We have been following a doco series on the Sky History channel on the rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany. This series has been particularly valuable because it effectively sets the rise of National Socialism in the economic, social and political context of Europe. It shows that the emergence of Nazism was "mainstream-normal" and inevitable. It also uses actual, former Nazi participants as interviewees and commentators. These are people who knew Hitler personally and interacted frequently with the Fuehrer and top Nazis.
Revisionist history has cast Hitler as insane. This documentary series shows that Hitler was a perfectly rational and reasonable man, as were the Nazis generally. The views he held were perfectly understandable then, and, we may add, now. The Nazis were of course operating within the world-view of Unbelief. They were both rationalistic and humanistic. They believed in the ascendency of the human race over animals; they were also strongly Darwinistic and evolutionistic in their outlook--as is Unbelief today.
Last night's episode discussed at some length how Hitler was fascinated with the concept of the survival of the fittest and that one could only achieve and maintain superiority of being through struggle. Fighting against and defeating less advanced beings was critical to establish and maintain superiority. This struggle was part of the natural order--it was how human life came into being and preserved itself. Now this was, and is, pretty standard stuff amongst biological darwinists--although since the advent of the Nazis the biological darwinists have squirmed and weaseled and sought to "tone things down" a bit.
Given this standard mainstream humanist world view, it was perfectly reasonable and understandable for Hitler and his colleagues, his academicians and scientists, to argue that the human race consisted of species that were inferior and superior, that there were those more and those less human. The Jews, of course, were sub-human. Uber-humanity could only be achieved and maintained by struggling against Jews (and gypsies and the handicapped) and destroying them. This was simply standard, text book, mainstream applications of the Darwinian cosmology--which, needless to say, is still the dominant Unbelieving cosmology to this day.
For the past two centuries, the Darwinistic cosmology has been at the centre of Unbelief. Ideologically, Hitler and the Nazis were mainstream Darwinists. As Unbelievers they were not insane, nor stupid, nor ignorant, nor extremist. They were perfectly reasonable and rational: every position they took was understandable (and compelling) within the paradigm of Unbelief. For a modern Unbeliever to argue against the Nazis, without acknowledging their moral, ethical and philosophical legitimacy, their reasonableness, and their legitimacy-within-the tent, is hypocritical, so say the least.
Modern Unbelief has, of course, resiled from the Nazis, and now profess their horror. But this is merely revisionist history, where the living are playing tricks upon the dead. It is both fashionable and comforting to present Hitler as a raving lunatic. Actually, he was a mainstream Unbeliever, just like the stock-standard Unbelievers of our day. He was a family member, and a mainstream one at that.
Take the idea of the human race consisting of a continuum--with some more human, some less human than others. This is straight out of the Darwinian Unbelieving cosmology. Today those that are considered lesser human are not blacks or Jews--but they might as well be. Today, to be sure, it is unfashionable and so yesterday to consider black and Jews to be sub-human. Fashions change. Then they change back. Today, the sub-human are yet-to-be-born children. The Darwinian struggle against inferior humans, necessary to achieve and maintain true self-realisation and uber-humanity, now takes place in the womb of mothers, who kill and abort to assert their true human autonomy. They assert rights over those they consider sub-humans, even as the Nazis asserted rights over Jews and gypsies. Academicians and scientists, politicians and press applaud and cheer as loudly and fanatically as any crowd clamouring before the Fuehrer. Given the world-view of Unbelief it is perfectly reasonable and understandable for them to do so. If you stand where the Unbeliever stands, how can you demur?
Or, take the euphemistically misnamed practice of euthanasia. The Nazis openly practised eugenics. Once again, given the world-view of Unbelief it was a perfectly reasonable stance to take. Equally reasonable and understandable is the modern appetite for killing the old, the sick, and suffering, and the terminally ill. As blogger MacDoctor put it:
Governments being what they are, as soon as euthanasia is legalised, there will immediately be a subtle drive to euthanase dying people. It will not escape bureaucratic attention that having granny die a few months earlier will save the government health budget millions a year. Recall that the bulk of expenditure in healthcare is spent on the last year of life. The vast majority of these people are clearly terminal in the last three to six months of this period. Imagine the cost-savings of involuntary euthanasia.
While I am fairly certain involuntary euthanasia will never become a healthcare cost-cutting tool, there is no doubt in my mind that pressure will be subtly placed on the terminally ill to “end it all”. It will be put as an “escape from suffering” or “to spare the family” or “to not be a nuisance/burden”. But it will still be coercion no matter how it is dressed.
Is this really how we want our society to be? Driving the elderly and infirm to a premature death in the name of convenience? Are we really so unable to train our physicians in the proper care of the terminally ill? Or is the word compassion only reserved for those who would kill rather than care?
Ah, yes--in the Darwinist cosmology--the dominant cosmology of Unbelief in our day--compassion is to be ascribed to those who dispatch the sub-human. It is an act of compassion upon and caring for us all who remain. As Neil Simon wrote: "these are the days of miracles and wonders."
The Christian grants that, within the framework of Unbelief, Nazism, genocide, abortion and euthanasia are eminently rational, reasonable and understandable. But the rational is not the right. Unmitigated and eternal evils they remain. They are sinful and abhorrently wicked beliefs and practices. Those who advocate and practise them--whether they be yesterday's Nazis or today's mainstream liberal modern--are under the condemnation of God. Whoever lifts his hand in arrogant Unbelief to strike against any other man falls under the condemnation of the God whose image that man bears. The Bible is very clear: the blood of the fallen cries out from the ground to God for vengeance.
God always hears the eloquent plea of the blood of the slain.
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