fiendishlibrarian
Active Member
He was a 16 year old boy manning an anti-aircraft battery. Even Yad Vashem is on record as saying there's no need to examine his war record.
|
|
|
- Thread starter Prometheus The Supremo
- Start date
He was a 16 year old boy manning an anti-aircraft battery. Even Yad Vashem is on record as saying there's no need to examine his war record.
Prometheus The Supremo
►Member №41+⅜◄
and those political ideologies that interfere with peoples rights are usually motivated by religion.
Prometheus The Supremo
►Member №41+⅜◄
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther#Luther_and_antisemitism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_their_Lies#The_Nazis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_Religion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Jews
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ehBDArceAlo
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761559508_1/Holocaust.html
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FLGpgmpStGg
fiendishlibrarian
Active Member
These links don't mean anything in and of themselves. All it proves to me is that you have the research ability and historical knowledge of a fifteen year-old. You still haven't really made a case for stating that religion (specifically Catholicism) was a major contributing factor behind the Holocaust. It was one factor, among many, of that there is no doubt. But to give it the centrality and emphasis you have is simplistic and a distortion of the events of that period. Try reading a book or two or forty next time before pronouncing people as "wrong", as you've ignorantly asserted.
Pep'rJack
Active Member
Dear Fiendish (any chance of that proposed forum section materializing...?),
Could you briefly point out some examples of this? The Nazis' use of Christian imagery and lore is clear, but the pagan elements have always been a bit unclear to me - vague references to a sort of pre-Christian Germanic tribal purity or some such. Where can one see clear pagan influences, beliefs or expressions in Nazism?
Related: the most fascinating documentary I've ever seen re the Nazis is called, "The Architecture of Doom", which presents a very compelling thesis that the entire Nazi movement was essentially a giant (and utterly insane) aesthetic project, rather than primarily a political or social movement:
http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:119117~T0
How? Could you elaborate?
Why do you believe that religion was the primary driving force, as opposed to other social/political/etc factors?
I don't think that's true. There are many authoritarian political movements which overlap with or are driven by religion, but there are also many that aren't (Chinese 'communism', for example). Both organized religions and political groups can act as vessels for authoritarian desires, but neither is the source of such - it's fundamentally about power and control over others, and not actually about specific beliefs, per se:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality
.
Could you briefly point out some examples of this? The Nazis' use of Christian imagery and lore is clear, but the pagan elements have always been a bit unclear to me - vague references to a sort of pre-Christian Germanic tribal purity or some such. Where can one see clear pagan influences, beliefs or expressions in Nazism?
Related: the most fascinating documentary I've ever seen re the Nazis is called, "The Architecture of Doom", which presents a very compelling thesis that the entire Nazi movement was essentially a giant (and utterly insane) aesthetic project, rather than primarily a political or social movement:
http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:119117~T0
How? Could you elaborate?
Why do you believe that religion was the primary driving force, as opposed to other social/political/etc factors?
I don't think that's true. There are many authoritarian political movements which overlap with or are driven by religion, but there are also many that aren't (Chinese 'communism', for example). Both organized religions and political groups can act as vessels for authoritarian desires, but neither is the source of such - it's fundamentally about power and control over others, and not actually about specific beliefs, per se:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality
.
Prometheus The Supremo
►Member №41+⅜◄
why don't you take your own advice?
it was the antisemitic influences of christianity that influenced hitler and gave hitler the means to have such influence. you can only gain such support by appealing to peoples core values. he would have never gained such support if it wasn't for the role of religion.
you wanna know why there are soo few jews in the world today? how many jews were wiped out in europe (even before the holocaust) by people professing to be christian?
here, some more catholic history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Inquisition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgardo_Mortara
Prometheus The Supremo
►Member №41+⅜◄
they used christianity to influence the population. i think it was something like 90% of the german population was christian. the churches exerted more influence than hitler. in the early years of nazi control, groups of people had the ability and influence to change hitlers social policies, and they did just that. at the same time, the churches could have used their influence over the german population to reject hitlers views but they didn't.
religion was the force that made it happen. the political factors were that italy and germany unified late in the game and therefore lost a large piece of the african pie.
Prometheus The Supremo
►Member №41+⅜◄
Rosenstrasse: the Power of Resistance
Far from exercising absolute power at home, Hitler often discontinued, modified, or concealed initiatives that threatened his regime’s precious popular approval. Stout public objection could and repeatedly did alter Nazi behavior. Flummoxed when the Protestant churches refused to unite, Hitler deferred his grand effort to reform German Christianity to a dreamlike utopian future. Later attempts by Nazi authorities to hamper church activities were often frustrated by sizeable demonstrations. When Party elements stripped Bavarian schools of their crucifixes without Hitler’s approval, vigorous protests by, among others, the mothers of schoolchildren quickly brought about their replacement. When Hitler denounced Protestant opposition bishops Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm and ordered their ouster, public anger boiled over. One protest drew 7,000 demonstrators. Hitler reversed course and reinstated Meiser and Wurm with fulsome praise. Strong opposition to the mass killing of the mentally disabled circa 1941 drove it further underground, saving many lives, even though this program too enjoyed the Führer’s approval.
This is not to say that protesters courted no danger. Opposition figures were frequently harassed, sometimes killed. But the top Nazis knew how limited their power was. When regime officials contemplated forcing the removal of Muenster’s Catholic bishop, Clemens Galen, Goebbels warned that the “the population of Muenster could be regarded as lost during the war if anything were done against the bishop . . . [indeed] the whole of [the state] of Westphalia.†Though Galen suffered harassment, he remained active throughout the war and held his office.
In occupied countries from Norway to Italy, residents successfully opposed Nazi racial policies and saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. In Denmark, political and ecclesiastical leaders forcefully protested Nazi policies; the whole nation worked under the noses of the Gestapo to save almost all of Denmark’s Jews. Neither leaders or citizens suffered severe retaliation. French bishops who opposed Nazi actions against Jews likewise survived the war.
Most extraordinary and telling is the Rosenstrasse incident. Some 30,000 Jews lived openly in Germany as the spouses of Christians. Nine in ten such marriages remained intact despite ceaseless harassment. Oriented toward family values as they were, the Nazis could not decide how to handle these Jews without violating the sanctity of marriage. Early in 1943, Goebbels, then in charge of Berlin, decided it was time to cleanse the capital by rounding up these last Jews. Hitler agreed. Some 2,000 Jewish men from mixed marriages were seized and taken to a large downtown building on the Rosenstrasse, from which they would be deported to the camps.
For a week their Gentile wives stood in the winter cold, chanting “We want our husbands back!†Ordinary Germans sometimes joined them. All told, the protests involved about 6,000 people. They continued in the face of S.S. and Gestapo threats, even threats to use machine guns. They continued though British bombers pounded the city by night. But the Nazis dared not fire upon these defenseless, unorganized Aryan women. Berliners saw the protests directly. Foreign diplomats spread word of it to the world press. The British Broadcasting Company broadcast the story back into Germany.
What was the outcome of Nazi Germany’s only mass demonstration to save Jews? The 2,000 Jewish husbands were released with Hitler’s approval. Two dozen who had already been sent to Auschwitz were returned. Jewish-Christian couples continued to live openly and survived the war. They would comprise the great majority of German Jewish survivors.
Goebbels later commented to an associate that the regime relented “in order to eliminate the protest from the world, so that others didn’t begin to do the same.†Sadly, this strategy was successful: during the rest of the war, no similar action would ever be taken in defense of Jews in general.
Nor does this exhaust the catalogue of successful opposition. When Goebbels called for mass employment of housewives in war industries, also early in 1943, refusal was widespread. Again, reprisals were rare, partly because of the regime’s established emphasis on traditional roles for women. On a broader scale, Germans who refused to participate in atrocities—even if they were soldiers, party members, or S.S. men—almost never suffered retaliation. This was so well known that, after the war, Nazis accused of war crimes were forbidden to claim fear of retaliation as a defense.
These incidents suggest that the Nazi regime was at root cowardly, happy to pick on the weak and disorganized but intimidated by public demonstrations. When it came to the Volk, Nazi leaders preferred propaganda, education, persuasion, and social pressure to terror. They knew that terror worked best when its objective was supported by many and opposed by few. Only toward the end of the war was widespread domestic terror resorted to in Germany, and it was often ineffective.
Clearly ordinary citizens could oppose and alter state policy, all the more so if powerful nongovernemental institutions supported them. As Sarah Gordon comments, the “failure of German churches to speak out against racial persecution is a disgrace . . . because the Nazis feared the propaganda or political power of the churches, it is almost certain that church leaders could have spoken out more vehemently against racial persecution.â€
The apologist claim that Germany’s traditional Christians were impotent in the face of Nazi terror is an exaggeration on a scale that Goebbels might have appreciated. As the wives of Berlin discovered, Christians had the power to protect the lives and well-being of others and the potential to confound Hitler and his minions. Had they wished to, they need only have applied it.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=paul_23_4
Far from exercising absolute power at home, Hitler often discontinued, modified, or concealed initiatives that threatened his regime’s precious popular approval. Stout public objection could and repeatedly did alter Nazi behavior. Flummoxed when the Protestant churches refused to unite, Hitler deferred his grand effort to reform German Christianity to a dreamlike utopian future. Later attempts by Nazi authorities to hamper church activities were often frustrated by sizeable demonstrations. When Party elements stripped Bavarian schools of their crucifixes without Hitler’s approval, vigorous protests by, among others, the mothers of schoolchildren quickly brought about their replacement. When Hitler denounced Protestant opposition bishops Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm and ordered their ouster, public anger boiled over. One protest drew 7,000 demonstrators. Hitler reversed course and reinstated Meiser and Wurm with fulsome praise. Strong opposition to the mass killing of the mentally disabled circa 1941 drove it further underground, saving many lives, even though this program too enjoyed the Führer’s approval.
This is not to say that protesters courted no danger. Opposition figures were frequently harassed, sometimes killed. But the top Nazis knew how limited their power was. When regime officials contemplated forcing the removal of Muenster’s Catholic bishop, Clemens Galen, Goebbels warned that the “the population of Muenster could be regarded as lost during the war if anything were done against the bishop . . . [indeed] the whole of [the state] of Westphalia.†Though Galen suffered harassment, he remained active throughout the war and held his office.
In occupied countries from Norway to Italy, residents successfully opposed Nazi racial policies and saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. In Denmark, political and ecclesiastical leaders forcefully protested Nazi policies; the whole nation worked under the noses of the Gestapo to save almost all of Denmark’s Jews. Neither leaders or citizens suffered severe retaliation. French bishops who opposed Nazi actions against Jews likewise survived the war.
Most extraordinary and telling is the Rosenstrasse incident. Some 30,000 Jews lived openly in Germany as the spouses of Christians. Nine in ten such marriages remained intact despite ceaseless harassment. Oriented toward family values as they were, the Nazis could not decide how to handle these Jews without violating the sanctity of marriage. Early in 1943, Goebbels, then in charge of Berlin, decided it was time to cleanse the capital by rounding up these last Jews. Hitler agreed. Some 2,000 Jewish men from mixed marriages were seized and taken to a large downtown building on the Rosenstrasse, from which they would be deported to the camps.
For a week their Gentile wives stood in the winter cold, chanting “We want our husbands back!†Ordinary Germans sometimes joined them. All told, the protests involved about 6,000 people. They continued in the face of S.S. and Gestapo threats, even threats to use machine guns. They continued though British bombers pounded the city by night. But the Nazis dared not fire upon these defenseless, unorganized Aryan women. Berliners saw the protests directly. Foreign diplomats spread word of it to the world press. The British Broadcasting Company broadcast the story back into Germany.
What was the outcome of Nazi Germany’s only mass demonstration to save Jews? The 2,000 Jewish husbands were released with Hitler’s approval. Two dozen who had already been sent to Auschwitz were returned. Jewish-Christian couples continued to live openly and survived the war. They would comprise the great majority of German Jewish survivors.
Goebbels later commented to an associate that the regime relented “in order to eliminate the protest from the world, so that others didn’t begin to do the same.†Sadly, this strategy was successful: during the rest of the war, no similar action would ever be taken in defense of Jews in general.
Nor does this exhaust the catalogue of successful opposition. When Goebbels called for mass employment of housewives in war industries, also early in 1943, refusal was widespread. Again, reprisals were rare, partly because of the regime’s established emphasis on traditional roles for women. On a broader scale, Germans who refused to participate in atrocities—even if they were soldiers, party members, or S.S. men—almost never suffered retaliation. This was so well known that, after the war, Nazis accused of war crimes were forbidden to claim fear of retaliation as a defense.
These incidents suggest that the Nazi regime was at root cowardly, happy to pick on the weak and disorganized but intimidated by public demonstrations. When it came to the Volk, Nazi leaders preferred propaganda, education, persuasion, and social pressure to terror. They knew that terror worked best when its objective was supported by many and opposed by few. Only toward the end of the war was widespread domestic terror resorted to in Germany, and it was often ineffective.
Clearly ordinary citizens could oppose and alter state policy, all the more so if powerful nongovernemental institutions supported them. As Sarah Gordon comments, the “failure of German churches to speak out against racial persecution is a disgrace . . . because the Nazis feared the propaganda or political power of the churches, it is almost certain that church leaders could have spoken out more vehemently against racial persecution.â€
The apologist claim that Germany’s traditional Christians were impotent in the face of Nazi terror is an exaggeration on a scale that Goebbels might have appreciated. As the wives of Berlin discovered, Christians had the power to protect the lives and well-being of others and the potential to confound Hitler and his minions. Had they wished to, they need only have applied it.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=paul_23_4
H
Hydrogen
Guest
I've seen this documentary, too, and it is well worth watching.
fiendishlibrarian
Active Member
So it wasn't his skillful fanning of anti-Versailles resentment? Or exploiting his opponents' weaknesses and divisions? Or his mastery of street-level politics he learned while living in Vienna? Or his connections with influential conservative politicians? Or his adoption of modern propaganda techniques combined with the use of skilled image crafters like Goebbels and Refienstahl? It wasn't any of those things, just antisemitic influences of Christianity, which I have already stated was one among many factors behind Hitler's rise? And yet you still insist it all boils down to religion.
Okay, we get it, you don't like religion, you probably don't like Catholics, so saying the two are the sole, main reason for Hitler's rise makes you feel better. But repeating it ad nauseum doesn't make it true. Ask Goebbels about that one.
Wow. Just, wow. I've seen ridiculous, reductionist non-arguments from small minds before, but this....this is just amazing. Then you go and *again* quote from the very selective and limited source you used as your crutch, with no solid ideas or arguments of your own, all the while completely ignoring the issue at hand and the issues I and others have raised.
It's official, you are the new miketoronto of this board.
Pep'r: re: paganism, two fascinating reads delve into this. Gerald Reitlinger's "The SS: Alibi of a Nation", and Heinz Hohne's "Order of the Death's Head".
ShonTron
Moderator
How come I feel like I'm reading Christopher Hitchens for Dummies?
This is getting really off-topic. I'm thinking about closing this thread.
This is getting really off-topic. I'm thinking about closing this thread.
Prometheus The Supremo
►Member №41+⅜◄
1) i don't like religion - yes.
2) i've been a catholic for the majority of my life. i had a catholic education, i read the bible in whole & i used to go to church every sunday. i don't like the religion, but that doesn't mean i hate the people. almost all my friends hold religious beliefs and the majority of them are catholic. the only catholics i hate are the church hierarchy.
3) i never said that religion was the sole reason for hitlers rise but i think it had a majority to do with it. most of the nazi elite we raised with religious values, hitler was a devout catholic who later embraced protestantism, and he idolized the authoritative structure of the catholic church. hitler fell in love with the anti-semitic writings of martin luther. hitler used christianity to a large extent in capturing his audience. he portrayed jesus as a fighter against the jews and a nazi superhero.
there were economic factors & there were political factors but in order to have the support he did, he had to use religion and religion accepted him to most degrees. religion is a force so easily exploited.
and don't compare me to goebbels. denying the truth doesn't make it go away.
cacruden
Senior Member
OK, 90% of the people in Europe (Germany) in this case were raised with religious beliefs (I will accept that statement for the sake of argument), so I would expect that person with psychopathic tenancies would be Christian would be 90% (or 9 to 1). Of course he was not a practicing Christian, at least I cannot find anything that leads me to that conclusion. Maybe it is the fact that he was raised Catholic, and deviated from the Church that lead him to that position, or maybe etc. Basically, all of this is just what you believe based on your prejudices (I have mine, and I am sure they influence me).
Now, there are a large number of that are Catholic, Protestant, etc. Why did this not happen elsewhere the same way. Taking the end result of one extreme example, then drawing a line backwards to what you want to be the cause is not a good way of determining that that was the cause of all this evil.
A psychopath will use anything (without remorse) to serve his goals.... religion or no religion.
Prometheus The Supremo
►Member №41+⅜◄
there's no need for that. this isn't a fight, it's a debate.
fiendishlibrarian, i know i'm offending you but i hope you don't hate me for it. i certainly don't hate you but i don't agree with your views. if you think my views are wrong, enlighten me instead of trying to insult me. and no, i'm not pissed that you're insulting me. it could be alot worse, i could be burning at the stake
- ya, that was a passive aggressive stab, but i learned from the best.