If you have opened a newspaper (do people still buy those??), or gone online and read various news websites, or spent time on the sewage dump called Twitter, or follow your friends and their thoughts on Facebook, then you have seen various different articles, blogs, posts, memes and more about equality.
Gender equality, class equality, racial equality, pay equality, sex equality, and more and more and more. Equality is the cause of the moment. It’s everywhere. Indeed our modern world is obsessed with equality. But did you know the Nazis were too?
For example, Van Creveld (2015, Chapter 11) tells us:
The Nazis attacked liberal equality from a different angle. On one hand, building on earlier doctrines, they set up a racial hierarchy in which their own Volk occupied the top rungs and everybody else was further down. Yet at the same time they also tried to create a certain kind of equality within the community or Volksgemeinschaft. As the Nazis’ opponents have never ceased pointing out, to some extent it was a sham. Property remained in private hands. Socio-economic gaps between the classes only decreased moderately if at all. The great industrialists, or chimney barons as they were known, remained in place. Nevertheless, especially during the early years of the regime, the promise of this kind of equality exercised a strong appeal. But for it, the Third Reich would have been inconceivable.
To turn their vision into reality the Nazis did two other things. First, like the Spartans whom they admired so much, they increasingly based their economy on Helot-like labor imported from the occupied countries and forcibly kept in place. Second and much worse still, they set out to exterminate those who did not measure up to a certain standard, whether medical or racial. Their crimes were among the worst in history and are likely to be forever remembered as a terrible example of what the quest for certain kinds of equality can do. Furthermore, similar to many socialist and all communist ones, the ship the Nazis ran was highly centralized and highly authoritarian. What equality was achieved, in other words, had to be paid for by liberty.
This is from Equality: The Impossible Quest, written by the Jewish historian, Martin Van Creveld.
We should never forget that the Nazi vision was an experiment in seeking equality, after all, they were called the National Socialist German Workers Party. Yes, it was a limited equality, equality for able-bodied, Germanic Aryans, who didn’t question the system. But still, it was a twisted quest for something, equality, that always has to be forced top-down, and is still never fully successful.
We rightly condemn the Nazis for their wicked oppression and extermination of those they considered sub-equal, and not worthy of their version of a socialist society. But we have to wrestle with the indisputable fact that the only way we’ve managed to get closer to equality between the sexes today is abortion, and the pill, two ways of killing the developing foetus.
If you do not believe me that the pill aborts children, perhaps this explanation will be informative for you:
In order to reach high effectiveness rates, hormonal contraceptives rely on two main mechanisms: prevention of the fertilization of a woman’s egg (prefertilization effect), and prevention of the implantation of an embryo by the modification of the lining of the uterus (postfertilization effect).
The second mechanism is what we’re concerned with here. If ovulation occurs and if the egg is fertilized by a sperm, which sometimes happens, especially with today’s low-dose pills[iv], the resulting embryo will travel to the uterus and attempt implantation. However, scientific literature shows that oral contraceptives, implants, the shot, the patch[v] and IUDs make the lining of the uterus inhospitable to it. It is also clearly stated in the labels of these contraceptive methods[vi] (Migeon 2015).
Disagree that life begins at conception? Well here is Migeon (2015) again:
Some studies show that a majority of people believe it does start at conception. But it’s not actually a matter of opinion or belief. In a remarkable scientific paper[vii], Maureen L. Condic, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine, writes:
“The scientific evidence supports the conclusion that a zygote is a human organism and that the life of a new human being commences at a scientifically well defined ‘moment of conception.’ This conclusion is objective, consistent with the factual evidence, and independent of any specific ethical, moral, political, or religious view of human life or of human embryos.”
If you still don’t believe me, that is fine. I suggest you do your own research. I was resistant to the idea that the bill aborts a child as well at first. But was forced by my conscience to investigate it, and it turned out that it is so.
But my main point in this piece is to question an obvious lie in our modern understanding of equality. We think we are an egalitarian society. So, this might be uncomfortable for most people to think about. But our equality is of a false and limited kind as well, just as the Nazis’ was.
You may think our society is much, much better than the Nazis, and sure in many ways, it is, especially from the perspective of many minorities. But from the perspective of the infant who possibly has down syndrome, in his mother’s womb, equality is a myth, and the doctor may as well be a Nazi doctor because his or her treatment is likely to be the same.
In fact, from the perspective of every unwanted child in the womb, not only is equality a lie, it is a cruel joke because they are the ones being killed in the name of “equality.” When are we going to stop this cruel pretence at equality, that is no equality at all, but just good old fashioned oppression of those who cannot defend themselves?
References:
Migeon, Gerard 2015, Women want to know: does the Pill cause abortion? Natural Womanhood: Know Your Body, accessed 6/02/2020
Van Creveld, Martin 2015, Equality: The Impossible Quest, published by Castalia House