Those Nazi American Christians again:

Posted by Stuka on March 10, 2005, 12:21 AM | #

The Serbs did not carry out “mass murder.” In fact, one of the most frequently repeated lies about the war, the discovery of so-called mass graves containing 4,000 victims attributed to Serb aggression, has been disproved.

Posted by John S Bolton on March 10, 2005, 01:06 AM | #

This is another indication that the left cannot use rational arguments in favor of moving towards their dystopia. It is not demented imitativeness, but proceeds from a real poverty of arguments on the left, that they are found to be only capable of using the ad hominem, false dilemna, slippery slope smear approach. They have to use an irrational approach like;‘only those who want the mass murder of minorities, could be against doing everything for the disadvantaged minorities as can be gotten away with today’. Also, it can’t be quite as explicit as just above, because the false dilemna loses the argument for them, as does the ad hominem smear approach, and the slippery slope they aver is not in accordance with the facts of history. If our society is still at the top of the slippery slope, while leftists have cried fascism and imminent genocide for generations, in what rubber sense of the word fascism are we on the slipslope of? The right must claim victory in the debate, at each appearance of one of the above leftist approaches.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 10, 2005, 03:03 AM | #

The right must claim victory in the debate, at each appearance of one of the above leftist approaches.

These approach are dear to all liberals, including those of the right.  Anyone who reifies a civil reading of freedom above all things (whether that freedom is constituted in terms of the individual, class, group or race) is operating too narrowly to survive debate with a thinking Conservative.

Posted by John S Bolton on March 10, 2005, 03:44 AM | #

Mass murdering socialism of the extreme and less extreme left, such as communism and nazism, were movements of scholars and officials with no Christian or priestly element to speak of. They were pagans and materialists, and loose mystics. In Germany the Nazi movement was also called the student movement. They polled ~40% of the vote at the University of Breslau in 1933. The blood on the hands of the government professoriate and the officialdom that they flattered, cannot be washed away by trying to blame the churches. All the advocates of genocide for almost two centuries have identified themselves as socialists. Egalitarianism is the most dangerous doctrine for setting societies on track for the mass murder of millions, as shown by the communists, especially the khmer rouge.

Posted by John S Bolton on March 10, 2005, 04:25 AM | #

The statement that all the advocates of genocide called themselves socialists, comes from Cambridge scholar George Watson’s “Never Blame the Left” (usable search term), but this appears to refer to Europe from 1849 to some time after the middle of the 20th century.

Posted by Svigor on March 10, 2005, 05:28 AM | #

The Serb Hoax:
http://www.exile.ru/feature/feature63.html
http://www.exile.ru/shite/86/kosovo.html
http://www.exile.ru/pr/pr63.html

a bit on the OSCE
http://www.exile.ru/feature/feature99.html

Posted by Svigor on March 10, 2005, 05:35 AM | #

Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38e753605be9.htm

Posted by Effra on March 10, 2005, 07:20 AM | #

A real conservative does not care enough about politics to be willing to pay the taxes needed to finance large-scale persecutions, let alone volunteer to give them a hand. We are quietists. We don’t think others are so much worse than we are. We instinctively mistrust all generalisations, sloganeering, mob movements, obtrusive professions of loyalty (even to things we hold dear) and calls for everybody to say and do the same things at the same time. Our interior lives are more important.

Increasingly I doubt whether anyone who does not think the main purpose of this life is to fit himself for salvation can “bellyfeel” conservatism. One Lifers are as dodgy as One Worlders. The Vale of Tears will never turn into Utopia. As the Red Queen said, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.

This habit of mind makes conservatives very good at spotting the impostures and encroachments of “left” and “right” activism—it’s all been done many, many times before—but very bad at resisting them.

Posted by ben tillman on March 10, 2005, 01:01 PM | #

All the advocates of genocide for almost two centuries have identified themselves as socialists.

They have to use an irrational approach like;’only those who want the mass murder of minorities, could be against doing everything for the disadvantaged minorities as can be gotten away with today’.

But it’s not irrational; it’s perfectly rational if you hold a value system in which the “other” is to be exterminated.  The hole in their reasoning is egomorphism, assuming that we think as they do.

Posted by MD on March 10, 2005, 08:17 PM | #

Shirer’s “Rise and Fall” has an entire section on the Nazi regime entitled “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.”

The standard registration card for Nazi party members had a written option for the renunciation of Christian belief.

And, Mr Bolton is quite right about the liberal establishment in Nazi Germany; it was completely supine before Nazism.  The liberal government bureaucrats that occupied most of the government prior to Hitler’s rise stayed on afterward and did their duty as if nothing had happened.  There were no revolts at the universities, or among the lawyers, or the doctors, or the civil servants.  Of course, Heidegger, the philosopher, became rector of Freiburg Univ under the Nazis.

The bomb plot against Hitler was conceived and executed by monarchists and conservatives, not socialists or liberals.

Posted by MD on March 10, 2005, 08:34 PM | #

In Gitta Sereny’s “Into That Darkness,”—a book about Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka—at page 281, Sereny says:

“Bormann first wrote it, apparently on his own initiative; and as subsequently edited (probably in the autumn of 1941) and sent out as a circular to all Gauleiters. . . .  The letter, entitled “Relationship between National Socialism and Christendom,” is a careful and careful analysis of all forms of Christian dogma, and a recommendation for the total abolition of all established religions, based on logic, patriotism and a kind of pantheism likely to appeal to wavering minds.  It is—to my knowledge, at least—the most outspoken denunciation of organized Christianity to emanate from any Nazi leader. . . .  There can be no doubt that the letter reached the Vatican.  Equally, there can be no doubt that the Vatican already knew . . . that the opinions expressed were current among the Nazi leadership.”

The letter was admitted as evidence in the Nuremberg War Trials for the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg Doc D-75).

Posted by John S Bolton on March 11, 2005, 12:41 AM | #

When we see the left trying to blame Christian conservatives for being the impetus behind the Nazi movement, thus exonerating the official culture which had been promoting socialism aggressively through public education, it should be clear that we are dealing with propaganda. A leftist propaganda offensive of more than 70 years duration is being mindlessly or shamelessly repeated. For more than 70 years the left has failed to persuade the majority of any nation that our alternatives are limited to the equivalents of Hitler or Stalin. Even if they could do so; it is manifestly a false dilemna. Rational arguments for a move towards stalinism are not to be found; which is why the false dilemna has to be resorted to. The slippery slope misrepresentations are also mendacious in that they proceed upon this false dilemna. History consists of almost nothing but a record of alternatives to those two kinds of tyranny. The right should claim victory in the debate whenever the left uses that false dilemna, and invoke the facts of history, which do not support any such absurd limitation of alternatives. It also shows a vicious dissociation from morality on the left, if their crippled moral imagination cannot draw from history or even journalism, the possibility of alternatives to the worst mass murderers in the history of the world.

Posted by seelow heights on March 11, 2005, 02:22 AM | #

But it’s not irrational; it’s perfectly rational if you hold a value system in which the “other” is to be exterminated.  The hole in their reasoning is egomorphism, assuming that we think as they do.
Posted by ben tillman
The “other” is to be exterminated(or perhaps “only” subjugated or dispossesed) as means to achieve an impossible utopia. Not even the NS or the Khmer Rouge were for were for extermination for its own sake. Or at least they put forward ideological justification for mass murder. Without doubt there were those who simply used the ideology as justification for their own savage impulses. And since nothing changes in human nature the same is true today.