• The Daily Telegraph
• Le Figaro
• The New York Post
• L’Orient-Le Jour
• L'Osservatore Romano
• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
• The Jewish Chronicle

• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
• Magyar Nemzet
• ABC.es
• The Catholic Herald
• Il Foglio
• London Playbook
• Financial Times

France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

I shall duly respond.

What has SS Doktor Mengele to do with the Dutch?

Some medical professionals among the Dutch are killing innocent children. Dr. Mengele killed innocent children. Quelle simplicité!

Have you seen Auschwitz, walked thru the gas etc etc, have met a survivor , or a member or the SS – I have.

I have not been to Auschwitz, but I have met and talked with an Auschwitz survivor, Jozef Garlinski, who recently passed away. I have not, to my knowledge, met a member of the SS.

Mengele was evil, not a Doctor , an M16 would have blown this prick away in a flash. , instead he was given time … time… reply ??

Mengele was evil, yes, but he WAS also a Doctor whether you like it or not. In fact, he was a doctor twice over, having both an M.D. and a Ph.D. We have to face the fact that doctors, just like priests, teachers, soldiers, and all the rest of humanity, are indeed human and thus imperfect and that they sin; that they can even do great evil, and many doctors do indeed do harm and evil today.

As for whether MI-6 had anything to do with his escape, I plead ignorance since I haven’t looked into it. Whether they did or didn’t, it has absolutely no bearing on judging the evil Mengele did back then and the evil some Dutch (and other) doctors do today.

This Dave character then goes on to point out that the United States still uses capital punishment. “Hey americans can talk” he says, somehow implying that the use of the death penalty on criminals convicted by a legitimate (though obviously imperfect) court of law denies the right of any American to come to any conclusion on the immoral and evil actions of some Dutch doctors in killing, without benefit of a trial, innocent and defenceless infants. Needless to say, it’s a farcical proposition.

I posess no crystal ball, but if I had to guess, I’d put my money on this ‘Dave’ being an anti-American European who supports euthanasia but who clearly does not want to be identified with Nazism. Yet, if my mere presumption is correct, he faces the conundrum that he indeed does share something in common with the Nazis, but it irritated him when this similarity is pointed out (and rightly so). He probably has just not thought everything through (but then again perhaps he has). Nonetheless, I believe a great number of modern people don’t think modern ideas through before they decide to sign up to them.

Example: people are sick and dying and in an immense amount of pain. The solution? Let them “die with dignity” by having a Doctor help them commit suicide. Problem solved! Or at least to those who don’t think things through. Let’s think things through, and posit the stages through which legalized euthanasia would go:

1) At the start, it is presented as its supporters present it now: people who are sick and suffering from a terrible amount of pain are given the option of ending their lives, “with dignity” we are always told. It is, of course, completely optional.

2) Down the line, euthanasia is still optional, but it is considered weird not to choose suicide; who could possibly want to continue through all that pain, after all? Surely only religious freaks. The desire to die a natural death will become viewed as macabre.

3) Eventually patients will be pressured into “doing the right thing” and no longer being such a bother and nuisance to the living. How can they be so egotistical and go on living, with all those medical bills, when little grandson Timmy needs the money to go to college.

4) Laws will be passed allowing hospitals the option of refusing necessary life-sustaining medical care when doctors deem the life no longer worth paying for.

5) Following this stage in the evolution of euthanasia, the profit-driven medical insurance companies will refuse to pay for ongoing medical treatment past a certan stage because it is “unnecessary”. Thus the sick man or woman is indignantly pressured into choosing “a simple medical procedure” which will end it all, “with dignity”. This will, of course, affect the poor most of all.

6) Next, euthanasia will be considered the default, just an average medical procedure: What we do with patients once they have reached a certain stage of illness is kill them. You will have to make a specific request if you do not wish to be killed. The onus will be on the patient to make clear their objection.

7) Then the final stage. Akin to Chesterton’s maxim that “Where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed” (aptly proven in the Episcopal Church of our day), where living becomes optional, sooner or later there will be situations where the option of living will be forbidden. When the case of a patient who wants to wait for a natural death arises, the doctors (backed by the hospitals and insurance companies) will simply have the patient declared mentally incapacitated or unable to make decisions and then get some kind of court order to kill the patient. Eventually an enlightened judge will rule court orders unnecessary.

These are mere predictions, and thus by no means are fated to happen. Indeed, I believe the United States at least will swing against euthanasia and other disturbing aspects of the Culture of Death, just as (after the Holocaust) the prevailing winds eventually blew against Margaret Sanger’s hopes for forced sterilization of people who were criminal, “feeble-minded”, or just plain Black. Though of course Planned Parenthood still idolizes Sanger, failing to mention her legacy of racism while at the same time furthering it by targeting African-American and other minority communities.

The sick, the elderly, and the infirmed are still complete human beings and thus entitled to the same basic dignity as the rest of us. Putting to the side the fact that God has not given us the authority to end lives which some deem inconvenient or unnecessary, the legalization of euthanasia assaults the dignity of the sick by implying that their continued existence is not really necessary, merely an option, and sets us on the slippery slope. Of course, euthanasia supporters say “that’s ridiculous!” and that of course there will be safeguards and lines drawn, but they are in the act of pushing back a line already drawn. There can be no guarantee that once they redraw the line they won’t want to redraw it again in twenty years’ time.

But this is just another aspect of “defining deviancy down” as the late (and sometimes great) Daniel Patrick Moynihan phrased it. Part of the modernist project is to continually change our idea of what is immoral and wrong until the paradoxical situation arises in which the only thing left that is considered “wrong” is considering something wrong. God willing, that day will never come, but there are some who will it should come so we must keep on guard, praying and working to create a culture that affirms life and pleasing to God.

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