We the cannibals
Oriana Fallaci.
article published in El Mundo, 9 and 10 June 2005.
Translation: José Manuel Vidal.
Italy will hold a referendum on 12 and 13 June where the citizens of that country will decide whether they want to allow research with human embryos, whether to deepen the scientific development in areas such as assisted fertilisation and stem cell testing. As a result of the enquiry to the population, the writer Oriana Fallaci published in the Corriere della Sera a article that El Mundo reproduces in full because of the topicality of topic in our society and the need for a discussion among properly informed citizens. In Italy, a vote will be taken on four points of a law that is considered very rigid. The first point will allow the repeal of the article that prevents the research on embryos -the most controversial issue-; while the three remaining chapters are much more technical and will depend, in essence, on the first one.
No, I don't like this referendum in which Dr. Frankenstein's patrons will vote out of mere political partisanship or moral myopia. That is to say, without reasoning with their own head, without listening to their own conscience and even without knowing the meaning of the words cells-mothers-oocyte-blastocyte-blastocyte-heterologist-cloning, and certainly without asking themselves or understanding what is behind the offensive for the unlimited freedom of the scientific research . In fact, I will not use my right to vote on 12 June, and I hope with all my heart that the offensive will fail miserably. A wish that was reinforced the day when at the Liceo Mamiani in Rome the most authoritative promoter of the four referendum questions made a joke that sounds like a joke by the head clown of the old variety theatre: "If the embryo is life, masturbation is suicide" (My Lord, I should have spoken to the students about freedom and not about masturbation. I should have reminded them of what Plato says in Book VIII of the Republic, when he writes that from freedom degenerated into licentiousness a bad plant is born and develops: the bad plant of tyranny. This is not about masturbation. It is about explaining to people that unlimited freedom, that is to say, unrestrained and without any moral sense, is no longer freedom but licentiousness. Unconsciousness, arbitrariness. It is about clarifying that, in order to maintain Freedom, limits must be set with reason and common sense. With ethics. It is about recognising the differences between what is lawful and what is unlawful). I don't like this referendum, because apart from the cunning blackmail with which the so-called therapeutic cloning justifies its perversities, i.e. it promises to cure diseases, apart from the obvious story of those who fill their pockets with this blackmail (e.g. the pharmaceutical industry, whose cynicism exceeds that of the arms merchants), behind this referendum there is also a project or even an unacceptable and terrible goal . The project to reinvent Man on laboratory, to transform him into a product to be sold, like a steak or a bomb. The purpose of replacing Nature, manipulating Nature, changing or even disfiguring the roots of Life, dehumanising it by massacring the most defenceless and defenceless creatures.
That is, our unborn children, our future selves, the human embryos sleeping in the freezers of banks or research institutes. Slaughter them, reducing them to drugs to be injected or swallowed, or even growing them large enough to kill them as one kills a calf or a lamb and extract their tissues and organs to sell them as one sells spare parts for a car.
All this reminds me of Huxley's Brave New World, yes, of the abominable world of Alpha and Beta and Gamma men, but above all it reminds me of the obscenity of eugenics with which Hitler dreamed of creating a society made up only of blondes with blue eyes. It reminds me of the camps of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, of Dachau and Birkenau where, in order to speed up the production of the Aryan race by intensifying the twin births of blondes with blue eyes, Dr. Mengele experimented on twins. Thanks to the unlimited freedom of research granted to him by Hitler, Mengele martyred, murdered and sometimes vivisected them. So, beware of fairy tales and hypocrisy.
The Frankensteins
If instead of Birkenau, Dachau, etc., we put the research institutes managed by democracy, if instead of twins vivisected by Mengele, we put human embryos sleeping in freezers, the speech does not change. It is not for nothing that when eight years ago the English created Dolly the sheep, instead of jumping for joy, a shudder of horror ran through me and I said: "We are finished. We are going to a society made of clones. We are going back to Nazism.
Frankenstein and his patrons (jurists, journalists, editorialists, actresses, philosophers, singing crickets, members of the Lyncean Academy, politicians in search of votes, doctors in search of glory) do not want to hear that "We-are-finished, we-are-going-to-a-society-made-of-clones, we-are-going-back-to-Nazism". When I centre speech on Hitler and Nazism or Mengele, they act offended and even scandalised. They blather on about prejudices and protest against the illegitimate comparison. And then, in the purest Bolshevik style, they pillory you. They call you a fool, a meathead, a servant of the Pope and of Cardinal Ruini, a mercenary of the Catholic Church. They reject you with words like retrograde-oscurantist-reactionary and, pretending to be neo-Enlightenment, progressive, avant-garde, they throw the usual banalities in your face.
They repeat that you cannot put short pants on Science, that Knowledge cannot be stopped, that progress cannot be stopped, that facts are stronger than reasons and that the world is moving forward in spite of obtuse people like you. Like me. With stupid calmness they declare that the embryo is not a human being: it is a simple-proposal-of-human-being-or-alive-being, a-simple-set-of-cells-that-do-not-think. With buffoonish assurance they proclaim that it has no soul, that the soul exists if thought exists, that the seat of thought is the brain, and the brain begins to develop two weeks after the embryo has settled in the womb.
Or that a foetus begins to think only in the eighth or ninth month of pregnancy, that, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, we are animals until the fourth month and, therefore, it is the same to protect embryos as chimpanzees. It is useless to object that St Thomas Aquinas lived in the 1200s and that he understood as much about Genetics as I do about cycling. It is useless to reply that to hide behind the syllogism "Brain-Thought-Soul-Equal-Human" is stupidity. An offence to logic. Animals have brains too, please. Animals think too. Ergo, if we stick to that syllogism, they too should have a soul and be considered human.
Needless to note, finally, that we know absolutely nothing about the training of the thought-soul. Not even what was known about the atom when Enrico Fermi found that of uranium 235 and discovered that its nucleus measured one hundred millionth of a millimetre and could disintegrate cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a moment. What if the infinitely small harboured much more than the infinitely large? What if the embryo's brain-soul measured even less than a hundred millionth of a millimetre and moral (as well as intellectual) myopia failed to discover it? What if, consequently, the embryo thought, suffered as we suffer when Zarqawi cuts off our heads with his halal knife?
The fact is that assertions that are not supported by evidence are theories, full stop, presumed certainties for convenience or opportunism launched as absolute certainties, points of view based on the presumptuous mirage of receiving a Nobel Prize that many shamelessly opt for and shamelessly aspire to without any merit whatsoever. Dogmas that are worth no more than mine. They are even worth much less than mine, which is not based on calculations, convenience or opportunism. And what is mine? The one I express in Letter to a Child Never Born, a book that begins with these words: "Tonight I knew you existed. A drop of life escaped from nothingness". My dogma is the one I repeated in the interview with Foglio, when the neo-Enlightenists and the progressives and the avant-gardists applauded the death sentence on Terri Schindler or, if you like, Terri Schiavo (in their opinion, guilty of having stopped thinking, of no longer having a soul, of not being able to attend every Sunday to the mass called a football match). It is true that I too, without having the proof Fermi provided about the nucleus of the atom, believe that from the moment the sperm fertilises the egg and the primary cell becomes two cells, then four, then eight, then sixteen, then final, it begins to multiply, we are already what we will be. That is to say, human beings. Perhaps not yet persons, since a person is the result of the innate essence and of the experiences acquired after birth, but certainly a human being. The embryo that blossoms in a louse egg is a louse. The embryo that blossoms in the ovum of a dog is a dog (the example of the dog is even given by Monsignor Sgreccia). The embryo that blooms in the ovum of an elephant is an elephant. The embryo that blooms in the ovum of a human being is a human being. And I do not mind at all that, this time, my opinion coincides with that of the Catholic Church. With that of Pope Wojtyla and Pope Ratzinger, with that of Cardinal Ruini and with that of the bishops, archbishops and priests who opposed divorce and abortion. (I too detest abortion, and in voting in favour of abortion, I found myself in deep dilemmas. But I consider divorce as a conquest of civilisation and, for it, I fought tooth and nail).
No blackmail
In fact, if my opinion coincided with that of the Marxist Church, of Lenin, of Stalin, of Mao Zedong, and even of the king of Cuba, the despicable Castro, I would express it with the same candour. I don't even care about his cunning blackmail, i.e. his promise to cure Stephen Hawking's diabetes, dystrophy, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis (the great cosmologist who, for decades now, has been living in a wheelchair and bending over more than a tattered flower). As I said in the Foglio interview, I wouldn't even care if stem cells could cure my cancer, or rather my cancers. God knows how much I like living and that I would like to live as long as possible. I am in love with life. But to cure my cancers by injecting me with the cells of an unborn child would seem to me to be a cannibal. A Medea who kills her own children. ("Cursed woman, abhorred by the Gods, by me and by all mankind. Monster, obscene being, murderer of your children", Euripides tells her through Jason).
And I care even less about the fact that the Frankensteins and their patrons expose me to public scorn with their accusations of being a backward-obscurantist-reactionary-reactionary-stupid-meapilas-servant-of-the-Vatican. And it is not worth explaining to them why an atheist (despite being a Christian) cannot be stupid, cannot be a meathead, and so on. Or why a secularist who has always fought for justice and freedom cannot be backward, obscurantist or reactionary. And I add: there is really no limit to the incoherence of the carpetbaggers. A few years ago, the now supporters of cannibalism shouted that it was cruel to slaughter animals in laboratories. And I am at agreement with them. (I have seen atrocious things in laboratories. Once, in New York, I saw a little dog's heart removed, replaced with the heart of a piglet, and then placed under the poor creature's nose to see if she recognised it. She recognised it and whimpered desperately. Another time, in Chicago, I saw a little monkey's brain removed. The monkey was alive, as the brain had to stay alive. His name was Libby, and as he was strapped to the operating table he stared at me with his eyes, as if asking for financial aid. In fact, I was embarrassed. I threw up and the Frankenstein on duty, a prestigious researcher, asked me in surprise: "Why? I thought she was less squeamish, -less squeamish-. Libby has no soul").
They also complained about the mice used to test the drugs, those charlatans. They defined them as martyrs and, in order to defend them, they organised vindictive demonstrations, similar to those of pacifists who only want peace for one side and that's it. Now, on the other hand, they accept that the guinea pigs are our unborn children, sacrificed like the little dog in New York and like Libby. They accept that the cells of these new guinea pigs will enrich the pharmaceutical accounts, whose cynicism exceeds that of the arms merchants. They accept that embryos will be butchered like calves in butchers' shops so that they can enjoy organs to sell like spare parts for a car.
Do they accept that all this will lead us to realise Huxley's Brave New World, to become Alpha or Beta or Gamma or God knows what: champions of health and beauty, but without brains, or highly intelligent monsters, but without arms or legs? (At purpose, in the laboratories I saw, on another occasion, a bird which, perhaps for amusement, they had made to be born without wings. It looked like a ball of feathers, and looked at me with eyes that, compared to it, Michelangelo's Prisoners, that is to say the four statues with their heads and limbs still inside the stone, look like happy creatures...).
And it is only logical that, from now on, the guinea pigs will also be us. A woman who undergoes egg retrieval is certainly a guinea pig. A woman who, in order to get pregnant, has it implanted, the same. Thanks to a science that is increasingly techno-science, thanks to a medicine that is increasingly technomedicine and therefore increasingly dehumanised, we are guinea pigs even in cases that have nothing to do with artificial fertilisation.
When I undergo radiotherapy in the USA, I don't see human beings. I sense that the doctors and technicians are somewhere, yes, perhaps on the other side of the glass that separates the room where I go to meeting with the machines. But I don't even hear their voices. They no longer speak to me. Even when receipt orders me to hold my breath, it is a machine that speaks to me. The reproduction of a human voice. And I feel alone, like an embryo in the freezer, helpless like a guinea pig at the mercy of a researcher. And the same thing happens to me when I have to fill in the forms that serve to enrich the statistics on healing methods, survivors and the dead. Forms in which I am a simple issue. The issue of a product whose label lacks only the expiry date.
For the sake of progress
Those who in good faith favour the Brave New World always protect themselves under the umbrella of the words Science and Progress. Perhaps the most abused words after Love and Peace. But on the interpretation of the word Progress, and even on the concept of so-called Progress, opinions do not agree. And it is very difficult to know where to stand. For Giordano Bruno it was Copernican astronomy. For Voltaire, it was the refinement of arts and manners. For Kant, it was law replacing force. For Darwin, biological evolution. For Marx, the collapse of the capitalist system. For my great-great-grandparents, the telegraph, the train, the steamship, gas lighting or constitutional monarchy. For my great-grandparents, the electric light, the thermometer, Pasteur's vaccine, Madame Curie's radium or democracy without universal suffrage. For my grandparents, the car, the aeroplane, the telephone, Marconi's radio, penicillin or universal suffrage without the vote for women. For my parents, women's suffrage, air conditioning, dishwashers, television, motorbikes and the Republic. For my world, organ transplants, spaceships, trips to the moon and Mars, bloody computers, bloody mobile phones and the bloody Internet, with which I can slander anyone I want and steal someone else's work without ending up in jail. In spite of the highly praised Human Rights that do not include the rights of those who, like me, go against the tide, nor the Human Rights of children. Rights violated with brainwashing at school, with mistreatment, with kidnappings, with murders, sometimes carried out by Medeas who kill their own children with hammers or by drowning them in bathtubs or swimming pools. And that's not counting the children abused by paedophiles in schools and sacristies, or raped and strangled and then buried alive like Jessica Lundman.
Do we also want to include the holocaust of human embryos in the debatable list of progress which, in 99% of cases, is based on the successes of technology, not morality? And patience if we were more advanced, when we were more ignorant, sicker, poorer or more humane, so that the death of a born or unborn child would fill us with sadness. For Christ's sake! Ratzinger is right (thank you, Holiness, for having the courage to always call bread, bread, and wine, wine), when he writes that Progress did not give birth to a better Man, to a better society, and begins to be a threat to the human race.
As far as Science is concerned, my God. From a young age I bowed to Science with the same devotion that Muslims have for the Koran. With the same obsequiousness they feel for Mohammed. I wanted to be a scientist, and that is why I enrolled in Medicine. Otherwise, I have an instinctive respect for science, a passion that not even the Frankensteins can extinguish. And I would be stupid to deny that humanity has also evolved thanks to it. Even I would like to go to the Moon or Mars. I would even like it much more than the avant-gardists like it. I also like to use the telephone, the radio, the aeroplane and the television. And if I am still alive at the moment, I owe it to medicine, which, even if it sometimes makes me feel like an embryo in the freezer or a guinea pig at the mercy of a researcher, cured and heals me. But...
But science is like fire. It can do great good or great harm. Like fire, it can warm you, disinfect you, save you or incinerate you. Destroy you. Like fire, it often does more harm than good. And the reason is precisely that, like fire, it does not pose moral problems. For it, everything that is possible is lawful. It does not allow itself to be trapped by rhetoric. Science has never had scruples or remorse. It always arrogated to itself the right to do whatever it wanted to do and wants to do because it can. And, in doing so, it never asked itself whether it was just. Moreover, like a whore selling her body, she always sold herself to the highest bidder. She always sought the Nobel Prizes, her vanity, her delusion of omnipotence, her desire to replace Nature (Ratzinger says "replace God"). And he never took his victims into account. Not even the sublime Leonardo da Vinci who, as a painter, painted exquisite Madonnas and exquisite Monnas Lisas and exquisite Lords with the Ermine, but, as a scientist, offered his services to Ludovico Sforza and projected war machines then unimaginable. Super cannons, super tanks, super helicopters to bomb people.
Science as fire
Not even the honest Oppenheimer who, together with Teller, discovered the atomic bomb, took this into account. And it is of no consolation to me to recall that, before exploding it at Fort Alamo, he had sent his Berkeley colleagues the telegram in which, quoting a passage from the sacred Hindu text Bhagavad-Gita and comparing himself to the god Khrisna, he cursed himself mercilessly. "I have become Death, the destroyer of the world". Besides, was it not a physician, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who, in 1789, invented the guillotine, and was it not another physician, Dr. Louis, who, in 1791, directed its manufacture? For every penicillin, science gives us a guillotine. For every Pasteur or Madame Curie or Marconi it gives us a Mengele. Or at least an Oppenheimer or a Teller. And his most dangerous disciples are precisely the researchers. Almost always (honour and glory to the exceptions), researchers don't give a damn about the human race. They are driven only by the demon of curiosity linked to ambition staff and monetary interest ("How will a bird without wings behave? How will a child conceived in a test tube function? What and how much money and fame will this finding bring me?"). And to hell with principles, to hell with the values on which a civil society is or should be based. My dear friends, Ratzinger is right even when he says that, in the name of science, the right to life is inflicted ever greater wounds. He is also right when he says that, by experimenting on human embryos, human dignity is vilified or even denied. He is also right when he says that, if we do not want to lose respect for man, we must demystify the scientific research , demystify Science, i.e. stop considering it as an idol or a divinity. Sacrosanct words that, in my opinion, are also valid for ethics.
(and II)
Any dictionary defines Ethics as that part of Philosophy that deals with Morals. What is right for man, what is right to do or not to do. In fact, the laws of non-barbaric or not entirely barbaric countries are generally inspired by Ethics, and, until yesterday, in the West, we have followed these rules. The problem is that, in the Modern Age, Ethics gave birth to a degenerate daughter called Bioethics. According to the dictionary, Bioethics is a discipline that "deals with moral, individual and collective problems related to the progress of the programs of study in the field of Genetics and technology related to the training of life processes". But about such a discipline I think the same as Erwin Chagaff, the great American biochemist who, just hearing about assisted procreation or artificial fertilisation, would go ballistic and shout: "Ethics is to bioethics what music is to military marches". Well, the Western world is splashing about in these military marches. Bioethics institutes, bioethics committees, bioethics academies. Always in the hands of wise men who claim to want to defend our future, to balance the joy of knowledge with social utility and to put a stop to the greed of industrial and financial interests. But in the face of the idol Science, in the face of the divinity Science, in the face of the myth of the scientific research , Bioethics always crosses its arms. In 1997, when Dolly the sheep was born and it was already clear that, by means of the same artifices, cloning could be extended to human beings, the representatives of the noble discipline defined the thing as ethically unacceptable. "Never! To allow it would be tantamount to going against the biological law core topic! It would be an outrage to Nature, which alone foresees the evolution of our species! It would lead to the decline of our civilisation! They all said it, absolutely all of them. The International Bioethics committee of UNESCO, the United States Bioethics Commission, the committee for Ethics and Bioethics of the European Commission, for example. And the World Health Organisation and the various National Academies of Medicine. When the first child conceived in a test-tube was born, the English child, the same thing. When it came to euthanasia, the same. On the occasion of the current embryo holocaust, ditto.
Vetoes, condemnations, but then everyone began to close their eyes. To give one stone and another one stone, to allow compromises that, in reality, were permissions. It's their way of being Politically Correct. At first, they scream at the outrage. Then they start mumbling that we need to think again, that scientific discoveries cannot be banned, that we cannot go backwards, and then they undo it. Vetoes and condemnations are reviewed. They even become accomplices to the crime. Always under the pretext of therapeutics, it is understood...
The latest example is Italian. It comes from the National Bioethics committee , which, last May, expressed its support for the use of stem cells isolated from aborted foetuses. "The use of foetal tissue extracted from the voluntary termination of pregnancy and its use for scientific and therapeutic purposes is not bioethically illicit". By pledging to keep their hands off "fresh material" (a freshly aborted child is called "fresh material", like fresh fish), and explaining that this might not be necessary, because there are thousands of fetal cells cryopreserved in a Milanese bank, our staminalists will therefore be able to experiment without scruples and without problems.
Abortion incentive
And patience, if they know perfectly well that the decision is an incentive to abortion, sorry, to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy (that's Politically Correct language). Patience. If they know just as well that, for many women and for many couples, the trade in abortive children is a very profitable business.
Think of the "procreative tourism" that many countries in Europe or close to Europe, such as Cuba and Thailand, have embarked on "sex tourism". For seven thousand euros, Ukraine offers a plane ticket, a first class hotel class with meals included, the tourist guide and even an egg. And when you disembark at the airport, you don't even go through customs. The sperm business is also profitable. Alongside frozen eggs, Western banks have huge quantities of frozen sperm. In both cases, the material comes from Ukraine, Romania, Albania, Slovenia, Korea and the poorest countries on the Asian continent. But it also comes from Switzerland, Norway, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Spain. Especially from Barcelona, the city where many immigrants from Eastern Europe live. The British banks in particular are full of this material. Not for nothing has the European Parliament (for its own goodness sake) issued a warning to England, where the market is shamefully flourishing with eggs from Romanian clinics. Mostly eggs sold for a thousand or two thousand euros a dozen by gypsy women. And in the most disturbing book I have ever read on this subject topic, Life for Sale, the authors, Christian Godin and Jacques Testart, report that in Europe, the eggs of blonde and stylish girls (often models) cost much more. At least fifteen thousand euros each.
And they guarantee children of beauty contests, you see? Tailor-made children, chosen from the menu of eugenics and biotechnology. In this regard, Godin tells of having found on an Internet site this advertisement: "Wanted beautiful and intelligent egg from a very sporty student and pupil of a very famous high school ". And now tell me if this research, for which the promoters of the referendum invoke enlightened freedom, cannot be associated with the camps of Dachau, Birkenau, Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Tell me if these investigations, ostensibly aimed at curing diseases, do not in fact point to something very similar to the Hitlerian dream of a society composed only of blondes with blue eyes. Tell me if, under the pretext of therapeutics, Science and Progress do not envisage a world of supermen (super is a figure of speech, given that the award Nobel doctor Kary Mullis proposes to clone us with DNA from famous athletes and rock stars...). However, the 60 members of the National Bioethics committee have given their approval almost unanimously. Only one vote against and one abstention. And among them were some Catholics, and among the Catholics was Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, as well as a bishop and a very prestigious authority in the world of bioethics. I jumped when I read the news. Even though I knew that his was a very well thought-out vote, I thought to myself: How is this possible? Wasn't Wojtyla the first to say that an embryo is due the same respect as any other person? Has the Church given in to Science, which wants to replace the legislators? Apart from Cardinal Ruini and a few others, only subject Ratzinger is holding out? "Science cannot generate ethos", wrote Ratzinger in his book Europe. A renewed ethical conscience cannot come from the scientific discussion ".
Naturally, Ratzinger says this at core topic religious, as a philosopher and theologian who does not dispense with his faith in the Creator God. A good God, a merciful God, a God who invented the universe and created man in his image and likeness. thesis which I sometimes envy him, because it solves the puzzle of who we are, where we come from, where we are going, but in which my atheism sees only a beautiful fable. If God existed and was a good God and a merciful God, why would he have created such a chaotic world? But, in saying so, he defends Nature, Ratzinger. He rejects a Man invented by man, that is to say a man who is a product of himself, of Mengelian eugenics, of Frankensteinian biotechnology. And what he says is true. It is fair and reasonable. It is a speech that goes beyond religion, a civil speech , in which the beautiful fable has nothing to do. It has to do with the duties we have towards Nature. Towards our species, towards our principles. The principles without which Man is nothing but an object of flesh without a soul.
Reflect deeply and you will realise that the blame for this madness lies not only with the scientists, with the researchers, with those without judgement for whom everything is lawful if it is possible and materialising it makes them rich and famous.
It is like the story of Dr. Guillotin. Because it is also the story of those who support him, of those who protect him. Of many politicians, for example. Politicians who, their ideologies having failed them, no longer know which saint to invoke and, in order to stay in the loop, look for the sun of the future in the wretches who want to create Man with the DNA of rock stars and famous athletes (the closest thing to apes and, moreover, drugged).
The role of politicians
Politicians who, in order to regain lost power, allow our (and their) unborn children to end up in the new extermination camps. Who, in order to crystallise their lost power, pass for enlightenment and disregard the concept of family, i.e. the biological concept on which any society is based. They do not define marriage for what it is, i.e. the union of a man and a woman presumably capable of procreation, the legal institution that regulates the need to perpetuate the species, but a union and an institution that welcomes two individuals of the same species with the same rights. And, therefore, it is not capable of perpetuating it. And patience, because if (as I wrote in The Apocalypse) our species opts for homosexuality, it will become extinct like the dinosaurs. Patience if, with gay adoption, instead of one father and one mother, the adopted child finds himself or herself with two fathers or two mothers. Patience if, with two fathers or two mothers, it grows up ignoring the concept of paternity and maternity...
Nor do children born from frozen embryos know who their father is. Nor will they ever know. Bioethics forbids them to be told, and in the father figure they see only a stallion who makes mules pregnant. As for the figure of the mother, think about it. If they are born from the egg of a gypsy woman or a famous model who does not want to say her name, these children will not know who their real mother is either. It is not for nothing that this new way of being born is loved by same-sex spouses. It seems to have been invented for them.
It is also the fault of the intellectuals that Uncle Bruno, my father's brother, used to call intelligentcretins or cretinousintelligent. Intellectuals who, out of opportunism or profit or a mania for influencing the future, approve or propagate Frankenstein's misfortunes as if they really were the achievements of mankind. And also the media, who present these misfortunes with complacency and even with their hats in their hands. With hat in hand, they describe them obsequiously and studiously, as if they were culinary recipes by Pellegrino Artusi or Anthelme Brillat Savarin - two famous Italian chefs. South Korean recipe: "Cells are taken from the epidermis of a patient and the genetic material, i.e. DNA, is extracted. Then you take a donated oocyte from a Ukrainian or Romanian or Slovenian or Korean or Albanian or Maltese woman, who certifies that it is not fertilised, and empty it. The nucleus is removed and discarded. After that, the DNA taken from the patient's body is inserted in place of the nucleus. This operation is called nuclear transfer. It is stimulated with electric shocks so that the cells multiply quickly and rapidly, as if the oocyte had been penetrated by a spermatozoon, the blastocyst is obtained, i.e. the oocyte that corresponds to the first phase of the embryo development . An embryo is created at final. When the embryo grows, it is sectioned (vivisection). Its stem cells are injected into the patient's body...".
The English recipe, i.e. the one provided by the Newcastle researchers, is almost identical. The only difference is to procure three blastocysts beforehand and, after nuclear transfer, to stimulate a rapid development. finding My American oncologist is indignant and says: "This waving the therapeutical purpose is a dirty fib, a cruel lie". It is true that we have not succeeded in eliminating cancer. However, we cure it. Sometimes we block it. They, on the other hand, have not discovered a cure for the diseases they cite to justify the new Slaughter of the Innocents. But if they had, I would say the same thing: we must oppose it. It must be opposed because therapeutic cloning is already reproductive cloning and therefore valid for manufacturing human beings. It must be opposed because distinguishing one from the other is tantamount to hiding behind a semantic trick.
It is necessary to oppose
We must oppose it because injecting a sick person with stem cells means killing them. Do you know why? Because embryonic stem cells are as vigorous and as powerful as they are messy. They do not multiply as and where we want them to, but as and where they please. Ergo, they cause tumours. Recently, they were injected into the brain of a monkey. The brain immediately developed a fulminant cancer and the monkey died within a few days". The fault lies with the so-called normal people. People who out of naivety or desperation believe in the story of diseases that can be cured. Believing it, they allow themselves to be duped by false hopes. Because, like the wise men of bioethics, people often cry out in outrage. They are frightened, they say: I hate what they want to do to me, what is going to happen to me. But then, stunned by the brainwashing done by politicians and intellectuals who present the Frankensteins as benefactors, seduced by the praise of the newspapers who treat them with their hats in their hands, they give in to their doubts. She does not realise that she is facing the tragic fate of our destiny, and changes her mind. In order to feel modern, it adapts. In order not to go against the tide and not to lose the advantages of the supposed modernity (which, in the end, is summary in a mobile phone hanging from her ear) she shouts "miracle". She kneels and applauds, even if it means slaughtering her own children like Medea.
Let's be clear. We live in a society that looks at life in hedonistic terms, full stop. That seeks only well-being, material advantages, comforts. A society in which the soul does not count. And spirituality, even less. And not only in Italy, not only in Europe, but also in the USA. Or worse. In fact, it was the USA that spread the cult of hedonism. It was the USA that launched the fashion for gay marriages and adoptions. It was the US that gave the approval to research. The only difference is that in the USA the majority of citizens oppose it and that their president says to the researchers: "I'm not going to give you money to carry out the slaughter of the innocents. I don't believe in science that destroys life to save life" (Bravo Bush).
From the Pacific to the Atlantic, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Sea, the entire West is sick with a disease that not even millions of millions of stem cells could cure: the intellectual and moral cancer, of which I speak in my Trilogy, especially in The Force of Reason. Precisely because of this cancer we no longer understand the meaning of the word Moral, we no longer know how to separate morality from immorality or amorality. It is precisely because of this cancer that Frankenstein's patrons would like a scientific research without vetoes and condemnations. Precisely because of this cancer, the guys of my subject are called fools, meatheads, servants of the Pope and Cardinal Ruini, and even exposed to public scorn with the words retrograde, obscurantist, reactionary. But morality is not stupidity. It is reason and common sense. Sometimes it is revolution. Ethics is not a fashion. It is a code of behaviour that applies everywhere and always. A discipline that financial aid us to discover Good and Evil. Good and Evil are not opinions or points of view. They are objective realities, concretisations that distinguish us (or should distinguish us) from the Zarqawi. Not for nothing have we made use of them since the days when we lived in caves and, though hunger made us cannibals, we knew that truth. Good is that which does good and makes us feel good. Evil is that which does bad and makes us feel bad. Today, Good is considered by most to be that which is most comfortable. Evil, that which is not. And few realise that to opt for Evil is for cretins. Not cretinointelligent or intelligentcretinos. Just plain cretins.
No fear of ridicule
On pain of being mocked and passed off as a new conquest of the Vatican, as an atheist in the process of conversion, an absolution-seeking eater, at final, a revisionist in articulo mortis, I return to Ratzinger. And Ratzinger is right when he writes that the West nurtures a kind of self-hatred and no longer loves itself. That it sees in its history only what is despicable, that it no longer succeeds in discovering what is great and pure in it. He is right when he says that the world of values on which Europe had built its identity (values inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans - and from Christianity, I add), seems to have come to an end. That Europe is paralysed by a crisis of its circulatory system and that this crisis is being cured by transplants - immigration and pluriculturalism, I add - which can only eliminate its identity.
He is right that Islam's renaissance is not only fuelled by oil, but also by its awareness that it can offer a platform of spirituality. The spirituality that old Europe and the entire West have given up. Finally, he is right when he quotes Splenger quotation , according to whom the West is inexorably heading towards its own demise. At this rate it will end as the Egyptian Civilisation or the Holy Roman Empire ended. Just as all peoples who forget that they have a soul have disappeared - and I add that they are disappearing. We are committing suicide, my dear ones. We are killing ourselves with moral cancer, with the absence of spirituality. And this initiative of the world to flee forward with deceitful eugenics and cheating biotechnology is the final stage of our masochism. That is why the Bin Ladens and Zarqawis, immoral and amoral individuals, but subjected to a paradoxical form of morality, are at ease.
That is why their co-religionists invade us so easily and with such a face they become the masters of our own homes. That is why they are welcomed into our homes with such servility. And with such fear. That is why Europe has become Eurabia and the US is at the same risk. And that is why, stamped on their foreheads with the mark I speak of in The Apocalypse, the mark of slavery and shame, many Westerners will end up kneeling on the mat praying five times a day to the new patron saint, to Allah. Referendum? But what do they want to endorse? The very term assisted procreation evokes the gesture of raising the white flag, of ending up in an unnatural world. Not to mention that, whatever happens, this referendum will end up like the hunting referendum. That is to say, with hunters continuing to shoot under our windows and kill the little birds.