In Trying to Protect the Dignity of the Dying, France Sacrifices Her Own Dignity

Earlier this month, a bill came before the French parliament that would legalize euthanasia. The novelist and essayist Michel Houellebecq considers its implications:

Catholics will do their best to resist, but, sad to say, we have more or less gotten used to the idea that the Catholics always lose. [Devout] Muslims and Jews . . . think exactly the same as Catholics; the media are generally in strong agreement about hiding this fact. I do not have a lot of illusions; these faiths will end up by giving way and submitting to the yoke of “republican law.”

There remain only the doctors, in whom I had placed little hope, doubtless because I am not very familiar with them; but it is undeniable that some of them resist and refuse to kill their patients and that they will remain perhaps the last barrier to euthanasia. I do not know where they get this courage; maybe it is only respect for the Hippocratic oath: “Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.” It is possible. The public uttering of this oath must have been a significant moment in their lives. In any case their struggle is an admirable one, even if it is a struggle “for honor.”

The honor of a civilization is not exactly nothing. But really something else is at stake, from the anthropological point of view. It is a question of life and death. And on this point I am going to have to be very explicit: when a country—a society, a civilization—gets to the point of legalizing euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else—another country, another society, another civilization—might have a chance to arise.

Read more at UnHerd

More about: Euthanasia, France, Medicine

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF