Scott – Actually,the Christian response to pagan Nazism was contemptable.The Evangelical Lutherans folded up very soon,and the Catholics were not much better(the Vatican was very anxious to cut deals with Mussolini and Hitler.
You can’t just claim that this or that party was without any grievance or rational fear of events outside Nazism at the time, therefore their behavior in ignoring the nazis or acquiescing to Nazi leaders, even supporting Nazis, was contemptable. This era in Europe was not like a couple of 1930s Nazis showing up at the door of a contented couple in a 2009 well-off, safe Denver suburb asking for support of 1930 policies suddenly transplanted to America.
And the “bashing” of those that worked with the Nazis tends to beat up Christians, evil capitalists, and US isolationists…and overlooks the “inconvenient” parties that allied with the Nazis to achieve common objectives:
1. The Poles and Slovenes wanted the Partition of Czechslovakia and backed Hitler.
2. Zionists cooperated with Nazis, even co-founding training camps for Zionist goals with the intent of them learning skills needed to move on to Palestine. Hitler youth and young Zionists working hand-in-hand erecting tents and building machine shops and industrial skills, farming skills shops…
3. The Soviets had German artillery and tank Divisions invited in to use Soviet ranges. French, Dutch, Pole, Belgian, Norweigan, and Brit defenders faced a German war machine 1939-mid 1941 fueled by Comrade Stalin’s Baku basin oil.
4. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Jews on the Left in America who strongly opposed Nazis then vigorously imposed the Party line to stifle critics of the deal their Comrade Stalin had made. Until June 1941, Jewish criticism of Nazis in leftist Jewish hotbeds like NYC and LA
was quashed a good deal by Jews beholden to communism and the Soviet Union.
As for the “Christian failure”, the “Pope’s failure”, and the “capitalist failure” to act…let us remember that those were the groups being killed off by the tens of millions by the Communists prior to and during the Nazi’s rise. 18-20 million even before the Great Purge of 1937-38. Aborted revolutions in Hungary and Germany showed the revolutionaries there, also disproportionately Jewish – as was the case in Russia – had extensive death lists prepared of Christian leaders, laity, landowners, and business owners. In Russia, most of the Orthodox churches priests and leaders were killed, their churches dynamited while synogogues were left unmolested. In the Spanish Civil War, and in the Soviet half of Poland, and in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia -Catholic priests were executed in large numbers by Red Terror NKVD liquidation squads as class enemies and counter-revolution enemies.
That they “didn’t do enough” about the Nazis appears to have been a completely rational call on the threatened groups part. They judged the Nazis to be odious, but not at all the existential threat that the Russian, Jewish, and other ethnicity communists were to them. And judged, as the French, Brits, and Americans did, that Germany lacked the strength on paper to even be a threat to take over France by force, let alone all of Europe. “SOBs, but Our son’s of bitches” that would serve as a bulwark against the Red Terror that would kill many Christians and capitalists for sure if they took over, and starve nations trying to collectivize them as happened in the Ukranian Holmodor. That was the consensus thinking. They underestimated Germany’s competent ferocity, the depth to which the Nazis would sink in war. But their decision to fear the communists more than the Nazis, prior to WWII, was rational.
As was, the Nazis are only 3rd on the list of
20th Century Democides.
1st-Chicoms
2nd -Soviets
3rd – Nazis
4th – Muslim Radicals & Turks
5th – Japanese military slaughter of civilians
6th – Cambodian Communists
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Scott – As for Bonhoeffer,he dithered around for years(as did Helmuth James von Moltke)about killing one man to save millions.Why is he a hero?
“Dithering” and not getting rid of a guy or thinking about it until things really got sour – infers that the “ditherers” were gifted with 20-20 hindsight. In Hitler’s case, the “prescient” argument that he should have been purged sometime in his successful years 1932 -1942 for the mess he would cause in the future years 1942-1945. And the purgers must be magically capable of ignoring the great successes happening in the early years by anticipating future failure.
And later, with wartime penalties for treason, defeatism escalated to “no appeal” rapid execution death penalty offenses, Germans opposed to Hitler faced the same magnitude of difficulty anti-Stalin forces in Russia faced – no public dissent countenanced, informers everywhere, a single wrong word to the wrong person – someone you read wrong or who later betrayed others when caught – could spell doom.
We see the same intimidation at work in the Muslim world and even in non-Muslim Europe – pervasive physical fear to denounce the radical Islamists, the default is to keep your head down and not speak up or risk your life by being discovered to be a threat to them. Quite unlike the dissent Americans can make in perfect safety. Contemptable for not knowing the future or not resisting when you know you will die for doing so if caught?
It’s like saying all Iraqis are contempable people for not removing Saddam Hussein. Lack of foresight? It’s sort of like saying voters failed in electing Eliot Spitzer given his future sex scandal, or Juarez failed in the 1858-61 Mexican Civil War and was no hero because he “dithered” for years before entering his phase of decisive action at great personal risk.
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