In a twisted perversion of Romeo and Juliet, former Dutch prime minister Dries van Acht and his wife performed a legal duo euthanasia. Both were in failing health conditions and wished to part the Earth together. Their death practitioner, or “doctor,” agreed and killed them both, hand in hand, last Monday.
The Netherlands had a horrifying euthanasia case in 2018 where a 74-year-old grandmother was forcefully euthanized against her will. Upon waking up from a sedative and changing her mind about suicide, her death practitioner had her own family assist in holding her down while he murdered her.
Legalizing and practicing assisted suicide, unfortunately, is growing increasingly common in recent years. More and more Western countries are legalizing the death of the conscious and consenting. Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Spain have joined the Netherlands in its suicidal crusade. Even ten American states have legalized it.
So far, Canada has perhaps the most radical record on euthanasia. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his constituents badly wanted to eliminate all Canadians with mental illnesses with euthanasia. Fortunately, they were prevented by the lack of practitioners available in the country, for now.
This modern strain of suicide is a distinctly Western phenomenon. It is a direct result of widespread nihilism, first popularized by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that the best thing for man is “not to be born, not to be, to be nothing,” and the second best is “to die soon.”
The West later became a self-hating society under the tutelage of the German Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Members like philosopher Max Horkheimer invented critical theory, which was meant “not merely to understand the various facts in their historical development … but also to see through the notion of fact itself, in its development and therefore in its relativity.” In other words, reexamine everything you thought you knew through a lens of skepticism.
This inspired movements that criticized and hated different aspects of the West, and they are stronger today than ever. These forces assert that everything about Western heritage is evil and that those who benefit or lineate from it share the sins of their ancestors.
Since then, Western society has been convinced that it shoulders all the sins of the world and must pay the price for them. It floods itself with foreign migrants, whittling away at what traditional culture remains. It aborts its children, eliminating its bloodline. And now, it legalizes its own physical suicide.
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The legalized suicide of van Acht, a Western world leader, serves as a sign of the trajectory the West is currently taking: one that ends in its own suicide as a society, as a culture, and as a people.
Now, the West exists in the final stage of this pattern of thought: a perpetual progression of emptiness and guilt that ends in death. A world with nothing but shame is an undesirable one. Suicide is the only logical conclusion, and we are reaching for that conclusion more and more.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner Winter Fellow.