By Giulio Meotti
Her name was Shanti De Corte. She was 23. This Belgian girl was euthanized, surrounded by her family, after legally obtaining euthanasia. Six years earlier, Shanti was at Brussels International Airport. She was to fly to Rome after graduation. She was in the departure lounge when Islamic terrorists blew themselves up. Shanti was a few meters away from them. She was taken away alive from the airport that morning, but she would never really get out of that nightmare.
She took eleven antidepressants a day and attended a project by Myriam Vermandel, who was also a victim of the attacks in Brussels, and which offers medical and therapeutic care to the victims of the attacks. Shanti did not hold up so she filed a request for euthanasia for “psychiatric suffering”. She might have improved eventually, but two psychiatrists granted her request. An investigation into Shanti De Corte’s euthanasia has now been opened at the Antwerp prosecutor’s office. But it will be archived, like all the other investigations.
Marion Marechal, the niece of Marine Le Pen who is trying to construct a conservative alternative in France, is right when she comments: “The traumatic shock of an Islamic attack leads a Belgian girl to the euthanasia that our government would like. A cruelly symptomatic double tragedy of our time”.
But since we live in a society that automatically transforms every desire into law, the state is now also being asked to pay for the last injection, in the name of “social justice” and “compassion”. There is, in a certain sense, a new fundamental right to demand from the state the medicalization of one’s death.
Opponents of euthanasia are not numerous, which does not mean that they are marginal. But most of them make arguments that never make themselves heard. Because the era is deaf compared to those who try to separate good and evil.
Shanti was not the case with Christian de Duve, the Belgian Nobel Prize winner for medicine who chose euthanasia at the age of 95. In Shanti’s case we are on yet another level. That one described by Michel Houellebecq: “I must be very explicit, when a country – a society, a civilization – comes to legalize euthanasia, it loses, in my opinion, every right to respect. Then it becomes not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it, so that something else – another country, another society, another civilization – has a chance to be born”.
Now the euthanasia of a 23-year-old girl for “psychological trauma” shows us how far the idea of a “life without dignity” can be extended, a life that ultimately belongs to the state or, more precisely, to the medicine that it shortens it for “humanitarian” reasons, and for “civil society” which decides with diabolical persuasive means what is right or wrong.
What a paradox! The Western public spirit that boasts of having outlawed the death penalty glorifies it when it is no longer imposed to punish, but to “alleviate” and “cure”, thus regaining all the trappings of nobility.
We have fallen into horror and have gone from the banal slogan “you will not have my hate” of some survivors of Islamic attacks to the much more terrifying “you will have my life”?
Chanti did not commit suicide, as happened to other victims of terrorism. A state, its doctors, its “bioethical commissions” and bureaucrats gave her legal death not knowing how to offer her a moral and human alternative.
Are we Europe trapped between Islamist barbarism and the culture of death? Do the nails that hold back all our “progress” fall off instantly when we discover the funeral cloth resting on our old shoulders?
Haven’t we ended up in humanitarian barbarism, where man is erased precisely in the name of the ideals we claimed to uplift, “dignity” and “humanity”?
Did we come out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch?
And what will honest historians say about this period of madness? Those who come out in their right mind will be lucky, but it will be our children who will have to see the sequel.
If it continues like this it will no longer be just decadence, but the apocalypse of civilization.