Organ Döner Kebap

Biased BBC touches on a story that’s been kicking around (in the form of an unaknowleded ‘season’) on the BBC: the matter of taking organs from terminally ill patients without them having ever signed up as döners, erm, doners.

"The Spanish organ donor system is a remarkable story of human generosity in the face of grief."

It’s a story ignoring the fact that a patient may not be an organ doner, and it’s floated out there to prop up a proposal by Gordon Brown to do the same.

Behold how taking a patient’s organs without their consent is now being called “Generosity”, much in the way government aid is renamed “charity”, and taxes renamed “contribution” in a fashion intended to impress upon the listener the illusion that there was free will involved.

On Radio 4 there was some awful panel discussion centered around the fact that the patient might change their mind if they knew how dead-like they were, might have neglected to place the organ doner card in their wallet, and so forth. The subject that was willfully and completely ignored was the will of the patient.

There isn’t any free will involved at all. Of course there isn’t. For heaven’s sake this is Europe we’re talking about. The only stories deemed “remarkable in their humanity” anymore involve a apparachik forcing people to do things by compulsion. Perhaps it’s based on the passivity trained into the population by virtue of a century of statist policy and general self-centeredness. Maybe there isn’t any other way to get people who are so distracted by their lauding of their own humanity to give of themselves.