An Astounding Set Of Assumptions
Dean
When I read this Eric Muller critique of Benedict XVI's recent speech at Auschwitz, I was simply stunned by both its ferocity and by the number of assertions he made about what the Pope was "really saying" versus what the man actually said.
I am not in the least bit Jewish that I'm aware of. But I've volunteered to help the ZOA, and am a supporter of the Holocaust Remembrance Project and generally of Israel.
Nor do I have any German ancestors that I'm aware of... hmm, no, wait, I think my maternal great grandfather came over to the US from Germany in the early 1900s. I think. So you know, maybe I've got a profound pro-German streak that I'm not aware of. But I don't think so, especially since both my paternal grandparents were veterans of World War II and were part of the fight against Germany.
Blah blah, who cares, right? Well after reading Muller's piece, all I can say is:
Eric, there are too serious academic scholars who say the German people, or at least vast swaths of them, were bullied and terrified into following Hitler's gang of criminals. A gang of criminals who were never legitimately elected. I can point you to academic sources that debunk the "Hitler was elected" nonsense any time you like. He and his group of thugs seized power, through terror, duplicity, and coercion. They then constructed an image of German national unity that had nothing to do with what everyday Germans actually thought. Indeed, if that's what you think Nazi Germany was, then you're actually buying into the illusion that Hitler himself tried to create.
I would also note that Hitler's false promises of prosperity and greatness were based on lies that turned out to be murderous, totalitarian, and horrific. Some are of the philosophical bent that an economic and social system based on lies will wind up making false promises it cannot possibly sustain--like the vision of the great, glorious, perfect third reich united in socialism and corporatism under the all-beneficent state that would cleanse all ugliness and badness (read: Jews and other undesirables) from our midsts.
And I would note that for the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church to assert that an attack on the Jewish people is as an attack on Christianity itself is a simply extraordinary statement for any Christian, let alone the patriarch of a church that not so long ago (only a few centuries, which is the blink of an eye in Jewish history) was hellbent on persecuting Jews or converting them by force. Now he says an assault on the Jews is a direct assault on his own church, effectively throwing Jews under their direct protection--and you're mad about that?
And how could you ever expect the patron of a church not to take special notice of members of his own flock, a Roman Catholic who was made a saint because she sacrificed her life to save Jews? He's not to take special notice of her memorial that's right there in front of him? You're going to get mad at him for this?
I'm not Catholic, but oy vey Mr. Muller, get a grip!
(Via Instapundit.)
Related Posts (on one page):
- An Astounding Set Of Assumptions
- Pope Visits Auschwitz
I wasn't. This sort of self-righteous asshatery is Muller's bread and butter. If he had written anything more measured than that, I'd have suspected a hacker had broken into his account.
But you got the wrong slant on Edith Stein, or Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, as the mary folks refer to her. She didn't go to her death in a nazi vernichtungslager out of act of defiance against the SS-Totenkopfverbanden who ran the camps.
They killed her because they viewed her as just another Jew, regardless of her religious affiliation. I suspect the orthodox among the moses folks would tell you she died twice. Once when she became a Catholic, and the second time when the Nazis correctly identified her as a Jew regardless of her new roman garb, and marched her into a gas chamber because of it.
The Nazis did not give a whit for religion. And the shit-brown cockroaches hiding in the woodwork who still perpetuate the nazi strain have not changed since the goose-stepping era. Race is all they care about. And racism, as you know, is a disease that is cured only by the death of a person infected with it.
So don't be too hard on Muller. Even if his screed made him sound like a minor whiner.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Lets face it: B-16 will always be a prime target.
They say that they don't really miss their home countries much because the people there are really quite intolerant. And, I've heard the same thing from other people. Indeed I've heard that a lot of Germans secretly (and in many cases, when they feel they're in "safe" company, openly) still admire what Hitler and his buddies tried to do.
I'm also conflicted in that I feel a sense of pride for the sheer competency of people from that part of the world. They're great engineers. I try to put as much effort into my engineering as they do. Unfortunately, they built great tanks and great planes and great bombs and proceeded to trash most of Europe, which is something entirely not to be proud of. And as for how they treated the Jews and other minorities - utterly barbaric. Yes, I understand where anti-war types get their zeal from, when one looks at what the Germans, Japanese and their allies did during WW2.
So while superficially they appear to have changed, and indeed many probably have, there may still be a little seed buried in many of them that were I religious I would hope to god never sees the light of day again.
Still, John Paul II declared her a saint, she has a whole church that was named for her, and she died at Auschwitz, and her name even invokes the name "Benedict," and yet somehow it's wrong for him to at least mention her? For Christ's sake (literally!) how rude would it have been for him *not* to? Oh yeah, here's this woman whom the church recognized with its highest honor, who was murdered by the Nazis right there on that very spot, and the Pope was supposed to politely *not notice?*
It reminds me of something our friend Paul Burgess, a Christian minister and Protestant against the church in Rome, said when Ratzinger became Pope: how offensive should it be that the new Pope is, of all things, a Roman Catholic?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Poland has for years tried to turn the camps respectively into a sacred place for the Polish war dead. Their have been years of struggles between the international Jewish community and the Polish government with the Catholic church -usually- siding with the poles.
For the pope to honor a woman who converted from being an atheist (and before that a Jew) goes the wrong way witht he folks who have been in the trenches on this one.
As far as Pope Benedict goes: I think Catholic Church selecting him as Pope was an incredible act of idiocy. Now that he is in fact Pope his trip to Auschwitz and the other camps were a necessity when he was in Poland.
Where did you hear that? I was in Oswiecim and went to both Auschwitz &Birkenau. The camps are museums and they have been for a long time. It IS a sacred place for the war dead. FYI, plenty of those dead were Polish. Crazy that Poland wants to honor their people in their country. Shit, next you'll tell me that we bury our war dead here instead of where they died or some crazy shit like that.
For the pope to honor a woman who converted from being an atheist (and before that a Jew) goes the wrong way witht he folks who have been in the trenches on this one.
Sorry, but us Catholics, especially us Polish Catholics, expect our Saints to be noticed when the Pope is standing on a spot that killed them.
The nerve of us Catholics wanting our Catholic leader to honor a Catholic.
P.S.
Poland was in the trenches, in fact Poland was practically turned into a trench by Hitler. Poland has Hitler to thank for needing Stalin to save her, so please drop the illusion that Poland doesn't have any rights in the "we got fucked by Hitler" department. Okay?
And CLEARLY museaums that up until the fall of communism ignored or didn't even mention the deaths of Jews in the camps until after the fall of communism isn't religous politics.
Go look up the war over crosses at the camps in 1998 many good articles are online about the conflict between the Catholic Church, Poland, and Jewish groups over the camps.
Pre-1989 Polish Catholics had made the area a virtual catholic shrine and excluded refrences to the Jews. Its better now then it was but it is still a conflict.
I think if their was a mindset amongst the two camps to be fair they should let Camp I be in honor of the other polish dead their and let camp II honor the jewish dead
But thats never going to happen anyway.
Stop taking umbrage at this fact and assuming anti-catholicism. Its part of a polish feud that is ongoing. So the pope's use of symbols has continued the feud and will continue to cause problems with the jewish community.
Are the commenters criticism/support of the Pope the same as that levied in support/against al-Sistani?
I notice that Dean &Rosemary's position is.
Just my $.02
I am critical of the pope because looking at what the english translation of his speech says, it seems to be going wrong on Christian teachings and seems to but head with catholic doctrine
That is a simple historical fact.
Beyond that it is worth debating how much ordinary Germans were responsible for what came next. Obviously, somewhat. But how much? I don't think quite as much as some people do.
By the model they used taking him in to a government deal Was a legitimate act of democracy as the germans were using it at the time,
Now, was their a threatened coup? well it wasn't till after he took over that Hitler had the ability to take the german military as an institution so its doubtful it could have worked.
as for german "responsibility" your thinking way to small Dean. Many people turned a blind eye to what hitler was doing in and out of europe, which was shameful and something few people are willing to talk about. and many more aided hitler willingly because they felt he was making a better world.
those people get a pass from folks like the pope when they say "hitler made me do it" which if the Pope believes what the Catholic church teaches means he is damning all their souls to hell.
If you could call all that "democratic" then I suppose you could say that Hitler was "democratically elected," but you've got one of the craziest, scariest definitions of democracy I've ever heard.
I think it is entirely fair to say that of the German people, most had no direct knowledge of what was going on, or only vague ideas, and would have been afraid to say anything given the lies the Nazis were telling and the fact that there was no free speech, no free press, no free elections, and a regime that made it clear that it would imprison anyone who opposed it.
To say that the German people were completely and joyfully in step with all this is just wrong.
And all do respect to Professor Rummel He is blurring issues of how Parliamentary systems work.
Nor can you call the people of Germany living under this tyrant's iron fist his "willing executioners." Yes, sure, some of them were, but many Germans had every right to say they were terrified of Hitler and felt they had no choice. And by that I don't mean the concentration camp guards, but the everyday citizens. Just like you cant call the average Soviet citizen "Stalin's willing executioner." That's just not right.
He was brought in Democratically and he then abolished Democracy which most of the german parliament (his party being only 1/3rd) going right along with it.
Hitler came into power democratically and then he transformed the german state into an undemocratic and autocratic form.
but he, like our buddy Chavez and others used the tools of Democracy to make an undemocratic state.
So you tried to attack the claim using a republicanist system of government that the Germans didn't have and when addressed with the realities of the system you say "well he tore up the constitution"
yeah he did... after he was democratically put into power as the leader of the German government.
As Hitler ramped up his persecution of the Jews with the support of masses of the german people they willingly collaberated with his regime of death.
yet when Hitler first started executing the disabled many germans stood up and protested and Hitler initially relented. Had these people stood up to the first dehumanizing acts against the Jews it would have stopped for a while until hitler found a way to sell it to the masses.
People choose to let it go because they had culturally viewed the Jews, The Gypsies, and so many of the other folks Hitler executed as a problem. And while they may not have known with 100% as the violence against them and the marginilization increased their was no way the German people could say honestly "I didn't know" the truth was far worse... they simply didn't care.
Many more of them were glad to get rid of "The Jews" and make their city and region better and more german.
And while the average soviet citizen was not Stalin's willing executioner Stalin did not have an engine of State that was so dedicated to the murder of people. Though those people who collaberated with the systems of state in Russia that did such things can and should be called his willing executioners
First of all, Hitler had armed gangs of Sturm Abteilung (SA) storm troopers, dressed head to toe in their shit-brown regalia, prowling around the halls of the temporary quarters of the Reichstag.
(The actual Reichstag building had been burned down shortly after Hitler came to power, and Goering later boasted to his friends that he and some of his own gangsters had engineered the fire; not the Dutch halfwit whom they claimed to find walking around the building looking for ways to start a fire, and who was quickly put to death for the arson.)
Roehm's storm troopers openly boasted to the non-nazi Reichstag deputies that unless the voted for the "enabling act", they would be murdered. So the demand was "vote as we tell you to vote, or don't expect to get out of this building in one piece." It worked good for Al Capone in Cicero, Illinois in 1924, and it worked again for Adolf Hitler nine years later in 1933.
A few of the non-Nazis -- especially Otto Wells, one of the opposition leaders -- told Hitler politely but firmly to go fuck himself, and was shortly dispatched to Dachau, the first formally constructed nazi concentration camp.
His heroism was all the more real when you consider that the nazis already had locked up various Reichstag deputies in temporary SA holding centers, some of which were used as torture chambers by the frequently drunk and violent storm troopers.
So Hitler got his vote from what was left of the Reichstag, then boasted that he had achieved power by legal means. (Yeah. Real legal.)
Needless to say, the nazis rarely hesitated to show their teeth and claws for purposes of overwhelming any form of opposition anywhere. And they practiced these tactics first and foremost on the German nation that unwittingly had spawned the shit-brown gang. (Who got theirs, by the way, the following summer, when Hitler allowed Himmler to turn loose his better trained and disciplined Schutz-Staffel (SS executioners) on Ernst Roehm and most of the other SA leaders.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Some of the people claiming it was an issue of being threatened i think is a factor in some, but I think at the time the support of a dictator was a natural thought to many then so their support of Dictatorship was a legitimate Democratic vote.
So how many people who subject to the politics and culture of their time voted freely for Hitler to disolve the German state, and how many were threatened?
and in the period following the war when good jobs were tied to De-Nazification how many people would say "I was pressured" when the oppisite case might have been true.
Your trying to oversimplify the case.
Adolf Hitler
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Adolf Hitler Nazi Photo's
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People are talking across each other here.
First we have Dean talking about "democracy" in the context of majority rule government. Alas, parlimentary forms of government do recognize coalitions of voting blocs.
Hence Canada could, in theory, see a coalition of the Liberal and Bloc Quebeqois, even though neither received a majority of the votes. You can find similar examples in the histories of Great Britain, Israel, and other countries.
Hitler gained power -legally- by forming a coalition with other party, including the Nationalists. Many of them felt Hitler was preferable to the communists.
Dean's objects that said majority did not allow Hitler to legally destroy the German contsitution is true. This is true. The Reichstag gave Hitler that power when they voted for a 1-year "emergency rule" which was contained in the German constitution.
Despite what Rudy Rummel says, (which claim is supported by nothing other than Rudy's say-so in the original linked article) Hitler came to power legally and constitutionally. He even gained "emergency" power legally, via Reichstag vote.
Now, while I know that Arnold was there(heh), and could actually observe the events in question, he missed a couple points, and makes some unsubstantiated claims. He also ignores the percieved communist threat at that time, not to mention the actual chaos in Germany immediately after WW1 which put a bad taste into many Germans' mouths. Voters are a lot more likely to approve "repressive" measures when armed gangs are shooting it out in the street nearly every day.
Did Hitler's bullies help intimidate many Reichstag members? Some, certainly. There is no evidence that such threats were the sole or primary cause of the vote approving "emergency" powers.
I know about the communist threat, except that after 1930, the NSDAP had outgrown the communist party by far. Less so in cities with large industrial districts such as Berlin and Hamburg, where communism had grown a major foothold, but overwhelmingly so around the rest of the country. In any case, I think Hitler and Goebbels over-dramatised the communist power to win votes for their gang. It was a smart trick, and it certainly worked for them.
Larry, most people in most countries are opportunists, so long as the man promising the revolution is threatening the other guy and not them. Also, Germany, like most of Europe, had residual anti-semitism which had shrunk during the age of reason in the 18th century and the age of reform in the first half of the 19th century, but which starting showing up again on racialist grounds in the latter half of the 19th century.
The fact was, Hitler's unabashed anti-semitism made him popular to no small degree even in countries which, before World War II, he already had marked for subjugation and in some cases, destruction.
And I'm not sure that a lot of this has arisen yet again, this time under the guise of anti-zionism. Even so, large numbers of Jews are learning that modern Germany has become a better and safer place for them to live than in most of the rest of Europe and maybe the whole world.
The Germans have their problems and their bad moments, but you can't deny they operate one of the best-managed societies in Europe, and, coupled with a written federal constitution that they take seriously, that's the kind of environment in which a mostly well-educated bourgeoisie sub-culture such as that of the Jews thrives in.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, and the Nature of Anti-Semitism
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