KAREN I. writes:

Today, I saw “death with dignity” being advertised on the website of my small local paper. There was a banner ad at the top of the page and the woman in the ad looked pretty happy, considering. 

When I clicked on the ad, it went to the following website for Compassion and Choices, [the national pro-suicide organization.]

My grandfather went through one of these so-called “dignified deaths.”He was denied food and water in a hospital, which acted under the orders of relatives who “knew” it was what he would have wanted. I could not be there as he was 2,000 miles from me, but I was not spared the details of his suffering, which included being denied food and water. He was “allowed” to suck on a wet rag to ease his suffering when he started begging for water. A dying old man begging for water and sucking on a rag in a hospital bed isn’t my idea of a dignified death. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking of it.

Laura writes:

There are important parallels between the “aid-in-dying movement,” which is mounting every single day and will grow so strong that in a few years many more people will bewilderingly look back and wonder how it all began, and the movement for same-sex “marriage.” Both are in favor of things that were not generally desired by the public when the campaign for their enactment began. The people were not clamoring for help in dying. The people were not clamoring for a redefinition of marriage. These innovations are the work of a determined minority.

Both movements are propelled by the activism and funding of a relatively small number of influential individuals, such as George Soros who funds the euphemistically named “Compassion and Choices,” which is a rebranding of its predecessor, the Hemlock Society. (Wealthy Jews appear to be especially numerous among the “aid-in-dying” movement’s supporters.) Here is a brief piece from The Washington Examiner about Soros’ finding of Compassion and Choices. Wesley Smith of the Center for Bioethics and Culture writes about this obsession of the “relatively few” here. In the case of same-sex “marriage,” well-off, childless homosexuals have contributed substantially to its lawsuits and publicity.

The other factor common to both movements is their appeal to the media and its love of highly emotional, disorienting and divisive stories, which keep readers coming back for more.

The media blitzkrieg is fed not only by the conviction of those in the media that these issues are open for debate, but by the widespread belief by the American public that any and all ideas should be entertained and given equal airing. We live in a society that does not say, “Stop, we should not even be talking about this,” or recognize the authority of anyone who would say such a thing, because it has believed so highly in a false freedom and has worshipped freedom-for-freedom’s-sake for so long.

Freedom, as we see again and again, becomes synonymous with aiding and abetting extreme nihilism. That nihilism is now manifesting itself as an actual love of death — and it is presented in the most sunny and smiley terms. Freedom has become another word for enslavement to those with a hatred for life and for everything good.

— Comments —

Mary writes:

Laura wrote: There are important parallels between the “aid-in-dying movement,” and the movement for same-sex “marriage.”

Assisted suicide and same-sex marriage both have as their ultimate goals the destruction of the bonds in the natural family; they will complete the work started by legalized abortion and easy divorce. The complete elimination of these bonds will result in the deconstruction of the family unit; at that point human society can be rebuilt according to the desires of whoever rules the world at the time. The “nice”, the “open-minded”, liberals, neo-pagans and atheists alike will be enlisted and will aid in this destruction as unwitting co-conspirators.

Laura wrote: “…the widespread belief in the American public that any and all ideas should be entertained and given equal airing. We live in a society that does not say, “Stop, we should not even be talking about this,” or recognize the authority of anyone who would say such a thing, because it has believed so highly in a false freedom and has worshipped freedom-for-freedom’s-sake for so long.”

The masses are easily manipulated through the public school system and television. One might call us sitting ducks.

From Dorothy Sayers’ essay The Lost Tools of Learning, written almost seventy years ago in 1947:

“Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?……For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”….. we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it…

“…. The truth is that for the last three hundred years or so we have been living upon our educational capital.…. the Scholastic tradition, though broken and maimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities….Right down to the nineteenth century, our public affairs were mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most part written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in places, where that tradition was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood. Just so, many people today who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted that it never occurs to them to question it. ..

“….But one cannot live on capital forever. However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number–perhaps the majority–of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits–yes, and who educate our young people–have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline….We have lost the tools of learning…..The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand….For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” [my emphasis]

 Laura writes:

Mary wrote:

Assisted suicide and same-sex marriage both have as their ultimate goals the destruction of the bonds in the natural family; they will complete the work started by legalized abortion and easy divorce. The complete elimination of these bonds will result in the deconstruction of the family unit; at that point human society can be rebuilt according to the desires of whoever rules the world at the time.

Absolutely. The aid-in-dying movement, as with same sex “marriage,” stems from a corrosive level of individualism and seeks to perpetuate and extend it.

Both movements also offer a community of sorts for their followers. I noticed in a previous video I had posted about a woman who was sick with cancer and had become a spokeswoman for the local Compassion and Choices that the organization seemed to offer her affirmation, support and comfort. How ironic for the dying to find comfort from those who wish to hasten death.

Anti-Globalist Expatriate writes:

“The media blitzkrieg is fed not only by the conviction of those in the media that these issues are open for debate, but by the widespread belief by the American public that any and all ideas should be entertained and given equal airing.”

In my view, what’s taken place is more of an inversion – i.e., things which oughtn’t to be discussed are being actively promoted, and things which have been discussed since time immemorial and should be discussed are being forbidden in the name of ‘political correctness,’ ‘racism,’ ‘homophobia,’ ‘hate speech,’ etc.

Laura writes:

You’re exactly right. That’s an important correction.

James P. writes:

This Daily Mail article notes that “Women, highly educated, divorced and rich people” (as well as those with no religious affiliation) are more likely to die from assisted suicide.

One can only guess how well that profile fits the leadership of the misnamed “Compassion and Choices” group.

Aditya writes:

I can only imagine your horror at these developments. I, however, have a radically different outlook on “assisted suicide” and “euthanasia.”

Whereas non-voluntary Euthanasia is indefensible (it is outright murder and any persons participating in this crime should be charged and prosecuted accordingly), the right, yes, the right, to take one’s own life is the natural and logical extension of “privacy” and similar individual rights that is the hallmark of “Classical Liberalism.”

That America was born an anti-Traditional Nation that is rooted in half-understood notions of Radical Individualism is undeniable. The Declaration and the Constitution, the latter more than the former, reveal a confused, deracinated mind as evidenced by the complete absence of evidence of a nexus between the “rights” delineated in the latter and the race/nation which is the origin of said rights. The Constitution, more than the Declaration, is a manifestation of laughable magical thinking and an almost unforgivable misunderstanding of the British Constitution and the Roman Republic (pre-Augustus, of course, since technically, Rome never ceased being a “Republic” and the “Emperors” went by “Princeps (“First Citizen”).”

One of the Godfathers of “Classical Liberalism,” a hero, until Guruji helped me see the light, expressed the quintessence of Liberalism thus:

“The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign (On Liberty, p. 14-15).”

Of course, there is Invictus which MK Gandhi (May his Name and Memory be Obliterated) employed to justify suicide, and which the Bombay High Court similarly employed while striking down the Indian Penal Code’s injunction against suicide:

“It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.” 

—William Ernest Henley

(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/invictus/)

If one accepts that one lives in a G-dless society, i.e., a society not based on Religion (a so-called “Theocracy”), and if one accepts that said Society was, and is, devoted to Radical Individualism, divorced from a two-millenia Religious and Racial (in the sense of “nation,” a group or groups of co-sanguine persons sharing common language, Religion, and most importantly, “the mystic chords of memory”) then Voluntary Suicide is logical, “natural” and completely kosher.

The only justification for banning such practices is by affirmatively and unequivocally declaring the State is based on, and justified by, the Christian Religion, specifically, its Western European variant, and the Traditions and Culture of the British Isles. This is the only means of establishing a State that is based on “blood & soil” which is the only defense to a whole host of life-destroying policies including, but not limited to, demographic displacement, sexual license, obscenity and so on & so forth.

The American Nation, at this juncture, is not ready for anything resembling the same since those who believe, belong, for the most part, to “low Church” denominations, are fiercely anti-intellectual, and remain opposed to any attempt at the Establishment of a State Church.

Also, the idea State Church, the COE, is a shadow of its former self, and is, for the most part, a sick joke. There is no way the milquetoast “philosophy” of the COE can challenge Leftism in any manner, shape or form.

I have noted before, Americans are religious fanatics. Initially, it was Low Church theology and Classical Liberalism that enthralled them. Gradually, the abandoned Christianity for Classical Liberalism which rapidly degenerated into modern Universal Utopianism. The damage wrought by these destructive pseudo-religions can only be countered by another Religion.

Although, personally, I don’t believe that anything but a re-invigorated Catholicism can save Europe and her Daughters in the North American and Australia/Oceania, I am not sanguine in this regard. Salvation will come, if it will, as a cure that is (almost) as bad as the disease: ethno-Nationalism. I view ethno-nationalism, specifically, White Nationalism, as a spiritual Vancomycin. It is a antibiotic so strong that it can destroy the very patient it seeks to cure. It can, and will, destroy all these parasites feasting upon, and draining, the body politic. But, if the patient isn’t carefully monitored, it will destroy him as well.

I hope this makes some sense. I would love to know what you, and your excellent correspondents, think about this hypothesis.

Laura writes:

A few quick points.

First, no one has the right to take his life. No one. We are created by God and we belong to him. There are no rights when it comes to suicide. All suffering in this world is relatively short-lived. Eternity lasts forever.

That said, it is not immoral to end aggressive, painful and intrusive treatment for a terminal disease. That is not suicide. A person who no longer feels the desire to eat should not be forced to eat. It is normal for people who are close to the end to lose the will to live and the desire for food. They should not be forced by artificial means to prolong their lives.

Secondly, the Church of England was started by a glutton who wanted to divorce his wife. The Catholic Church was started by Christ. Britain was Catholic for 900 years before the greedy king divorced his wife and told the Pope to go to hell.

Thirdly, man cannot live by ethnonationalism alone. It is thin gruel. But, just as no individual should commit suicide, no people should commit suicide. That’s immoral. They must have the will to defend themselves as a people — so that they can live for things higher than ethnonationalism, such as the Glorious and Immaculate Virgin and Jesus Christ, Our Lord and King.

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