Smoking:Lung Cancer :: Socialism:Child Murder

 
Be patient. It will take awhile to establish these links. Just about as long as it took the link between smoking and lung cancer to be admitted, accepted, and then established as fact. Once upon a time, a researcher could get fired for finding a link between lung cancer and smoking. Remember the days when doctors endorsed Luckies? Hey, I’m old enough to remember smoking in my living room with our family doctor when he came by on a house call to see my ailing son. We both smoked in front of this child who was sick with a respiratory ailment.

But times have changed because our available information has changed. From universal tobacco smoke wherever you went, smoking is now rated right up there with social disease. Just to take a random example, what do you want to bet that they frown on smoking at NARAL meetings while touting the moral neutrality of partial birth abortion? Aside from a few furtive hold-outs, cigarettes are becoming the albatross only of the underclasses.

Meanwhile, here’s a news report from the Brussels Journal. Warning: the material is bizarre, inhuman and painful to read.

It seems that Sabine H., a thirty nine year old woman has had nine children in the last twenty years. Or rather, nine babies, since they never grew up. After each birth she killed the baby and buried it in a flower pot. The news report doesn’t say whether or not she used a fresh flowerpot for each baby but for some strange, no doubt hormonally-driven reason, I want each baby to have had his very own flowerpot.

Of course, eveyone is shocked, shocked I tell you. The interior minister announced that everyone must ask themselves how this “unbeleivable crime remained hidden all these years.” I’m sure he meant to say “crimes” since there were nine of them. Then, upon reflection, Mr. Schoenbohm suggested that “one of the causes of this horrible crime might have been the “proletarisation” of the former GDR.”

You see, the GDR was East Germany, and as we all know East Germany was a Communist dictatatoship. Perhaps, the interior minister (a man with higher political ambitions) suggested, it was living in such an amoral climate that had been the root cause of Sabine H.'s murders and flower pot burials:

Schoenbohm had opined that the compulsory collectivisation of farms 50 years ago in the largely rural state had led people to lose their sense of personal responsibility, which in turn had led to a decline of moral values in society. “This is one of the fundamental reasons for both the disregard of and the readiness to resort to violence,” he said, blaming communism and the “deliberate proletarisation” of the country by the former SED regime.

You can bet that this kind of moral conjecture brought the wrath of…well, not of God, perhaps, but the wrath of the German politicos, which is probably worse.

Schoenbohm was immediately criticised by the German Left Party (the “post-communist” successor to the SED), the Greens, the Socialist SPD, and the Liberal FDP, while even his own party leader Angela Merkel called him to account.

There were calls for his resignation and indignant claims that he had insulted East Germans. The Speaker of the German Parliament, a socialist, angrily retorted that he was not going to accept any blame that saw the GDR as “the root of all evil.”

However, as the Brussels Journal points out, the interior minister has hit a sensitive nerve.

A number of German academics and intellectuals, however, stress that Schoenbohm’s explanation should not be rejected out of hand. Crime expert Christian Pfeiffer pointed out that according to official statistics the risk of being killed by their parents is three times as high for children in East-Germany as for those in West-Germany. The historian Hubertus Knabe, who researched the archives of the former East-German secret police Stasi, said Germans ought to reflect on the causes of Sabine H.’s behaviour, though he stressed that obviously not all East-Germans are child murderers.

And then the Brussels Journal makes its case, here:

Sabine H’s case, though horrendous in its scope, is not an isolated one. Over the past years there were 17 cases of child murder in East-Germany, with a total of over more than 40 victims.

Further, the author proposes an analogy, one which you will hear more of in the coming years re various acts and their unintended consequences both for the actor and for the larger community in which she lives:

The situation can be compared to that of a smoker who is dying of lung cancer after having smoked two packets of cigarettes a day for 30 years, and who claims that his cancer has nothing to do with his smoking habits, ignoring the fact that thousands of heavy smokers develop lung cancer.

In a final entreaty to reason, they plead for recognition of the obvious:

Surely the fact that the loss of morals due to communism may have something to do with this spectacular rate of infanticide must be taken into consideration. That socialists and post-communists alike feel uncomfortable about this is understandable, but one wonders why Angela Merkel should call a party member to account for stating the obvious, namely that a regime that robs people of their sense of personal responsibility also robs society of its moral values.

Good summation of this moral conflict and self-questioning, but the real parsing of the problem was made in the beginning, by the interior minister:

…the compulsory collectivisation of farms 50 years ago in the largely rural state had led people to lose their sense of personal responsibility, which in turn had led to a decline of moral values in society.

In other words, the right to private property is the source of liberty. Frédéric Bastiat said it was the primary source of liberty and was God-given. Where men take it away by force, they also rip asunder and eventually cause to atrophy a multi-layered, dense and highly contexted individual morality. Morals are not about being good. They are body-based, visceral understandings of how the world operates and on what it hinges. Morality is the deep understanding that all actions have consequences and that we can never know ahead of time absolutely every ramification of our behaviors.

Socialism in all its forms destroys the very idea of personal responsibility, leaving in its place a vapid and vacuous sense of license.

What a gyp.