Posted on 01/10/2002 9:53:22 AM PST by marshmallow
>I expected a response like that from you.
Well, when you lie, you should expect to be called out on it.
>What do you expect from a man who spends virtually all his time attacking Christians,
And when have I attacked Christians? Are you one of those simple minded apes who considers criticism to be an attack?
>and in this thread linking them to Nazi's?
Most Nazi's were Christians. Deal with it. "Gott Mit Uns"
30 posted on 1/8/02 8:55 AM Pacific by lexcorp
What's your source for this allegation? You mean most Nazi party members were also professing Christians? I don't think so.
Also, "Gott mit uns" (="God [is] with us"), was a motto of the German Empire during WW I. It wasn't used by the Nazis. Get a clue.
"First the Saturday people. Then the Sunday people..."
Well, it was, in a manner of speaking. It was on German Army belt buckles and other accoutrements, but it had been there for a long time before the Nazis and the Nazis just never changed it. Proves nothing about the Nazis one way or another.
I read THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH by Shirer (sp?) over 20 years ago now and I seem to remember this was also documented in there. Basically, the NAZIs wanted to subvert EVEN Christianity to THEIR purposes.
Hitler was not -- so it is reported -- an "Odinist", and had little patience with the neo-pagans, probably regarding them on the same level as the people who dress up as Klingons at sci-fi conventions.
The major obstacle to the Nazi agenda was, in my opinion, the German people themselves. Had Hitler and Goebbels explicitly stated their anti-Christian agenda, the Nazi party would have been unable to co-opt the "genuine" rightists into the anti-Bolshevic alliance of the Weimar period. The fact that the ruling circle of the NSDAP had to keep their real feelings under wraps (with plans to "settle scores" after the war), has led enemies of Christianity (such as W. Clinton and some on this forum) to conflate the NSDAP and the Church. These people mistakenly take the Nazis' advertising campaign, aimed at traditionally-minded Germans, at face falue. They ignore the actual "product" that was delivered, which includes the persecution of Christian groups and ministers. That is as bogus as conflating the platform of the Democrat Party with the Constitution.
It interested me the way the poster you quoted conflated not simply Nazism and Christianity, but WW I Germany and Nazi Germany. The irony is, Germany during WW I had a relatively good reputation regarding its treatment of its Jewish citizens, contrasted with France with its recent "Dreyfus affair," and Russia with its anti-Jewish pogroms. In fact, German forces on the Eastern Front in WW I often had to take care of Jewish refugees who had fled from Russian held territory, often the result of persecution from Russians who suspected them of sympathy for Germany. The man in charge of homefront logistics for the German war effort in WW I, Walther Rathenau, was also Jewish.
I wasn't aware of the fact you mentioned. And I can't deny that the Nazis did try to appeal to Christian "tropes," if you will, when it was to their advantage, such as telling soldiers to execute Jews "because the Jews killed Christ." However, as you said, it proves no connection between Nazism and Christianity, any more than the Soviet regime use of the Orthodox Patriarchate to drum up patriotism during WW II proves that the CPSU was really "Christian."
Strange. We have reached the opposite conclusion about the Incarnation of Jesus. All power oriented political movements (the Left in total) must work to destroy Christianity precisely because Christians believe that Elihom/Yaweh/God/Zeus/Allah actaully became man. It's a stunning reorganization of the natural order if every individual man knows that the Lord God was also a man--that he could be betrayed (even hurt?!) by common fishermen and other such laborers. It alters everything. Everyone's proper place, as you put it, is radically altered.
It's revolutionary in a way that all other fake "revolutionary movements" could never comprehend.
That is why Christianity is so despised. It's revolutionary central fact threatentens the pretensions of the faux revolutionaries of all stripes; And also why many other religions--especially, within the context of current event, Islam--are "respected" by the Global controlling class. Napoleon, the proto-Hitler, was confortable "converting" to Islam but despised Christianity.Those religions are more wisely "natural". Man submits to "higher authority" in the heavens, and more importantly for the Controlling Class, on earth. The apostles never "submitted" to Jesus.
"This could be the New World socialists of today if substituted the word "environmental" for "racial".
Made for more uniform people and malleable brains, I guess.
Regards, Leisler.
NAZI HEALTH TIPS---"Lingua Franca"
IN 1941 THE nazi magazine auf der wacht (On Guard) published an illustration reminding Germans of a new public-health ordinance. The poster showed a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe, all smoldering beneath a menacing black boot and an eagle-and-swastika insignia.
The illustration, and dozens others like it, is reproduced in a new book by the Penn State science historian Robert N. Proctor. In The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton), Proctor argues that medical and scientific research under Hitler produced some significant, verifiable breakthroughs. Nazi Germany was decades ahead of the democracies in discovering that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, and its scientists worked to identify carcinogens in the workplace and the environment. WhatÕs more, the Third Reich promoted a series of public-health measures that might well be called forward-looking: banning smoking in certain public places, running an aggressive antismoking propaganda campaign, and placing restrictions on how tobacco could be advertised. Proctor asks a stunning question: Could the most extensive cancer-prevention campaign of this century have been initiated by Hitler?
At this point, the answer is unclear. Though dozens of scholars have written about science and medicine in Nazi Germany, few have even glanced at the anticancer effort. For good reason: The cruel and needless medical experiments performed on prisoners in concentration camps, the mass sterilizations, and the "euthanasia" of those with mental disabilities and physical handicaps tend to command the attention of historians and medical ethicists alike. Even Proctor took a while to get interested in the Nazi war on cancer. His first book about fascist science, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard, 1988), concentrated on the connections between racial ideology and medical practice. Though it included a chapter on the Nazi obsession with natural foods, Proctor presented that history as an odd sidebar to the racism and genocide. Only years later, when he was a fellow at the Holocaust Museum and needed a related research topic, did Proctor revisit the subject. "I started thinking that it had been completely hushed up, or ignored, depending on how you look at it," he says.
Cancer, little understood, and relatively uncommon before the late nineteenth century, emerged as a socially important, and politically charged, issue at the beginning of the twentieth. Germans, even more than their counterparts in most of the industrial world, seemed to be obsessed with the diseaseÐin part because Germany was a major producer of carcinogenic coal dyes and other potentially dangerous products and had a disproportionate share of cases as a result. In Nazi ideology, cancer became a powerful symbol, a disease of modernity the nation would have to purge. Jews were doubly scapegoated: Because they were imagined to spread "diseased genes," they were seen as agents of the disease; because they were metaphorically viewed as a tumor on the volk, they were also seen as cancerous themselves.
DID THE NAZIS DISCOVER THE LINK BETWEEN SMOKING AND CANCER?
Hitler, needless to say, shaped many of these theories. A nonsmoking, nondrinking vegetarian, the FŸhrer promoted the idea that through asceticism one could improve the health of the race. This helped orient German medicine away from trying to cure cancer and toward trying to prevent it. Nazi-friendly researchers did important research on the dangers posed by long-term exposure to X rays, while other physicians warned early on about the dangers of asbestos and quartz dust. Perhaps most striking, though, was Nazi research on the links between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Reviewing the work of dozens of now-forgotten Nazi-era German researchers, Proctor concludes that the link between smoking and lung cancerÐtypically credited to American and British researchers of the 1950sÐwas the consensus view among German cancer experts by the early 1940s.
History hasnÕt been kind to some of HitlerÕs critics in the medical professions. As researchers in Germany and elsewhere began to connect repeated exposure to X rays with cancer, prominent left-wing doctors worried that the findings would play into the hands of antitechnology eugenicists. So they dismissed the findings as fascist propaganda: A 1932 article for Sozialistischer Arzt, the journal of the Association of Socialist Physicians, chalked up the research to "racial fanaticism." Critics of the Nazi diet managed only slightly better. Martin Gumpert, an *migr* physician, laid into Nazi food policy in his deliciously titled polemic, Heil Hunger!: Health Under Hitler (1940). But a quick look at GumpertÕs main evidenceÐhe was concerned that Germans were eating more carbohydrates and not enough meats, fats, and eggsÐhardly suggests a crisis in nutrition.
The Nazis translated their scientific discoveries into public policy. Propaganda campaigns promoted the FŸhrerÕs clean-living lifestyle as a benchmark for all Germans, who were called on to live healthily for the good of the race. The Nazis began a temperance campaign, although they avoided demonizing beer for fear of alienating the German workingman. Smoking was a different story. The habit, Proctor reports, "was associated with jazz, and with swing dancing, with rebellion, with Africa, with degenerate blacks, Jews, and Gypsies, with many of the other fears that inspired the Nazi retreat into a paranoid, xenophobic fortress of purity, cleanliness, and muscular macho health fanaticism." The Nazis passed criminal sanctions against driving "under the influence" of cigarettes. Reich health fŸhrer Leonardo Conti worried that tobaccoÕs addictive qualities would compete with political loyalty. One medical paper discussed a final, if nonlethal, "solution to this difficult problem of smokers." And the Nazis even sentenced one unlucky worker to death after a stray cigarette ash started a fire at a spray-paint factory.
THE NAZIS PASSED CRIMINAL SANCTIONS AGAINST DRIVING "UNDER THE INFLUENCE" OF CIGARETTES.
All this may sound like fodder for libertarians, who sometimes argue that any policy to deter a particular behavior leads us down the road to fascism (and who already compare Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler). But Proctor insists that isnÕt the point. A consultant for the plaintiffs in an Ohio-based class-action lawsuit against tobacco companies, Proctor describes himself as "firmly antismoking." And he points out that the Nazi propaganda campaign ultimately failed to wipe out the habit. "The best way to combat tobacco is taxation, and then to cut back on the economic advantages that the tobacco industry enjoys," he says. In Germany, tobacco fought back. It financed its own tobacco research center and took on the health fŸhrer when he tried to close it. In the end, the Nazis proved unwilling to dismantle the industry completely. They continued to supply the Wehrmacht with tobacco rations and eventually made a deal with German tobacco makers that guaranteed the industryÕs survival. Perhaps that's the important lesson for today: The tobacco industry was able to thwart even the Nazis.
Is there a danger in giving the Nazis credit for their medical insights? "We have to remember primarily Auschwitz and the role of doctors at Auschwitz," insists Robert Jay Lifton, the author of The Nazi Doctors (Basic, 1986). "These additional areas are very important to bring out, and much of their importance lies in their illustrating how an evil regime can have aspects of respectable intellectual and scientific behavior."
Proctor suggests that his predecessors may have passed on this project in part because "itÕs kind of an embarrassing fact. WhoÕs going to be interested? Even in Germany, they donÕt like to see anything ÔgoodÕ come out of the Nazi era." In the end, he argues, "We do not want to forget MengeleÕs crimes, but we should also not forget that Dachau prisoners were forced to produce organic honey and that the SS cornered the European market for mineral water."
JEFFERSON DECKER
Achtundachtzig Bumpskovitsches.
Nazi "Book of Virtues"
Go figure.
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