I submit that the horrors of the last 200 years are the proximate result of the rise of the will to power and its usurpation of the role that individual conscience, moral restraint and religious sanction used to play in Western human affairs. It is about control, the exercise of power. "Progressives' above all desire to wield the power to decide who lives and who dies.
'Progressives' refusal to acknowledge the value of individual human life is one of the principal reasons why no peace, no accommodation, no compromise can ever be made with them. Theirs is a reckless, willful and fundamentally evil disregard for the most fundamental of all of our rights: the right to live.
Here is the Vulcan mind-meld translation of the language of the Left: you have no right to live. By their lights, you are no more than a thing, an animal, or a machine. Therefore, you have no right to the fruits of your labors. You are a ‘resource’ at best. Or you are in their way and must be eliminated. There’s the last 200 years of leftist philosophy in a nutshell.
This premise is and has been central to the justification of the slaughter of millions - and the enslavement and impoverishment of hundreds of millions more. I have written a modest essay concerning the idea of killers without conscience and the pedigree of their ideas. These ideas are on display in the details of 0bamacare, for example. 0bamacare represents the deliberate and willful devaluation of human life - the reduction of people to mere objects. That is the next step on the way to physician-assisted suicide and, if it is not stopped, government-mandated euthanasia.
And worse. Far, far worse. But that's precisely the intent of the so-called "Obamacare" legislation.
Why else would the modern American Left seek to 'move the goalposts' that define life? And further, to define the value of individual life by its utility? "Utility" - to whom or for what? We have moved from questioning whether any sane human being should be allowed to make such decisions to dithering over who will decide. This is monstrous. And if any of you feel that this is hyperbole or tinfoil hattery, consider the source of such ideas:
Listen to Dr. Peter Singer speaking blithely of extending that 'right to choose' to children as old as 28 months! Why? Because Singer argues that at that age, well... they're not fully conscious and capable of reason! Is this some crackpot who no one takes seriously? Hardly. Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His ideas are, within academia, universally applauded.
Why else would we hear of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel - Rahm Emanuels brother - also an 'advisor' to 0bama, advocating the assessment of the relative 'quality of life' under the aegis of his innocuous-sounding “Complete Lives” program? Emanuel’s guidelines are strictly utilitarian, and are based in part upon the notion of an individual’s ‘value to society’.
What happens when:
1. Those goalposts defining the beginning and the end of life at last converge?
2. The decision as to who lives and who dies eventually passes from individuals and to the state - as it most surely will if progressives aer allowed to have their way?
If that seems a tad, well, extreme to some of you, consider this: there are those who believe that Dr. Emanuel deserves a medal for his fearless and 'enlightened' rationality. Dr. Singer's prescription for infanticide without guilt are warmly applauded in the halls of academe.
These ideas pave the road to a nightmare world of slaughter and atrocity. The nudge, the gradual squeeze - and then the shove. This is the foundation and the prerequisite for a world in which neither love, nor mercy, nor hope survive. It is a world where all of your hopes, aspirations and dreams, all of your love of country and family not only count for naught, they - and you - will be extinguished as if you never had existed. Because you surely must be if these will-to-power driven monsters are to rule without fear of opposition.
Pope John Paul II in his 1995 work, The Gospel of Life made this observation:
This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death". This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of "conspiracy against life" is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.
There is only one way we can stop the monsters who seek to impose such a hellish existence on this world.