Saturday Commentary and Review #101

Apocalypse Germany, Canada's "Assisted Suicide" Boom, The 60s' Cult of the Individual and its Current Impact, Secularist Extremists MAD ONLINE, Gloria Steinem: CIA Asset

Lord Ismay

Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay was NATO’s first Secretary General, a position he was initially reluctant to accept. By the end of his tenure however, Ismay had become the biggest advocate of the organisation he had famously said earlier on in his political career, was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

This may sound like a fanciful quote, like something that was made up to drive a point home, only to be later accepted as if it was actually spoken.

The fact of the matter is that Lord Ismay did indeed say this famous line, and his quote is enshrined on NATO’s website. Click this link right here to see it for yourself.

Lord Ismay’s synopsis of NATO’s purpose comes to mind with respect to the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, where the organization is not an official party to the conflict, but is an active participant via its support of Kiev. The Russians are being kept out (especially their oil and gas) and are in fact being pushed further towards Asia, in a repeat of Guderian and von Manstein.

The Germans are being kept down, as they have been bullied into joining a sanctions regime against Russia that starves them of the oxygen needed for their massive export sector: cheap and reliable Russian oil and gas. Thanks to Merkel’s wanton erosion of her party’s standing during the COVID era, the room was opened up for the suicidal Greens to enter government, happily shut down Nordstream 2, agitate for conflict with Russia, continue the phase out of nuclear energy in Germany, and destroy the country’s economy. A 12 year old could have predicted what would happen to Germany, and it is now happening.

For several decades, Germany was able to build strong domestic cohesion, a solid social welfare system, and limited income inequality on the back of a strong manufacturing sector and competitive exports. This kept unemployment low, wages stable, and politics bland. Their high quality of life often came at the expense of poorer members of the eurozone, but few Germans could argue with the result: the world’s fourth-largest economy and one of its most steady and apparently sane political societies.

But the last two years, and the last seven months in particular, have revealed this model to be something of a Ponzi scheme. The entire German system, it turns out, depended on a never-ending supply of cheap Russian gas, immaculate just-in-time Chinese supply chains, and ever-expanding foreign markets. No other country bet more on the end of history, and we all know how that turned out.

Neither Russia nor China are a threat to Germany, in fact they are solid trading partners. This does not make the USA happy, because not only do they view both of these countries as competitors, but especially because it makes Germany too powerful, and that violates Lord Ismay’s NATO dictum. Something had to be done.

Until the end of September, there had been widespread speculation that Chancellor Olaf Scholz was willing to trade sanctions relief in exchange for a revival of the halted Nord Stream gas pipelines. Now that the pipelines have exploded, the loss of the cheap energy that underpinned modern Germany is all but irreversible.

An amazing coincidence!

An export sector (and economy) on the brink:

Because Germany depends so disproportionately on foreign markets, remains ideologically committed to large savings surpluses, and suppresses wages to keep exports competitive, Germans themselves cannot consume enough of what they make—while German workers make things that are especially vulnerable to inflationary pressures. Baseline inflation forecasts for Germany are now in double-digit territory. Steel, fertilizer, chemical, and toilet paper plants are shutting down or on the brink of closure, and German automakers are threatening to shift more production to places like South Carolina and Alabama. The anger and frustration of a large number of increasingly nationalist voters—the worst fear of the German establishment, for obvious reasons—has benefited the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which now polls as the most popular political party in all five states of the former East Germany.

There is a real danger of de-industrialization. Even the Belgian Prime Minister agrees with this assessment:

Europe risks a huge reduction in industrial activity and social unrest if it does not act quickly to bring down energy prices as winter approaches, Belgium’s prime minister has said.

Without an intervention on gas markets “we are risking a massive deindustrialisation of the European continent and the long-term consequences of that might actually be very deep”, Alexander De Croo told the Financial Times.

European leaders enjoyed grandstanding when Ukraine was invaded by Russia this past February, but now the bill has come in.

Back to the previous link, Robert Habeck (German Economics Minister and Co-Chief American Stooge) finally realized how stupid he has been all along:

Economy Minister Robert Habeck meanwhile recently appeared to accuse the United States of war profiteering by putting Germany in the position of having to buy expensive U.S. liquefied natural gas exports, now that its rightful cheap Russian gas is spilling into the ocean.

What the fuck did you expect, you stupid fucking idiot? You did everything to sabotage your own country’s economy on behalf of US foreign policy objectives, and are now acting shocked that they aren’t coming to your rescue?

The failed German vision:

Angela Merkel’s plan was to recalibrate Germany’s delicate balance to accommodate—and benefit from—a rising China, a supposedly restored Russia, and an increasingly unstable United States. In her vision, while Chinese markets expanded, the EU single market would continue to serve as the primary destination for German exports while Brussels would function as a force-multiplier for German power—giving the helpful impression that Berlin was tightly bound by alliances, its ambitions properly subsumed in multilateral institutions. That plan is now kaput.

The new reality:

Instead, Germany is approaching what would be a worst-case scenario for the Western alliance: a more or less unaligned, frightened, and insecure behemoth floating in the middle of Europe. Far from the realization of some long-held dream, this kind of geopolitical independence would be more terrifying for Germans than for almost anyone else. Contemplating the simultaneous calamity of an inflationary spiral, an industrial collapse, a blackballed Russia, a recalcitrant China, an anti-German Europe, a lunatic United States, and a potential nearby nuclear attack, the last thing Germans want is to feel they must now create and secure their own destiny.

But where, exactly, are they supposed to turn? Not to the United States, whose own president has been telling anyone who will listen that America is indeed an election away from succumbing once and for all to “semi-fascism” and white supremacy, and that an “out of control” Supreme Court may soon ring down the curtain on American democracy. Even a more objective assessment than Biden can be expected to deliver still leads Germans to similar conclusions. To American complaints about Germany’s current account surpluses and austerity policies, Germans respond that America’s $5 trillion pandemic stimulus is starting to look like a policy blunder of generational proportions. To accusations of cretinous energy policy, Germans point out that the United States is currently suppressing domestic oil and gas production while making itself a supplicant of petrostates it is simultaneously sanctioning and threatening.

You have heard me say from day one of this war that Europe is a loser in this conflict due to the cowardice of its leadership. This has now become undeniable.

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I read a short story in elementary school, probably in 7th or 8th grade, and I could swear that it was an early piece from Kurt Vonnegut despite being unable to find it anywhere. I don’t know the title of the story, but it was about eugenics. In this story, a teenage boy with a higher than average level of intelligence receives a letter that enthuses him, but horrifies his parents: he is invited to go to a theme park because of his excellent marks at school.

I might be mistaken with some of the details of this story as I read it only once (decades ago), but he ends up getting odds of 8 to 1 for his first ride: a roller coaster. The odds are of survival, and he doesn’t survive his first ride (I can’t recall what the prize would have been if he survived). If this story rings a bell with any of you, let me know in the comments, especially if you know the title and can confirm whether the author was or was not Vonnegut. (A reader has informed me that the story is called “The Carnival”, and was written by Michael Fedo, published in 1980 -ed.)

This foggy memory came back to me when I read this horrifying piece about the explosive growth of “assisted suicide” in Canada. Compassion and autonomous decision-making were how this new program was sold to Canadians, and it is being expanded. The Canadian Government is killing its own people on purpose to “alleviate suffering”, while saving money on health care costs down the line.

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S. 

In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064—accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year. 

There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died. In 2017, only 34 MAiD deaths were in the 18- to 45-year-old category. In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49. In 2019, it was 103; in 2020,118; and in 2021, 139. 

Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying—successfully—to kill themselves. 

“Assisted suicide” is now closing in on 5% of all deaths annually in several Canadian provinces:

Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent. Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the “assisted-death capital of the world,” doctors told me. 

Expansion of the program:

Why the dramatic increase? Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.” This included applicants like Margaret Marsilla’s son, Kiano.  

In 2023, those numbers are almost certain to rise. 

Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.” According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.” (The federal government does not define “mature,” nor does it specify who determines whether one is mature. On top of that, the doctrine varies from one province to another.)

Concerns:

Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MAiD when it was first conceived, said she had “tons of worries” about where this might lead. She could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die. “Some of them will mean it, some of them won’t,” she said. “And we won’t necessarily be able to discern who is who.” 

Hugh Scher, an attorney advising Margaret Marsilla, told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

Dr. Ellen Warner is an oncologist at the prominent Sunnybrook Research Institute, in Toronto, and a professor at the University of Toronto’s medical school. “My objection to MAiD, from day one, was that there was no way we would be able to avoid this slippery slope, because these aren’t black and white cases,” she said. “I’m 100 percent against MAiD. I’m an old-fashioned Hippocratic Oath kind of doctor.”

The not-real slippery slope is always real.

The argument in favour:

But Dr. Derryck Smith, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia, views the rise in MAiD deaths as progress. (Smith never took the Hippocratic Oath, he said, because he thought it was “archaic.”) “MAiD is about relieving suffering, respecting human dignity, and recognizing the inherent right for individuals to make decisions affecting their health and even their death,” Smith told me. Assisted suicide, he pointed out, had been happening for ages. “Before MAiD, patients who were going to die were assisted along the way with high doses of narcotics,” he said. “The rationale was to ‘make people comfortable.’” 

This entire issue screams out for ethicists, and I am not one. My question is: what does this say for the societies that have been built in the West? And the follow-up question: Does it indicate a lack of meaning for its citizens?

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Dignity of the individual is what is being argued up in Canada by those who wish to expand its “assisted suicide” program. This is a very liberal argument, as it rests on the basis of the individual, and his/her ability to decide for what is best for them. This sounds good on paper, and we all seek to increase our own autonomy on a daily basis. Yet we often run head first into the wall of society, and sometimes what is perceived ‘good’ for the individual may not be good for the whole.

We’ve all been bored to death hearing about “The 60s” from Boomers, and how they tried to change the world. The fact of the matter is that these attempts were REAL, and are important in understanding the USA today, and by extension, the rest of the West. The changes that began to sprout in 1960s America led to a massive liberalization of much of the rest of the USA over the course of the next decade. David Frum, a person that I do not like, actually wrote a very good book detailing the changes that took place on a wide-scale in the 70s.

What this cultural shift indicated to me was the completion of the liberalization of the USA: cultural and social liberalism began to supplant a very conservative America, and wedded itself to an economic liberalism (free market capitalism) that idiosyncratically is considered “conservative” in the US context. “You go ahead and seek personal liberation in any way you want, and we’ll keep making money.”

Leighton Woodhouse has written a great essay on how the 60s Boomers shifted away from mass politics and class struggle, towards a left-libertarianism that suited Corporate America just fine.

The main thrust of Savio’s speech — the part that did make the history books —was a wholesale rejection of the American corporate/administrative state that had been constructed to manage the United States’ postwar global economic empire. It was an impassioned assertion of the dignity and humanity of the individual against the cold automation of the modern bureaucratic society:

Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be —  have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean — Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!

Even in the crescendo of his speech, Savio reiterated his distaste for “organized labor,” which, by the 1960s, had, in the young radicals’ minds, become part of the problem. Following a massive wave of strikes in the late 1940s by workers who had served as soldiers in World War II, the big industrial unions had struck a bargain with corporate America and the federal government. The major employers in manufacturing, freight, steel, mining, the airlines, communications, meatpacking and other industries would pay union workers middle class wages and increase the wage floor every year. In exchange, the unions would guarantee them permanent labor peace. Unions abandoned their adversarial posture toward Big Business and became partners, rather than resisters, in industrial capitalism. That collaboration and complacency had earned Big Labor the suspicion of their nominal allies on the scrappy New Left.

The Baby Boomers were intent on stirring shit up:

More accurately, though, it was the mission statement of a new ruling class. The Baby Boomers had grown up in a world in which the incomprehensible devastation of World War II, which included both a campaign of genocide and the dropping of two atomic bombs, was still a recent memory. Far from ushering in world peace, the capitalist victory in that war had brought the prospect of nuclear Armageddon and the sickening, barbaric violence of the Vietnam War. And the promise of the free market to raise every person out of poverty and hasten human equality was flagrantly belied by the racist atrocities of the Jim Crow South. Modern industrial capitalism, from the young Boomers’ perspective, was a failure and a moral abomination. It had generated unprecedented wealth but only at the price of rampant injustice. In exchange for prosperity it had stifled the human spirit.

Some of this sounds both good and reasonable. But we have the privilege of hindsight to see how these radicals ended up.

The individual as central:

The New Left was the intellectual and political vanguard of this rising Professional Managerial Class. In rejecting the dehumanizing economic and social order of the industrial past and the class-based politics that came with it, the New Left championed the dignity and autonomy of the human individual over the drudgery and anonymity of the popular mass movement.

This break with the past was the fundamental spirit of the sixties, from Berkeley to Woodstock. The leaders of SDS had no love for the hippies, but the Counterculture embodied what the Port Huron Statement articulated even more radically than Hayden himself. The hippies eschewed the professionalism and political organization of SDS as vehemently as they did the conformity of the “squares.” They eventually advocated dropping out of society altogether and going “Back to the Land” on communes in the countryside. This may have appeared to them to be a radical rupture with mainstream American culture, but it was also an embrace of the most American virtues of all: self-reliance, liberty and rugged individualism.

Apart from aesthetics and their penchant for drugs and orgies, in this sense the hippies’ politics weren’t so different from those of Barry Goldwater.

The pathology that has resulted from the Cult of the Individual:

In cities on the West Coast, where left libertarianism has been an ideological pillar of local government since the sixties, one can see the cult of the individual carried to its logical extreme in activists’ proscriptions against taking even the mildest steps to restrict flagrantly anti-social behavior such as public drug use, camping on sidewalks, brazen shoplifting and open drug dealing. Any exercise of coercion, particularly through law enforcement, is derided as an act of oppression. But even non-coercive means, such as prodding a drug addict into recovery, is seen by those same activists as “stigmatization,” which is an offense to the dignity of the individual.

So invested are these activists in the sanctity of the individual that they’ve lost sight of any sense of the sanctity of the human community around them. No attention is paid to the loss of public space to homeless encampments and the open air drug market, the pervasive fear of strangers that inevitably accompanies the rise in crime, the collapse of confidence in our governing institutions, the hardening of attitudes and the erosion of social norms. Yet all of these harms unravel the social fabric of our cities. Those who can afford to do so leave altogether, while the rest of us retreat into bunker mentalities, looking upon our neighbors with cynicism and suspicion instead of trust and affection. For all of the good the New Left achieved, this, too, is part of its legacy. On the West Coast, the movement’s vilification of the institutions of government and its idolatry of the heroic figure of the virtuous individual have developed into a full-blown political pathology.

Leighton’s verdict:

Fewer excuses can be found for today’s radical activists, who have embraced nihilism as their secular religion for the sheer narcissistic gratification of it. They burn down city blocks over transparent lies. They defend drug cartels over the users who die for their gains. They cosplay as protectors of the oppressed while indulging the ideological fantasies of the elite.

A half-century later, this Cult of the Individual (and paradoxically, minority group rights) are now institutionalized and championed by Corporate America as well, the original enemy of Mario Savio and his fellow Berkeley radicals.

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Sometimes you come across pieces that are so bad that you cannot help but to share them with others.

In this article, Suzanne Schneider (an outspoken liberal and secularist) demands that Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, and Muslims should remain Protestants i.e. liberals for whom “faith, not works” is important, so that religion is a ‘private matter’, and that it should stay that way so as to not interfere with liberalism.

It’s all so “troubling”:

There is instead a deeper and more interesting shift occurring in the world toward a new post-liberal or illiberal order of religion and politics. Understanding the nature of this transformation enables critics to break out of the cycle of allegations of hypocrisy or inconsistency, and to grasp an emergent worldview that is both coherent and deeply troubling.

In order to apprehend what is new in the post-liberal order, we have to first understand how liberalism as a philosophical and political project developed its distinct notions about the proper relationship between religion and the public sphere. Building on Martin Luther’s theological revolution, liberal thinkers from John Locke to John Stuart Mill embraced the Protestant ideal of religion as chiefly concerned with faith, not works. As Luther argued in one of his most influential essays, ‘On the Freedom of a Christian’ (1520):

God cannot be received and honoured by any works, but by faith alone. Hence it is clear that, as the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone and not by any works. For if it could be justified by any other means, it would have no need of the word, nor consequently of faith.

The degradation of ‘works’ chiefly meant Catholic sacraments – and the corrupt clerics who officiated them – but it also advanced a thesis that later became the cornerstone of secularism: that true religion was private, faith-based, and thus necessarily individualist in nature. Faith alone could save, and faith resided in the realm of conscience, thus liberating Christians from the Church’s clerics and communal structures.

As Luther clarified in his treatise ‘On Governmental Authority’ (1523), the separation of faith from works found a corollary in the division of affairs between spiritual and temporal leaders.

Pleasae note “proper” and “true religion” as “private, faith-based, and thus necessarily individualist in nature”.

In short: your beliefs are silly, so stay out of our way as we rule over you.

Viktor Orban as a ‘bad man’:

Hungary offers a prime example of how the new political order rejects many liberal conceptions about the nature and purpose of religion. Since being re-elected to power as Hungary’s prime minister in 2010, Orbán has repeatedly invoked Christianity in public statements and political gestures.

……..

Orbán styles himself as a modern St Stephen, a defender of Christian traditionalism against its avowed enemies. For Orbán, these include LGBTQ people, Muslims and ‘globalists’. His frequent attacks on George Soros betray deep antisemitism, despite his chummy relations with the Israeli Right (as I’ve argued previously, there is nothing inconsistent with being an antisemite and Zionist; a Jewish nation-state offers one way of ridding countries of their actual Jews). Orbán also speaks with passion about battling Christian persecution worldwide, including within the heart of Europe. At an International Conference on the Persecution of Christians in 2019, he linked the struggles of Christian communities in Africa and Asia to assorted ‘anti-Christian phenomena’ in Europe. He claimed that ‘an organised and wide-ranging attack’ was underway on ‘our culture, our civilisation’, not only in Africa or the Middle East, ‘but also here in Europe – in the land of the most successful Christian civilisation in history.’ According to Orbán, the means of attack vary, but include ‘population exchange, immigration, stigmatisation, ridicule, the muzzle of political correctness’.

Helping persecuted Christians is a sign of “illiberalism” in Schneider’s eyes, I guess. It’s supposed to be a private thing, not political at all.

Israel is a baddie too:

The most obvious contemporary rendering of religious belonging in ethnic terms is Zionism. As a modern nationalist movement, Zionism articulated a vision of political and social identity freed from the constraints of ritual observance and structures of religious authority. According to its late-19th- and early 20th-century ideologues, creating a homeland in ‘Eretz Yisrael’ (the land of Israel) would enable Jews to maintain a communal identity regardless of religious observance. As I have charted elsewhere, this project involved rejecting liberalism’s normative boundary between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ affairs.

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In adopting this determinism, Christian nationalists have moved away from liberal notions of religion as tied to individual conscience, and thus choice more broadly. In place of choice, they offer a new communalism that subsumes individuals based on the fact of birth. It is this elevation not of the natural but the natal – the inborn, supposedly fixed nature of identity – that binds the new nationalism together, and that helps clarify the authoritarian quality of all post-liberal movements that are mostly willing to dispense with individual freedom. There is nothing ‘natural’ about individual rights, the conservative Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko told The New York Times in 2021, ‘no such thing as a rights-bearing individual.’ Legutko’s bleak assessment underscores just how much of the assault on individual liberty is conjoined with the right’s fixation on what is ‘natural’.

The preeminent role of natal status in the new Right-wing nationalism, combined with the disparagement of individual choice more broadly, is important for another reason too. It helps explain the obsession, bordering on pathological, that national conservatives display regarding LGBTQ equality, and trans people in particular. What could be more opposed to the Right’s vision of identity as innate and fixed than the trans subject, whose very existence reflects a sort of individual self-fashioning par excellence? What could be more contrary to the claims of liberalism – and yet more resonant with the actual experiences of so many born into the hollow shell of bootstrapping ideology – than the insistence that you are, and will remain, what you were born, that all those paeons to personal choice are insubstantial nonsense?

“You can have your stupid belief in a Sky God, but it must not interfere with liberalism.”

This woman is blinded by her own prejudices, and is a more devout believer in her faith than many of the people that she derides. In her world, faith should be little more than a personal accesory like this:

…..devoid of principle, substance, and meaning.

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We end this weekend’s Substack with a peek into the history of noted feminist Gloria Steinem, and her collaboration with the CIA.

*IRS is not to be confused with the Internal Revenue Service, but was instead the Independent Research Service, a CIA-funded group in which Steinem served as president.

Click here to read the rest.

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