Euthenasia and Covid restrictions

I am indebted to my faithful reader Toma for this information. 

The highest German court ruled last year that euthanasia was not unconstitutional and, since then, in some provinces it has become legal, but anyone wishing to be euthanised should first present proof of vaccination or recovery from Covid, according to new guidelines issued by Germany's palliative care association.

I think it very shocking that euthanasia is being legalised. 

I also dislike the word guidelines. It came into fashion when traditional institutions became bureaucratic and run not by landowners and the church but by the kind of people who rule us now.

The Nazis, Napoleon, the Kaisers and compulsory vaccination

The decision by Austria to have another lockdown was a big surprise to me but it is, I suppose, what one should expect. Her decision to make vaccination against Covid compulsory shocked me very much, but people who say this is reminiscent of the Nazis are mistaken.

An article in The Daily Telegraph explains that the world’s first vaccine was developed against smallpox in 1798. Bavaria, which had become a kingdom the year before, was the first place to make vaccination compulsory in 1807. This, the article says, two years later led to an armed rebellion in the Northern Tyrol, then in Bavaria, now part of Austria, led by Andreas Hofer, who opposed the vaccine for religious reasons. 17,000 people died in the rebellion.

Great Britain made smallpox vaccination compulsory from 1853 till 1971 and the second German Reich did so in 1874. Then as now there were plenty of people who opposed vaccines.

The Nazis inherited the compulsory vaccination law, but fearing they might stir up resistance they did not enforce it and in 1940 they effectively made vaccination optional. Compulsory vaccination for smallpox returned to Germany and Austria after 1945. 

Words and phrases that go out of fashion

Odd how expressions go out of fashion. I just said 'Homer nods' and realised I haven't said or heard it said for decades. 

I also suspect I might be the last man to say 'Mr Gladstone' and one of a declining number who say 'Dr Johnson.' I used the expression 'pile Pelion on Ossa' recently talking on Facebook to an erudite professor of Scottish literature who hadn't heard it.

Things I read recently

Aldous Huxley in 1946 predicted exactly how we live now.

"There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an ‘iron curtain’ between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals."

Remedy worse than the disease

A disaster often does much less harm than what you do in response to it. September 11 being the best example. Covid-19 looks like another example.

Europe is a sick man

The key Marxist idea that class drives history seems to be forgotten, except by the hard left, but the equally key idea that countries, nations, ethnic groups and races are false consciousness was never more alive and well. 

It is now clear that this in many ways was the biggest Marxist fallacy of all and is being adopted by liberals, by Catholics, by the dying continent of Europe.

Europe which ruled the world until 1941, despite barbarian and then Muslim invasions, is now utterly feeble. As Neagu Djuvara said, it is committing suicide (if it has not already done so). 

This short essay by Peter Franklin is interesting on this theme.

What all of these crises reveal is the essential powerlessness of the European Union. We’ve been told ad nauseam that the EU is the producer of peace in Europe. The truth, however, is that the EU is the product of it. 

Marxism is still powerful in the USA and has been for about 6 decades, except in the 1950s

The 1960s social revolution stems not from Paris in 1968 but from the American Civil Rights movement which was organised originally by Communists, as Harry Truman pointed out. 

Communism has played a crucial role in American history in every decade since 1920, except the 1950s, and you ain't heard nothing yet!

Think of the Soviet spies. Think of the Weather Underground that anticipated today's Woke movement with its talk of white skin privilege. They went into bombing public buildings, but then realised that running kindergartens not terrorism was the way to win power.

But although political correctness was a Leninist phrase revived by George HW Bush as a weapon against the left (it made a noise but it turned out that it fired blanks) the new sort of liberalism, influenced by the ideas of heretical Frankfurt School of Marxism and academics who sought refuge in the USA from Hitler, is more  important than the old hard left, as it was back in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Haikus

Seen on Facebook:

Help me, I am trapped 

In a haiku factory

Save me, before they

My favourite haiku by the Emperor Hirohito:

We had intended
To visit the flower show at Kyoto
But unfortunately were prevented by ill health.

Indian summer in Bucharest

 

How did Chips Channon know two days in advance that Germany would invade Russia on 22 June 1941?

I learnt some interesting things last night from reading a review of the second volume of the (almost) unexpurgated diaries of Anglo-American diarist and Conservative MP Chips Channon.

Channon, who wasn't in the government (he was merely Rab Butler's P.P.S., i.e. bag carrier), told the people he dined with on 20 June 1941 that Germany would invade Russia two days later, which is what happened.

How did he know and Stalin not?

Please to remember the 5th of November and English hatred of Catholicism

Thirty years ago in the summer of 1991 I went into the Jesuit Church in Farm St and talked to a priest on duty. He turned out to be a lovely elderly Jesuit called Father Francis Edwards and he told me as we parted that he had written a book arguing that the Gunpowder Plot was what conspiracy theorists these days call a false flag operation. The details are here.

The burning of Cranmer and other Protestants - and Fox's Book of Martyrs detailing the deaths - strengthened Protestant feeling, even though far, far more Catholics who took part in the Pilgrimage of Grace had been killed by Henry VIII. 

Churchill said that the grass grows on the battlefield but never on the scaffold. 

Still, Shakespeare and the men of his generation were either Catholics or well disposed to the old religion. 

Somebody said that hatred of Catholicism is the only genuinely religious emotion that the English ever experience. The gunpowder plot was the moment when the English came to hate the Catholic Church.

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen - Danny Kaye was right

In the 1980s Peking, as it was called, was full of cyclists and Copenhagen was full of cars. Now it's the other way around. 

Danes are friendly people but watch out for cyclists who have the right of way, though they are much nicer about almost running you down than the young battleaxes of Stockholm. 

The disused church of St Nicholas in Copenhagen, now an art gallery, with its large banner proclaiming 'IN ART WE TRUST' seems to sum up Denmark (and Europe) looking for a substitute for God. 

Art, science, eliminating poverty, Marxism have all been tried. Non-discrimination is the latest attempt. Another attempt at finding the meaning of life, as Douglas Murray says, is by taking nice holidays.

Although Douglas Murray did not mean this, holidays are more than materialistic and self-indulgent means to refresh oneself. They have their spiritual dimension. Solitary travel is one of the most pleasant forms of introspection. I think Laurence Durrell said that. Mircea Eliade said that one travels abroad to explore ones subconscious mind.

Can we trust the climate scientists? Certainly not with decisions

The BBC is more unbearable than usual, propagandising about climate change. When did the media stop trying to report the news and begin telling people what to think and how to behave? Was there a time when they just reported things?

A BBC insider said that the BBC internal briefing to editors on covering climate change was reminiscent of ‘a campaigning organisation'.

I am sceptical about climate change and shocked that the views of sceptics are deliberately suppressed by the BBC. It is the same with Covid and lots of other subjects. You can list them, gentle reader.