Planned Parenthood, Adolf Eichmann and the Banality of Evil
Deborah Nucatola, the Planned Parenthood doctor caught on video chatting about the harvesting and sale of infant body parts over a bulbous glass of wine, brings to mind Adolf Eichmann's manner as he was on trial in Jerusalem in 1963 for being a major henchman in Hitler's Holocaust.
Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher and writer who was able to get out of Germany before the worst of Hitler and the Nazis fell upon her people, covered the trial for The New Yorker. Later she wrote a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Arendt was struck by Eichmann's nonchalance on the stand and in court. She thought of the word, "banal," meaning hum-drum, ordinary, as one would feel about performing trivial activities, like filing papers, sweeping a floor, counting sheep, or nailing nails.
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Eichmann helped lead the killing of at least 11 million people in the concentration camps. Yet he was simply doing his job, he protested, much as he did before the war as a traveling salesman, or during his post-war period in Argentina when he became manager of a rabbit farm, and later a welder in a Mercedes-Benz plant.
It was in the midst of the most banal of activities — going through the routine of catching a bus — that Israeli Mossad agents caught him and brought him to Jerusalem.
Nucatola was captured on video in a Los Angeles restaurant. "A lot of people" want livers of unborn babies, she said as she sipped and munched. She could only say "Wow!" when she had discovered how great is the demand for pre-born infants' hearts. Nucatola was as casual in her description of the most efficient removal of heads and other organs from the human in the womb as Eichmann might have been tallying up the number of cattle cars to transport Jews and other non-Aryans to Auschwitz.
Critics protest when people in the pro-life movement call abortion on the scale performed by Planned Parenthood a new "holocaust" — that of the unborn human beings. But, try as it may — and Planned Parenthood spokespersons have done their best — this time, through one of its own, the huge, well-funded, abortion provider cannot hide.
Any more than Eichmann could hide in South America.
Jesus said that "all that is secret will eventually be brought into the open" (Luke 8:17). "God will bring our darkest secrets to light, and will reveal our private motives," says the Bible, in 1 Corinthians 4:5 (NLT).
That goes for all of us, not just a doctor in an abortion organization.
Arendt was struck by Eichmann's "stock phrases and self-invented clichés" that were part of the in-house technical parlance that disguised the reality of the Nazis' deeds. So the people Nucatola presided over as they performed the slicing of babies are "providers," and the material extracted "tissues." In making sure the product is intact, "one must be cognizant of where you put your graspers."
The remnant of civilized people left in the propagandized culture of our day have to wonder how a person can sit in a chic restaurant and talk in a banal fashion of the hacking of a human infant yet in the "sanctuary" of the womb.
In Eichmann's case, Israeli court psychiatrists had examined him and found him a "completely normal man," Arendt reported. The implication, she said, was that "the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions."
Nucatola's hackneyed chitter-chatter was such an explosion. The aura of the normality of removing a complete body part from a living human being blasts at the foundations of sanity.
Arendt reflected on what could produce an Eichmann and masses of people who thought and behaved as he did.
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any," she said.
Nucatola is a product of schools that helped students clarify values until they have no values, education systems that have excluded study of the transcendent truth to which all are accountable, and academies that level and teach the equivalency of all phenomena.
This is the scholastic world that has given us, for example, Princeton ethics (!) professor Peter Singer who advances the idea that "the life of a newborn (human) is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee."
Oh, the banality of it all.
"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him," wrote Hannah Arendt. They "were neither perverted nor sadistic," just "terribly and terrifyingly normal."
That, perhaps, is what is so frightening about Deborah Nucatola. She is the poster child for the new normal of the culture the elites have foisted on America. "Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda."
So Hollywood, the progressive academy, the mainstream media, the corrupted pulpit and other propaganda machines will continue to crank out the banalities that will influence that portion of the mass demographic that still elects to office leaders of any and all parties who will contrive the policies that certify the abnormal as normal and the criminal as legal.
Another Bible passage comes to mind: "The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron" (1 Timothy 4:1-2 NIV).
The only way one can banally banter over lunch about mutilating a human being is through a seared conscience. A society that continues not to be appalled at such activity suffers from a collective seared conscience.
Deborah Nucatola shows these are indeed "later times."
