The Banality Of Evil

"The Banality Of Evil:" - When The Process Is More Important Than Life

In her book, "Eichmann In Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt uses that phrase to describe Eichmann's peculiar and detached attitude toward the monstrous evil that he perpetrated on the Jewish people. Her thesis is a bit more complex than that, but the phrase applies so well to the clerks and administrators and judges whose slavish attention to the process and the rules and the reinforcement of their own power made sure that Alfie Evans died.

It is nothing more than a firm and unshakable belief that government knows best; that the individual is secondary and subordinate to to the wishes and goals of the central planners and the career bureaucrats whose contempt for Everyman is palpable.

What saddens me almost as much as the death of an innocent child is the obtuseness of the political and medical establishment, who have become so inured to the concept of government as the ultimate arbiter of...everything...that they have lost sight of the basic human right of self determination. As Alfie Evans dies, calls grow for better ways to support grieving parents There are a bunch of awful quotations from the article, but here is one that encapsulates it, from a physician no less...

Looking forward, there is a real need to try to resolve disagreements between parents and doctors. Entrenched disagreement can reach a point where it's very difficult to step back from...

It wasn't a disagreement. The parents of this child were trying everything in their power to save his life, and the government, in the form of the judiciary and the medical establishment was trying to kill him.

Why? because those are the rules, and rules must be obeyed slavishly, or society will soon be filled with individuals who do what they want with their own lives.

The first thing Hitler did when he gained power was to change the law, to make his desire for the destruction of the Jewish people a legally acceptable result. 

Alfie Evans' death does not rise to the level of genocide, but it is on the continuum.

Why do once-great nations crumble and fall?

Because they deserve to.

Like the parents of Charlie Gard – another child similarly condemned to death by a preening NHS – Alfie’s parents disagreed with the hospital’s plans to abandon further treatment and remove life support from their son.  They began to investigate alternatives for care outside the NHS system, never suspecting that the state-run system would see their love for their child as a threat to the NHS and would respond with ferocity.

Alder Hey’s physicians have been unrelenting in their abandonment of this child, having decided more than a year ago, in February of 2017, that Alfie should quit embarrassing them by surviving in spite of receiving no treatment and get on with the business of the afterlife.

Since making that decision, the hospital has refused to perform even the most common of procedures for a patient with Alfie’s needs, such as a tracheostomy to facilitate easier breathing or a gastrostomy feeding tube for nutrition and medication.

For all this time, Alfie has been fed through a nasal tube, never intended as a permanent solution, but rather as a stopgap (weeks, not months) designed to be used until a g-tube can be placed.

The medical treatment Alfie has received is abominable, as a direct result of the hospital’s decision, and subsequent criminal obstinacy toward anyone suggesting that their prognosis might be in error.

To hear the barristers for Alder Hey wax poetic about the “first class care” given Alfie by the NHS (parroted by judge after judge in court proceedings) is indeed revolting – the British equivalent of Baghdad Bob. In truth, they have made no attempt to diagnose Alfie’s condition, preferring instead to place him on heavily sedating anti-seizure medications, then claiming that his lethargy is further evidence of his irreversible decline.

The world is witness to slow-motion murder. The perpetrators are the NHS, and the motive is not pecuniary, but rather a perverse form of institutional vanity.

Italy has conferred citizenship to Alfie, and there is a medical air ambulance standing by at the request of the pope to fly Alfie to the Vatican’s children’s hospital, Bambino Gesù, where Alfie can be treated.

But while socialism requires citizen confidence to operate, it will settle for coercion to gain compliance. This is why Alder Hey refuses to release Alfie. Should the boy survive outside NHS care, their “infallibility” would be shattered, and (gasp!) the sheep may begin to question their shepherd.

Collectivist schemes of medicine are no more sustainable (or just!) than collectivist schemes of societal order. Both require submission, even unto death.

The only “life unworthy of life” is that of the arrogant, self-congratulatory medical murderers of the NHS and their judicial enablers. May God’s judgment be realized in the fullest.

Amen to that. The decree refusing to allow the child to be flown to Italy for treatment at precisely no cost to anybody is what shifts this from typical bureaucratic heartlessness and obstinacy into the realm of purest evil. No caring person—no healer worthy of the designation—would ever countenance being party to such an atrocity.

But these are neither caring people nor healers. We’re talking here about monsters, abominations. To grant them an indulgence they in no way deserve by calling them “human” besmirches the word itself.

Yet instead of being righteously cast out of decent society as they should be—shunned to grub about its margins in wretched disgrace and deprivation—they’re running the damned place. Astoundingly, incomprehensibly, it gets even worse (see the attached threatening Tweet from the Merseyside Police for that). Perhaps worse still, the Facebook post linked in the Tweet is chock-full of nitwit statements of support for the NHS posted by Old Blighty’s bleating sheeple.

Maybe it would be better after all if little Alfie winds up succumbing to England’s inhuman savagery and indifference in the end and passes on to a better place. It might be better than living out his life in such a place, forced to acknowledge such contemptible curs as his countrymen.

May the perpetrators of this repulsive display of wanton cruelty burn in the hottest fires of Hell for all eternity.

And yeah, when the day comes that America’s government-(mis)run health-care system has attained this summit of degeneracy, I think everyone here will agree that it is DEFINITELY time to start shooting the bastards.

Update! The cold, hard truth:

If you don’t understand why the NHS and British courts refused, you don’t get socialized medicine. It is not, nor has it ever been, about health care. It’s about power. Once a government — any government — takes control of your health care, they own you and your children. Alfie’s parents and the British public had for months demanded Alfie’s release just to seek treatment by doctors competent enough to figure out what was wrong with him. But, for a socialized system, that’s dangerous. It implies that an individual Brit has rights not bestowed by the state.

In a social “democracy” like Great Britain, the state isn’t there for the purpose of serving the people — sick or otherwise. The people are there for the purposes of the state. If the state can hold your child hostage in a hospital whose doctors are too incompetent to arrive at a diagnosis — yet may terminate his life without your permission — neither you nor your child are “free” in any meaningful sense of the word. And this doesn’t stop at health care, of course. Remember Brexit? What happened when the voters of Great Britain made their wishes known regarding the European Union? The will of the British electorate was ignored.

Likewise, the wishes of Alfie’s parents never meant anything. Nor did the overwhelming public support they received. It is the “interests” of the state that matter in Perfidious Albion, and they have little or nothing to do with those of the “free people” who populate that benighted isle. There is only one way that Alfie is ever going to escape the clutches of the state apparatus they call, with no intentional irony, the National Health Service. The NHS and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital was always going to have the final word on Alfie’s fate. 

The most chilling thing about all this has little to do with Britain or its inhabitants; the people of Europe have for centuries been perfectly willing to subject themselves to despotism, oppression, and abuse by tyrants—nor have they ever suffered a shortage of would-be dictators willing to step up and take the job. It’s that here in America, a substantial percentage of our own population demands that we walk down this exact same ruinous road ourselves.

Which in turn is why, in my more pessimistic moments, I’m convinced that either a conflagration or a breakup is inevitable. How can people who cherish liberty and self-determination peacefully coexist for long with grasping, megalomaniacal fools and still call themselves free?

Alfie Evans, the State, and Us

You think the issue of the baby in England is just another story of individuals dealing with a personal tragedy?   You're wrong.   The story involves all of us.   It involves all of us in a very serious manner.   It is part of the thus far  nonviolent civil war we fight here in America – a war, again, like the first Civil War, for the soul of our country.   It is the war between Western,  liberal Judeo-Christian values and the values of leftism.   It's a war between the individual as the focus of our lives and culture and the big state as the focus.  

Just look at the stark realities that have played out in England.   Its health care system is now completely absorbed by the state.   (Ours is well on the way.)   The focus was the state, faceless, unaccountable, a massive bureaucracy armed with tremendous power shared with the politicians up in their distant offices, the unelected judges with their lifetime appointments, and the government employee doctors all on one side, and the individuals – Mom, Dad, and the baby – on the other.   Who do you suppose won this give-and-take, this health care transaction?   Talk about inequality. 

 Those on the left are livid if the guy  next door has a BMW and themselves only a Toyota, but they don't blink an eye at the truly massive inequality inherent in state versus individual power.   The state in England crushed Mom.   The state eliminated Dad.   And the state has told the baby his life is up, and he's ready to die.   But of course, keep in mind that all the state actors wrap their actions in  words of kindness, compassion, and  what is best for all concerned, serving the will of the people, and acting for the common good – all their usual regressive Marxist claptrap.

Now, if this is the soul of America one is fighting for, I say a plague on your house.   But this, indeed, is the soul the American left is battling for – the glorious state as the center of American life.   This is what the Democratic Party, our N.Y.  Times  op-ed writers, our mainstream media and tech elites, our university professors, leftist clergy, and Hollywood stars are all lined up rallying for: government – big, controlling, iron-fisted power centered in Washington.   They fight for this because no matter how smart, no matter the Yale or Princeton degree, no matter how sweet and well intentioned, American men and women of the left are now almost completely unmoored from the wisdom and liberalism of our great Western American Judeo-Christian values.   They have bought into what all humans tend to be attracted to, the child in us all, the world of "take care of me forever, Mommy and Daddy."   And government is, for them, that forever Mommy and Daddy of their fantasies.

Those of us who have retained control of that child within, channel instead the free adult inside, and have learned from our great Bible, from Western traditions and the American Founders – we fight this poison.   It is because we know  that though the state  can bring some good to life, when it becomes the center of life, the dominant force in a society, when it overwhelms what should be the center – namely, the individual – great evil comes of that.   That evil has come hard to England, and now it has moved on to America through our civil war between Americanism and leftism.  

What comes of losing to the left is a child kidnapped by state actors for "his own good."   What comes of losing to the left is the government standing in every examining room in America, every operating room, every emergency bay, unseen but present and powerful and demanding.   It is an entity that knows nothing of you, that knows nothing of your life and family and desires and needs, but is there nonetheless saying loud and clear,  "You will see the doctor I demand, have the test I think best, undergo the procedure I assess proper, accept the payment I think socially just, swallow the pill I approve, deal with your family member in the manner I prescribe, and if you disagree or push back, or do not comply,  the fury and massive power  we hold will be unleashed to confront you."

So, men and women of the left, cheer on your Obamacare, single-payer, Medicare for All, and Medicaid.   Cheer on the child inside you.   Cheer on socialism and all the degradation of life that comes with it.   But if at the end of  this civil war in America and you  the left  wins, keep in mind there is much to pay for this utter foolishness.   Mom and Dad in the guise of the state are a demanding and controlling thing.   Brace yourselves to live the degrading lives of children, as subjects of this raw and oppressive power.   Keep in mind that it never, ever  turns out well.   Ask the parents in England, or their child.   Ask the thousands who will die this year in England waiting to get the care they need.   Ask the millions in socialist Cuba about not having an aspirin available in their hospitals.

Leftism poisons everything it touches, from our health care to our economy, our  schools, universities, arts, sports, religious institutions, and even the Boy Scouts.

The child in Great Britain has no chance of ever even becoming a scout of any sort.   The state in England is done with him and his parents.   That's what Hope and Change are all about.