Earlier this year, Noa Pothoven, an anorexic and depressed Dutch girl, attempted to receive state-supported euthanasia. She was refused on account of her age, and decided to starve herself. The state, faced with a self-starving anorexic girl, decided to condone her actions and helped her die in palliative care.
Thirty years ago, thousands of student protesters near Tiananmen Square were killed by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Fifty years ago, Jan Palach, a Czechoslovakian college student, set himself alight on one of Prague’s main boulevards in a protest against the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of his home.
And 75 years ago, thousands of men stormed four beaches in northern France on D-Day, charging forward although many knew they were doomed to die.
Death and politics have always been interlocked. Humanity has long wrestled with death and our fear of it. Indeed, the two largest religions on the planet, Christianity and Islam, feature their central players — Jesus Christ and Muhammad — conquering death.
In modernity, death has continued to dominate the discussion. It connects to almost every single major political issue. Abortion, euthanasia, gun policy, healthcare, foreign intervention — all center around death. Even when death is not at the forefront of issues, it still remains unspoken. The state has even managed to find a way to tax death itself with the inheritance tax.
Death’s centrality is not altogether shocking. After all, death is the absence of life, and life is the most precious thing — or is it?
Already, multiple European states have passed laws which so wrongly allowed — and by allowed, I mean indirectly encouraged — a hurting teenager to end her life prematurely.
These laws are being passed because those who support them have abandoned the view that life — that is to say, innocent life endowed with unalienable rights — is inherently a precious thing which must be protected at all costs. To them, it has become nothing more than the life so famously created in the first chapter of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: without meaning.
To them, life is not the most important thing. That value has instead been assigned to stability. Stability is what matters, even if life becomes devalued. A 17-year-old girl, anorexic and depressed, is unstable; allowing her death (or had she been slightly older, actively partaking in her death) restores stability. The importance of her life is irrelevant in the quest for stability. Such calculated thinking is what has led China to endorse totalitarian concepts like labor camps for Muslims and social credit scores. Rights are nonexistent. Stability reigns.
Compare that view of death with those of the martyrs. Those in Tiananmen Square, Jan Palach, the D-Day soldiers — they knew they could die; Palach and many of the men on the beaches could be relatively certain they would. But they did not yield, instead sacrificing that most precious gift — life. They knew that a long life of stability under the Chinese, Soviet, or Nazi constitutions was worthless. They viewed death as a small price to pay, if it meant that others could avoid a cold life of totalitarian stability.
A life protected by rights is what is most precious. Our collective fear of death has so begun to overtake us that we have lost sight of this critical fact. If nothing changes, then in the coming years laws similar to those which opened the way to and allowed Noa Pothoven to end her life will be passed throughout the world.
Those martyrs died so that we would remember how important it is that life is respected, and that rights endowed are protected rights. Let us remember their version of death, and not the version of death which seems to prevail today.
Anthony J. Constantini recently graduated from Saint Petersburg State University with a master’s degree in Strategic and Arms Control Studies. He currently lives in Vienna, Austria.
