Counter-Currents
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Euthanizing the Homeless? It’s a Start
Jim Goad
1,463 words / 10:47
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
As artificial intelligence renders everyone unemployable, financial systems collapse, and healthcare systems become overburdened, maybe the only prudent, humane, and cost-effective solution would be to kill everyone.
“One third of Canadians fine with prescribing assisted suicide for homelessness,” reads a recent headline in Canada’s National Post. “Roughly the same number told a poll they were fine with approving MAiD [Medical Assistance in Dying] for someone whose only affliction was poverty,” adds the subhead.
The article uses the word “fine” seven times to underline how perfectly fine a substantial quotient of Canucks are with letting the nation’s shivering hobos perish with state-provided anxiolytics and anesthetics and neuromuscular blockers rather than find them something to eat, a job, and a place to live.
Only a handful of countries — all of them majority-white — currently allow for assisted suicide, but Canada seems to be going out of its way to appease its masters at the World Economic Forum by concocting creative new ways for people to self-terminate even if they’re merely feeling a tad lonely or a trifle sad.
At first it was done in the name of “rights and freedoms.” Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in Carter v. Canada in 2015 that the nation’s Criminal Code needed to be amended so that euthanasia was no longer classified as homicide; it would have to change to satisfy elements of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that declared it was a fundamental human right to kill yourself, and that every last Canadian should be able to do it — with the government’s help, of course.
In June of 2016 the Parliament of Canada passed Bill C-14, which legalized both physician-administered euthanasia, where a doctor or nurse practitioner injects you with drugs that kill you; and physician-assisted suicide, where you are prescribed drugs that you use to kill yourself. Back in the law’s original incarnation, though, it stipulated that a candidate had to be terminally ill and likely to die within six months.
Apparently, more than 99% of Canadians who’ve availed themselves of Medical Assistance in Dying’s (MAiD) services opt to be lethally injected by a doctor or nurse rather than swallow the poison pills themselves. But even if one’s intent is to alleviate unbearable suffering and go out peacefully, one doctor claims that the paralytics that MAiD uses to kill patients may produce “a frothy fluid in the lungs” and “bear the potential for a painful death akin to drowning.”
MAiD also comes custom-made with a little loophole allowing doctors and nurses to suggest euthanasia to patients regardless of whether that patient has already made clear that they don’t want it; that way, any pesky legal liabilities could be averted, because medical practitioners can merely shrug and say the patient refused treatment.
But since all legal systems are rapacious and insatiable, it didn’t take long before MAiD started skiing pell-mell down the slippery slope. In 2021 the initial law was amended by Bill C-7, which dropped the requirement where a candidate needed to have a terminal illness that was destined to put him in the grave over the following half-year. Instead, now one merely needs to have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.” According to the Canadian government’s official webpage about MAiD, “You do not need to have a fatal or terminal condition to be eligible for medical assistance in dying” [emphasis theirs].
As a result, euthanasia deaths in Canada spiked from 1,018 in 2016 to 10,064 in 2021, accounting for 3.3% of all deaths that year.
In December of 2022, the Canadian government loosened restrictions even further to where one doesn’t even need to have a physical ailment to qualify for state-sponsored extinction; if one’s sole condition was the unquantifiable phantom demon of “mental illness,” they were willing to kill the patient for free. Originally slated to go into effect in March of 2023, the law was delayed for another year, so Canada’s nutjobs and cuckoo birds will have to wait until March 17, 2024 before the government will permanently erase their psychic pain.
In February of this year, a government committee issued a report pondering whether MAiD should be offered not only to adults, but to “mature minors.” Some activists are even agitating for MAiD to be extended so that it provides euthanasia for terminally ill babies.
In an article called “No Other Options: Newly revealed documents depict a Canadian euthanasia regime that efficiently ushers the vulnerable to a ‘beautiful’ death,” Alexander Raikin writes:
Since Canada legalized euthanasia in 2016, there has been a strange balancing act at the heart of its medical system. There is a national suicide prevention hotline you can call 24/7, where sympathetic operators will try to talk you out of killing yourself. But today there are also euthanasia hotlines, where operators will give you the resources you need to carry out your wish. Doctors and nurse practitioners are now in the business of saving the lives of some patients while providing death to others.
And even though Canada technically won’t permit the “mentally ill” to be euthanized until 2024, what are we to make of the 2020 case where “[a]n elderly Canadian woman was killed by her doctor because she would rather be dead than go through another COVID lockdown”?
And even though the word “poverty” is nowhere to be found in the letter of the law, I suppose that being poor can make a person anxious, and I reckon that anxiety is one of those “mental illnesses,” right?
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
In 2022 a woman pseudonymously known as “Sophia” applied for, and received, a lethal injection via MAiD because she couldn’t find affordable housing.
Late last year, a disabled Canadian man applied for MAiD services merely because he feared impending homelessness. Another disabled man says that one doctor officially approved of the MAiD application he’d submitted because he was afraid that changes in his pension benefits would send him out onto Canada’s unforgivingly frigid streets.
What if you’re a male veteran of the Canadian Forces who applies for mental-health treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder? Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone involved if the government offered to kill you instead? Okay, what if you’re a retired female army vet who merely wants a wheelchair lift or ramp installed in your house? Wouldn’t everyone be happier if you just shut up and died?
Canadian doctor Ellen Wiebe — who has reportedly euthanized over 400 people and calls it “the most rewarding work we’ve ever done” — says that “[a]s all Canadians have rights to an assisted death, people who are lonely or poor also have those rights.”
Last year, a chilling headline in The Globe and Mail read, “We must make it easier to both live and die with dignity, but denying MAiD to those living in poverty is not the answer.” It spoke of MAiD’s “evolution since being legalized in Canada in 2016.”
I suppose one man’s “evolution” is another man’s rapid slide into state-sanctioned mass murder.
In a startlingly cold-blooded essay titled “Choosing death in unjust conditions: hope, autonomy and harm reduction,” a pair of female bioethicists at the University of Toronto simultaneously lament the fact that there isn’t a more robust healthcare and social-services network to meet the public’s needs while they essentially encourage patients to go ahead and let some nurse jab them to death anyway:
The fact that better supports are not provided in cases like these is abhorrent and the lack of options constitutes a deep injustice. . . . [But] restricting an autonomous choice to pursue MAiD due to the injustice of current non-ideal circumstances causes more harm than allowing the choice to pursue MAiD, even though that choice is deeply tragic.
What’s also deeply tragic, yet darkly comical, is that the world’s well-meaning bioethicists, along with all the sadistic keyboard eugenicists, seem to think they’re immune from one day sliding down that slippery slope, too.
Or, as Martin Niemöller might have put it, “First they came for the street trash, but I did not speak out, for I was not street trash.”
There are a few voices of sanity howling alone up there amid the Great White North’s barren tundra. As one pundit for an obscure website puts it,
MAiD is changing our health system to one designed to bury us at the lowest possible cost. . . . As euthanasia is increasingly institutionalized, and as a younger generation of professionals becomes fully adjusted to its “medical” use, we must expect that typical patients will face an increasingly hostile clinical environment if they do not accept the recommended treatment.
Canada can’t feed and house everyone, you know — after all, that nation of only 38 million inhabitants is taking in another half-million or so new immigrants every year. So it’s out with the old blood, in with the new.
* * *
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20 comments
Years ago, when I got out of the Army, I thought about moving to Canada, a country full of pale White faces. I was just sick of negroes and thought it might be a way to get away from them. Guess it was a good thing I didn’t go through with it. They’ve gone crazier than Americans.
Well, this article is depressing. Two women named ‘Wiebe’ are at the forefront of state-sponsored killing. As a Canadian Mennonite, I was worried my people had gone insane.
Fortunately, the anti-MAiD link you sent was written by a Friesen.
Faith in my co-ethnics restored.
I recommend the film Pierrepoint (2005), based on one of Britain’s most prolific hangman executioners of 1931-56. I consider myself having a strong stomach but found it quite disturbing in its well acted portrayal of the workmanly ethic of it’s subject, done with no gore. Pierrepoint took on this work as a 2nd job to supplement his main duties as a grocer, and sought to be an ever more efficient and ‘humane’ hangman. Upon hearing that another executioner dispatched someone within 15 seconds of entry to the death chamber, Pierrepoint set about to make improvements to reduce the time to 12, then 8 seconds. His grim efficiency was much admired by the establishment, as he could achieve his task ‘professionally’ without drawing too many news headlines for botched or delayed executions. The film and his bio cover some moments that gave him pause, including a combative and unwilling participant, and another who was a personal acquaintance. So euthanasia also shares an aspiration to ‘do a jolly professional job’ with executioners.
Of course, whenever you imagine some ghastly concept or a twisted fetish no one could have thought of, someone Japanese has already been there. The land of the rising sun brings us a new film, Plan 75, positing a dystopian plan where citizens are urged to kill themselves off at age 75. In 2021 a Japanese economist at Yale university suggested mass suicide as a consideration to deal with their aging population, “I feel the only solution is pretty clear”. His twitter bio has a notable byline, “The things you’re told you’re not allowed to say are usually true”, indeed, but damn he’s really running wild with it. But none of this is really new at all as there are at least two versions of the Ballad of Narayama (1958 & 1983) on the legend of ubasute, leaving one’s elderly parents on a mountainside to perish once they get on in years. I don’t claim to have the answers to all this, but I’m still not ready to eat dogs, cats and crickets yet either.
Thank you for those excellent links to films I’d never heard of, but now would like to see.
These are all very difficult issues, fortunately far more so that the core issues related to preventing white extinction that are supposed to be the main concerns of white nationalists. I have long felt there is too much emphasis in modern societies on length as opposed to quality of life. What is an extra 10-20 years at the crummy end of life when set against eternity – the period before you were alive, and the period after?
I strongly support medically assisted dying, especially for those with terminal conditions. Indeed, volunteering to kill oneself is, in many situations, a supremely noble, altruistic act, from the father staging an “accident” so that the family can obtain some needed life insurance; to the soldier on a “suicide” mission; to a terminally ill person who concludes that the considerable money that would be spent prolonging his life for half a year could be better utilized for other purposes.
Of course, given the expenses associated with eldercare or terminal care today, one can easily imagine government euthanasia programs sliding from voluntary to coercive. And they become especially problematic when the elderly are disproportionately ethnically different from a (new) majority. Imagine a bunch of nonwhite immigrant “Canadians” voting for a ‘liberal’ euthanasia regime for overwhelmingly white elderly Canadians.
Indeed, living healthy should be more a priority than living long and infirm, though sometimes one leads to the other. Grim, emotional decisions are often made about how much money ought be spent on some new cancer drug that might extend life by months. The average cost of these is over $200k/year. Pediatricians say the money is better spent on them, as they are preserving life at the outset, though they sometimes end up preserving someone who will be left with a lifetime of grave disability, but most will still enjoy happiness and enliven their family. The boundless racial resentment and mistrust in the US will likely stand in the way of euthanasia/assisted suicide being expanded soon. As children regularly move away from home base, a lonely old age is more likely. In retirement, elders should strongly consider moving closer to their kids (and hopefully grandkids). The extra help and family bonds may help with the birthrate.
All of us are going to get old, and even if not immediately at death’s door, there will be a time you are bed-ridden and unable to walk or feed yourself or make it to the bathroom. And then, just imagine who your ‘carers’ are going to be, if you have not created a loving family for yourself. So, please stop all of your other activities — other than working and saving money, because women adore SECURITY — and get on the path to a caring spouse and children. I missed the marriage and children thing, so I will die in the hands of vapid immigrant carers. of various hues. Oh well, maybe I could bleach my hair blonde and give it one more try.
Don’t despair. There’s the hope that robots will take care of us in our dotage.
Some say there’s a danger that they’ll go “Skynet” on us, but I’d rather take a chance of that happening than trust in Negroes.
You could try donorsperm?
I think the blonde hair-dying is worth the effort. Also, if you haven’t already done so, going to the gym and getting in better shape can be very attractive for guys.
You might also try White-Date. I’ve read that the men to woman ratio is 8:1. Certainly better than Bumble where it appears to be 400 men per 1 woman. Also the AmRen conference is coming up in August. They might even pay your airfare if you tell them you’re a single W-I woman looking for a good guy.
Please advise if you need any more suggestions.
I would (and will) instead think with gratitude that I have made it to such an old age. Many do not. I had two acquaintances in their 50s who died during (but not from) the Covid pandemic. A person should keep making plans (while actually living daily life to the fullest) until age 80. At that point, however, you’ve lived a full life (whether happy or not, successful or not), and should be preparing for death any day, even if in fact you have a decade or more left.
Oh, and a lot of children abandon their aged parents to poorly overseen nursing homes anyway. Or, if the home is high quality, as my mother’s one is, too many assume their filial obligation is fulfilled, and rarely visit or maintain vigilant oversight of care (as I do). Having children these days is no guarantee against a lonely old age. Of course, our younger comrades should still make family formation a top ambition, as even if families are imperfect and no cure for anything, we’re still generally better off with them than without.
As part of a longer quote, Martin Amis ends it with, “Death gives us something to do. Because looking the other way is a full time job”.
That may seem macabre on the face of it but it strikes me as profoundly poignant. Life can be sad, brutal, painful and many other negative experiences, but it can also be joyous, sublime, hopeful, exciting and worth sharing. When we get life right or we are truly being blessed (in any context you wish to describe ‘blessed’) in our mortality it is our moral duty to instil such pleasure in our family and friends. That’s looking the other way, the way to life and purpose and making the best and most of it.
My grandad died at 97. Never was in hospital except when he fell off a submarine during the war and when he was 94 for a UTI. When in hospital at 94 the nurse asked if she could get him anything, he replied with a twinkle in his eye, “a wee half”. That’s our way of asking for a whiskey.
He was bright and alert and of sound mind right up until his heart could no longer keep up with his sound mind.
If we are advocates of natural order and where we fit in this fucked up world, then we should act like the race of humans we have become and take no part whatsoever in this barbaric ritual.
Eugenics was bound to make a comeback. And it certainly did.
Is that a problem?
I have no feelings regarding the subject, I just see the change as a normal and natural progression. If we want to keep our rich, pleasant and technological welfarestates well then we will have to reintroduce eugenics. We will call it something else and use liberal and progressive arguments to sell it instead of nationalistic or darwinian but the results is the same either way you frame it.
Just so
Soft Eugenics is part of most societies. Arranged marriages are very much in the spirit of mating with a ‘good family’ (i.e. good genes). The very act of choosing a mate with whom to bear children is at the very least “assortative mating”, a favorite topic in the manosphere. Education and wealth are very much the ‘caste system’ of the west. I know a woman who used to try and elicit a ’23 and me’ profile from her dates, ‘just for fun’ when I’m sure she was being a canny little eugenicist, later aborting a fetus with a genetic problem. In classic liberal hypocrisy, at the same time she was all about a public veneer of progressivism, just not in her backyard.
Did Cheech & Chong predict the general direction of dystopian society fifty-one years ago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAAI8aKTkVM
I wonder what Dr. Ellen Weibe gets paid per. I mean 400 down is nothing to sneeze at, and for her to call it “rewarding”, she probably means it.
I watched my dear mother suffer with multiple forms of dementia for years before she finally died. It was horrific in ways I could never have imagined, including the last days when her body “forgot” how to hold her own head up. But on the day she died there were angels in the room, I swear to God I believe that. And if I had taken that decision upon myself – to end her suffering on my timeline – it would have felt like murder to me. I get it, and I have sympathy for everyone who suffers, but no freaking way should it be normalized to this point.
Coming to Britain when Labour take power: ‘nudge’ pieces by Guardian opinion-formers have already been penned. Euthanising the hated caste of Conservative-voting pensioners will doubtless fall under the slogan “Protect the NHS — Secure Britain’s Future”.
Reminds me of the movie “Whoops Apocalypse”.
There a british prime minister is elected who ends unemployment by shoving people down the cliffs of Dover.
Maybe the Canadians took this movie as an instruction manual…
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