John R. Houk
© May 27, 2016
I have noticed over the years that Lefties (aka Liberals,
Progressives, Left Wingers, Moonbats, etc.) have smeared Conservatives as Nazis
or Hitler-equivalents. The irony is Hitler’s Nazism was a Left Wing Movement
that employed the nationalist-corporatism of Fascism which is ultimately State
control of the industrial complex.
Karl Marx’s Communism envisioned Industrial workers rising
up in revolt over the means of production and who controls those means. Which
ultimately played out of State ownership of everything from property to the
industrial complex under the illusion that the people (aka workers or the
proletariat) controlled society’s living conditions and the mode of production.
In essence the State assumed the role of the people by proxy.
Nazism was not so much interested in the illusion of who
controls production as much as every citizen serves the needs of the State
paying homage to the elites of State that made the lives of true citizens
prosperous. Consider how the word Nazi Party gained its appellation:
Acronym Finder
NSDAP stands for
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NAZI Party)
1930, noun and adjective, from
German Nazi, abbreviation of German pronunciation of Nationalsozialist (based
on earlier German sozi, popular abbreviation of
"socialist"), from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei "National Socialist German Workers' Party,"
led by Hitler from 1920.
The 24th edition of Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (2002) says the word Nazi was favored in southern Germany (supposedly from c. 1924) among opponents of National Socialism because the nickname Nazi, Naczi (from the masc. proper name Ignatz, German form of Ignatius) was used colloquially to mean "a foolish person, clumsy or awkward person." Ignatz was a popular name in Catholic Austria, and according to one source in World War I Nazi was a generic name in the German Empire for the soldiers of Austria-Hungary.
An older use of Nazi for national-sozial is attested in German from 1903, but EWdS does not think it contributed to the word as applied to Hitler and his followers. The NSDAP for a time attempted to adopt the Nazi designation as what the Germans call a "despite-word," but they gave this up, and the NSDAP is said to have generally avoided the term. Before 1930, party members had been called in English National Socialists, which dates from 1923. The use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, etc., was popularized by German exiles abroad. From them, it spread into other languages, and eventually was brought back to Germany, after the war. In the USSR, the terms national socialist and Nazi were said to have been forbidden after 1932, presumably to avoid any taint to the good word socialist. Soviet literature refers to fascists.
The 24th edition of Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (2002) says the word Nazi was favored in southern Germany (supposedly from c. 1924) among opponents of National Socialism because the nickname Nazi, Naczi (from the masc. proper name Ignatz, German form of Ignatius) was used colloquially to mean "a foolish person, clumsy or awkward person." Ignatz was a popular name in Catholic Austria, and according to one source in World War I Nazi was a generic name in the German Empire for the soldiers of Austria-Hungary.
An older use of Nazi for national-sozial is attested in German from 1903, but EWdS does not think it contributed to the word as applied to Hitler and his followers. The NSDAP for a time attempted to adopt the Nazi designation as what the Germans call a "despite-word," but they gave this up, and the NSDAP is said to have generally avoided the term. Before 1930, party members had been called in English National Socialists, which dates from 1923. The use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, etc., was popularized by German exiles abroad. From them, it spread into other languages, and eventually was brought back to Germany, after the war. In the USSR, the terms national socialist and Nazi were said to have been forbidden after 1932, presumably to avoid any taint to the good word socialist. Soviet literature refers to fascists.
The Wikipedia
entry for “Nazi Party” goes into greater detail if you are
interested. At Wikipedia the focus is more on nationalism combined with racism
more than Socialism.
Either way, Nazism and Communism were political vehicles to
control the masses under the direction of an elitist oligarchy.
Matt Barber has written an essay that I located on
Constitution.com highlighting that Adolf Hitler was an anti-Christian
pretending to be a Christian with Left Oriented Socialism in the backdrop.
Who does that sound like today in 21st century
America? Since Barber doesn’t mention any modern day similarities, allow me to
name a couple:
·
Barack Obama
·
Hillary Clinton
JRH 5/27/16
*******************
No, Hitler Was Not a Christian… He Was More Like
Modern-day “Progressives”.
By Matt Barber [webpage lists him as Guest Columnist but at
the end the essay attributed Barber]
May 26, 2016
“[T]he only way of getting rid
of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.”
– Adolf Hitler
Yes, there have been evil men who have done evil things in
the name of false Christianity. To a limited degree, Adolf Hitler was one such
man. Still, and as even he frequently admitted outside the public eye, he was
no Christian.
As a counterweight to stigma associated with the tens of
millions slaughtered in the 20th century alone under the atheist regimes of
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al., the secular left is quick to thunder, “But
what about Hitler? He was a Christian!”
Bad news, kids. Herr Führer was your guy, too.
“I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian
lie,” Hitler confessed (audio transcribed in “Hitler’s Table Talk” [1941-44]).
“It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who
made concessions in this field [to be labeled a Christian].”
Did Adolf Hitler ever call himself a Christian? Certainly.
He did so, and as he would later admit, for the singular purpose of
disseminating political propaganda.
“To whom should propaganda be addressed?” he wrote. “It must
be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. … The whole art consists in
doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is
real.”
The Nazi Germans of the 1930s and ’40s are not alone in
swallowing Hitler’s Christianese-peppered puffery. Today’s secular- “progressive”
establishment likewise bandies about a handful of carefully crafted Hitlerian
quotes released for public consumption. His “pro-Christian” proclamations in
“Mein Kampf” and elsewhere, for instance, were universally a perversion of
biblical Christianity leveraged for the sole purpose of justifying the extermination
of the Jewish people.
“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior
as a fighter,” he wrote. “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 [the Jews] to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers
and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.
… For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.”
That was the extent of Hitler’s plastic “Christianity.” The
Bible, always taken out of context, served as a twisted weapon to justify the
mass slaughter of over 11 million Jews, Christians, disabled people and other
“undesirables.”
In reality Hitler insisted,
“In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to
exist together.”
What Brutal Hitler and Softer Modern Day Progressives
Share in Common
Sounds an awful lot like today’s American church-state
separatists. Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, for example, held, “I am
for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself. …
I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class,
and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”
Indeed, the ACLU’s promotional materials similarly advocate
anti-Christian intolerance and mirror Hitler’s directive that, “Socialism and
religion will no longer be able to exist together.” “The message of the
Establishment Clause is that religious activities must be treated differently
from other activities to ensure against governmental support for religion,”
imagines the “American” so-called “civil liberties” union.
That’s viewpoint discrimination and it’s unconstitutional.
This is secular socialism in a nutshell. It’s a religion,
and its devotees, be they Nazi Germans or American Leftists, are Communist
Manifesto-thumping fundamentalists.
“There is something very unhealthy
about Christianity,” Hitler opined. “As far as we are concerned, we’ve
succeeded in chasing the Jews from our midst and excluding Christianity from
our political life. … The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the
coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both
are inventions of the Jew. … Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one
could imagine nothing more senseless.”
Indeed, Hitler’s robust anti-Christian hatred lives on
beyond the death of the Third Reich. Modern-day progressives like Hillary
Clinton, though, tend to take a kinder, gentler, more surreptitiously
totalitarian approach: “Rights have to exist in practice – not just on paper,”
the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee recently said in
the context of some phantom “right” to exterminate undesirable infants. “Laws
have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated
cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
Yikes. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
While Hitler was more direct, he
nonetheless shared Hillary’s secular socialist vision: “We’ll see to it that
the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of
the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and
the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.”
Sound familiar? Progressive “truth,” of course, invariably
means Christian torment.
Hitler, borrowing from socialist icon Karl Marx, said that
all Germans must “free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the
only people who are immunized against the disease.” Marx, a hero to the secular
socialist left, famously called religion, “the opium of the people.”
Hitler a Christian? No chance.
Anti-Semitism, Islam and a Dash of Darwin
Moreover, like the preponderance of today’s similarly
anti-Semitic secular progressives, Hitler, too, was an apologist for Islam. As
America’s own Dear Leader has done, Hitler partnered with Iran, present-day
“Palestine” and other Islamist regimes in the shared goal of eliminating the
Jews:
“The world had fallen into the
hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!” he fumed. “Then we
should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which
glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone.
Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone
prevented them from doing so!”
Hitler also parroted the godless ideology of modern
atheists. Like so many of today’s secular progressives, he was an avowed
materialist, neo-Darwinian evolutionist and hardhearted God-denier: “When
understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men
know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited
worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.”
“Christianity, of course, has
reached the peak of absurdity,” he said. “And that’s why one day its structure
will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more
Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.”
Two thousand years and still waiting.
And so Hitler endeavored to assist “natural selection” and,
as he wrote in “Mein Kampf,” “establish an evolutionary higher stage of being.”
He placed his hope in Germany’s youth because they were “absolutely indifferent
in the matters of religion.”
A beloved Hitler Youth marching song captured the Führer’s
heart on matters of Christ and Christianity:
We follow not Christ, but Horst
Wessel,
Away with incense and Holy Water,
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth.
Away with incense and Holy Water,
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth.
Today’s progressive “social justice” warriors are angling
for a dystopian, Swastika-free repeat. Their hope, too, lies in the youth
(witness the socialism-fueled anarchist insurgence occurring on college campuses
nationwide).
Like then, progressive secular socialists endeavor to rule
the world.
And “Christianity alone,” to update Hitler’s own words, will
“prevent them from doing so.”
Matt Barber is
founder and editor-in chief of BarbWire.com.
He is author of “Hating Jesus: The
American Left’s War on Christianity,” a columnist, a
cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having
retired as an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer,
Matt has taken his fight from the ring to the culture war. (Follow Matt on
Twitter: @jmattbarber).
________________________
American Left can be seen in Nazi History
John R. Houk
© May 27, 2016
________________________
No, Hitler Was Not a Christian… He Was More Like
Modern-day “Progressives”.
