Quote of the day

"Rational people will go quietly, meekly, joyously into a gas chamber, if they are only allowed to believe it is a bathroom" (Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 203).

Simon Wiesenthal

At the ripe old age of 96, Simon Wiesenthal has passed away today. "I think he'll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice," says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

It's with a heavy heart that I hear this news today. Mr. Wiesenthal was a major influence and inspiration to me, both professionally and personally. For nearly sixty years (I think he officially stopped looking for hidden Nazis in '93), Wiesenthal has done the right thing. He decided to act, not out of self-pity or self righteousness, but rather because he continued to cling to possibility of God's existence. He, in the words of Emil Fackenheim, refused to "hand Hitler a posthumous victory" by turning his back on his faith, despite the horrors he witnessed, the trials he faced and the ridicule he endured.

Dobson likened embryonic stem cell research to Nazi experiments

On August 3rd, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family was discussing the current debate over the use of embryonic stem cells. In one statement, he likened embryonic stem cell research to Nazi experiments, saying:

You know, the thing that means so much to me here on this issue [embryonic stem cell research] is that people talk about the potential for good that can come from destroying these little embryos and how we might be able to solve the problem of juvenile diabetes. There's no indication yet that they're gonna do that, but people say that, or spinal cord injuries or such things. But I have to ask this question: In World War II, the Nazis experimented on human beings in horrible ways in the concentration camps, and I imagine, if you wanted to take the time to read about it, there would have been some discoveries there that benefited mankind. You know, if you take a utilitarian approach, that if something results in good, then it is good. But that's obviously not true. We condemn what the Nazis did because there are some things that we always could do but we haven't done, because science always has to be guided by ethics and by morality. And you remove ethics and morality, and you get what happened in Nazi Germany. That's why to Senator [Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist [R-TN] and the others who are saying, "Look what may be accomplished." Yeah, but there's another issue, there's a higher order of ethics here.

While I heartily agree that embryonic stem cell research represents a serious moral failure, Dobson's analogy breaks down. This may seem a small thing, but worth pointing out. The horrors of the Holocaust were only the final step, the "Die Endlösung"; embryonic stem cell research only represents one small step toward something worse. (Which, of course, is not to suggest that is not bad on it's own merits.)

The experiments done by Dr. Josef Mengelle, Friedrich Mennecke, etc., had very little to do with causing any "good". Almost none of these so-called experiments were designed in any real way to gain scientific knowledge beneficial to mankind as a whole. They were designed to see how best to kill someone and what the effects of particular death-dealing procedures would be. Secondly, embryonic stem cell research (and the procedures designed to gather the cells in the first place) are nothing like Auschwitz or even Hadamar where the goal was to kill as quickly as possible rather than do legitimate research.

Bear in mind, I am a firm believer in the slippery-slope theory; what happened in Germany in the 1920's, 30's and 40's happened because small, unsound "wedges" were inserted into otherwise sound moral reasoning. People in Weimar Germany allowed many small steps toward Auschwitz, without really examining the path they were on. True, they always felt that they were heading in the right direction, but never really understood. History is full of people who honestly believed they were doing good but, come to find out, their struggle only allowed for evil. This is where Dr. Dobson is correct; while the Nazis never committed moral outrages because they wanted to help mankind (well, if you follow their logic they did, but that's another story), they did commit horrors on a grand scale because of the smaller steps which lead up to Auschwitz. He is also correct, in my view, in stating that embryonic stem cell research represents a "wedge" in our culture. When we get to point where helpless humans, or, more accurately, humans that have a very small political voice of their own, can be sacrificed to potentially help other humans with a stronger political voice, we should always worry. I'll leave you with the words of another fine researcher, Harold Kaplan, from his book, Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust:

When people say "never again" as their chief lesson from the Holocaust, we are at a loss. What is to be never again? And then to treat the Holocaust as some indecipherable horror and mystery . . . is to put "never again" at a total impasse. Those who say "never again" speak of the final result, the "solution." That comes too late for such a vow. The question is, Where, at what point in the Nazi series of crimes, does the "never again" begin to apply?

The first sin was not the gas chambers, of course. . . . We understand that all human rights are connected that a Holocaust is only the last stage of their loss. (pp. 9-10)