V.J. Chalupa

On Post-Modern Politics

APPENDICES

Appendix 1 - Mass Communications Media

a.

By presenting one-sided pictures of the Vietnam war, TV forced the U.S.government to capitulate in spite of military successes. Pictures from Somalia and Burundi forced the American government to undertake extensive humanitarian actions. A typical example of the influence of television was the fate of the tobacco industry. When television took up the theme of smoking as a health problem, within weeks smoking was prohibited on air planes, trains, public premises, work places, each cigarette carton bears a warning against smoking and representatives of the tobacco industry were subjected to investigation by a Congressional committee about an alleged intention to convert the American youth into addicts by increasing the nicotine strength in cigarettes. The industry was forced to pay medical expenses for inveterate smokers who are considered victims rather than culprits.

b.

Terrifying pictures of victims of famine and civil wars in Africa evoked a surge  of public compassion and forced the American government (and through it     the world opinion) to take action. But no less terrifying pictures of mutilated, dismembered and burned remnants of abortion victims and their insensitive disposal as garbage has during the twenty years of legalized abortion never been shown on television screens, although these horrors take place right at home in America and the number of victims, some one and a half million annually, with a total exceeding 20,000,000 by far surpasses the number of the homeless, of the unemployed and even of the victims of famine and war elsewhere in the world.

c.

The best example is the comparison of the way the media handled police brutality in the case of Rodney King and in the case of the Philadelphia pro-life protesters. In the first case, the video of the beating by the police of Rodney King, a notorious criminal resisting arrest after a car chase lasting many minutes, was on all screens, it started a short uprising in Los Angeles and ended by incarceration of the responsible officers (even after he had been found not guilty by a jury). In the other case, the videos of Philadelphia police atrocities against nonviolent protesters blocking the access to an abortion clinic, got nowhere. The video and subsequent witness depositions recorded breaking of fingers, dislocation of arms and elbows, kicking, beatings, humiliating personal inspections of arrested women by policemen, i.e., behavior which would have caused a storm of TV indignation had it been directed against any other movement. The victims were not criminals, but peaceful law-abiding citizens using in a nonviolent way their right to free expression. In spite of their efforts at prosecution of the perpetrators, in three years they have not yet obtained any satisfaction, not one of the perpetrators was punished and the entire episode is mentioned only in letters begging for financial help to cover the legal expenses of their litigation. If such were a fate of a movement favored by the media, the screens and front pages of prominent newspapers would be full of pictures and editorials whipping up general indignation. Their reporting and/or silence on discriminatory legal and judicial measures aimed against this movement keep the public in ignorance and apathy concerning acts which otherwise cause public outcry and outrage. On the other hand, isolated acts of violence against abortion clinics and their personnel get immediate and widespread attention so that Congress voted a law granting abortion clinics  unique protection even against  peaceful presence of protesters, something not granted to any other institution in the United States.

d.

A reader of spy stories could not fail to observe how the era of the Vietnam war produced a flood of novels in which members of American secret services were depicted as murderers, cheats and blackmailers in the services of the industrial-military complex while a Soviet (later an Israeli) secret agent represented a fearless fighter for truth and justice. Science fiction and detective stories, underwent the same cycle. Years after the end of the Vietnam war, fiction still ridicules Vietnam veterans as dull and hopelessly outdated clods -- members of the anti-war movement never. Similar floods of tendentious literature arose around the questions of nuclear disarmament, the sexual revolution, population growth, ecology, feminism, any theme whose advocacy was adopted by the elitist movement.

Appendix 2 - Doctors as Veterinarians of the Human Race

(Summary of the now famous editorial "The Traditional Ethic..." published in California Medicine, the official journal of the California Medical Association  [Sept. 1970, Vol.0113, No. 3]. The article now sometimes dubbed as "prophetic" is a very clear representation of the method applied by the Movement. Most of its recommendations, some worded as conclusions, have been implemented fully, others partially, without the need for any conspiracy behind this success. All that was needed was the spontaneous positive response of the many adherents of the Movement among the knowledge class and the media, whose opinions the article expressed clearly and comprehensibly, but its significance escaped the attention of the others. Only Human Life Review reprinted it twice.

The article acknowledges that "the traditional Western ethics" (not only Christianity) "always" demanded from the medical profession to "preserve, protect, repair, prolong and enhance" the life of every patient. In 1970, more than a year before the Roe vs. Wade decision, California Medicine refutes this ethics on the basis of "certain new facts and social realities" originating from technological advancement whose impact will not fail to displace this irrational limitless devotion to everyone's life. The tension between the growth of the world population and the demand for the "quality of life" will result in the necessity to discard this "Judeo-Christian" ethic and replace it with a new scientific ethic which will require "placing relative values on human lives."

The  new ethics will lead not only to "birth control and birth selection," but also to "death selection and death control" to be performed primarily by physicians. The progress towards this enlightened state will be delayed by the inertia of people who have not yet managed to free themselves from the allegiance to the old ethics, but it will be impossible to stop. This is most apparent by the public's negative attitude towards abortion: although everyone knows that it is killing, the public prefers to avoid "the scientific fact, which everyreally knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intro- or extrauterine till death."  Nevertheless, under the leadership of the enlightened elites and especially the medical profession this attitude is gradually changing and the impact of the new problems which are basically biological and ecological, will complete this development. The article closes with the following sentence: "It is not too early for our profession to examine this new ethic ... and prepare to apply it in a rational development for the fulfillment and betterment of mankind in what is almost to be a biologically-oriented world society."

The reasoning behind  ideology, goals and methods of the breeding of all  humanity and their implementation were explained here unequivocally and are being consistently pursued.

Appendix 3 -- The Case of Roe v. Wade

In the very beginning of the feminist movement in the United States, its leadership (Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and other very intelligent, educated and affluent ladies) concluded that having children is an obstacle to self-fulfillment in their artistic, scientific, professional, social or sexual life and that elective abortion is the way to remove this obstacle. But the democratic character of the United States did not allow it.

According to the Constitution, all powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the individual states. The Constitution does not mention abortion, therefore it was regulated by the laws of the individual states; most of them prohibited it outright and others surrounded it with extensive restrictions. To gain a majority for an unlimited right to abortion was politically preposterous. Its proponents therefore searched for ways to circumvent the democratic process. Dissenting from from the citizenry, a tight, but sufficient majority of the Justices on the Supreme Court belonged to a philosophical movement whose ideology included the right to abort. In order to legalize abortion, it was therefore necessary to bring  a case centering on this issue before the Supreme Court.

This occurred when a young brilliant lawyer Sarrah Weddington was approached by Norma McCorvey, an abandoned young women in a desperate situation, occasional prostitute, drug addict, with one child, pregnant again, who was seeking help in procuring an illegal abortion. Ms.Weddington promised help and sued the state on behalf of Miss McCorvey under the name of "Roe" (to protect her privacy). The substance of the complaint was that state laws prohibiting abortion violate constitutional rights of Ms. Roe and of all women and that her pregnancy was caused by rape. After expenditure of large amounts of money provided by feminist organizations, the case landed before the Supreme Court which decided by a majority of 5:4 that constitutionally protected human rights produce emanations of a right to privacy in turn producing penumbras which include the right of women to decide whether they wish to be pregnant or not. This right, then, in turn included the right to abort the "fetus" because "fetuses" were not persons in the sense of law. This decision was justified by uncertainty about the moment when life begins, and the blob of cells forming a fetus is therefore not protected by the constitutionally guaranteed right to life.

By this legal trickery, the right to decide questions concerning the "fetus" was exempted from the jurisdiction of the states, laws of all 50 states concerning abortion became unconstitutional and the right to abortion came under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has since declared unconstitutional all the numerous attempts by referendums and legislation to narrow down the right of abortion (e.g., laws requesting a permission of parents prior performing an abortion on minors, laws subjecting abortion clinics to health inspections, and so on). In order to reverse a decision of the Supreme Court, it is necessary to amend the Constitution, a process so complicated and difficult as to be practically hopeless.

During the litigation which lasted some two years, the plaintiff bore a girl. Her "protectors" abandoned her after the successful conclusion of the litigation as soon as her usefulness as an instrument of policy ended and she sank back into misery. She described her role and experience in a book where she also published the fact that she had not been raped and that the father of the "fetus" was the man who lived with her at that time. This disclosure had no effect; the Supreme Court ruled that the litigation was a class action and became a precedent; therefore cannot be reversed. An accusation of perjury (with penalties up to 20 years of prison) was never raised; Miss McCorvey became an anti-abortion activist, but the "inalienable right" to unlimited abortion remained on the books as a constitutionally protected liberty even after incontrovertible determination by biology and medicine that life beings at the moment of conception and some 1,500,000 preborn human beings are aborted annually.