Fascism Was Anti-Religious Too

Campus Report ^ | May 13, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Fascism Was Anti-Religious Too

Bethany Stotts, May 13, 2008

In our age of moral relativity, leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair have been cast as modern Adolph Hitlers—a practice which trivializes the “moral collapse” perpetuated by the Third Reich. Weekly Standard contributor David Gelernter, in contrast, is intent on magnifying these moral differences.

Claiming inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s characterization of WWII as a choice between “Christianity” or “paganism,” the Yale professor said at the American Enterprise Institute that “The thesis I want to investigate, one that involves such a daunting tangle of complex issues and demands so many qualifications...this thesis is that we need to study not only the holocaust and the gulag and Japanese atrocities, but this phenomenon of moral collapse as it was connected with a doctrine of state paganism.”

Professor Gelernter views World War II as a faceoff between pagan state cults (Germany, Russia, and Japan) and two “Christian” nations (Britain and America). Besides Italy, Gelernter’s lecture dismissed the effects of Christianity within Spain, France, and other European nations. He describes this paganism as replacing “the idea of individuals in a nation with the idea of parts or cells in a body directed by a mind that was divine or divinely ordained or otherwise superhuman and yet present on earth.” He continued,

“Group assemblies with ranting, singing, or shouting in unison are invaluable to the creation of the nation of the pagan beast, because they act not as mythical but as real, tangible, amplifiers—feed in your own voice and get back a roar.”

This dehumanizing trend was true in Japan as well. “The idea of all Japanese merged into the sacred being of the Emperor is reflected in the anonymity of the individual and the irrelevance or non-existence of the individual’s moral judgement,” he said.

[Eva]

This is an excellent topic for discussion because the liberals in WA state are heady with the prospects of gaining control of all branches of government, both state and federal and advancing their fascist agendas. I am in a discussion with someone on the local newspaper blog about this subject right now. Jonah Goldberg is visiting our city next week to discuss his book, Liberal Fascism and I had referred to a proposed Task force on Energy as an example of Liberal Fascism.

The other poster is touting a far left reporter who did some work for MSNBC, as a counter to Goldberg’s lecture.

[Eva]

Of course fascists are anti-religion, they oppose anything that might interfere with the power of the state. The organizing techniques that are mentioned are typical Marxist crowd motivation methods. That’s why you see the frequent use of slogans being repeated over and over again in the Democrat gatherings, slogans like, “We are the ones, we have been waiting for.”