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December 2, 2004
The Protocols Of The Soulless Of Groningen

Hugh Hewitt addresses the Groningen Protocol debate in his latest Weekly Standard on-line column, "Death By Committee". Hugh has led what little media attention that Groningen Academic Hospital's announcement of killing four babies has generated, and he marvels at the sharp outbreak of widespread apathy he sees:

Incredibly, the nation's elite media has turned a collective blind eye to this story, though the Los Angeles Times did, on the day following the Drudge headline, find time to put on the paper's front page, above the fold, the story that Salmon and Steelhead May Lose Protection, but not a column inch of ink for a radical leap past Kevorkian land into the regions of Mengele.

LAST WEEK I marveled at the casual manner with which the Target Corporation announced that the Salvation Army could no longer place its kettles and ring its bells outside the giant retailer's 1,500+ stores. It was a callous and Scrooge-like act, one that I and thousands of others found sufficiently appalling as to oblige us not to shop at the store this season. I noted the irony of a retailer grown fat on Christmas gift sales tossing the charity most closely aligned with the public's image of Christmas spirit.

How foolish to imagine that actions such as Target's would offend greatly when protocol's such as Groningen's pass without comment before the eyes of editorialists and talking heads.

The reason that the Groningen Protocol fails to rouse much interest relates more to its banality than anything else. We have been killing unborn humans legally for over thirty years in the United States, sublimating any sense of value in their humanity for the expediency of casting off responsibility for them. One can argue that Roe v. Wade caused this, but to be honest, the US had moved inexorably to legalize abortion through legislation before the 1973 decision. If it were set aside today, Congress and most states would immediately ratify abortion, albeit with varying restrictions.

The lack of widespread horror following Groningen's announcement betrays a world where human life only matters for its commercial value, not as a sacred or unique gift. Even the revelation that Groningen proposes to kill children it deems too inconvenient to live despite their parents' wishes, up to age 12, fails to shock a world desensitized to humanity and wrapped up in its so-called secular "humanism".

The more I consider the Groningen Protocol and the lack of any protest to it, the more pessimistic I become about the capacity for the world to recover its soul. A few days ago -- in fact, the day before this story broke -- I watched an excellent movie called Judgement At Nuremberg. An adaptation of a fictional play about the Nazi trials, it used the very real atrocities of forced sterilization of "undesirables" and the slaughter of those the Nazis deemed undesirable to underscore the banality of those who stood trial at the dock. Richard Widmark and Spencer Tracy portrayed Americans whose exposure to these atrocities forever changed them.

Nowadays, it's just another story off the wire.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have not just reached a slippery slope -- we have hit a greased chute, which is what depresses me more than anything else. Now that Groningen has commenced killing the undesirables and the world has answered with a shrug, we will now hear from the chorus of statists telling us that in an era of limited resources, we need to make these hard decisions for the benefit of the families involved and the greater good of society. That child who may never walk or talk will be such a burden on his family, they'll say; the parents are too close to the situation to make an informed decision, so we'll make it for them -- for their own good, of course. And the time wasted on keeping him alive could be used to save other lives. We'll all sound so reasonable while we march living human beings to their death, without their consent or desire, when inconvenience is their only crime.

In twenty years, most of Europe will have their own home-grown Groningers, and the ghouls here in America will scold us for not being as sophisticated as the Dutch, the French, and so on.

We've crossed the Rubicon, my friends. The only hope we have will be to make friends with the committee that decides our worth to society.

Sphere It Digg! View blog reactions
Posted by Ed Morrissey at December 2, 2004 12:20 PM

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» Low Profile Protocol from Slant Point
Hugh Hewitt's column about the Groningen Protocol is up, and the Hugh is uqually appalled at the lack of coverage as he is about the hideous procedure. UPDATE: Captain Ed has some ominous remarks on the fact that this story received a worldwide shrug: ... [Read More]

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» THE DEATH OF REASON from Right Wingnuthouse
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