To Kill or Not to Kill: Euthanasia in a Society with a Cultural Death Wish

By John Fleming

Euthanasia emerged as a talking point for progressives and secularists in the West in the 1960s. Given that they simply appropriated (without anyone’s permission) control of national and private broadcasters, newspapers and university faculties, it became, eo ipso, a matter of public controversy. Other modish enthusiasms of that period – sexual licentiousness and psychotropic drugs for example – have long been abandoned, but the quest for legislative sanctioning of the killing of the old and infirm and distressed never abated; not a parliamentary year passed in one of the Australian States, it seemed, or even at Commonwealth level, but another bill was placed on the notice paper. Well, in the states of Victoria and Western Australia, that bill is now an act as it is in Canada, various states in the USA, The Netherlands, Belgium and other nation states.

It has remained an Article of Faith for the left throughout all of the decades of post-modernity – just like that other form of authorised killing: abortion. Why is this? What is it about these issues that evoke in the minds and imaginations of liberals and leftists an almost millenarian enthusiasm?

It required a scholar of Father Fleming’s insight and experience to provide us with the explanation, in this, the latest and, in my view, most important of his publications.

His answer takes us to a close examination of the real legacy of the enlightenment, and it is not the benign and rational one that generations of us have been taught to believe in our schools. His careful unravelling of the three centuries of the secular project from Rousseau to Safe-Schools can leave us in no doubt as to what comes next if we don’t stand up for the Christian inheritance of our institutes. It was always about power. And power always ends up being about persecution.

Father Fleming has been a priest, a broadcaster, a controversialist and a scholar in his long and distinguished journey through public life.

His book will be essential reading for the many Christian folk of all denominations who now understand that our age will be one that will call upon them to be soldiers as well as servants for the church.

– Stuart H Lindsay, barrister and former federal circuit court judge

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528970556

Book preview

To Kill or Not to Kill

Euthanasia in a Society with a

Cultural Death Wish

John Fleming

Austin Macauley Publishers

To Kill or Not to Kill

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgement

Foreword 1

William J. Tighe

Foreword 2

David Flint

Introduction

What is at stake?

The long march through the institutions includes the Church

The Long March over the precipice

Chapter 1: Euthanasia and Traditional Codes of Medical Ethics

What is Euthanasia?

The Crucial Roles of Intention and Motive in the Moral Act, or I Purposely killed Bill Because He was Having an Affair with My Wife!

Euthanasia by Omission of Reasonable Care

Euthanasia by Omission in Australia

What’s the point of tube feeding?

How the starting point conditions the Judge’s final decision

When is a Drug Not a Drug, and Does it Matter?

Who gets to say what palliative care really is?

Contemporary Medical Ethics and Killing?

World Medical Association Resolution on Euthanasia

Traditional Codes of Medical Ethics and Euthanasia

Implications for the Medical Profession

Alternative persons who might carry out euthanasia

Chapter 2: History? You Can Take it or Leave It!

Bridges

Chapter 3: Secularism – Both Religion and Ideology

Secularism – Both Religion and Ideology

Religion or Belief?

Ideology: part reality and part illusion

When God is Dead!

The Decline in Religious Adherence and Practice

Secular – What Does it Mean?

Liberty or Progress?

The Loss of Moral Language and Moral Distinctions

Politicians and Their Beliefs

Free Speech In the Modern Liberal Democratic State

Freedom, Religion, Conscience vs the Arrogant Utopianism of Left Liberals

The Hypocrisy of Inclusion

Folau – the Next Chapter

Peter Singer and Israel Folau

Off to Court We Go

The New Atheism: An Exercise in Ideological Rigidity

Be Careful What You Think – You May Need to Be Re-Educated!

Secularism: A Religion or System of Beliefs

The New Reality

Chapter 4: Secularism’s War Against Family, God, Church and Reason

Secularism’s War against the Family

Secularism’s War against God and Christianity Pitting Reason against Faith

Faith Needs Reason as Reason Needs Faith

Religion is Practiced both Publicly and Privately

Christianity and the First Hospitals

God of the gaps: science versus religion

Dawkins Misrepresents St Augustine as Being Anti-Science

What Marxists and Liberal-Democrats Have in Common? – Ideology!

There is no Proof God Exists – The Default Position of Atheists

Can Something Come from Nothing?

Fair-Minded Atheists

Chapter 5: When Ignorance is a Virtue

Atheism and Belief in God

Atheism versus Religion

Religion as Mental Illness – the New Totalitarianism?

Religion as the Major Cause of Wars – Bunkum!

Jesus Did Not Exist Say Hitchens and Morris

Brian Morris Rejects the Historicity of Jesus

The Biblically Illiterate Christopher Hitchens

Scientist Peter Atkins Dismisses the Resurrection of Jesus

Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?

A Recommendation for Those Genuinely Seeking the Truth

Peter Atkins’ Theism

The Atheism of the Alt-Right

Chapter 6: Church and State – Separation or Cooperation?

Australian Constitution Protects the Church from the State

Totalitarian Temptations in Utopia

Chapter 7: Élites Undermining Democracy: Judges, Politicians, Educators and Journalists

Who makes the law?

Who Governs Australia?

Vocal Élites: Fear the People!

Who is Responsible for Making Law?

Judicial Activism in Australia?

Politicians and the Media Exploit Religious Bigotry

Chapter 8: The Attitude of Australian Citizens to Making RU486 Legally Available

The Inalienable Right to Life: But Only for Some?

Defending Human Rights Post World War II

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

Universal Agreement on Basic Human Values

Religion

Consensus Gentium; Agreement of the People

The Human Failure to Honour Human Rights

What Are Inalienable Rights?

Empirical Evidence for Slippery Slopes

Euthanasia as Practised Illegally in South Australia

Research Evidence in Australia as a Whole

Australian Surgeons and Euthanasia

Extending the Boundaries for Euthanasia in the Netherlands

Euthanasia in the Netherlands 1984–1990

Dutch Euthanasia Continues to Rise

Pathway to Legal Medical Killings: Machiavellianism at Work in the Victoria State Task Force

The Keown Critique of the Victorian Parliamentary Committee Report

What about Other Australian Research?

Victorian State Government Planned to Legalise Euthanasia

The Right to Life Is an Inalienable Right

Euthanasia Undermines Suicide Prevention Programmes

Chapter 9: Belgium: Sliding Down the Euthanasia Slope

Legal Control of Euthanasia

Administration of a Lethal Dose without Explicit Request from the Patient

Increase in Numbers of Cases of Euthanasia

Widen the Scope: Euthanasia for Children

Chapter 10: Eugenics

Let’s Start by Denying We Have a Problem

Eugenics Persists Into the 21st Century

A Brief History of the Eugenics Movement to the Present Time

Population Planners are still at It

The Enlightenment and the Perfectibility of Man

Mid to Late 20th Century Eugenics and Onwards

The Link Between Abortion and Eugenics

A Glimpse at Future Eugenic Proposals for Utopia

Denying the seriously disabled are human

Linking Compassion with Killing

Eugenics in Australia – Melbourne the Epicentre

Connection between Eugenics and Voluntary Euthanasia in the Third Reich

From Eugenic Abortion to Infanticide to Euthanasia

Philosophical Beliefs About When a Human Being Is a Person: The Secularists’ Weapon of Choice

The Real Intentions of Proponents of Euthanasia

Chapter 11: Power without Responsibility

What are the Responsibilities of Members of Parliament Bearing on the Question of Euthanasia?

Politicians, Pious Platitudes and the Secularist Ideology

Have we forgotten Aboriginal persons and the Northern Territory experience?

Euphemisms and Legislation

Polls

The Real Motives and Intentions of Euthanasia Advocates and Slippery Slopes: Invoking the Principle of Personal Autonomy to Annihilate Personal Autonomy

In Short

Entertainer Andrew Denton

Andrew Denton’s Philosophical Beliefs

We’re the Land of Neighbours, Not Nazis (Andrew Denton)

The Law in Relation to Assisted Dying

Weasel Words and Euphemisms Mask Reality

Euphemisms Have Many Purposes but Mainly to Deceive

TV Entertainer Andrew Denton Only Wants Legal Assistance in Dying, Not Killing!

Denton, Hard Cases and Palliative Care

What is Palliative Care?

The Painful Death of Kit Denton

Transference

The Case of Liz Le Noble

Euthanasia and Hospice Care

Denton’s Atheistic Rant

Essential Elements of Denton’s Case

Chapter 12: Remake the Culture! – Capture the Language!

Moral Relativism – Incoherent and Dangerous

Non-Judgementalism and Marriage Equality

The Sexual Revolution

Replacing Sex With Gender

Intersex Persons

Conclusion

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

About the Author

John Fleming is a 77-year-old retired academic. After completing his undergraduate degrees in politics and psychology, he completed his PhD at Griffith University in 1992 in philosophy and medical ethics.

He was Foundation Director of Adelaide’s Southern Cross Bioethics Institute, 1987-2004, a foundation member of UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee (1993-1996), and has served on many Federal and State government policy advisory committees in Australia. He was an elected delegate to the Australian Constitutional Convention (1998), a member of the Council of the National Museum of Australia, from 2003-2009, and Foundation President of Australia’s first tertiary liberal arts college, Campion College, Old Toongabbie, Australia (2004-2009). He was a Corresponding Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life (Vatican) between 1996-2016. He is the author of nine books and many articles on bioethics and public policy.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Alison; to our children, Rebecca, Jane and Jessica; to their spouses, Kieran and Andrea and to our grandchildren, James, Peter and Yolanda.

Copyright Information ©

John Fleming (2021)

The right of John Fleming to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528970525 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528970556 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Acknowledgement

This book has been several years in the writing. I acknowledge those brave souls who have read the entire text and, where they thought appropriate, made suggestions for improvements. Dr Peter Joseph’s extraordinary eye for detail not only provided the external auditing necessary for the text of any book but offered several helpful and constructive critical comments which improved certain parts of this text. Archbishop John Hepworth, a retired political scientist from the University of South Australia, offered critical insights into the political argumentation used. Arlene Macdonald read the entire book and provided several suggestions for improvement, all of which were accepted. And, of course, I am indebted to the two eminent professors who have each written a foreword to this book, one from an American standpoint and the other from an Australian standpoint: Professor William Tighe is Professor of History at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA. Emeritus Professor David Flint OA is a former Chairman of the Australian Press Council and of the Australian Broadcasting Authority and has a distinguished academic reputation in economic law and the Australian Constitution.

Stylistic points to note

Within quotations, all emphases in bold are added by this author unless otherwise specified.

Within quotations of other people’s work, sentences which are both emphasised in bold and occur within squared brackets, [], are comments about that work by the author of this book.

In the general text, emphases in the author’s own text will be either in italics or bold.

Foreword 1

William J. Tighe

Dr Fleming has written a book that will become required reading for all concerned by, or simply interested in, the propagation and spread of the practice of active euthanasia throughout the world, as well as an evaluation of its subject. I termed the work a book, for so it is, and a long one, but it is really a dissertation (in the old sense of the word, not the modern academic one: a comprehensive treatment of its subject, including its history, context and implications), as it examines and presents the legal, medical, philosophical, religious and social contexts in which advocacy for legally-permitted euthanasia has become a widespread and successful reality in the world today, along with an analysis and critique. In its analytical rigor, its clear focus and its success in delivering the goods it calls to mind, and resembles, the works of critique of the late Anglican academic and theologian Eric Lionel Mascall (1905–1993).

This brief foreword is not the place for a summary of the subjects treated in the book; Dr Fleming has, in any case, done that in his introduction. Readers will nevertheless find several themes which, at first glance, do not seem to have any obvious connection with euthanasia: historical obliviousness and distortion (chapters. 2 and 5); the ideology of secularism as a new proselytizing and persecuting religion, and one which sanctions lying – secularist taqiyya – on its behalf and which actively inculcates the attenuation of freedom of speech (chapter 3); contempt for and ignorance of Philosophy as an intellectual discipline (chapter 4); misunderstanding separation of Church and State in terms of both its origins and its purpose (chapter 6) and redefining, and so undermining democracy (chapter 7), to mention the most significant.

Particularly important among them is a chapter (chapter 10) on eugenics, which traces the close historical and ideological connections between eugenics, euthanasia and scientific racism, as well as illuminating the manner in which many genuine scientists, geneticists especially, refrained from voicing their doubts about the qualification of eugenics as a science out of respect for their eugenicist friends and colleagues. Shorn of its associations with racism, many eugenicists continue to promote their quest for a scientific utopia of their own creation and remain committed, and often influential, advocates of population control through political and financial coercion, including abortion and euthanasia as means towards that end; nothing much has changed (p. 441), as Dr Fleming concludes concerning eugenicists’ division of human beings into persons and dispensable non-persons (pp. 78, 158, 310-11).

These ancillary matters comprise slightly more than half the length of the book, which then turns to euthanasia for its residue – primarily in Australia, as befits a treatment by an Australian bioethicist, but by way of the Netherlands and Belgium. They may appear initially to readers as bye-ways to the subject of euthanasia, but in fact, they are essential to situate it as a cultural and social phenomenon in the contemporary world, and its advocacy as an élite – and media-driven political and propaganda campaign.

John Irving Fleming was born in Port Lincoln, South Australia, in 1943. Ordained in 1970 in The Church of England in Australia (now The Anglican Church of Australia) he became a Catholic in 1987 and was ordained a priest in The Catholic Church in 1995. In 1995, he received the PhD degree from Griffith University, Queensland, for a thesis on the relationship between Human Rights and Natural Law. He has worked professionally both as a bioethicist and in commercial media over a period of 35 years. As a bioethicist, he has served as a Corresponding Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life (Vatican City) from 1996 and was a Sessional Lecturer in the faculty of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family (Melbourne) from 2001–2008. He has also been involved in public-policy decision making. He was the Foundation Director of Southern Cross Bioethics Institute (Adelaide) from 1987 to 2004, during which time, he served on many Australian federal and state government policy advisory committees. He was from 1993 to 1996 a member of UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee, whose work culminated in the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights of 1997. From 2004 to 2009, he was President of Campion College Australia, and from 2004 Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at Southern Cross Bioethics Institute. Through his work in commercial media, his organization of conferences, lectures, submission of briefs to legislative committees, service on panels and at workshops, not to mention the publication of eight books on bioethics and numerous articles, Dr Fleming was able to exert considerable influence on the way bioethical issues could be conceptualised and then actualised in government policy.

Although the focus of the book, as regards the detailed description and analysis of euthanasia battles, is on Australia, as already mentioned, it ought to be disseminated and read as widely as possible, since its subject has become an issue of global importance and strife. Were Dr Fleming an American, a Canadian, a British subject (as he is, in addition to an Australian), a New Zealander or a European from any Central and Western European state, he might have written the same book, but with a different set of activities, controversies and legislative initiatives and struggles. The questions, arguments and issues at stake would in most respects be almost identical, although the state of play would differ from place to place. That is what gives the wide thematic range of the book which I mentioned in the second paragraph of this foreword its salience and necessity. Only by linking together these themes can it be discerned that the strife over euthanasia is not the result of a spontaneous upwelling of a desire, whether well-founded or ill-informed, to alleviate suffering, but of a calculated attempt to overthrow the ethical and religious foundations on which Western Civilisation was built – which is not to say that it lacks analogies in other cultural traditions – and to substitute for them a modern humanist (meaning here, implicitly atheistic) utilitarian one, in which emollient terms along the lines of care and choice and individual autonomy in decision making are deployed to mask what is often in reality the manipulation of fearful individuals and an appeal to bottom line consideration of prices and costs. It is the humanity of the ant-heap, the compassion of the account-book.

Finally, Dr Fleming’s drawing together of these strands offers to those who take the time to read and ponder his book the possibility of a turnabout, the original sense of the Latin verb convertere, from which we in English get convert. There is a logic to euthanasia enthusiasm which, when revealed in its connections, antecedents and implications, may repel those who are drawn to support it by sentiment or fear. The future Cardinal Newman once wrote (in his case of the atheism, he saw implicit in the Liberal Protestantism of the mid-Nineteenth Century): Logic is a stern master; they feel it, they protest against it; they profess to hate it and would fain dispense with it; but it is the law of their intellectual nature. Struggling and shrieking, but in vain, will they make the inevitable descent into that pit from which there is no return, except through the almost miraculous grace of God, the grant of which in this life is never hopeless (Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teachings, pp. 32–33).

To understand the logic in this case may be cause for those embarked on it to turn back, and for those drawn to it, whether in fear or compassion, to turn about. The book does not presuppose any sectarian philosophical or religious commitment of its readers, although it will probably have a greater initial resonance with those skeptical of the promise of improvement offered by gurus of social amelioration campaigns. I commend it to all interested men of good will and concern, troubled by the advance of legalized euthanasia and the means by which this advance has been effected.

Prof. William J. Tighe

William J. Tighe is Professor of History at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States, where he has taught since 1986. He received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University, two masters degrees from Yale University, and his doctorate from Cambridge University, where he was a student of the late Sir Geoffrey Elton.

Foreword 2

David Flint

I first met Dr John Fleming in Old Parliament House in Canberra in February 1998. He had been elected as an Australians for Constitutional Monarchy delegate to the 1998 Constitutional Convention to consider whether Australia should become a republic. Coming out as a constitutional monarchist and, in particular, standing for election as such, required a degree of courage.

At least three quarters of all politicians supported so-called republican change with only a very small number of the remainder willing to put their heads above the parapet to support the Queen to whom they had so often sworn allegiance. (I say so-called republican change because the model chosen seemed more about increasing the powers of the politicians than interest in any real republicanism.)

The republic was very much a project of the élites, supported by the intelligentsia. Those who doubted the advantage of attempting to graft some republic onto an essentially monarchist constitution were dismissed as dinosaurs and subject to extreme ridicule. The attitude of the mainstream media went beyond what we would expect of a responsible press. As the distinguished former British editor and minister, Lord Deedes observed in the London Daily Telegraph on 8 November 1999:

I have rarely attended elections in any country, certainly not a democratic one, in which the newspapers have displayed more shameless bias. One and all, they determined that Australians should have a republic and they used every device towards that end.

I came to appreciate the fact that the courage Dr Fleming displayed in coming out as a constitutional monarchist was not an isolated incident, but one typical of and wholly consistent with his approach to the many issues that came before him in his several capacities.

And several there were. Formerly an Anglican priest, Father Fleming was subsequently received into the Catholic Church and ordained as one of its very few married priests.

With a doctorate from Griffith University on the relationship between Human Rights and Natural Law, he has had, over a period of 35 years, an unusually wide professional experience ranging from his work as a bioethicist to his work in the commercial media.

He has served on the Pontifical Academy for Life and taught at the Melbourne-based John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family. Apart from the Constitutional Convention, he has been involved in public-policy decision making over a wide range of matters.

He was the Foundation Director of Adelaide-based Southern Cross Bioethics Institute from 1987 to 2004, which led to his serving on several federal and state government policy advisory committees. From 1993 to 1996, he was a member of UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee which handed down an important document in its Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights of 1997.

Dr Fleming played a significant role in Australian education when in 2004 he became the foundation President of Australia’s first liberal arts college, Campion College, as well as serving as Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute.

Through his teaching and especially his writings, Dr Fleming has made a major contribution to the development of public policy on bioethical issues. His publications include eight books on bioethics and a range of published articles.

In all this, Dr Fleming has been guided by those Judeo-Christian principles which have been at the basis of civil society in the West and in Australia since the settlement. These are currently under attack by what can be best described as the élites.

As the American author Christopher Lasch had argued, the élites are those who hold opinions typical of upper-middle-class liberals, that is liberal in the American sense. American liberals are essentially left-wing on social and cultural issues, and hostile to many Judeo-Christian values. This is a form of cultural Marxism with the élite practitioners of this cult being essentially neo-communists. They differ from old style communists in organisation, but there is a similar strong propensity to accept any view prescribed by the leadership, even if by doing so this contradicts a previous position, a phenomenon brilliantly demonstrated in George Orwell’s 1984, and shown in practice by communists over the years.

A stark example was when the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact was announced in 1941 between Nazi Germany and the USSR. This contained secret clauses for the division of Poland and the takeover of the Baltic States. The day before, communists around the West, exercising the freedom that only Western civilisation allows, were denouncing Hitler as an evil associate of the West. The next day, he was a peace-loving ally of Stalin.

In the same way, élites believe in anything which emerges in élite leadership circles in America and Europe, including the culture of death.

So, when the New York Senate recently gave a standing ovation at the passing of legislation which allows the killing of a child surviving from an abortion, this will no doubt be followed in Australia.

Of all the new moral rules adopted with the decline of religion, none has wider general support than euthanasia. This is because of one of the successful policy slogans advanced in this area. In essence, this is that no one should be condemned to live with unbearable and excruciating pain or condemned to live in a vegetative state.

This slogan is based on three assumptions which its supporters have had such success in advancing that they are generally accepted as self-evident truths.

They are, that for the conditions described in the slogan above, there is no alternative to death, palliative care is a myth and a safe system of euthanasia can be erected free from individual or state abuse.

Accordingly, Dr Fleming does not limit his book to a study of the practice of mercy-killing, as euthanasia was once called. (That had to be changed no doubt because it draws too much attention to the fact that it is about killing, pure and simple.)

Rather, he sets its success as part of the decline in the once universal acceptance in the West of our Judeo-Christian values. This began in the aftermath of the First World War when Western civilisation was itself challenged by the rise of communism and Nazism. Even with the victory in the Second World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conversion of Communist China into a fascist corporate state, those values were never again to enjoy widespread acceptance.

In the meantime, that neo-communist alternative to revolution, the long march through the institutions, has been extraordinarily successful. Atheism everywhere is ascendant. But in the saying usually attributed to Gilbert Keith Chesterton, when a man stops believing in God, it is not that he believes in nothing. Rather, he will believe in anything.

Every new and foolish idea on a range of issues seems to concentrate on sex, now called gender to deny biological truth and to advance the fiction that sex may be changed at will. These are still essentially Marxist ideas, aiming at the first of the three targets of communism – the family, private property and the state. In the same way, the culture of death challenges the truth that Life is given by God replacing it with the belief that it is always under the control of man.

Dr Fleming shows how the culture of death was introduced not by a legislature which could never obtain such a mandate but by a judiciary made activist as a result of the long march.

The result is that when what once horrified society, the killing of the unborn, gradually came to be accepted, its proponents went further, pushing the new institution to include a trade in body parts, as well as the infanticide or killing of a child which survives abortion. At some stage we can expect the introduction of what has been long argued, infanticide outside abortion.

Relying on the slogans about unbearable pain and not living in a vegetative state provided advance consent is given, euthanasia is being introduced across the West. But as the once pro-euthanasia Netherlands politician cited by Dr Fleming admits when she surveyed the blood bath which followed, they should have put more effort into palliative care.

The fact is that there has never been erected any secure system of euthanasia, limited to cases of excruciating pain or not living in a vegetative state, rigorously requiring true consent and free from individual and state abuse. There never can be.

As Dr Fleming points out, a House of Lords inquiry whose members were initially sympathetic finally recommended against a law allowing euthanasia. They had concluded that it was impossible to establish a safe system of euthanasia as its proponents claimed. They said that such an institution could never be constructed.

They were right. As Dr Fleming illustrates, even if you accept that it is within the moral authority of man to terminate innocent human life, outside of course of the criminal law in relation to such matters as treason, as well as fighting to defend the country, it is impossible for the élites to limit the institution to the two cases used originally to justify its introduction.

The fact is there is no way to prevent euthanasia being used by the greedy to advance their interests nor by a delinquent state which, notwithstanding its extraordinary wealth, decides that it is unable to provide the health services its elderly citizens need.

With this book, Dr Fleming is making a crucial contribution to the debate on the introduction of euthanasia as an acceptable institution in our civilisation.

It is not; it is an indication of its terrible decline. There is no better explanation of why this is so than Dr Fleming’s.

Are our politicians, judges and mainstream media moral enough to at least consider this?

Let us hope so.

David Flint

David Flint read law and economics at Universities of Sydney, London and Paris, and is an emeritus professor of Law.

He has served as Chairman of the Australian Press Council and of the Australian Broadcasting Authority and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1995. He writes regularly in the press and comments on radio and television and has published books and articles on topics such as foreign investment law, European Union law, the media, international economic law and Australia’s constitution.

Introduction

The ministers of the law are the magistrates; the interpreters of the law are the judges; lastly, we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen.¹

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.²

There is nothing new about the subjects of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Historian, Ian Dowbiggin, has demonstrated the way which, in Western societies, attitudes to euthanasia and assisted suicide have changed over the centuries. Toleration of euthanasia and assisted suicide was followed by centuries of moral rejection culminating in these activities being made illegal.

In ancient Greece and Rome, before the coming of Christianity, attitudes toward infanticide, active euthanasia and suicide had tended to be tolerant. Many ancient Greeks and Romans had no cogently defined belief in the inherent value of individual human life, and pagan physicians likely performed frequent abortions as well as both voluntary and involuntary mercy killings. Although the Hippocratic Oath prohibited doctors from giving a deadly drug to anybody, not even if asked for, or from suggesting such a course of action, few ancient Greek or Roman physicians followed the oath faithfully. Throughout classical antiquity, there was widespread support for voluntary death as opposed to prolonged agony, and physicians complied by often giving their patients the poisons they requested.³

Against the general disapproval of euthanasia over the last 20 centuries, Dowbiggin shows that at least since the late 19th century active euthanasia or mercy killing has been advocated by some as acceptable public policy. This shift in attitudes to euthanasia Dowbiggin associates with the major intellectual shift that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the shift away from Christian moral teaching. Causes of this change in the intellectual climate included the emergence of Darwinism and eugenics which questioned the right to life of the physically or intellectually unfit.⁴

There is a raft of other major events which contributed to changes in moral beliefs. Account must be taken of the extraordinary advances in the medical sciences, the greatly increased years of life for the average person, the capacity of medicine to defy impending and inevitable death even at the cost of increased suffering to the dying person, and the much greater value placed on the principle of autonomy and the right of the individual to make such moral choices about the disposition of his own body as he sees fit.

Over the last 2500 years, what has changed is the historical context within which euthanasia issues have arisen, but not the fundamental moral questions involved in either doctors killing their patients with at least the presumed consent of the patient or assisting patients to kill themselves. The context within which these issues arise is what has changed, not the moral issues themselves and not the essential elements of what constitutes good public policy.

The contemporary context in Australia and other Western countries is one in which a very small but influential group of religious believers, best described as atheists, secular humanists and secularists, dominate the major switch-points of influence in society. They are especially to be found in education, the media, political parties, the public service (state and national), business, the law, medicine and sports organisations. And like other revolutionaries, either from the right or the left, they rely on the compliance of those innocents in positions of authority, the ones Lenin allegedly called utter simpletons or useful idiots.⁵

That these people are, like communists, religious believers who have embraced a particular creed or set of beliefs will be discussed in chapter 3. They try to hide this fact from the public claiming that their beliefs are objective and guided by reason alone. They aim to expel Christians especially from public debate on the basis that they are trying to impose their Christian beliefs on society but have no such scruples when it comes to imposing their belief system on society.

These are the people who have championed the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage and euthanasia. That they have been so successful despite their small numbers is testimony to their political acumen, their ability to mislead the public on their ultimate intentions, and the utter failure of the leadership of the Christian churches to (1) adequately and strongly contend with secularist aims to banish Christianity from any position of influence in Western societies, and (2) explain just why the Hebrew-Christian tradition is crucial to the proper and just workings of civil society as we in the West have received it. Indeed, many within the churches have colluded with the secularist agenda.

It is certainly not true that all agnostics and atheists belong to these activist groups which promote:

hatred of all other religions,

intolerance and persecution of those who speak against their agenda by claiming that those who disagree with them are Islamophobes, homophobes, fundamentalists, racists and

the idea that other non-secularist religious believers are necessarily disciples of an out-moded and hateful system of beliefs.

There are serious-minded agnostics and atheists who are tolerant of ideas with which they disagree, can disagree without being disagreeable, have an appreciation of the great contribution made to our civil institutions by Christianity, and see no need to adopt the reflex position that if the Christians are in favour of something then it must be opposed. Any generalisation on the attitudes of atheists and agnostics must be qualified by the undeniable fact that outstanding contributions to Western societies have been made by people who do not believe in God.

This book presumes to tackle only those who fit the description of ideologues who are disrupters of civil society as traditionally received in the West, enemies of free speech, self-proclaimed haters of other religions and persecutors of the right of Christians to contribute to society as freely as that granted to those who hold any other set of beliefs. Far from being guided by reason, they prefer caricature and personal abuse as their weapons of debate, and the more so given their claimed celebrity status as the only right-thinking members of society.

Particularly of relevance to this book is the danger to civil society of legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide, the cause du jour⁶ of the élites and recently embraced by most of the politicians in the Victorian and Western Australia State Parliaments (Australia).

Chapter 1 will define euthanasia and distinguish it from acts and omissions commonly but, as I argue, wrongly thought to be euthanasia. Reference will be made to the remarkable agreement over many centuries of human experience about the wrongfulness of euthanasia expressed in codes of ethics which have arisen in cultures and regions of the world which differ very widely from each other.

Chapter 2 will identify some of the currents of thought which have done much to revolutionise Western societies from within, such that euthanasia is just one of an enormous range of social reforms being embraced by those societies, each reform making further reforms more likely.

Chapters 3 to 7 will investigate the emergence of the religion or belief called by various names of which secularism and secular humanism appear to be the most widely used names and rationalism the most unfitting. The war against religion [code for Christianity and especially Catholicism] will be reviewed and, in the context in which it seems to have permeated the minds of most of those who occupy our public institutions such as the law, medicine, the judiciary, parliaments, universities, secondary education and the churches.

Chapters 8 to 11 will look at euthanasia in terms of the internationally agreed basis for human rights, the inherent dignity of every human being from which arise human rights and the cavalier indifference of contemporary Western societies to the Charter of the United Nations which they have signed and endorsed. The champions of human rights are shown to be morphing into the enemies of human rights where the most vulnerable members of the community are concerned. The champions of the new society and its dysgenic effects will be exposed as persons who use weasel words, euphemisms, assertion and an avoidance of the facts to make cases fraught with logical problems, a case usually based upon a practical atheism devoid of rational defence, and a certain misanthropy where suffering human beings are concerned.

The book concludes with its final chapter placing the entire euthanasia debate in the context of moral subjectivism (moral relativism), the misappropriation of concepts such as autonomy and judgemental, and the use and abuse of language as a means of promoting dangerous ideologies while shutting down rational public debate from those who have the temerity to oppose the presumed politically correct thoughts, opinions and actions of ideological atheistic secularists among which we must include those who promote the ideology of transgenderism.

What is at stake?

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.⁷

When I joined the Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class. When will you middle-class perverts stop using the Party as a cultural spittoon?⁸

The central thesis of this book is that euthanasia as an issue is just a part, but a representative part, of the determination of certain élites to de-Christianise Western societies, to rid society of the most important ingredients of civil society as we have received it. Western civilisation evolved over the centuries through the synthesis of Christianity, Greek philosophy and Roman law, a synthesis which ultimately shaped democratic societies based upon the rule of law, promoted the inherent dignity of each human being, born and unborn, the provision of education at all levels in society, the emergence and development of the sciences, the provision and development of hospitals and orphanages, and a social safety net for those who are most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the world.

The massive destruction of human life in communist societies has been no deterrent to the inhuman utopianism of many of these self-described intellectuals who always wanted to make friends with the Soviet Union, believing it to be what Stalin claimed it was, a workers’ paradise. The British Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb and the Australian Jessie Street were shocking examples of visitors to the Soviet Union who saw only what they wanted to see and then presented that as evidence of the need for the fundamental demolition of the Western Christian democracies in favour of Soviet communist totalitarianism.

Australian scholar and journalist, Gerard Henderson, made these observations about Jessie Street.

Street visited the Soviet Union on 10 occasions between 1938 and 1965. On her first journey, she visited Ukraine and praised Stalin’s rule – ignoring the reality of Moscow’s forced famine, which had led to the deaths by starvation of millions of Ukrainians.⁹

And of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, he remarked:

The Webbs admired not only the Soviet prison system but also Stalin’s secret police. As Paul Hollander wrote in Political Pilgrims (1981), the Webbs’ misapprehension of Soviet society was even greater than that of many like-minded left-wing intellectuals at the time. They even praised the OGPU (the predecessor of the KGB), mentioning its strong and professionally qualified legal department. Sure, the Webbs ended up buried in Westminster Abbey. But their support for Stalin’s repression is unforgivable, especially because, in their capacity as free intellectuals in the West, they supported Stalin’s actions in persecuting and killing intellectuals in the Soviet Union.¹⁰

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) proposed a different way forward to promote the socialist revolution given the failure of the working class to spontaneously rise up in violent revolution. Building on Marx’s idea of cultural hegemony or domination, Gramsci proposed the replacement of the Western cultural hegemony deriving from the Hebrew-Christian tradition with a new cultural hegemony deriving from an awakened new consciousness. The proposed new cultural hegemony extended not only to questions of religion or belief but to the cultural values and mores of society. The ruling class sets the dominant worldview. The old ruling class must give way to new rulers who will impose the religion or ideology of secularism by force of law to ensure citizens are bound by what is now described as political correctness. These new political prescriptions and proscriptions are justified by appeal to the OK virtues of compassion, equality, science, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-discrimination and all the canards of third wave feminism.

In the new cultural hegemony, no one will dare say that homosexual behaviour is immoral or unnatural, or that the doctrine of gender fluidity is sheer antiscientific nonsense (which it is), or that parents are the first educators of their children not the State. A multitude of newly invented human rights and anti-discrimination tribunals will see to it that those who do not conform to secularist morality, opinion and ideology will be punished.

In the current context, this new cultural hegemony is the religion of secularism, about which more will be said in chapter 3.

The process by which this revolution will be achieved is what has been called the long march through the institutions a term proposed in 1967 by the German student radical, Rudi Dutschke (1940–1979).¹¹ Dutschke’s reformulation of Gramsci’s philosophy of cultural hegemony was an allusion to the Long March of Mao and the Communist Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Dutschke’s aim was to replace the culture of Western States with that of a new dominant culture, that form of secularism (of which atheism is a key component) which lay at the heart of Marxism.

It is interesting to note the recent resurgence of the works of the Marxist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), doyen of the student anti-war protest movement in the US and Australia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Herbert Marcuse endured a brief moment of notoriety in the 1960s, when his best-known book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), was taken up by the mass media as the Bible of the student revolts which shook most Western countries in that decade.¹²

This resurgence of the doctrines taught by Marcuse is not surprising given the way in which democratic societies like the US, Australia, the UK and most of Western Europe have developed over recent years. One of the first to identify the Marcuse resurgence was professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College,¹³ Carlin Romano in 2011. Moving away from Marx’s idea that the working class would be the natural vehicle of revolution, Marcuse

…vaunted the role of students and discriminated-against minorities such as African-Americans. Combined with Marcuse’s embrace, in his revisionist, Freudian Eros and Civilization, of liberationist sexuality, the expansion of the play impulse, and the ability of art to build resistance to a highly administered, repressive capitalism – Marcuse believed that beauty leads to freedom – the philosophical package positioned him as an effective guru to 60s radical youth already throwing off antiquated sexual mores.¹⁴

By the term one-dimensional society, Marcuse was referring to the nature of advanced Western capitalism which imposed its hegemony over the working class. Marx was addressing a much earlier form of capitalism. The new situation demanded a new strategy. The mass of the people, the working class, had lost their authenticity and had identified themselves with all the trappings of the consumer society. Their critical intelligence had been swamped by the avalanche of consumer products and entertainments. They had become conformists, contained by the society which was their enemy if only they realised it. Raising the consciousness of the working class was too difficult with students and minorities such as homosexuals, LGBTQ, womyn¹⁵ oppressed by patriarchy, people of colour and greenies being the better vehicle for the overturning of the existing order. This approach, largely in agreement with that of Gramsci and Dutschke, fuelled the long march through the institutions as the graduates from the universities, schooled in the religion of secularism and the politics of identity, moved into the switch points of power in the parliaments, the judiciary, the media, education, social work, the churches, and the economic managerial class.

The long march through the institutions

includes the Church

Evidence that the long march through the institutions includes the Churches is not difficult to find. This is especially true of the Catholic Church where those in significant positions of authority now argue quite openly for a change in Catholic doctrine where, for example, moral issues are concerned. Feeling in no way bound by Catholic teaching, many teachers in Catholic schools make their own arrangements about what they will teach children where sexual morality is concerned, encouraged by religious education experts in Catholic education bureaucracies.

The Catholic Church has traditionally not seen the definitive interpretation of scientific evidence as within her own competence. It is not within my competence either and this book in no way takes a side in, for example, the debate on human caused climate change.¹⁶ Certain agencies of the Catholic Church have, however, played an active role in the advocacy of green politics, the use and misuse of scientific theories to advance a political cause. Green politics is not part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Church agencies should not use the Church to advocate partisan political stands based upon one side of a scientific controversy.¹⁷ Notwithstanding the fact that human-caused climate change is a matter of scientific debate, some Catholic bureaucracies have taken anthropogenic caused climate change as unquestionably a fact and that human beings can, by certain actions, restore the climate to some agreed normative range. In some cases, attachment to a particular secularist ideology conditions their promotion of political and economic solutions not within their competence to propose. Take this, for example from Catholic Earthcare Australia, the ecological agency of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference whose vision is for an ecologically sustainable and resilient Australia, where Catholic communities play an active part in the holistic care of social, human and environmental ecology:

Rapid climate change caused by human activity is now recognised as a scientific reality. Ecosystems and communities around the world are already experiencing the impacts of increasing land temperatures, rising sea levels, and a change in the frequency of extreme climatic events. And although climate change affects all life, the marginalised and the disadvantaged are the most vulnerable.¹⁸

Another example would be the apparent challenge to Catholic moral teaching in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, depending on how you wish to interpret this document. Such a challenge has been clearly expressed by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, when he spoke of a paradigm shift in morality.

It’s a paradigm change, and the text itself insists on this, that’s what is asked of us – this new spirit, this new approach! So every change always brings difficulties, but these difficulties have to be dealt with and faced with commitment.¹⁹

What is being spoken of here appears to be the admission to Holy Communion of persons living in an unrepented and continuing state of adultery. So much for the Sixth Commandment. Even worse, rejecting the rules of reason and logic, Father Antonio Spadaro, said to be very close to the Pope, has made this extraordinary statement in order to justify the unjustifiable, to use reason in order to attack reason.

Theology is not Mathematics. 2 + 2 in Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with God and real life of people.²⁰

Father George Rutler has described this remarkable formulation as the attempt of a confused mind to justify ‘situation ethics’, by which sentiment replaces reality. And Rutler reminds us that in the lives that people actually live, facts are facts, as distinct from the indulged lives lived in ivory towers.²¹

Added to this have been the remarks of moral theologian, Maurizio Chiodi who, in mid-December 2017, in a lecture at the Pontifical Gregorian University, said that artificial contraception is in certain situations not only acceptable, but even required. His lecture was taken by many people to mark the beginning of the deconstruction of Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical, Humanae vitae, issued in 1968.

For the casual observer, Pope Francis strongly encourages progressivism with his green Laudato Si’, his Amoris Laetitia, and his more recent Apostolic Constitution, Veritatis Gaudium, published on the 29th of January 2018, when he called on Catholic academicians to work towards a radical paradigm shift or cultural revolution.

This vast and pressing task requires, on the cultural level of academic training and scientific study, a broad and generous effort at a radical paradigm shift, or rather – dare I say – at a bold cultural revolution. In this effort, the worldwide network of ecclesiastical universities and faculties is called to offer the decisive contribution of leaven, salt and light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the living Tradition of the Church, which is ever open to new situations and ideas.²²

The footnote reference for a bold cultural revolution is not to Mao Zedong, but to his own Laudato Si’ at paragraph 114.

All of this shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution. Science and technology are not neutral; from the beginning to the end of a process, various intentions and possibilities are in play and can take on distinct shapes. Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.²³

Journalist and writer Claudio Ivan Remeseira, specialist in Latino & Latin American Culture and Politics, offers a perceptive account of the political theology of Pope Francis. Remeseira correctly identified the challenge for the Catholic Church [which] is how to accommodate to today’s world without being assimilated into its secular values.²⁴ In his perceptive explication of the political theology of Pope Francis, Remeseira identifies the contradictions at the heart of Francis’ theology. He is, says Remeseira, anti-Modern and deeply mistrustful of Liberalism and capitalism, on the one hand, yet very much a product of the secularism of the Peron phenomenon which helped form him in his early years in Argentina. He is not exactly in favour of democracy, more in favour of a populist and Peronist movement.

One Anti-Modern trait of his thinking is his mistrust of Liberalism. Despite his constant appeals to political tolerance, Francis’ political thought is rooted in a pre-modern, organicist view of the community as foundation of social and political life. Liberal democracy and the modern doctrine of human rights are the antithesis of that view. In Evangelii gaudium, the word people appears 164 times; the word democracy, not once.²⁵

For Catholics, secular political beliefs should not be the prism through which the Gospel is understood and presented. It is the Gospel which is the lens through which the secular world is to be understood and evaluated, with Catholic moral and social teaching informing that critique. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to Him (cf Matthew 22:21). And as St Paul put it, Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God and those which exist are established by God (Romans 13:1). It is not the role of the Church to impose, endorse, let alone propose a political ideology based on secularist principles.

The liberal protestant churches also exhibit strongly the influence of the doctrines of secularism with their promotion of contraception, ambivalent stances on abortion, promotion of green politics where climate change is concerned, and tolerance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

However, where euthanasia is concerned, the mainstream Christian churches, to this point, have maintained their traditional opposition to the killing of patients even at the competent request of the patient.

The Long March over the precipice

Those who understand the real nature of the political game now being played out in Western democracies know that to conquer the institutions (the law, the media, the schools, the churches, universities, etc.,) positions them to gain popular political power and support. On winning the war of positioning, the high priests of the new political ideology would then have the necessary political power and popular support to further promulgate and instantiate the political culture which had its origins in Marxism. However, Marcuse’s prescription for a society in which man is truly liberated offers us little hope that in a progressive society our freedoms will be safeguarded.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.²⁶

Do the new atheists fully understand to what they are party? Almost certainly not, because they are more motivated by their hatred of religion and by their dismissal of philosophy as a waste of time. Do elected politicians and Christian progressives who assist the ideology of secularism really understand to what they are agreeing? For most, almost certainly not. They are, as I suggested earlier, the useful idiots to which Lenin is said to have referred. But there are others who know full well what they have in mind for us.

Expertly manipulated by those who have embraced secularism as their default religion or belief, the wider society sleepwalks to the precipice of a new and malignant cultural imperialism which, when fully achieved, may awaken them from their slumber but too late to do much about it.

This is the context in which the manic embrace of the culture of death must be considered. It is a cultural context in which an appeal to personal autonomy to extinguish personal autonomy (my right to be killed or to kill myself) has been approved in the Victorian and Western Australia State Parliaments, in various States