By comparison with today’s news, Darren Aronofsky’s environmental apocalyptic epic Noah, which I mentioned yesterday, is a light-hearted reminder of why Wesley Smith’s upcoming e-book, The War on Humans, is so timely. The book is out next week, February 17, along with its companion documentary. Now comes a much grimmer occasion to reflect on Smith’s message: the passage by Belgian lawmakers of legislation to allow the euthanizing of ill children, with no age restriction.

As Wesley notes at National Review Online, a particularly "cruel" requirement of the law will demand that a child, faced with "unbearable" suffering and without hope of cure, should request in writing that he or she be killed. Cruel? I would say sadistic.

Yes, the rationale here is ostensibly compassionate, and the law is hedged with guidelines so it should not be abused. Wesley observes:

Killing sick children is wrong on its face — but given the history of Belgian euthanasia (and the euthanasia/assisted suicide movement generally), there is no way these "protective guidelines" will stick or be enforced.

The "war on humans" that Wesley Smith documents in his book has a different motivation: a dark environmentalist fantasy that the Earth and other creatures would be better off if up to 90 percent of human beings were erased. Yet there too, anti-human campaigners seem to have a special thing against children.

Wesley writes about how children are being taught to "loathe themselves" for existing, since in their numbers they are a drain on resources and a threat to the environment. He describes a video ad by the activist "10:10 Campaign" that shows school kids being blown up for failing to get active about reducing their carbon footprint by 10 percent. Amazingly, written by a British comedian, it’s supposed to be humorous. You can see it here, but I warn you, you may regret it.

More:

The 10:10 Campaign has hardly been alone in symbiotically depicting the death of children as part of an answer to saving the planet. Until recently, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website carried a children’s feature known as "Planet Slayer." The most offensive feature on the site was "Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator" a now-erased online game that told children how to "find out when you should die!"

This "game"asked children a series of questions about their lifestyles and consumption habits. Their answers were then computed. At the end, players were told the age they should die, having exhausted their individual share of the world’s resources.

Once again, the visual involves explosions — not as vivid as the exploding flesh-and-blood children killed for not supporting the 10:10 Campaign — but gorily depicting a cartoon pig blowing up in a bloody mess. While an exploding cartoon pig may not be as offensive as a blown-up child, the imagery is in some ways more pernicious, because it communicates to children that they are pigs for consuming resources. Indeed, the game teaches children that they are planet-killers who should die before becoming adults. In fact, the grading was so tough — no mercy shown — that when I played the game Professor Schpinkee told me I should have died at age 7.4!

Remember, Planet Slayer was published on Australia’s equivalent of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s website — illustrating how mainstream anti-human global warming hysteria has become and how deeply it has penetrated Establishment institutions.

What links the story from Belgium with these others is what Wesley calls the "culture of death." It’s what inevitably happens when a civilization gradually loses the sense of awe in which it once held human life, replaced with the Darwinian conviction that man is simply on a continuum with other animals and, as Smith puts it in the title of another book, quoting PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."

It may be, too, that targeting the youngest and most vulnerable, in the name of principles that sound high-minded, holds a sadistic allure for a certain personality. When I was a kid growing up in Southern California I went to a liberal summer camp in Malibu that, in retrospect, had some weird aspects about it. I later heard that a couple of years after I was there, at the height of the hysteria that insisted President Reagan was for sure leading the world to nuclear war, camp counselors got an ingenious idea.

To dramatize the need for disarmament, they rousted all the kids out of bed in the middle of the night and brought them to the dining hall. An adult then informed the campers that nuclear war had begun — the U.S. and Soviet Union had launched missiles against each other’s major cities. Nearby Los Angeles would be leveled. The children were told that they would never see their parents again.

Only after allowing some time to pass, while the children I assume were first shocked then sobbed uncontrollably, did the adults inform the campers that it was all an imaginative exercise. No nuclear missiles had been launched. But, they were told, it was a good time to reflect on the perils of stockpiling nuclear weapons and maintaining a belligerent rhetorical stance toward the Soviets.

Cruel? You bet. Does it make you angry — I mean, all of this? It should.

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Photo source: Skin – ubx/Flickr.