Nuremberg Remembrances and other Ironies
For Life Advocate Magazine
30 April, 1996
(An accompanying personal note to the now-decedent editor Paul DeParrie precedes.)
Hello Paul! Myriad pardons, please. I spent most of Tuesday and was up at 4:00 am on Wednesday to finish it. The muses finally began to speak in the early morning, but other unscheduled pastoral matters did assail my schedule and discredit my promise to get this to you.
Incidentally, I shall be in Florida for Paul’s hearing on 31 May. Also hope to make the Sperle/Martin trial. Pressure is on the latter to nail the former. A two-year plea bargain was offered.
(Note: the spelling, “Lenin,” below is intended.)
Of Romeo, Juliet wailed:
“O serpent heart, hid with a flow’ring face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven! wolfish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damned saint, an honorable villain!”
How sorely disappointed she was upon hearing that her “three-hours” husband had killed her cousin, Tybalt. The horrible irony she saw vanished after a moment, however. Since Tybalt wanted to kill Romeo, the irony dissolved when she focused upon the question of whose life she loved more? One was bound to die. Juliet quickly altered her attitude when she seized squarely upon the fact that she valued the life of Romeo more than that of her cousin.
When we get our “value system” in order, certain radical/extremist/intolerable deeds, at last, don’t seem so bad. Whose life do we love more; that of the guilty assailant, or the innocent victim? Thence comes appreciation for the terminations performed by Paul, burnings by Beseda, and abductions by Anderson
But the ironies which abound in a world gone crazy with a pagan value system are bewildering – even comical – aren’t they? One of my favorite sights on the cultural landscape is the animal sacrifice scene down in Miami. Followers of the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santeria now number about 100,000 in South Florida and a million nationwide according to anthropologist Rafael Martinez (April AP report). Mr. Martinez has been working with the Dade County Medical checking into crimes linked to the worshippers. (Stolen pets or livestock, cruelty to animals, etc.) But what is a crime? Citizens of Dade county outlawed the sacrifice of animals with a county ordinance; the Supreme Court outlawed the law, of course.
There is what must be an embarrassing connection between Roman Catholicism and Santeria. The AP report says that before a person becomes initiated in Santeria, he must be baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. “On the last day of Santeria’s seven-day initiation period, the first place a newly initiated person goes is to a Roman Catholic Mass.” (Of course, we hasten to add, this is no more shameful than Bill Clinton’s last two church memberships are to several million Southern Baptists and United Methodists – if there be any pious among them.)
And now Gerardo Lastra’s botanica in Miami sells live ducks for $10 and female goats for $70 to the Santeros so they can sacrifice them to Yemaya, the Santeria god of the seas. And Gerardo delivers! “Business is good. We have lawyers, doctors, policemen coming in here,” he says. Yes, the ever-expanding business opportunities in the land of the free have gone beyond the milkman of yore, even beyond the pizza delivered at your home. You can now have a cultural experience from the pre-Christian good old days! Yes a new day is dawning when Tartar, Bantu, Zulu, Aztec, Hun, and hyena shall commune together in inter-cultural loveliness! (Excuse us, please. We temporarily ascended again via Transcendental Meditation to join John Lenin, Jerry Garcia and other greats in those ethereal imaginings.)
So business is booming! (The only shortage is in excommunications. And where are all those animal rights people when you need them?) Let’s see here. Right to life for animals versus right to religious freedom. Where does a good liberal Democrat stand on this issue? (Is this what that Christian poseur – Barry Lyn – means by religious freedom? Is this what his Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is all about?) Well, at least we think we know where free enterprise Republicans and Libertarians stand; to wit, “Forget the social issues. It’s all about the right to pursue wealth with minimal taxation.”
Now there’s an idea. This freedom of religion thing could be played out to the advantage of Paul Hill! Consider the Aztecs. How about a little human sacrifice? Given that people are just another kind of animal (in fact – in the leftist mind-set of Vice President Al Kazinsky [Paul: Do you like Theodore Gore better?] – humans are a detestable and lower form incessantly offending Lord Ecosystem), people ought also to be ruled legitimate objects to be sacrificed. (Fewer polluters!) The case for human sacrifice can be made. (Now stay with me.) This native people is making a come back on the Forgotten Noble Savage hit parade. In a San Jose park, for example, a statue of the snake-shaped Aztec God – which is said to look like a deposit from a large dog, earning it the snide title of “Park God” by irreverent locals who intend it to be subliminally and phonetically read in reverse – was recently erected. The Aztecs are making a come back. And Paul Hill could jump on this PC bandwagon!
Here’s the pitch. Paul was just sacrificing abortionists. He wasn’t interfering with a woman’s divine right to choose by killing altruistic providers of reproductive health services. No! No! No! He was just offering up sacrifices in northern Florida where there was a shortage of ducks and goats. Just practicing his religion in the land of the free.
And I know of some cheap swampland in Florida with lots of adorable alligators, and . . . [Cut this paragraph; huh, Paul?]
Yes, those ironies abound in post-Christian America. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. Gathered on Yom Hashoah (Day of Remembrance) in the Capitol Rotunda in April were five Supreme Court justices and various members of Congress. Pro-abort Jewish Justice Stephen Breyer, the keynote speaker, said that the trial “reminds us that after barbarism cam a call for reasoned justice.” Pro-abort Sen. Christopher Dodd was there recalling the memory of his father, the late Sen. Thomas Dodd who was one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg.
Miles Lerman, chairman of the United States holocaust Memorial Council, declared that Nuremberg taught us that “we cannot look the other way when evil plans are in the making; when atrocities take place and the truth is distorted. We must always be ready to speak out against evil” (Washington Times, 17 April)
Here they were, condemning the holocaust of another generation while supporting the one in their own. If not immoral to the extent that it becomes comical, blindness and hypocrisy are at least sublime.
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