A Free People S Suicide

Os Guinness traces the evolution of the American ideal of freedom from the founders to the present, warning that the country's defining experiment is on the verge of failure. Summoning historical evidence on the fate of early democracies, he argues that without a renewed commitment to the task of virtue, America will soon wish away her own freedom.

A Logos Book of the Year "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." Abraham Lincoln Nothing is more daring in the American experiment than the founders' belief that the American republic could remain free forever. But how was this to be done, and are Americans doing it today? It is not enough for freedom to be won. It must also be sustained. Cultural observer Os Guinness argues that the American experiment in freedom is at risk. Summoning historical evidence on how democracies evolve, Guinness shows that contemporary views of freedom--most typically, a negative freedom from constraint-- are unsustainable because they undermine the conditions necessary for freedom to thrive. He calls us to reconsider the audacity of sustainable freedom and what it would take to restore it. "In the end," Guinness writes, "the ultimate threat to the American republic will be Americans. The problem is not wolves at the door but termites in the floor." The future of the republic depends on whether Americans will rise to the challenge of living up to America's unfulfilled potential for freedom, both for itself and for the world.

For much of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth, the per capita rate of suicide in Cuba was the highest in Latin America and among the highest in the world--a condition made all the more extraordinary in light of Cuba's historic ties to the Catholic church. In this richly illustrated social and cultural history of suicide in Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. explores the way suicide passed from the unthinkable to the unremarkable in Cuban society. In a study that spans the experiences of enslaved Africans and indentured Chinese in the colony, nationalists of the twentieth-century republic, and emigrants from Cuba to Florida following the 1959 revolution, Perez finds that the act of suicide was loaded with meanings that changed over time. Analyzing the social context of suicide, he argues that in addition to confirming despair, suicide sometimes served as a way to consecrate patriotism, affirm personal agency, or protest injustice. The act was often seen by suicidal persons and their contemporaries as an entirely reasonable response to circumstances of affliction, whether economic, political, or social. Bringing an important historical perspective to the study of suicide, Perez offers a valuable new understanding of the strategies with which vast numbers of people made their way through life--if only to choose to end it. To Die in Cuba ultimately tells as much about Cubans' lives, culture, and society as it does about their self-inflicted deaths.

Originally published in 1972, this volume contains selected significant documents to illustrate Soviet foreign policy between 1953 and 1970, according to its author, 'in the words of Soviet leaders and Soviet people.' Extracts from speeches by Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Brezhnev and Kosygin are included, together with commentary from other communist leaders, including Hoxha of Albania and Nagy of Hungary. The invasion of the former Czechoslovakia and the Chinese view of Soviet foreign policy are fully covered. A comprehensive and informative introduction traces the course of Soviet foreign policy since 1953. Some general considerations are given in the conclusion, and short explanatory comments elucidate the documents themselves.

The Test of morality of euthanasia : The suicider should ask himself : "Can I do some service to society by tolerating the unbearable pain created cancer? The suicider wants his parents to weep by sitting near his dead body. The suiciders should be punished according to the old French custom that is, by carrying them to the graveyard with their bodies pointing in the downward direction. A divorce is better than committing suicide due to the homosexuality of the husband.

Vol. 2 of Free People from Mental Slavery. God bestowed him with blessings for serving the world with his emancipated mind. This book is based on on man's experience of making the world a better place.

For the nineteenth-century physician, the moral issues that suicide raised could not be isolated from its constitutional components. Thus, those who exhibited suicidal tendencies were subjected to an amalgamation of pharmacological, social, and psychological interventions, which practioners labeled the "moral treatment." By the 1890s, however, the consensus about the causes of suicide became unglued as a bacteriological medicine and the rise of the social sciences jointly served to call into question eclectic diagnoses. The goal of American Suicide is to demonstrate how the apparent contradictions among sociological, psychoanalytic, and neurobiological explanations of the etiology of suicide may be resolved. Only througha reintegration of culture, psychology, and biology can we begin to construct a satisfactory answer to the questions first raised by Durkheim, Freud, and Kraepelin.