In Europe, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia go hand in hand


headlineImage_adapt_1460_high_Anti-Semitism_Islamophobia_Europe_a_1425930231689

In Europe, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia go hand in hand
Both scourges are projections of the illiberal mind
 
Paul Hockenos

Paris — The spate of anti-Semitic violence in Europe might appear to justify Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for European Jews to move to Israel where, he claims, Jews can be safe.

“Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country,” Netanyahu said on Feb. 15, “but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters, ‘Israel is your home.’ We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe.”

Europe’s Jewry should nevertheless reject Netanyahu’s call. It’s a populist ploy ahead of Israel’s March 17 election. Jewish citizens in Europe should instead be active participants in the societies in which they live, continuing to promote democracy, civil liberties and tolerance of diversity as they have done energetically in the past, to Europe’s enormous benefit.

Nowhere, even in long-established democracies such as France, can the liberal order be taken for granted. Every generation has to fight anew to maintain (or even, in a best case scenario, improve on) the quality of democracy as its circumstances change. Anti-Semitism is one challenge to this struggle, Islamophobia another. The two illiberal ideologies and their implications for open societies are more closely linked than they appear.

Anti-Semitism in Europe

Anti-Semitism is on the rise across Europe, propelled by familiar and new antagonists. The Jan. 9 shooting of four Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris followed a string of lethal assaults on Jews across the continent in 2014. Last month an attack on a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, left one man dead and two police officers wounded. The incident forced Jewish schools in Belgium and France to close temporarily. Last year the Jewish Museum in Brussels was bombed. At least eight synagogues were attacked in Europe in July 2014. In Germany, Jewish men wearing the skullcap, or kippa, were harassed, cursed and beaten up on the street.

A 2012 European Union survey of 6,000 Jews in eight European nations, which together account for 90 percent of Europe’s Jewish population, found that 66 percent believed anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe; 76 percent said anti-Jewish sentiment increased in their country since 2007. In a survey a year later, almost half of the respondents said they were concerned about being verbally insulted or attacked in public. Seventy years after Auschwitz’s liberation, which is being commemorated across Europe, Jewish graves have been desecrated, and Jewish citizens are uncomfortable in certain neighborhoods, particularly those with high proportions of Muslims.

Anti-Semitism is not a new phenomenon in postwar Europe. But its usual standard bearers were Europe’s far-right groups. Far-right and populist groups still propagate hatred toward Jews, although in its more muted form than in recent decades. (There’s an anti-Semitic stripe in the far left as well, closely linked with anti-Americanism and sympathy for the Palestinian quest for statehood.) Parties such as the National Front in France, Austria’s Freedom Party and Belgium’s Vlaams Bok have long traded in anti-Semitism. Opinion polls show residual anti-Semitism in most European populations, which is largely understood as a reaction to globalization, modernity and urban values. In Central and Eastern Europe, where there was no postwar reconciliation, anti-Semitism burns hotter as part and parcel of old-school volkish nationalism.

Muslim leaders have to fight anti-Jewish mindsets as actively as Europe’s Jews must help dispel the falsehoods fueling the anti-Islam discourse.

But the far-right anti-Semites now have a more opportune target: Islam. The same tools and tropes that were once used to create fear of and resentment toward Jews have been turned against Muslims. They claim that Muslims are swamping their countries and diluting their national cultures — claims once made against Jews. Whereas Jews were claimed to partake in blood rituals, Islam is cast as an inherently violent religion and all Muslims as threats to European security and identity.

Germany’s PEGIDA movement, which took to the streets in Dresden and elsewhere in Germany in late 2014 and early 2015, offers a perfect example. While PEGIDA’s foremost target was the Muslim community, its closeness to neo-Nazi groups and anti-Israel currents was manifest. One man with an Israeli flag was chased from a PEGIDA demonstration, and marchers carried posters reading “Just say no to Israel” and “Let Germany finally be Germany,” the latter a resentful reference to Germany’s war guilt and coming to grips with the Holocaust. Just as contemporary anti-Semitism is often strongest in places with no Jews, PEGIDA support was the highest in Dresden, a city with a population less than 0.5 percent Muslim. In other words, as with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is highly irrational.

Muslim anti-Semitism

The chief perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence and terrorist attacks, however, are not the far right ideologues but radicalized elements in Europe’s Muslim community. It goes without saying that not all Muslims are anti-Semitic. (Collective guilt is almost always wrong-headed.) But polls show that anti-Semitism is strikingly high among European Muslims, particularly younger Muslim men and women.

A recent French survey found that 74 percent of French Muslims said they believe Jews have too much influence over the nation’s economy. (The figure among non-Muslim French was 25 percent.) Seventy percent of French Muslims said that Jews control the country’s media. A 2013 study by the EU found that Jews in Europe felt most threatened by Muslims in their societies. Günther Jikeli in his new book, “European Muslim Antisemitism,” corroborates these findings and argues that anti-Semitism is pervasive in the beliefs of young European Muslims.

The reasons for the new anti-Semitism are part socioeconomic, part political. So far, the young Muslims involved in the recent attacks against Jews have almost always been the kind of poor, disenfranchised young men whose circumstances breed resentment and anger. In Islam they find a home and identity. The politics of Israel in the Middle East have thrown fuel on the fire consistently over the last two decades; the ongoing violence against the Palestinians in Gaza is only the most recent agony. The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant has facilitated the mix of a toxic cocktail that targets Jews across Europe.

But Jews are not necessarily safer in Israel than they are on the streets of Paris or Berlin. Europe is facing an enormous challenge in reacting to this new element in its midst and defeating it without encouraging more converts to radical Islam. We saw this happen in the aftermath of United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in response to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Central Intelligence Agency’s black sites and the drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

On Feb. 14, the European Jewish Congress called for enhancing existing anti-racism legislation, which is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. It envisions prohibiting the wearing of the full-face veil everywhere in Europe, punishing denial of the Holocaust and hate speech and outlawing praise for a terrorist act. But the proposal is not constructive in the long run. Such measures cast suspicion on all Muslims and would work to alienate rather than integrate.

European countries must devise a way to make Muslims feel part of their societies. Here in Paris it is stunning to experience firsthand how abruptly the City of Light ends at the banlieues, the tenement housing on Paris’ periphery where much of the migrant population lives. Here one leaves the urban wonderland of museums, fine restaurants, graceful apartment buildings and good jobs and enters the underworld of poverty, marginalization, unemployment and ugliness.

There are many ways that French and other European societies can reach out to their Muslim neighbors. This could mean interfaith dialogue, common civic initiatives, integrated schooling and more inclusive governance structures. Projects such as Germany’s Schule Ohne Rassismus, a nonprofit that fights racial bias against Jews, Muslims and others in secondary schools across the country should be replicated elsewhere in Europe. Ultimately, all Europeans, including Muslim communities, must insist on more democracy, civic culture and tolerance. Muslim leaders have to fight anti-Jewish mindsets as actively as Europe’s Jews must help dispel the falsehoods fueling the anti-Islam discourse. This is the way to beat the twin menaces of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Paul Hockenos is a journalist living in Berlin. He has covered the transformations of the EU for over 25 years.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

Religious Families Regularly Beat Their Children; Abuse Study


GERMAN CHURCHES UP IN ARMS OVER ABUSE STUDY

by  

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Jennifer Stahl’s blog Yeshua, Hineni. It was originally published on November 25, 2013.

German Bible. Photo by J. Stahl.

German Bible. Photo by J. Stahl.

In following the story of the Twelve Tribes, I had become aware of a study on religious families and their children, tendencies towards abuse and such being carried on within Germany. I had heard about the study. But not being registered to either the Evangelical, Free Evangelical or local Catholic Churches, we were not polled for the study, though we are a religious household.

I am somewhat curious as to what was in the survey itself. It seems rather revealing that the Free Evangelical churches are showing many of their members do, in fact, regularly beat their children.

For those who do not know, this is illegal to do in Germany.

One of my many concerns within the homeschooling movement and the greater German church community (especially after coming out of this environment in the United States) is to get away from the punitive and corporal punishment mindset, seeing children as sinful inconveniences unless they’re perfectly behaving like little adults and back to what the Bible actually teaches; namely love and parenting being a job of parent and child to do together.

My second major concern was finding on Amazon.de teachers such as: Michael and Debi Pearl (To Train Up A Child is now removed, but No Greater Joy volume 1volume 2 and volume 3 remain); Ted Tripp has three books represented (this remains, and as does this also); James Dobson‘s harmful books; Bruce Ray’s Withhold Not Correction (also a Spanish edition!); Gary Ezzo‘s books; Elyse Fitzpatrick’sTim Kimmel‘s (there is a second book here), and a couple other religious punitive-based child training manuals can be found.

Finding those books means that there is a market here in Germany. That, as someone who was raised so punitively, terrifies me. It terrifies me because this means there are other children being raised this way, who will not know a day in their lives where just being children is not a sin.

I had heard that some time back, that one branch of the Evangelical Churches in Germany had made statements against corporal punishment and other punitive discipline methods, which created some shock when I saw the results of this study: 45,000 students from 9th grade forward and about 11,500 adults were polled (so over 50,000 individuals) and they found that one in six very religious children are smacked by their parents or given other punitive disciplinary methods against their undesirable behavior(s).

In the Catholic and other Protestant students, the rate is considerably lower, if not rare.

The results of the study were published here, and does run through Google Translate in a mostly discernible manner into English. The name of the study is “Christian religiosity and parental violence. A comparison of familial socialization of Catholics, Protestants and Members of the Free Churches.”

More on the study and why everyone’s up in arms:

With parents from free churches that have no academic training, but declared themselves as “religious” or “very religious”, the trend is even more pronounced: More than a quarter of the surveyed children from these families has at some juncture suffered massive violence in their household. The study’s authors also provide a possible explanation: There is “a Christian tradition of parental driven beating as discipline for children.”
NDR – Freikirchen wehren sich gegen Gewaltstudie

The findings in the survey are quite shocking to me. I’ll post some of the figures below for those of you who don’t have time to sift through a pages long PDF:

image1

Source: http://www.ndr.de/regional/niedersachsen/freikirchen109.pdf

image2

Source: http://www.ndr.de/regional/niedersachsen/freikirchen109.pdf

image3

Source: http://www.ndr.de/regional/niedersachsen/freikirchen109.pdf

image4

Source: http://www.ndr.de/regional/niedersachsen/freikirchen109.pdf

Now, these are in order, but without all of the information behind what makes this all so shocking. What I want to point out is that this is consistent with studies done in the United StatesCanada, the United KingdomAustralia and elsewhere as it pertains to parental violence towards children and its affects on the children involved. One study paper that someone had pointed me towards a couple of years ago was “The Long Shadow: Adult Survivors of Child Abuse.” Psychology Today has several articles about this phenomenon as well. One that stands out in my memory is “The Lingering Trauma of Child Abuse.” (Note: My list is not exhaustive, but just to give an example of what one will find on the subject.)

Articles referenced within this NDR article and the PDF are as follows:

…in the late 90s the German Parliament had established a Study Commission to look at so-called sects and mind-control groups. The study found that in fundamentalist Christian communities there is a widespread “…significant advocacy for physical punishment…”
NDR – Kinder schlagen im Namen Gottes 21.12.2011

NDR.de: Critics say the national church must be clear in distancing themselves from such fundamentalist positions. Shouldn’t you make it clearer that you do not agree with such  positions [about corporal punishment being biblical]?

[Kerstin] Gäfgen-Track: In the case of these parenting books and this position, I can speak for the national church, because we draw a very clear line of demarcation. We have nothing to do with such, so we want to continuing having nothing to do with such. We wish to strongly condemn such counselors. [Ted Tripp and so on]  
NDR:  “Wir verurteilen das aufs Schärfste” 21.12.2011

…as they contradict the law and [Christian Beliefs], there is a secret culture of spanking among devout Christians… Parents who follow these beliefs belong to denominations such as those [found in the] Evangelical Free Churches and the Jehovah’s Witnesses who are apt to taking the Bible literally, and consider doubts about the Word of God as whisperings of Satan.
Süddeutsche Zeitung: Liebe geht durch den Stock 30.9.2010

…It is striking that the violence of evangelical parents seem to have a lasting effect on their young. With [such] systemic beatings, it may be that parents seek to break the will of children so that they would assimilate the beliefs of adults; warn psychologists..
Süddeutsche Zeitung: Schläge im Namen des Herrn  17.10.2010

There was a study published in April of this year (2013) by infoSekte in Zürich, Switzerland entitled “Erziehungsverständnisse in evangelikalen Erziehungsratgebern und -kursen.” (Yes, this too can be run through Google Translate!) It is 61 pages long, detailing “Problematic trends such as corporal punishment or psychological violence arising in connection with certain child rearing methods … [and] possible effects of certain parenting styles.” Also explained in the document is how Switzerland signed and ratified the UN Rights of the Child in 1997; and such parenting styles are incompatible with such an agreement.

The UN Rights of the Child is the very same document that many Christians in the United States have pushed for a refusal to ratify since the 1990s.

(The US has signed, but not ratified as of this date in time.) Also something to note; Michael Farris has really pushed home-schoolers into a frenzy over it as taking away parental rights to discipline punitively and claim it is “biblical.” (For the uninitiated, Michael Farris is the head of Patrick Henry College, The Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and loosely affiliated with Schuzh, which defends many German home-schoolers in court. You may have recently seen Michael Farris in the news pushing against the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

If you get a chance, please do read this study. I understand that 61 pages is awfully long, but it is worth it. There is a serious problem when familial violence becomes an accepted piece of one’s culture and religious upbringing — when we normalize it to the extent that no one is shocked at all.

Issues brought forward by the Twelve Tribes in Germany are not at all shocking in many parts of the United States because such methods have become so normalized.

So many people believe it is the right thing to do. Anything contrary is “unbiblical.” That is not to say that there are not Christians, like myself, who believe that corporal punishment is actually what is contrary to the Bible.

If one wishes to claim that the Bible teaches beating their children, I would have to recommend you go back and actually investigate those claims for yourself as this is not understood to be the case within the Jewish community; and from whom we get the proof-text “spanking”/”smacking” passages from. It is a purely Christian phenomenon that came into place some time in the middle ages, as far as I can find at this juncture. Before, corporal discipline was for adult members of the faith who wished to submit themselves to flagellation.

One book that discusses this phenomenon and suggests a better way is Samuel Martin’s Book, Thy Rod And Thy Staff They Comfort Me: Christians and the Spanking Controversy.  I have others, should you wish to peruse them, but they are not free.

There are wonderful articles referenced here in an older post on my blog and I also have a ton on my Pinterest parenting boards, should you have an account there.

If you don’t know about the Pearls and their harmful teaching, I’d be happy to throw you more than the recommendation to read Hermana Linda’s Blog and this review of the Pearl’s ministry.  I would also like to mention that any court willing to speak with me personally is more than welcome to discuss punitive upbringing, homeschooling, corporal punishment proof-texts, etc.  I’m not an expert, but I’ve lived through it and am working to change things with my children and advocating for others to the best of my abilities.

Update: Michael and Debi Pearl and critiques about them and information on the Hana Williams case were on CNN last night via Anderson Cooper. If you still doubt the methods this couple advocates, look no further.

I would like to leave with a closing message by Robbyn Peters. It is “Violence: A Family Tradition.” For those who are still unconvinced, I ask that you please consider Robbyn’s words and investigate for yourself.

Alien Skull? Archaeologists discover ancient ‘conehead’ in French necropolis; wealth artistocratic woman’s skeleton


Archaeologists discover ancient ‘conehead’ in French necropolis; wealth artistocratic woman’s skeleton
conehead skull

The pointy ‘conehead’ skull of an ancient aristocratic woman has been discovered in a French necropolis. Picture: Inrap Source: Supplied

A SKULL of an aristocratic woman with a deformed, pointed ‘conehead’ has been found in an ancient burial plot in France.

The skeleton, whose skull was bound into a deformed cone-shape reserved for aristocracy, was unearthed in a necropolis discovered in the Obernai region of Alsace, France. The burial site contains 38 tombs from the Stone Ages to the Dark Ages, discovered in 2011, reports INRAP, the France’s archeological research institute.

Archaeologist Philippe Lefranc said the ‘conehead’ skull was discovered in a section of the necropolis that includes 18 tombs from either the late Roman period or early dark ages, roughly 1650 years ago, LiveScience reports.

In that period, an alien-like, domed skull was a privilege only afforded to deceased aristocracy.

“The deformation of the skull with the help of bandages (narrow strips of cloth) and small boards is a practice coming from central Asia,” said Mr Lefranc.  The practice was made popular by the Huns, from central Asia, and then spread throughout Germany, he said.

“In France, Germany and eastern Europe, these deformed skulls appear in tombs rich in objects,” he said. Researchers also found signs of wealth including gold pins, pearls, a comb made of antler and a bronze mirror in the woman’s grave.

The remains are thought to be the graves of Asian mercenaries and their families, hired by the Roman Army during the decline of the Roman Empire.

conehead skull

Researchers say the graves likely belong to Hun mercenaries who were hired to fight for the declining Roman Empire. Picture: Inrap

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity


The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

A popular belief is that Nazism was the polar opposite of Christianity: in Germany, the Nazis planned to eliminate Christian churches while devout Christians opposed the Nazi agenda. Is this perception accurate? No. Some Nazis were anti-Christian and some Christians were anti-Nazi, but the majority were equally at home in both camps.

Book Review

Traditional evaluation of Christian complicity in the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes focuses on the degree to which Christians allowed themselves to be used for Nazi purposes, but this presupposes a distinction between Nazis and Christians which did not entirely exist. Many Christians actively supported the Nazi agenda. Many Nazis were not only devout Christians, but also believed that Nazi philosophy was animated by Christian doctrine.

The Christianity promoted by the Nazis was labeled “positive Christianity,” a perspective that focused on the relationship between Christian promises of salvation and the German Volk as a special race of people. Point 24 of the NSDAP Party Program, created in 1920 and never rescinded, reads:

“We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our Volk can only take place from within, on the basis of the principle: public need comes before private greed.”How is all of this possible? How can the reality of the relationship between Nazism and Christianity be so far removed from popular perception? The truth about all this is detailed in Richard Steigmann-Gall’s book The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945.

Christians avert their faces from the true relationship between their religion and Nazism in part because the truth is difficult to bear, but also in part because they simply don’t understand what Christianity was like in Germany at the time.

“Positive Christians may have said little or nothing about the Augsburg Confession or other signifiers of theological orthodoxy, but they nonetheless regarded Christian social theories — “practical Christianity” as it was also known — as a linchpin of their worldview. Although generally unconcerned with dogma, many of these Nazis nonetheless adhered to basic precepts of Christian doctrine — most importantly the divinity of Christ as the son of God. Although they clearly departed from conventional theology in their rejection of the Old Testament and insistence on Christ’s Aryanhood, they were not simply distorting Christianity for their own ends or engaging in idiosyncratic religious meandering. Only by ignoring the intellectual precedents for these ideas can we argue that positive Christianity was an “infection” of an otherwise pristine faith. Rather. These ideas found expression among bona fide voices of Kulturprotestantismus before the Nazi Party ever existed.”

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-GallThe Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

Although Christians today may find it implausible that religion as they practice it could have anything in common with Nazism, they need to recognize that Christianity — including their own — is always conditioned by the culture where one finds it. For Germans at the beginning of the 20th century, this meant that Christianity was often profoundly anti-Semitic and nationalistic. This was the same ground which the Nazis found so fertile for their own ideology — it would have been amazing had the two systems not found a great deal in common and been unable to find a way to work together.

Germany after World War I was regarded as a godless, secular, materialistic republic which had betrayed all of Germany’s traditional morals, values, and religious beliefs. An important aspect of the Nazis’ appeal to the great mass of religiously conservative Germans was the fact that they said all the right things about the evils of atheism, materialism, greed, corruption, law and order, communism, and religious values.

Alongside the Christian Nazis were a number of anti-Christian Nazis who sought to create a new, neo-pagan religion for the German people. These were, however, relatively few in number and their views were never officially endorsed by the Party or by Hitler. Slightly more common were anti-clerical Nazis who continued to accept basic theistic and Christian doctrines, but who repudiated churches and priests. This seems to have been a view gradually adopted by Hitler himself.

Isn’t it true, though, that Hitler sought to eliminate churches and Christianity from Germany? It’s been said that Hitler only spoke positively about Christianity in public because he had to in order to maintain support from the German people; in private, he admitted to his true hatred of all things Christian. This view is based upon allegedly private comments recorded in the book Hitler Speaks, but Steigmann-Gall argues that the balance of evidence indicates that these statements are probably forgeries and are regarded as such by many scholars.

“The conspiratorial tone of this account of the “private” Hitler has convinced many church historians that Hitler was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” anti-Christian to the core and from the outset of his career. The caricature Rauschning presents of Hitler’s ranting should alone have raised questions as to its authenticity; but the more troubling fact remains that Rauschning’s book stands completely alone in handing down sayings of this nature from this period.”“It is not for nothing that these factors should raise questions: Hitler Speaks is now considered to be fraudulent. As a recent biographer has put it, “Especially the chapter ‘Hitler in private’ …‘is untrustworthy through and through — a product of war propaganda… [Rauschning’s] ‘conversations with Hitler’ are far-off fantasies.” Moreover…Rauschning was too peripheral to the movement to have been part of Hitler’s inner circle of confidants, as he consistently maintained.”

Sometimes people use passages from Hitler’s Table Talks to argue that Hitler was really anti-Christian, but even if the authenticity of this entire collection of reminiscences is acknowledged, there is far more ambiguity and pro-Christian commentary than is usually acknowledged. It would be surprising if Hitler had never said anything critical of churches, priests, and Christianity and so the existence of some negative quotes is expected. What matters most is the overall balance of his commentary — and that is indisputably pro-Christian and pro-religion.

The deliberate promotion of pagan beliefs was a minority within the Nazi Party. Alfred Rosenberg favored the creation of a new religion, but Hitler went so far as to threaten to take action against his book Mythus, and it was banned by some lower-ranking party organizations. Himmler was obsessed with ancient Germans, but Hitler dismissed this as ridiculous — and even Himmler insisted that Christian viewpoints be respected within the SS. At times he admitted that he was less anti-Christian than anti-clerical.

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-GallThe Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

One important point about all this which may be missed is the fact that these and other pagan Nazis never pretended to be anything else — they never affected a pro-Christian stance in public in order to win over the approval of the German people. When Nazis were pagan, it appears that they were unabashedly and enthusiastically pagan, without apology.

This makes it difficult to argue that other leading Nazis, like Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler himself, only pretended to be pro-Christian for the sake of public relations. If they had wanted to endorse a new paganism in Germany, they had ample opportunity. Instead, what we have are a few Nazis publicly endorsing paganism, but most Nazis publicly endorsing Christianity and all official party organs endorsing Christianity, right up to the official party platform.

Reviewed by

How American Homeschoolers Enabled and Funded German Child Abuse: The Real Story Behind the Religious Right and the Twelve Tribes


How American Homeschoolers Enabled and Funded German Child Abuse: The Real Story Behind the Religious Right and the Twelve Tribes
by R.L. Stollar

Twelve Tribes members perform a ceremonial dance representing "the battle of Armageddon," using banners that announce and condemn "the sins of the modern age."

Twelve Tribes members perform a ceremonial dance representing “the battle of Armageddon,” using banners that announce and condemn “the sins of the modern age.”

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

*****

“Without the assistance of American homeschoolers, these advancements would not have been possible.”

~ Homeschool Legal Defense Association, concerning German legal association Schulunterricht zu Hause

*****

Last week, German police raided a monastery and farm belonging to a religious cult in Bavaria. They removed 40 children on allegations of child abuse. While the event was originally portrayed by the cult as well as American right-wing news sources as religious persecution, that portrayal was quickly proven wrong. Video evidence of cruel and systematic abuse of children surfaced.

Some homeschool advocates originally attempted to chalk this up as another example of “German intolerance” of homeschooling. German homeschool advocate Jörg Großelümern, who leads the HSLDA-allied Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit (or Network for Freedom in Education), had brought the situation to the attention of Michael Farris, chairman of HSLDA, the U.S.-based homeschool lobbying organization. Großelümern alleged that “the authorities want to create a fait accompli because school holidays will end next week in Bavaria and their private school is not approved by the state.” Farris responded in turn, “Thanks so much for the info and for your leadership and courage.”

When evidence surfaced of real and horrific abuse, however, these homeschool advocates immediately distanced themselves from the cult. Großelümern backpedaled: ”I didn’t know what was going on behind the curtain of this sect. They didn’t tell the truth and things must be judged differently now.”

Farris added that, “My sources were wrong,” Which makes sense, since his source was Großelümern.

People can, and do, make mistakes. People can have lapses of judgment. But the elephant in the room is how a German homeschool leader like Großelümern, and an international homeschool advocate like Farris, would not first wait to find out what was “going on behind the curtain.” It is slightly unsettling that their gut reactions to allegations of child abuse in a group universally recognized as a cult was to assume the best about cult parents over the well-being of children. 

But more than this, it is entirely disingenuous.

The cult in Bavaria, otherwise known as the Twelve Tribes, has been actively defended directly and indirectly through the actions of American homeschool advocates — most notably, by HSLDA itself — for the last decade. These advocates have organized legions of American homeschoolers and funneled over $100,000 of American money to groups that have directly and unabashedly supported this cult and its “rights.” Whether through sheer ignorance, or turning a blind eye, HSLDA and fellow homeschool advocates have encouraged Americans to both enable and fund child abuse in Germany.

A Summary of the Twelve Tribes

The Twelve Tribes is a religious cult founded in 1972. I say “cult” not as a dismissive pejorative but because its former members have declared it to be such, using descriptions such as: “The Community instills intense fear in their members,” “The Twelve Tribes cult denied my right to make free will choices,”  and “mind control.”

Former members also argue that common allegations of child abuse within the Twelve Tribes are not only real, but more prevalent than even the news reports state:

  • “Former members made many accusations of child abuse and I’ll state unequivocally that abuse (physical, mental and emotional) occurred.”
  • “The newspapers often sensationalize information, but the child abuse within the Twelve Tribes was 10 times worse than reported.”
  • “We witnessed the beating of children almost to the point of death.”

The cult was created by Gene Spriggs in Chattanooga, Tennessee and was influenced by the “Jesus Movement” of the time. The cult’s beliefs mirror those of Christian fundamentalism and Messianic Judaism. They homeschool their children, hold to a form of Quiverfull ideology, and champion home births with midwives. Adherents to Spriggs’s cult have branched out from Tennesse and now live in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Argentina, and the United Kingdom. In 2001, a New York branch of the cult got in trouble over child labor allegations.

The most recently newsworthy branch is the branch in Germany, where it is known as ”Zwölf Stämme.”

Zwölf Stämme

The Twelve Tribes branch in Germany acquired the Klosterzimmern estate in Bavaria, Germany in the summer of 2000.

The cult believes homeschooling is the only Christian form of education. Since, according to them, education “must take place within the ‘church’ or the community of believers,” “[they] train [their] children in [their] own homes.” They also “do not send [their] children to college because they “do not think college is a healthy environment.”

On Thursday, September 5, 2013, German police removed 40 children from the Twelve Tribes’ monastery and farm — their homes in Klosterzimmern and their other home at the Georg-Ehnes-Platz. The Twelve Tribes’ original press release from September 5 portrayed the removal as religious discrimination or persecution, that they were “found guilty based on their association with a religious faith” and that “no specific evidence was produced against any individual affected.”

However, according to the Guardian UK, the police were very clear that the raid was due to “accusations of child abuse.” The state education ministry also was clear, according to the German paper The Local, that it “did not have anything to do with topic of school attendance.”

Unlike some of the reports you might have heard from HSLDA, Fox News, WorldNetDaily and WORLD Magazine, German children are not necessarily required to attend public school nor is homeschooling carte blanche illegal. The German government sanctions public, private, and religious schooling. (In fact, Article 7, Paragraph 4 of Germany’s constitution guarantees the right to establish private schools.) They even sanction homeschooling for families who travel significantly as well as families with sick children.

Indeed, the Twelve Tribes themselves originally had a license to operate a private school. But according to the Guardian, they lost this license due to “unfit teachers”:

Teaching licences were recently withdrawn from the sect’s own school near the town of Deiningen, near Augsburg, with inspectors declaring its teachers unfit.

On their website, the Twelve Tribes say that, “Our children grow up in a loving environment and are educated in the spirit of charity.” Though just last year there were concerns as well, according to the Guardian:

Following a magazine investigation last year in which the abuse allegations were raised, the sect strongly denied allegations of abuse, declaring: “We are an open and transparent community which does not tolerate any form of child abuse.”

So the cult denied allegations of abuse. Yet the police said that the raid was due to ”fresh evidence indicating significant and ongoing child abuse by the members.” Though, of course, that is not how WORLD Magazine and others presented the situation. WORLD emphasized that police “didn’t offer details” and highlighted the supposed illegality of homeschooling in Germany and how police had recently “forcibly removed” the children of “a homeschooling family” — as if to connect the Twelve Tribes situation with the “persecution” of German homeschoolers in general.

Now the evidence is out there, though. Not only does it have nothing to do with homeschooling, it also is not pretty. According to the Independent on September 10, 2013, in an article entitled “In Germany’s Twelve Tribes sect, cameras catch ‘cold and systematic’ child-beating”:

Within the space of a few hours, six adults are filmed in the cellar and in an underground school central heating room beating six children with a total of 83 strokes of the cane. The graphic and disturbing scenes were shown on Germany’s RTL television channel last night. They were filmed by Wolfram Kuhnigk, an RTL journalist equipped with hidden video cameras and microphones, who infiltrated a 100-strong religious community run by the fundamentalist “Twelve Tribes” sect in Bavaria earlier this year. Kuhnigk claimed to be a lost soul to gain entry… He collected 50 beating scenes on camera… Mr Kuhnigk’s clandestinely obtained evidence prompted police and youth workers to raid two “Twelve Tribes” communities in Bavaria last Thursday… The evidence he collected at the sect’s community in a former monastery near the village of Deiningen exposes a dark world in which children have no rights and are subjected to round-the-clock surveillance and persistent beatings for the most trivial offences.

While the exposed child abuse is horrifying and not related to German homeschool laws, this is not the first time the Twelve Tribes has been in trouble. They were in trouble as recently as 2004, and that situation involved homeschooling. It also coincided with another important German homeschool situation.

Two Sets of Seven Families

Between 2004 and 2005, 2 different sets of 7 homeschool families each ran into trouble with the German school system. The first set of 7 involved the Twelve Tribes community in Klosterzimmern — the exact same community that just got busted for cold and systematic child abuse. The second set of 7 involved families from a fundamentalist Baptist community in Paderborn, Westphalia. Since right-wing media and American homeschool advocates often compared and connected these two sets of 7 families, it is important to look at each.

The Twelve Tribes Seven

In September of 2004, 7 homeschooling fathers from the Twelve Tribes were arrested for refusing to send their children to state-approved schools. To understand what happened, we must first rewind to 2002. Remember, too, that the Twelve Tribes had only acquired the Klosterzimmern estate in Bavaria a mere two years prior in 2000. So this is occurring shortly after they took residency in this area.

In October of 2002, German police raided the Twelve Tribes and took their children to a nearby primary and secondary school — as is required by law. While the raid led to dramatic scenes, not much actually happened. The kids were taken to school, the Twelve Tribes’ families were heavily fined, and then the Twelve Tribes families did not pay the fines. The bailiff actually felt some sense of sympathy for them.

Two years later in September of 2004, despite everything that happened, the Twelve Tribes still refused to send their children to state-approved schools and still refused to pay the fines. Since they refused to pay the fines for two years, the fines — according to the German newspaper The Spiegel — had reached “a six-figure sum.” So finally, after two years of breaking the law, 7 of the homeschooling fathers from the Twelve Tribes were arrested and placed in prison.

That same month, over in the United States, Ron Strom from WorldNetDaily wrote an article about the situation entitled “7 HOMESCHOOLING DADS THROWN IN JAIL.” He reported,

Seven homeschooling fathers in Germany spent several days in jail for refusing to pay fines that were imposed on them for failing to send their children to government schools. The fathers, who are part of the Twelve Tribes Community in Klosterzimmern, Germany, were forced to spend between six and 16 days in what the group’s website translates as “coercive jail.”

One of the homeschooling fathers who was arrested wasted no time comparing the situation to Nazi Germany:

The ‘wrong’ of the members of the resistance in the Third Reich is being praised today, the members are being esteemed as heroes.

Strom ends his article with instructions for how to help:

Those wishing to help the cause of homeschooling in Germany can contact a legal defense organization there, Schulunterricht Zu Hause E.V.

So the members of a cult had flagrantly violated the law on several occasions and refused to accept both the penalty for that violation as well as obey the law after the fact. Strom from WorldNetDaily presents the situation as something Nazi-like, and then appeals to readers to send money to a specific organization: Schulunterricht Zu Hause.

We will get to this “legal defense organization” Schulunterricht Zu Hause shortly. But I want to point out what the end result of all this legal drama was. Through the efforts of Schulunterricht Zu Hause and another organization, the Twelve Tribes were actually successful. Because at the end of August 2006, the Twelve Tribes won permission to run a private school:

A group of fundamentalist Christians in Bavaria has won a long battle for the right to privately teach their children — without sex ed and lessons on evolution…The members of the fundamentalist Christian sect “Zwölf Stämme” (Twelve Tribes) have won a victory of sorts in their fight to educate their children outside of Germany’s state school system. Bavarian officials have agreed to let the group’s 32 school-aged children be taught by their own teachers in a private school.

According to German broadcaster DW, the Twelve Tribes receiving permission to run their own school — that omitted sex education and evolution science — was not merely a victory for the cult. It was, more importantly, a homeschool victory:

In Germany, there have been partial victories for such [homeschooling] parents. A group of fundamentalist Christian parents in Bavaria recently won the right to have their children taught by their own teachers in a private school subject to state oversight. That helped end a standoff between the religious group called the Twelve Tribes who don’t want sex education and evolution taught to their children. But the truce is temporary — the school is on a one-year trial.

Fast forward now to July 2013, two months before evidence of widespread child abuse surfaced. The Twelve Tribes had their education license — according to the German paper The Local — revoked due to “a lack of suitable teachers.” So not only did these children experience unfit teachers and thus likely educational neglect (as evidenced in July 2013), but also they were being systematically beaten (as evidenced in September of 2013). And note: this is because the Twelve Tribes successfully won permission to run their own private school, courtesy of the efforts of Schulunterricht Zu Hause and others.

The Paderborn Seven

The other set of 7 homeschooling families are from Paderborn, Westphalia. Their situation arose mere months after the Twelve Tribes situation. In January of 2005, we once again hear from Ron Strom from WorldNetDaily:

German Christians who choose to homeschool their children are coming under continued enforcement action by the government, with one group of families fearful they may lose custody of their kids. According to Richard Guenther, an American expatriate who lives in Germany, several families in the town of Paderborn currently “are being heavily persecuted for their faith.”

So in September of 2004 we have seven families from Bavaria. And now there are seven families from Paderborn. (We also are hearing about Richard Guenther, who will be important shortly. So remember his name. And keep remembering Schulunterricht Zu Hause.) Strom makes sure to connect these seven families from Paderborn to the seven families from the Twelve Tribes:

As WorldNetDaily reported [in other words, as Strom himself reported], Seven homeschooling fathers from the Twelve Tribes Community in Klosterzimmern spent several days in jail last fall for refusing to pay fines that were imposed on them for failing to send their children to government schools.

The Paderborn Seven became a news sensation among right-wing media and particularly among homeschool advocates. What had happened, according to a Germans news source on June 19, 2005, was that a community of fundamental Baptists decided to boycott public schools because of “sex education” as well as “anti-fundamentalist-Christian and corrupt education” practices in the schools. Mediation talks were first attempted by the school system, and then fines and penalties.

The German news source, too, compared the Paderborn Seven to the Twelve Tribes Seven, saying, ”Similarly violent clashes between authorities and fundamentalist Christians are so far known only from Bavaria.” In fact, the Paderborn Seven attempted to take a page from the Twelve Tribes book by similarly asking for permission to create their own private school. However, according to the Brussels Journal in February of 2007, this request “was rejected by the German authorities” because a court ruled the Baptists had shown “a stubborn contempt” for the state’s educational duties as well as the necessity of children’s development.

As soon as the Paderborn case blew up, HSLDA was on it. The same month it started, January of 2005, HSLDA sounded the alarm:

Seven homeschool families in Northwest Germany are being forced to enroll their children in public school…In order to help these seven homeschool families in Germany, we urge you to call or write to the German Embassy immediately.

HSLDA continued lobbying for the Paderborn Seven, encouraging thousands of American homeschoolers to call and email the Germany embassy. Also, in the May/June 2005 edition of their Court Report, HSLDA mentioned that another organization was similarly lobbying, and that both organizations’ lobbying efforts were working together:

In January, local school officials threatened to prosecute seven families for homeschooling in Paderborn County, Germany. Home School Legal Defense Association immediately sent out two e-lerts, which prompted thousands of phone calls and emails to the German Embassy… Simultaneously, Schulunterricht zu Hause e.V. (School Instruction at Home) attorneys Rich and Ingrid Guenther, who are also homeschooling parents, mediated with the authorities on behalf of the seven families… The combined force of the Guenthers’ influence and the flood of embassy contacts persuaded some officials to call for the legalization of homeschooling and delayed prosecution for nearly three months.

So persuasive was this two-pronged effort on behalf of HSLDA and Schulunterricht zu Hause — which means School Instruction at Home — that German officials were rethinking their positions. Also, prosecution of the Paderborn Seven was put on hold.

Notice, again, the involvement of Schulunterricht zu Hause and Richard Guenther — the latter, we now find out, is an attorney of the former. However, Guenther is not only an attorney. According to HSLDA in March 22, 2005, Rich Guenther is “the head of School Instruction at Home, a German homeschool advocacy group.”

In the midst of a media frenzy over the Paderborn case, American homeschoolers immediately conjured up Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Several homeschoolers have pointed to Mary Pride’s Practical Homeschooling magazine as the source for this imagery. On February 17, 2005, Practical Homeschooling made the (very historically false and simplifying) association between compulsory government education and the Third Reich: “One of Hitler and his buddies’ first acts on taking office was to establish the Reich Ministry of Education and give it control of all schools… Current German officials seem to have this same Nazi-inspired view.”

This Nazi imagery has been repeated time and time again. In the Brussels Journal, August 2005:

Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools…As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders unquestioningly.

Note, too, that the Brussels Journal also references the Twelve Tribes Seven:

Last year the police in Bavaria held several homeschooling fathers in coercive detention.  They belonged to Christian groups who claim the right of parents to educate their own children, but they are not backed by the official (state funded) churches.

Bob Unruh from WorldNetDaily jumped on the Nazi bandwagon a year later, when talking about the Romeike family’s situation, calling it “a Nazi-like response from police.” Unruh also pointed to HSLDA’s involvement in the historically inaccurate Nazi comparison, saying: “[HSLDA] also noted that homeschooling has been illegal in Germany probably since 1938 when Hitler banned it.” Even the late Christopher Klicka from HSLDA played the inaccurate Nazi card in 2006.

(This is a side note, but a necessary one considering all these Nazi references: if your first reaction to something that the German people do that you do not agree with, is to conjure up imagery of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, that is a sign of xenophobia. If you start describing actions of particular people in terms of a whole group of people and those terms involve inherently negative stereotypes, then — yeah, you are a xenophobe. Germans like being compared to their own culture’s own worst nightmare as much as Americans do — in other words, not at all. So consider how you would like it if, every time the United States did something wrong, people constantly brought up the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It would become a sore subject very quickly, would it not?)

The Religious Right’s Global Intentions

To properly understand why HSLDA, an American lobbying organization, as well as American homeschoolers are involving themselves in a foreign country’s domestic policies, one must consider two distinct yet intimately connected phenomena: (1) the American Religious Right’s global intentions and (2) HSLDA’s global legal strategy. The former is the larger context in which the latter exists, and the latter explains HSDLA’s current international tactics.

Since the 1990s, the American Religious Right has become concerned about, and thus interested in, domestic courts and their decisions. While evangelicals had amassed significant political clout through the Republican Party, they had simultaneous lost significant clout through the court systems. Defeats in the courts, according to Legal Affairs in 2006, is what inspired the Religious Right in the 90′s to create public interest firms, including “Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice [ACLJ], and Liberty Counsel [LC], affiliated with the Rev. Jerry Falwell.” Important to the larger narrative here is that, in 1994, James Dobson of Focus on the Family as well as Bill Bright from Campus Crusade created the Alliance Defense Fund (or ADF), which recently was renamed the Alliance Defending Freedom. Dobson and Bright “formed the ADF as a counterweight to the ACLU.”

Through groups like the ACLJ, LC, and ADF, the Religious Right has won significant court battles. But in the early 2000s, a new threat was perceived: international law. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an antisodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy referenced the decriminalization of sodomy by both the British Parliament in 1967 as well as the European Court of Human Rights in 1981. 2 years later, Kennedy again referenced both foreign and international law (Roper v. Simmons).

As Legal Affairs pointed out in 2006, “It didn’t escape the notice of evangelical Christians that judges had looked to foreign courts in two cases that struck at the heart of their agenda.” Consequently, the Religious Right became highly concerned with international law. Organizations like ACLJ, LC, and ADF began the process of created international networks and foreign organizations in order to counter the perceived influence of foreign and international law on American law: first, to change foreign and international law so that it would reflect their own American values; and second, to change foreign law and international law so that, should it influence American law in the future, that influence would be in a way they considered good and righteous.

The result has been nothing less than the full-scale global export of American culture wars. As the American Prospect said in their 2007 article, “Tomorrow, the World,”

Over the past 10 years, American Christian conservatives, once focused on the U.S., have begun to take the culture wars global, developing networks of like-minded activists worldwide, delving into legal battles overseas, and taking with them the scorched-earth tactics that have worked so well in the United States. As the Christian right has expanded its base in America, it has secured more resources with which to venture abroad… Evangelical Christianity and other conservative religious movements gain force in Europe.

The American Prospect points to a number of organizations from the Religious Right that are engaging in the exporting of conservative Christian values, including the ADF. One organization that they highlight is the International Human Rights Group (IHRG), a Christian conservative organization run by a man named Joel Thornton. IHRG “runs many seminars for European lawyers” teaching them “how to bring their faith into politics,” and focus on “winning key cultural debates, from abortion to home schooling.”

What is very interesting about many of these groups is that they are often one and the same. In fact, many of them are nothing more than “shell organizations.” They exist to address one or two issues and then they are disbanded. For example: The ADF, according to Legal Affairs, “has financed locally based lawyers to intervene in a number of foreign cases.” One group of lawyers that the Allied Defense Fund funded was the “European Defense Fund” (EDF), which no longer exists. The EDF was created for one and only one purpose:

With ADF funding, lawyers from a new allied organization, the European Defense Fund, are advising German Christian parents who home school their children but fear they will be prosecuted for failing to send them to school, as Germany’s laws require they do.

So EDF was funded by ADF to defend German homeschoolers — though it also maybe had some project involving the Olympics, according to their now-defunct website. And who was the founder? According to Rome News-Tribute on March 11, 2007, the founder was an American attorney from Rome, Georgia: Joel Thornton. Thornton, former chief of staff for Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, was “founder of the former European Defense Fund.” However, the EDF was “recently renamed the International Human Rights Group.” So EDF and IHRG are the same thing: an ADF-funded organization led by Joel Thornton to defend German homeschoolers. And if you look at IHRG’s original website, the organization dealt with one and only one issue: German homeschooling. (Their current website is similarly sparse.) And not only is EDF/IHRG “ADF-funded,” it really just is an extension of ADF. Even HSLDA, as an ally of ADF, referred in 2008 to Thornton’s efforts as efforts from “the Alliance Defense Fund.”

So part of the Religious Right’s global strategy of influencing and changing foreign and international law has specifically involved homeschooling. According to the Christian Science Monitor in 2007, this is because German homeschoolers’ plights have “struck a chord with US evangelicals, who often see home-schooling as a way to instill Christian values.” This had led Americans to rush to their aid, “providing legal counsel and lobbying the German parliament.” This is, of course, exactly what the Religious Right is hoping for. They want American Christians and homeschoolers to fight these cultural wars for them.

Through ADF’s efforts and Thornton’s work as both the EDF and IHRG, the American Religious Right is impacting Germany politics, the goal being ”to ward off precedents that might someday be used against the ADF’s causes in American courts.” As the American Prospect said, “In Germany, Thornton’s International Human Rights Group” (as well as other allies, which we will talk about shortly) “have taken up more than a dozen court cases dealing with home schooling.” That is actually a conservative estimate. The Christian Science Monitor has said IHRG “has had a hand in more than 40 German home-schooling cases.”

All in all, Thornton believes he has been extraordinarily successful through IHRG and EDF. So successful, in fact, that he and other U.S. culture warriors are mapping out the future and figuring out where next to export American-style culture wars to. Once Europe is conquered, where next? Well, the Middle East, actually:

…It’s all a long way from 10 years ago, when Thornton remembers finding almost no one in Europe who understood how to win the culture wars. Now, the Christian right has done well enough in the Old World that it is looking for new, even less hospitable lands. “The next logical place for us is the Middle East, and we’ll also be able to have an impact,” says Sekulow of the European Center for Law and Justice. “We will succeed there, too.”

HSLDA’s Global Intentions

Just as the Religious Right has set its sight on foreign and international law since the 1990s, so, too, has HSLDA. In fact, everything that you are seeing and hearing about regarding the current situation with the Romeike family is part of a larger, premeditated plan of action that HSLDA came up with over a decade ago. I do not propose that as a conspiracy theory. Rather, this very fact was laid out in detail by HSLDA’s Michael Donnelly three years ago, in the March/April 2010 edition of Court Report.

In that Court Report, Donnelly begins with the January 26, 2010 decision by a U.S. immigration judge to grant the Romeike family asylum due to “persecution for homeschooling.” Donnelly compares German homeschoolers to “the courageous English families who fled to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.” The granting of asylum (later overturned) was a significant legal precedent at the time. As Donnelly points out, this was “the first case ever to recognize homeschooling as a reason for granting asylum.”

While HSLDA and Donnelly were ecstatic for the Romeike family, they were more ecstatic about something else: that their political strategy seemed to have payed off. That judge’s decision was the Golden Egg of HSLDA’s decade-long plan to get homeschooling established as a fundamental and human right — not just to shake up Germany’s laws, but more importantly — as in the case of the Religious Right’s international efforts in general — to influence U.S. law. I am not making this up. This is what Donnelly himself said: “The Romeikes’ asylum victory is the culmination of years of groundwork to protect homeschooling.”

Years of groundwork for what? Donnelly explains:

Home School Legal Defense Association has been tracking the plight of German homeschoolers for years. In the early 1990s, then–HSLDA President Michael Farris became aware of the struggles homeschooling families were facing in several European countries during his travels on behalf of Christian Solidarity International.

Over the next decade or so, Farris and the late Christopher Klicka would visit Germany frequently and champion German homeschoolers. As early as September of 2000, the Washington Post wrote an article entitled, “Home-school movement goes global.” The Post highlighted how American homeschoolers protested Germany’s homeschooling policies. How HSLDA encouraged American homeschoolers to ”[barrage] the German Embassy with e-mail, letters and phone calls.” HSLDA itself bragged in 2000 about how “U.S. home-school families began an aggressive campaign…directed at the German Embassy in Washington, which resulted in thousands of phone calls, more than 800 e-mail messages and 400 letters urging the German government to make home schooling legal.”

“Our goal,” said HSLDA’s Christopher Kilicka, “is legalization of home schooling throughout Germany.”

But HSLDA needed more than phone and internet bullying to be successful. According to Donnelly, “a comprehensive strategy was needed.” This was needed less for Germany’s own sake but more for international reasons: “if Germany could continue to get away with persecuting homeschoolers, other countries might follow its lead.” Which led HSLDA to think personally: “such a trend may not stay on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Donnelly explains that, in looking at losses homeschoolers experienced in Germany, prospects were not promising. Germany’s supreme courts rejected homeschoolers’ claims. In fact, the courts said — and I find this fascinating — that homeschooling (rather than forbidding homeschooling — “was an abuse of parental rights.” So in 2007, Michael Farris and Mike Donnelly met with Germany homeschool advocates — and more importantly, attorneys from Schuzh. Schuzh is the shortened name of the group I mentioned earlier: Schulunterricht zu Hause, or School Instruction at Home. Together, HSLDA and Schulunterricht zu Hause ”laid out a new three-part strategy of legal defense, humanitarian assistance, and political influence.”

Key to this strategy, Donnelly says, was creating a Marxist-like “war of position,” or an inversion of German values. Their strategy required a page from Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony playbook: “changing public opinion.” Since there were hardly any homeschoolers in Germany — the latest numbers are approximately 400 families total — HSLDA realized there was no way they could “exert any kind of political influence.”

So they decided to engage in political theater — an international act of high performance art.

HSLDA’s director of litigation “suggested considering a political asylum case.” HSLDA’s first opportunity to do so was in 2006, when they agreed to help a Germany family “get to Canada and file a claim for refugee status.” However, later that year, Uwe and Hanne Romeike fell into HSLDA’s lap. In October of 2006, the Romeike children were taken from their family by German police and placed into a state-approved school.

At the time, Jörg Großelümern (the director of Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit) expressed support for the family: “The Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit strongly empathises with the Romeike family, whom many of us know personally to be an intact and conscience-driven family.” (Interesting side note, considering it was Jörg Großelümern who brought the recent Twelve Tribes issue to Michael Farris’ attention: there is a rumor, which I honestly cannot find verification of, that the Romeike family — HSLDA’s token German homeschoolers — is affiliated with the Twelve Tribes. That would certainly be a fascinating backstory.)

During a homeschool conference in Germany, Donnelly told Romeike that if his family would leave Germany for the U.S., “HSLDA would support [them] in a claim for political asylum.” After selling one of his pianos to fund the trip (because apparently HSLDA could not afford it?), Uwe Romeike moved his family to the U.S. in August 2008. Note that the Romeikes have been in the U.S. since 2008. That is how long HSLDA’s overarching international plan has been in motion, a plan that — according to Donnelly — was aiming for one thing:

“To be able to say that homeschooling is a human right.”

HSLDA and Schulunterricht zu Hause

In addition to overwhelming German embassies with phone calls and emails as well as employing a political asylum case as an Gramscian exercise, HSLDA’s international strategy also required legal “boots on the ground” in Germany. So in August of 2000, Christopher Klicka and HSLDA created a legal defense organization for homeschoolers in Germany. As Crosswalk reported on January 30, 2005, HSLDA “started a legal organization for home schoolers in Germany called Schulunterricht zu Hause, or ‘School Instruction at Home.’” It is also known as “Schuzh.”

Schulunterricht zu Hause was the culmination of efforts by the late HSLDA attorney Christopher Klicka, who — according to the Washignton Post in 2000 — “had contact with home educators in 25 nations around the world over the past couple of years.” In October of 2001, Klicka talked about the organization in a letter to the Brazillian Embassy:

I worked to help network the Germans lawyers and home schoolers and we were able to establish a national home school organization called School Instruction at Home in that country.

The person in charge of Schulunterricht zu Hause as early as 2002 was Richard Guenther. According to HSLDA itself, Guenther’s work through the HSLDA-created organization in Germany was sponsored by “the generosity of American homeschoolers.” HSLDA repeatedly asked for American homeschoolers to financially support Guenther and his organization. This is from 2004:

HSLDA is asking for families to consider donating financial support for the cause of freedom in Germany. You can send donations to the Home School Foundation, earmarked for German homeschoolers. Please go to http://www.hslda.org/elink.asp?ID=1211 . We will send the donations on to Schulunterricht zu Hause.

Encouraged by HSLDA, American homeschoolers donated $100,000 to the organization. Furthermore, not only did HSLDA create the organization, it was intimately involved, as Christopher Klicka was on the board. HSLDA also provided the initial funds. According to a January 4, 2006 article by Education Week entitled, “U.S. Home Schoolers Push Movement Around the World,” 

The legal-defense association [HSLDA] taps into its fund for international support — about $15,000 a year — to subsidize start-ups of legal organizations. Other times, Mr. Klicka raises money from American home-schooling parents to support their counterparts overseas… One leader of [Germany’s] homeschooling movement is Richard Guenther, an evangelical Christian and the director of a legal-defense organization founded five years ago. Mr. Klicka organized American home schoolers to raise $100,000 for the organization, and he serves on its board.

Today, HSLDA’s International page for Germany has two organizations officially listed: Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit (led by Jörg Großelümern) and Schulunterricht zu Hause e.V. (formerly led by Richard Guenther, and currently lead by Armin Eckermann).

So HSLDA created Schulunterricht zu Hause in 2000, using member dues to fund its start-up. Then HSLDA rallied American homeschoolers to raise $100,000 for the organization. And HSLDA’s Klicka served on its board. What did Schulunterricht zu Hause do with that American support and money?

With that question, we come full circle to the Twelve Tribes.

HSLDA, ADF, and the Twelve Tribes

I have already pointed out that both the Religious Right in general as well as HSLDA specifically have invested in the German homeschool movement, the former through ADF (and consequently EDF and IHRG) and the latter through Schulunterricht zu Hause. What I should point out first is that these two organizations are actually not that distinct.

The director of HSLDA’s Schulunterricht zu Hause was Richard Guenther.

But Richard Guenther was also the “Director of European Operations” for the ADF’s International Human Rights Group.

So both of these American organizations that rallied American Christians and homeschoolers for “German homeschooling freedoms” had the exact same person in leadership. This ought not be surprising, since IHRG’s Joel Thornton was a huge fan of Christopher Klicka and HSLDA. In fact, in 2000, right around the time when HSLDA was beginning their international strategy as was ADF, Thornton said in his eulogy of Klicka that he “spent time with Chris…in the ACLJ’s offices at Regent University.  Chris was there for the national convention, and he was there to see what could be done to help the home school families of Germany.” (By the way, even Kevin Swanson supported the German homeschool movement and Richard Guenther’s role in it, exclaiming that, “Civilization is dying in Europe.”)

And what did that result in? According to the Christian Science Monitor in 2007,

IHRG and its German ally, Schuzh, have won several cases and scored some coups at the negotiating table. Take, for instance, the case of the Twelve Tribes, a controversial evangelical movement that was founded in the US. Followers live in small, communal groups largely cut off from society. Until last August, a pocket of Twelve Tribes disciples in Bavaria had been locked in a struggle to keep their children out of public schools… IHRG and Schuzh were able to persuade the Bavarian ministry of education to allow the group to set up its own school.

Also, from the American Prospect:

Thornton’s group and [Schulunterricht zu Hause] helped get the German state of Bavaria to allow disciples of Twelve Tribes, a controversial American evangelical group called a cult by some of its ex-members, to set up its own school.

Both ADF and HSLDA’s Schulunterricht zu Hause were the organizations that enabled the Twelve Tribes — the cult that just got busted for cold and systematic child abuse — to win permission to keep their kids isolated from the rest of the world. In fact, mere months after the Twelve Tribes were first prosecuted by violating German law, HSLDA asked American homeschoolers to donate to Schulunterricht zu Hause:

Please continue to support School Instruction At Home, which HSLDA helped to establish in Germany… Please consider donating to School Instruction at Home… Please go to http://www.hslda.org/elink.asp?ID=1211 to make a tax-deductible gift to the organization…

Sincerely,

Christopher J. Klicka HSLDA Senior Counsel

Not only did HSLDA and ADF support, enable, and fund the Twelve Tribes through the efforts and money of American Christians and homeschoolers, HSLDA partnered with the cult to lobby German embassies. According to Barbara Smith’s Home Education Foundation in New Zealand in January of 2005,

Home educators in Bavaria, the Twelve Tribes Community, have been fined for not sending their children to school…Richard Guenther, an American ex- patriate who lives in Germany and is helping the Twelve Tribes Families, says, “The claim of the parents is that the local school is raising the children to be promiscuous and the girls prostitutes.”…The American Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and the Twelve Tribes Community are both encouraging home educators everywhere to email the German authorities

Side Note About Homeschool Politics

Richard Guenther was a key player in the German homeschooling movement since the early 2000s. After HSLDA created Schulunterricht zu Hause, he was the director. He was also appointed Director of European Operations of the IHRG/EDF by the ADF. He has been referred to as “the HSLDA of Germany” as well as “the Lafayette of German homeschooling.”

So, you might be wondering, why have you not heard about him in the last few years?

Well, Richard Guenther is the pseudonymous “Mr. Smith,” who has authored many articles for HSisLegal.com, arguing in recent years that — no joke — HSLDA has singlehandedly destroyed the German homeschool movement through sectarian, patriocentric politics. A chronological timeline of the HSLDA/Guenther debacle — which apparently involved tensions with Homeschooling Pillar Gregg Harris and Vision Forum’s Doug Phillips — can be read here. Note, too, that Richard Guenther’s son, Hans, was interviewed by Gregg Harris’ sons Brett and Alex on September 28, 2005 on their Rebelution blog. They were “thrilled with the quality of his answers.” It seems the children’s parents were not as keen about each other.

Honestly, this seems like a repeat of the Seelhoff vs. Welch debacle, with Harris and Farris marginalizing out of their movement someone who is “out of sync” with the “vision.”

Enabling and Funding Child Abuse

Placing the recent revelations about the Twelve Tribes cult into this historical context changes the shape and color of how both Jörg Großelümern and Michael Farris initially responded to the German police raid. This cult is not some random group that appeared on the headlines, thereby excusing the homeschool advocates’ unfortunate assessments of what happened. Rather, this cult is one of the most prominent examples of the Religious Right and HSLDA’s international strategy for defending homeschooling freedoms abroad.

On account of the efforts by ADF and HSLDA’s German organization, the Twelve Tribes won the right to continue to keep their children isolated from the rest of the world. This was an extraordinarily important case, as it would lay the groundwork for the next case a few months later, involving the Paderborn Seven. What ADF and HSLDA did for the Twelve Tribes was both directly and indirectly funded by American Christians and homeschoolers, who were led to believe that their money and time would be used to support healthy families and their right to direct their children’s education.

Yet ADF and HSLDA chose to defend a cult. One can say, “We didn’t know what was happening behind the curtain” all one wants to, but that does not explain why they did not take the time to figure that out (which seems to be a really important why, considering HSLDA previously called a man who kept children in cages a “hero”). It does not justify the fact that they used over $100,000 of American money and the dues of their members to create Schulunterricht zu Hause which used that money and support to defend a cult of child abusers. Because of ADF and HSLDA’s tinkering in German affairs, the children of the Twelve Tribes have lived for almost a decade in near-isolation.

The children of the Twelve Tribes suffered horrifying abuse until last week because American dollars enabled and funded that abuse.

“My sources were wrong,” Michael Farris said.

How many other sources of yours have been wrong, Mr. Farris? And how many other children have suffered because of them?

How I, an Australian Jewish-atheist, became a German citizen


How I, an Australian Jewish-atheist, became a German citizen

My identity is a conflicted mix that incorporates Judaism, atheism, anti-Zionism, Germanic traditions and Anglo-Saxon-Australian beliefs. I both routinely reject and embrace them all.

 

Dresden after bombing during the second world war
Dresden in 1945, after the Allies’ bombing. Photograph: Corbis

It was hard to forgive the Nazis. The “1,000 year Reich” lasted a mere 12 years, and the German state was crushed under the weight of bloody streets, genocidal concentration camps and despotism. For this to happen in the heart of apparently civilised Europe was unimaginable – especially for Jews who had often been fully included, and very often assimilated, members of society.

One of my relations fought on Germany’s side in the first world war. I’ve seen his grave in a Dresden cemetery, a city fire-bombed with spite by the allies in 1945. I was the first Loewenstein family member to visit the place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember finding the street where my family had lived, unrecognisable in a sea of Soviet-inspired concrete. I used a pay phone and called my parents in Melbourne. We all cried, a silent recognition that our tragic Jewish story, sadly too common for words, began in a quiet and plain street in a deceptively normal German setting.

American writer Erik Larson’s stunning book In the Garden of Beasts, which profiles William E Dodd, the first US ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, gives a chilling taste of the seductive nature of German fascism. One of Dodd’s daughters, Martha, had her hand kissed by Hitler in 1933, and her father acknowledged “that Hitler was not an unattractive man personally.” This was the illusionary calm before the onslaught.

As a Jew born in Australia in 1974, I never imagined that Germany’s long shadow would envelop my adult life. In 2011, I became a German citizen while maintaining my Australian passport, due to a 1954 German law that allowed Jews to re-instate citizenship removed by the Nazis during their reign. I wanted citizenship for a few reasons, not least to honour my family that Germany once rejected, and to have the option of working freely across the European Union. 

Article 116 par 2 of Germany’s Basic Law reads:

Former German citizens who between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial, or religious grounds, and their descendants, shall on application have their citizenship restored. They shall be deemed never to have been deprived of their citizenship if they have established their domicile in Germany after May 8, 1945 and have not expressed a contrary intention.

The vast bulk of my European family were murdered during the war, and those who escaped were made stateless before they fled. The vibrant global Jewish diaspora that exists today is largely due to the rupture of Jewish life in the 1930s across a world that was far from keen to accept them. My grandparents left Europe in 1939 and arrived in an Australia that viewed Jews with suspicion. They said that Perth, where the ship first docked, was “primitive and without rye bread”.

The process of acquiring German citizenship has been a long journey that reveals the often tortuous relationships that continue to define Jewish identity in the 21st century. My father’s father, Fred, died before I recall having any serious conversations with him about becoming a German citizen. His attitude towards his birth country evolved to a point where I sensed he didn’t hate Germany, loved his adopted nation, Australia, but would not have even remotely considered re-acquiring his German citizenship.

My uncle, Herbert, also born in Dresden, is 93 and still alive in Toronto. For him too, re-acquiring his German citizenship was out of the question. He wasn’t even prepared to visit Germany until a few years ago – and then, it was because he was invited by the city of Dresden. After all, Germany had rejected our family, killed the youngest and oldest and changed the fate of our lives irrevocably.

My father, Jeffrey, was different. When I first mentioned the idea of obtaining a German passport many years ago, he dismissed the whole idea out of hand. It was not an unusual Jewish response, a visceral rejection of ever seeing Germany as a nation worth respecting and viewing us as Jews and equals. I protested his intransigence but it was futile (he had to obtain citizenship first before I was able to do so).

Over the years I would occasionally ask if his position had changed, and it took a long time for his opposition to relent. I continued reminding him that Germany had shifted, and was no longer a haven for Jew-hatred (though Neo-Nazis and the far-right remains a growing problem).

Finally, my father gave in and realised that becoming a German citizen was in no way endorsing the policies of former German governments, but a way to rightfully re-claim our birthright. My father had meticulously kept all the documents that the German consulate required. A process that officials said would take a few months took two years.

On 14 January 2011, I arrived at the German consulate in Sydney and waited until a senior official appeared. He congratulated me on becoming a German citizen and asked how I felt. I had tears in my eyes, unsure what to say, but I mumbled something about never imagining that Germany was again so keen to welcome me, as a Jew and atheist, into its heart. I also felt, but didn’t verbalise, that it was a personal victory against Nazism.

Today I feel neither German nor Australian. I hope my murdered ancestors would understand why I wanted to once again assume a German identity, or at least attachment to my pedigree as a fully-fledged member of German’s Jewish community. And yet I’m a non-practicing Jewish atheist currently based in Sydney.

Uncritical nationalism towards my birth country is impossible. I share human rights lawyer Julian Burnside’s despair at the Australian elite’s ability to unleash cruelty against asylum seekers and the dispossessed, and I question whether our settler-colonial state has ever really felt comfortable fully accepting the strange, the new, the remote, the other. Multiculturalism exists but its implementation can never be complete while politicians and media commentators divide a population by warning Australians that [insert minority group here] are a threat to our harmony.

My ostracism from mainstream Judaism is directly linked to Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians. For too many Jews, Zionism has become their main religion, and a God of intolerance is praised on a regular basis. When then Israeli finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a conference in 2003 that Israeli Arabs were a threat to the Jewish nature of his country (he said “If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens”) it should have been condemned as outright racism.

Instead, such comments are routinely expressed by senior Israeli officials and the world shrugs though. As leading American human rights professor and United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories professor Richard Falk said last week in Sydney, the Jewish state will increasingly face boycotts, sanctions and divestment so long as it oppresses the Palestinians.

A former head of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, says in the Israeli film The Gatekeepers that “[We’ve become] a brutal occupation force similar to the Germans in World War II”.

This is what my people are known for around the globe. 

According to new Israeli government released figures, Jews are now outnumbered by Arabs under Israeli sovereignty by over 50,000 people. That’s segregation by definition. Israel learns nothing from history except how to brutalise the marginalised. Germany struggles to understand how it allowed itself to be overcome by 12 years of madness. Australia is a free nation that locks up refugees in remote and privatised detention camps, making a mockery of our “fair go” claim.

My identity is a conflicted and messy mix that incorporates Judaism, atheism, anti-Zionism, Germanic traditions and Anglo-Saxon-Australian beliefs. And yet I both routinely reject and embrace them all. It sounds exhausting but it’s actually invigorating. I never feel I belong anywhere. I can’t be a Jew, atheist, German or Australian without a bundle of caveats.

Perhaps that just makes me human.

Nazi Persecution of Masons | “The relationship between Jews and Freemasons.”


Eugenics poster entitled
“The relationship between Jews and Freemasons.”

The text at the top reads: “World politics World revolution.” The text at the bottom reads, “Freemasonry is an international organization beholden to Jewry with the political goal of establishing Jewish domination through world-wide revolution.” The map, decorated with Masonic symbols (temple, square, and apron), shows where revolutions took place in Europe from the French Revolution in 1789 through the German Revolution in 1919. This poster is no. 64 in a series entitled “Erblehre und Rassenkunde” (Theory of Inheritance and Racial Hygiene), published by the Verlag fuer nationale Literatur (Publisher for National Literature), Stuttgart, ca. 1935.

Credit: USHMM, courtesy of Hans Pauli

Few people are aware that Freemasons suffered at the hands of the Nazis following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. This is probably because numerically Freemasons were a much small group than any of the others which also suffered.

Essentially, Hitler’s argument was that Freemasons and Jews had colluded in taking over Germany and had brought the country to its knees – politically, culturally and economically. History tells, if we are prepared to listen and learn, that there is nothing new under the sun. Hitler’s belief that the Jews and Freemasons were responsible for all the ills of Germany after the end of the First World War led him to believe that by eliminating them Germany’s problems would be resolved.

A few may be aware of the persecution of Freemasons by Hitler, but very few know that they were also hunted down and executed by Franco (Spain), Stalin (USSR) and Mussolini (Italy). When one is aware that Freemasons were also executed, and their property stolen, in countries invaded and occupied by the Nazis (e.g. Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Greece, Austria, Romania, etc.) then one begins to wonder exactly what was the total death toll of Freemasons.

It is not possible to now determine how many Freemasons were executed just because they were Freemasons, but a conservative estimate has suggested that the number of German Freemasons who died in concentration camps numbered 80,000.

Read further papers and documents about nazifascist persecution of Freemasonry:

Silencing Judith Butler


Why Judith Butler had to be shut down

Posted by Cecilie Surasky

The announcement of a prestigious international academic prize doesn’t typically generate endless sturm und drang on the pages of major newspapers around the world, threatening to turn into an international incident. But when that prize is given by a German city, and the recipient is Judith Butler, one of the great thinkers of our time– who also happens to be a vocal critic of Israeli policies—apparently it signifies the end is near.

Within minutes of announcing that Judith Butler, who can best be described as the Mick Jagger of left academia, had won the prestigious Theodor Adorno prize for her extraordinary and wide-ranging body of critical theory work, the hapless judges of the Frankfurt prize were besieged with complaints by those who said it should be revoked immediately.

Writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal,  Richard Landes and Ben Weinthal claimed the decision to give Butler the award would threaten Germany and Israel’s “special relationship”, and compared it to

Germany’s circumcision bans, Berlin sending submarines to a newly belligerent Egypt, and ugly revelations of German behavior in the Munich Olympics terror attack.

Elsewhere in Opposite-landia, the weird through-the-looking-glass world created by those who would defend Israel at all costs, right-wing critics claimed Judith Butler is anti-Semitic.  Judith Butler loves Hamas. Judith Butler is too political. Judith Butler isn’t political enough . Or my favorite, Judith Butler is ignorant.

But the truth is Butler became a lightning rod because one of the world’s best-known philosophers, who happens to be Jewish, is also deeply engaged in questions of Judaism, Jewish ethics and Zionism. Her lifelong investigation of these questions, in the spirit of Arendt and Buber who inspired because they walked their own paths—led her to keep one foot solidly in Jewish culture while placing the other in solidarity with precisely the people much of the Jewish world want us to forget, Palestinians.

Equally unforgivably, her intellectual and personal journey led her to support a movement that mainstream Jewish institutions are desperately trying to claim as anti-Semitic: the Palestinian-led, nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. (My use of the the word desperately is deliberate. As more and more individual Jews and Jewish organizations support some form of boycott or divestment to pressure Israel into being accountable to international law and basic Jewish ethics, the argument that doing so is essentially anti-Jewish reveals itself for the emptiness that it is.)

Butler wrote her own defense:

I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. I received a Jewish education in Cleveland, Ohio at The Temple under the tutelage of Rabbi Daniel Silver where I developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought. I learned, and came to accept, that we are called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its alleviation. But to do this, we have to hear the call, find the resources by which to respond, and sometimes suffer the consequences for speaking out as we do. I was taught at every step in my Jewish education that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice. Such an injunction is a difficult one, since it does not tell us exactly when and how to speak, or how to speak in a way that does not produce a new injustice, or how to speak in a way that will be heard and registered in the right way. My actual position is not heard by these detractors, and perhaps that should not surprise me, since their tactic is to destroy the conditions of audibility.

WWTD? What would Theodor Do?

Back in the late 80s as an undergraduate at Brown, my world couldn’t get enough of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. And when the Matrix films came out, we were all certain the Wachowski (then) Brothers had stayed up late nights imbibing Marcuse and Adorno, and probably something a bit stronger, to come up with their too-close-to home dystopian trilogy.

Reading Adorno helped us understand the signs of fascism and our own willing imprisonment. I suppose his criticisms of mass culture helped herald the rise of the corporatocracy.

Adorno was a big Schoenberg fan. He didn’t go for treacly harmonies, for much the same reasons my mother used to refuse to let us watch the Brady Bunch, though the cynical MASH was OK. Adorno liked dissonance. It revealed the dark truth behind harmonious bourgeois culture. I suppose it was the only thing that made sense to someone who witnessed, and escaped, the Nazi Holocaust. (Real differences aside, it could be said that it took the war to help Adorno and others like him see the underlying brutality and dehumanization that colonized peoples of all kinds have always known firsthand at the hands of “the civilized”. Just ask the Congolese about King Leopold. Or just ask…women.)

This is the realm in which Judith Butler and her work dwells that makes her so utterly inspiring–especially to those of us who aspire to justice in Israel and Palestine while remaining firmly grounded in our Jewishness.

There is Butler’s personal willingness to try to embody the best of the Jewish texts she studies. And her willing look at the dark underbelly of “civilized” cultures (think Pamela Geller ads) which declare some people grievable and others entirely unworthy of grieving. (In that sense, the United States and Israel have more than a special relationship, they are conjoined twins, awash in self congratulatory language about democracy and civilization that obscures the foundation of structural violence that in both cases, has never really ceased.)

Adorno is often quoted for sayng that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. But he also wrote:

“The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating.”

Hold that thought. Let us all, like JB and so many countless others, refuse to cooperate. We must refuse to be that person laughing at a Tel Aviv café while just miles away a captive population in Gaza is bombed ceaselessly, or to simply ask someone to pass the cereal moments after reading again that the US military drone dropped a bomb on a group of civilians, this time a group of women and girls.

Let us refuse to cooperate with the mythical Jewish consensus that to be a good Jew, one must not mourn Palestinians as one mourns Jews, and one must not hold Israel up to those same standards.

This Yom Kippur, I’m going to think about the times I didn’t refuse.

I hope also that some of the people who called Judith Butler and so many like her anti-Semites, simply in order to maker them “inaudible,” will consider the gravity of their actions. But I’m not holding my breath.

(Oh, and by the way, Judith Butler did get that prize after all. And the room of 700 cheered.)

-Cecilie Surasky

Never Forget! Hitler Was a Catholic! | Pope Called Hitler The Saviour of Germany


Never Forget! Hitler Was a Catholic! | Pope Calls Hitler The Saviour of Germany

“We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian.” — Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928

“Hitler was Christian We Tolerate no one in our Ranks who Attacks the Idea of Christianity~ Adolf  Hitler .
By Fighting off the Jews I am Doing the Lords Work. Hitler being Called the Savior of Germany by the Catholic Pope
My feeling as a Christian leads me to be a fighter for my Lord and Saviour.
It leads me to the man who, at one time lonely and with only a few followers, recognised the Jews for what they were, and called on men to fight against them…As a Christian, I owe something to my people
I Regard Christianity the Basis of Morality the Basis of National life and a New World Order.
Adolf Hitler God gave the savior to the German people.
We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he [Hitler] was sent to us by God to save Germany.”  –Hermann Goering,  The Göring Wedding Only Christians perform Christian weddings, and the Nazis were no exception. Hermann Göring married Emmy Sonnemann, a famous Opera star.
Adolf Hitler stands in the front row as “Best Man” during the ceremony in the Cathedral by Reichbishop Müller.
Hitler Oath: I swear by God, this holy oath, to the Führer of the German Reich and people. Adolf Hitler…  Gott Mit Uns (God With Us) “

The Most Godless Place on Earth


Eastern Germany: the most godless place on Earth

East German atheism can be seen as a form of continuing political and regional identification – and a taste of the future

Germany Celebrates 20 Years Fall Of The Berlin Wall

A woman dressed as an angel waves from a roof top near the German Reichstag on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

They are sending missionaries to eastern Germany. A recent study called Beliefs About God Across Time and Countries found that 52.1% of people asked whether they believed in God identified themselves as atheists. This compared with only 10.3% in western Germany. Indeed, the survey was unable to find a single person under the age of 28 in eastern Germany who believed in God. Obviously there are some – I think I may have even met some once – but the survey was unable to find them. On the face of it this is an extraordinary finding and it is something that needs some careful explanation.

Different reasons are adduced for the absence of religion in the east. The first one that is usually brought out is the fact that that area was run by the Communist party from 1945 to 1990 and that its explicit hostility to religion meant that it was largely stamped out. However, this is not entirely the case. In fact, after initial hostilities in the first years of the GDR, the SED came to a relatively comfortable accommodation with what was called the Church in Socialism. The churches in the GDR were given a high degree of autonomy by SED standards and indeed became the organisational focus of the dissident movement of the 1990s, which was to some extent led by Protestant pastors.

In addition to an accommodation with religion, the party also deliberately created alternative poles of integration for the population. Young people were brought up in a highly ideological atmosphere and were required to undergo a so-called Jugendweihe – a sort of atheist confirmation. Interestingly, this ceremony has survived the end of communism and many young people still voluntarily enter into it. Equally, especially under Eric Honecker in the 1970s and 80s, an attempt was made to create a sort of “GDR patriotism”, in which figures from Prussian history such as Frederick the Great were put back on their plinths in East Berlin and integrated into the Communist narrative of the forward march of history. Martin Luther, Thomas Münzer and other figures from the Reformation were also recruited into the party.

Another factor is that religion in eastern Germany is also overwhelmingly Protestant, both historically and in contemporary terms. Of the 25% who do identify themselves as religious, 21% of them are Protestants. The other 4% is made up of a small number of Catholics as well as Muslims and adherents of other new evangelical groups, new-age sects or alternative religions. The Protestant church is in steep decline with twice as many people leaving it every year as joining.

If we were to follow the Weberian line on this, then a highly Protestant area undergoing rapid modernisation would almost automatically experience a process of radical secularisation going hand-in-hand with industrialisation, a process which was only speeded up by the communist obsession with heavy industry.

When we look at western Germany however, we see that there Catholics are in a majority and indeed, political power in West Germany has traditionally been built on western-orientated Catholic support for the Christian Democratic Union in the south and west. Indeed, the first chancellor of postwar West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had been mayor of Cologne in the 1930s and even then was in favour of the division of Germany and a “Rhineland Alliance” as a sort of precursor of the European Union.

What all of this means is that rather than simply just being an area that was occupied by the Soviet Union and their satraps in the East German Communist party, the eastern part of Germany has an identity which – almost a quarter of a century on – continues to make unification more difficult than expected. Religious confession, or rather the lack of it, plays an important role in this. This has led some to talk of East German atheism as a form of continuing political and regional identification. For example, in 2000 the Catholic theologian Eberhard Tiefensee identified what he called an “East German folk atheism” which could be argued to constitute a substantial part of a regional identity against West German Catholic domination.

Secularisation processes are under way throughout the continent and the role of religion and the church in modernity are being questioned everywhere, from gay marriage to women priests to abortion and on to whether the EU should identify itself as a Christian entity. The question should perhaps be whether it is actually folk atheism that represents the future of Europe.

List of Catholic Hitler Quotes | Hitler’s Catholic Christianity


List of Catholic Hitler Quotes | Hitler’s Catholic Christianity

by PZ Myers

(I thought this was a perfect time to repost this list.)

Douglas Theobald passed along an interesting collection of quotes from that atheist evolutionist, Adolf Hitler. It’s particularly interesting that he outlawed atheist and freethought groups in 1933.

It’s a long list of quotes, so I’ll tuck it below the fold.


“The anti-Semitism of the new movement (Christian Social movement) was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf“, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”

[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]

“I have followed [the Church] in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism, or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it.”

[Adolf Hitler, from Rauschning, _The Voice of Destruction_, pp. 239-40]

“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.”

[Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on his personal Christian feelings. Published in “My New Order”, quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]

“I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 46]

“What we have to fight for…is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator.”

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 125]

“This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.”

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.152]

“And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.”

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.174]

“Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another… while the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve.”

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.309]

“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so”

[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]

“Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, p. 171]

“I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 1]

“I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna’s destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 2]

“…the unprecedented rise of the Christian Social Party… was to assume the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

“As long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people fulfilled their duty and obligation overwhelmingly. Whether Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, both together and particularly at the first flare, there really existed in both camps but a single holy German Reich, for whose existence and future each man turned to his own heaven.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

“Political parties has nothing to do with religious problems, as long as these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the scheming of political parties.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

“For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

“In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

“It [Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad masses of its adherents.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

“If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3, about the leader of the Christian Social movement]

“Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]

“I had so often sung ‘Deutschland u:ber Alles’ and shouted ‘Heil’ at the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]

“Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]

“I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger’s time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 6]

“Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord’s grace smiled on His ungrateful children.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 7, reflecting on World War I]

“The more abstractly correct and hence powerful this idea will be, the more impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it continues to depend on human beings… If this were not so, the founders of religion could not be counted among the greatest men of this earth… In its workings, even the religion of love is only the weak reflection of the will of its exalted founder; its significance, however, lies in the direction which it attempted to give to a universal human development of culture, ethics, and morality.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 8]

“To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 8]

“The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution, against prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles. The first prerequisite for even the moral right to combat these things is the facilitation of earlier marriage for the coming generation. In late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the ‘image’ of God.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]

“Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth…Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10, echoing the Cultural Warfare rhetoric of the Religious Right]

“But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]

“While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to win new followers for their doctrine– an activity which can boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in particular– right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply go their own ways. The consequences, particularly from a moral point of view, are not favorable.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]

“The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude. The various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really to embrace the broad masses, the unconditional authority of the content of this faith is the foundation of all efficacy.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]

“Due to his own original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 11]

“The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties– and this against their own nation.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 11]

“….the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 11, precisely echoing Martin Luther’s teachings]

“Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]

“The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]

“The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]

“All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]

“Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the ‘remaking’ of the Reich as they call it.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 1]

“Of course, even the general designation ‘religious’ includes various basic ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the soul, the eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. This, above all, is the fighting factor which makes a breach and opens the way for the recognition of basic religious views.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 1]

“Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 1]

“A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]

“It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]

“That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy, obligated and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church. Should the same renunciation not be possible if this injunction is replaced by the admonition finally to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created?”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]

“For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]

“It doesn’t dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture- race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]

“It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]

“Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 5]

“For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure? …Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas… it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 5]

“The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated. For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 10]

“In the ranks of the movement [National Socialist movement], the most devout Protestant could sit beside the most devout Catholic, without coming into the slightest conflict with his religious convictions. The mighty common struggle which both carried on against the destroyer of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them mutually to respect and esteem one another.”

[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 10]

“For this, to be sure, from the child’s primer down to the last newspaper, every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every billboard, must be pressed into the service of this one great mission, until the timorous prayer of our present parlor patriots: ‘Lord, make us free!’ is transformed in the brain of the smallest boy into the burning plea: ‘Almighty God, bless our arms when the time comes; be just as thou hast always been; judge now whether we be deserving of freedom; Lord, bless our battle!’

[Adolf Hitler’s prayer, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 2 Chapter 13]

“The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life”

[Adolph Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933]

“ATHEIST HALL CONVERTED

Berlin Churches Establish Bureau to Win Back Worshippers

Wireless to the New York Times.

BERLIN, May 13. – In Freethinkers Hall, which before the Nazi resurgence was the national headquarters of the German Freethinkers League, the Berlin Protestant church authorities have opened a bureau for advice to the public in church matters. Its chief object is to win back former churchgoers and assist those who have not previously belonged to any religious congregation in obtaining church membership.

The German Freethinkers League, which was swept away by the national revolution, was the largest of such organizations in Germany. It had about 500,000 members …”

[New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 2, on Hitler’s outlawing of atheistic and freethinking groups in Germany in the Spring of 1933, after the Enabling Act authorizing Hitler to rule by decree]

“I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.”

[Adolf Hitler, Speech, 15 March 1936, Munich, Germany.]

“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life….”

[Adolf Hitler, Berlin, February 1, 1933]

“Today Christians … stand at the head of [this country]… I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the *poison of immorality* which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of *liberal excess* during the past … (few) years.”

[The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press, 1942), pg. 871-872]

I can imagine a few objections that will be raised.

Objection! Hitler was no true Christian.
Reply: None of them are.

Objection! Christians don’t commit genocide.
Reply: Look up the Albigensians, review your history of the Crusades, and what about the Jews of Spain? Did Darwin coin the word “pogrom”?

Objection! Hitler was merely cynically manipulating the German people by using their beliefs in God.
Reply: I’d say something similar of his misuse of scientific theory.

Objection! You’re doing the same thing we are, only instead of blaming Darwinism, you’re blaming Christianity.
Reply: No, I think humans have done evil throughout their history, and are always willing to grab any convenient rationalization for their behavior, whether it’s science or religion or twinkies. Science doesn’t dictate morality, and it’s also rather clear that religion does a piss-poor job of it, too.

Objection! But evolution is a scientific theory that has more rhetorical and philosophical power than mere religion, and therefore must bear a greater weight of responsibility.
Reply: I don’t think the kind of people who blame mass murder on evolution will actually make this argument. Still, I’d just say what is, is. Science describes it and explains it, but doesn’t tell us what we should do with it.

Google:- Catholic Hitler, Catholic Crusader Adolf Hitler, Catholic Political Arm Nazism

The Religio-Fascist Takeover of the Republican Party


Is The Republican Party Becoming Fascist?

Image from oldamericancentury.org

Republicans have been busy since they took control of the House of Representatives in 2011. Busy alienating every single group of people they can think of, except themselves. The United States is being transformed into a fascist state before our eyes and now is the time we must fight back and turn this evil tide.

Instead of focusing on jobs and the economy like they were elected to do, Republicans have used the excuse of budget crises whether real or not, to take rights away from us. In the 1920′s and 1930′s, fascists in Europe used economic crises to gain power and that is exactly what Republicans are doing now. Using the recession as an excuse to create a police state. Let’s examine how Republicans are frighteningly similar to fascists.

Fascism is the ultimate manifestation of social change and moral revolution, and glorifies nationalism. Sound familiar? It should. Republicans are all about culture wars and preach morality and how great America is. Fascists, like Republicans today, reject democracy and liberalism. Many Republicans called for violently overthrowing the government if the 2010 midterm elections didn’t go their way and have viciously attacked liberalism. Fascists also reject internationalism and pacifism and support militarism and war. Republicans have been calling for the United States to pull out of the United Nations since the 1950′s and have since 2001, been the party of war as evidenced by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the calls to attack Iran, North Korea, and most recently Libya. Fascists also promote heroism, vitalism and violence. Ever notice how Republicans promote themselves by chopping wood or firing guns or some other “manly” activity? They are trying to prove how tough they are. And the examples of violence are aplenty. Just look at the shooting in Arizona and the calls to shoot liberals in the forehead and the threats of “second amendment remedies” among many others. Republicans have ALL of these traits. Now let’s examine how fascists and Republicans agree on the issues.

As we all know, Republicans claim to be the party of family values. This is the exact stance of fascists as well. Fascists, like Republicans, believe that a woman’s role is confined to the home as a mother. In Italy, the fascists banned literature on birth control and increased penalties for abortion in 1926, declaring both crimes against the state. Fascists even pushed policies designed to reduce the number of women in the workforce. Republicans are attempting to do all of these things. They have relentlessly railed against birth control, and have pushed their idea of abstinence as if they have always practiced it themselves. Hypocrites. They are attempting to ban abortion, considering laws to legalize the killing of abortion providers and laws that destroy Planned Parenthood and allow hospitals to let women die rather than give her a life saving abortion. Republicans are also assaulting unions that represent professions held by mostly women such as nurses and education and have been highly critical of single mothers who work.

Speaking of education, Republicans and fascists have that in common too.
Fascist states pursued policies of social indoctrination through propaganda in education and the media and seek to regulate the production of educational and media materials. We see Republicans doing this every day. They have their own news network that uses blatant lies and misinformation to paint liberalism as evil. Fox News is directly responsible for spreading hate and fear on behalf of the Republican Party and even promotes Republican candidates with total disregard to acceptable journalism ethics. Republicans have criticized journalists for asking tough questions and have called for laws to change the mainstream media. Many Republicans are against Freedom of the Press and have even detained journalists against their will for asking questions. Then there is the GOP stance on education. Their attempts to destroy public education is nothing more than an effort to create private schools designed to do their ideological bidding. Private schools can deny an education to anyone and can discriminately hire any teacher they wish which means an army of conservative teachers that will only teach the Republican ideology and their view of history. Fascists created their systems of education to glorify their movement and sought to inform students of its historical and political importance to the nation. It attempted to purge ideas that were not consistent with the beliefs of the fascist movement. Republicans are also doing this. Take Texas and the South for instance. In those Republican controlled areas, the Confederacy is being glorified and Joe McCarthy is being portrayed as heroic. The Civil Rights movement is being largely ignored and the Founding Fathers are being transformed into Republicans that agree with everything the Republicans are doing today. They are trying to portray the founders as Christians that wanted Christianity to rule the state. Republicans are also trying to abolish the Department of Education and are trying to slash education spending to a bare minimum. Republicans and fascists hate the well educated because they want the people to be stupid in order to manipulate them. Fascism tends to be anti-intellectual and so does the Republican Party.

Another major aspect of fascism is its relationship with corporations. In 1925 the Fascist regime in Italy created a corporatist economic system. In theory, Fascist Corporatism is supposed to give unions a voice but in practice, that’s not what it did in Italy and Germany in the 1930′s. The Fascist regime first created a Ministry of Corporations that organized the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations, banned workers’ strikes and lock-outs. Even Hitler banned unions. This is similar to how corporations were before America declared its independence. At that time, corporations such as the Massachusetts Bay Company, controlled entire colonies. The Founding Fathers hated this practice so much they rebelled against it and set many restrictions against the corporate world they abhorred so much. Republicans are attempting to reintroduce this idea that corporations should run states and the government. They’ve already called for privatizing policemen and the military and they already allow the Koch brothers to call the shots. It won’t be long before they introduce corporatism. Marxists accuse fascism of being a capitalist tyranny that attempts to make conservative reaction popular to the working class but in practice represses the working class. Even Lenin claimed that “Fascism is capitalism in decay.” Fascists dismantled working-class organizations, significantly reduced wages in certain areas, abolished taxes on inheritance and war profits. Republicans seek to do ALL of these things. They have called for an end to the minimum wage, are ending union rights state by state, most recently in Wisconsin where Republicans slammed through an anti-union bill illegally, and seek to destroy any and all corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthy.

Another aspect shared by fascists and Republicans is their hatred of homosexuals and people who are different. Just as fascists banned homosexuality in 1931 and hated certain groups like gypsies and Jews, Republicans seek to make homosexuality illegal and have made it clear that they intend to persecute those they feel are inferior such as Muslims, African-Americans, hispanics, and other ethnic groups. The current hearings in Congress specifically targeting Muslims is sufficient proof of that, not to mention their constant racial attacks on President Obama and the laws being passed against hispanics in Arizona.

Another major aspect of fascism that Republicans share is the fixing of elections. If the 2000 Election isn’t enough to convince you of fraudulent elections then also consider these current attempts to subvert democracy. Republicans in New Hampshire are pushing bills that would keep college students from voting. One bill would require a students parents live in the state and another would ban same day registration. Why? Because the youth come out to vote for liberals. This is the reason Republicans are out to destroy unions too, since unions support Democrats in elections most of the time. One Tea Party leader has already suggested a bill that would only allow people with property to vote. Even the voting rights of women are being threatened. These are blatant attempts to subvert Democracy and destroy political opponents. These are things that fascists do.

Here is something else that Republicans and fascists have in common: death panels. In Arizona, Republicans have already decided the fates of 98 people by taking their names off the transplant lists in an effort to save money. Never mind the fact that the federal government has sent funds to cover these people. The Republican fascists in Arizona are too busy spending that cash on private prisons so they can send suspected illegal immigrants to them. Death panels are expected to spread to other Republican controlled states such as Texas and Mississippi among others. Fascists like death panels and private prisons too. Millions of Jews died because of death panels and the deaths only stopped after American soldiers liberated the prison camps.

The last aspect that fascists and Republicans have in common is their obsession with Christianity. The Republican party is one with the Christian Right today. Their goal is to make Christianity the national religion in order to create a Christian state. Republicans would then tear up the Constitution and replace it with the Bible. Republicans hate separation of church and state and have vowed to destroy it. Republicans have even gone so far as to make up quotes and falsely attribute them to the Founding Fathers to make it seem like they wholeheartedly agree with them. They actually do not agree. This obsession with religion is very familiar, in fact its Hitleresque. Take a gander at these quotes.

“The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

“It is the purpose of the Government to fill our whole culture once more with a Christian spirit, and that not only in politics. We want to burn out the harmful features in our theater and our literature.”

“The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, is creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life.”

“The struggle against materialistic views and for a real national community is just as much in the interest of the German nation as in [the interest] of the welfare of our Christian faith. The Government of the Reich regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation. The rights of the churches will not be diminished.”

All of these quotes were spoken by Adolf Hitler, one of fascisms biggest stars. And Republicans agree with his words. In fact, Christianity is one reason why Republicans are doing all of the above things stated throughout this article. If you are a white Christian male that votes Republican, you are safe. But if you aren’t, you are targeted.

The time for compromise with Republicans is over. The time for tolerance of them is also over. We could sit here and allow them to control things and turn the country into a fascist state or we can take action and bring down fascism before it takes hold and strangles us. I’m not suggesting general strikes or pacifism. Republicans would only be too happy to abuse the law and use military force against us. I’m calling on freedom loving Americans everywhere to storm Republican controlled capitals across the country and drag these Republican fascists out of power kicking and screaming and then elect new people to replace them. There may be little other recourse by the time Republicans are finished serving their terms and waiting to recall them will take too much time. Voting rights are being attacked from every angle. Our personal lives are under constant assault. Our right to negotiate our wages are being terminated and war and corporate power are increasing. We can no longer risk allowing this dangerous political party to have any power whatsoever. There was once a time in this country when a party rose up and forcefully put the other one on the sidelines for a long period of time because it was a danger to the nation and its ideals. During the Civil War era, Republicans, also the liberals of the era, came to power and brought down the once conservative Democratic Party for being a threat to freedom and Democracy. Once again, we liberals must rise to the occasion and be willing to fight for ourselves, for others, and for our nations ideals no matter the cost. Only this time, it must be Republicans that pay the price. They must be restricted from holding public office for a couple decades so that Democrats have ample time to clean up their mess and reverse all of the damage done by Republicans. In these dark times, it is our duty to do whatever is necessary to keep America free and its people equal. We must stand up and march together in the millions and topple every Republican controlled capital in the nation and then press forward to Washington DC and chase Republicans out of Congress. Its the only way to save America, ourselves, and those we love. Perhaps after a couple decades in political exile, Republicans will have denounced the fascist elements of their party and come to their senses. If forcing Republicans out of office is our only option to save America and ensure the freedom, equality, survival, and prosperity of the middle class, then in the words of John Boehner, “So be it.”

Will America Become the New Catholic Reich?


Christo-Fascism without Tears: Response to Evangelical Writers who Distance the Church from the Nazi Party

By Alex Constantine

“The prophet seldom has any honor in his own country.” – Adolf Hitler

“Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” – Adolf Hitler

priestssalute 300x212 Christo Fascism without Tears: Response to Evangelical Writers who Distance the Church from the Nazi Party

Point 24 of the Nazi Progamme circulating in Germany of the 1920s stated that the only religion that the party officially denounced was “Jewish”:

We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest.

Many historians of WW II have downplayed the role of religion in Hitler’s Germany, most notably Richard Overy, author of The Dictators, cited by Christian researchers everywhere to reprimand those who suggest that the Nazi leader used religion as a vehicle of mass persuasion. Despite prestige appointments and numerous awards for scholarship, Overy, as a historian of Hitler’s Germany, is a complete incompetent if not deliberately dishonest. His contention that Hitler was hostile to capitalism, for instance, is blatantly false. Pay no heed to slippery conservative Christians who cite Overy and his equally dubious contention that Christianity was “in decline,” and played no role in the rise of the Third Reich.

Overy’s sourcing alone is a red flag – he relies heavily on the writing of Hermann Rauschning (a friend of Hitler who “defected” and sat out the war in the United States); other questionable citations and deliberate misinterpretations of Nazi Party rhetoric are common.

One widely-repeated citation is made by Bruce Walker in an article posted on the Net, “The Nazis and Christianity,” published by American Thinker, a Christian site. According to Walker, the “decline of Christianity in Germany led directly to the rise of Nazism. Professor Henri Lichtenberger in his 1937 book, The Third Reich, describes the religious life of the Weimar Republic as a place in which the large cities were ‘spiritual cemeteries’ with almost no believers at all, except for those who were members of the clergy.”

Seems to be a legitimate history until one considers that Henri Lichtenberger, the French historian, was a fascist propagandist who idolized Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. He was a mercenary with a pen, drawn from ranks favoring a Franco-German intersect in the early ’20s. He was PRO-NAZI. Lichtenberger’s word on anything was determined by who paid him.

This is the caliber of “experts” that right-wing evangelical propagandists cite when making the claim that Nazi Germany was “secular.” The bottom line is that, in private, Hitler found National Socialism and Christianity fundamentally incompatible because he believed that the latter – “an invention of the Jews” – had given rise to Bolshevism. Ironic, then, that before Hitler, Lenin became Christ … in a true athiest state … as reported by Vision, a quarterly academic print and online journal of news and analysis:

… As chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin soon became a dictator …. The use of traditional religion played a part in securing popular support. Following an attempt to assassinate Lenin in 1918, his public persona was infused with religious verbal and visual imagery. Sociologist Victoria Bonnell notes that now the leader “was characterized as having the qualities of a saint, an apostle, a prophet, a martyr, a man with Christ-like qualities, and a ‘leader by the grace of God.’” Posters showed Lenin like a saint in Russian iconic art. …

“Aspects of the political, social and religious fabric of the Russian Motherland provided many of the necessary conditions for Lenin’s cult. .… While Hitler and Stalin were deranged and profoundly evil, they were aided and abetted by masses of people who moved toward them as the leaders they desired. As we have noted before in this series, the symbiosis of leader and led cannot be ignored as we try to explain the bloodlust that characterizes the rule of many, if not all, false messiahs. Nor is exploitation of religious fervor ever far from the surface as leaders seek and maintain followers. Mussolini appealed to elements of traditional Catholic religion to create his fascist cult, and Hitler was well aware of religion’s power to induce loyalty to a cause. It was no different in the atheistic Soviet Union for most of the last century.

http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/page.aspx?id=2966

Hitler’s religious beliefs and fanaticism (quotes from Mein Kampf)

Hitler wrote: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord..”

As a boy, Hitler attended Catholic Church and was exposed to the anti-Semitism of the prevailing religious culture. In Mein Kampf and in his speeches, Hitler appeared to be a fanatical believer in God. In one speech, he declared:

The world will not help, the people must help itself. Its own strength is the source of life. That strength the Almighty has given us to use; that in it and through it we may wage the battle of our life…. The others in the past years have not had the blessing of the Almighty – of Him Who in the last resort, whatever man may do, holds in His hands the final decision. Lord God, let us never hesitate or play the coward, let us never forget the duty which we have taken upon us…. We are all proud that through God’s powerful aid we have become once more true Germans.

On marriage: “A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” (Mein Kampf)

On race war: “But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.” (Mein Kampf)

Hitler’s Biblical beliefs show clearly where he based his notion for offensive action:

On liberty: “God does not make cowardly nations free.” (Mein Kampf)

On Judaism: “Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord’s image.” (Mein Kampf)

A prophecy: “Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow.” (Mein Kampf)

In a speech delivered on April 23, 1922, Hitler stated:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them. … In boundless love as a Christian and as a man, I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.

On himself: “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.” (Hitler speech, 1941)

“Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.” (Mein Kampf)

“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” (Hitler speech, Berlin, October 31, 1933)

Third Reich Christianity | Nazi Germany as Implementation of a Christian Agenda


Third Reich Christianity: Nazi Germany as Implementation of a Christian Agenda

How Was Nazi Germany an Example of Christian Nationalism & Power?

By

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-GallThe Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

Image Courtesy Pricegrabber.com

Hitler and the Nazis are often cited as an example of the horrible crimes which atheists have committed in the 20th century. They are only assumed to be atheists, though, because people can’t imagine Christians doing such things; in reality, Hitler explicitly appealed to Christianity on a regular basis and this was part of why he was popular. Not every Christian supported the Nazis, of course, but he was most popular with conservative Christians seeking a restoration of traditional values.

In The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Richard Steigmann-Gall writes:

In a speech celebrating Germany’s exit from the League of Nations, Hitler again maintained that the Third Reich was actively implementing a Christian agenda: “Along with the fight for a purer morality we have taken upon ourselves the struggle against the decomposition of our religion. We have therefore taken up the struggle against the Godless movement, and not just with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out. And above all we have dragged the priests out of the lowlands of the political party struggle and have brought them back into the church.”

This declaration was quite consistent with Hitler’s speeches earlier in the year and also with the basic attitude he laid out — privately as well as publicly — in the “time of struggle.” Insisting that Nazism as a state would not distinguish between Protestant and Catholic, he recognized only a common supra-Christian faith. True to his promise, Hitler defended Christianity against the “Godless” movement, outlawing the Socialist and the Communist parties very early after the Seizure of Power.

Now, one can argue that Hitler and the Nazis only appealed to Christianity as part of a political ploy — that they emphasized Christianity in public without ever intending to promote Christianity in reality. Such an argument would be accompanied by the claim that the actions of Hitler and the Nazis didn’t reflect “true” Christianity and, therefore, must be attributed to atheism, paganism, or something else.

There are two problems with this. First, there is little to no evidence that Hitler and his top leaders only endorsed Christianity in public and for public consumption. Their private remarks on religion and Christianity were generally the same as their public remarks, but they didn’t hesitate to privately contradict public remarks on other matters, like peace with the Soviet Union. The similarity of their public and private positions on religion and Christianity indicates that they were genuine.

Second, the above argument could be made about any of the crimes committed by Christians over the course of history. It’s ultimately an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy: no true Christian could do such things or advocate such things, therefore they weren’t true Christians and their crimes cannot be attributed to Christianity. This is a fallacious argument because it relies on shifting the definition of “Christian” to match whatever conclusion the person prefers.

The actions of Hitler and the Nazis were about as “Christian” as the actions of people during the Crusades or the Inquisition. There were certainly non-Christian Nazis, and several leading Nazis preferred a neo-pagan theistic religion over Christianity, but the position was never officially endorsed either by the Nazi Party or by Adolf Hitler himself. Indeed, Christian complaints about the paganism of some Nazi leaders were given a sympathetic reception.

Christians may not like acknowledging that Nazi actions might have anything to do with Christianity, but Germany saw itself as a fundamentally Christian nation and millions of Christians in Germany enthusiastically endorsed Hitler and the Nazi Party in part because they saw both as embodiments of both German and Christian ideals. Conservative Christians who wanted a return to traditional values either voted for the Nazis or one of the other right-wing nationalist parties which eventually supported and merged with the Nazis.

Related:- Catholic Hitler. Catholic Fascism. Catholic Nazism. Catholic Nazi Crusade. Catholic Dictators. Christian Right. Christian Fascism.

Hitlerland | American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power


Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

” … Americans reacted to Hitler rather as any other nationality did. First they ridiculed him, then they expressed grudging admiration for the order he brought to Germany. Later, they turned a blind eye to his anti-Semitism … ” – Washington Post, March 16, 2012

How Hitler happened while America watched

By Liz Smith

Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2012

61dFezz2XYL  SL160 SL160 1 Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (Book Reviews)

“THE TIMES in which we live move too fast for the considered historian to record them. They move too quickly to permit the writing of long books about momentary phases. Ours is the age of the reporter.”

If you think that is a recent quote, a comment on our age of instant reporting, blogging and tweeting, you’re wrong. The above was written by Dorothy Thompson, the famous journalist (and wife of Sinclair Lewis) in 1932. She was explaining the big rush of her short book, “I Saw Hitler!”

Dorothy’s quote is culled from a longer book, coming from Simon and Schuster. It is titled “Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power,” written by Andrew Nagorski. This book chronicles observations — from letters, diaries and unpublished memoirs — of American reporters, embassy workers and even tourists who worked and played in Germany from 1922 to 1941. It is riveting stuff.

Today, people continue to ask, “How could it have happened? How could Hitler have mesmerized a nation, planned a global conquest and attempted to exterminate the Jewish race?” Mr. Nagorski’s book goes a long way toward explaining. With few exceptions, most people — even savvy journalists embedded in Germany — simply could not believe what they were seeing. They didn’t take Hitler seriously … they were isolationists … they didn’t really care that much. And anyway, no one man — certainly not one as physically unprepossessing as Hitler — could truly sway all of Germany, could he? (Only his icy blue eyes distinguished him.)

I read this book in one terrible gulp. You know what’s coming, and you want to scream, “Wake up before it’s too late!” There are never enough examinations of this period. It wasn’t the 14th century; it was the 20th. With cars and movies and most of the luxuries, modern conveniences and civilized attitudes we have today. Yet it happened. And, yes, of course, it could happen again. It does, in fact; “ethnic cleansing” has occurred in Bosnia and Africa.

Amongst the cast of real-life characters there was one odd, infuriatingly flighty standout. Her name was Martha Dodd, daughter of William E. Dodd, who served as the American ambassador to Germany for a number of years. Martha was pretty and promiscuous, and spent her time in Germany bedding as many attractive men as possible — Nazi or otherwise. At first she was sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Then she became disenchanted and switched her attentions to communist Russia, which she considered an “ideal” way of life. She married an American financier, but became a Soviet spy! Eventually she and her husband fled the United States. They died in Prague many years after the war. Martha was kind of a thoughtless idiot, but as she kept popping up throughout the book, I wondered if her story might make an interesting film? The heroine doesn’t always have to be nice, after all.

In any case, Martha is only one of many who populate the pages of “Hitlerland.” This is an important, chilling book.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-201203221700–tms–lizsmittr–x-a20120323mar23,0,997613.story

Washington Post:

“Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power” by Andrew Nagorski

By Gerard DeGroot

WaPo, March 16, 2012

… The cover boasts that the book contains some big names, including George Kennan, Charles Lindbergh, Jesse Owens, Edward R. Murrow, Sinclair Lewis and Richard Helms. But they in fact have small parts. The meat of the testimony comes from lesser figures such as the journalists Sigrid Schultz and Hubert Knickerbocker, the embassy official George Messersmith, and the military attache Truman Smith. Their recollections are bulked out with some fascinating trivialities.

As Nagorski points out, Berlin was, during the interwar period, the most interesting and exciting city on Earth. A sublime and cutting-edge culture was combined with peculiar politics, skyrocketing inflation and a lot of kinky sex. The political drama was rendered all the more fascinating by the shenanigans of a clown called Hitler whom few observers took seriously. Americans were welcomed because they represented the New World, a state of aspiration for Germans. Given the inflation, American dollars were powerful, making the frolics these visitors could enjoy in this land of fantasy all the more intense.

Americans reacted to Hitler rather as any other nationality did. First they ridiculed him, then they expressed grudging admiration for the order he brought to Germany. Later, they turned a blind eye to his anti-Semitism, excused his craving for territorial expansion and doubted his appetite for war. A few warned of Hitler’s threat, but they were largely ignored.

Most Americans tolerated German racism precisely because it was directed at Jews. The most striking feature of this book is how easily these visitors grafted themselves onto the prejudices of their hosts. Typical was Donald Watt, who arrived in Germany in 1932 to organize a student exchange. He convinced himself, on no evidence, that “relatively few” Jews were mistreated and decided that the main cause of anti-Semitism was that “a large proportion of all business was in Jewish hands.” In Berlin, hating Jews was the equivalent of high fashion. …

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/hitlerland-american-eyewitnesses-to-the-nazi-rise-to-power-by-andrew-nagorski/2012/03/02/gIQAEOtBHS_story.html

More Reviews:

Early Warnings: How American Journalists Reported the Rise of HitlerThe Atlantic – Mar 13, 2012

Turning a blind eye to the Nazi terror – Minneapolis Star Tribune – Mar 10, 2012

Bestiality Brothels On Rise In Germany


brothels spur call for animal sex ban

http://www.thelocal.de/society/20120203-40531.html

 

Animal sex abuse is on the rise in Germany, with bestiality brothels being set up across the country, according to a state animal protection officer demanding stronger laws to protect mankind’s furry and feathered friends.

Madeleine Martin, the animal protection official for Hessian state government, said the law needed to be changed to make sex abuse of animals – known as zoophilia – a crime.

“It is punishable to distribute animal pornography, but the act itself is not,” she told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily paper on Friday.

“There are even animal brothels in Germany,” she said. Sex with animals was being increasingly seen as a lifestyle choice, and thus more acceptable.

“The abuse seems to be increasingly rapidly, and the internet offers an additional distribution platform,” she said.

She said the justice authorities had found it exceptionally difficult to convict a man from Hesse, who had offered pictures and instructions for animal sex abuse over the internet.

Zoophilia must be completely banned in the reformed animal protection law,” said Martin, referring to the governments plan to rework that section of the law.

Sex with animals was banned until 1969, when the animal protection law was introduced, but failed to include a specific ban on zoophilia, the Frankfurter Rundschau said.

Martin said the current legal situation makes it too difficult for authorities to intervene – an animal has to be shown to have massive injuries before the animal protection laws prescribe action.

The Local/hc

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