Dystopia is at the Bottom of The Slippery Slope
This post is not on one of our usual topics, but still goes to the heart of why our website Dark Emu Exposed was started.
When we first came across Bruce Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu, we read it as adults and were fascinated by its tale. This fascination soon turned to incredulity, then contempt, as we realised most of the claims by Pascoe were ‘just made up.’
As adults we had the experience and critical thinking skills to be able to throw the book to the side, knowing it was just rubbish. Nevertheless, on reflection, although we only gave Pascoe’s book 1-star for quality, we did give it 5-stars for inciting its readership to revisit the fascinating Aboriginal and Colonial history of our nation.
However, some time later, when we became aware that a book, Young Dark Emu - A truer history, was being introduced to our schools, the penny dropped. The whole aim of the Dark Emu hoax became apparent. It was to indoctrinate our children with the fantasy that pre-colonial Aboriginal societies were agricultural, where the people were ‘farmers, built dams, sewed clothes and lived in settled villages.’
This hoax was part of the ideological vanguard to convince Australians that the British illegally, and contrary to the international laws of the seventeenth century, ‘stole’ the land of New South Wales, without signing a treaty with the hundreds of Aboriginal tribes that were present at that time.
Now, as adults we can have those debates and arguments. But it seems that today our children’s primary and teenage years are seen as a new, unconquered territory, or even a ‘market’, for adults to wage their ideological campaigns. Our children’s years are no longer seen as something special, sacred and off limits to adult manipulation. It is as if some adults see the teenage years in particular as a source of ‘fresh, blanks minds’ to be colonised in the name of a particular, adult ideology. Stretching one’s imagination, perhaps teenagers are a bit like black Africans of centuries ago - coveted by the slavers who took them from ‘Darkest Africa’ to the ‘New World’ to feed the plantations.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. The modern world now consists of a physical world and a virtual world - an intellectual world of online memes, memes which need a constant feeding of new brains to survive and spread.
At this website we always try to look for actual evidence to support claims that people are making, whether they are historians, fake Aborigines or ourselves.
As evidence in this case, it does indeed seem to us that our children’s teenage years are being encroached upon, or even stolen, in the name of ideology. The international push to lower the voting age to 16 is probably a case in point. In our view, it is reprehensible to cut into a child’s teenage years by adding a new huge burden of having to make informed political decisions. 16 year olds just do not need that stress.
In this post we will discuss another adult ideology that is working its way down towards teenagers in some countries, an ideology that inevitably will need to be addressed in Australia at some point - state-sanctioned euthanasia of younger people. In the past, euthanasia was only viewed as being of concern to older people with a terminal illness, or close to the end of their natural lives, say for people 60 years and older.
But, despite what the idealists might say, the ‘slippery slope theory’ is always a real threat when considering the more dangerous of the ‘progressive’ ideologies.
The case below only considers a young adult, a 37 year old woman ‘Jennyfer’. However, given that the company in question markets to much younger customers as well, it is certain that the idea of the acceptability of euthanasia will also diffuse slowly into the minds of teenagers.
A summary of the case of ‘Jennyfer’ appeared in the online newsletter, Aleteia,
‘Canadian fashion giant La Maison Simons, known better simply as “Simons,” has generated controversy with an advertisement that featured a terminally ill woman who elected to end her life by physician’s assisted suicide (PAS). Now, the company has pulled the video without comment, removing it from YouTube and its website, due to a backlash.
The ad, titled “All Is Beauty,” follows a woman identified only as “Jennyfer” who suffered from an unnamed terminal illness and was euthanized in October 2022. Prior to her death, however, she worked with Simons to record the video and voice-overs to make the commercial. The footage shows what seems to be a celebration of Jennyfer’s decision, with her and her loved ones spending time on a beach, blowing bubbles, watching puppets, playing music, and sharing a meal. All the while, Jennyfer’s narration remarks on the beauty in the world and the “bravery it takes to see it,” even while seeking help to end one’s life.
A spokesperson had stated that the video was not a commercial, and to be fair it did not seem to be promoting Simons’ merchandise. Still, in its attempt to present euthanasia as something normal or “beautiful,” it can be viewed as an advertisement for Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD), a law that has allowed Canadians to seek euthanasia in cases of terminal illness.
The company also pulled an accompanying video in which former CEO Peter Simons explained and defended its contents. According to the Christian Post, Peter Simons commented:
“We wanted to do something that really underlined human connection, and perhaps would help people reconnect to each other, and to this hope and optimism that is going to be needed if we’re going to build the sort of communities and spaces that we want to live in and that are enjoyable to live in,” Simons said’. (Source)
Our readers can make up their own minds, as we have located copies of the video, which comes in two formats. Firstly, as a short 30 second commercial, and secondly, as a 3 minute, reality-documentary style.
An excellent article in the New York Times by Ross Douthat goes to the heart of what is going on here and the dangers for the morality of our modern liberal democratic society as it faces the developing alliances of Big Business and the Big State.
What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada
The New York Times, International Edition, 3 December, 2022 – by Ross Douthat
La Maison Simons, commonly known as Simons, is a prominent Canadian fashion retailer. In late October it released a three-minute film: a moody, watery, mystical tribute. Its subject was the suicide of a 37-year-old British Columbia woman, Jennyfer Hatch, who was approved for what Canadian law calls “Medical Assistance in Dying” amid suffering associated with Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a group of disorders that affect the body’s connective tissues.
In an interview quoted in Canada’s National Post, the chief merchant of Simons stated that the film was “obviously not a commercial campaign.” Instead it was a signifier of a public-spirited desire to “build the communities that we want to live in tomorrow, and leave to our children.”
For those communities and children, the video’s message is clear: They should believe in the holiness of euthanasia.
In recent years, Canada has established some of the world’s most permissive euthanasia laws, allowing adults to seek either physician-assisted suicide or direct euthanasia for many different forms of serious suffering, not just terminal disease. In 2021, over 10,000 people ended their lives this way, just over 3 percent of all deaths in Canada. A further expansion, allowing euthanasia for mental-health conditions, will go into effect in March 2023; permitting euthanasia for “mature” minors is also being considered.
In the era of populism there is a lively debate about when a democracy ceases to be liberal. But the advance of euthanasia presents a different question: What if a society remains liberal but ceases to be civilized?
The rules of civilization necessarily include gray areas. It is not barbaric for the law to acknowledge hard choices in end-of-life care, about when to withdraw life support or how aggressively to manage agonizing pain.
It is barbaric, however, to establish a bureaucratic system that offers death as a reliable treatment for suffering and enlists the healing profession in delivering this “cure.” And while there may be worse evils ahead, this isn’t a slippery slope argument: When 10,000 people are availing themselves of your euthanasia system every year, you have already entered the dystopia.
Indeed, according to a lengthy report by Maria Cheng of The Associated Press, the Canadian system shows exactly the corrosive features that critics of assisted suicide anticipated, from health care workers allegedly suggesting euthanasia to their patients to sick people seeking a quietus for reasons linked to financial stress.
In these issues you can see the dark ways euthanasia interacts with other late-modern problems — the isolation imposed by family breakdown, the spread of chronic illness and depression, the pressure on aging, low-birthrate societies to cut their health care costs.
But the evil isn’t just in these interactions; it’s there in the foundation. The idea that human rights encompass a right to self-destruction, the conceit that people in a state of terrible suffering and vulnerability are really “free” to make a choice that ends all choices, the idea that a healing profession should include death in its battery of treatments — these are inherently destructive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cruel brave new world, a dehumanizing final chapter for the liberal story.
For anyone on the right opposed to Donald Trump and the foulness around him (most recently at his Mar-a-Lago dinner table), the last six years have forced hard questions about when it makes sense to identify with conservatism, to care about its direction and survival.
One answer turns on which dystopian future you fear most. Among those NeverTrumpers who have left the right entirely, the overwhelming fear is of an authoritarian or fascist future, a right-wing threat to democracy requiring all possible resistance.
But in the Canadian experience you can see what America might look like with real right-wing power broken and a tamed conservatism offering minimal resistance to social liberalism. And the dystopian danger there seems not just more immediate than any right-authoritarian scenario, but also harder to resist — because its features are congruent with so many other trends, its path smoothed by so many powerful institutions.
Yes, there are liberals, Canadian and American, who can see what’s wrong with euthanasia. Yes, the most explicit cheerleading for quietus can still inspire backlash: Twitter reactions to the Simons video have been harsh, and it’s vanished from the company’s website.
But without a potent conservatism, the cultural balance tilts too much against these doubts. And the further de-Christianization proceeds, the stronger the impulse to go where the Simons video already went — to rationalize the new order with implicit reassurances that it’s what some higher power wants.
It’s often treated as a defense of euthanasia that the most intense objections come from biblical religion. But spiritual arguments never really disappear, and the liberal order in a dystopian twilight will still be infused by some kind of religious faith.
So I remain a conservative, unhappily but determinedly, because only conservatism seems to offer a stubborn obstacle to that dystopia — and I would rather not discover the full nature of its faith. - by Ross Douthat
