Totalitarian
systems are militantly Christophobic. The comments to some of my
articles on the dangers of materialism or the ignorance of atheism try
to prove that religion is as dangerous to goodness as atheism repeat
the false "fact" that "Hitler was a Catholic." This is utterly
untrue. Moreover, all Nazism was viciously Christophobic as well
as
Judeophobic.
My American Thinker article of
November 2007
covers some of the evidence found in old books about the hate all Nazis
felt toward Christianity. My book, Swastika against the Cross:
The
Nazi War on Christianity, covers many more documentary sources that
reveal Nazi persecution of Christianity and Christianity's lonely war
against Nazism. Many writers at the time noted that Christianity
was
the only force resisting the Nazis in Europe.
Indeed, there were many books about the Nazi persecution of
Christianity and hatred of religion published before the Second World
War began with titles like The Nazi Persecution of the Catholic Church
in the Third Reich and The Nazi Persecution of Christianity and The War
against God and Nazism versus Religion.
Hitler
before the Nazis came to power described himself to Martin Niemoller as
"pagan to the core." Hitler stated, "Antiquity was better than modern
times because it did not know Christianity and syphilis."
Hundreds of authors writing before and during the Second World War saw
Nazism and Christianity as mortal enemies. These authors were
Christians – both Catholics and Protestants – and Jews and
agnostics.
They were on the right and on the left. They were Frenchmen and
Germans and Poles and Americans and Britons. The convenient
rewriting
of history that invents out of whole cloth the notion that Christianity
and Nazism were in any way linked runs utterly contrary to the
historical record of the time.
But were any leading Nazis Christians in any sense of the word?
Emphatically, no. Consider first Hitler himself. John
Gunther noted
as early as 1935 that "Hitler was born and brought up as a Roman
Catholic. But he lost his faith early and attends no religious
services of any kind[.] ... On being formed his government almost
immediately began a fierce religious war against Catholics,
Protestants, and Jews alike."
[snip]
Albert Einstein, during the war, wrote: "Only the Church stood squarely
across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I
never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a
great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had
the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral
freedom."
I could go on, for dozens of pages and hundreds of quotes, but the
historical record is quite clear: Nazis hated and feared Christianity
as much as any totalitarian regimes in modern history. Soviets,
by the
way, hated and feared Jews and Judaism about as much as the Nazis
did.
These two great religions have proven indigestible to all great evils.
[
Full
Brilliance]
Today we see the suppression of Christianity in Red China. I don't know why their government would do that, since the Christians are not plainly a force against the government. They could well be helpful to the government, but not if they are targets of suppression.
ReplyDeleteThere are a number of persistent myths about Hitler and the Nazi party.
ReplyDeleteOne of which is the line about Hitler being a Catholic. Like all
socialists, he was at best areligious, if not anti-religious. His
regime persecuted thousands of Catholic Priests who resisted the
regime. He was brutal in his suppression of Catholics. Ask Deitrich
Boenhoffer.
Another myth is that he was popularly elected. He was on the ticket
with Hindenburg, and was elected with him to the office of Vice-Chancellor.
Hitler did it the old-fashioned way by means of a palace coup.
The biggest of the big lies fabricated by the left was that fascism and
communism were two diametric opposites. That led to the false left-right
paradigm. Fascism is the logical conclusion of leftist/collectivist
ideologies separated only by the degree to which private property ownership
was permitted. Marx knew exactly what he was doing by concentrating all
political power in the hands of a small ruling oligarchy.
The promised workers paradise in the Soviet Union quickly degenerated into
a brutal police state. Hitler and Il Douchebag both went directly to
the police state. I once knew people in the Progressive Labor Party (a
Maoist communist group.) They trotted out the old left-right scale and
they stated that Soviet communism is evil and that fascism on the other
end was also evil.
They called the Soviets "revisionists" and laid claim to the area
between center far left. Inherent to this argument is that the
Soviets did not properly implement communism. (where have we heard
this line before?) The left-right scale is flawed by the fact that
if both ends represent evil, the whole scale is evil. But then it
was designed to allow them to smear conservatives as fascists. In
my revised scale all collectivist forms of government are by their
very nature evil. Small d Democracies coupled with individual
rights, free markets, and constitutional republics belong on the
right. If you subordinate individual rights for some greater
(often undefined or unstated) collective "good," you are evil.
I am a proud right-winger!
I read a few years ago (I can't remember where, unfortunately) that Hitler and Nazism actually killed more Christians than Jews (5.5 million Jews vs. 6.5 million Christians).
ReplyDeleteHitler like Stalin was born into a Catholic family. End of story.
ReplyDeleteLeonard Jones hits the bullseye! That phony "Nazis are right-wing" lie always irritates the daylights out of me.
ReplyDeleteIt says right in the Nazi party's name that they are National Socialists, a Worker's Party! All of these totalitarian movements are collectives, and the differences are only really apparent to other collectivists. The Nazis sprang from the Socialist movement, so did the Communists and the Fascists. The differences between them are trivial to someone on the Right, who abhors all of them, and celebrates the fact that he's an individual!
The Collective has no use for individuals (except for the one running the collective, of course- he's the Big Brother who can do no wrong!)