Sunday, April 15, 2018

By their fruits

I just finished listening to The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D'Souza. If you are a student of history, politics, and competing worldviews, the book is worth reading, despite its provocative title.

As a foreign outsider, I cannot offer informed comment on the some of the information he presents, such as the academic question of whether Nazism is to be classified as a extreme left or extreme right ideology. However, I was astounded to learn that the Nuremberg race laws were partially based on the Jim Crow laws of the American South, Nazi eugenics programs being partially modeled on those in some American states, the idea for the Nazi genocides came from that which was perpetrated on Native Americans, and that the Democrats, who in the present time position themselves as the progressives, were historically the party of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. There was what D'Souza terms as "two way traffic" between Nazism and the American left.

I will deal with the portions of this book that I am informed about. Atheists have often claimed that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, and that the Nazi movement was a Christian one. These claims do not stand up to historical scrutiny. D'Souza's earlier work has dealt with this question, and he addresses it again in this book.

D'Souza writes:

"Hitler's Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer's private opinions, assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great "scourges" of history, and said of the Germans, "Let's be the only people who are immunized against this disease." He promised that "through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity." In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution.

Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler's leading advisers like Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany."

Here we have definitive statements from Hitler and other top ranking Nazis, clearly stating their contempt for Christianity and Christian ethics. To them, it was a disease that had to be eradicated. There is no way that they were Christians, not even in the broadest sense of the term. It is time that this fiction was stopped.

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