Progressive Blindness

Hitler's a Good Chap

We have been re-reading in recent days the diplomatic interactions between Herr Hitler and the British, just prior to the commencement of World War II.  Of course, hindsight is always 20-20 vision.  Things seem so obvious, clear, and plain now.

The numerous interactions with Hitler amongst the British leadership were grounded in a grand presumption: Hitler, it was assumed,  shared  the same basic mindset as all European leaders.  Much of the interaction at top diplomatic levels reinforced the British conclusion that Hitler was "one of us".  He was a man who could be reasoned with on universal common ground.  Progressivist, pacifist ideology spurred them all on in a willing suspension of disbelief.

Mass Murder and the Totalitarian Embrace

Why Atheism Has Produced Mass Murder

The celebs amongst the secular atheist crowd are known for drawing long bows between the monsters of the twentieth century (Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Nazis) and religion.  The intent is to portray as many as possible of the monsters as having religious belief of one kind or another.  After all, the object is to prosecute a Donald Trumpian type of argument whereby religion is evil, evil, evil and does all kinds of evil things.

The bow gets pretty long, but you have to admire a trier.  Did not Stalin train in a Russian Orthodox seminary?  Did not Hitler reflect in certain ways his Catholic upbringing?  Sure, it's hard to find a religious connection in the case of Mao Tse Tung.  But Pol Pot--well, Cambodia was a French colony, so we should assume the Jesuits had some influence over PP.

But one thing we can be definitive about, we are told, is that the atheism they all shared in common to one degree or another was in no way connected with their mass murders of multitudes of human beings.  As David Berlinski writes:

Koba The Dread's Wilful Ignorance

Purblind Prejudice

We have been reading with great interest and pleasure Winston Churchill's six volume, The Second World War.  We are nearly halfway through, in the midst of volume III.  In chapter xx, "The Soviet Nemesis", Churchill details the lead up to the German invasion of Russia, June 1941.

One would be on safe ground believing that Churchill had little time for either Communism in general and Stalin in particular.  Somehow the-oh-so-stuck-in-the-mud, antediluvian UK Prime Minister had not got caught up in the adulation communism, and of the Soviets that swept up UK intellectuals at the time. 

Churchill made the following comments against the backdrop of an evident build-up of the Nazi war machine along the line between the USSR and Hitler's eastern border.  This build-up was an open secret throughout the UK and US governments at the time, and was well known amongst European nations.  Only Stalin remained completely blind to it--so much so that when Hitler finally attacked, a great deal of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground within a matter of hours.

Churchill writes:

Nothing New

Taking Offence at God

Lucia, over at NZ Conservative, says she has come across some folk amongst the Chattering Classes who lump the Bible in with Mein Kampf because, by their lights, both are equally offensive.  The pretext has been the revelation that an aspiring politician in this country, a German national no less, has a rare signed copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf in his possession, along with a pen once owned by Stalin and a cigar holder once owned by Churchill.

Books can offend because of what they avow.  The Bible clearly offends multitudes of people because of what it reveals and avows.  After all, the Jewish leaders and the multitudes were grossly offended by Jesus Christ, the Son of God and had him executed with the willing complicity of the Gentile rulers, Pilate and Herod.  But not just the leaders were offended.  Common people who became his disciples for a time were so disillusioned and offended by His teaching that they turned away and had nothing more to do with Him (John 6: 66).  Even His own family rejected Him for a time.

Deadly Fun

For Your Ears Only, Mein Fuehrer 

Disinformation has been a deep art of warfare for time immemorial.  The old aphorism, "the first thing to die in war is the truth" has a general application, but using fiction as a weapon against the enemy is in a different class entirely. 

It is difficult to overestimate the crucial contribution misinformation made to the defeat of Hitler and the Axis Powers.  It turns out that the British contribution was influenced by a novelist who wrote spy stories.  It was a case of life imitating art.  Dennis Wheatley was a spy thriller writer whose main character, Gregory Sallust was in deadly action against the Nazis.  Wheatley was quick to market, writing stories set in events just four months prior to publication, in some cases.

Then Churchill hired him as part of the Deception Team.

Mad or Not

Hitler Was a Perfectly Rational Man

There has been a discussion going on in Auckland recently as to whether Hitler, Stalin, and latterly Ahmadinejad were mad--that is, bonkers (a psychiatric techical term, for those unfamiliar) or insane. The overwhelming consensus in the discussion was that these folk clearly were and, in the case of the president of Iran, are.

But what does that mean? Clearly, under our legal system it would mean that none of these tyrants are to be held accountable for their actions. There would be no moral concupiscence in their crimes because they were unable to distinguish between right and wrong. But why the rush to declare them mad? Why the overwhelming consensus that Hitler was insane? Are we to conclude that the Nuremberg trials were a terrible travesty of justice?

The standard answer to this question is that no sane person would ever have committed such unspeakable horrors. This assertion, in turn, rests on an unspoken premise: that sane people do not commit horrors, or, more subtly sane people do not do evil things. Whilst this premise is a complete nonsense, when it comes to those whom our culture identifies as the Black Beasts--Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.--folk tend to take mindless comfort in it.

We suspect that there are some strong drivers which seduce people into such mindlessness. The first is that our culture has stopped seeing things in ethical categories. Concepts such as sin, evil, righteousness, and depravity have dropped out of the popular lexicon as the Christian faith has waned. The doctrines of original sin and of the fallen nature of humanity have been replaced with Enlightenment assumptions about innate human goodness. They have also been eroded by the pervasive cosmology of evolutionism which does not operate with categories of right or wrong, but of fitness for purpose--a very different concept entirely.

If the culture believes that mankind is innately righteous, then the existence of evil must have extrinsic causes. We see this all the time. The common ideology of victimhood is an example. Crime exists because of poverty. Drunkenness is caused by easy access to alcohol. People are not wrong or sinful when they are drunk; they, rather, are the victims of big brewery and supermarket businesses. They are being exploited as victims for money.

When someone commits unspeakable acts of extreme horror, however, these explanations wear a bit thin. OK, so Hitler did not have a strong, stable family background. But neither do millions upon millions of others, and they do not murder six million Jews. So, another causal explanation must exist. The consensus of the age is that Hitler, then, was not evil, but mad. Poor chap couldn't help it.

This nonsense is comforting to people. For if Hitler were evil, and was a human being, then that implictly might say something about all human beings. Modern man does not want to go down that track.

Hitler was clearly not insane. He was eminently rational. So was Stalin. So is Ahmadinejad. They had a clearly defined world-view, with premises, organising principles, meta-narratives, values, ethics, and assumptions which facilitated rational evaluation and decision making. An evil world-view to be sure, but rational nonetheless. All lived pefectly consistently by their lights.

Hitler, to cite just one illustration, took Darwinism and evolutionism seriously--far more seriously than people do today, most of whom merely use evolutionism as a lazy warranting concept to justify their agnosticism or Unbelief. He believed in higher and lower forms of life, including higher and lower forms of humanity. Within this ideology and cosmology he opined once that Maori were sub-human, primitive, ape-like creatures who deserved extinction. This is a perfectly rational position.

And if readers take umbrage at the idea that to hold Maori to be primitive ape-like sub-humans is perfectly rational, then consider an example closer to home. Just a sort time ago, within living cultural memory, it was openly asserted that Aborigines in Australia did not have souls and were not human beings. This, of course, was also perfectly rational within the Darwinian scheme of things. Are we really seriously going to assert that the majority of European settlers in Australia were insane? OK, a lot of them were convicts--but insane? We think not.

One is clearly not mad to hold such views. Evil, yes. Wicked, yes. Depraved, yes--but not mad. Darwinism itself as a religious cosmology is likewise evil, wicked and depraved. When men, in their wickedness embrace evolutionism it is their innate wickedness that makes the evolutionist cosmology attractive and compelling. It is like answering to like.

When our modern world cheerfully and self-righteously crusades for abortion and murders twenty-thousand innocent and defenceless children in this country every year, sacrificing them upon the grisly bloody altar of human rights, paying for the sacrifices with our tax exacted money, it is perfectly rational in doing so--by its own lights. Yet, evil, monstrously evil to be sure. And the rationale is very, very close to Hitler's evolutionism--that is, the unborn child is sub-human; therefore, it is reasonable to kill it.

Ahmedinejad is a Shi'ite Muslim--reportedly an ardent "Twelver Shīa" Muslim. This means that he believes that the twelfth Imam, born in 869 is still alive, yet hidden by Allah. He is about to reappear (a second coming) to smash Israel and the entire world into submission to Allah. Ahmedinejad believes that nuclear conflagration will be part of the appearing and the submission of the world. That is why Iran must develop nuclear weapons--to prepare for the Imam's appearance. That is also why he has been busy widening public streets in Teheran to accommodate the triumphal processions the twelfth Imam will lead.

Ahmedinejad is a perfectly rational man. He is also a workhorse for the powers of Satanic darkness. But, then, so are all who are involved in the abortion industry--both its cheerleaders and its practitioners who perform the human sacrifices on the altar of human rights.

Christians hold these views about Hitler, Ahmedinejad, social darwinists, and abortionists without self-righteousness. They can speak plainly about evil and depravity, because they also profess the total depravity of the entire human race descended from Adam by ordinary generation. All Christians know that there is no evil of which they are not capable. Lurking within them, apart from being baptised into the death and resurrection of our Lord, lies the evil rationality of Hitler and Stalin and the abortionist. Every Christian knows that given certain circumstances and opportunities there is no evil of which they are not capable. Every Christian looks at Hitler or Pol Pot and professes, "There, but for the grace of God, am I".

And they are both rational and righteous to make such a profession.

Lest We Forget

Sorry, It's Already Been Forgotten

We recently had the opportunity to watch the DVD, The Soviet Story. Derived from previously secret archival material and from eye witness accounts, it presents a history of the Soviet Union that is chilling and almost beyond belief. For a good deal of the script, Russian academics, particularly historians, present the story.

The West to this day consistently and wilfully blindfolds itself to the horrors of Soviet Communism. If you asked the "person in the street" which they considered more evil, Hitler and the Nazis or Stalin and the Soviet Communists you would almost certainly be told that the Nazis were the greater evil by far. In fact, notwithstanding the evil of Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin and the Communists wreaked unspeakable evil upon the human race.

The Soviet Story documents, for example, the genocidal forced starvation of millions in Ukraine during the years 1932-3. Stalin ordered the Ukrainian border sealed, confiscated all food which could be found in the Ukraine, then waited for the people to starve to death. The entire Ukraine became one vast concentration camp. Over 11 million people perished. The footage is far more grotesque than any that has survived the Nazi concentration camps--if such comparisons can be meaningful in any way. Hitler admired Stalin's accomplishments in this arena.

What the documentary establishes from the Soviet archives is that in the years prior and during the Soviet-German Non Aggression pact, the Soviet Union regarded Hitler and the Nazi's as fellow socialists, and constantly aided, supported, and abetted Hitler. This changed only when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and attacked the Soviet Union. Only then, in the official Soviet mind, did Hitler and Nazi-ism become distinguishable from Communism and cease to be part of the de-facto Comintern. It is likely that Stalin's stubborn refusal to consider that Hitler might attack and his angry dismissal of irrefutable intelligence on Hitler's plans were due to his inability to conceive that one socialist/communist nation (Germany) would attack another (the Soviet Union).

Claire Berlinski, writing in City Journal, marvels at the indifference in the West to Soviet atrocities.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

The Soviet Story needs to be shown to every high-school pupil, lest we forget. Actually, it's too late. We are all socialists now, non? Any disagreement the West may have with Stalin and the Soviets is only the relatively minor matter of arguments over tactics--as was the case between Hitler and Stalin.

Reductio Ad Hitleram . . . Again

Mayor Richard Daley in the Bunker

When Chicago failed, we knew Hitler had to be in it somewhere.



Hat Tip: Blog and Magblog