Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "Liberal Hivemind"
channel.
-
6
-
4
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@x "Hitler was a Catholic. "
Nope.. It is true that Hitler when he was a politician seeking office expressed certain pro-Christian statements. But in his private remarks to his officials he made it clear where he really stood as has been revealed by seized Nazi government documents and the notes of an author who planned to publish a collection of Hitler's remarks at the dinner table.
Dr Zoellner and [Catholic Bishop of Munster] Count Galen have tried to make clear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the son of God. That makes me laugh... No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle's Creed... True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially the Fuehrer to a real Christianity... the Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation."
— Hans Kerrl, Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, 1937
During the war Alfred Rosenberg formulated a thirty-point program for the National Reich Church, which included:
The National Reich Church claims exclusive right and control over all Churches.
The National Church is determined to exterminate foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.
The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible.
The National Church will clear away from its altars all Crucifixes, Bibles, and pictures of Saints.
On the altars there must be nothing but "Mein Kampf" and to the left of the altar a sword.
Prior to the Reichstag vote for the Enabling Act under which Hitler gained legislative powers with which he went on to permanently dismantle the Weimar Republic, Hitler promised the Reichstag on 23 March 1933, that he would not interfere with the rights of the churches. However, with power secured in Germany, Hitler quickly broke this promise. Various historians have written that the goal of the Nazi Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle) entailed not only ideological struggle, but ultimately the eradication of the Churches. However, leading Nazis varied in the importance they attached to the Church Struggle.
William Shirer wrote that "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists." During a speech on 27 October 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt revealed evidence of Hitler's plan to abolish all religions in Germany, declaring:
Your government has in its possession another document, made in Germany by Hitler’s Government… It is a plan to abolish all existing religions—Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike. The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever liquidated, silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler.
Hitler himself possessed radical instincts in relation to the continuing conflict with the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Germany. Though he occasionally spoke of wanting to delay the Church struggle and was prepared to restrain his anti-clericalism out of political considerations, his "own inflammatory comments gave his immediate underlings all the license they needed to turn up the heat in the 'Church Struggle, confident that they were 'working towards the Fuhrer'". According to the Goebbels Diaries, Hitler hated Christianity. In an 8 April 1941 entry, Goebbels wrote "He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity."
In Bullock's assessment, though raised a Catholic, Hitler "believed neither in God nor in conscience", retained some regard for the organizational power of Catholicism, but had contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". (Bullock wrote.)
In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.
— Extract from Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock
Writing for Yad Vashem, the historian Michael Phayer wrote that by the latter 1930s, church officials knew that the long-term aim of Hitler was the "total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion", but that given the prominence of Christianity in Germany, this was necessarily a long-term goal. According to Bullock, Hitler intended to destroy the influence of the Christian churches in Germany after the war. In his memoirs, Hitler's chief architect Albert Speer recalled that when drafting his plans for the "new Berlin", he consulted Protestant and Catholic authorities, but was "curtly informed" by Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann that churches were not to receive building sites. Kershaw wrote that, in Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of Eastern Europe, he made clear that there would be "no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches'.
Geoffrey Blainey wrote that Hitler and his Fascist ally Mussolini were atheists. "The aggressive spread of atheism in the Soviet Union alarmed many German Christians", wrote Blainey, and with the Nazis becoming the main opponent of Communism in Germany: "[Hitler] himself saw Christianity as a temporary ally, for in his opinion 'one is either a Christian or a German'. To be both was impossible. Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was its high priest... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions". Nonetheless, a number of early confidants of Hitler detailed the Führer's complete lack of religious belief. One close confidant, Otto Strasser, disclosed in his 1940 book, Hitler and I, that Hitler was a true disbeliever, succinctly stating: Hitler is an atheist.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Darn it as much as you like democracy is not socialism. Wanting to save democracy in the US is not the same thing as classifying the US as a democracy. Democratic election of representatives and officials in the Federal government and the requirement for the states admitted to have a representative form of government were just one among many, even if the most profound and radical, means of DISPERSING POWER. Often the the system of the US republic is compared unfavorably with a parliamentary system, for instance, on the grounds of efficiency. The parliamentary supposedly more rapidly implements the sense of the majority. Such critics are mistaking a means for an end. The founders of the US constitutional republic were concerned with dissipating power, of keeping it from being concentrated and thus facilitating tyranny. Democracy is just one, even if the most important and radical, of the means to this end. "Checks and balances" were placed throughout the system. Gridlock is a feature, not a bug. Democracy may well be necessary for freedom, but it is certainly INSUFFICIENT.
That being said, it is absurd to berate anybody who refers to the US democracy, or discusses the democratic aspect of our government. Classifying the US and other Western nations under the generalization "democracies" is a useful and, as far as it goes, valid usage. For one thing, no 2 critics who dogmatically insist that the US be referred to exclusively as a "republic" and never as a "democracy" posit the same definition (if they posit any at all) of what "republic" means. Often, they are fuzzy on the definition of "democracy" as well. The term "republic" is better as a description of the US, but in some contexts, particularly when discussing voting, or grouping our closest allies by common values, democracy is an important concept. It is the left, not conservative Constitutionalists, who are in the business of banning words.
1
-
1
-
1
-
@ConvictedFelonTrump8647 How to say you didn't listen to the arguments. This is Bulverism. It's what they teach in schools nowadays instead of critical thinking. You posit an irrational or ignoble CAUSE for your opponent's position, hoping to excuse yourself and your readers for dismissing his ARGUMENTS prior to consideration.
Quote from Bulverism by C. S. Lewis:
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.
In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — "Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the natural dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall." That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant — but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1