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Harvest of Shame
The year was 1985, and the place was Jerusalem. A capacity crowd had assembled in Yad Vashem to listen to 30 Auschwitz survivors describing the barbarism of Josef Mengele. Vera Alexander, 62, described how Mengele pampered one young lady during her pregnancy, only to personally tear the baby from the womb and hurl the live child into an oven because it wasn’t a twin.
Vera Kriegel, 60, told of seeing Auschwitz guards crush the skulls of babies with their rifle butts, a practice that I assume Planned Parenthood would disavow on purely economic grounds. Besides, as Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter explained with the nonchalance of someone describing a new candy bar, babies can now be finished off in ways that are “less crunchy.” Which is to say, their young lives can be exterminated while keeping certain organs intact for the purpose of selling them. Indeed, as one Planned Parenthood “care provider” said, “Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we are able to see them for a procedure, then we are intact.”
Ms. Kriegel described the indescribable to the gathering in Jerusalem, back in 1985, recalling the sight of hundreds of human eyeballs pinned to the office wall in Dr. Josef Mengele’s little shop of atrocities. “It was like a collection of butterflies,” she recounted. There were of course still more horrors in the camp. “Usually you can see the whole brain come out,” said another doctor, Savita Ginde. “Here’s a stomach, kidney, heart,” Dr. Ginde explained.
Sorry, but I’m playing loose with the chronology here, because Dr. Ginde didn’t really ply her deadly trade for Dr. Mengele, but rather for Planned Parenthood. The difference? Whereas yesterday’s butchers pinned eyeballs to the wall, today’s dismember children and sift through their bloody remains in search of remunerative body parts. As the old Virginia Slims commercial used to say, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
“C’mon Carter,” you say, “the Nazis were interested in outright genocide! You can’t reasonably compare that with Planned Parenthood now, can you?” Well, let’s do a little comparing, shall we? First, a look at the animating philosophy as described by Mengele himself:
Everything will end in catastrophe if natural selection is altered to the point that gifted people are overwhelmed by billions of morons. … we have to prevent the rise of the idiot masses.
Pretty harsh, no? Now, compare Mengele’s ghastly reasoning with the enlightened and tender-hearted philosophy of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger:
A government which allows men and women to become parents whose records show insanity, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, syphilis, pauperism, idiocy and various other transmissible defects, cannot be said to consider the welfare or happiness of the country or of the next generation. Billions are now spent on charities, both public and private, in the U.S.A. The normal and intelligent citizens are being taxed and drained and bled to keep alive an increasing horde of human beings who never should have been born into a civilized society.
And that, sports fans, stripped of its rhetorical and euphemistic finery, is liberal “compassion.” And you thought Donald Trump was crude! But the woman Hillary Clinton described as her “hero” wasn’t done:
Our “overhead” expense in segregating the delinquent, the defective and the dependent, in prisons, asylums and permanent homes, our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrate our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism. No industrial corporation could maintain its existence upon such a foundation. Yet hardheaded “captains of industry,” financiers who pride themselves upon their cool-headed and keen-sighted business abilities are dropping millions into rosewater philanthropies and charities that are silly at best and vicious at worst. In our dealings with such elements there is a bland maladministration and misuse of huge sums that should in all righteousness be used for the development and education of the healthy elements of the community.
Well. That is certainly bracing! Notice how the quote fits neatly into the stereotype constructed by people such as Ms. Clinton to describe conservatives and yet … and yet it proceeds directly from the mind of Margaret Sanger, of whom Ms. Clinton rhapsodizes, “I am really in awe of her, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life.” What lessons are we to learn from a woman whose exertions in eugenics gave birth to an organization that locates 79% of its abortion clinics in minority neighborhoods?
“I admire Margaret Sanger enormously,” cooed Hillary, “her courage, her tenacity, her vision.” Was it the courage and tenacity to announce her vision — “Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective” — that prompted Hillary Clinton to accept the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood?
Describing Planned Parenthood as “the object of such a concerted attack for so many years, and it’s really an attack against a woman’s right to choose,” Ms. Clinton invites the question: a woman’s right to choose what, exactly? The right to choose what school her children may attend? The right to choose to arm herself in self-defense? The right to fight the unwanted sexual advances of Hillary’s husband? The right to practice her religion even if it offends gay activists? The right to resist those Obamacare mandates that violate a woman’s pro-life convictions? The right to choose an incandescent lightbulb? The right to purchase a large soda even if Michael Bloomberg doesn’t approve? The right to keep her doctor or health insurance? The right to put her Social Security contributions into her private account? The right to retain her earnings rather than see them apportioned out to strangers who didn’t earn them?
Of course not, for the “choice” that has become enshrined as a liberal sacrament begins and ends at the abortionist’s door. Through that door, as the Center for Medical Progress’s cameras confirm, the human capacity for savagery unfolds in all its depraved and bloody wretchedness. The camera focuses on a petri dish containing a petite foot here, a liver there, a small lump from which extends tiny human fingers, and, placed haphazardly on opposite sides of the dish, two minuscule human eyeballs that stare lifelessly, like those that adorned Josef Mengele’s wall 70 years earlier; historical descendants, victims of a timeless evil, bearing silent and unflinching testiment to Mengele’s statement: “The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe that we are doing it.”
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. There can be no acquiescence, no half-hearted or weak-kneed compromise. Not from a country that liberated Auschwitz and declared, with the rest of the civilized world, “Never again.”
Published in Domestic Policy, General
RightAngles, I’m sorry it has taken so long for me to respond. It’s been a busy day, it’s late and I’m fairly fried at the moment and I want to take some time to think through your remarks before responding in depth. One question for now, if I may: Your counsel is for us to leave the abortion topic alone, a position you take by virtue of being realistic, correct? Were a candidate to accept your recommendation, how would he or she leave it alone when the press will quiz them on the topic in every conceivable way and at every conceivable opportunity?
You do remember, do you not, George Stephanopoulos asking Mitt Romney, “…do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” Thus began the War on Women nonsense, so that even if Republicans wanted to hide their views, the press pursuit would be relentless. Under the circumstances, how “realistic” would it be for our candidates to persist in their evasions?
Some very cold comments here: trigger warning.
1. If abortion is for the empowerment of women, advocacy, etc — will Planned Parenthood be paying a commission to the donors of their saleable items, to the would-have- been mothers? I mean, isn’t the mother’s poverty part of the rationale? After all, PP isn’t in it for the money, are they?
2. Is anyone going there to plan parenthood?
3. For gangs, a killing is an initiation that makes you a loyal member, a real commitment. How much of this is a similar cognitive dissonance process?
4. Roe couldn’t be trusted to the states. Where, then, does the equality and fairness routine come in?
5. A medical clinic doesn’t do business this way. A car theft ring does, and there’s a name for the headquarters.
Dave,
I agree with you that there is no way to avoid this issue. The Republican Presidential Candidate must have his ideas down rock solid and fight his way through. The only tactical advice I have is to stay with the late term theme. The 20 week rule is a very good stance to take. There is evidence of Fetal Pain at this point.
I must make an unrelated comment here. Your presentation is very important in a very broad intellectual way. The great weakness of the history of the last 200 years is exactly your subject. The incapacity to come to grips with Eugenics. Other than associating it with the Nazis as if it just popped into world in the 1930s in Germany is the major problem. Recognition that Sanger was Goebbels in a skirt just doesn’t happen in the standard historical treatment much less the revisionist krypto-marxist nonsense that is out now. This however isn’t really enough if you want to really “trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored”. We need to go back to Darwin’s cousin Galton in the 1880s. Galton extrapolates the strict Darwinism of the Origin of the Species into his new theory of Eugenics. He is consciously holding as closely to cousin Darwin as he can. This is a defense of his cousin because the intermittent species that Darwin promised “the missing link” have not been found. He is doubling down on the whole intellectual framework but it is The Origin of the Species itself that is in question.
I consider Darwin not a scientist but an ideologue. He is the flip side of another ideologue who was his contemporary. Karl Marx justified the Poor murdering the Rich. Darwin justifies the Rich murdering the Poor. Galton extends Darwin. Lenin extends Marx. Fast forward to Stalin facing Hitler in Barbarossa the largest land battle in History. Now it makes sense. One version of evil facing another version of evil.
If you want to really get free of the evil you must break out of both the trap of Marx and Darwin. Sanger must be exposed. This is the right first step. Great job Dave.
Regards,
Jim
Supposing a person wanted to go kill an African lion but thought he might be too squeamish to pull it off. (Why would such a person want to? I dunno. Maybe impress someone who is important to him. Maybe he has something to prove. People are weird.)
Would killing a human fetus (directly or indirectly) put him more in the right frame of mind for lion killing, or make it easier to do? As a certified armchair psychologist I can think of reasons why it might work either for or against. Anyone else have thoughts on the matter?
There is one point here where I agree with Rightangles: That to start calling for abortion to be outlawed would simply give the “women’s rights” camp a rallying cry, one that they desperately need.
Ideally, I’d like Roe v Wade to be thrown on the dustbin of history and the issue be left (where it should be) to the states. But I have a really tough time making ANY Federalist argument to anyone under 30 and college educated.
That having been said, I will be disappointed in any candidate who doesn’t make the point that Planned Parenthood is a racist organization. I’m hearing about disparate results all the time in banking and real estate – why not make the point that a disparate number of black babies are being killed. Black Lives matter.
Abortion should be regarded with such revulsion and horror that we needn’t make it illegal, which is why the Center for Medical Progress is to be applauded. Same for the upcoming Gosnell movie.
And Ben Carson is doing a great job responding to all the other supposed services PP provides: Isn’t Obamacare supposed to take care of that?
Good point. I hadn’t heard, probably because I don’t “consume” TV or radio news.
Good points all around, Annefy, in my opinion. Seems to me that the disaster occurred, at least from a legal and political perspective, when the Court ripped the issue from the states, which is to say from the people themselves, and adjudicated the question from atop Mt. Olympus. The point upon which I would plant the battle flag right now is on taxpayer funding. The people ought in no way to be required to fund this barbarism.
I will join you on that hill. Actually, that’s where I’ve been for some time. The problem, though, is that this provides people with a choice as to whether to take part in abortion. And the whole purpose of being pro-choice is to deny people the power to choose.
I think Claire (as usual) makes an important point. Videos of fetuses and of actual abortions, with those “lump of tissues” trying to escape the killing curettes, will fundamentally change attitudes over time. The great irony here is that an entire statist ideology, based upon a foundation of victimhood, can blithely dismiss human fetuses as victims, merely because they have no voice and have been, heretofore, almost unseen. It is the highest hypocrisy.
As others have pointed out, legal personhood is a construct based upon subjective value. It is a biological (and scientific, thus usually important to liberals) fact that a fertilized embryo exists as a unique human being on a developmental continuum. For those who claim to zealously guard to rights of the powerless, it requires quite some mental contortions to ignore these facts.
Very true. Visual evidence makes people take notice of things that they could otherwise ignore, whether it’s ultrasounds of babies in utero, the clubbing of baby seals, the beheading of prisoners on a beach, or the punching of a woman in an elevator.
But to repeat a point made often on these threads, euphemism is a powerful enemy of truth. We simply can’t let the left get away with calling the murder of babies “women’s health.”
When I was teaching law classes and the subject of Roe v. Wade would come up, I used to pose the question, “When does a fetus become a baby?” I would get all kinds of technical answers about viability and trimesters, but the answer I always hoped to get, and never did, was “When the mother decides she wants to keep it instead of killing it.” When I provided that answer, I could see glimmers of understanding on almost every face in the room.
Three things here.
1. I was quoting someone else whose position I disagree with. That reference is easily checked by going back to my reply. (See #s 22 and 32, with 32 being mine.)
2. After my original reply, it occurred to me that the person I was responding to reads like an argument from the abortionists. Downplay the issue to win a vote then spring the trap. The trap would be sprung on those who hid the issue. They would be pilloried for hiding the issue as if it is that unimportant that it could not be aired.
3. Defunding the abortionists is not equivalent to defunding the social safety net, at least until this country runs out of money.
Me: If you don’t wear your seatbelt, you could be badly injured in a minor car crash.
The internet: A seatbelt is not the equivalent of a car crash. How dare you compare them.
I actually really like this argument MWtA. There is a line of argument that the lefties like to use that goes like this: You on the right are so concerned about what happens to the child before it is born, but after it’s born you don’t care. Even though this is demonstrably untrue it strike me that this would be an effective counter argument.
You can make all the arguments you want but the left doesn’t deal in arguments. It deals in power. Brute force is all that matters on their side.
Abortion is the promiscuous male’s best friend….he gets more free casual sex with no obligation for the outcome. How many women are talked into something they will later regret by the “loving” boyfriend who doesn’t want the financial obligation of child support? It is a man choosing what a woman will do with her own body.
Absolutely true, as for committed leftists of the occupy mindset, who might as well have their fingers in their ears.
But at the margin there are some people of good will who are truly trying to grapple with these difficult issues, and they may very well be persuadable by argument, just as were all those who have previously changed their minds about this and other issues.
That is a good point. Thank you.
This is a very profound statement.
The difference between a pro-lifer and a pro-abortionist is if you view the baby as a baby or just a piece of tissue. Unless you are the “ethicist” Peter Singer, nobody is for killing babies.
ALL over my FB page! “It’s not pro-life, it’s pro-birth!” Ugh – I will give major props to anyone who can give me an effective one liner for this. Just because I think the most effective method of reducing poverty is economic freedom does not mean that I do not care about children. It means I believe in RESULTS, not EMOTION.
Or you view it as a piece of tissue instead of a baby to justify your stand on abortion
So true! This, from the party of science. Does anyone recall that there was an episode at the very end of Boston Legal in which James Spader’s character admits and ruminates on this very thing? I was a very occasional viewer, but I just about fell off the couch when I saw this admission.
As an anti-abortion advocate I agree with that designation. Wish I had thought of it myself. Pro-Lifers are not pro-life any more than pro-choicers are pro-choice.
Confronting and exposing euphemisms is one of the simplest and yet most powerful weapons in confronting abortion (perhaps now a euphemism itself by its long-standing use and many people’s desensitization to the term). Planned Parenthood and their supporters in the media and government, by necessity and by design, continually try to obscure, obfuscate, and deflect from what is actually going on – the genocidal murder of human beings. Each of these slaughtered innocents has their own unique DNA, and as the third and fourth videos so vividly show – their own hands with fingers that have their own unique fingerprints (which develop due to each individual’s unique experiences in the womb, the interaction of his or her’s developing skin with the surrounding amniotic fluid, how thick that fluid is in that mother, and the baby’s position in the womb). The only thing babies at Planned Parenthood don’t have are names, which aid in abortionists’ abilities to deny the humanity and remembrance of their victims (ex: the necessity of giving names to Gosnell’s victims in the grand jury report – “Baby A”).
Naming a child is an expression of love (the love shown by couples naming their child lost to a miscarriage or still-birth) and dedicating oneself to future remembrance of that person. As God is love, the names of all of these innocents, so many times known only to Him, are not lost or forgotten. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
Yes, I agree with that. Have a response ready and respond when asked, but phrase it well. Don’t say anything sanctimonious. Don’t say anything judgmental about women and their sex lives. Just don’t harp on it already.
As to those who think we risk our base leaving us, the RNC has to whip them into shape and get them unified like the Democrats are. Staying home because the candidate you like didn’t get the nomination or because the candidate doesn’t sound like a Bible-thumper is idiotic.
I think Carly Fiorina did a great job on this. We need to be better about answering the question we want to answer, not the one we’re asked. This is PR 101, and since the media will never ask us a question we want to answer, we need to be more fluent in exercising this tactic. As always, when boxed in, we express sympathy for the person who feels abortion is the only choice available, and discuss how we might improve the lot of the most vulnerable who find themselves in this situation. An unwanted pregnancy always has a tough outcome. One of those outcomes involves a death.
An alternative to whipping the base and forcing it to the polls would be for the RNC to whip itself into shape and listen to the base. Maybe it would learn something.
As for Bible thumpers, the most effective sound requires the proper wrist action. You can’t clap your hands effectively without using your wrist, and you can’t thump your bible effectively without using your wrist.
Been here a whole two days and you feel free to disparage Bible-thumpers. Ricochet is indeed a welcoming forum.
I would disagree with your narrative on their fundamentals. Both Darwin and Marx assumed that the history of existence is one moving towards the perfection (at least improvement) of life. Marx was influenced by Darwin and like him he thought there were those that were “fit” and “unfit”. In this sense they both thought they were advancing humanity (in the sense of collective). Both Darwin and Marx had influence on Soviet Socialism and National Socialism. The issue between Nazis and Soviets was the end goal.
The purpose of Socialism is to get to Communism (post scarcity) in Marx. Nazis believed that Socialism was the ideal world of existence in which the fully potential of the collective was realized (the collective being Aryans). To the Soviets the collective was the Proletariat in which socialism would eventually yield to communism in which there was everything for everyone (from according to ability to according to need) thus realizing fully the potential of humanity (ending the dialectic).
Could be,
That which denies individual human responsibility is immoral by definition. Socialism, either the fascist variety or the marxist variety has never produced anything but scarcity and tyranny. If you think about it. How could it do otherwise.
Another way of thinking about socialism is to realize that its structure is basically that of mercantilism or a less sophisticated feudalism. Remove the Churches Great Chain of Being and Install Darwinism or Marxism. You get the hybrid that is not an advance but a throwback. Aside from the immorality, the system is simply vastly less efficient than a capitalist republic which affirms individual rights and a consistent rule of law. Usually, this inefficiency results in the murder of the “excess” population as the false claims meet the hard reality. The fascist will simply deny the full humanity of their victims. The marxists love to use the phrase “on the wrong side of history” just before they are going to commit genocide.
One last note dialectical reasoning is specious reasoning. Refer to The Critique of Pure Reason. Resting on a question that has no answer, an endless dialogue is produced that goes nowhere. Only a fool would base his entire philosophy upon “dialectical reasoning”.
Regards,
Jim
I read this in an article on the upcoming challenges for the Synod of the Family but it seems to be appropriate for this challenge as well: