German Throwback to Nazi Laws

‘Major Blow to Parental Rights’

Court Rules Against German Homeschoolers 

Thomas D. Williams
Breitbart London


A recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that German authorities had not violated a family’s rights when they stormed their home and carried away their four children to prevent them from receiving homeschooling, a decision condemned by human rights advocates as “a major blow to parental rights.”

The case goes back to August 2013, when more than 30 police officers and social workers burst into the home of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich, just as they were beginning their first homeschooling lesson of the year, a practice that is illegal in Germany, and seized their children.

Ellen Fantini, Executive Director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe, told Breitbart News on Monday that Germany is one of the only nations to criminally enforce its ban on homeschooling, and that the officials had “entered the Wunderlich home with a battering ram and taken the children by force.”

The January 10 ruling by the ECHR defending the police action sends the very clear message that “German officials know better than parents how to educate their children,” Ms. Fantini said.  “This ruling ignores the fact that Germany’s policy on homeschooling violates the rights of parents to educate their children and direct their upbringing. It is alarming to see that this was not recognized by the most influential human rights court in Europe,” said Paul Coleman, Executive Director of ADF International. “This ruling is a step in the wrong direction and should concern anyone who cares about freedom.”

After courts in Germany ruled in favor of the government, the Wunderlich family appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which agreed to take up the case in August 2016.

Willing Executioners

Eliminationist Anti-Semitism is Alive and Kicking

We have been reading Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners with great interest.  [Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Abacus, 1997)].  The book has attracted significant academic controversy.  Goldhagen's central thesis is that ordinary Germans in the nineteen thirties and forties were captured by an ideology of eliminationalist anti-semitism.  

The idea is that the great majority of German people were not just anti-semitic, but had come to believe that the only solution to the "Jewish problem" was the elimination of Jews from Germany--not by expulsion, but by their extermination.  The Nazis institutionalised this idea and sought to effect it as the "Final Solution".  But--and this is where Goldhagen's thesis becomes more controversial--eliminationist anti-semitism was not distinctly Nazi; it was, argued Goldhagen, a widely held idea within Germany.  One fundamental trail of evidence produced by Goldhagen was the enthusiastic extermination of Jewish people perpetrated by non-Nazi, German Order Police Reserve Battalions,  made up of older, middle-aged German men.

The historical reality is that anti-semitism became "eliminationist" in Germany.

Testing Ideologies

Ain't No Fig Tree

The terms "ideology" and "ideological" are  used as an insult these days, more often than not.  To accuse your opponent of being ideological implies that they are out of touch with reality, closed minded, impractical, dangerous, even absolutist.  The term, "idealist" less so.  In common parlance, an idealist is someone close to sainthood--a person who puts their ideals and beliefs ahead of themselves and who is willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of a higher, nobler cause.  Usually, however, their devotion it is said that their devotion has put them out of touch with reality.  Which is to say they are slightly mad. 

Whether being ideological or an idealist is good or bad depends upon the ideology in question.  Stalin and Hitler and Mao were ideological.  They could even be said to be idealists, in the sense that they were controlled by a set of ideas bigger than themselves, to which they were committed and devoted servants.  So was Mother Theresa.  But in the case of the former, the ideology was evil; consequently the idealists devoted to it were given over to evil.  Not so with the celebrated Christian in Calcutta. 

Whether we like it or not, or are aware of it or not, every human being is controlled by ideologies of one shape or form.

Letter From the US (About Germany)

‘Brutal and Vicious’: Armed German Police Storm Homeschooling Family’s House and Forcibly Seize Children, Report Claims

Aug. 30, 2013 3:25pm
Billy Hallowell
TheBlaze

[Editor's note: Germany just cannot shake off its Nazi past.  It remains partially instituted in laws making home schooling verborten in that country--laws that were Nazi creations and which have never been repudiated or repealed by Germany.  Now the Reich is applying the Nazi anti-homeschooling tyranny with an energy worthy of the Gestapo itself.  JT ]

The Romeike family’s very public legal battle has brought to light the homeschooling community’s ongoing battle inside Germany. Educating children in this manner is illegal in the European nation, which led Uwe and Hannelore Romeike to inevitably seek refuge. While the family’s battle for asylum in the U.S. continues, there’s another story coming out of Germany that will likely send chills down the spines of homeschooling advocates.

Letter From America (About Concentration Camps)

Much More Than Thought

We all know about the Nazi death and concentration camps.  It seems, however, that it was much more pervasive than we knew.  Recent research is showing that Germany and the occupied territories were riddled with them.  This, from the New York Times

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Collection of Eugenia Hochberg Lanceter

A group of Jewish women at the entrance to the Brody ghetto in Eastern Galicia, 1942. The sign is written in German, Ukrainian and Polish.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945. 

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington. “The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

Progressives and the Ideology of Eugenics

Dirty Secrets

Eugenics was and remains a proud glory of the Progressive ideology.  It was somewhat unfortunate that Hitler and the Nazis took eugenics seriously, so seriously that it became a movement for mass extermination of those deemed unfit.  This served to take the gloss off  what many in the Progressive movement deeply believed.  So public support for eugenics faded.  But the reality and the dystopian nightmare continued.
 
Abortion is a form of soft-eugenics.  A baby that is unwanted by its mother and father is likely to experience a terrible life.  Cold pity argues for the termination of the child's life, rather than let the child experience deprivation, rejection, and hardship.  It's a mercy to kill, don't you know.

Dougla Wilson's Letter From America

Our Ruling Class

Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 01 March 2012

I wanted to make sure that I made at least a couple points about this particular travesty from The Journal of Medical Ethics, HA! (JMEH!).

The first point to make is that when men have lost their soul, they have not yet necessarily lost their capacity to reason. They can still say B, and do so because they said A earlier. They are exactly right that there is no moral difference between killing a child here and killing a child there. But there are two ways to remove the inconsistency -- you can say B, and then C, so on down the line until you get to H for Holocaust, or Hell, take your pick. The other way to remove the inconsistency is by repenting of having said A. God is in Heaven, and He remains just. It would serve us well to remember that God is angry at America's ruling class, with us for tolerating them.

How Familiar

Nazi Indoctrination


A youth rally song children in the Hitler Youth were taught:

We are the happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots.

Mutatis mutandis, this sounds remarkably similar to the hymn sheet employed most modern anti-Christian secular government schools.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor; Jonah Goldberg

Darwin and Higher Breeding

Pistols At Dawn

It is presumably an embarrassment to the modern evolutionist that Charles Darwin, the founder of the evolutionist cosmology, welcomed the extinguishing of what he saw as lower human species.  He saw this ethnic cleansing as inevitable and right and natural and determined by evolutionary principles.  He wrote in The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004, p.163):

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races throughout the world.

So more advanced human beings were going to exterminate the less advanced--the fact that they would be successful in exterminating them would be proof positive of their superiority and fitness to survive. When that happened, argued Darwin, we would see a far bigger gap between apes and human beings in the evolutionary chain of being. At his time of writing Darwin thought that there were human ethnic groups that were pretty close to apes--specifically the Australian aboriginal and the Negro.

Now, of course, today such views are regarded by evolutionists as quaint, old-fashioned, or Victorian. It is more fashionable to speak of all men being equal--but this is just a modern fad.

Hitler Was a Reasonable Man

Tricks Played By the Living Upon the Dead

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.