“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.
Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
Authored by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestinian Solidarity Committee and co-signed by over thirty other student groups at the elite university, this statement has started to cause problems for its signatories.
Resignations have occurred. Groups have backtracked. Names have been sealed. Why? Because for once in their life, these kids are going to be on the receiving end of the anger that they often direct at others.
Responses to the horror in Israel have been varied. Whilst a good majority of people are horrified by the atrocities that have been committed, not everybody has been so sympathetic. Some have outright celebrated what has happened. Others have been more measured in their response, instead doing the ‘both sides’ tango that they are excellent at dancing.
Such an example is at play here. The students and societies at Harvard who wrote this letter may not have actually straight up endorsed the atrocities that have occurred, but they did lay the blame squarely at Israel’s feet.
The backlash has been sudden and all-encompassing. Academics, fellow students, businesses, politicians and all other types have roundly criticised the groups and students who signed this letter. Those who have been named have distanced themselves from the letter.
The list of groups and names have been removed from the statement in order to apparently protect them from repercussions. Unfortunately for them, the list remains readily accessible.
If these people were so sure of this viewpoint that they signed a statement such as this, it begs the question: why have they decided to step back?
It’s simple really. They’re terrified of facing the consequences that they demand of others.
Take for example a woman named Ryna Workman, President of the NYU Law Student Bar Association. Ms. Workman, who had been a summer associate of the prestigious Winston and Strawn law firm, had a job offer rescinded by them. She had written a statement online refusing to condemn the actions of Hamas, all while once again blaming Israel.
With such actions costing a student from a top college a job, it’s no wonder that those who signed the Harvard statement are melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West. These students attend the oldest and arguably most elite college in the US, and are primed for their pick of summer internships and jobs in some of the top organisations possible. If their names are attached to controversy, then their necks are on the line.
Considering Harvard students wish to permeate a culture in which one can easily be shunned for their actions, it’s fair that some might be unsympathetic to their plight. In 2020, students petitioned for any official in the Trump administration to be banned from engaging with the college in any official capacity. Its scores on self-censorship and free speech are abysmal. Students actively keep their opinions to themselves. Harvard is no bastion of freedom.
These students don’t care if other people suffer for their thoughts, but God forbid they can’t work for some human rights lawyer during the summer holidays.
For years, there have been people who have believed that the rules don’t apply to them. They have kept themselves on the right side of the opinion divide. Their voices have been the loudest. They’re the good guys. They’ve never had to worry about their views being scorned. They’ve always been safe. Now, however, they’ve crossed the line that they set down, and they’re reaping the consequences.
Considering how many presidents, members of Congress and Supreme Court Justices have attended Harvard, it’s more than likely that these students will be the ones running the country one day. Even if they’re not in the top branches of government, they’ll be the lawyers standing up in court.
Harvard is a place that opens doors. They don’t want those doors slammed in their face. It’s just a pity for them they’re the ones usually on the other side of that door.
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Environmentalism: The Quintessential Conservative Cause
Over the past few weeks, a single topic has dominated the German media and has meanwhile made its way into the international media: The removal of climate activists from the village of Lützerath, which they occupy to stop the mining of lignite there.
Activists had already demonstrated in 2020 against the resettlement of the village for the Garzweiler open pit mine and subsequently occupied the village. Beginning on January 11, more than 1,000 police officers went on the offensive and began driving the activists out of the village, resulting in large-scale unrest that lasted for nearly a full week. The locality has not been cleared to this day, in part because activists have tunneled themselves into the ground and barricaded themselves in tree houses. After police officers were pelted with stones and even Molotov cocktails, the reaction of politicians on the right-wing spectrum has been concentrated on these acts. Of course, this is not surprising, but none of these politicians have really been critical of the issue of relocation and demolition of villages, their community and history itself. It seems that only left-wing people ever stand up for environmental protection and, in this case, for saving the village as well as, indirectly, its history (even though this is probably not a motivation for them). But the fact is that environmental protection should also be something important for conservatives, and it is the relationship between the two things that I intend to examine here.
Parts of the small village, first mentioned in the annals of history in the 12th century, belonged to the Cistercian Abbey of Duissern for many centuries. After more than 900 years, the village, like many villages before it, must now make way for the Garzweiler open pit mine and its owner RWE AG. As a result, the Duisserner Hof, for example, which is on the list of monuments of the city of Erkelenz because of its historical and cultural significance, has to be demolished.
A similar fate befell the village of Immerath in 2018, when the neo-Romanesque St. Lambertus Church was demolished. As art historian Annette Jansen-Winkeln noted before the demolition, it was quite dramatic that the church was partially destroyed during World War II and the community then had to invest heavily in rebuilding it, only to have it demolished for the expansion of the open-pit lignite mine. The congregation had invested in large ornamental windows during the reconstruction period, which she was able to save from demolition. The diocese of Aachen had sold the church to RWE AG “with the proviso that the [windows] be treated in the same way as the wall.”
The St. Lambertus Church was a symbol of identity from the very beginning, according to the art historian. In 1886, the village’s approximately one thousand inhabitants decided to build this new church. “For such a small community to produce such great things – there must have been a lot of social competence.”
This situation should cause an unpleasant emotion in every conservative. What is being destroyed in these cases is the active life of a village, its community, and its history, all things that should be central to the conservative view of society. Not only that, but it is being done for a purpose that is detrimental to the environment, that is, contrary to a cause that conservatives should champion: Environmentalism.
Roger Scruton captured this sentiment perfectly when he famously wrote,
‘We must make the environment, the countryside, and the settled communities of our nation into priorities of government. Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but conserves and enhances them. Environmental politics therefore needs to be rescued from the phony expertise of the scare-mongers and from the top-down manipulation of the activists. Properly understood, environmental protection is not a left-wing but a conservative cause.’
Now, as Scruton correctly points out, environmentalism is seen as a core issue of the left political spectrum. Climate change organizations like Greenpeace and social movements like Fridays for Future have uniformly adopted a progressive stance on sociocultural issues, making it almost impossible to support them as a conservative. The reason that the issue of environmentalism has found particular appeal on the left is because of the way they frame the fundamental nature of the problem. The movement, according to Scruton, has
‘acquired all the hall-marks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims (future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors), powerful philistines who exploit them (the capitalists), and endless opportunities to express resentment against the successful, the wealthy and the West.’
Meanwhile, for a long time, little to no real engagement with the issue was made in conservative circles, thus surrendering an issue to political rivals that is now key to due electoral decision-making. In the 2021 German federal election, the environment and climate played the second-largest role for voters in their election decision.The Christian Democratic Union of Germany’s (CDU) internal election report shows that almost one million voters switched from them to the Green Party. For the Greens, 82% of voters named the environment and climate as the most important issue for their election decision. It stands to reason that for many of those who switched their votes, the lack of climate policy competence on the part of the CDU was at the forefront of their minds.
Far from being a foreshadowing of the years to come, this situation offers an ideal opportunity for conservative politicians and movements to reflect on the principles of conservatism. Environmentalism should be an issue that conservative politicians ought to make an important part of their election platforms if they want to win. It is not the case that this is to be done for opportunistic reasons. In fact, for Roger Scruton, environmentalism represents “the quintessential conservative cause”.
Fundamental to this view is the conservative attitude toward society best captured by Edmund Burke, who speaks of society as a social contract, but ‘not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ The preservation (and amelioration) of nature and the Countryside is considered a duty for those who are aware that they have received everything from previous generations and must conserve it for future generations. As the great American poet and farmer Wendell Berry puts it: “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.’
This awareness gives rise to a natural preference for the local over the distant. Which manifests itself best in Roger Scruton’s notion of oikophilia: ‘[T]he love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.’ American legal scholar Robert P. George aptly summarized this position when he stated “that one naturally and rightly has a special love for, and duties toward, members of one’s family, tradition of faith, local community and region, and fellow citizens.”
This love for the familial and social environment, traditions and nature is naturally linked to a sense of identity. We recognize the need for a “We” that cherishes traditions and evokes a sense of home, a place that is “Ours”. This notion of oikophilia is thereby something that is animated only because we are located in such a place. There exists a deep connection with environmentalism, since this notion has a great impact on the way we treat the environment. It is simply a fact that man tries to protect what belongs to him more than what is not his own. Now, with the environment, man receives a communal inheritance from which responsibility for the inheritance arises.
Accordingly, it is also a profoundly intergenerational view, consistent with the Burkean social contract, for thus one is not master of the land but a tenant who is but one person in a long line of tenants who are all equally entitled to receive that inheritance. One might object that this means that you may not change anything about the environment or use its natural resources, but therein I would say with Theodore Roosevelt, ‘I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.’
With all that said, it does seem that a brief consideration of policy implications is needed. From the view of conservative environmentalism that has been presented, there are attitudes that conservatives should have toward economic and technological policies and practices.
It seems that conservatives in this case must be completely opposed to an unregulated free market, not conservative in the first place, and regulations regarding the extraction of natural resources should be supported. In this, again, it may be said with Roosevelt, “I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few, and here again is another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude.” (1910 speech on “New Nationalism) What seems obvious to me is that a rethinking of ecological issues should also include a rethinking of economic issues.
Conservatives should also stand up for domestic producers, discouraging them from taking production overseas, and oppose the globalization of industries, if possible. Restricting the import of certain products might also be worth considering, instead supporting local farmers and passing laws that encourage people to buy locally, which saves a lot of shipment mileage, automatically helping the environment and strengthening the local economy.
It also seems as if many conservative movements ought to change their language on the subject of environmental protection. Often excessive opposition within conservative circles creates the feeling that you can’t be conservative if you are pro-environment or you feel that you have to deny climate change to be conservative, which is wrong. It is necessary to emphasize more often that environmental protection is not only about climate change, but also about the degradation of natural resources and the preservation of the beauty of our home.
However, the most important thing remains something that politics cannot do and must come from the citizens themselves: Taking personal responsibility, which comes from rational self-interest that encourages the people to look after the environment themselves. The key for this is for people to realize that we are inheritors of this world and like a good farmer we have to cultivate this land and pass it on better to our inheritors.
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Right Place, Right Time, Wrong Movement
During an interview for the H. L. Mencken Club, writer Derek Turner described political correctness as a ‘clown with a knife’, combining more petty nanny state tendencies with a more totalitarian aim, thereby allowing it to gain considerable headway as no-one takes it seriously enough. In a previous article, the present author linked such a notion to the coverup of grooming gangs across Britain, with it being one of the most obvious epitomes of such an idea, especially for all the lives ruined because of the fears of violating that ‘principle’ being too strong to want to take action.
The other notion that was linked was that of Islamic terrorism, whereby any serious attempts to talk about it (much less respond to it in an orderly way) is hindered by violating political correctness – with both it and Islamic extremism being allowed to gain much headway in turn. Instead, the establishment falls back onto two familiar responses. At best, they treat any such event with copious amounts of sentimentality, promising that such acts won’t divide the country and we are all united in whatever communitarian spirit is convenient to the storyline.
At worst, they aren’t discussed at all, becoming memory-holed in order to not upset the current state of play. Neither attitude does much good, especially in the former’s case as it can lead, as Theodore Dalrymple noted, to being the ‘forerunner and accomplice of brutality whenever the policies suggested by it have been put into place’. The various ineffective crackdowns on civil liberties following these attacks can attest to that.
However, while there is no serious current political challenge to radical Islam, there was for a time a serious enough alternative movement that was, and despite it not being completely mainstream, certainly left its mark.
That was Britain’s Counter-Jihad movement, a political force that definitely lived up to the name for those who could remember it. Being a loud and noisy affair, it protested (up and down the country) everything contingent with Islamism, from terrorism to grooming gangs. It combined working-class energy with militant secularism, with its supposed influences ranging as far as Winston Churchill to Christopher Hitchens. It was often reactionary in many of its viewpoints but with appeals to left-wing cultural hegemony. It was as likely to attack Islam for its undermining of women’s and LGBT rights as for its demographic ramifications through mass immigration.
While hard to imagine now, it was the real deal, with many of its faces and names becoming countercultural icons among the British right. Tommy Robinson, Anne Marie Waters, Paul Weston, Pat Condell, Jonaya English, as well as many others fitted this moniker to varying degrees of success. It had its more respectable intellectual faces like Douglas Murray and Maajid Nawaz, while even entertaining mainstream politics on occasion, most notably with Nigel Farage and UKIP (especially under the leadership of Gerard Batten) flirting with it from time to time.
While being a constant minor mainstay in British politics for the early part of the 21st century, it was in 2017 when it reached its zenith. The numerous and culminating Islamic terrorist attacks that year, from Westminster Bridge to Manchester Arena to the London Borough Market as well as the failed Parsons Green Tube bombing had (cynically or otherwise) left the movement feeling horribly vindicated in many of its concerns. Angst among the public was high and palpable, to the point that even the BBC pondered as to whether 2017 had been ‘the worst year for UK terrorism’. Douglas Murray released his magnum opus in The Strange Death of Europe, of which became an instant best-seller and critical darling, all the while being a blunt and honest examination of many issues including that of radical Islam within Britain and much of the continent itself – something that would have previously been dismissed as mere reactionary commentary. And at the end of the year, the anti-Islam populist party For Britain begun in earnest, with its founder and leader in Anne Marie Waters promising to use it as a voice for those in Britain who ‘consider Islam to be of existential significance’.
In short, the energy was there, the timing was (unfortunately) right and the platforms were finally available to take such a concern to the mainstream. To paraphrase the Radiohead song, everything (seemed to be) in its right place.
Despite this, it would ironically never actually get better for the movement, with its steep decline and fall coming slowly but surely afterwards. This was most symbolically displayed in mid-2022 when For Britain folded, with Waters citing both far-left harassment and a lack of financial support due to the ongoing cost-of-living crisis in her decision to discontinue. This came shortly after its candidate Frankie Rufolo quite literally jumped for joy after coming last in the Tiverton and Honiton by-election, the last the party would contest. All the movement is now is a textbook case of how quickly fortunes can change.
What was once a sizeable movement within British politics is now just as much a relic of 2017 as the last hurrah of BGMedia, the several jokes about Tom Cruise’s abysmal iteration of The Mummy (half-finished trailer and film alike) and the several viral Arsenal Fan TV videos that have aged poorly for… obvious reasons. Those in its grassroots are now alienated and isolated once more, and are presumably resorting to sucking a lemon. Why its complete demise happened is debatable, but some factors are more obvious than others.
The most common explanation is one the right in general has blamed for all their woes in recent years – what Richard Spencer dubbed ‘The Great Shuttening’. This conceit contended that reactionary forces would eventually become so powerful in the political arena that the establishment would do all it could to restrict its potential reach for the future. This was an idea that played out following the populist victories of Brexit and Trump, largely (and ironically) because of the convenient seppuku that the alt-right gave to the establishment following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, leading to much in the way of censorship (on social media especially) with that event and the death left in its wake being the pretext.
Needless to say, it wasn’t simply Spencer and his ilk that were affected, confined to either Bitchute or obscure websites in sharp contrast from their early 2010s heyday. Counter-jihad was another casualty in the matter, with many of its orgs and figureheads being banned on social media and online payment services, limiting the potential growth that they would have had in 2017 and beyond. In turn, the only access they now had to the mainstream was the various hit pieces conducted on them, which unsurprisingly didn’t endear many to these types of characters and groups.
But if they couldn’t gain grassroots support (on social media or off it), it might be for another obvious reason for the collapse: the movement itself was not an organically developed one, of which made its downfall somewhat inevitable. This is because much of the movement’s main cheerleaders and backers were that of the conservative elite (or Conservatism Inc., for pejorative purposes), on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than the public at large. For Tommy Robinson in particular, the movement’s unofficial figurehead for the longest time, this was most apparent.
On the British end, it was a matter of promoting Robinson in differing ways. At best, they tactfully agreed with him even if disagreeing with his behaviour and antics more broadly, and at worst, they promoted him as someone who wasn’t as bad as much of the press claimed he was. That he had friendly interviews in the Spectator, puff pieces written for him in the Times, all the while having shows from This Morning and The Pledge allowing right-wing commentators to claim that he was highlighting supposed legitimate contentions of the masses demonstrated much of this promotion.
American conservative support came through similar promotion. This mostly came during his various court cases in 2018 and 2019, whereby many major networks framed him as a victim of a kangaroo court and a political prisoner (all the while failing to understand basic British contempt of court laws as they did so under ‘muh freedom’ rhetoric). However, most of the important American support was financial. This often came directly from neoconservative think tanks, mainly the Middle East Forum which gave Robinson much financial support, as did similar organisations. To what end is unknown, but given the war-hawk views of some involved (including MEF head Daniel Pipes), it is reasonable to assume something sinister was going on with that kind of help.
This in turn compounded another central reason as to the movement’s collapse: the genuine lack of authenticity in it as a whole. This is because the movement’s pandering to secularism and left-wing thought as expressed earlier are acceptable within mainstream political discourse. This sharp contrast between the inherently left-wing Robinson and Waters and their ideologically reactionary base made the movement unstable from the get-go. Much of it was a liberal movement designed to attack Islam as undermining the West as defined by the cultural revolution of the 1960s, not a reactionary one attacking that revolution as a whole as well much to the chagrin of its supporters.
Counter-jihad was therefore just simply a more radical version of the acceptable establishment attack on Islamism. As Paul Gottfried wrote in a recent Chronicles column, ‘Those who loudly protest that Muslims oppose feminism and discriminate against homosexuals are by no means conservative. They are simply more consistent in their progressive views than those on the woke left who treat Islamic patriarchy indulgently’. It is for this reason that the mainstream right were far kinder to counter-jihad and Robinson in the early 2010s than the likes of actual right-wingers like Nigel Farage and the Bow Group under its current leadership.
It is no surprise then that a movement with such inauthentic leadership and contradictory ideology would collapse once such issues became too big to ignore, with Robinson himself being the main fall guy for the movement’s fate. With questions being asked about his background becoming too numerous, the consistent begging for donations becoming increasingly suspect and people eventually getting fed up of the pantomime he had set up of self-inflicted arrests and scandals, his time in the spotlight came to a swift end. His former supporters abandoned him in droves, all the while his performance in the 2019 European Elections was equally dismal, where he came in below the often-mocked Change UK in the North West region, to audible laughter. Following his surprise return to X, formerly Twitter, and his antics during Remembrance Day, scepticism regarding his motives, especially amongst people who would otherwise support him, has only increased.
Now this article isn’t designed to attack British Counter-Jihad as a movement entirely. What it is meant for is to highlight the successes and failings of the movement for better attempts in the future. For one example, as other have discussed elsewhere, when noting the failings of the 2010s right, having good leadership with a strong mass movement and sound financial backing is key.
Those that can get this right have been successful in recent years. The Brexit campaign was able to do this through having moderate and popular characters like Nigel Farage, eccentric Tories and prominent left-wingers like George Galloway be its face, all the while having funding from millionaires like Arron Banks and Tim Martin, who could keep their noses mostly clean. The MAGA movement stateside is a similar venture, with faces like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson being its faces, with Peter Thiel as its (mostly) clean billionaire financier.
The British Counter-Jihad movement had none of that. Its leadership were often questionable rabble rousers, which while having some sympathy among the working class, often terrified much of the middle England vote and support needed to get anywhere. Its grassroots were often of a similar ilk, all the while being very ideologically out of step with its leadership and lacking necessary restraint, allowing for easy demonisation amongst a sneering, classist establishment. The funny money from neocon donors clearly made it a movement whose ulterior motives were troublesome to say the least.
Hence why counter-jihad collapsed, and its main figurehead’s only use now is living rent free in the minds of the progressive left and cynical politicians (and even cringeworthy pop stars), acting as a necessary bogeyman for the regime to keep their base ever so weary of such politics reappearing in the future.
However, this overall isn’t a good thing for Britain, as it needs some kind of movement to act as a necessary buffer against such forces in the future. As Robinson admitted in his book Enemy of the State, the problems he ‘highlighted… haven’t gone away. They aren’t going away.’ That was written all the way back in 2015 – needless to say, the situation has become much worse since then. From violent attacks, like the killing of Sir David Amess, to the failed bombing of Liverpool Women’s Hospital to the attempted assassination on Sir Salman Rushdie, to intimidation campaigns against Batley school teachers, autistic school children accidentally scuffing the Quran and the film The Lady of Heaven, such problems instead of going away have come back roaring with a vengeance.
In turn, in the same way that the grooming gangs issue cannot simply be tackled by occasional government rhetoric, tweets of support by the likes of actress Samantha Morton and GB News specials alone, radical Islam isn’t going to be dealt with by rabble rouser organisations and suspicious overseas money single-handedly. Moves like Michael Gove firing government workers involved with the Lady of Heaven protests are welcome, but don’t go anywhere near far enough.
Without a grassroots org or a more ‘respectable’ group acting as a necessary buffer against such forces, the only alternative is to have the liberal elite control the narrative. At best, they’ll continue downplaying it at every turn, joking about ‘Muslamic Ray Guns’ and making far-left activists who disrupt peaceful protests against Islamist terror attacks into icons.
As for the political establishment, they remain committed to what Douglas Murray describes as ‘Rowleyism’, playing out a false equivalence between Islamism and the far-right in terms of the threat they pose. As such, regime propagandists continue to portray the far-right as the villains in every popular show, from No Offence to Trigger Point. Erstwhile, the Prevent program will be given license to overly focus on the far-right as opposed to Islamism, despite the findings of the Shawcross Review.
In conclusion, British Counter-Jihad was simply a case of right place, right time but wrong movement. What it doesn’t mean is that its pretences should be relegated or confined to certain corners, given what an existential threat radical Islam poses, and as Arnold Toynbee noted, any society that doesn’t solve the crises of the age is one that quickly becomes in peril. British Counter-Jihad was the wrong movement for that. It’s time to build something new, and hopefully something better will take its place.
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Against assisted dying
It is unsurprising the government is rushing through ‘assisted dying’. Having decimated what little political capital it possessed after a hollow election victory, Labour is clearly desperate to shore up as many achievements as quickly as possible; successes which can be fashioned into something resembling a coherent and tangible legacy at a later date, showing little-to-no regard for the common good.
What is surprising is how limp-wristed and tepid the opposition to this policy has been, especially from Britain’s commentariat. In no uncertain terms, the assisted dying bill is one of the most radical proposals for social liberalisation in decades, yet our opinion-having class has alarmingly little to say, at least when compared to other matters. Those eager to broadcast their intelligence on other issues – which they’re similarly unqualified to write about (that’s not a bad thing, by the way; far from it!) – are inexplicably scared to take a crack at this offputtingly complex but highly important matter which affects us all.
What little discussion has occurred in the commentariat (never mind Parliament) has revolved around the foreseeable practical issues of such a policy, typically pointing to the results of Canada’s assisted dying policy (MAID; Medical Assistance in Dying), the initial proponents of which say is being abused. As such, opponents of assisted dying in Britain essentially oppose it on the basis of negative and unintended consequences, specifically the gradual loosening of safeguards overtime, killing people who should’ve received non-lethal forms of care.
None of this is wrong per se, although it’s hard to treat this angle as anything other than unsatisfying. It does not bode well for a civilisation that its only barricade against its destruction is the ineptitude of the barbarians.
More than a total lack of faith in anything improving at all, it suggests that we are caught between our reluctance to end life yet struggle to justify such an instinct; we retain the form of a society which professes something like the sanctity of life, but lack any of the substantial belief, frightened to unlearn that which can’t so easily be relearnt once lost to history as another primitive superstition.
It’s difficult to be truly hard-line on something like assisted dying because it elicits so much sympathy. No right-minded person wants people to suffer, never mind be made to feel that they are forcing people to suffer. After all, humans are motivated by aversion to pain more than most things. However, advocates of assisted dying use this fact to strongarm more hesitant individuals into agreeing with assisted dying in principle, disagreeing solely on the technicalities of implementation.
More often than not, support for assisted dying is couched in the idea that if you’re in ‘unbearable’ pain, you might as well be given the choice to end your life, especially if you’re going to die in six months anyway. Putting aside the remarkable precision of such a prediction, it never occurs to advocates that if you’re going to die in six months anyway, you might as well tough it out, if not for the sake of yourself or your loved ones, then for the sake of ensuring that society-at-large doesn’t suffer the wrath of short-sighted policy.
Of course, this is assuming unbearable pain is the main reason for assisted dying, contrary to plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.
According to data from places where it’s already legal, the main reasons for assisted dying are the inability to fulfil day-to-day tasks and engage in ‘meaningful activities’. Even abstract notions like autonomy and dignity are cited as more important than pain. Even fear about being a burden on one’s family is reportedly just as common.
A real shame, that’s for sure. There are few greater exertions of autonomy than refusing to die for someone else’s benefit, and there is nothing more ‘undignified’ than having so little sense of self-worth that you sacrifice yourself for others in your most intimate and personal moment. If we can’t reserve ourselves for our own death, it’s no surprise that things like sex and marriage continue to lose any sense of exclusivity.
Concepts like ‘anarcho-tyranny‘ and ‘two-tier policing’ are typically used in discussions surrounding criminal justice, but the underlying logic surely applies to a system which releases unrepentant, serially violent criminals as it provides the sick and vulnerable – many of whom needlessly swell with guilt over their condition – with the option to end their own life. This sense of guilt will only become stronger when someone in a position of medical authority – in a culture which reveres expertise, even when it fails us – tells them they can make it go away. That which is legally a ‘right to die’ will feel like the duty to die, and by extension, those expected to sign-off on the procedure will feel as though they have a duty to kill.
Far from acting as a safeguard, medical professionals will act as affirmers to something which they’ve been told is not theirs to dictate in the first place. When the option is available, like the patient, the fact something can be done will weigh down upon them, and whilst they may be motivated by a desire to alleviate or prevent suffering, those once hesitant are now incentivised to act with urgency.
Indeed, the same can be said of the patient’s family, the consultation of which is notably absent from the bill’s supposedly stringent requirements, although they’ll certainly weigh on the patient’s conscience. If patients don’t feel burdensome to their loved ones, they’ll absolutely feel burdensome to the NHS, an institution our country continues to revere with mindless zealotry.
Courtesy of the selfish (but outwardly generous) nature of our present culture, the patient’s expectation of good care risks being outweighed by the ’empathy’ we demand them to have for others in a different position. Assisted dying is not yet legal and yet many already feel (perhaps not without reason) that the elderly are spitefully overstaying their welcome on this mortal coil.
Advocates of assisted dying (similar to advocates of abortion) like to believe that leaving something up to choice absolves the decisions made of any and all comparable virtue. Far from removing an ideological imposition on society, this notion that we have no choice but to leave everything up to choice, that all options must be on the table, is one of the most duplicitous and tyrannical value systems afflicting contemporary society; so much that life itself is ceasing to be the default, becoming just another option for which one is cruelly judged behind a veil of strained, artificial tolerance.
Extending the comparison, liberalising assisted dying doesn’t just implicate those who’ll be inevitably and unjustifiably killed in the name of healthcare, it devalues death outside of the circumstances in which assisted dying would be viewed as an option. When abortionists downplay (or functionally deny) the value of the child, they’re implicating any baby which (for whatever reason) doesn’t make it. A procedure once permitted for the sake of saving the mother’s life, balanced against the life of the child, is now a simple matter of preference, exalted as a form of empowerment.
Followed to its conclusion, an involuntary miscarriage, rightfully treated as a tragic incident deserving sympathy, can only be regarded, in all sincerity, as ‘tragic’ as receiving a bad hand in a game of Blackjack. Of course, insincerity is the essence of civility, and therefore integral to any tactful interaction, but this is not the same as having a genuine moral compass. The tragedy lies in the fact we know something deeply valuable has been lost. We say “I’m sorry for your loss” not “better luck next time” for a reason. As such, unless you intend to engage in mental gymnastics to suggest “terminating” highly viable babies past the legal limit is worlds apart to killing newborns, the recent movements for decriminalisation should be concerning, even if wholly in-step with our opponents’ revealed attitude towards the unborn.
In a similar vein, if assisted dying should be liberalised to alleviate suffering on the basis that our life is ours to use as we see fit, then suicide becomes just another expression of individual choice which needs to be destigmatised. After all, why should we need to suffer? Why would such a precondition exist if life didn’t have an inherent value, and if life has an inherent value, how could we justify a policy like assisted dying in the first place? Because the suffering outweighs that inherent value? How would you know when suffering outweighs this value? After all, suffering is extremely subjective. You can make this assessment for your own quality of life, but not for another person’s. Confronted with the potential suicide of another person, there’s not a lot you could do. You needn’t assist the act or condone it, but you’d be a hypocrite for showing or feeling anything more than defeated indifference. After all, who are you to judge? Again, it’s not your life. In order to override them, you’d need to believe life has a value beyond quantification, which it certainly does.
If one’s suffering is one’s business, then it becomes one’s business to deal with it, using their preferred option of the many made available. Although plausibly convenient, it makes life less rich, for what good are the virtues of mercy, assurance, and even heroism itself? More than rendered obsolete by consent-based ethics, they are contorted into acts of undue, arbitrary interference.
Life is worth suffering, not merely because of what can be done between our birth and death but due to its facticity; it is given, not chosen. Nobody derives meaning from the things they consciously choose; at least, not for long. There will always be the sense that relying on such things feels constructed, inviting us to seek something more essential. We don’t choose our nationality, our sexuality, our name, our family, and so forth, and so the importance of these things is heightened in an era with an abundance of choice.
The present political landscape serves as testament to this fact, not solely in the form of progressive-left identity politics. Regardless of how his economic prospects ebbed and flowed, the Englishman could rely on having won the lottery of life. He was born into a community with just cause and proficient capability to take his welfare seriously, as well as provide him with a sense of rootedness in an otherwise changing world. He had a cultural heritage which suggested he was part of something greater than himself; any belief in his abilities was well-founded and any shortcoming would surely be redeemed by the successes of his kin. Confronted with large scale demographic change from immigration, he feels himself in revolt against a class which has not yet taken everything from him, but is in the process of trying to destroy his few but cherished saving graces.
Even things which aren’t pleasurable, such as personal tragedies, supply us with a greater and much needed confrontation with the involuntary nature of our existence than even the most high-brow, profound, and enriching pastimes.
It is often said that the value of life lies in its depth, not its length; in other terms, life is about having a good time, not a long time, and whilst there’s certainly truth in this idea, it detracts from the distressing fact that we have time at all; a fact we tend to avoid truly thinking about until we’re out of it. Indeed, I suspect many have thought about how they’d spend their last day on Earth before resuming their lives as if their mortality was part of the hypothetical. The fact death takes us without our prior consent frightens us; it goes against what we regard as the basis for permissibility, so we’re inclined to ignore it.
The simple fact of the matter is that assisted dying is never abused; it merely comes to better embody the spirit in which it was introduced. The process misconstrued as the ‘slippery slope’ is nothing more than a superficially innocent argument being carried to its garish but logical conclusion. The ever-ambiguous safeguards aren’t meant to shield against improper uses of the system, merely to shield against uses which haven’t achieved mainstream acceptance, and could be used as a justification to prevent (or outright reverse) its full implementation. Things called insane right-wing conspiracy theories today will be referred to as inevitable and necessary progress tomorrow.
So, let’s cut to the chase. Instead of obsessing over regulations which will be altered or subverted, let’s be very frank about our fundamental and irreconcilable differences, and eagerly embrace the intellectually demanding and morally sensitive nature of this matter.
Those in support can make their case for life’s essential hollowness, and that our time on Earth is nothing more than taking the path of least resistance to the grave, filling our time with surrogate activities until it becomes too much, at which point we hop-off the existential ride. As for those opposed, we must more staunchly make the case for death as it comes for us, as it does. Just as we can gain value from being born here rather than there, from being this rather than that, the same must be said of our death. We do not view life as an empty vacuum to be filled with things that matter. The fact we do what we do, in the knowledge that our time is finite, makes what we do meaningful. Life gives meaning to our activities, not the other way around.
The advocates of assisted dying are right about one thing. We don’t get to choose what we do with our life, but it is because of this fact that our death remains our own. Therefore, the only way to ensure our death remains truly ours, something indivisibly belonging to us as individuals, free of aggregated social pressures and bouts of false consciousness, immune to last-minute bargaining and uncontaminated by ambiguity over cause-and-effect – altogether free from the risk of coercion – is to prevent it from being turned into a choice in the first place.
