SEBASTIAN C. writes:

I was an acquaintance of the late Lawrence Auster here in New York.  Notwithstanding my many contributions to his extraordinary website, Larry eventually banished me because of our irreconcilable differences over 9/11, an event I lived through first-hand at and around 180 Maiden Lane.  I was one of those people covered in white soot, and became a “truther” by the end of the day after seeing the second airplane from my office window, the strange demolition, learning that WTC 7 had been “pulled” (and reported as destroyed prior to its demolition), that Cheney had assumed command of Norad, and that the Pentagon had been hit by…something…anyway.  Poor Larry told me he “refused to believe his government would…”  I am delighted your website has continued.  But I am writing about something possibly worse than 9/11, which was, after all, a one-time event.

Here is a video by the very influential Economist magazine.  It features a depressed and confused 24-year-old “tomboy” girl in Belgium who had decided to avail herself of her country’s assisted suicide laws.  The 20-minute documentary is an overt promotion of suicide, in this case state-administered death for a girl with no physical ailments.  That’s right: this is not a cancer or Leukemia patient but simply a girl who’s depressed.  The state has concluded she will not improve (she’s 24!), and gave her the green light to die.  On Death Day (5:00 p.m. sharp), just before the state’s doctor could inject her, she suddenly felt better and decided to go on living, sort of.  The report’s thesis is succinctly stated near the end:  the availability of state-administered suicide helps many patients by letting them know there is a way out.  Those opposing state-administered death are cruel and inhuman.  Suicide for depression is a Human Right.  (That she could have jumped off a ledge of her own accord is never mentioned in the video).

One could fill a book on this with Bertonneauesque comments on the Sickness Onto Death of the West, but really, the thing speaks for itself.  Remember that The Economist is an enthusiastic promoter of mass Muslim migration into Europe and “gay rights in Latin America.”  Of course they would be. They know what they’re doing.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing.

Nice scenes of (formerly) Catholic Belgium in that video. When Catholics fall, they hit the ground very hard.

What cleverly staged propaganda! It seemed to offer counter arguments, but really did not. I’d like to have 30 minutes alone with Emily and talk to her a bit about the unbearable suffering of hell. Her entire plan was based on the presumption that she would experience post mortem peace. But what if her suffering was a million times worse after the injection? Ah, they forgot to mention that possibility. A few bureaucrats might be out of a job if hell entered the picture. Emily might be cured, at least enough to carry on. By a simple reading of The Divine Comedy or Fr. François Xavier Schouppe’s Hell: The Dogma of Hell Illustrated by Facts Taken from Profane and Sacred History, she might realize that things could be worse.

Emily needs a dress. That ridiculous hat must go too. Masculine dress affects a woman’s soul. She needs the sacraments, not a lethal injection. However, she may be laughing all the way to the bank. She may have been simply a hired hand for this commercial.

The Bolsheviks murdered the intelligentsia. Today they get the intelligentsia to murder themselves.

It’s all unfolding as if according to plan.

— Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Sebastian C. puts me in debt to him for his coinage of “Bertonneauesque.”  I doubt that it will ever compete with “Spenglerian,” but there is nevertheless a strange pleasure in having one’s surname associated with the End of Western Civilization – as an observer, of course.

Concerning the young Belgian woman in the article that Sebastian references:  You are right that she needs a dress and should lose the hat; she also needs a boyfriend who can affirm her femininity, which she must possess no matter how shamefully she has buried it in political cant, speak to her about marriage and family, and treat her to a nice dinner in a formal restaurant.  Minus the dramatic-narcissistic claim of a suicidal bent, I see versions of this girl all the time: Young women who have been taught to be ashamed of their femininity, who wrap themselves up like Muslim women in sexless garments and frown, studiously, at life.  None is happy.  None could not be happy.  It is another nasty fact about our life-hating Gnostocracy.

Laura writes:

Notice her (depressed) mother is in the picture. No father.

Laura adds:

She needs help becoming a woman. Emily would possibly be a happy wife and mother.

She needs supernatural femininity. The whole culture conspires against her finding it. She seems to have nothing to look forward to but the life of a neutered drone. Ah, what an enlightened age we live in! Thank goodness we got rid of all that superstition. Now we are ourselves. Now we are nothing.

La Vierge et l’Enfant avec le Jeune Saint Jean-Baptiste et Trois Anges, Domenico Ghirlandaio; 1490

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

You write, “Emily would possibly be a happy wife and mother.”  Yes!  Again – I see many similar young women, including the “party girls” among the waitresses at my habitual watering hole.  They are the female version of Peter Pan, but they are stuck at the ninth-grade level of emotional maturity, where being noticeable, and latterly available, to “the boys” is the supreme achievement.  A twenty-year-old “party-girl” is transiently excusable, but a thirty-year-old “party girl” is one step away from being a “woman of leisure” whose price is negotiable.  In a strange way, Belgian “Emily” and the twenty-seven-year-old cocktail-waitress “party girls” are the same.  They are denying, on one side or another of the truth, what we might call their Cosmic Destiny.

Paul writes:

The European title Emily’s Story is misleading.  It is a Belgian story of neglect. A “doctor” states the following:

Most people who ask for euthanasia is based on a long history of mental suffering have a long history of it . . . This is an important distinction we three doctors must make . . . But there must be a genuine belief in recovery.  For some people, we don’t have that belief.  Just like for terminal cancer patients. Sometimes for suffering there’s nothing left to offer. [Emphasis added.  Are they morons?]

Permission can only be granted if the following criteria are met: “[T]he patient is in a medically futile condition of constant and incurable physical or mental suffering that cannot be alleviated.”

Supposedly “Emily has faced a lifelong battle with extreme depression complicated [garbled unspecified] extreme psychiatric disorders.”

Emily admits to engaging in cutting and banging her head against the wall to ease her pain.

By virtue of the Holy Spirit, she later decides against death but later says, at least in one instance, she still wants death.

An attorney who has overseen the commitment of about a hundred of severely disturbed psychiatric patients and has helped to defend against charges of psychiatric failure would be appalled at this law.  In the good ole USA, every state has laws prohibiting this abominable euthanasia.  There are drugs to treat these people.  This lovely young woman deserves treatment and the very best loving attention from her caregivers.  It is possible her family is a source of her problems.

She does not appear to have a personality disorder, where people lack insight and are inappropriate.  She is lucky she knows she is sick and needs help.  If she is insightful, she is capable of responding to psychological discourse.  A charming young man could be helpful if the providers promoted such opportunities.  If she is homosexual, she still has hope.  There are cures for such a disorder.  The article mentioned tomboy (as a deception?), but she is feminine (even thought that is what most homosexual women are).

The lawful murdering is worse than the lobotomies performed before the 1970s.  At least the state was willing to spend time and money caring for the mentally killed victims.  Now the state wants to engage in euthanasia for the same reason the state did in the insightful movie Soylent Green, to get rid of people the state no longer wants to afford.

Belgium is a country to be avoided.

Laura writes:

Emily and Brittney Maynard are the pretty faces of the euthanasia movement. The reality is much more likely to be old or handicapped people who no one loves and who are costly.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Assuming that she is sincere and not a paid actress, I’d like to reply to the statement “I’d like to have 30 minutes alone with Emily and talk to her a bit about the unbearable suffering of hell.”

Why do you think for one moment she would buy your story? People in serious mental pain don’t care what anyone says about some unprovable “hell”. They largely believe – right or wrong – that hell is right here on earth.

All in all, the suggestions that’ll supposedly make her feel okay are ghastly. Right, girly, just go shopping for a feminine outfit, take the sacraments, get a guy, and Bob’s your uncle!

That she could have jumped off a ledge of her own accord is never mentioned in the video.

That’s because women normally don’t kill themselves in that manner, that is more of a male thing. Women tend to take pills and alcohol.

Laura writes:

I didn’t say she would be convinced, but she deserves to be informed of the theological proofs for the existence of hell. She has a right to those revelations, of which she has been systematically deprived, and she definitely is a rational woman.

Obviously you don’t believe God has any power over human affairs. You are out of touch with reality. Emily is out of touch with reality. Her psychiatrists are out of touch with reality.

A female reader writes:

I watched the documentary on Emily wanting to die. Did I understand correctly that she is still alive, that she didn’t end up killing herself? [Laura writes: Yes.] That makes the introduction to the video very misleading. Hurricane Betsy left an inane comment, painting caricatures of what you were actually saying. It is evident that the emo/hipster culture and the general promotion of ugliness has strongly influenced Emily. Her attire, indeed her ridiculous hat and glasses, show that she is far from unique. I know plenty of people who dressed just like her and cut themselves in teenage angst. The point was that, as you said, it is conceivable that through the use of her reason and with the proper instruction, she could come to believe in the true religion (including the existence of hell, of course) and that the culture she has conformed to has only increased her loneliness because it separates her from Being itself. (Emphasis for HB’s sake, who is truly the one who fails to have compassion on these miserable people.) And of course these current fads result from modernity’s purposeless egalitarian existence. As Cardinal Siri wrote,

“In truth, the motive that impels women to wear the clothing of men is not always to imitate him, but rather to compete with the man who is considered stronger, less encumbered and more independent. This motivation shows clearly that masculine dress is a visible support to bring about a mental attitude of being ‘like a man.’ Further, since the existence of man, the clothing a person wears conditions, determines and modifies the gestures, attitudes and conduct of a person. Thus, just by its wearing, the clothing comes to impose a particular state of spirit in the person…. The perversion of her psychology is clearly evident.”

If she is still alive, it is likely that God has been sending her graces. We should not fail to pray for her conversion.

 Laura writes:

Some are destined to experience intense mental suffering. It’s a privilege in a way. Comprehending true agony, they can keep the vigil in the Garden of Gethsemene with Christ.

Paul C. writes:

The slickness lies at the very end when they propose that given the opportunity to have help in killing themselves, the victim has an increased chance of changing her mind.  Are they talking about a foolish form of shock therapy?  Awful idea.  Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is extremely beneficial to a lot of patients with major depression?  It cured my mother quickly.

They don’t explicitly say it has shock value probably because they have a muddled reason; asking us to read between the lines is a pretty thin reason considering the seriousness of the topic.  I tried to determine whether ECT was tried on Emily (aka Laura) but could not find out.  Based on an Belgian study of Belgian’s use of ECT in 2003 though, this was the conclusion:

“The present findings demonstrate that the practice of ECT in Flanders and the Brussels Capital region in 2003 generally was not performed according to the available guidelines. ECT is underused in Flanders and the Brussels Capital region compared with other countries, although it is available in both specialized psychiatric facilities and in the psychiatric departments of general hospitals.” [Emphasis added.]

In addition, Emily’s huge drawer stuffed full of medications is a clear indication of polypharmacy.  It perhaps is helping her, but most American physicians find it problematic.  All the crap can inhibit the other crap.

I learned this personally when trying to stop constant outbreaks of herpes simplex (non-genital but the usual lip sores from kissing a parent or a girlfriend) a few years ago over a period of months (I suspect because of intense job stress).

I take a few other medications. Well when my dermatologist realized the highly-effective medication I was taking might be undergoing interference by the other meds, he said to take it a couple of hours before or after the other meds.  I did and was cured in about three days.  It has tried to return a couple of times, but all it takes is one pill alone, and it is gone.

I signed a petition to help protect Emily against her confused doctors.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

I found among my mother’s stuff a brief article that she had cut out from an old newspaper advising how we could be helpful when someone felt hopeless and wanted to cease carrying on with life. The first item was:  Don’t try and talk someone out of their attitudes no matter how wrong they may be.  “Just shut up and listen” was the basic advice.  The gentleness of Christ is what is needed is what I took from that article.

Laura writes:

Yes, of course.

In the heat of depression someone who is suicidal may be little affected by rational arguments. They deserve great compassion and should be protected from harming themselves until the crisis passes. But Emily was rationally and publicly planning to kill herself, and she appears to have been capable of thinking it through more deeply.

Paul C. writes:

People should consider how sanitariums could help people like Emily and all the severely mentally ill and drug/alcohol addicted people.  Sanitariums would no doubt be expensive to ensure modern humane treatment.

But we expend a fortune on kidney dialysis, liver transplants, kidney transplants, transplants of other organs damaged by the drugs to suppress rejection of the source organ, and the other innumerable physical maladies caused by addiction to drugs and alcohol and perhaps to the greatest addiction we face today, food.  Huge savings could occur if we got people off of addictions and made them at least somewhat productive along with many of the mentally ill people.

Type II diabetes is often caused by an addiction to overeating.  One can learn in an endocrinology course the seemingly endless maladies caused by diabetes.  It would be a shock to learn glucose (e.g., candy) could cause such havoc unless kept under control by insulin secreted by the pancreas, a large endocrine gland.  Diabetes adversely affects every single cell in the body.

Addiction to sloth could contribute to Emily’s problems.  One wonders if anyone has made Emily work, something essential to a feeling of self-worth, or has at least had her take up painting or volunteer work, something to get her out of her head.  (Presumably professionals have tried, but with Europe’s crazy socialism, no one can be sure.)  Few people don’t mind being known deadbeats.  It is why 4% unemployment is full employment.  At a sanitarium, depressed and addicted patients could earn privileges or even money by working or taking part in activities that would get them out of their heads.

The video (which should have been at least an hour) does not address any of these topics because it has the purpose you highlighted.  But you cleverly inserted the video of a lovely young woman, sure to grasp the heart of any adult male and any mother.  So the producers ended up worsening their case.

Thank you. I wish I could do more for Emily.

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