By Carolyn Yeager
FRIDAY IN MY INBOX I FOUND A FORWARDED ARTICLE by a certain Danusha Goska from a site I never look at, the 'progressive' pro-Israel website Front Page Mag. It was titled “Hitler's Religion,” so I began to read it. Long and tedious as it was, I was losing interest until I got near the end to the paragraphs I've reproduced below.
The article was based on a new book by Richard Weikart, Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. Goska writes that “Weikart makes the case that Hitler's God was a Darwin-inspired, non-personal, pantheistic deity exacting a pitiless survival-of-the-fittest-through-struggle morality.” Weikart (and Goska) wants to kill the idea that Hitler and National-Socialist Germany were ever, in any way, Christian - thus that any of his policies could have had a Christian basis. The idea is to refute the more common historical opinion that German Christians perverted or set aside their native Christian beliefs in order to participate in National-Socialism, up to and including the horrors of the “holocaust.”
This is just noise as far as I'm concerned, but what attracted my attention were statements made at the end of the article that I found sufficiently incorrect to require refutation. I'm not bothering to source my refutations, however, because the writer doesn't source her accusations. Unproven statements shouldn't require detailed proofs against them; simple correction should be adequate. Especially when an ordinary search into Goska's identity reveals her motivation for carrying on against the 'Nazis' in this way.
I'll get into that later. First, the article. She concludes her screed with these unproven accusations (highlighted in yellow with my comments in blue):
It is undeniable that Nazism focused on Jews in a way that it did not focus on others, and that Nazis murdered almost six million Jews, or sixty percent of the world population [of jews]. [FALSE and has been proven to be false.] This is exceptional and is deservedly treated as exceptional. It is also true that anti-Semitism has been a plague in Christianity, and that Christians must never shirk the struggle against anti-Semitism. We all know that most Germans, including Germans who committed atrocities, identified as Christian. All these facts demand and receive massive attention. I have only praise for books like Robert P. Erickson's Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany that demonstrate how Germany's best and brightest, from university professors to theologians, abandoned their core values. There's a difference between saying that Christians distorted their faith to support Nazism and saying that Nazism is Christian.
Every semester I ask my university students what group the Nazis mass murdered first and last, even after they surrendered to the Allies. "Nazis murdered Jews first," my students respond. No. Communists. No. Homosexuals. No.
When I tell them it was handicapped Germans, they are dumbstruck and unbelieving. [FALSE, there was no mass murder of handicapped, not even close. The short-lived euthanasia program was not for the “handicapped,” but for the severely deformed, the hopelessly insane, those whose lives were hell. For certain other inheritable afflictions that caused harm to society, the solution was sterilization.] They have no pattern into which to fit this fact. They have been taught that Nazism is a function of Christianity, and a damning blot on Western Civilization. They have not been taught about how Nazi anti-Semitism fits into a Darwin-inspired, Neo-Pagan, nationalist worldview.
My students don't know that Hitler expressed genocidal intent for Poles: "I have placed my death-head formation in readiness … with orders to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language." [This quotation is taken out of context; it refers to all-out war from the Polish side. I could supply several quotes of Polish leaders expressing genocidal intent toward Germans. It was very common in Poland before the war.] Poles were shot by Einsatzgruppen. Approximately two million non-Jewish Polish civilians were murdered. [FALSE, 'murder' is the wrong word for however many deaths actuallly occurred.] Auschwitz was initially created, and run for its first 18 months, as a center of internment of Poles. Poles were tortured, dispossessed, and the subject of medical experimentation. Polish bodies were turned into soap. [ALL FALSE.] Between 1.5 and 3 million Poles were conscripted into forced labor. Almost twenty percent of Polish priests were murdered. [POLISH priests were among the most dangerous anti-German resistance. They were arrested and shot or incarcerated, not murdered, as enemy saboteurs and fighters, not for religious reasons.] Even as the advancing, victorious Red Army was within sight of soon-to-be-defeated Germans, even as the Allies advanced from the west, German soldiers went building to building in Warsaw, killing civilians with flamethrowers, targeting churches, museums, and libraries. [These Poles weren't civilians, but resistance fighters killing Germans. Germany lost 8000 killed and 9000 wounded from the uprising! It was August 1944 and they had no intention of giving up and leaving all the resistance fighters to join with the Soviets. The Warsaw Uprising was a tactical mistake by the Poles because Stalin wanted the resistance to be defeated, so didn't support it. It is false that churches, museums and libraries were specially targeted.] Himmler ordered, "The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth … No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." There was no military reason for this. [False, it was because the Russians were coming – it was “scorched earth” policy.] Sam Harris' "explanation" that Christianity is responsible for Nazism is revealed as patently inadequate when one considers what Nazi Germany did to Catholic Poles, or the German handicapped, or Soviet POWs, or Romani. [FALSE as previously stated, plus the Germans did nothing to Romani except put some of them in Family Camps when they were convicted of petty criminality. They didn't even have to work because they had no skills, nor could they be trusted with responsibility.]
When I clicked on Danusha V. Goska's author name, I found a whole page full of articles she had published at Front Page Mag, and discovered she was a Polish Catholic writer. So right there was the explanation for her anti-German prejudice. I found three books of fiction by her at Amazon and easily laid my eyes on a passage in Save Send Delete where she was describing how she met the protaganist in her story. On page 3, she writes of watching an upper-class Englishman on a television show:
“Your bona fides consist in this: you are tall, you are blond, you have an aquiline nose, you've climbed Mount Everest, and you made some discovery about the first few seconds after the Big Bang. […] Moyers had other talking heads on, of course [...] two women, both slender and attractive […] whose beauty I just want to steal; we Slavs do not age well.”
I do not feel wrong to pick and choose what part of the quote I want to share because she does the same. Tit for tat. The blond gentleman does sound impressive … an accomplished person, indeed. But right there is the resentment against the “tall and blond” that Danusha Goska feels. The same as she would feel upon seeing Reinhard Heydrich, say ... 'I'd like to take him down a notch or two.' Just a little further on, she again comments on the program:
There were no poor people. No ugly people. No diseased people. Why do you people get to tell the rest of us whether or not there is a God? How about six million dead Jews? Isn't the Holocaust the signature event that types that question IN ALL CAPS?
Who would watch television programs featuring ugly and diseased people? As a highly-identified Polish Catholic, she's focused on defending Poles (and Jews) by keeping the accusations coming against the “non-Christian” Nazis' alleged terrible treatment of “inferiors” – except without any concern for how she defames all Germans in the process.
This defamation never stops. More and more it seems that Germans are doomed to be genocided based on their 'flawed nature' – flaws that only their competitors can see. What these competitors see is 'too smart, too strong, too moral.' Therefore, we want to wipe you off the face of the earth. The very thing Germans are eternally accused of having wanted to do to others.
Are we tired of this yet?
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Comments (16)
Poles feel a huge inferiority
Gilson
Poles feel a huge inferiority complex toward Germans, which is easy to explain: Poland is a cultureless nation, though there are a few smart Poles.
From the16th to the beginning of the 19th century the Poles adopted Sarmatism, which is basically Turkish culture since the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth shared a large border with the Ottoman empire. Oriental influences were visible in their attires, they adopted the Ottoman scimitar, etc..
The Swedes say "Polish Parliament" refering to total chaos. The Germans use "Polnische Wirtschaft" to denote mismanagement, chaos, disorder. In the USA anything Polish indicates backwardness and stupidity. So a bridge that runs along a river is a Polish bridge; broken car:Polish engineering; Polish electricity: you light a candle.
If you visit Poland-I've been there a dozen times- you'l note the primitiviness of the place, e.g. all houses have high walls or fences, and most people still live in those run down commie housing states. That's why millions of them are leaving Poland and moving to the West. Time to stop the invasion!
Religion
Al Milligan
Dear Carolyn, Thank you for your courage and persistence of the truth, even if it is a losing battle, I feel. But because of people like you I have been made free. What does it say, the truth shall make you free? One of the attacks made against Christianity is that the Germans wore 'God with Us' on their belts. My response is always, then, check your premise. Why did the elite German intelligentsia stay with Germany? Could it be that they thought Germany was a good nation under God?
But what this issue you are talking about here really spoke to me about is how the Germans are accused of doing to others everything that was done to them. For example, Mr. Hitler did not think bombing population centers was moral but the allies readily fire bombed all of the major cities of German in order to exterminate the German people.
After watching the terrifying truth of HELLSTORM it is understandable how the propaganda had to turn this around by saying that Germany wanted to exterminate Jews. That is why the victors cannot give up the lie of the holocaust. But the holocaust was, and is today, against the German people.
I love your work and I love you. Stay the course and all will be well.
How "Christian" Hitler really
Franklin Ryckaert
How "Christian" Hitler really was can be seen from his Table Talk, which can be read on line. I will not quote all the relevant passages, but I will give the information from the index, under the term "Christianity" :
heavy blow struck at humanity by...7,75
no co-existence with National Socialism...145
natural death of...59
rebellion against natural law...51
These terms speak for themselves. Hitler welcomed the death of Christianity because he thought it was contrary to science and his own movement.
Hitler was never, ever an atheist
carolyn
I'm glad you brought this up because my brief post didn't do justice to the subject of Hitler's religious beliefs.
I mentioned in the title his "religiosity", not his Christianity. I agree he was not a Chrstian, but he was not an atheist or a pantheist either. He equated atheism with communism, a completely destructive influence. He thought Nature was a good model to follow, but his God was a force active in his life that he felt and knew. He spoke about that in Table Talk, along with his attacks on Christianity. His personal character reflectedf his belief in a Higher Organizational Reality ... one that was Good, not neutral or uncaring.
It struck me that he once said that after death he could see himself in the company of some of the great men of human history (and maybe women), participating in creative talk and sharing ideas. This was his idea of heaven, not sitting on a cloud singing hosannas.
During our Table Talk podcast series, Ray Goodwin and I pointed out many times Hitler's very evident alienation from Christianity. That in itself doesn't make him a monster. I am not a Christian either, except in the fact that it's the religion of the West - it's part of our European heritage and identity.
Correction on "not neutral"
carolyn
I wrote:
His personal character reflectedf his belief in a Higher Organizational Reality ... one that was Good, not neutral or uncaring.
Actually, this God Reality or Life Force is neutral, in that it is the source and sustenance of all living beings. It's just a matter of accessing more of it, which is the actual teaching of Jesus in the bible. "Ask, and you will receive."
I read that article and even
Hadding
I read that article and even considered writing something about it.
I think that Goska's whole analysis is simplistic. The fact that the National-Socialists used ancient German symbols doesn't mean that they were anti-Christian. Only a narrow religious fanatic would think this. Many organizations in the USA have rituals, and normally it doesn't enter anyone's mind that there would be a conflict between participating in a secular ritual and being a Christian. The National-Socialists could not be anti-Christian because almost all Germans were Christians.
Voltaire observed long ago that Christians in general must be hypocrites, because a consistent Christian would not even defend himself.
How Christian is the USA? Thomas Jefferson did not believe in the miracles of the Bible. Abraham Lincoln never joined a church, and people who knew him disagree about whether he was even a Christian. Irreligiosity is certainly much more common in the USA than in Germany.
What it all comes down to is trying to explain why the Germans under Hitler's rule did something that they in fact did not do! Goska says that the Germans did the Holocaust because they weren't Christian, while Dawkins (along with others before him) says that they did the Holocaust because they were Christian. It's absurd.
Hitler believed in a Higher
Franklin Ryckaert
Hitler believed in a Higher Power which he called "Providence", but his morality was Darwinian. He didn't try to create a new religion, he was primarily a political figure, though with strong cultural interests. I think he would have considered such creations as the "esoteric Hitlerism" of Miguel Serrano or Savitri Devi with disdain if not ridicule.
So just what are you trying
carolyn
So just what are you trying to say? That Hitler's legacy was nothing but Darwinianism? Hitler had great compassion and great love for many people, institutions and places. He was supremely gifted and intelligent. He was patriotic. He was sensitive, but developed the power of his intellect and will to avoid sucumbing to pure sentiment. He was goal-oriented.
Of course he would not relate to Serrano's silly ideas of some kind of "esoteric National Socialism". It never attracted me for even a second.
Adolf Hitler was one of the most fully developed, most highly evolved personalities ever to act upon the European politiical stage. You, Franlkin, go along with the downgrading of Hitler as simply "Darwinian" because all your sympathies are with the other side in the conflict. You proudly carry on the anti-Germanism so prevalent in the Netherlands, even though the Dutch and Germans are racial brothers. Not even just cousins, but brothers! This anti-Germanism infects even the German folk themselves, by labelling pro-Germanismt dangerous nationalism. This genocidal attitude holds that Germanic people must be anti-German to be good and moral, while those who are pro-German are bad.
Was Winston Churchill "Darwinian" too? He was as ruthless and heartless as they come. How about Josef Stalin? I see nothing wrong with Darwin's findings, but you use it as a way to avoid acknowledging Adolf Hitler as the full, rich personality he was. What racial group is most behind this avoidance? Goska herself is strongly connected to this racial group.
NS positive for Christianity
Alexander [Melb/Aus]
What is important to remember here, is that the party and Hitler stayed quite neutral when it came to matters of Religion. Whatever Hitler's deep thoughts and feelings were, under his leadership Christianity thrived. Many of the policies encouraged and promoted people to live a life that followed or resembled the ideals in the Bible.
I would say the opposite is in fact the case today under Democracy here in Australia and what I know of other countries like the U.S.A.
I am of the view, the outcome of the war resulted in a largely negative impact for Christianity, taking such a hard hit in the long term. This is a topic which deserves and needs much debate because Christians I talk to, just have this rediculous notion that Hitler replaced the Church with his own religion and this is usually supported with the most rubbish of propaganda videos. One sent to me was showing Mein Kampf as some kind of book that replaced the Bible! How would this even work, I don't know.
Unfortunately, my experience is that most of the Christians have the completely wrong idea and have just been led down the wrong path. The problem is trying to communicate with many of them is ever difficult. Any influence from National Socialism and Hitler was all positive for Chrisitianity, but this can not be made known, which is why every effort is made to separate NS/Hitler from this truth.
Europe, Christianity and Paganism.
Beaker
@Carolyn: Check out this youtube channel: ThuleanPerspective.
Has Europe really ever been Christian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6FjGSM0qQo
Varg has many other interesting and enlightening videos regarding European culture, Christianity and paganism.
The Swastika is actually a very ancient symbol representing life, success and good fortune - a pre-Christian symbol. Why did Hitler choose the Swastika?
From what you write about
Al Milligan
From what you write about Herr Hitler’s religion it sounds a lot like the Christian Platonism which so dominates the modern perspective on Christianity. That world view says that there is an immortal soul that survives death. Hitler, like Socrates, talks of a Spiritual reality wherein after death there is the possibility of meeting up with friends and family. Classical Christian thought rejected this kind of thinking as a denial of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the New Testament Christianity (is there another?) humans are mortal beings with mortal souls. Otherwise Jesus Christ did not really die on the cross. The Arian Heresy is that Jesus body died but that his soul was waiting around to be rejoined with his body in the resurrection. (Incidentally, the Muslims say that Jesus did not die at all but was taken directly up into never never land. At the last minute Judas was crucified in Jesus place!) But if Jesus did not die (mind, body, and soul) then believe what you want, it’s just another wishful thinking that denies death. (First Corinthians 15) That aside, Hitler’s God is no different than the majority of Christians and other world religions. But the majority of Germans during the war were Christian as witnessed by the fact that during these years the churches in Germany were filled on Sunday morning. (We American Christians just don’t want to admit that the German Christian is our brother and then kill him.) So the pseudo-Jew has got to demonize the German Christian in order to make their case for the so-called ‘holocaust’. I wonder how the German soldiers felt when he learned that Dresden had been incinerated and his wife and children burned alive. Might have made them mad, I mean mad. But the Jew will never admit his part in this real holocaust.
Interesting, Al
carolyn
What I take from this is:
... Christian Platonism which so dominates the modern perspective on Christianity. That world view says that there is an immortal soul that survives death. [...] Classical Christian thought rejected this kind of thinking as a denial of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
That's why I'm not a Christian. The CHURCH would naturally decide in that way since then the simple folk would be tied to the Confessional, the Sacrament and priestly dispensation for their salvation from hellfire. I prefer to use common sense and my own experience.
I think that when I die it's more like "shedding the mortal coil" and becoming non-physical awareness again. The sense of "I" won't disappear. I don't believe in punishment, per se, but I do believe in some mental anquish based on regret, remorse for missed opportunities, for harm done, etc. But eternal life is overwhelmingly forward-looking, so maybe all that is just felt during our lifetime. And maybe, as the "near-death" people say during the transition into death.
You mentioned a number of "stories." Christians have their stories just as Jews do, and they're just as false.
I'm quite willing to continue talking about this if you like.
Front Page Mag
MGD
I just wanted to say that the website where this article was published isn't "progressive" it's actually a Neo-Con site. Of course like most Neo-Cons the "owner" of the site(David Horowitz) is a former Communist. I've read his book The Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts on the Sixties and it's VERY critical of leftism/Marxism/Communism and it's negative effect on America. His co-author is Peter Collier who used to run Encounter Books a Neo-Con publishing concern.
Poor Poles
Ezio
The Polish author reminds me of a quote by Igor Stravinsky: "If you pitch your tent in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it is quite likely you will be run over by a bus."
Poland has been run over hard and often; indeed, between 1795 and 1918 it disappeared from the map of Europe.
Even today, Polish leadership is playing with matches again, this time, allowing American troops to enter upon Polish soil.
It's been said that control of central Europe is the linchpin to controlling global politics. Poor Poland. Her fate, as always is in the hands of others.
Poland cant/won't defend herself
carolyn
"... allowing American troops to enter upon Polish soil."
Not just allowing. Asking, even pleading.
I am Polish myself and to
Adi
I am Polish myself and to answer the question: "Are we tired of this yet?" yes I am very tired of this hatred towards German people although I don't blame the common folk of my nation. I have to admit I was one of those who had unreasonable hatred towards Germany, but that ended once I started to study history as a hobby. I advise you to try and get yourself hands on polish history textbooks see how one sided the history is told. Teachers, movies(both hollywood and polish) and books don't help it either. They deny many facts as regime propaganda and will continue to deny it.
I sometimes wonder how history would turn out if Józef Piłsudski was alive at the time. I am pretty sure he didn't have any hostility towards the germans. Ba. He fought alonside the central powers against tsar forces to some point. Many say he forsaw what will be aftermath of The Great War to "end all wars". He was afraid of Germany and knew what would come eventually. So afraid he offered a prevention war in (I belive) 1933 against 3rd Reich to France to which of course France said no. Unlike deluded leadership in 1939 he knew French or British won't help us. Maybe he could came to terms with Adolf Hitler? Who knows.