Fifty years after the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, the struggle to protect life continues unabated. In the victorious democracies, Judeo-Christian based morality has been subverted by a specious amorality based on reason. Individual responsibility has been expropriated by relentless increase of government control over all aspects of human life: in who will be born, and whether someone’s quality of life is worth saving. The family has been displaced by the government as the fundamental basis of society.
Looking back, World War II veterans question how so many aspects of the fascist morality, that so many gave their lives to defeat, could now, fifty years later, become so entrenched in modern peace-time society.
The memory of the sacrifices of Canadian and Allied servicemen during World War II to end the Fascist domination of much of the world has forever marked the lives of generations of Quebecers.
The family of Louis Jean Baptiste and Agnes Senez of Notre Dame de Grace was celebrated across the province of Quebec and throughout the country for its unique contribution to the war effort. Ten of their 17 children survived infancy. Corinne was the only girl and Fred, Bernard, Hector, Vincent, Frank, Charles, Norbert, Wilfred and Roger all enlisted. The second youngest, Wilfred, was killed in a bombing raid over Hamburg and the others survived.
Many francophone Quebecers, apparently unconcerned with the liberation of France from the Nazis, objected to the notion of fighting to protect England. Quebec premier Adelard Godbour attempted to persuade them to join the war effort by publicizing the nine Senez brothers. Photographs of the brothers were mounted together and published extensively across the province. Family members were interviewed regularly by media from around the world and Agnes Senez was proclaimed “Canada’s Proudest Mother. Families who had a soldier in the was used to fly a flag in their window. The Senez family had nine flags in their window.
Since 1945, a series of seemingly insignificant, harmless, and unrelated changes has dramatically transformed the moral order in Canadian society. The traditional Judeo-Christian view of man as a subject of creation was replaced by the belief that man is just another object in the physical universe to be controlled and manipulated. While politicians, who never served, or who dodged the draft, proclaim, with one eye on re-election, that the sacrifice of so many young lives was not in vain, those who saw comrades cut down in the prime of life are less certain.
“Sometimes when you read the paper today…you see what’s going on in the world,” says a Quebec veteran, Bob Nicol, “you wonder if the guys may have wasted their time…and their lives.” How many veterans, now grandfathers, have had their unborn children and grandchildren aborted by a government unable, a society unwilling, to protect the right to life of all human beings, born and unborn?
The primitive techniques of mass indoctrination and manipulation, pioneered by Joseph Goebbels, have been refined and applied to modern society. Various types of deception and trickery were used by the Nazis to induce their victims to so-operate in their own destruction. Over the entrance at the Dachau concentration camp was the inscription “Freedom Through Work” and, it is said, that the Nazis took a certain demonic pleasure in raising the false hope that good behaviour could help someone avoid the ‘ultimate solution’ to the problem of undesired people.
The sexual revolution, the acceptance of artificial contraception and the abortion pill have eliminated the need for extermination camps. Social policies which promote indiscriminate sex, contraception and abortion encourage the individual to abandon personal responsibility and liberty while simultaneously increasing dependence on government and the concentration of power in the hands of a few.
In some countries, individual racial groups have been pressured by various international agencies to contracept themselves out of existence. The “birth control pill” is in effect a “suicide pill,” which, had it been available in 1942, may have been applied by the Nazis to all non-Aryans, as was abortion.
A widespread propaganda campaign has been mounted to suppress objective discussion of the public and private costs of the “free sex” mentality. Among the private costs is the pollution of the individual’s moral environment and the destruction of personal integrity. Contraception unnaturally separates the unitive aspect of sex from its procreative function. This renders the individual operationally impotent by making sex irrelevant to the exercise of power. Unable to participate in the creation of new life and contribute to the development of society, the individual is reduced to accepting the illusion of power and freedom ad may express his dissatisfaction in various antisocial ways.
In Quebec the free sex movement has become a demographic, if unacknowledged, neutron bomb where the falling birth rate and the threat of exponential increases in social costs are main factors which underlie the current political malaise which affects all of Canada.
There are signs, however, that traditional Judeo-Christian values may soon be back in style. The current humanistic, amoral view of society is based on the belief that nature and the natural order is random and unpredictable.
A wide range of ethical behaviour is tolerated because the set of possible consequences of a given activity is assumed to be quite narrow. Recent discoveries suggest that the consequences of a given act are interrelated suggesting a return to traditional values in the not too distant future.
(Michael Farrel is the husband of Interim columnist, Regina.)
