Morality of Tainted ‘Vaccines’

I have no title of authority other than that of an ordinary priest. I have no accomplishments to which I can give standing to my reasons. I have no claim to the wisdom of experience. Nevertheless I do think we all agree that truth and sound reason outshines arguments based on one's authority, accomplishments or wisdom. And it is this that I hope to show that my arguments have truth and right and sound reason.

Standing up for the Truth

Mt 5:13, 14; “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.”

The Church has the mission of salt and light: as salt to stay corruption, as light to make manifest (clear and unmistakable) that which pleases God and that which does not.

The Church has done this in regards many matters including abortion.

It has also spoken clearly in regards to embryonic stem cell research,

Dignitas Personae.

The obtaining of stem cells from a living human embryo, on the other hand, invariably causes the death of the embryo and is consequently gravely illicit: “research, in such cases, irrespective of efficacious therapeutic results, is not truly at the service of humanity. In fact, this research advances through the suppression of human lives that are equal in dignity to the lives of other human individuals and to the lives of the researchers themselves. History itself has condemned such a science in the past and will condemn it in the future, not only because it lacks the light of God but also because it lacks humanity”. [51]

The use of embryonic stem cells or differentiated cells derived from them – even when these are provided by other researchers through the destruction of embryos or when such cells are commercially available – presents serious problems from the standpoint of cooperation in evil and scandal. [52]

...[T]he use of human embryos or fetuses as an object of experimentation constitutes a crime against their dignity as human beings who have a right to the same respect owed to a child once born, just as to every person”. [54] These forms of experimentation always constitute a grave moral disorder. [55]

We know that for many of these covid ‘vaccines’ embryonic stem cell research plays and has played a central role. Either with just the design, development and testing or in some cases also of its mass production.

It is true that the use of these ‘vaccines’ does not imply formal cooperation but it has been established that it does imply material cooperation. This material cooperation may be remote in regards to the original abortions for the production of the cell line HEK-293. This however does not exclude the fact that our eager acceptance of the vaccine will be proximate material cooperation to present and future abortions and organ havesting of the unborn for experimentation and new cell lines. By accepting these ‘vaccines’ so readly we have not only funded these ungodly corporations but encouraged them to continue in their monstrous and unholy work.

Proverbs 17:15 He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD.

Pushing again the same point: even if it is not direct cooperation in the numerous abortions from which these ‘vaccines’ came; even if it is not direct cooperation in the mutilation of the bodies of these children when their organs were harvested; even if it is not direct cooperation in the continual desecration of this child’s remains; by freely accepting these ‘vaccines’ we do cooperate and we cooperate freely and willingly.

By our silence of the reality and fact of these abortions, exploitations and desecrations, by our eager promotion of these ‘vaccines’ we have expressed our approval of these ‘vaccines’ and for their corporations and consequently their evil methods. By our silence we failed to hinder these immoral methods. Why should pharmaceutical companies change their methods of production if there is no opposition? And so we cooperate with another sin by our approval and failing to hinder it (CCC #1868).

In any case, there remains a moral duty to continue to fight and to employ every lawful means in order to make life difficult for the pharmaceutical industries which act unscrupulously and unethically. However, the burden of this important battle cannot and must not fall on innocent children and on the health situation of the population - especially with regard to pregnant women.

Moral Reflections On Vaccines Prepared From Cells Derived From Aborted Human Foetuses Pontifical Academy for Life

Scandal

Is 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness to light and light to darkness, who replace bitter with sweet and sweet with bitter.

Catholics are rejoicing for having taken one of these ‘vaccines’.

Important people in the Church are promoting these ‘vaccines’.

We are being told that taking it is good, virtuous and commendable. We are also hearing that we have a moral obligation to take it out of charity for our neighbour.

Lk 17:1-2 Jesus said to His disciples, “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks will come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.

The Church has never taught that the end justifies the means. But doesn’t it appear that here we contradict ourselves by promoting these ‘vaccines’? There has been very little show of reluctance and grand show of enthusiasm for vaccination.

A good result can never justify intrinsically unlawful means. It is not only a matter of a healthy criterion for the use of limited financial resources, but also, and above all, of respect for the fundamental human rights in the area of scientific research itself.

Address Of His Holiness Benedict XVI To The Participants In The Symposium On The Theme: "Stem Cells: What Future For Therapy?"

Rom 3:8 Why not say, as some slanderously claim that we say, “ Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is deserved!

That being said... this argument is made and is licit:

As regards the diseases against which there are no alternative vaccines which are available and ethically acceptable, it is right to abstain from using these vaccines if it can be done without causing children, and indirectly the population as a whole, to undergo significant risks to their health. However, if the latter are exposed to considerable dangers to their health, vaccines with moral problems pertaining to them may also be used on a temporary basis. The moral reason is that the duty to avoid passive material cooperation is not obligatory if there is grave inconvenience. Moreover, we find, in such a case, a proportional reason, in order to accept the use of these vaccines in the presence of the danger of favouring the spread of the pathological agent, due to the lack of vaccination of children.

Moral Reflections On Vaccines Prepared From. Cells Derived From Aborted Human Foetuses. Pontifical Academy for Life

To simplify this into short points. Vaccines with moral problems can only be used when:

On a temporary basis, until it can be replaced with a moral alternative.

Only if there are no alternatives moral treatments

Only if there is considerable danger to the health/life of oneself or the population.

Do these Covid ‘Vaccines’ fulfill this criteria?

The ‘vaccines’ have been presented to us NOT as a temporary fix but rather as an ongoing treatment.

There are no plans of developing an alternative treatment or a new vaccine.

There are alternative treatments for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid 19).

Thousands of doctors have claims of alternative treatments. Having successfully treated numerous patients.

We are told that these treatments have not been confirmed as viable treatments for Covid but that can also be said of these experimental ‘vaccines’ which have yet to prove themselves as effective or even a treatment.

These ‘vaccines’ were not the last resort, after all things failed. These ‘vaccines’ were sought after as the first recourse.

These ‘vaccines’ are still experimental, having yet to prove themselves safe and/or effective.

SARS-CoV-2 (Covid 19) does not pose a threat to the majority of the population. And therefore cannot be considered considerably dangerous for the majority of the people.

If these ‘vaccines’ work as how vaccines are meant to work, by helping one develop immunity to the virus, only the most vulnerable should/could/may be vaccinated. (Look at ‘Appendix A’ for more information about vulnerable)

If these ‘vaccines’ are meant to prepare the immune system against this new virus, why are people who have had Covid 19 already being ‘vaccinated’? They already have built up an immune defense against the virus.

These ‘vaccines’ do not claim to stop you from either catching or spreading the virus, but only to reduce the severity of the symptoms.

How does getting ‘vaccinated’ help protect our neighbour, the population?

How can one claim a moral obligation of charity for our neighbour?

How can one justify anyone receiving these ‘vaccines’, with exception of the most vulnerable (which is very much debatable)?

NO. On no account do these ‘vaccines’ fulfill the criteria of being morally justifiable. Not even satisfying one of the three necessary criteria, which even if it did would still leave it wanting (lacking) for it to be considered justified.

Possible danger of these ‘Vaccines’

These ‘Vaccines’ are EXPERIMENTAL.

They have not been thoroughly tested.

They have not proven to be effective against the covid virus.

People are not being warned against the adverse effects of these ‘vaccines’: long term or short term.

The possible proximate effects are terrible. There are tens of thousands of deaths and over a million injuries reported after receiving these vaccines (look at VAER (US), Yellow Card (UK), EudraVigilance (Europe)).

Do we know the long term effects of these ‘vaccines’?

Etc. etc. etc.

The word vaccine is used for these ‘vaccines’ not because they are vaccines but rather because vaccines are more trusted than experimental gene therapy does.

If you were told to take gene therapy to protect yourself against Covid, would you take it?

Are we really following “the science” or are we following the crowd? (See Appendix B)

Comparison: Nazi Concentration Camps & Abortion

“But your eyes and your heart are intent only upon your own dishonest gain, and on shedding innocent blood and on practising oppression and extortion.” Jeremiah 22:17

Because abortion is so common and ubiquitous the secular world has grown indifferent to it. But the reality of abortion is horrific. The world has no problem of reminding us of the horrors of the Nazi Concentration Camps but never tells us of the horrors of the abortion clinic. The deaths men and women suffered in Nazi German were horrendous but are they any worst than what we do to the unborn?

I give here a quick overview (for more detail go to Appendix C).

The unborn are torn limb from limb. They have scissors jammed into their heads then opened to give space to a suction tube to suck the child brains out. They have their heads crushed. Did the prisioners in the Nazi Concentration camps die like this?

The unborn can be starved to death using the chemical Mifepristone.

The unborn can be poisoned.

The unborn can be killed with salt poisoning which burns their skin, the eyes, their lungs, etc. dehydrating them causing brain hemorrhage, and convulsions.

How are any of these ways a nice way to die? To treat an innocent child like this one must have a heart of stone, yet the secular world celebrates this as the woman’s right.

The Church has an obligation to condemn this and defend the innocent, which it does. But by actively promoting these vaccines and not actively pushing for medicine or treatments or vaccines which don’t involve this evil act, the church leaders have failed. The end does not justify the means. By promoting and using these vaccines we encourage and funding these means, the scientific exploitation of the unborn.

As said before, though we may be cooperating with evil only in a remote material manner in regards to the original abortions, this doesn’t mean that we are not cooperating in a more proximate material way to present and future abortions and organ harvesting of the unborn for the experimentation and new cell lines which will follow our funding and approval of these vaccines. Simply put: we are funding and promoting the present and future of embryonic stem cell research with all the abortions, exploitation and desecration by taking and promoting these ‘vaccines’.

Crimes against Humanity

Egypt will become a waste, and Edom will become a desolate wilderness, because of the violence done to the sons of Judah, in whose land they have shed innocent blood. Joel 3:19

Crimes against humanity are certain acts that are purposely committed as part of a widespread or systematic policy, directed against civilians, in times of war or peace. It is an offence in international criminal law, adopted in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nürnberg Charter), which tried surviving Nazi leaders in 1945, and was, in 1998, incorporated into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: The Rome Statute provides the most recent and most expansive list of specific criminal acts that may constitute crimes against humanity.

Prohibited acts include: Murder, Extermination, Enslavement, Deportation or forcible transfer of population, Imprisonment, Torture, Sexual violence, Persecution against an identifiable group, Enforced disappearance of persons, The crime of apartheid, Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health (Appendix D)

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Art. 7

Abortion and forced organ harvesting fits quite naturally in this category. Who today is being treated more inhumanly than the unborn who are thrown away as if they were garbage (no funeral or burial is given to them). In fact we are told and taught that the unborn are not even human. The Nazis justified their extermination of Jews and slave owners justified enslaving black people because they were seen as less than human (Appendix E), and these are others crimes against humanity. If today we would refuse to cooperate with the Nazis scientists who experiment on humans even in a material manner, why is it that we will cooperate with these scientists of today who experiment on the unborn and exploit them for their organs?

If the Nazis scientists had produced these ‘vaccines’ to save us from Covid, would you eagerly take the vaccine, celebrate the fact that you are vaccinated or even encourage other people to take the vaccine?

Would you be comfortable funding such people?

Would you be willing to fund such research?

I am not.

If the devil offers you a hand and tells you that he will save you, would you take his hand?

Gen 4:10-11 “What have you done?” replied the LORD. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed and banished from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.

This is my opinion. These are the conclusions I have come to after much thought and prayer. It is true that I am nothing more than a simple priest but that doesn’t affect the veracity of the arguments.

If these ‘vaccines’ can be considered morally licit, demonstrate it. Because their design, development, production and testing come at a high price, a price which the devil is notorious for requesting.

Written By

Fr. Dominic Clovis IVE

Appendix A - Risk of Death from Covid Virus (%)

There are several observations worth noting. First, as we have long known, people of college age and younger are very unlikely to die. The 5-9 and 10-14 age groups are the least likely to die. (Note that an IFR of 0.001% means that one person in that age group will die for every 100,000 infected.) The 0-4 and 15-19 age groups are three times likelier to die than the 5-9 and 10-14 age groups, but the risk is still exceedingly small at 0.003% (or 3 deaths for every 100,000 infected).📷

Second, the IFR slowly increases with age through the 60-64 age group. But after that, beginning with the 65-69 age group, the IFR rises sharply. This group has an overall IFR just over 1% (or 1 death for every 100 infected). That's a fairly major risk of death. (The red line in the chart marks where the "1% threshold" is crossed.) The IFR then grows substantially and becomes quite scary for people in their 70s and older. People in the 75-79 age group have more than a 3% chance of dying if infected with coronavirus, while people aged 80 and over have more than an 8% chance of dying. That's roughly the same chance as rolling a four with two dice.

Third, the virus discriminates. Beginning with the 20-24 age group, men are about twice as likely to die as women from COVID. This pattern remains in each age group through 80+.

With this data, let's hope that public health officials and policymakers can craft smart guidelines in regard to what parts of society should be locked down and how vaccines should be allocated.

Source: O’Driscoll, M. et al. "Age-specific mortality and immunity patterns of SARS-CoV-2." Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2918-0 (2020).

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatality-rates-sex-and-age-15163

Appendix B - Solomon Asch - Conformity Experiment

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a ‘vision test.’

Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task.

The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven confederates/stooges were also real participants like themselves.📷

Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last.

There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.

Asch's experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a "real participant."

Findings

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.

Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed.

In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

Appendix C - Abortion Methods

There are three abortion classifications—surgical abortion, medical abortion, and chemical abortion. They are defined as follows:

Surgical abortion: These are abortions that involve an invasive procedure. Major types of surgical abortions include:

Suction aspiration: This is the procedure most often used in the first trimester of pregnancy (the first three months). The abortionist inserts a suction tube (similar to a vacuum hose with an extremely sharp end) into the mother’s womb. The suction and cutting edge dismember the baby while the hose sucks the body parts into a collection bottle.

Dilation and curettage (D&C): In this procedure, the abortionist uses a loop shaped knife to cut the baby into pieces and scrape the uterine wall. The baby’s body parts are then removed and checked to make sure that no pieces were left in the mother’s womb.

Dilation and extraction (also known as D&X or partial-birth abortion): Used to kill babies well into the third trimester (as late as 32 weeks old), the abortionist reaches into the mother’s womb, grabs the baby’s feet with a forceps and pulls the baby out of the mother, except for the head. The abortionist then jams a pair of scissors into the back of the baby’s head and spreads the scissors apart to make a hole in the baby’s skull. The abortionist removes the scissors and sticks a suction tube into the skull to suck the baby’s brain out. The forceps are then used to crush the baby’s head and the abortionist pulls the baby’s body out the rest of the way.

Dilation and evacuation (D&E): This form of abortion is used to kill babies in the second trimester (24+ weeks). The abortionist uses a forceps to grab parts of the baby (arms and legs) and then tears the baby apart. The baby’s head must be crushed in order to remove it because the skull bone has hardened by this stage in the baby’s growth.

Hysterotomy: Performed in the third trimester, this is basically an abortive Cesarean section (C-section). The abortionist makes an incision in the mother’s abdomen and removes the baby. The baby is then either placed to the side to die or is killed by the abortionist or nurse.

Medical abortions: These are abortions that involve the administration of drugs specifically intended to abort the child. Common drugs used for medical abortions include:

Mifepristone (RU-486): Mifepristone blocks the hormone that helps develop the lining of the uterus during pregnancy (progesterone). This lining is the source of nutrition and protection for the developing baby. The tiny boy or girl is starved to death, and then a second drug, misoprostol, causes contractions so that the dead baby is expelled from the womb.

Methotrexate: This highly toxic chemical directly attacks and breaks down the baby’s fast-growing cells. It also attacks the life-support systems the baby needs to survive. When the systems fail, the baby dies. Misoprostol is then used to cause contractions and push the dead baby out of the womb.

Salt poisoning: This technique is used in the second and third trimester. The abortionist sticks a long needle into the mother’s womb. The needle contains salt which is then injected into the amniotic fluid surrounding the baby. The baby breathes in, swallows the salt and dies from salt poisoning, dehydration, brain hemorrhage, and convulsions. The baby takes nearly an hour to die. His skin is completely burned, turns red and deteriorates. The baby is in pain the entire time. The mother goes into labor 24-48 hours later and delivers a dead baby.

Prostaglandins: Used during the second and third trimester, prostaglandin abortions involve the injection of naturally produced hormones into the amniotic sac, causing violent premature labor. During these convulsions the baby is often crushed to death or is born too early to have any chance of surviving.

Chemical abortions: These are abortions caused by drugs that, at least some of the time, prevent the implantation of the already-created baby in the uterine lining. Some of the more popular methods of birth control that can be responsible for the deaths of newly-created children include the following:

https://www.all.org/learn/abortion/abortion-methods/

Appendix D - Organ Harvesting of the Unborn

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina was right when she said an undercover video shows an intact baby's leg twitching after an abortion, according to the pro-life group that shot the video.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO has come under fire since saying at the last presidential debate, "I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’” Numerous outlets accuse her of lying, some going so far as to say none of the footage she described exists.

Fiorina is referring to a scene included in the seventh video released by the Center for Medical Progress.

The baby seen in the footage at the 5:56 mark was indeed taken from inside an abortion clinic, according to the owner of the footage. Gregg Cunningham, executive director of The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, the organization that obtained the footage and provided it to CMP, said “The video clip we provided to CMP depicted an intact delivery abortion. It was filmed at an abortion clinic."

At another point in the video, CMP included a clip of a baby who was stillborn at about the same gestational age, for a means of comparison. Some pro-abortion activists had accused Fiorina of falsely claiming that this baby was aborted.

However, she was actually referring to footage of the baby whose leg was kicking, who was indeed an abortion victim, according to Cunningham.

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"It was not a miscarriage. Mothers don’t go to abortion clinics to miscarry," he said.📷

He refuses to disclose whether the facility that performed the abortion was a Planned Parenthood. "Our access agreements forbid the disclosure of any information which might tend to identify the relevant clinics or personnel with whom we work," he said. "Preserving confidentiality is vital to future clinic access."

He added that such footage was "not anomalous. It is representative of the frequent outcomes of many late term intact delivery terminations performed at clinics of all organizational affiliations.”

The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform also released the full, 13-minute-long footage of the abortion [WARNING: This video depicts a complete abortion, including the birth of a living baby. It is EXTREMELY GRAPHIC] in question, showing the preceding abortion procedure.

Her Super PAC, Carly for America, released a video last week showing the CMP's outtake.

Nonetheless, the issue came roaring to the surface last Saturday, when a group of Planned Parenthood protesters pelted Carly Fiorina with condoms, chanting that she was a liar.

On Sunday, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked Fiorina if she were ready to admit she "exaggerated" the scene, which "at best is a reenactment."

Instead, Fiorina tripled down.

“That scene absolutely does exist," she said, referring to the baby's twitching leg.

"And that voice saying what I said they were saying - ‘We're going to keep it alive to harvest its brain’ - exists, as well,” she said.

To date, none of the footage released shows a tech uttering that exact sentence. However, a former StemExpress employee Holly O'Donnell describes seeing a baby's heart beating outside its body sometime before she cut its face open to harvest its brain. It was her first day on the job.

Fiorina feels vindicated by CBR's video release and her super PAC's video.

Fiorina defended herself this week. "Many in the mainstream media have tried their best to pretend that these videos don't exist. They repeated the talking points from Planned Parenthood that told them there was no footage of an aborted baby at all. Now that it's clear the video is of an aborted baby left to die in a metal tray kicking for life, they are calling it...stock footage."

The major networks have virtually blacked out news of the videos, which have instead been featured on cable news networks.

When asked if the mainstream media had disproportionately focused on Fiorina's comments about the videos rather than the contents of the videos themselves, Fiorina's deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores told LifeSiteNews simply, "You bet."

https://youtu.be/Yhn0DdH8M-0

Appendix E - 'Less Than Human':

The Psychology Of Cruelty

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

"We all know, despite what we see in the movies," Smith tells NPR's Neal Conan, "that it's very difficult, psychologically, to kill another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on them." So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings "to overcome the very deep and natural inhibitions they have against treating other people like game animals or vermin or dangerous predators."

Rolling Stone recently published photos online of American troops posing with dead Afghans, connected to ongoing court-martial cases of soldiers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. In addition to posing with the corpses, "these soldiers — called the 'kill team' — also took body parts as trophies," Smith alleges, "which is very often a phenomenon that accompanies the form of dehumanization in which the enemy is seen as game."

But this is just the latest iteration in a pattern that has unfolded time and again over the course of history. In ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature, Smith found repeated references to enemies as subhuman creatures. But it's not as simple as a comparison. "When people dehumanize others, they actually conceive of them as subhuman creatures," says Smith. Only then can the process "liberate aggression and exclude the target of aggression from the moral community."

When the Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen, or subhumans, they didn't mean it metaphorically, says Smith. "They didn't mean they were like subhumans. They meant they were literally subhuman."

Human beings have long conceived of the universe as a hierarchy of value, says Smith, with God at the top and inert matter at the bottom, and everything else in between. That model of the universe "doesn't make scientific sense," says Smith, but "nonetheless, for some reason, we continue to conceive of the universe in that fashion, and we relegate nonhuman creatures to a lower position" on the scale.

Then, within the human category, there has historically been a hierarchy. In the 18th century, white Europeans — the architects of the theory — "modestly placed themselves at the very pinnacle." The lower edges of the category merged with the apes, according to their thinking.

So "sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans were denizens of the bottom of the human category," when they were even granted human status. Mostly, they were seen as "soulless animals." And that dramatic dehumanization made it possible for great atrocities to take place.

Excerpt: 'Less Than Human' by David Livingstone Smith

Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I'll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War. More than seventy million people died in the war, most of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.

Let's begin at the end. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the first of twelve military tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Twenty doctors and three administrators — twenty-two men and a single woman — stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had participated in Hitler's euthanasia program, in which around 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped people deemed unfit to live were gassed to death, and they performed fiendish medical experiments on thousands of Jewish, Russian, Roma and Polish prisoners.

Principal prosecutor Telford Taylor began his opening statement with these somber words:

The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected ... To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.

He went on to describe the experiments in detail. Some of these human guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high altitude parachute jumps. Others were frozen, infested with malaria, or exposed to mustard gas. Doctors made incisions in their flesh to simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken glass or wood shavings into them, and then, tying off the blood vessels, introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women were made to drink seawater, were infected with typhus and other deadly diseases, were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their agonized screams and violent convulsions.

The descriptions in Taylor's narrative are so horrifying that it's easy to overlook what might seem like an insignificant rhetorical flourish: his comment that "these wretched people were ... treated worse than animals". But this comment raises a question of deep and fundamental importance. What is it that enables one group of human beings to treat another group as though they were subhuman creatures?

A rough answer isn't hard to come by. Thinking sets the agenda for action, and thinking of humans as less than human paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It's wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.

Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project. From the beginning, Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a deadly threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization were represented as parasitic organisms — as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion. "Today," Hitler proclaimed in 1943, "international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus." Both the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a "severe but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements" (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of "international Jewry", and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, "soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as 'animals' ... that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis' new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter."

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it can be strangely comforting. It's all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it's tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What's most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It's that they were ordinary human beings.

When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the Holocaust, but it wasn't only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin's Red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the smell of Germany's animal breath," and described Germans as "two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war" — "ersatz men" who ought to be annihilated. "The Germans are not human beings," Ehrenburg wrote, "... If you kill one German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses."

This wasn't idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. "They were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists..." writes journalist Giles McDonough:

East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army ... In the course of a single night the red army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.

Excerpted from Less Than Human by David Livingstone Smith. Copyright 2011 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.