November 18 marks a powerful anniversary. In 1920, the newly-hatched dragon that was the Soviet Union legalized abortion. That made it the first government in the West to embrace the destruction of children since the conversion of Constantine. No one even dared to raise the idea of doing that until the 18th century, when the Marquis de Sade proposed it — in the midst of one of his many pornographic, literally Satanist books.

The egg he laid took centuries to mature, but it pecked its way out 100 years ago today. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir both argued for abortion as the only way women could be fully “equal” to men. Equally free, that is, to abandon the innocent product of sexual gratification. In the U.S., Ruth Bader Ginsburg picked up de Sade’s argument (likely ignorant of its origins) and tried to enshrine it in U.S. law. In the Soviet Union, by the best estimates, the average woman had six abortions in her lifetime.

Abortion and Totalitarianism: You’re Only “Free” in the Bedroom

One of the best comprehensive pro-life organizations around is the Ruth Institute. Its founder and president, Jennifer Roback Morse, issued a statement to mark this bleak day in history.

‘It’s not surprising that a totalitarian state pioneered legalized abortion. Just as communism violates human rights on a massive scale, abortion denies the most fundamental of rights — the right to life — to the unborn child.

That’s why it’s ironic that so many international organizations try to portray abortion as a fundamental human right, comparable to free speech or the right to a fair trial.’

Until the end of World War II, legalized abortion was limited to Russia and countries controlled by the U.S.S.R. Then Sweden and Japan followed suit. In the 1960s and 70s, many European democracies passed similar laws. In 1973, the Supreme Court imposed abortion on the United States.

Today, the World Health Organization estimates there are 50 million abortions a year worldwide. ‘The number of abortions performed in the past 100 years could be in the billions,’ Morse said.

She also warned: ‘Now some prominent NGOs and government aid-givers are trying to force abortion on African countries like Kenya, despite overwhelming local opposition. It’s important for us all to understand the origins of legalized abortion. It started with a regime dedicated to the abolition of human rights and the family, and the massive expansion of state power.’

Subhumanism: Treat People Like Veal

What we’re seeing around the world, from the famine-inducing lockdowns and dehumanizing mask diktats to euthanasia by COVID in blue-state nursing homes, is clear. It’s the revival of a worldview we called Subhumanism. We devoted much of our book, The Race to Save Our Century, to exposing this hydra-headed monster. As we wrote in it:

Here’s an ugly truth you can drop in the punchbowl at your next office party. Most Western men and women, including many who consider themselves conventionally religious, treat human beings as subhuman. They accept without reflection theories of human life that reduce us to brainy animals, or let us play at being gods.

These theories render suffering meaningless and train us to live as cowards. They teach us to despise the weak but train us in habits of laziness and avoidance. They speak the language of progress while in fact encouraging the lowest of human instincts. They claim to have surpassed Judeo-Christian ethics. But really they have slumped below the standard of most pagan or animist cultures. This complex of truncated, crass, and despairing accounts of man’s dignity deserves a name. Since the picture of man presented by these modern ideologies is distinctly un-heroic … the only proper term for it is “subhumanism.”

…

When we speak of humanity now, too often we think in terms of ecological damage, excessive numbers, and intractable hatreds. Ecologists have even taught us to see ourselves as a kind of plague on the planet, with our generation’s task to limit the damage we do to the rest of the biosphere. And yet, somehow and from somewhere, we are said to possess a set of things called “human rights,” which can be so expansive as to include the right to transgender reassignment surgery funded by our neighbors, but which do not necessarily include the right of terminal patients to food and water.

We Tried to Dethrone God, and so Turned into Beasts

How did we get here? We forgot about God. Or tried to erase Him, deface Him, even replace Him:

[W]e tried to root Him out, to create consistent systems that preserved all the good things we’d come to take for granted in Western society, while excising any reference to transcendent underpinnings. We tried to build the steeple on the temple of humanity with steel we’d ripped from its foundations. In this way, the whole tower collapsed in the muck and the killing fields of the twentieth century.

And now of the 21st century too.

Lockdowns, Euthanasia, and Stolen Elections

Remember when Governor Andrew Cuomo (and his Democratic colleagues in California, Michigan, New Jersey, and other states) blathered about saving lives from COVID back in March? At the very same time, they were dumping virus patients on nursing homes.

Was that part of the strategy Biden COVID advisor Ezekiel Emanuel cooked up? He’d already written that nobody over 75 ought to get life-saving treatments, since their lives are effectively over. Was the COVID dump on nursing homes just euthanasia by virus? That’s literally crueler than the methods the Nazis employed to eliminate those whom they called “life unworthy of life.”

The same governors who closed our churches and schools and locked us up in our homes sent virus patients to kill off veterans and grandmas penned up in nursing homes. They forbade these elderly Americans any visits from their family or clergy to give them last rites. When the virus carried them off by the tens of thousands, they didn’t even get funerals. Nor graves in Potter’s Field. They were incinerated en masse, like pets cruelly abandoned at some city kill shelter.

We Have No Excuse, and Need None

So we’re in no position to sneer at the Soviet Union. Its citizens were subject to a cruel dictatorship and secret police, which was even then building the Gulag. All we face is a pack of election-stealing corruptocrats. What’s our excuse?

We have none, and we don’t need one. Because with God’s help we’ll beat these people. Please enjoy this video Movie to Movement made of the final words in our book. Let it steel you for the struggle, which is right now to “Stop the Steal.”

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, author, activist and human rights worker. You can follow him at @JasonJonesShow.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.

Together, Jones and Zmirak wrote The Race to Save Our Century.