From: rivk@quads.uchicago.edu (nora gayle rivkis)
Subject: Re: What the pro-lifers do not tell you
Reply-To: rivk@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 22:56:31 GMT

In article <1992Apr10.003426.9619@cco.caltech.edu> anne@cco.caltech.edu (Anneliese Lilje) writes:
>In article <1992Apr9.203910.4727@midway.uchicago.edu> rivk@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>>In article <1992Apr8.214030.10716@cco.caltech.edu> anne@cco.caltech.edu (Anneliese Lilje) writes:
>>
>>>So you're making the analogy that by comparing abortionist to Nazis
>>>that somehow degrades the term NAZI? Your OBVIOUSLY not looking at it 
>>>from the hard core pro-life perspective. To some pro-lifers, abortionist
>>>are people who methodically (sp?) KILL children. Because they see
>>>the life of the unborn child as being as important as your life or my
>>>life. TO you or ME this may not be the case...but the comparison is 
>>>QUITE valid to many. 
>>
>>But it isn't valid, and it's known not to be valid, to the people the
>>pro-lifers are trying to convince. If they just use the analogy when
>
>WHY?????????????? Why is it NOT valid. I have presented a case for it 
>being valid in the eyes of some pro-lifer, now please show me
>how it is NOT valid. I could be wrong ya know!

Sorry; my wording was ambiguous. What I meant was "It isn't valid to
the people the pro-lifers are trying to convince, and the pro-lifers
know it."

>>talking among themselves, it doesn't do any harm. But when they, and
>>the prp-choicers who are claiming that pro-lifers are nazis, and the
>>anti-fur people, and everyone else with a cause to further, start try-
>>ing to make their points to the unconvinced by using the analogy, the
>>inevitable reaction is that the people who *don't* see the cause in
>>question as that bad will start tuning out anyone who refers to the
>>Holocaust, as in, "Oh, no; not *this* again!!" And this will get very
>
>Ohhhh Mannnn. This is *YOUR* preception. Do you have any evidence that
>affiliating the term "Nazi" with a cause "tunes" people out to the 
>horrors of Nazi Germany? The pro-lifers equating these terms are NOT
>taking it lightly. THAT is why they are using the term in the first place,
>to illustrate the horror that they perceive abortion is.

But they're saying it to people who *do* take abortion lightly. And
there's plenty of evidence for the "crying-wolf" effect -- scream "Nazi"
or scream anything else about too many different things, and can you
blame someone for ignoring it?

>>dangerous, in exactly the same way that it was very dangerous that the
>>reaction of Americans, British, and the population of most of Europe,
>>when the Jews started to call for help, was, "That's ridiculous. Everyone
>>knows they're always yapping about something." The underground radio
>>station from the Warsaw Ghetto broadcast for thirty days, detailed re-
>>ports from inside Treblinka and Majdanek. Nobody listened. When I have
>>to prepare those reports and broadcast them from the Chicago concentration
>>camp, I want people to be so unused to hearing such things that they are
>>shocked into action.
>
>DO you *really* believe that Jews are going to be thrown into a camp in
>Chicago some day soon? 

Yes. Maybe not in the next few years -- though if certain people end
up in political office, probably -- but within my lifetime. Or in Minsk,
or in Damascus, or in Germany again (there's been a massive rise in
neo-Nazi popularity there recently). I wouldn't be terribly surprised
if it were in the United States, but I think the chances of it *not*
coming up again within the next fifty or sixty years, somewhere in the
world, are virtually nonexistent.

>Look, I can understand if you are *particurlarly* sensitive
>to the human tragedy of the Nazi Germany for some reason. A large part of
>my family tree (Western Russia) was wiped into oblivion by Nazi forces. But
>I can't quite imagine that by equating something like the pro-lifers
>view of abortionists with the term Nazi is going to somehow lead to 
>a concentration camp in Chicago! That seems a bit too out there for my
>beliefs at this moment...

It's not going to lead to it; the usual batch of violent racists is
going to lead to it. What equating every political position that comes
along with the Nazis is going to do is to ensure that, when it *does*
happen, the essentially decent people won't believe it or do anything
about it.

>Should we ask Suzanne to stop claiming that unmarried women are "lower
>than prostitutes" because it is devaluing the "magnitude of immoral behavior"
>of prostitutes and therefore making them more accepted in society. NOT!

Suzanne's position isn't used by every idiot with a cause to yell about.
The Holocaust is.

>I also take GREAT offense at your saying that Warsaw Ghetto broadcasts
>we're ignored by EVERYONE. THere is a GREAT difference between hearing
>broadcasts and being ABLE to do something and hearing them and NOT being
>able to do something. There we're people who believed these reports but
>were powerless to do anything. 

"ignored" can mean "behaved as though it hadn't happened." Nobody did
anything about them, you're correct; and the ghetto was broadcasting
specific instructions on what *could* be done. They may simply have
not had the courage, but I somehow don't find that an excuse; the people
in the ghetto somehow managed to find the courage...

	-Nora


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Oseh shalom b'imromav, hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael.
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