On several occasions at the end of WWII army commanders who liberated German concentration camps forced local people to file through them, under guard, meet some of the prisoners, and witness for themselves the horror of it all.
For most of those people, the experience must have been deeply traumatic, and it is said that some were driven to suicide by the shame and shock of reality.
Our attitude to this has commonly been: “Serves them right!”
When you see the record of those places on film your anger rises to choke you. It is easy to feel vengeful towards civilians who lived near the camps and didn’t know, or pretended not to know, what was really going on.
On calmer reflection, though, we might decide that most of them probably were ignorant of the details, because the human capacity for self-deception and the denial of unpalatable truths is a highly developed mechanism.
Certainly, most Germans could not fail to be aware that so-called enemies of the state disappeared from time to time. But in challenging times, you don’t ask too many questions and you'd prefer to think that such removals were justified and humanely carried out.
This is just the tip of an iceberg, a mountain of human rights violations are occurring that are lawful, and even commended, in several of our states.
As a nation, we either deny these things altogether or pretend they are not important—a sign we have lost all claim to moral superiority.
This may feel like a stretch to some, but how dare we point an accusing finger at Adolph Hitler—or Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin—when we ourselves are so engulfed in evil?
How are we better than those German villagers who didn’t know what was going on, or at least persuaded themselves that it couldn’t be too bad, and that things like that “don’t happen here.”
As a nation, we permit and practice pre-natal infanticide on an enormous scale. Let’s abandon that lame word “abortion” (like that other weasel word “women’s health”) and call it out for what it is.
Post-natal infanticide will come next, as inevitably as the night follows the day.
Many readers will perhaps feel that I focus too closely on this issue, neglecting more serious threats to the survival of our rich civilised inheritance. But to my mind, there are no threats more serious than the killing of the innocent, and the lying and deceit that strives to keeps it hidden.
I suppose we do have a better excuse than the German village people: they were forced to witness actual evidence of atrocities, whereas the media go to great lengths to keep the truth of “abortion” hidden from us.
On public television, you can watch any number of warm-hearted vet shows, and view any number of surgical procedures on much loved dogs and cats, but they'll never let you see a human “termination,” because if they did, the tide would turn.
New French Abortion Law
The mainstream media have had much to say about the recent constitutional change in France, and they have done so for the most part with little detail, but much euphoric delight.The actual wording of the new law is: “La loi détermine les conditions dans lesquelles s’exerce la liberté garantie à la femme d'avoir recours à une interruption volontaire de grossesse.”
Translation: A woman is guaranteed the liberty to have recourse to a voluntary interruption of pregnancy, and the law determines the conditions under which that is exercised.
Much has been made of the fact that a constitutional change is difficult to reverse. That is no doubt true.
Liberal feminists, not only in France but elsewhere throughout the West, are clearly exultant about this apparently uncompromising outcome, while pro-life supporters are deeply saddened and fearful for its enduring and possibly ineradicable consequences.
But there are some grounds for hope.
The sweeping comprehensiveness of those words could turn out to be a weakness: their very brevity may be their undoing.
For example, they fail to distinguish between early and late “terminations,” or terminations based on sex. Is a baby to be destroyed because she is not a he? We know that happens far too often (though even once is worse than a disgrace).
Not just for orthodox Christians, but also for authentic Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and many unbelievers too, the killing of an innocent human being is always wrong.
But decent people often attempt to make distinctions out of a genuine sense of humanity, concern for young women forced into pregnancy perhaps, or maybe to ease their own consciences: Is the brain activated? Is there a heartbeat? Was an anaesthetic used?
Much more pertinently, people will want to know if the baby is being slain just because she’s a girl, while her designer-family parents hope for a boy.
This law will run into trouble—even among the French liberals—as actual cases of revolting and narcissistic discrimination become known.
