Some people get angry at the very idea of drawing a comparison between Joseph Mengele and Henry Morgentaler. Harvey Schachter, associate editor of the Kingston Whig-Standard is on of those persons. He wrote an extra-long, 1300-word, editorial the day after Morgentaler’s visit to the Queen’s University on February 6. Entitled “The lessons of Morgentaler,” the editorial really focuses on only one point: that of overblown, emotional rhetoric, for which the editor holds Pro-life responsible.
The remainder of the text merely re-states points from the Morgentaler position, of which the writer clearly approves. Except of disapproving of Morgentaler’s “V for Victory” sign, Schachter obviously regards both his speaking at a prestigious lecture series and his pro-abortion arguments as perfectly reasonable.
With regard to the local Pro-life movement, Mr. Schachter accused it of bringing: “shame upon itself and the city, most notably in the ridiculous attempts to link Morgentaler to Joseph Mengele – and in a group of Protestant ministers’ unthinking use of the word Holocaust in an ad attacking a Jewish survivor of Nazi concentration camps…”
Harvey Schachter went on to note that the attempt “to depict an enemy as evil incarnate” is not new, but “a basic tactic of war,” increasingly used by protest groups of all shades and stripes. Moreover, he continued further on,
“It is far easier for the Kingston pro-life movement to attack Morgentaler than to picket our neighbors, doctors who carry out abortions daily in Kingston General Hospital, or, women and men who seek those abortions. If abortions are murder, then those people are killers – but the anti-abortionists know they would have difficulty propounding that argument, so instead they devalue the evils of Nazi Germany and try to compare Morgentaler to Mengele, the mad doctor who reigned in the concentration camp where Morgentaler, 40 years ago, was imprisoned.”
The editorial concluded by expressing the hope that “the Morgentaler talk will serve as a lesson: that the issue deserves to be discussed logically, without mindless slogans, in an atmosphere worthy of the weight of the issue.” Just ahead of this, the writer had noted that “the issue of abortion is a deeply moral and highly important issue. It involves the dilemma of when life begins and the issue of people’s rights to control their bodies.”
Clarification of Issues
Before tackling the main issue of the Morgentaler/Mengele parallel, let us clarify a few of the issues mentioned above, but do so briefly so as not to lose the forest for the trees.
Firstly, the concluding lines just quoted are wholly inadequate as a description of what abortion is all about. Abortion is not an academic debate. Abortion is about the grinding up of pre-born babies in garburators. This was made abundantly clear once again in the Toronto trial of Morgentaler and his associates last October. It is precisely this fact which abortion supporters try to hide.
Secondly. While at first sight the quoted paragraphs may appeal to many as reasonable and right, the only factual sentence is that it is easier for Pro-Life to target the one than the many. Even this observation proves of little value when one recalls that Morgentaler is the self-appointed leader of a crusade to establish every woman’s right to abortion. Thus he stands out as significantly different from the others, and this is recognized throughout Canada. The other abortionists, meanwhile, are indeed killers just like Morgentaler. This too, has been recognized throughout the country. Hence the regular demonstrations in front of abortion hospitals, which in some places have been held uninterruptedly for five, six or more years.
The third point concerns the use of the term holocaust. Holocaust is the Old Testament term for the religious sacrificial offering consumed by fire. For example, Abraham was to offer a holocaust of his son Isaac until divine intervention provided him with a ram instead. In Christian religious language the term continues to be used in a related manner. In ordinary usage the term has the added character of a loss of life of exceptionally large numbers such as in “nuclear holocaust.” Since 1945, Jews speak of the murder of six million of their own as “The Holocaust.” This seems entirely appropriate in view of the particular character of this tragedy, which closely resembles a religious sacrificial offering of the innocent.
Today’s slaughter of the innocent pre-born, is in various aspects (numbers, public legal approval – instead of doing it by stealth and secret as in the 40’s, etc.) a worse blasphemy than any previous holocaust. It is a revolt of many against God in favour of human autonomy. That is its deepest theological significance. Thus, this sacrifice of the innocent is also a holocaust. The use of the term here is not meant to devalue the Jewish Holocaust but to draw an appropriate analogy.
Fourthly, it appears that Mr. Schachter and others like him vastly underestimate the evil of abortion. Abortion is not just one more issue, it is unlike any other issue in the nation. Morgentaler, on the other hand, understands this very well. There is no doubt in his mind that this is a battle of clashing ideologies. Hence, his use of the “V for Victory” sign.
To illustrate this further, let us now turn to the Mengele-Morgentaler comparison.
Mengele, the abortionist
Recently, the Toronto Star (Sunday, January 27, 1985) published a report that Dr. Josef Mengele, the wanted Nazi war criminal, had been in Buenos Aires at one stage of his fugitive life. The report was based on a U.S. intelligence document which the Star obtained following the revelations that Mengele, called the “Angel of Death” by prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp, had applied to enter Canada in 1962.
Canadian newspapers printed a series of articles during January and February, partly in connection with a three-day “mock” trial of Mengele in Jerusalem and partly because of the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Some four million people were murdered there, mostly Jews and Poles. (In Poland six million people were murdered during the second world war, three million of them Jewish. Also another million Poles perished at the hands of the Communists, mostly after 1945.) the document in U.S. Foreign Service Dispatch, No. 1837, prepared by a member of the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps, and sent through official channels to authorities in Washington in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The intelligence document traces Mengele’s movements from the time he arrived in Argentina aboard a freighter from Genoa, Italy, in 1949. Mengele lived in Buenos Aires for the next nine years, had his fingerprints on file with the Argentine police and was issued an identification card. The U.S. agent states that, from 1956 to 1958, he was “the leading abortionist” in Buenos Aires.
Mengele’s career as an abortionist came to an abrupt end in 1985 when one of his patients died in his abortuary. He was arrested by the police but was set free after two hours, when a friend arrived with a large bribe. Mengele hurriedly left for Paraguay (on October 2, 1958), apparently on a 60-day visitor’s vista because on January 1, 1959, he re-entered Argentina. From there on he kept changing his domicile, apparently form country to country.
Comparison
The first point to note about the Morgentaler/Mengele comparison, then, is that it is not a comparison between a “warm, sensitive, socially-conscious human being” on the one hand and “the mad doctor who reigned in the concentration camp 40 years ago” on the other. The parallel is between Morgentaler, the abortionist, and Mengele, the abortionist. It was this revelation that brought out the Mengele signs among pro-life picketers.
The “Mengele abortionist” story was the occasion for the new signs. However, the Morgentaler/Mengele comparison has a much deeper conection. Therefore, the next question is, what else do Mengele and Morgentaler have in common? The answer: despite contrary appearances, they share a similar ideology. In order to recognize this , some preliminary points must be examined. Here it should be understood that the comparison with Mengele is less with the particulars of the man himself and more with Mengele as representative of anti-human spirit.
Josef Mengele Again
Mengele is mainly known for his unbelievable brutality in killing an estimated 400,000 people. Not only did he select who was to live and who was to die, but his cruelty was refined by further doing experiments on many of the prisoners, injecting victims with camphor, phenerol, benzyne, evipan, chloroform and even air as part of his fiendish experiments into genetics. Another illustration of his mentality was the shooting of 100 children in the back of the head in the summer of 1944 so that he could do autopsies on them. He also attempted new sterilization experiments on his prisoners.
In other words, Mengele imagined himself a medical practitioner seeking to advance mankind. He did this with a warped mind. This warped mind was further distorted when it embraced the social-political aims of Nazism. When Nazism came to power, first in Germany, then in the rest of Europe through conquest, it provided Mengele with the opportunity to become a human monster.
It is important (if difficult) to realize that, under different circumstances, men like Mengele would have been ordinary citizens. Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, focused on the banality of evil. Eichmann, responsible for the transportation of perhaps as many as four million of the six million Jews who died, was a somewhat bureaucratic but perfectly ordinary citizen, kindly to his wife, the cat, and his neighbors. He was incapable of recognizing evil, let alone its enormity. He was just doing his duty, he thought. In Jerusalem he had even had the gall to claim that nobody had ever told him what he was doing was wrong.
Mengele and Eichmann are kindred spirits, the one doing his medical experiments, the other pushing papers on his desk. When Mengele’s political environment changed, forcing him to flee from Europe, he continued to ply the trade he knew best, that of a medical practitioner whose interest was not in healing but in killing human life. Thus the profession of abortionist in the 50s came naturally to him.
Body without soul
How did this medical doctor, as well as others of his thinking, come to his perverted actions? Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish lawyer who has spent 40 years tracing war criminals, has a chapter in his book The Murderers Among Us, explaining how future concentration camp commandents were “hardened” in the thirties, for their work in the forties. They were put to work in clinics specializing in sterilization and euthanasia. (The former to purify the race and the later to get rid of so-called “useless eaters” such as the mentally handicapped.)
Mengele became a human monster because of National Socialism. But his fundamental disrespect for the human being must be traced to an earlier source – the philosophy dominant in medical schools of the day.
The state medical schools in Germany – and, often enough, elsewhere in Europe and America – were and, perhaps, still are the typical products of nineteenth century naturalism and scientism. These divorced the soul from the body, dismissing the former and looking upon the latter as essentially a mechanism whose technical intricacies were a challenge to the scientist to be resolved in the laboratory. In this frame of mind it doesn’t take much to lose the distinction between people and guinea pigs (and disregard the remaining respect for guinea pigs as well.)
Once the atheistic view of the human being has taken hold, it will go in search of some kind of social philosophy. Because the Judeo-Christian view of the dignity of the human individual (based on man as an immortal spiritual being in need of salvation) is not wanted and cast aside, any cock-eyed surrogate will do. Social Darwinism and its theory of the survival of the fittest had prepared the way. In one direction it supplemented and strengthened agnostic liberal individualism which claimed human reason to be self-sufficient and denied man’s need of God or redemption. In another direction, it supported group dominance whether class (Marxism) or race (Nazism). Despite all declarations, the individual human being counts for nothing under these totalitarian systems. The individual is sacrificed on behalf of the collectivity.
Stranger yet perhaps, agnostic liberal individualism also leads to disparaging the human being. Starting with the exclusive assertion of one presumed right – the absolute autnomy of the individual – it ends by distorting and corrupting the rights of others.
The above explains to some degree how a Dr. Mengele can appear in human history (leaving unmentioned the key factor of the individual’s free act of the will to choose evil at any given time.) There were many Dr. Mengeles though relatively few achieved the same degree of barbarity.
Hatred for Christianity
Liberal autonomous individualism on the one hand and racist or class totalitarianism on the other, share their hostility for Christianity with its specific dogmas and insistence on the need of human redemption which cannot be attained by reason alone but requires Revelation. They all hate or despise Christianity with a passion.
One should not be misled by counterfeits such as Hitler’s “Positive Christianity.” This was Christianity minus Christ; in other words, not Christianity at all. Jesus, together with His Mother, the apostles and all of the Old Testament, were exorcised from “Positive Christianity” because they were Jewish, therefore, unpalatable to the nationalists and racists. This counterfeit “religion” served no other purpose than deceit and corruption.
The most important characteristic which people like Morgentaler and Mengele have in common are two: they reject God and seek human self-sufficiency, if necessary, through violence. It matters little whether they are godless by design (atheist) or by practice (agnostic). Godlessness leads to a profound misunderstanding of the human person, his role, his destiny, his dignity. Whether or not these errors will be expressed violently depends on political circumstances. Morgentaler shares these characteristics and expresses them to the extent possible within the present Canadian climate of opinion.
The tactic employed in this pursuit also resembles the Aryan race theory which denied Jews the designation “human” in order to free itself of them.
For as long as necessary abortionists must and will deny the humanity of what is conceived in the womb. They talk about moving their theoretical limit for killing the unborn from 28 weeks (still the legal limit in Britain) to 24, to 20, to 16 weeks of pregnancy. (In Canada there is no legal limit at all; abortions may be done up till just before birth. Individual doctors, or hospitals, however, set their own limits.) But time and again abortionists, as well as radical feminists, have indicated the right to abortion must be absolute. If necessary they are prepared to acknowledge that a four months, or five months, or six months-old unborn is a tiny human being but in that case they are equally prepared to sacrifice it to “the quality of life” of the parents.
Morgentaler’s Worldview
Henry Morgentaler does not do abortions merely for money – however profitable it may be. He does it above all to increase his atheistic worldview. He has said so frequently. He constantly speaks of helping a woman and advancing the cause of womanhood. As he expressed it after his latest acquittal, for example, “it is a fight between light and darkness, democracy and totalitarianism.” (Globe, November 9, 1984). That also is why, on hearing that the Ontario government had decided to appeal his acquittal, he accused Roy McMurtry, the Attorney General, of having missed the chance “to be a statesman” (Globe, December 5, 1984). In appealing to McMurtry two weeks later to withdraw the appeal, he thought McMurtry could “still capture a moment of greatness and truth.” (Toronto Star, November 22, 1984).
At the same time, Morgentaler, year in and year out, denounces the pro-life as “a totalitarian and semi-facist ideology” (for example, while addressing Ontario Federation of Labour unionists during lunch, Toronto Star, November 22, 1984). Pro-Lifers themselves are “quasi-facist, anti-democratic, half crazy, mean product of a male chauvinist society” (Edmonton, January 16, 1985). Frequently, he refers to Pro-life as “a vocal, fanatical right-wing group.” He has kept this up from some seventeen years.
In the mid 1970s Morgentaler targeted all his opponents, including governments, as Nazis, anti-semites and racist nationalists. The following is the first part of a poem he wrote while in prison in Montreal and printed (together with others) in his biography.
A Nazi Storm Trooper Crushing a turtle under his boot (I am the turtle).
A Polish anti-Semite throwing a chair onto my defenseless intellectual head.
A French-Canadian nationalist throwing a bomb at my peaceful house, While inside I dream of the Brotherhood of Man.
I look up at those vile faces that have the cruel might of their world in their fingers and boots and I tremble.
(E. Perline, Morgentaler, 1975, Chapter 7 “The establishment hits back”)
As for Christianity, Morgentaler despises it, especially Catholicism. (The heading of Chapter six of his biography is entitled “Peeing against the Church Door.”) Christianity stands in the way of his proposed liberation of the human being from all dependencies because it argues that no such autonomy is desirable or possible.
In my pride and self-satisfaction I was blind to the forces of Darkness believing that Justice and Humanity will triumph.
I underestimated the Power of Evil and the determination of black-robed eunuchs to castrate me.
(Ibid, page 53)
Dachau
Morgentaler, also, according to his biographer, was briefly in Auschwitz, while Mengele presumably helped supervise its operations. Morgentaler, brought therefore a few days after the dissolution of the ghetto in Lodz in August 1944 till his selection for transportation to Dachau (near Munich, Germany) where he was liberated in April 1945, was, of course, a victim. He frequently mentions his suffering, claiming it gives him a special understanding of the helpless and suffering.
His experience brings out waves of sympathy from the audiences he addresses. It lends him an apparent authority. This authority should be denied him. Morgentaler uses the martyrdom of millions of millions for his own selfish purposes, to establish a credibility and nobility for himself that he has not earned and does not deserve, and to imply infamy and insincerity to his opponents when this is a lie and a smear.
While Morgentaler is not, and cannot be, another Mengele in an identical way, the comparison between the two is in no sense “overblown rhetoric.” Their ideologies, their attacks on the dignity of the human being and their self-given aims in life are altogether too close.
