Canada's hellish euthanasia laws

<em>Does life have no value anymore?</em> <em>asks </em>Simon Caldwell For a language which to the English ear occasionally sounds guttural, German also contains a few words as musical as they are useful. Think of&nbsp;<em>Doppelgänger</em>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<em>Schadenfreude</em>. Words such as these tend to creep into the English language when we lack an equivalent to convey the meaning so succinctly expressed. One such word with contemporary relevance is&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung</em>. This appeared in the works of Friedrich Schiller, the 18th century playwright, philosopher and poet, and was later borrowed by Max Weber, the 20th century sociologist often referred to as one of the most important theorists on the development of modern Western society. Weber gave&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung</em>&nbsp;a modern meaning. It is commonly translated to English as “disenchantment” but he was referring to something much deeper and dynamic. To him,&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung&nbsp;</em>is the de-mystification of the sacred elements of society, the persistent and extensive rejection of the metaphysical and the spiritual aspects of both private and public life. It was a phenomenon he observed until his death in 1920 and which has accelerated over the succeeding century, perhaps most energetically in Sexual Revolution when the reproductive act effectively lost its meaning along with the purpose and truth of marriage and, most recently, in the erosion of the self-evident biological realities of the male and female sexes. The final&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung</em>&nbsp;has yet to come but it is appearing in sight. This will be the loss or total rejection of the sacredness and inviolability of human life itself and it is manifesting itself most powerfully in the drive throughout the western world for the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide.&nbsp; Such practices don’t just appear from nowhere. They are not simply accepted and introduced into societies. Rather, they are preceded by a philosophical and theoretical basis to make them palatable. This is the&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung</em>&nbsp;now at full throttle in the UK, implicitly yet forcefully proposing that life has no intrinsic value and that death is an enlightened solution to any kind of suffering. It is no accident that the people advancing this&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung</em>&nbsp;are openly frustrated by the Christian sentiments in the DNA of the British people. Time and again they insist almost fanatically that those who oppose assisted suicide and euthanasia do so because they are religious – ergo, irrational and superstitious.&nbsp; They see Catholics everywhere. Polly Toynbee, a&nbsp;<em>Guardian</em>&nbsp;writer, even challenged Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, the Professor of Palliative Medicine at the forefront of the campaign against assisted suicide, to declare her Catholicism before she spoke against “assisted dying”.&nbsp; It must have been to her chagrin to discover that Baroness Finlay is no more Christian than she is herself. Finlay is among the many non-Christians who recognise that euthanasia and assisted suicide will not create a Post-Modern utopia in which no-one will suffer but a hell on earth, a trap for people considered “imperfect”. They understand that the only safeguard that works is prohibition. Here is Baroness Finlay, the scientist with no religious faith, explaining last week, in her own words, why other “safeguards” always prove utterly useless in protecting the vulnerable against exploitation, abuse and murder – and how it is always “incredibly easy to expand those boundaries”, adding that “Canada should sound a warning to people here”.&nbsp; Canada is indeed a case in point. Not since Adolf Hitler implemented the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, under which 300,000 incurably ill and disabled people were murdered, has any slope proved to be quite as slippery. Comic actor Robin Williams once described Canada as “a really nice apartment over a meth lab”. If he were alive today he may be wondering if Dr Harold Shipman or Dr Josef Mengele had moved in. To some observers, it is no exaggeration to say that Canada is going the way of Nazi Germany. They include Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, who told Associated Press that the law has introduced “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ programme in Germany in the 1930s”.&nbsp; Euthanasia and assisted suicide were legalised in Canada in 2016 after the country’s highest court decided that the ban was unconstitutional because it deprived people of their dignity and autonomy. Access was quickly expanded to encompass more and new categories of people, while rights to object on grounds of conscience were simultaneously removed. Medical insurers have at the same time grown reluctant to pay for palliative or nursing care, but will cover “medical assistance in dying”, known as MAiD; a lethal injection or a deadly cocktail is always the cheapest alternative.&nbsp; Yet the law came in with robust “safeguards”. Access was limited to mentally-competent adults with serious and advanced diseases, who were enduring “unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be relieved under conditions that patients consider acceptable”, and whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable”. There was an implicit assurance that it was meant for the few but last year 10,000 died at the hands of medics. It is easy to get a lethal jab in Canada because it now offers euthanasia for non-terminal cases, such as disabled people, elderly people who claim their frailty is unbearable, and anyone who says they are mentally ill. Soon it is expected that children can qualify too. All the time, the Canadian government is actively making it easier for medics to kill. Nurses as well as doctors can perform euthanasia, and Canada also unique in that it encourages medics to present death as a “clinical care option” – an offer to kill you even before therapeutic options have been tried or exhausted. The state, meanwhile, is also in covering up the truth about how its citizens die by ordering doctors to omit euthanasia as a cause from all death certificates and by protecting medics from the ire of disaffected families. Take the case of Alan Nichols, a 61-year-old stroke victim suffering from depression, who was given a lethal injection against the knowledge and wishes of his family. His relatives complained to British Columbia’s College of Doctors and Surgeons and to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but were simply told that he “met the criteria” and that the family had no right to intervene. This hell is presided over by none other than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the globalist woke authoritarian and self-regarding virtue-signaller&nbsp;<em>par excellence</em>. At the same time as granting a medics a right to kill with apparent impunity, his government thinks nothing of stripping away authentic rights and freedoms of the general populace, forcing them to have dodgy vaccines and wear face masks in a phoney war against Covid, an illness which is now no more harmful than the common cold. A person with two glass eyes can see that it is the Canadian state which is truly sick. If they were to wonder how this awful situation came to pass, they could start by pondering the German concept of&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung</em>&nbsp;and how the apostasy of the West has become an atheistic onslaught against religion which is now destroying the very notion that life is sacred along with the idea that genuine human rights are innate and not the gift of the state. This very dangerous situation should give any person of good will pause for thought – to consider perhaps several other foreign words which have also found a home in the English language.&nbsp; They include&nbsp;<em>sho’ah</em>&nbsp;– a Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe” – and&nbsp;<em>holocaust</em>, a word derived from the Greek word&nbsp;<em>holokauston</em>, meaning a burnt sacrifice, because the mass murders of the 20^th&nbsp;century may find an echo in the final&nbsp;<em>Entzauberung</em>&nbsp;of the 21^st. This article is reproduced with kind permission of TCW: Defending Freedom (<em><a href="https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/">https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/</a>).&nbsp;</em><em>Simon Caldwell's debut novel,&nbsp;</em>The Beast of Bethulia Park<em>, is now on sale from Gracewing. Click here to order your copy (</em><em><a href="http://www.gracewing.co.uk/page416.html">http://www.gracewing.co.uk/page416.html</a>)</em><em>.</em>