- If you want Terri Schiavo – or your ailing Grandma – dead, then kill her yourself. But call things by their right names. The act is murder. The actor is a murderer. And the victim is not ever a volunteer.h.koppdelaney / Foter.com / CC BY-ND
At FreeTheAnimal.com, Richard Nikoley riffs on an idea that has bounced around between us for close to a decade: If you want someone dead, kill him yourself:
I have a modest proposal and it’s already in the title: if you want someone dead, then just kill them yourself.
You see, it’s very difficult for me to assume that many people don’t want one whole fuck of a lot of people dead. Isn’t that part of the reason why so many agitate, then stand in line at a voting booth, to vote death by proxy, “support the troops,” and all thayt? Do they go home and wash their hands?
If you want someone dead — and I’m certainly not saying there’s not valid reasons for that — then kill them yourself.
Just kill them yourself.
Imagine a world where that was the creed, and you had to live with, or got to enjoy, the real consequences of your deed. Might you be a little careful?
My piece of this turns on the state-sanctioned murder of Terri Schiavo in 2005. I wrote this about it at the time:
Schiavo
I have very little time right now, but I’ve been following this case for years, and I don’t want to have misrepresented my views by my silence.
I am stoutly opposed to “sanctioned” violence in any form, with the only exception being where to fail to act with immediate force will result in even greater injury. I think Ayn Rand and much of the (broadly-drawn) libertarian movement has made a huge mistake in their endorsement of abortion. Abortion is the wedge issue by which Communism seeks to introduce the idea of a “sanctioned” murder into the minds of otherwise decent people. Geriatricide and “merciful” infanticide are other emotion-laden tines in the same rhetorical fork. If we ever come to the day when we as a culture proceed to killing Jews or Kulaks or genetic defectives or other “useless eaters,” it will be because we have unthinkingly adopted these specious arguments of a “sanctioned” homicide.
(Members of AARP could stop to consider that Terri Schiavo is the left’s final solution to the Socialist inSecurity mess.)
First, in the world as libertarians idealize it, there would be no circumstance under which a state could “justly” harm an innocent homo sapiens.
Second, in the world as it exists now, if Terri Shiavo’s husband sought to kill her with his own hands, he would certainly be prosecuted for murder by the State of Florida.
This establishes the proper libertarian political position in this matter: It’s none of the state’s damn business, not on either side, not at any level of government.
Another bogus argument being propagated by seemingly thoughtful people, an advanced symptom of the Communist ploy cited above, is this claim:
No one would want to live in that state.
Why is this specious? Because the words are a canard, a decoy intended to disguise the true claim:
No one who actually is alive in that state would want to live.
This is clearly false to fact, both in the instant case and universally. If you poke Terri Schiavo with a knitting needle – which, unlike giving her water, is probably lawful – she will demonstrate that, to the extent that she is capable of expressing wants, she wants to live. The invalid move in “no one would want to live” is the substitution of a claimed hypothetical desire now, without any risks or consequences, for actual expressed desire later, in the actual imagined future circumstances. Libertarians will thunder, “I would never choose to live as a slave!” but the evidence of history is that many, many people have preferred slavery to death. Armchair expostulations – or even living wills – are fine sentiments, but people in Terri Schiavo’s circumstances very clearly do want to live, and it is twice obscene to claim that the allegedly “sanctioned” murder of an innocent homo sapiens is allegedly “justified” by the victim’s alleged past desires.
If you want Terri Schiavo – or your ailing Grandma – dead, then kill her yourself. But call things by their right names. The act is murder. The actor is a murderer. And the victim is not ever a volunteer.
I would address this differently now, as a matter of self-adoration on the part of the actor – as I do with abortion – but it’s interesting to me to revisit the kinds of double-think that go in to so many “modern” arguments in behalf of atrocity.
