By Michael Cook
Although she discourages it, crowds at Kamala Harris’s rallies chant: “Lock him up. Lock him up.” Crowds at Trump’s rallies had the same chant for Hillary Clinton.
I wish the media and the police had a similar fervour about locking up Philip Nitschke, the world’s best-known assisted suicide activist. Dr Nitschke is an Australian doctor and physicist who has dedicated his life to promoting “rational suicide”. The most recent casualty of his obsession is an unnamed 64-year-old woman from the American mid-West. She became the first person to use Sarco, the latest of his suicide inventions, to kill herself in Switzerland.
Nitschke’s organisation explained that she “had been suffering for many years from a number of serious problems associated with severe immune compromise.” Was the pain which drove her to suicide physical or mental? We don’t know.
Sarco is a sleek airtight pod. The client – or is he or she a patient? or a suicidee? or a victim? – gets comfy inside. The lid is closed. The client pushes a button and the capsule fills with nitrogen gas. The client goes to sleep and never wakes up.
The lid is transparent and the base is elevated and tilted, so the patient can take a last look at the world. Afterwards, the pod can also be used as a coffin – a seamless transition from smelling the roses to pushing up daisies.
No one could question Nitschke’s energy and ingenuity. Sarco is only the most sophisticated of his efforts to help people to shuffle off this mortal coil. In 1996, he created “the deliverance machine”, a laptop computer connected to a syringe driver filled with a lethal drug. In 2008, he created a suicide bag which kills with nitrogen. In 2009, he invented a barbiturate testing machine so that people could ensure that their lethal drugs were still active. In 2012, he launched a beer-brewing company, Max Dog Brewing, for legally importing nitrogen canisters into Australia.
He has also published an online guide on how to kill yourself, The Peaceful Pill eHandbook, which is updated regularly on methods involving barbiturates, over the counter drugs, gases, and poisons. (It is banned in Australia.) He travels around the world giving DIY workshops on how to top yourself. His message? Anywhere, anytime, anyone rational should be allowed to commit suicide.
“You must be able to control the time at which you die,” he told Guardian Australia in 2015. “That should be an essential human right. In other words, you don’t have to be sick to qualify for voluntary euthanasia. Everybody qualifies. I see too many people now who want to die for social reasons, not medical reasons. They may not be my reasons. They may not be yours. But they are certainly the individual’s.”
How many people has Philip Nitschke killed?
Technically, none. In 1996, when voluntary euthanasia was legal in Australia’s Northern Territory, he assisted four people to die by suicide. Since then, he has confined himself giving advice and encouragement. After the Medical Board of Australia restricted his ability to practice medicine in 2015, Nitschke upped sticks and moved to the Netherlands with his partner, Fiona Stewart. From there he runs Exit International, a network of rational suicide acolytes. He has also established a group in Switzerland – where assisted suicide is legal –called “The Last Resort”, to promote Sarco.
“The day you die is one of the most important days of your life.” Nitschke explained to a Dutch newspaper. “When it becomes inevitable, why don’t we embrace it? With this machine you can die anywhere you want: with a view of the mountains or of the waves of the ocean. And apart from this device, you don’t need much: no doctor putting a needle into your veins, no illegal drugs that are difficult to obtain. This demedicalizes death.”
How many people has Nitschke killed is the wrong question. He is careful enough to abide by the letter of the law in every jurisdiction in which he is active. In his latest triumph, the first Sarco death, he wasn’t even present. The woman’s final moments in a Swiss forest were filmed and he observed them from over the border in Germany in a live-streamed snuff video.
“We saw jerky, small twitches of the muscles in her arms, but she was probably already unconscious by then. It looked exactly how we expected it to look,” he commented.
Nitschke never kills anyone – he encourages people to kill themselves. How many of these have there been? No one knows. Scores? Hundreds? Nobody seems too interested in counting them.
Swiss police arrested four people after the American woman’s death, and may charge them with conspiracy to incite suicide. But my guess is that no one will be fined or jailed, least of all the man most responsible for inciting her.
What is he guilty of?
Legally, nothing. He’s a cunning bastard. But morally, apart from these deaths, he is guilty of an offence for which we don’t lock people up nowadays – blasphemy. But it’s not the old-fashioned kind of blasphemy, which was insulting God. It’s blasphemy against life itself. It’s the worship of nihilism. In Nitschke’s worldview, life has no special value. It’s not worth fighting for; it’s not worth treasuring; it’s not worth defending.
No society which treats a man like Nitschke as an endearing eccentric – as the media has done – can survive.
If there is anyone on God’s earth who deserves to be locked up, it is Philip Nitschke.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at mercatornet.com/this_assisted_suicide_machine_is_not_a_joke.
