That was the headline in the Sunday Telegraph on the subject of Thursday's 60th anniversary of the Russian army's entry into Auschwitz. They made a telling point - we congratulate ourselves on how much better we are than were the Nazis, but we have an extermination programme every bit as ruthless as their's was. The Nazis started off by forcibly sterilising the mentally handicapped as 'unfit to reproduce', a policy supported by British socialist intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw. They moved to exterminating those they termed 'useless eaters', using gas to kill them, and then extended the policy to other sections of society they disliked, mainly Jews. As for the disabled, 70,000 handicapped people were put to death by the summer of 1941.
In Britain today, to kill an unborn baby after 24 weeks is illegal, unless the baby is diagnosed with a handicap, which as we have recently seen, can be as trivial as a cleft palate. We compel the owners of the smallest public building to construct ramps for the disabled, whilst trying to eliminate disabled people before they are actually born. Disabled people cost money to look after, and the Nazis would have appreciated the logic of our position.
At 550 unborn babies a day, we may not be killing as fast as the Nazis managed, but we have been at it for longer. Just like they did with their extermination programme, we started by killing the hard cases, but moved quickly to extend it to those who were just inconvenient to have around. Our total death toll is now well over 6 million from abortion in the thirty-six years since it was legalised in 1968. The Sunday Telegraph concluded:
"We have successfully disguised the enormity of what we are doing from ourselves, just as the Nazis did. Thursday should not be an occasion for congratulating ourselves on how far we have come from the moral abyss of National Socialism. It should rather prompt an honest recognition of how disturbingly close our abortion laws have taken us to it."
