What have we done to this one? Can it
be expected that anyone who has no compunctions about keeping this commandment will have
absolutely none about any of the other nine? Can we trust people who deliberately
call for the violation of the Sixth Commandment, who are motivated in that by violations
of the Tenth Commandment, and who deliberately violate the Ninth Commandment to achieve their aims? Can we trust them to
truly speak for our children when ostensibly "in the best interest of the
children" they call for the introduction of new legislation that will rip apart the
bond between children and their parents?
Assisted suicide (see
also Abortions)
In the latter half of 1945 war-crimes trials were held in
Germany and many other parts of Europe to bring criminals to justice who under the guise
of the code name "euthanasia" had introduced a program of mass killings.
Just as in the vilification of today's men and fathers, the deliberate creation of a
propaganda campaign, including the production of a number of very compelling movies by
Leni Riefenstahl and others, preceded the legalization of the Nazi "euthanasia"
program. The "mercy killing" of ten's of thousands of handicapped people
provided the expertise that eventually expanded the program of mass-exterminations by the
SS of "humans of lesser value" into the mass-extermination of 12 million
Europeans, half of them Jews. However, the mass-extermination of these 12 million
Europeans too had to be made palatable first. That was done by expanding and
stepping up the propaganda campaign that had made the SS euthanasia program
possible. The scope of the propaganda campaign was quite simply expanded into a hate
campaign to include the Sinti, Roma (both Gypsy races), Jews and others in the definition
of "humans of lesser value", to condemn them to death and thereby to purify the
"Aryan" race.
Today's advocates of the merits of assisted suicide claim the record of the
Netherlands, where it is now legal to assist greatly suffering people in their wish to be
killed, so that they may be allowed to die in dignity. However, the record in the
Netherlands shows that the majority of such patients are being killed without their
consent and without the prescribed forum of doctors who must reach a unanimous decision as
to whether a given patient can be killed. Most of such decisions are being made by
just one single doctor upon the request of relatives who no longer want to carry the
burden of providing for members of their families that became a nuisance. It appears
that more than 80 percent of ostensible "assisted suicides" in the Netherlands
are in reality cases of euthanasia, so-called merci-killings, in which the victim has no
say. What's more, although charges of manslaughter or murder were brought against
some of the Dutch doctors who in spite of the liberated Dutch euthanasia laws killed some
of their patients illegally, none of them have yet been brought to trial.
On November 22, 1998, Dr. Kevorkian, a.k.a. "Dr. Death" was featured on
"60 Minutes", which showed a video made by Dr. Kevorkian. That video
provided clear evidence of how Dr. Kevorkian in violation of his Hippocratic oath killed a
man, without any doubt an act of homicide. Sure, the man asked that he be killed,
but it is still illegal to kill! At any rate, the video showed Dr. Kevorkian
injecting first a drug that would stop the man's breathing, and then showed him injecting
a drug that was intended to stop the man's heart from beating. Dr. Death promptly
made the news on account of having challenged the authorities to charge him with
murder. Dr. Kevorkian believes that it is his right to kill people and that if
anyone should dare to find him guilty that that would be an injustice. He threatens
the authorities that if they should dare to sentence him to prison for what he has done,
that he'll promptly go on hunger strike.
(Update 1999 06 11: Dr. "Death" has been sentenced to Prison. There is no
word on whether he has started his promised hunger strike yet)
How are his actions and his experiments—which apparently included the use of
plastic bags to suffocate his victims—as to how best to kill people any different
from the experiments of the Nazis. Those eventually brought 12 million people to the
gas chambers of the extermination camps. Let's hope that the authorities take Dr.
Kevorkian by his word and let him starve himself to death.
The advocates of "assisted suicide" claim that if someone isn't capable any
longer to kill himself, it should nevertheless be permissible to put him to death, because
there is no hope for him anyway that he'll ever be able to lead a productive and
comfortable life. What excuse can therefore be used when such people insist that
abortions must be made legal?
Abortions
Abortions involve the killing of an unborn child, something not even the Nazis
considered making legal. Unborn children in the wombs of their mothers—a place
once regarded to be a sacred place, the safest place ever for a child to be—are now
being killed at any stage during their gestation right up to the instance of birth (see
the Partial-Birth Abortion Procedure. Diagrams
Texts). The legalization of
abortions became promoted under the euphemism "therapeutic abortions", abortions
that were intended to prevent "defective" children from reaching full term,
abortions that were to protect the life and health of the mother from harm of the risk
posed by specific isolated pregnancies and associated complications.
From those ostensibly benign intentions the rate of abortions grew to 55 million
abortions annually in the world. In North America, about one third of all conceived
children are being killed before they have a chance to be born—under the premise that
it is the right of the mother to her body that allows her to ask someone to kill her
unborn child, and that because she asks for an abortion, it is legal for any doctor to
kill her unborn child for her.
Abortion rates in North America:
- USA: 1.5 million per year
- Canada: 106 thousand per year
- Alberta: 10,231 per year, an increase of 15% over two years, "...3,401, of
the 1997-98 abortions were performed on women that had previously aborted, some of them up
to six times." (Alberta Health Statistics released in May 1999, Alberta Report, June
7, 1999, p. 27). Obviously, if abortion are for therapeutic reason, the
"treatment" doesn't take too well and must be taken repeatedly.
The killing of unborn children and young children alike has become so commonplace that
it is hardly ever mentioned in the news, unless the circumstances of a particular killing
are extraordinary violations of even our much relaxed moral values. Yet, the heart
of the public still beats for the rights of animals. If someone should dare to hurt
a dog or a cat, a public outcry is made. Animal-rights people would rather that we
pollute the environment to produce the plastics that are used in the manufacturing of the
clothing and footwear that is to protect us from the extremes of the Canadian climate than
to have any items of clothing made from animal products. They clamor for ceasing the
use of animals for the development of new medication but will not utter a single word of
protest against the use of tissue obtained from freshly-killed children to be used in
biological experiments.
Update 2006 05 14
Chilling perspectives on "Ethics"
In case of a deadly flu pandemic, whom should we save?
Once-upon-a-time a question like that never came up, except in
totalitarian nations such as the USSR, Red China and Nazi Germany.
The presence of universal moral standards in the cultural heritage of
the West ensured that the answer to such a question was, women and
children first, then the elderly, the weak and the sick. We fought
wars to preserve that as a right of humanity, to ensure the abolition of
slavery and the right of everyone to life and liberty. That had
made our society reach the heights it attained before its fall.
However, those standards no longer exist. Now the legalization of
euthanasia, assisted suicide and rigorous culling to establish the
survival of the fittest is the norm in our brave-new world.
In the name of science it is now rationalized that rigorous
selective culling is needed on the basis of economics, not survival of
the weak on moral grounds. The outcomes of such practices are
similar to those that the Nazis hoped to achieve, for similar reasons;
only the methods differ. The Nazis actively killed those that were
— and in our brave-new world we actively withhold the means to keep
alive those that are — deemed not worthy to let live, although in the
rationalizing for the eradication of the right to life of the weakest of
all, those not yet born, we have already shown ourselves to be far more
ruthless than the Nazis ever were.
Still, vestiges of our largely vanished great cultural aims
still exist, or else it would not be that the proposal by Ezekiel
Emanuel and Alan Wertheimer (in the journal Science, May 12,
2006) sparked as much
public discussion as it did. (The discussion is still growing.
A May 13, 2006 search per the preceding link provided 539 entries in the
search return list. Sixteen hours later, May 14, the entries in the
return list for the search had grown to 572.)
Abortions and violence against women in the context of overall numbers of
violent deaths
In the US, 1,326 women died in 1996 in domestic violence-related incidents, versus bout
1,600 a few years earlier. (Mother Jones: Women Hit Too!),
yet, 38,000 people in North America (mostly men) died last year as the result of successful suicide
attempts, and about 25,000 (mostly men) in total died as the result of interpersonal
violence. Almost an equal number of men died in domestic violence-related incidents
(41% of spousal murder victims are men, according to US Bureau of Justice).
What extraordinary efforts we make to secure the well-being of 2% of
the victims of violence! Yet, we permit the same half of society from which these 2%
of domestic-violence victims come to kill 1.5 million defenceless children each year in
North America (55 million each year in the whole world). Not only that, but we give
them the right to do these killings.
