In Memoriam
From Michael Paulsen's incredible essay on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, posted today on RealClearPolitics, a piece that manages to be both scrupulously objective and emotionally devastating:
After nearly four decades, Roe’s human death toll stands at nearly sixty million human lives, a total exceeding the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot’s killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined. Over the past forty years, one-sixth of the American population has been killed by abortion. One in four African-Americans is killed before birth. Abortion is the leading cause of (unnatural) death in America.
And later:
Roe is a radical decision and a legally indefensible one. But what really makes Roe unbearably wrong is its consequences. The result of Roe and Doe has been the legally authorized killing of nearly sixty million Americans since 1973. Roe v. Wade authorized unrestricted private violence against human life on an almost unimaginable scale, and did so, falsely, in the name of the Constitution.
It is hard to escape this conclusion, but not impossible—and many certainly try. I will not here belabor the question of whether the intentional killing of innocent, dependent, vulnerable human children is a grave moral wrong. My concluding point concerns the lengths to which we will go to deny the reality of this holocaust, because it is almost unbearable to contemplate and still go on living life as if nothing is terribly wrong. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great. And so we have become, in effect, a nation of holocaust deniers.
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Feb '11
Re: In Memoriam
Thanks for posting this, Troy. I posted a link to the live feed of the March for Life at the members page, and will also post it here.
The hundreds of thousands there in Washington today are the exact opposite of holocaust deniers.
Dec '11
Re: In Memoriam
This may be the first example of Godwin's Law I've seen on Ricochet.
Aug '10
Re: In Memoriam
I have always felt that comparisons of the horrible consequences of abortion to the holocaust fall flat rhetorically. Those who perform abortions and those who defend the "right" to kill the unborn don't do so out of some affirmative hatred of the unborn. There is little rhetoric (outside of the Zero Population Growth movement) asserting that the unborn are a virus, a cancer, or are vermin.
No, the greatest tragedy is that the killing of the unborn is done with a nihilistic absence of malice. There is a genuine amoral and apathetic lack of empathy for the unborn. When I found out that my wife was pregnant, I knew I was a father and I loved that child instantly. I imagined his/her future immediately. I empathized with something that had just begun to live. This isn't true of those who advocate abortion or perform it.
They are not holocaust deniers, they are the Last Man.
"Lo! I show you the Last Man.
Edited on Jan 23 at 11:25am"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks."
May '10
Re: In Memoriam
For a look at the great irony buried herein, read "Roe effect". In short, the babies killed by abortion would most likely have grown up to be liberals. The ramifications are interesting to contemplate.
Edited on Jan 23 at 11:29amRe: In Memoriam
Respectfully, NP, that doesn't hold up here. Comparing a political opponent you despise to Hitler strictly as an indication of the intensity of your dislike would be an example of Godwin's law -- and a failure to recognize the grave seriousness of the evil that existed in Nazi Germany. Referring to the mass extermination of innocents as a "holocaust" -- that's just respect for the word's meaning ... and gravity.
Dec '11
Re: In Memoriam
Respectfully, NP, that doesn't hold up here. Comparing a political opponent you despise to Hitler strictly as an indication of the intensity of your dislike would be an example of Godwin's law -- and a failure to recognize the grave seriousness of the evil that existed in Nazi Germany. Referring to the mass extermination of innocents as a "holocaust" -- that's just respect for the word's meaning ... and gravity.
Michael Paulsen's implicit conflation of millions of American citizens who made a difficult, lawful choice with the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust is repulsive.
And then he goes on, as Leftist environmentalists do when faced by resistance to their global warming fanaticism, to brand anyone who disagrees with his views as "deniers", whose opinions are, ipso facto, illegitimate.
Look, we can disagree about abortion without this sort of hateful rhetoric.
Jan '12
Re: In Memoriam
I am exhausted from the previous thread on abortion. Disagreements with other commentators will not be resolved. I'll just say that I "like" the latter paragraphs of Nathaniel Wright's comment immensely; that I hope that first the legal climate and then popular moral opinion will return to those which prevailed over the many decades before 1973.
Edited on Jan 23 at 12:09pmMar '11
Re: In Memoriam
Nobody's Perfect:
Michael Paulsen's implicit conflation of millions of American citizens who made a difficult, lawful choice with the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust is repulsive.
· 6 minutes ago
Didn't the Nazi perpetrators act lawfully?
May '10
Re: In Memoriam
Why throw in "difficult" there, NP?
Does the fact that it's a difficult choice for some women affect its moral value or disvalue even one iota?
Further, who says it's a difficult choice? For some it is, for some it isn't at all. There are lots of women out there who think abortion is great. Lots more who dislike it but who have no doubt about it all, morally speaking.
As for lawful, owning slaves was once lawful too. It was still immoral.
What makes it a holocaust is that it is, as a matter of indisputable fact, the mass slaughter of innocents.
Edited on Jan 23 at 12:07pmDec '11
Re: In Memoriam
What makes it a holocaust is that it is, as a matter of indisputable fact, the mass slaughter of innocents.
"Mass slaughter"? A mass slaughter is what happens when government loads people onto cattle cars and transports them to extermination camps.
That's a very different thing from an individual woman making her own, lawful choice.
Now that's an indisputable fact.
May '10
Re: In Memoriam
Nobody's Perfect:
A mass slaughter is what happens when government loads people onto cattle cars and transports them to extermination camps.
That's a very different thing from an individual woman making her own, lawful choice.
The key word in that sentence is "lawful". Suppose government told everyone they would not be prosecuted for hacking up their neighbors with machetes. Would it not be slaughter because the government merely condoned individual choices?
Murder is an individual's choice. Law isn't.
May '10
Re: In Memoriam
Nobody's Perfect: What makes it a holocaust is that it is, as a matter of indisputable fact, the mass slaughter of innocents.
"Mass slaughter"? A mass slaughter is what happens when government loads people onto cattle cars and transports them to extermination camps.
That's a very different thing from an individual woman making her own, lawful choice.
Now that's an indisputable fact. · 11 minutes ago
When masses of women make that same choice it becomes a mass slaughter.
One of horrors of abortion is that many more "ordinary Americans" are implicated in it than "ordinary Germans" were implicated in Hitler's crimes, or Russians in Stalin's.
Edited on Jan 23 at 12:39pmMay '10
Re: In Memoriam
To me it's not the "affirmative hatred" that's the essence of the evil of the holocaust; its rather the de-humanization of a whole class of persons. You can de-humanize with affirmative hatred or you can dehumanize by moral indifference. Either way, it's one set of people arrogating to itself the right to dispose of another set.
Oct '10
Re: In Memoriam
Nobody's Perfect:
Michael Paulsen's implicit conflation of millions of American citizens who made a difficult, lawful choice with the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust is repulsive.
There’s no such thing as an “implicit conflation.” Either you’ve conflated something or you have not. The Holocaust comparison was with respect to body count, not motives for--or the "difficulty" or legality of--the killing. (Murdering Jews and "useless eaters" was entirely legal in Nazi Germany. So that abortion is legal proves what, exactly? It's also right?) You might have noticed other mass-murder events in the comparison. Why are you focused on only one?
The morality of taking innocent life is the point here. You may disagree with whether an aborted child is a really a life, but you can’t deny that if it is life it is wholly innocent. The device of citing well-known events to express by comparison the magnitude of something less-well known is hardly unusual or inappropriate . . . it works perfectly here as a rhetorical device to convey a viewpoint. Rather than arguing the viewpoint, you want to stifle highly effective rhetoric. Could it be because the former is indefensible?
Nov '11
Re: In Memoriam
katievs
To me it's not the "affirmative hatred" that's the essence of the evil of the holocaust; its rather the de-humanization of a whole class of persons. You can de-humanize with affirmative hatred or you can dehumanize by moral indifference. Either way, it's one set of people arrogating to itself the right to dispose of another set. · 4 minutes ago
Very well said.
May '10
Re: In Memoriam
Let's say those sixty million people lived. What then? The chances are that the vast majority of them would be living below the poverty and dependent on a welfare state that has plunged us into debt. Sure, there is adoption, but there are issues with that, like finding enough resources for prenatal care and financial support for the mothers. How do people reconcile a simultaneous contempt for those who chose to bring children into a cycle of dependency and for those who choose not to? And how can people wish to deny abortions to women, but also wish to deny them access to contraception to prevent pregnancies in the first place?
Edited on Jan 23 at 1:31pmJun '11
Re: In Memoriam
Getting bogged down in the aptness of Paulsen's analogies might make one miss one of his main points. The one about the sheer, mind-boggling magnitude of the abortion wave since Roe v. Wade. The numbers are staggering.
Of all the bull markets our culture has produced, infanticide may be the biggest of them all.
Aug '10
Re: In Memoriam
Katievs,
I wanted to highlight this quote because it is exactly what I was saying.
"To me it's not the "affirmative hatred" that's the essence of the evil of the holocaust; its rather the de-humanization of a whole class of persons."
What I call nihilistic absence of malice is your dehumanization of a whole class of persons.
Nihilistic absence of malice is, to me, horrifying. To be able -- even for a moment -- to have no ability to induct to the Teleological ends of the act of conception is unfathomable and inhuman. How can one not immediately imagine the life story of a growing child?
To be able to deny that a fetus is a child... To remove any capacity for empathy for the unborn... is to be the Last Man. One must have no true capacity for love, save maybe for the self.
Some can be tricked into this state for a time, but I don't think that can last if a person has any capacity for empathy.
Mar '11
Re: In Memoriam
Karen, you've just pushed the whole issue closer to the Nazi Holocaust, not further away.
Mar '11
Re: In Memoriam
Does application of the "kill them before they suffer" rationale have a cut-off age, or is it flexible?