Pence is the poster boy for banal evil. “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” Hannah Arendt
8 Likes
There were good people on both sides, you know!
6 Likes
'44 was the Warsaw Uprising. '43 was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
8 Likes
3 Likes
You are right. Thanks for the gentle correction and apologies to Xeni and all for my error.
4 Likes
And remember, Hitler was a Catholic who believed that religious training should be a requirement in school. He had the tacit blessing of the Church, if not of some of its priests. He was NOT, as some would have it, an atheist.
7 Likes
I guess it might depend on their brand of Christianity. If they were Catholics, they would have to be truly contrite to receive forgiveness (I’m not sure how it works for the other side of the faith).
One of the things about Nazis that made them so successful was that they were everything for everyone (well, as long as you believed that Jews and Communists were the reason for every problem). There were staunch Catholic Nazis from Bavaria and Austria, fervent Protestant Nazis from Prussia and rest of North Germany, there were cynical atheist Nazis who saw religion as a tool of the state to keep the people united and under control, and there were Nazis like Heinrich Himmler with his bugfuck insane occultist-pagan woo. If Nazis hadn’t been so thoroughly and completely antisemitic, I guarantee there would have been proud Jewish Nazis, too.
11 Likes
My layman’s understanding of Gottgläubig is that it was incredibly useful when recruiting people in doubt about their own beliefs and ideology.
“Not sure what to believe? Join us anyway and we’ll work it out together!”
The religious have since taken advantage of this by equating Nazism’s rejection of organised religion as a kind of Atheism.
1 Like
Pence, Netanyahu, and Duda: three people who, each in their own ways, are guaranteed to completely miss the core lessons of Auschwitz.
7 Likes
Even German President Roman Herzog confused the two events when he visited Poland in 1994. And he was a different kind of president, i.e. he could and did read.
I presume he’ll apologize for the Nazis and ask that we forgive them?
Indeed, the cultural mind-shaping goes very deep. I’ll quote you to demonstrate:
So, to rephrase, christian can DO evil, but non-christian can BE evil.
And I’m pretty sure you were not even consciously aware of this sub-text.
Just in case: no offense intended, just pointing out how far cultural conditioning can go.
2 Likes
Believe me, I’m pretty aware of the subtext, as it was the point of the post. The wording was quite intentional.
1 Like
My mistake, then, for I didn’t see it so.
Perhaps he can take one of the children from his own camps who was separated from its parents with him on the trip - “See, we could have made it even worse”
Not regarding to catholic doctrine post Vatican II:
Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle. (…)
Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.
(American) evangelical protestantism is another matter though …
And even that has more variance than people might think. Overall, though, judging Christianity by the shit the worst Christians get up to is not a good idea.
1 Like
A god that will forgive anyone of absolutely anything simply in exchange for belief seems like a morally dubious god.
5 Likes
For Donald so loved the currency of the United States that he stepped away from his failing business empire to become King, that whosoever voteth for him shall not perish and shall be great again, for he had seen that there are many fine people on both sides, and money to be made from them all, and it would be rewarding, if not strictly legal.
- Donald John 3:16
The Xtian faithful are working up a new version of the Bible that will incorporate all the morally dubious stuff they support under one big tent.
6 Likes
So true! There was a lot of paganism and folklore for good measure. And don’t forget the openly homosexual Nazis like Ernst Rohm, leader of the S.A., at least until the Night of the Long Knives…which brings to mind individuals like Milo Yiannopoulos…The genius of ultra-nationalism is that it masquerades as the ultimate inclusion, so long as you don’t think too much and are not one of the scapegoated groups of course…Germany’s religious right supported National Socialism as a bulwark against godless Communism, whilst the Nazis offered the ritual and pageantry of a new quasi-religious movement to the unaffiliated and more secularly inclined. There is no doubt Hitler applied what he had observed as a Roman Catholic choir boy to his bastard creation; if you watch Triumph of the Will you can see in full colour the breathtaking (and ostensibly inclusive) religious ritual on display. First and foremost Nazism gave a people shaken my war, industrialization and globalization a new form of tribal belonging. The Nazis used words like ‘Volksgemeinshaft’ (‘common community’) to convey this idea. We forget these lessons at our peril. The more I write about it, the more the parallels are striking goddamnit…
1 Like
