Independent thought - a response to dreamer_marie

I don't like it when people try to manipulate me
You are obviously in bad faith. You have not even tried to read the story Melanie Philips actually told. Far from trying to manipulate anyone, Hirsi Ali repeatedly and candidly told the world that - like many refugees - she had told some lies in order to get to what she thought would be a safe country. The people who manipulate you, and by whom you are happy to be manipulated, are the Muslim Dutch journalists who suddenly, after years of this being known, pulled the dirty old tabloid trick of presenting it as if it was something new and surprising, and smeared Hirsi Ali's integrity in the process; and the vile politician who, having known it all along, suddenly decided that the laws of Holland had to be applied, in their full rigour, in that case and in that case alone. You have swallowed their lies whole, because you don't like Melanie Phillips and me calling your country names. Well, tough. If you don't want to be despised, don't be despicable.
Dutch people are thouroughly convinced that you should be free to do whatever you like, no matter what religious leaders say, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else
That you cannot see that this is about as far from the truth as to say that Iran is a democracy or India a small country, says all that needs saying about the bill of goods you have willingly let yourself be sold. The Dutch have no idea what individualism is. If they worship at the altar of freedom of choice, they do so as to an unknown god, something they revere without understanding - or rather, as Plato argues in a famous passage, something they love because they do not have it. The establishment informs the Dutch that they are independent thinkers who do not let themselves be convinced by any religious leader, and they repeat in a uniform chorus: "we are independent thinkers who do not let themselves be persuaded by any religious leader." The establishment tell them: "it is more dignified for old folks to choose their time to die;" and the Dutch repeat with one voice (some, among the old, rather trembly and uncertain): "it is our independent view, unconditioned by any religious leader, that it is more dignified for old folks to choose their time to die." What, in the name of God and all the stars in the sky, does the killing of the old and sick have to do with respect for individuals? If you accept in any way the notion that any life is not worth living, you have denied the value of individual life; you have said that a man's life is only worth living as long as it meets society's parameters for "value". And do not give me that nonsense about willing suicide. First, it is well known that elderly Dutch citizens do not visit their doctors for fear that they should be invited to commit suicide. It is the medical bureaucracy that decides that you are no longer of any use, and that to keep you alive would not be cost-effective. It then tries to "convince" you and, more to the point, your family, that it would be so much more dignified to let them shove a needle in you; and you are from that moment on under pressure - from the bureaucracy, from your selfish and sentimental relatives, from the national culture - until you give in, and are then complimented on what a fine, dignified figure of a human being you make, being killed by some professional who still has the shameless nerve to call itself a doctor. The obvious shame of this picture, however, never penetrates the skulls of that fantastic collective of independent thinkers in step. Even when the murderers start removing disabled babies, where no notion of consent is possible, and even when your hero Balkenende makes it legal for them, you never for one minute allow any doubt about the moral status of killing the old and sick to enter your independent-thinking mind.

Think of the article I linked to and blasted a while back. Here it is again, in case you had forgotten:
Sharon DijksmaSharon Dijksma, a leading parliamentarian of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) wants to penalise educated stay-at-home women. “A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital,” she said in an interview last week. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society’s expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”

Hence her proposal to recover part of the cost of their education from highly-educated women who decide not to seek paid work. Between 2001 and 2005 the number of Dutch women aged between 15 and 65 who were out on the labour market rose from 55.9 to 58.7 per cent. Dijksma says she wants to stimulate more women to join the work force. In the municipal elections earlier this month the PvdA became the biggest party in the Netherlands thanks to the Muslim vote. The PvdA is generally expected to win the general elections next year, when the 35 year old Dijksma, who has been an MP since she was 23 and is a leading figure in the party, might become a government minister.

On her weblog Dijksma explains that her proposal is a logical consequence of the Dutch system of subsidizing students. Society finances their studies with government scholarships, hence it is only normal that they pursue a professional career or repay. “If someone chooses not to work, then there should be a substantial repayment,” she said.

Most Dutch women who decide not to seek paid jobs do so in order to care for their children. Consequently the Dutch media refer to Dijksma’s proposal as “the PvdA Mother Plan.” The proposal elicited fierce criticism, some of which was aimed at Dijksma’s person. Twice the politician started a college course, and twice she failed to complete the course: her grades were poor, and anyway, at the age of 23 she was already a well-paid MP. Angry Dutch bloggers demanded that Dijksma pay back the costs of her unfinished studies before going after the mothers. “Let the fat cow repay her own scholarships first, because that was a real waste of public money,” one of the bloggers wrote.

The PvdA website has come to the rescue of the beleaguered politician, repeating the stance that those who study at the taxpayers’ expense and do not join the workforce are guilty of “destruction of capital.” Edith Snoey, the leader of the biggest Dutch trade union, who has made a similar proposal to Dijksma’s, wrote on her weblog that Dijksma had expressed herself somewhat unfortunately by giving the impression that she was only focusing on women, while the sanction should also apply to educated men who do not want to join the workforce. However, Snoey said, Dijksma’s mistake was unintentional. The union leader added that the politician should continue the fight: “Cheer up, Sharon. Let us proceed, because we aim for the same goal: more women in the labour force.”

If you can read that without being outraged, you have no idea what respect for the individual is. If you can read that without being outraged, you regard human beings as ants in an anthill; you regard the individual as nothing, and the community as all. And you do so, what is worse, for mean and despicable motives. You do so, as the creature said, because you value capital spending more than the individuals on whom it is spent. You do so because to you, only money is true. Hence the killing of everyone who costs more than they generate - old folks, terminally or chronically sick people, disabled babies. The anthill must work efficiently, without individual misfits to disorder it, for the sake of its all-holy capital.

I tell you that Italian Communists have more individualism in their little fingers than any Dutch independent thinker has in his or her whole body. I tell you that no Italian Communist, however hard line, no terrorist thug jailed for murdering people who disagreed with him or her, would even begin to conceive an argument so collectivistic and so mean. I tell you that anyone who did so would be not even laughed out of the party; they would be looked at with puzzlement and wonder, as if they had tried to argue that yellow is square or round.

And to get back to what provoked this little exchange: you seem to think that Verdonk has said enough when she has said that Hirsi Ali has broken the laws to get to safety. This, of course, implies that men exist for the laws and not the laws for men; or, in the words of one of those Religious Authorities from which you are so independent, that the Sabbath is not made for man, but man for the Sabbath. When the Abdel Rahman case (the Afghan Christian convert condemned to death in his country) burst upon the world, the Berlusconi Government, corrupt as it was, decided unanimously to offer him asylum and state protection. When it was pointed out that Abdel Rahman would not quite fit any of the existing Italian legal conditions for granting asylum, the Government simply passed an unanimous motion to accept him for humanitarian reason on the Government's simple parole. The Opposition did not say a word to protest, in spite of the fact that this was taking place during a national election; they showed by word and deed that they concurred completely. To a Dutch anthill lover, this may show a deplorable attitude to the laws; to a human being who has not yet surrendered his mind to the independent thought of the anthill, it shows a respect for human life and liberty - those things which you worship without having any notion of what they are.

The temptation of politeness

A few days ago I wrote an entry about the problems that my tendency to rage caused in my relationships with others. I have no doubt that a lot of people will have read the last entry - about the abomination that is Dutch law, especially on euthanasia, and about the atrocious behaviour of the Dutch government in the matter of Ayaan Hirsi Ali - and thought of that. Except that in this case, this does not apply.

Everything is right in proportion. It is wrong and silly to burst into fury over some fandom quarrel - such as the Blaise Zabini affair a while back - even though I may feel that I am in the right, or at least that I have a good argument that other people insist on refusing to understand. But when you are dealing with mass murder under the most obscene conditions and for the most obscene reasons, then exactly the opposite is the case. Then what is wrong is to yeld to the temptation of politeness; and speak and act as though mass murder were a reasonable, sensible, civilized alternative to be discussed in courteous tones - instead of a foul abomination whose very mention ought to make us shudder with disgust and wonder at a world where such things do not bring down fire from the sky.

A few days ago we celebrated Mother's Day. I have been particularly lucky in my mother - as beautiful as she is intelligent, as brave as she is unselfish, and so full of good things that it took me some time to realize that, like all other human beings, she had her flaws. To be sure, not everyone has my good luck - I could mention my mother's own sister, but I won't. There are indifferent or bad mothers. But having said that, everyone knows this: that only the greatest saints perform, in their lives, as many unselfish and helpful and loving things as a quite ordinary mother does in the ordinary course of her work. She is alwyas the one who takes the bad part of the chicken, who stays up late if the baby cannot sleep, who carves out time in her scarce timetable to take her child to school or to play - who is there a million times, too often to mention, until you realize that you have relied on her all your life and taken it quite for granted. After all, what is the one thing that no man will let pass, what is the one thing that nobody will ever allow to be said in his presence? We all know it: "Don't you dare touch my mother. You can say what you want about me, but, by God, don't you dare touch my mother." Thugs and criminals revere one thing in their filthy lives - their mother - when they revere nothing else. Sane men and women know it instinctively. It is for this reason, for this background of unselfish love that lies like a mountain wall all around the beginnings of our lives, the towering protection and help that has made us born and fed us and kept and helped us grow, that we Christians have come to see in the Blessed Virgin the highest of all saints: if that is what is our mother means to us, how much more - of the same, but how much more - must have been in the mother of the Saviour, in the mother of God in man? It is for this reason, just as any self-respecting man will fight for his mother's good name, that Christians going to war to save their nations and their people from oppression, have many, many times seen above the terror of the battlefield, warm and loving and peaceful in her blue mantle, Our Lady of Victories; and charged in Her name, through terror and pain and death, to victory and salvation.

This is what I, what any person, owes to his or her mother. The intensity of the love of the average person for his or her mother is not commonly realized, for the same reason why we do not stop to think that we look on the world from a walking six-foot tower; that it is fundamental to us. And as for our mother, so for our father. Our father is different - he is the person who comes in from outside, the voice of a strange stern world of work and fatigue and contact with little-known and unsympathetic beings, bosses, colleagues, clients. But he is the one who feeds us and looks after us; the one we go to in trouble or fear; the last bulwark in our need; and, on occasion, the extravagantly generous source of largesse - if mother is the one who will always give us a candy bar or a banana, father is the one who from time to time will slip us, from the apparently infinite resources of his labour and of his sometimes saturnine kindness, the unimagined wonder of a twenty-pound note or of a new bicycle or of a TV. As a rule, it will come as a surprise, and when you least expected it - and you realize that he has heard you talk about god knows how far back, and kept it in his mind. The average human's love for his/her father may not be as intense, as flesh-warm, as passionate, as that for the mother; but it is not less deep. He is the standard of value, the authority whose views are deferred to and whose statements are quoted. He is the first hero we look up to, and the first person in whom we have absolute confidence, even - strange mystery of the human soul - when we rebel against him.

Yes, there are men and women who fall short of this - even very far short. But this is what being a father, being a mother, means. And even those among fathers and mothers who fall far short of the ideal, still can call on us for a debt that cannot be repaid: they made us. Their will is the reason we are here. And in so far as they were father and mother at all, however little that may have been, to that extent they were those great and beloved figures. There is no other fatherhood or motherhood. And there is no human being who does not deserve one, or wish they had when they had not.

And in the course of normal, sane human life, the time comes when we can, if not repay them for what they have done for us - which is quite literally impossible - at least make manifest to them our gratitude and our love. It is when they are old; when they are weak; when they perhaps have regressed, and need - for the first time - our help. This is a privilege that life gives us: that in a forest of unpaid and unpayable obligations, of random events and people we meet once and never again, there are two people in the world to whom we can do something to repay what they have done for us. As a rule, we do not do enough. By the standards of what the average mother has done throughout her life, it would not be too much, when she is old and weak, to carry her around on your back, or, like Solon's two young men, pull her chariot like oxen. Luckily such shifts are rarely needed; but it certainly is our function, once our parents can no longer look after themselves, to look after them. What decent human being would think otherwise?

A Dutchman. A Dutchman would think otherwise. A Dutchman would think that the proper reward for the life his parents gave him is a bullet through the head, or rather, since that is what we are talking about, a lethal injection. A Dutchman would think that the proper reward is not to look after your father after his fourth heart attack, or your mother under advanced Parkinson's, but to let them die. Die with dignity, they call it.

Let us not even speak the base and disgusting reason behind ninety per cent of these displays of love - money; let us leave unmentioned the expense and time that it takes to look after a fragile old person who is never going to get better, because, truly, the only problem with him or her is old age - the weariness of years many of which were spent in your service. Let us assume that the Dutch really mean it, and do not lie like Dutchmen, when they say that what they really dread is the loss of dignity. Do you know what that means? Moral cowardice. It means not to be able to look at the horror of human life in the eye - the horror of illness, the horror of helplessness, the horror of dependency and exhaustion and pain and loss of control. It means taking death as an escape from these facts of life; and taking it, not for oneself, but for others - removing the object of horror from your sight, so that you do not have to be reminded that one day you, too, will be like this - trembling, helpless, weak, dribbling, blind, cold. It means killing people rather than be reminded that people must die. This is the noble, the elevated, the lofty principle of choice - that choice which begins when the doctor marks an old person down for the exit lounge, and ends when the old person, pestered and prodded by eager relatives and heartless medics, weary and sick and tired of life, or perhaps too far gone to understand, gives an extorted consent - and "dies with dignity."

As a Dutch citizen, dreamer_marie will, if her parents live long enough, be eventually asked to consent to their murder; this is certain. I hope that she has enough human left in her - to quote Hagrid - to tell the first, second and third person who make such a suggestion to go jump out the window; but what if she is so stuffed with the fraud of euthanasia to see what it is that she is consenting to? What if I am speaking with a person who, one day, will have her parents killed - because that is the way things are done where she comes from? Should I have been polite about it? Does anyone have such a vile idea of me as to expect me, for a minute, to be polite about it? Now that would be an insult.

And as for the horrendous cowardice of many Dutchmen in the matter of Hirsi Ali, I think it is directly connected. This nation has sold its soul. It has collectively signed its own death warrant, person by person. Each Dutchman or Dutchwoman who lives long enough will be eventually a candidate for the lethal injection. And it has done so on one promise, for one reason: for the promise of having, until the day it runs out, a "high quality of life" - life without stress, without chronic illness, without fear or trouble or hate. And just as those nations in which the relationship between parents and children is still sane will in fact fight for principles and justice and to defend the country, so, conversely, the intrusion of the violence and hatred of the outside world must seem, to the Dutch, the ultimate violation of their pact with the Devil. What, they have signed their own lives away - they have handed themselves body and soul to the State to decide how long they will live - and they cannot even be preserved from the intrusion of Islamic violence and the need to resist terrorism? No, no, no! Too horrible to contemplate. Drive out the cause of contention; drive out the person who draws the hatred with her; and let us hide away from other people's anger, and cradle the only thing that our Devil's pact has given us - that precious, all too precious quality of life.

This is what dreamer_marie defriended me rather than have to defend. Can you blame her? And do you see a pattern there?