SNP says you are allowed to hold Pro-Life views so long as you don’t ‘verbalise’ them.

‘Freedom of speech and expression…’

 

Architects of Evil #1: Margaret Sanger

Having been roundly chastised by Aelianus for hardly ever posting anything on here, and prompted by the subject matter of a recent conversation with the aforementioned, behold the first in a sure to be sporadic and unspectacular series of posts about people I don’t like very much.  First on the list, Margaret Sanger.

There is, of course, no shortage of anti-Sanger stuff online, but it is surprising (in a ‘not really that surprising’ sense) how little of this is ever mentioned in the mainstream media in arguments about “women’s health” and “reproductive rights.”  The same could be said for Sangers’ contemporary and fellow eugenicist, our very own Marie Stopes.

Planned Parenthood, (which kills a baby every 96 seconds and gets over $500 million a year from the US taxpayer), is the result of an amalgamation of various organisations, the most notable of which was Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL), whose mouthpiece was the Birth Control Review (1917-1940).  (Stopes was a bit more up-front about the agenda – in 1921 she founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress)  You can read archives of the Birth Control Review online here – for those with neither the time nor the inclination, Sanger’s contributions include articles entitled: “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (Feb 1921), “The Purpose of Eugenics” (Dec 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925) and “Birth Control: The True Eugenics.”  On the Church, she says:

“The Catholic Church is the bigoted, relentless enemy of birth control.  This [birth control] movement threatens its hold upon the poor and the ignorant, and probably only the existence of restraining laws prevents it from applying the thumb-screw and the rack to all those who believe in a woman’s right to practice voluntary motherhood.”  Birth Control Review, June 1918

Recently, I came across a video of Sanger being interviewed on American TV.  It is quite chilling to listen to her speak.  One of the most revealing excerpts reads as follows:

Interviewer: “Do you believe in sin… do you believe there is such a thing as sin?” Sanger: “I believe that the biggest sin in the world is bringing children in the world… that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being, practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things, just marked when they’re born.  That to me is the greatest sin.”

{The full length interview is here.}

In Salvation is From the Jews, Roy Schoeman has a fascinating chapter on ‘Ideological Foundations of Nazism’ in which he examines the interplay between the birth control movement, eugenics and euthanasia in the years leading up to the Holocaust.  Commenting on Sanger, he says:

“Her plans for a national eugenics programme consisted of the same elements found in the Third Reich – forced sterilisation and concentration camps (which she referred to euphemistically as ‘segregation’ or ‘separation’.)  Consider the following points from her “Plan for Peace”, published in her Birth Control Review (April 1932):

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilisation and segregation to that grade of the population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilisation.

g. to apportion farmlands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.”  [page 189]

The modern-day Planned Parenthood supporter would (one hopes!) be embarrassed by this, but PP are hardly falling over themselves to distance themselves from Sanger’s worldview.  Cf . The Annual PPFA Margaret Sanger Award, which PP says is its “highest honour.”

Hilary Clinton receives PP’s highest honour from President Cecile Richards.

Receiving the 2009 Sanger Award, Hilary Clinton said:

“..the best way to ensure that women are not victimized by coercive government practices is to make sure that they have access to family planning. For those who care so deeply about reducing the abortion rate, the best way to make sure we reduce abortion is to provide access to safe family planning. (Applause.)”

She also reminded everyone that:

“Margaret Sanger’s work here in the United States and certainly across our globe is not done.”

Fast forward to March 2013, and here is a Planned Parenthood person giving the PP line on whether a baby lying alive on a table following a botched abortion should be “victimized by coercive government practices.”  Margaret Sanger would be proud.

 

Occultism in the Endnotes…

Alyoshenka (appropriately enough) bought me The Brothers Karamazov a while ago. I am not very good at novels. Napoleon once said novels are for women while history is for men. Usually therefore, I have to find some long journey devoid of internet access and make sure I only have the novel with me and so have to read it. Ideally this then provides me with sufficient momentum to finish the thing when I get back. I was making a transatlantic flight a few weeks ago and I had ordered the most negative revisionist history of the American Revolution I could find to read on the way over. Alas! It did not arrive in time so, as it was at the top of the pile, I took The Brothers Karamazov instead. To be more specific, I took The Karamazov Brothers translated by Ignat Avsey for Oxford World’s Classics. Knowing no Russian I have no idea if this is a good translation, it certainly reads nicely. OUP is usually seen as a rather respectable publisher. I don’t know anything about Mr Avesy but I am pretty sure he is a theosophist. He not only translated the text he also provided the notes. I was already very suspicious when… on page 82 …in the course of an attack on the Church and an encomium of ‘Orthodoxy’ Fr Paisy (a minor character in the novel) remarks “The star will shine forth from the East”. There then follows a lengthy endnote by Mr Avesy. After correctly identifying Fr Paisy’s words as an allusion to Matthew 2:2 Avesy goes on to explain:

“It has been said that the current of culture arises in the East and moves West, eventually dying in the Americas. [fairy nuff] Thus Rudolf Steiner [uh-oh…]  claimed that, on the death of the Atlantean age and civilization [come again?], the Arians, under the leadership of Manu [wow], migrated to India, forming the pre-Vedic Indian culture. When that culture itself became decadent, a new culture was founded in Persia by Zoroaster or Zarathustra (the name means ‘Morning Star’ [how reassuring]). That culture was, in its turn, succeeded by the cultures of the Middle East, particularly those of Egypt and Babylonia. Following the decline of those cultures, the cultures of Greece and then Rome arose. Since the fifteenth century AD the Northern European or Germanic/Anglo-Saxon culture has emerged the culture which is still dominant today [thank you Mr Himmler!].”

Remember this the OUP edition of the greatest Russian novel. This is full-on National Socialist mumbo jumbo delivered as sober fact. Avesy then mentions that some Russians think that when the Californians have finished with Western Civ. it might get round to being their turn before giving us some references:

“See Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science and Lectures upon the Apocalypse; the several works of Valentin Tomberg (privately printed in Riga, 1936-9 repr. by Candeur Manuscripts, Spring Valley, New York, 1977-9); Maria Schindler, Europe a Cosmic Picture (New Knowledge Books, Horsham, Sussex, 1975-6) …”

Rudolf Steiner is, of course, a famous purveyor of mumbo jumbo but Valentin Tomberg has a special interest as the occultist for whose Introduction to the Tarot Hans Urs Von Balthasar wrote his sinister forward. In the light of this connection I would dearly love to know if the Maria Schindler cited here has any connection to the Schindler dynasty of creepy Balthasarians. Given the ease with which Balthasar and his followers have managed to infiltrate allegedly respectable Catholic theological circles I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at a spot of kindred occultism in the endnotes of an Oxford World’s Classics volume.

So! Occultism and Nazism with Balthasarian connections – a long haul flight well spent methinks…

 

A sad and tedious German story

Business matters recently led me to the University of  Göttingen, highest ranked university in Germany (Times Higher Education ranking place 43 in 2010/11), and only University in Germany named after a British monarch (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, after George II of Great Britain). I whiled away a lengthy train trip by reading up on the history of Göttingen in Wikipedia (to which I can add some original research pursued during a bicycle trip of 800 km from south to north of Germany, just so you can admire me). What I found was a tale of glory mixed with abounding bitterness.

Stemming both from a little Saxonian village and an Ottonian Imperial Palace, the city apparently tried very hard to achieve the independency of a free imperial city, yet failed. This might have served it better than it thought, for, initially impervious to the Lutheran revolt, its ‘new wool weavers’, a progressive lot, coupled political strivings with adherence to Lutheranism and brought down a longer-ranging wrangle in their favour, protestant preaching being allowed in the Göttingen churches at last. Still, this might not have been a sustainable development, for Eric I, Prince of Calenberg, while dependent on the wealth of the city, was an adherent of the Old Faith. Unfortunately, he was also very tolerant (one feels tempted to say: ptui!) of the conversion to Lutheranism of his 25-year junior wife, Elizabeth of Brandenburg. This spirited lady managed to pretty much hold the reins during the regency of her son, Eric II, 12 years old when his father died. Apparently really convinced of the truth of Protestantism, she seems not to have been motivated by greed, because – quite uniquely, poor little historically illiterate me thinks – she put all monastery wealth into a trust that still exists today, serving the upkeep of churches and caritative purposes only. As a result, a number of Lutheran monasteries exist up to this date in Lower Saxony. *

Yet, everything might have turned out well. Eric II, in a way quite a failure of maternal expectations, went abroad, broadened his mind, and returned a Catholic. In his attempts to reverse his mother’s reformatory exertions, he was unfortunately, again, hampered by financial considerations. Hindsight teaches that the Göttingen Bürgerschaft quite lost power afterwards, what with the pest, and the Thirty-Years-War, and all that, so that a Duke might have brought the thing round to Catholicism after all.  However, Eric II.’s decendents failed to reproduce sufficiently, so that the whole area fell to Protestant Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

The Thirty-Years-War, however atrocious, might still have helped Göttingen in the end. Conquered by Tilly for the Catholics in 1626, it was re-conquered by the Protestants in 1631, and remained thus (alas for anyone on a business trip looking for weekday Mass). The Principality rose to an Electorate in 1692; in 1714 the Prince-Elector became King of Great Britain;  his son, George II., decided that it was a bit pathetic for his Hannoverian lands not to have a single university, and founded that of Göttingen in 1737, into which three of his grandsons were immatriculated. The university was an immediate European success, but suffered somewhat form successive restrictive governments, against which it put up some spirited protest. A duel between students on 22. April 1766, resulting in the death of one combatant, became the cause of the technical re-organisation of the whole student duelling business in Central Europe (little hint towards a continuation of the Bodis Riper, at the behest of my inner child).

Bla, bla, revolutions, decline; being fed up with the Hanoverians and quite placidly welcoming the news of becoming Prussians, and an extremely bad chapter of history: a university town with a total of 40 Nobel Price winners – had an absolute majority for the National Socialists in the July 1932 (not! 1933 elections) , and an apparently pretty enthusiastic burning of ‘un-German’ books headed by the Rector. Only to a small extent justice has been done, as the university has shot itself quite in the own foot, for the most renowned scientists were Jewish, and found better places abroad.

* I visited one of those ‘Lutheran Monestaries’, in Marienberg. Originally following the Cistercian rule, its observance had quite declined by the beginning of the 16^th century, or so. By a bitter irony, reform, in the true sense of the word, seems to have succeeded there shortly after, the Liturgy of the Hours and common meals, plus other stuff, being restored. Comes Elizabeth with her pious Protestantism, abolishing all and sundry on evangelical grounds, but not those two items. A hundred years or so, both are gone. What remains are noble women, or rich bourgeoise ones, living on state expanses in a comfortable life style together with their mothers and sisters, reading the odd devotional book, going to church together on Sunday, and that’s it.

 

Eugenics and the BBC

A trailer just popped up on Radio 4 for a new debating programme. The first topic up is the merits of sterilizing the mentally and morally unfit. Yes that right folks the merits of sterilizing the mentally and morally unfit. This is to be chaired by liberal pseudo-Catholic Edward Stourton. The problem here is not the result of any debate but the fact that such a topic is considered a fit topic for discussion in the first place. This is part of the softening up process for our Eugenic future. Not long ago the Economist published an article speculating that the mapping of the human genome will reveal that some human beings are untermenschen and we need to prepare ourselves. Ricky Gervaise published an article calling for the sterilization of the socially unfit. James Watson a few years ago announced that the population of Africa are genetically of inferior intelligence. The ubiquitous abortionist and vivisectionist of the unborn Lord Robert Winston is a trustee of the Galton Institute (formerly the Eugenic Society) founded by proto-Nazi cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton. The BBC are forever giving him air-time to re-educate us all.
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Nazism was not wrong because of dodgy anthropology or because it advocated an incredibly stupid political system it was wrong because it denied the inviolable dignity and essential equality of mankind. It replaced the Decalogue with a breeding programme. This essential error is quite as compatible with the free market, capitalism and democracy as it is with corporatism and dictatorship. This is what we are being prepared for via the Abortion Act, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the relentless campaign for Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, the promotion of contraception and promiscuous sex education and the assault on marriage. These forces are very powerful, the defeat of Hitler only set them back about three decades. Unless people wake up very soon, in the absence of robust and orthodox Christianity, the allure of evolutionism will bring about their triumph.
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In April 1938 Pius XI issued the following list of errors to be combated in all Catholic educational institutions. We would do well to remember them.
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1. The human races, by their natural and immutable characters, are so different from each other that, the humblest of them is further from the highest race than of the highest animal species .
2. We must by all means, preserve and cultivate strong race and purity of blood, so that all leads to this result is therefore honest and permitted.
3. It is blood, seat of the characteristics of the race, that all the intellectual and moral qualities of man derive as their main source.
4. The basic purpose of education is to develop the characters of the race and inflame the minds of a burning love of their own race as the supreme good.
5. Religion is subject to the law of race and must be adapted to it.
6. The first source and the supreme rule of law and order is racial instinct.
7. There exists only the Kosmos or living universe ; all things, including humans, are only various forms growing over the ages of universal life.
8. Each man exists only by the State and for the State. All that he rightly possesses derives exclusively from a concession to the State.

 

Marx and Engels on 1848 Revolutions and the Racial Inferiority of Slavs

“Thus ended for the present, and most likely for ever, the attempts of the Slavonians of Germany to recover an independent national existence. Scattered remnants of numerous nations, whose nationality and political vitality had long been extinguished, and who in consequence had been obliged, for almost a thousand years, to follow in the wake of a mightier nation, their conqueror, the same as the Welsh in England, the Basques in Spain, the Bas-Bretons in France, and at a more recent period the Spanish and French Creoles in those portions of North America occupied of late by the Anglo-American race —these dying nationalities, the Bohemians, Carinthians, Dalmatians, etc., had tried to profit by the universal confusion of 1848, in order to restore their political status quo of A. D. 800. The history of a thousand years ought to have shown them that such a retrogression was impossible; that if all the territory east of the Elbe and Saale had at one time been occupied by kindred Slavonians, this fact merely proved the historical tendency, and at the same time physical and intellectual power of the German nation to subdue, absorb, and assimilate its ancient eastern neighbors; that this tendency of absorption on the part of the Germans had always been, and still was one of the mightiest means by which the civilization of Western Europe had been spread in the east of that continent; that it could only cease whenever the process of Germanization had reached the frontier of large, compact, unbroken nations, capable of an independent national life, such as the Hungarians, and in some degree the Poles: and that, therefore, the natural and inevitable fate of these dying nations was to allow this process of dissolution and absorption by their stronger neighbors to complete itself. Certainly this is no very flattering prospect for the national ambition of the Panslavistic dreamers who succeeded in agitating a portion of the Bohemian and South Slavonian people; but can they expect that history would retrograde a thousand years in order to please a few phthisical bodies of men, who in every part of the territory they occupy are interspersed with and surrounded by Germans, who from time almost immemorial have had for all purposes of civilization no other language but the German, and who lack the very first conditions of national existence, numbers and compactness of territory?”

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– From ‘Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany‘

 

Einstein, the Nazis and the Catholic Church

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks….

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Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

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– Albert Einstein, Time magazine, 23rd December, 1940 p. 38

 

Duffy on Pius XII

I have just foolishly listened to an awful Radio 4 programme on Pius XII narrated by Eamon Duffy. He adopts a soothing scholarly tone but his words are dripping with malice. He interviews and treats with seriousness John Cornwell and though Cornwell climbs down on the specific claims of his book ‘Hitler’s Pope’ the fact that he tells downright lies about Pius XII and his own research in his book is not mentioned. Benedict XV is referred to by Duffy as Pius XII’s ‘Great predecessor’ and his identical policies in the First World War excused and their effect exaggerated (liberals love Benedict XV because he ended Pius X’s anti-Modernist campaign). The fact that no one other than the Soviets accused Pius XII of having failed to condemn Nazism until after the Pope’s death is not mentioned. The fact that Rolf Hochhuth who invented the charge consorts with and defends Holocaust denier in chief David Irving is also not mentioned. Duffy admits that Pius XII was right to suppose that a denunciation of specific war crimes [the nature of which he could not verify at the time] would have led to the death of tens of thousands of people in the Church’s care. He admits that Pius XII thought such a denunciation was a luxury not open to him in conscience. He admits that Pius XII believed he would have had to denounce the Soviet crimes as well and that this would have also led to the revenge killing of tens of thousands. He grudgingly admits that Pius XII denounced Nazi doctrines (though he completely ignores the Encyclical Summi Pontificatus). However, he still goes on to conclude that Pius XII failed as the Vicar of Christ in not denouncing specific Nazi crimes.

Eamon Duffy, though he has a conservative aura because of his liturgical views and his work on the Reformation, is an arch-modernist who denies the divinely instituted character of the Papacy. Like all modernists he loathes Pius XII who represents everything they believe to have been overthrown by the spirit of Vatican II. As Ralph Mcinerny points out in ‘The Defamation of Pius XII’ the real agenda of the critics of Pius XII is a theological one, internal to the Church. It is the apostate who insists on remaining within the Church who most hates Pius XII the representative of a time when him and his kind were far more effectively identified and removed.

 

Moral Descent

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

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– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1882) Part 1, Chapter 6

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“We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

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– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1882) Part 1, Chapter 5

 

Selling the Pass to Herod

I wish people would stop advocating the reduction in the time limit for abortion on the basis that premature babies are now surviving earlier. This is completely irrelevant. Dependency increases our moral obligations to someone it does not diminish them. We should be putting the case incessantly and firmly, not for the repeal,  but for the nullification of the Abortion Act on the grounds of its intrinsic repugnance to reason and morality. We should not be selling the pass by accepting the obscene premises of the eugenicists. The Pro-Life cause has made virtually no progress in this country because of these kinds of idiotic  tactical manoeuvres which abandon the argument to the enemy. Abortion will not be recriminalized until the population is morally outraged at the entire concept. If even those who oppose it fail to display this outrage with any consistentcy  we have no hope. Should we have argued for a change in the law in Nazi Germany to preserve Aryan handicapped children from Euthanasia?