BHHRG

“The worst is not; so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’”
Shakespeare, King Lear (IV, I, 27)

The universal clamour for “something to be done” about Uzbekistan reaches from the serried ranks of proponents of the invasion of Iraq to find its elusive WMD and overthrow Saddam Hussein to that crusade’s fiercest critics. Ironically, those who doubted every jot of the Bush Administration’s claims about the nature and weaponry of Saddam’s regime are as gung-ho for intervention in Uzbekistan as Washington’s hawks. Unanimity like this among opinion-makers ought to make observers’ queasy. Even if they were right in their analysis of what happened in Andijan, are there solutions not naively optimistic in thinking that Western intervention will necessarily promote a solution which makes matters better for Uzbeks?
Remember Mobutu’s Zaire, for instance. Before his downfall in 1997, everyone agreed there too that nothing could be worse than that regime’s kleptocrat. Well, 3 million dead later, perhaps it is time for human rights activists to prepare for the worst case consequences of their own success. Yet Mobutu is still trotted out as simply an example of American hypocrisy during the Cold War when he was backed as an anti-Communist, rather than seeing the unanimous Western governmental and media campaign to remove him in 1997 as a classic example of short-sightedness on the part of the moral indignation brigade.[1]

It is often claimed, especially by opponents of euthanasia, that one of the reasons why euthanasia is practiced so widely in the Netherlands is that palliative medicine is underdeveloped there. Palliative medicine is medical treatment whose purpose is to cure symptoms where there is no hope of curing the underlying illness. This was developed, especially in England, after the Second World War.
A leading opponent of euthanasia in the Netherlands is Dr. Karel Gunning. He presides a Dutch and an international organization of anti-euthanasia doctors. He is highly critical of the present arrangements, and says, "The whole law is complete nonsense because doctors know in advance that they cannot be punished. If they fill in the forms wrongly (explaining why they put an end to their patients’ life) they will simply be asked to fill them in again."