The West’s uncivilised euthanasia policy

So much is happening on the surface at the moment that it can be difficult to notice certain undercurrents. Since the following story has gone almost unheeded in the Anglophone press, let me point at one especially suggestive current which could be glimpsed on the Continent this month.

Cast your mind back to March 2016 and you may remember a co-ordinated set of suicide bombings in Brussels: two at the airport, one at a metro station. The three Isis-inspired terrorists managed to kill 32 people that day. But you may, understandably enough, have forgotten about it. The attacks came after the even larger ones in Paris, and people didn’t really have much to say about them. My principal memory is of being asked on to Radio 4’s The Moral Maze the following evening to discuss the question of whether there are tensions between security and privacy – or some such bilge – and losing what remained of my patience.