“Christmas is now celebrated, however imperfectly, in most lands where the worst tyrants tried to eradicate it and its celebrants,” Mark Tooley writes at the American Spectator. But for much of the 20th century, that wasn’t the case:
Today, unsurprisingly, North Korea and Saudi Arabia actively suppress Christmas. But much of the rest of the world seems to have at least secular versions of the holiday. Although still officially communist, Chinese cities are more and more decorated with holiday trees and lights, partly reflecting the country’s growing economic integration with the West, partly reflecting the growing Christian population. Much of the world’s Christmas ornaments are now manufactured in China.The old Soviet Union tried to displace Christmas by highlighting New Year’s Day as the alternative Winter holiday. (In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Christmas follows New Year’s.) Of course, Christmas outlasted Soviet communism. East European communism collapsed in 1989 in time for Christmas. Romania’s brutal tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu and his equally brutish wife were tried and executed by the “people” on Christmas Day. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day, providentially ending the Soviet Union.
Less than two decades later, how easy to forget that the last century was dominated by totalitarian monster regimes like the Soviet Union. Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and German National Socialism together murdered more millions than all that century’s wars combined. The Nazis usurped Christmas by emphasizing its supposed pre-Christian pagan origins. This Christmas, we can celebrate, among so much else, despite the world’s current travails, that the great totalitarian murder machines are, for the most part, gone.
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To get a sense of the Nazis warped Christmas to fit their ideology, check out this heavily-illustrated 2009 article at the London Daily Mail: “How Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas.”
Related: At Roger Kimball’s blog, it’s Christmas, Antonio Gramsci style: “’Tis the Season to be Politically Correct.”
But then, isn’t that the case 24/7, 364 days a year?
Check out Google’s home page today. The Holiday that dare not speak its name. Google has icons representing a mysterious disconnected world-wide celebration of… what is not exactly clear.
“The Nazis usurped Christmas by emphasizing its supposed pre-Christian pagan origins.”
“Supposed”? How about truthful? Not the Nazis — the Daily Mail piece makes pretty clear what a militaristic hash they made of it — but the Christians: this holiday has origins centuries older than what Rome eventually appropriated for the birth of their savior god. I would hope this would be fairly common knowledge by now; the research is pretty overwhelming.
I suppose Mr. Tooley *could* be saying the Nazis hijacked Christmas itself — not its “origins” — by fuzzing up its myths back to suit their purposes. But it sure doesn’t read that way.
Looks to me like the National Socialists messed up the ancient winter solstice celebration about as badly as the Christians; they both stole and distorted for their own purposes.