Suffering from Evil
Why is this book on the shelf? Two books that made me angry
This is a sort of sequel to a post from last October:
“When you get out into the real world, you won’t be able to handle it.”
I could still hear those words as I began college, spoken years before by a relative who thought my homeschooled siblings and I were too sheltered. By sheltered, they meant our archaic clothing, narrow social circle, and limited exposure to popular culture. When I entered college to study nursing, I was still wearing ankle length skirts, black ones that I sewed myself to match my fashionable black shirts. Two prior years of night courses, studying with adult classmates of varied lifestyle choices and colourful language use, had left me unfazed. My music and reading choices steadily widened to include current culture. I watched gritty films.
I began clinical placements in my first semester. The days in hospital left me physically and mentally drained. One day after clinical, I tried to relax through distraction by watching a film I had seen before, The Pianist. Partway through, I turned it off. The cinematic portrayal of the Holocaust did not overwhelm me - I read Vladislav Szpilman’s original memoir, which has darker details. But on the screen, I could only see actors pretending to suffer. In the hospital I saw patients who were slowly suffocating from chronic lung disease, drowning with advanced heart failure, fading away in delirium and dementia. There are so many ways humans suffer.
When I completed my nursing program, I was no longer sure I wanted to be a nurse. It was not constantly witnessing human suffering that brought me to this bitter conclusion. It was the divide between the ideals I was taught and the realities I trained in; it was the jaded cynicism of overworked staff; it was the bullying of managers; it was the callousness of a system obsessed with cost management. It was the realization that I too could become careless and indifferent.
Under pressure, I feared I would compromise my own code of ethics. My ethics have a simple premise, that all humans are created in the image of God, entitling them to life and dignity. When I read my first nursing textbook and found the universal ethics of healthcare, I knew my personal code fit. The four ethical principles are non-maleficence – do no harm, beneficence – do good, justice – do right, and autonomy – respect the patient.
I understood the complexity of balancing the four ethics. My drained confidence was not due to headline ‘culture war’ healthcare issues.1 It was due to ethical conflicts in mundane life or death tasks, such as giving medications to thirty care home residents at suppertime. How can the right patient be given the right medication in the right dose by the right route at the right time for the right reason, within so short a period to so many varied patients?
With billions of humans on earth, how do any of us promote human life and dignity? It is easy to want quick answers. There are two books on my shelf that record past answers that seemed quick and were evil. I do not like these books. I did not enjoy reading them. They each took a decade to finish. I read and keep them out of a sense of duty, to those many unknown, real humans who suffered under these awful answers.
Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, by Rudolph Höss, edited by Steven Paskuly, translated by Andrew Pollinger
I have mentioned before that I had two extended family members who suffered under the Nazi regime. One of them, my great uncle by marriage, wrote a brief memoir, My Way to Life, which had limited distribution and is long out of print. The experiences of these two family members, both respected and loved, meant I grew up keenly aware of the Holocaust. In early adulthood, I read several volumes on the atrocity, including my great uncle’s memoir, and watched films such as The Pianist and Judgement at Nuremberg:
Then, I encountered someone who questioned ‘the agreed-upon historical narrative’. To say I was shocked is an understatement. I was simultaneously bewildered at why anyone felt it necessary to raise such questions, and outraged that the testimony of people I respected and loved was discounted. This questioner focused on Auschwitz, claiming a lack of evidence for the gas chambers. I pointed out that the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Höss, had confessed to the mass gassings. The questioner claimed that Höss had been tortured to make a confession.
So, I purchased Höss’s memoir to read for myself. Höss wrote the memoir while awaiting execution for his crimes. It is not well written – Höss was no scholar. It is not well presented – Höss writes by classification more than chronology. It is not a manifesto – Höss spends little time on his ideology, which was essentially that in order for his nation to prosper, others had to suffer – or an apology. Höss consistantly uses self justification and blame shifting to complain about logistical difficulties while also giving horrifying details about the camps and gas chambers. The sheer banality of the memoir makes it more horrifying and difficult to read.
I did find that Höss said he was beaten when he was first captured by the Allies and that he signed a confession at that point. But that is not the confession quoted in the history books. History quotes Höss’s statement at the Nuremberg trials, and Hoss very clearly states that he was not beaten at Nuremberg. He actually opines that mistreatment of prisoners could not have occurred at Nuremberg, due to close supervision. So, if one accepts Höss’s statement that he was beaten after capture, one must also accept Höss’s statement that he was not tortured at Nuremberg, and also Höss’s assertion that at the time of writing his memoir, which is much longer than his Nuremberg statement, he was well treated.2
Höss’s opinion on the conditions at Nuremberg was very much in keeping with his morbid interest in incarceration in general. Before Höss became a member of the SS, he was a member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary SA and was imprisoned under the Weimar Republic for murder. He describes his fellow prisoners during that incarceration with the same detached curiosity that he describes the groups imprisoned in Auschwitz, classifying them by superficial traits that he presumes are defining. The length of writing he spends on such categorization argues against the notion Höss wrote under coercion.
Since Höss was assigned to both Dachau and Sachsenhausen before becoming commandant of Auschwitz, he superficially profiles most groups targeted by Nazism, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, political prisoners, and ‘special prisoners’ such as Pastor Martin Niemöller.3 On Auschwitz, Höss wrote sections about Russian prisoners of war, used as test subjects; the woman’s camp, which included children; Jewish prisoners in both the main and women’s camps; and the Roma family camp. He also describes the Kapos, male and female convicted criminals assigned to supervise prisoners, whom Höss primarily blames for Auschwitz’s violence.
Höss’ self-deception is terrible, and obvious. While profiling other SS officers, he blames them for unsanitary and overcrowded conditions in the camps, and then, in the same profiles, talks about “extermination” as if it were normal camp business. Höss records that other SS officers showed no emotion at killing, as if they were cold hearted, but claims he suffered inwardly when he “could not” show any emotion while he watched women and children enter the gas chambers.4 He cannot see himself as a killer. He hides his conscience behind orders and necessity.
Self-deception is terrible because all humans are capable of it. While training on a maternal-child floor, I heard a jaded healthcare worker say of a mentally disabled person who had given birth, “They should sterilize people like that.” The speaker seemed unaware of proposing the same ‘solution’ Nazi Germany had used for the mentally disabled. It was also the ‘solution’ that the Canadian province of Alberta used for mental disability from 1928-72, and that multiple jurisdictions in the U.S. used in the same decades.
The Nuremberg trials exposed but did not solve the evil of human self-deception. What humans are considered problems requiring ‘solutions’ today? Are the ‘solutions’ having the same effect on those humans that the Nazis’ did? Humans deceive ourselves when we say we could never do something as heinous as any given historical evildoer.5 In his last officer profile, Höss describes SS Doctor Edward Wirths as an excellent doctor with a careful sense of duty; so conscientious, Höss says, Wirths experimented on patients with gas and lethal injections to find ways “to make it easier”.6 Even ethics can be perverted into evil by self-deception.
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population by Matthew Connelly
As G.K. Chesterton observed, the doctrine of Original Sin “is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”7 Original Sin is the premise that every human is born with an innate instinct to, as Chesterton puts it, “go wrong”.8 It does not contradict the premise that every human is made in the image of God, it means that the image is imperfect, broken, in need of repair. It means that I never assume humans, including myself, will naturally do the right thing.
The Nazi Holocaust was not the first or last attempt to eliminate whole groups of humans that other human groups decided were obstacles to human thriving. Just in the 20th century, before the Nazis, there was the Armenian genocide in the final act of the Ottoman Empire; the Soviet-caused Holodomor in Ukraine; and the attempt to exterminate the Herero of Namibia by Imperial Germany. Since WWII, the century had, to name a few, the Mau-Mau concentration camps in British Kenya; the killing fields in Cambodia; and in the 1990s, war crimes in Liberia, ethnic cleansing during both the Bosnian and Chechen wars, and the Rwandan genocide. The entire earth is soaked in innocent blood, crying out for justice.
It is easy to identify times when humans have openly destroyed others. The more passive destruction over long periods of time, with limited bursts of open atrocity, is easier to ignore, deny, and even justify. Whether it is colonists displacing indigenous populations; or corporations abusing populations for profit through enslavement and environmental contamination – it takes longer to accumulate evidence in order to convince humanity that such actions are wrong. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, by Professor Matthew Connelly, is the accumulated evidence of a very recent attempt at ‘passive’ human destruction.
Connelly begins the book with the rise in eugenics ideology and coincident Western anti-Asian sentiment at the beginning of the 20th century. The atrocities of the Nazis demonstrated the evils of eugenics. Yet, during the Cold War, influential international bodies of intellectuals, politicians, and philanthropists, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council, lobbied governments both in the West and in developing countries to reduce the population in non-Western nations. Massive birth control campaigns, which used, at different points, propaganda, coerced mass sterilization, poorly-supervised mass contraception, and subtler methods, such as funding ultrasound devices to assist sex selective abortion, caused real human suffering.
The dense information in Fatal Misconception is so well supported, with over a 100 pages of endnotes citing firsthand evidence, that it was used as source material for at least two other books. I discovered Connelly’s book through citations in Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection, which addresses the problem of missing girls in populations due to sex selective abortions. Another book referencing Fatal Misconception is Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin, which uses Connelly’s research superficially to place blame on the political left. In reality, both political left and right in the West, each with their own motivations, contributed to the unjust pressure toward population control in non-Western populations.
Connelly is himself pro-choice, but the population control campaigns of the 20th century were not about empowering women.9 They were about reducing populations considered politically dangerous and economically burdensome. Connelly’s scholarly account demonstrates the racism behind Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb. It shows how Margret Sanger, former nurse and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist and leader in early international population control conferences.10 It recounts President Johnson’s profane refusal to help India with famine relief unless they controlled their population. It details everything from Nixon and Kissinger’s open foreign policy of aid for population control, to the subtle influence of Western population control rhetoric on China’s one child policy.
Reading how the wealthy and powerful wielded population control as a carrot-and-stick towards the impoverished and powerless was overwhelming. I do not usually cry over books, but, more than once, I put down Fatal Misconception, to sob in grief and rage. Leading advocates of population control were from Allied nations who fought the Nazis in World War II, and considered themselves ‘the free world’ in the Cold War. Reading it made me deeply skeptical toward both Western conservative anti-abortion/anti-immigration policies, and public donations by Western progressives for reproductive rights in developing countries.
Fatal Misconception documents how population control think tanks treated fertility as a sickness needing a cure. IUD insertion in women was pushed as an effective mass contraceptive method, despite the known risks. The impoverished women who got an IUD in mobile contraceptive campaigns had little follow-up care. When the cheap, poorly designed devices caused hemorrhage or infection, or even embedded itself into their uteruses, the results were permanent damage, even death.11 As Connelly states during his conclusion: “The legacy of “crash programs” to reduce fertility was to make many poor people mistrust sexual and reproductive health care…”12
The information was not entirely theoretical to me. While working in rural West Africa, I encountered a patient suffering side effects from an injected contraceptive implant that had been inserted by a mobile contraceptive clinic run by an internation aid program. The clinic had moved on, so this patient’s subsequent health problems would never be recorded in the program’s statistics. My experienced teammates said the patient’s scenario was not uncommon.
While the population committees and conferences faded from influence as the worldwide birthrate dropped – not due to the campaigns13 – the ideology of controlling populations continues. When I began reading Fatal Misconception, I saw a news story about hundreds of botched sterilization procedures that killed women in India. Uyghur women report being forcibly sterilized under China’s policies. Indigenous women from remote communities in Canada say they are still pressured to have sterilization procedures after giving birth.
In retrospect, Fatal Misconception inoculated me against the current rise in popularity of pro-natal Christian nationalism in the West. There is a proverb of Solomon the Wise which states, “He who digs a pit will fall into it; he who starts a stone rolling will be run over by it.” [26:27] The hypocrisy of Western pro-natal Christian nationalists decrying the shrinking birth rate in the West, when they are heirs of Western powers that tried every means possible to shrink the birth rates of non-Western countries, is sickening. I now understand Jesus Christ’s furious response to the national religious hypocrites of his day, “Whitewashed tombs, full of dead people’s bones and filth!”14
To quote from the conclusion of Fatal Misconception:
“The great tragedy of population control, the misconception, was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves. But if the idea of planning other people’s families is now discredited, this very human tendency is still with us. The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the “unfit,” or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them.”15
I did not find answers to my ethical questions immediately. As I have related elsewhere, it took time to find work in nursing, since I graduated during an economic recession.16 The answer came when I went to West Africa, and recognized the divide between the rarified West and the rest of the world. I worked with experienced team members, some of whom had been in the country for decades, speaking the language fluently, and living as much like their neighbours as possible. That made a great difference in how the villagers perceived them. In one of my letters home, I wrote:
“Other times, it seems like we could have done something, if only we had the proper equipment or medication... But, I think of how Christ came to share our human life and Paul’s attitude of weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice. Perhaps, the most important thing we can do is share in these people’s lives, whether hard or easy…”17
I better understood the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, God becoming human, with all a human’s limitations.18 I have indicated how little I trust Western Christianity, in its detached prosperity. But I trust Jesus Christ, because he knows how it feels to walk on this earth as a human, not able to heal everyone, not able to feed everyone. Nevertheless, Jesus healed and fed those he could, before he died for every human. He told those who believed in him to follow his example.19 So, I serve whom I can with the resources I have, never forgetting all those whom I cannot reach – in Gaza and the West Bank and Israel, in Sudan and South Sudan, in Iran and Afghanistan, in Ukraine, and so many other nations.
There is one other Christian doctrine that is relevant to these two books. In the book of Genesis, God tells Noah:
“Whoever sheds human blood, by humans his blood will be shed, for in the image of God, he made humans.” [9:6]
The earth does not cry out with innocent blood unheard. An unnamed historian in the Book of Samuel records that God punished ancient Israel with three years of famine after King Saul tried to exterminate the Gibeonites, remnant of a Canaanite tribe who had survived the Israelite invasion by tricking the Hebrew general, Joshua, into a promise to protect them.20 There will always be consequences to harming humans. In the words of Quebec Superior Court Chief Justice Albert Sévigny in 195021:
“Rein n’échappe à la justice de Dieu!”
“Nothing escapes the justice of God!”
This may be a question in the mind of the reader, considering my Christian faith. I do not trust the anti-abortion movement - I have caught its publications in lies. I recognize there can be medical necessity for abortion and I reject the legalism of abortion abolitionists. My deepest concern regarding medical assistance in dying (MAiD) is the pressure its legalization now places on the disabled and other vulnerable populations. I have stated in job interviews that I cannot personally participate in surgical abortions or MAiD. Whether or not that cost me jobs, I cannot definitely say, nor am I interested in promoting my rights at others’ expense. In short, I refuse to participate in the culture of ‘the culture wars’.
Page references to claims: Rudolph Höss. Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. ed. Steven Paskuly, trans. Andrew Pollinger. 1996. Da Capo Press: New York. pp. 179-181, 184.
Niemöller is the only ‘special prisoner’ named and singled out for detailed description.
Höss. ‘Wirths’. Death Dealer. pp. 161-162
Jesus condemned human self-deception regarding the past: “Woe to you! You build tombs for the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Therefore, you are witnesses that you approve the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their monuments...” [Luke 11:47-51, CSB]
Höss. Death Dealer. pp. 323-325.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Orthodoxy. 1994. Harold Shaw Publishers: Illinois. p. 10
Ibid. p. 124
Matthew Connelly. ‘Preface’. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. 2008. Harvard University Press: Massachusetts. pp.ix-xii.
Dorothy L. Sayers satirizes the early 20th century female eugenicist with a character portrayal in Gaudy Night.
Connelly. ‘Controlling Nations’. Fatal Misconception. pp. 203-206
Ibid. ‘Conclusion’. p. 375
On the back cover of Fatal Misconception are snippets of media reviews. The Economist’s blurb states: “Connelly’s most devastating critique of population control is not that it destroyed lives, or was based on imperialist or eugenic ideas, but that it did not work.”
Connelly. ‘Conclusion’. Fatal Misconception. p. 378.
Job search details here:
H.A.J. Personal letter. 2013
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.” [Hebrew 4:15, CSB] Further thoughts on the Incarnation:
_Kindermoord_in_Bethlehem_-_Alte_Pinakothek_25-01-2017_16-35-34.jpg){kind=link}
‘During David’s reign there was a famine for three successive years, so David inquired of the Lord. The Lord answered, “It is due to Saul and to his bloody family, because he killed the Gibeonites.” The Gibeonites were not Israelites but rather a remnant of the Amorites. The Israelites had taken an oath concerning them, but Saul had tried to kill them in his zeal for the Israelites and Judah. So David summoned the Gibeonites and spoke to them...’ [II Samuel 21:1-14, CSB]; backstory in Joshua 9.
Terrance F. Flahiff. ‘Murder by Airplane’. Salute to Canada, 1967. Reader’s Digest. p. 172. The article recounts the 1949 disappearance of Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108 and subsequent mass murder trial of Albert Guay, whose target had been his estranged wife.
Powerful stuff