Holocaust De'Ja' Vu!

Holocaust Déjà Vu
John R. Petrilli

Former New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra is known for his humorous comments. One of my favorites is his quip, “It’s déjà vu all over again!” The humor lies in the fact that the phrase déjà vu (borrowed from psychology) actually means “the illusion that one has previously had a given experience”. So Yogi’s quip actually translates, “It’s all over again, all over again”. This article is about déjà vu, but its not the kind that dwells in the realm of the imagination. No, this déjà vu falls under the category of stark reality. It’s déjà vu of the worst kind, indeed a veritable nightmare version of déjà vu.

After viewing the PBS program, Escape From Auscwitz, I referenced a book in my library titled, “The Abandonment of the Jews”, written by David S. Wyman. There I discovered a running account of how various American agencies and organizations responded to the plight of 1.5 million Jews being gassed to death at Auschwitz. The details provide a glimpse into the covert blocking and nauseating indifference these institutions displayed toward the Jews in their hour of extermination. As I read, I noticed a striking similarity between America’s wartime response to the Jewish holocaust, and America’s current peacetime response to the holocaust of abortion. The haunting parallels should be enough to awaken our land to action to end this wanton execution of life.

I. The American Government Was Indifferent to the Jewish Holocaust and Remains Indifferent To
The American Holocaust.

On April 10, 1944 two young Slovakian prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, successfully escaped from Auschwitz. They fled to Slovakia, where they met with the Jewish underground and dictated a 30 page report detailing Auschwitz’ geographical layout, internal conditions, and gassing and cremation techniques. A copy of the Vrba-Wetzler statement was dispatched to Hungarian Jewish leadership in Budapest in May, and made it to Switzerland by mid-June. By late June the truth about Auschwitz was known to the entire outside world. Over a period of two years the executive branch (under Franklin Roosevelt), the War Department, the State Department, and the U. S. War Refugee Board (WRB) each chose to shelve or ignore the pleas of the Jewish Community worldwide to take intervention steps to stop the killing at Auschwitz and elsewhere.

Here we stand a full 36 years beyond the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made the American holocaust possible. Our abortion tally approaching 50 million makes Hitler, Himler, and the Gestapo look like innocent choir boys. In hindsight we shake our heads in disgust at the atrocities against the Jews in WW II, yet fail to see a holocaust 8 times more deadly that continues daily across our land. The Nazi’s hid their holocaust from public view, building death camps in remote European country sides, but the American holocaust takes place in plain view right under our noses at the local abortion clinic just around the corner from where we live!

The diabolical experiments of Nazi psychiatrist Joseph Mengela twisted and destroyed the minds of prisoners, but the American abortionist does him one better, sucking the brains right out of the skulls of half-delivered babies. We’re aghast over how Nazi military brass proudly displayed the skulls, hair, and other body parts of murdered prisoners. But American profiteers have one up on them … they sell the body parts of aborted babies for profit to the highest bidder. Our Supreme Court continues to uphold Roe v. Wade, so this merciless, cold-blooded killing goes on. Organizations like Planned Parenthood enjoy raking in billions of our tax dollars to finance their killing machine and spread their lies and pro-death propaganda. Where will this end?


II. The American Church Was Indifferent to The Jewish Holocaust and Remains Indifferent To The
American Holocaust.

Wyman reports, “America’s Christian churches were almost inert in the face of the Holocaust and nearly silent too. No major denomination spoke out on the issue”… “Few of the many Christian publications cried out for aid to the Jews. Few even reported the news of extermination, except infrequently and incidentally. The bulk of the Protestant press was silent, or nearly so. And few cries for action arose from the pages of any part of Protestantism’s print media.” “ Two important Catholic periodicals, America and Commonweal, did speak out from time to time on the extermination of the Jews and called for action to help them. But the rest of the Catholic press was almost silent on the issue, as was the American church itself”. “ At the heart of Christianity is the commitment to help the helpless. Yet, for the most part, America’s Christian churches looked away while the European Jews perished.” (1)

How many denominations maintain a sustained public outcry against the murderous acts of abortion that claim thousands of lives per day in our country? How many local churches consistently pray about this holocaust and call for their people to actively take a stand against this evil of all evils? How many individual Christians do more than march once a year or participate in a one-day National Day of Prayer? Are we to honestly believe for one moment that such minimal involvement will even scratch the surface of this heinous industry? Anyone who faces this squarely has to admit that it won’t. Thousands die a horrible death daily here in America. Where is the Church? Why is She so incredibly silent and so apathetically disengaged from one of “civilized” history’s largest wholesale slaughter of innocent life?

III. The American Culture Was Indifferent to the Jewish Holocaust and Remains Indifferent To The
American Holocaust.

The next step in Wyman’s search takes us into the 1940’s American culture, only to find the same degree of disinterest and inaction. He notes that most American liberals, most American intellectuals, and American Communists were virtually absentee with regard to the holocaust. American filmmakers avoided the subject of the Jewish catastrophe, refusing to produce even a single short film on the mass killing of the Jews.

Consider these incredible cultural statistics gleaned from Carenet, a national prolife organization. “In our American culture, by the age of 45, 43% of all women will have had an abortion. There is one abortion for every three live births. 234,000 evangelical Christian women choose to abort their babies each year. And less than 5% of all abortions are done because of rape, incest, or health.”

The truth is, the average American is far more worried about his or her own pocketbook than the fact that close to 50 million innocent lives have been quietly snuffed out since Roe v. Wade. We carry on with our fun and entertainment while thousands of unborns daily enter eternity screaming in pain, the silent screams falling on our deaf ears, blinded eyes and calloused hearts. Where are the movies documenting this atrocity? Where are the massive social movements protesting this “unjust war” against innocent little babies? Where is the outcry against the greatest “social injustice” ever committed against an entire population and generation of Americans? Where is the media and mass communications coverage of this unbelievable genocide?


IV. The American Media Was Indifferent To The Jewish Holocaust and Remains Indifferent To The
American Holocaust.

Unresponsiveness to the plight of European Jews on the part of ordinary Americans was due to the fact that the majority weren’t aware of the Third Reich’s extermination programs until mid-1944. Such information was virtually unavailable because the systematic murder of millions of Jews was treated as minor news by the mass media.

According to Wyman’s research, “Most newspapers printed very little about the Holocaust, even though extensive information on it reached their desks from the news services (AP, UP, and others) and from their own correspondents. American mass-circulation magazines all but ignored the Holocaust. Radio coverage of Holocaust news was sparse. There is no clear explanation for the mass media’s failure to publicize the Holocaust.” (2)

It was not until the full Auschwitz report received frontpage coverage across the country that the press finally got on the ball. Shortly thereafter, when the German concentration camps were liberated, the whole world saw firsthand what Eisenhower described as the “almost unbelievable barbarous treatment” of prisoners. Conditions were absolutely abysmal, including massive starvation, unchecked disease, terrible crowding, and thousands of unburies corpses. But, ironically, these camps (Buchenwald, Belsen, Dachau, etc.) weren’t the worst case scenarios. These were not extermination camps like Auschwitz, Majdanek, and four other killing centers where Jewish murders numbered in the millions.

So how many news stories have you heard (ever) on the abortion industry? When did you ever read any article in any major news publication anywhere that exposed in graphic verbal and pictorial fashion the horrors of this holocaust of the unborn? Has the nightly national or local news EVER reported a SINGLE story showing a graphic depiction of just what a victim of a saline or curettage abortion comes out looking like? Name one such instance! Our media is guilty of the most crass bias and cover up of all time.

SOURCES

(1) The Abandonment of the Jews, David S. Wyman, Pantheon Books, New York, New York, pp. pp. 317-320.

(2) Ibid, pp. 321-322.