The appointment of Bishop John J. O’Connor to the “first among equals” post of Catholic Archbishop of New York has sent a powerful message through the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States. It is a clear signal that the winds in the Church are blowing in favor of orthodox moral positions plus a strong national defense.
As chief Catholic Chaplain in the U.S. Armed Forces for many years, Bishop O’Connor is known to be a strong advocate of U.S. military strength in order to protect our freedom against Communist aggression. He is also known as an outspoken opponent of abortion.
Immediately upon assuming his prestigious New York City post, the new Archbishop O’Connor spoke out on the sanctity of human life and compared abortion to the Nazi Holocaust. It brought down the editorial wrath of the New York Times that anyone could dare to make such a comparison.
Comes now a professor in the School of Social Service of Saint Louis University who provides impressive documentation for Archbishop O’Connor’s comparison. Dr. William Brennan, author of “The Abortion Holocaust,” sets forth a list of alarming parallels between abortion and the Nazi Holocaust which he believes should be addressed by the media.
Dr. Brennan points out how euphemisms were used to conceal and disguise the horror of the Holocaust. Nazi semanticists avoided the word “kill” like a plague. In sugar-coated Nazi language, people were simply “removed” from ghettos and “evacuated” to “the East” for “resettlement,” “special treatment” or “rehabilitation” in the “wash and disinfectant rooms” and “bathhouses” of “concentration,” “resettlement,” or “recreation” camps.
Likewise, the abortionists cover their destructive activities with semantic camouflage. According to the abortion lexicon, “products” or “contents” are merely “removed” or “evacuated” from the womb in the antiseptic settings of “reproductive health centers,” “clinics,” or “preterm institutes.”
In both instances, the plight of the victims remains hidden from view. Jews were killed in remote areas inside gas chamber walls while unborn children are “terminated” inside the walls of the uterus. Technology thus has the insidious effect of hiding the most repulsive features of killing and reducing it to the level of a technical procedure carried out with assembly-line proficiency.
Dr. Brennan shows that the dehumanization of the victims was an essential part of the process. Hitler’s contention that “Jews are not human beings” did not develop out of a void. Professor Jacob Katz in “From Prejudice to Destruction” and Professor Alfred D. Low in “Jews in the Eyes of the Germans” both showed how the numerous demeaning stereotypes imposed on Jews were created by German (including liberal) intellectuals.
Likewise, many members of the U.S. liberal intellectual community deny the humanity of the unborn as vociferously as the Nazis denied the humanity of the Jews. Many liberals continually assert that “the fetus is not a human being.”
Even much of the terminology concocted to derogate Jews and unborn children is the same: “nonperson,” “subhuman,” “parasite,” “mass,” and “garbage.” Nazi extermination specialist Christian Wirth referred to Jews at Treblinka as “garbage.” In 1980 Dr. Martti Kekomaki justified fetal research on the contention that “an aborted baby is just garbage and that’s where it ends up.”
“The right to choose” and “choice” are at the top of the list of phrases manufactured by abortion wordsmiths to rationalize their destructive procedures. Dr. Brennan’s research shows that the main designations used by Nazi medics to conceal death camp atrocities were “they were selected” and “selection.” Nazi doctors presumed their own “right to select” who perished in gas chambers just as the abortionists insist upon “the right to choose” who will expire in abortion chambers.
The fiction that the victim is a “nonperson,” says Dr. Brennan, played an indispensable role in stripping away legal rights from both Jews and the unborn. In “The Dual State: A Contribution to the Study of German Dictatorship,” legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel showed that the German Supreme Court in 1936 “refused to recognize Jews living in Germany as ‘persons’ in the legal sense.” In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”
Dr. Brennan suggests that the Times should commit its superior capacity for investigative reporting to probing these astounding parallels instead of lashing out at Bishop O’Connor.
