisfy “a whim,” and aborting a child to avoid Down syndrome is a more consequential reason than a whim.
In the end, the baby’s life means no more to Marcus than to her buds on the High Court, because those who would protect the baby, or even the life of Marcus herself, are mere “government officials who believe they know best,” in Marcus’ eyes.
The Death Culture
The conservative HotAir blog responded on March 10 with various criticisms of Marcus, including a tweet that said, “Monstrous evil unashamedly displayed. You would never say that women need the right to abort, say, a fetus predisposed to be gay, or a fetus predisposed to be alcoholic, or a fetus predisposed to be (*cough*China*cough*) female.”
But even more powerful was a video the blog offered that showed children with Downs in different countries, all charmingly speaking their native languages, saying they’re happy. The video ended with them and their mothers hugging.
The video was banned in France because it might have made mothers rethink a desire for abortion — “for doing nothing more than asking the Marcuses of the world to listen a little more carefully to their consciences,” the blog said, adding that you know your own stand is morally sound if it has to be legally suppressed by the other side.
Thus has been the march of the death culture through Western societies, hushing and suppressing traditionalists until the hush of the grave becomes, um, “a kind of a hush all over the world,” as the Herman’s Hermits pop group sang in the different context and times of 1967.
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