"Hitler remained to the end a socialist"; the Führer "was totally irreligious and" wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter's Square

There is much to learn from Paul Johnson's history of the 20th century, not least the appalling truth about the "Republican" camp during the Spanish Civil War; some unpalatable facts about FDR and his "vanity … compounded by an astonishing naivety"; and, most importantly, the many ways in which the autocrats of the left (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc…) and of the right (Hitler, Mussolini, Pétain, etc…) inspired, complemented, and even conspired with, one another.

Much of what we have learned turns out to be myths. What explains the rise of rightist fascism, and how does it differ from leftist communism?  According to Paul Johnson, there isn't much difference at all, and the reason for its rise in Europe was the genuine shock, by the general population as well as by the Left itself, over the disastrous results of Lenin's communist revolution in Russia, as much on an economic level as on a humane level. To counter the ruin and the atrocities of international socialism, the Left in Europe invented and turned to national socialism. (Vielen Dank für den Instalink, Kamarad Gail Heriot…)

Also fascinating is the thread that runs through the book, by which the expansion of the State in general and the appearance of "gangster statesmen" in particular took place in the wake of the disappearance of religion and moral absolutes in public life. 

"By early 1933, … the two largest and strongest nations of Europe were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and practiced, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its horrifying potentialities."

Perhaps the most interesting regarding Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) is that efforts by the Left to link Hitler and the Fascists with the Right's (and/or with the bourgeoisie's) religion and capitalism are the complete opposite of the truth. Not only were the Nazis and il Duce die-hard (even Karl Marx-quoting) socialists (in Hitler's case, a Leninist, according to Paul Johnson, and, in Mussolini's, virtually a Marxist), but the Germans engaged in "attacks on Christianity" and der Führer — who was simply "a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist" — had plans for the Pope to "be hanged in full pontificals in St Peter's Square."

Another piece of evidence that Hitler was in no way beholden to any part of the Judeo-Christian religion (danke zu Stephen Green): Christians Save Western Civilization From Islam — to Hitler's Regret: 

 … on Oct. 10, 732, one of world history’s most decisive battles saved Europe from becoming Islamic.  Interestingly, none other than Adolf Hitler regretted this development

 … the führer — who further accused Christianity of promoting “meekness and flabbiness” — believed what many in the West continue to believe, particularly those whose worldview is colored by Hollywood: that, historically, Christianity only bred weak and feeble men, especially when compared to more “robust” peoples, in this case, Muslims.

 Back to Paul Johnson and praise about his books:

Beginning with Modern Times (1985), Paul Johnson's books are acknowledged masterpieces of historical analysis. He is a regular columnist for Forbes and The Spectator, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. 

That was Amazon's description of the late author and below, find excerpts from the first half of Paul Johnson's history book of 780 pages:

Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) Chapter One  A Relativistic World 

Marxism, now for the first time easing itself into the seat of power, was another form of gnosticism claiming to peer through the empirically-perceived veneer of things to the hidden truth beneath 

 … Feelings of guilt were thus not a sign of vice, but of virtue

 … But personal guilt-feelings were an illusion to be dispelled. None of us was individually guilty; we were all guilty

 … The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too, part passu.   … The effect of the Great War was to enormously to increase the size, and therefore the destructive capacity and propensity to oppress, of the state.  Before 1914, all state sectors were small, though most were growing, some of them fast

Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum … In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology … The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster-statesmen to emerge 

Chapter Two  The First Despotic Utopias

Religion was important to him [Lenin], in that he hated it.  Unlike Marx, who despised it and treated it as marginal, Lenin saw it as a powerful and ubiquitous enemy. … 'There can be nothing more abominable', he wrote, 'than religion.'

 … His writings abound in military metaphors [cf. LBJ's "war against poverty"]

 … Italy was also a semi-industrialized country, where Marxists were looking for ways to speed up the revolution… These ideas were taken up by [another] Italian Marxist, Benito Mussolini … Again, there is the endless repetition of activist verbs, the militaristic imagery. In the years before 1914, from his impotent exile in Switzerland, Lenin watched the progress of Mussolini with approval and some envy 

… Certainly there was nothing legal about the way in which Lenin came to power.  But it was not a revolutionary uprising either.  It was an old-style coup, or as the Germans were soon to call it, a putsch

 … In fact the real tragedy of the the Leninist Revolution, or rather one of its many tragedies, is that it revived a savage national method of government which was actually dying out quite fast.  In the eighty years up to 1917, the number of people executed in the Russian empire averaged only seventeen a year, and the great bulk of those occurred in the earlier part of the period.  Wartime Russia in the last years of the Tsars was in some ways more liberal than Britain and France under their wartime regulations.  The republic abolished the death penalty completely, although Kerensky restored it at the front in September 1917.  Most of Lenin's own comrades were opposed to it

 … It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the decision to use terror and oppressive police power was taken very early on by Lenin, endorsed by his chief military agent Trotsky… As early as 1901 Lenin warned:  'In principle we have never renounced terror and cannot renounce it'

 … Lenin had thus displaced one ruling class by another, the party 

One of the most depressing features of the Lenin regime, as Rosa Luxembourg had feared, was the almost conscious reproduction of the very worst features of Tsardom.  The Tsars, too, had periodically experimented with 'responsible government', a cabinet system like Sovnarkom … In each case, the combination of autocracy plus bureaucracy wrecked the system, as the Tsar dealt privately with individual ministers instead of allowing the cabinet to function.  The whiff of Divine Right was too strong in the Tsar's nostrils, just as now the whiff of history,  and its handmaiden the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, was too strong in Lenin's.  When it came to the point, he did not want responsible government', any more than he wanted any kind of legal, constitutional or democratic restraints on his decisions

This meant crushing all opposition within the party, the third stage in the building of Lenin's autocracy

 … [When] Lenin had his first stroke … his work was already complete.  He had systematically constructed, in all its essentials, the most carefully engineered apparatus of state tyranny the world had ever seen.  In the old world, personal autocracies, except perhaps for brief periods, had been limited, or at least qualified, by other forces in society:  a church, an aristocracy, an urban bourgeoisie, ancient charters and courts and assemblies.  And there was, too, the notion of an external, restraining force, in the idea of a Deity, or Natural Law, or some absolute system of morality.  Lenin's new despotic utopia had no such counterweights or inhibitions.  Church, aristocracy, bourgeoisie had all been swept away.  Everything that was left was owned or controlled by the state.  All rights whatsoever were vested in the state.  And, within that state, enormous and ever-growing as it was, every single filament of power could be traced back to the hands of a minute group of men — ultimately to one man

 … Lenin hated the essence of democracy, and he regarded its forms merely as a means to legitimize violence and oppression … an unrestricted license for terror

 … Lenin's legacy was a solidly built police state surrounded by economic ruins

 … [In the West] There was genuine fear of a Red Terror, for the catholic newspapers were full of Lenin's atrocities and the Russian famine.  Mussolini was not personally identified with the violence [in Italy].  On the contrary:  he seemed to many to be the one to stop it

 … Once installed, [Mussolini] did not make any of Lenin's obvious mistakes. He did not create a secret police, or abolish parliament.  The press remained free, opposition leaders at liberty.  There were some murders, but fewer than before the coup 

 … One senses that Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a Marxist, albeit a heretical one; and to him 'revolution' was meaningless without large-scale expropriation, something the bulk of his followers and colleagues did not want

 … a new kind of mountebank dictatorships, less bloodthirsty than Leninism and much less dangerous to property.  But to Marxists it was much more serious.  By the mid-1920s, there were fascist movements all over Europe.  One thing they all had in common was anti-Communism of the most active kind

 … Mussolini's Italy was now an empirical fact, just like Lenin's Russia, inviting the world to study it, with a view to imitation, perhaps, or avoidance

 … No utopia was emerging in Italy, but the contrast with hungry, terrorized Russia was striking,  To those north of the Alps, who rejected alike the Bolshevism of the East and the liberalism of the West, the Italian renaissance seemed to offer a third way

Chapter Three  Waiting for Hitler

 … Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil:  Satan. But modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race

 … The new anti-Semitism, in short, was part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of individual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt — the revival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous, even bestial, of instincts

 … German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a 'back to the countryside' movement … Unlike Marxism, which was essentially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a cultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism

 … Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion stripped of Christianity because it had been Judaized by St Paul, 'the Rabbi'

 … Hitler was totally irreligious and had no interest in honour or ethics.  He believed in biological determinism, just as Lenin believed in historical determinism.  He thought race, not class, was the true revolutionary principle of the twentieth century, just as nationalism had been in the nineteenth.  He had a similar background to Lenin

 … Hitler, like Lenin, was the product of an age increasingly obsessed by politics … in that barren and cheerless world, he, like Lenin, was a master…

 … Like Lenin and still more like Stalin, he [Hitler] was an outstanding practitioner of the century's most radical vice:  social engineering — the notion that human beings can be shovelled around like concrete

 … in important respects he remained a Leninist to the end

Chapter Four      Legitimacy in Decadence

William Temple    …     was the first of the Anglo-Saxon clergy to opt for progressive politics as a substitute for evangelism of dogma, and was thus part of that huge movement which, as Nietzsche had foreseen, was transforming religious energy into secular Utopianism

Chapter Eight      The Devils

 … [Stalin's] colossal exercise in social engineering, the destruction of the independent Russian peasantry … [it was] time to exact a dreadful revenge on the rural multitudes who had humbled Soviet power

 … the way in which the pursuit of Utopia leads the tiny handful of men in power abruptly to assault a society many centuries in the making, to treat men like ants and to stamp on their nest

 … Collectivisation was a calamity such as no peasantry had known since the Thirty Years' War in Germany

 … The cost in Russian lives was staggering [and led to the] re-feudalization of the Soviet peasantry, who then formed three-quarters of the population

 … It was Stalin who pointed the way to Hitler

 … Under the influence of Stalin, the German CP made no real distinction between the Social Democrats ('Social Fascists') and Hitler.  Their leader, Ernst Thälmann, told the Reichstag on 11 February 1930 that fascism was already in power in Germany, when the head of the government was a Social Democrat

 … Blinded by their absurd political analysis, the Communists actually wanted a Hitler government, believing it would be a farcical affair, the prelude to their own seizure of power 

 … The events immediately preceding Hitler's accession to power are curiously reminiscent of Lenin's rise albeit the first used the law and the second demolished it — in that they both show how irresistible is clarity of aim combined with a huge, ruthless will to power

 … It had taken Hitler less than five months to destroy German democracy completely, about the same time as Lenin.  Not a soul stirred

 … Hitler had thought that Lenin's greatest economic mistake had been to order party members to take over the running of industry, and kill or expel its capitalist manager

 … There is no evidence that Hitler was, even to the smallest degree, influenced by big business philosophy.  He bowed to business advice only when convinced it would forward his military and external aims.  He regarded himself as a socialist, and the essence of his socialism was that every individual or group in the state should unhesitatingly work for national policy.  It did not matter who owned the actual factory so long as those managing it did what they were told.

 … German socialism, he told Herman Rauschning, was not about nationalization:  

'Our socialism reaches much deeper.  It does not change the external order of things, it orders solely the relationship of man to the state … Then what does property and income count for?  Why should we need to socialize the banks and the factories?  We are socializing the people.'

… Far from big business corrupting his socialism, it was the other way around

 … some Catholic peasants … refused to give the Nazi salute and greetings, and bitterly resented attacks on Christianity

 … Hitler also appealed to the moralistic nature of many Germans, that is, those who had a keen desire for 'moral' behaviour without possessing a code of moral absolutes rooted in the Christian faith

 … The notion of obeying 'iron laws' or 'a higher law', rather than the traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian one.  Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a race one.  Just as the Soviet cadres were taught to justify the most revolting crimes in the name of a moralistic class warfare, so the SS acted in the name of race — which Hitler insisted was a far more powerful and central human motivation than class.  Service to the race, as opposed to the Marxist proletariat, was the basis of Nazi puritanism

 … By early 1933, therefore, the two largest and strongest nations of Europe were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and practiced, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its horrifying potentialities

 … Like Lenin he [Hitler] was a gnostic

 … From the end of 1936 to the second half of 1938, Stalin struck at every group in the regime  …        He had been in secret negotiations with Hitler since 1935.  The following year he persuaded the Nazi government to concoct forged evidence of secret contacts between the Soviet army commander, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and Hitler's generals; it was done by the Gestapo and transmitted by one of its agents

 … the furtive contacts which the security services of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia maintained throughout this period.  On the whole, European Communists were safer in their own fascist homelands than in the 'Socialist mother-country'.  Roy Medvedev, the independent Soviet Marxist historian, noted:  "It is a terrible paradox that most European Communist leaders and activists who lived in the USSR perished, while most of those who were in prison in their native lands in 1937-8 survived.'  

 … In social engineering, mass murder on an industrial scale is always the ultimate weapon:  Hitler's 'final solution' for the Jews had its origins not only in his own fevered mind but in [Stalin's] collectivization of the Soviet peasantry

 … The attempt by Western intellectuals to defend Stalinism involved them in a process of self-corruption which transferred to them, and so to their countries, which their writings helped to shape, some of the moral decay inherent in totalitarianism itself, especially its denial of individual responsibility for good or ill

Chapter Nine      The High Noon of Aggression

 … Germany, Russia and Italy had gangster dictatorships

 … Behind [PM] Negrin's complaisant ignorance, the Communists — that is, Stalin's secret police — took over Republican Spain.  The result was one of the major political tragedies of the century

 … The purge coincided with Stalin's massacre of his own party in Russia, and it bore all the marks of his methods [what with] the former Barcelona convent of St Ursula [becoming] known as 'the Dachau of Republican Spain'

Andrès Nin, the POUM leader [was] the model for Orwell's hero Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four … During the rest of 1937 and well into 1938, many thousands of POUM members, and indeed other Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons.  They included a large number of foreigners  …  Among those … who managed to escape were Orwell and Willy Brandt, the future German Chancellor

 … It was one of Spain's many misfortunes at this time that her … Civil War coincided with the climax of Stalin's great terror 

 … Stalin was having his leading agents killed all over the world in 1937-8.  And, as in Russia, virtually all the creatures who helped him to take over the Left in Spain, and then to terrorize it, were murdered in turn       

… Throughout the Spanish war, Stalinism was assisted not only by superb public relations but by naivety, gullibility and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals

 … The intellectuals of the Left did not want to know the objective truth; they were unwilling for their illusions to be shattered.  Many of them treated 'the Party' with abject subservience

Chapter Ten          The End of Old Europe

 … The lesson he had learned from the First World War and from Ludendorff's analysis of it was that it was essential for Germany to effect a break-out from its Central European base, which could always be encircled.  In Hitler's view, Ludendorff had just begun to attain this, at Brest-Litovsk, when the 'stab in the back' by the home front wrecked everything.  Hence his real plans began where Brest-Litovsk ended:  the clock was to put back to spring 1918, but with Germany solid, united, fresh and, above all, 'cleansed'

 … Being a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the dynamic of history was race.  The dynamic was interrupted when race-poisoning took place

Chapter Eleven      The Watershed Year 

 … Hitler and Stalin played chess with humanity

 … when the moral restraints of religion and tradition, hierarchy and precedent, are removed, the power to suspend or unleash catastrophic events does not devolve on the impersonal benevolence of the masses but falls into the hands of men who are isolated by the very totality of their evil natures

 … Hitler was not in the business of liberation.  Like Stalin, he was in the business of slavery
in essential respects they were fellow ideologues, pursuing Utopias based on a fundamental division of mankind into élites and helots [in which the] Einsatzgruppen [would form] the most audacious exercise in social engineering ever conceived

 … The Alps would be the boundary between 'the German Empire of the North',  with a new 'Germania' as its capital, and 'the Roman empire of the South'. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St Peter's Square

 …He [Hitler] would forbid smoking, make vegeterianism compulsory, 'revive the Cambrian art of knitting', appoint a 'Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs' and an 'Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects'

 … With the prospect of death on all sides of him, the ordinary Russian soldier had no real alternatives but to fight to the last

Stalin's ruthlessness, combined with Hitler's folly, ensured Soviet survival.  Yet, as generalissimos, the two men were strangely alike, in their total indifference to casualties, however calamitous, in their refusal to visit the fronts (in both cases for security reasons) and in their personal direction of their campaigns

 … On a moral plane Stalin was no better than Hitler; worse in some ways

 … Always pro-Soviet, [FDR's] bellicosity increased sharply once Russia entered the war

 … In his twilight, Mussolini reverted to his Lenin-type totalitarian socialism, always the bedrock of his political philosophy, and preached the destruction of 'plutocracy' and the supremacy of syndicalism.  By the end of march 1945 he had carried through, albeit largely on paper, a socialist revolution which had nationalized all firms employing more than one hundred workers

 … It was essentially Hitler's decision to fight the war to its inevitable finish.  For a time at least Stalin was always prepared to revert to the Nazi-Soviet Pact.  He offered to negotiate with Hitler in December 1942 and again in summer 1943

 … Hitler remained to the end a socialist, though an eccentric one.  Like Stalin he lived in hideous discomfort

 … It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Hitler's aims could not be achieved except through war and under cover of war.  Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler believed in ultimate social engineering

… [For Hitler] the massacre of entire categories of mankind was nothing more than a distasteful duty.  Lenin seems to have cultivated exactly the same attitude

 … Because Stalin believed, as Lenin had done, that a Soviet Germany would emerge from the war, he underplayed German war-guilt in his public statements and encouraged Western supporters to do the same.  His private feelings were quite different

 … The links between the Nazi and Soviet security forces had always been strong, and were cordially resumed after the war.  Himmler had always admired Soviet police methods (he believed Stalin had distinguished Mongol blood from Genghis Khan's horde) and his head of the Gestapo, SS General Mueller, probably went to work for the NKVD.  Many of the Prussian police officials, who had served Goering, went on to high office in the police of the East German People's Republic, which Stalin in due course set up

 … The Japanese POW record, in fact, was much worse than the Nazis': of 235,000 Anglo-American POWs held by Germany and Italy only 4 percent died, whereas of the 132,000 in Japanese custody 27 percent died … In fact Japanese atrocities against Indian and Filippino soldiers and against Chinese, Malay and other non-white civilians were infinitely more savage and numerous than any inflicted on the Anglo-Americans

 … the confusion of moral issues by the end of the war was fundamentally compounded by the presence, in the ranks of the righteous, of the Soviet totalitarian power.  There was scarcely a crime the Nazis or the knights of Bushido had committed, or even imagined, which the Soviet regime hand not also perpetrated, usually on an even larger scale.  It ran precisely the type of system which had produced the war and its horrors.  More specifically, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 and the Japanese-Soviet Pact of April 1941 had made the Axis aggressions possible.

 … Nevertheless, Soviet Russia not only judged the guilty of the war it had helped to create but emerged as its sole beneficiary

Chapter Thirteen      Peace by Terror

 …Roosevelt also wanted to bypass Churchill, whom he thought an incorrigible old imperialist, incapable of understanding ideological idealism

 … This vanity, so reminiscent of Chamberlain's belief that he could 'handle' Hitler, was compounded by an astonishing naivety.  He did not believe Stalin wanted territory  … The menace which Roosevelt's blindness constituted to the post-war stability of Europe

 … The Cold War may be said to date from the immediate aftermath of the Yalta Conference, to be precise from March 1945

 … Eastern Europe and most of the Balkans were lost to totalitarianism.  It was unclear for some time whether Western Europe could be saved too

 … it was Stalin's greed which led him to overplay his hand and so reverse the process of American withdrawal.  And it was greed not only for land and power but for blood.

 … Like Stalin, [Tito] was an experienced gangster familiar with the rules of survival

 … Of course the reason Truman wanted UN backing [for Korea] was that he took America into the war without getting Congressional approval first

 …  If the Cold War began over Poland it reached maturity over Korea and embraced the whole world.  In effect, Stalin had polarized the earth

 … Stalin hated 'Westerners' in the same way Hitler hated Jews, using the same term:  'cosmopolitanism'.  This explains the extraordinary thoroughness and venom with which, in 1945-6, he destroyed or isolated in camps all those who had been in contact with non-Soviet ideas:  not only prisoners of war but serving officers, technicians, journalists and party members whose wartime duties had taken them abroad

 … [Stalin] was running what the Chinese Communists were later to term a Cultural Revolution, an attempt to change fundamental human attitudes over the whole range of knowledge by the use of naked police power

Chapter Fourteen      The Bandung Generation

Until the early 1950s, the Americans had controlled the UN.  Their first mistake was to involve it in Korea, especially through the forum of the General Assembly, a pseudo-representative body which spoke only for governments, a growing proportion of which were undemocratic.  Korea broke Trygve Lie, the Norwegian Secretary-General, who was loyal to the principles of the old Western alliance.  He resigned when the Russians boycotted him and got the Left to stir up his own Secretariat against him.  At this point the Western powers should have dropped the UN and concentrated instead on expanding NATO into a world-wide security of free nations.

Chapter Fifteen      Caliban's Kingdoms

The former colonies [after WWII] became the superlative prey for the great human scourge of the twentieth century:  the professional politician

No Pasarán has linked to and quoted Paul Johnson numerous times, notably from his History of the American People.

• NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY (2022 & 2021): Is Thanksgiving a "Myth" or a "Problematic Holiday"? What Nobody Tells You About Indians and Other Native Americans

• AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY (2021): The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence

• WHITE HISTORY (2021): Thanksgiving: Can the Élites' Contempt for American History and for the Voters' Desires in the 21st Century Be Traced All the Way Back to the Jamestown and Plymouth Colonies?

• JIMMY CARTER (2008): 32 years ago a Democrat politician with very little experience "transcended" politics as usual and was lifted on waves of good will to the White House

• NIXON & WATERGATE (2018 & 2017): The Troubling Parallels Between Today and the Watergate Era: The media was determined to "reverse the verdict of the election by non-constitutional means"; Trump 2016? No, Nixon 1972 • Nixon and Watergate: What Do the MSM and History Books Fail to Tell Us About the 1970s Scandal?

• JFK'S 1960 CAMPAIGN (2020, 2012, 2008): Evidence of Fraud in 2020 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign • Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign • Stealing the Election: The 1960 and the 2008 Contests Compared

• EUROPEAN HISTORY (2005, 2020): The Europe of totalitarianism, in which communism, fascism and Nazism competed to impose regulations on every aspect of human existence • Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Ghastly — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?

• ANTI-AMERICANISM (2004, 2006 (twice)): The truth is, any accusation against America that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia • No American citizen should stoop to apologize for being American; doing so is nothing short of despicable • "Go sell peanuts in the Métro"

 
HITLER AND CHRISTIANITY

• 卐mas Caroling: The Extremes Hitler Wanted to Go To in Order to Replace Christianity with the "Religion" of National Socialism.

• Adolf Hitler in Religious Surroundings: Is There Really Evidence That the Führer Was a Christian?

• Worshipping Little Else But the Aryan Race, Hitler Abhorred the Christian Faith and Wanted to Replace Christmas with the Pagans' Yule

• "Out With Jesus" — During His 12 Years in Power, Hitler Tried to Ban the Tradition of Christmas

Related: • Jonah Goldberg: Just for the record, Hitler detested Christianity

• Ray Comfort, whose “Hitler, God and the Bible” points out Hitler devised a master strategy to crush all Christian churches, explains that it would be either ignorant or disingenuous to call Hitler a Christian:

In a special Christian Broadcasting Network program, Comfort cites the head of Hitler Youth, Boldur von Schirach, who said, “Destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist Movement.”

 … The CBN program explains how Hitler put on a religious, even Christian, façade, until he became powerful.

 … But later one of his inner circle acknowledged: “I’m absolutely clear in my own mind, and I think I can speak for the Fuhrer as well, that both the Catholic and Protestant churches will vanish from the life of our people.”

• How Hitler's Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas (danke zu Ed Driscoll)

 … the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.

 … 'Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis - after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,' Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. 'The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.'

The exhibition includes swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles shaped like Iron Cross medals.

The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin.

The symbol that posed a particular problem for the Nazis was the star, which traditionally decorates Christmas trees.

 … The is a legacy of the Nazi Christmas. The wartime version of the traditional Christmas carol 'Unto us a time has come' is still sung. 'The Nazis took out the references to Jesus and made it into a song about walking through the snow,' Breuer said.

Surprisingly, German churches put up little opposition to the Nazification of Christmas. 'You would have expected them to protest loudly and insist that it was a Christian festival,' said Breuer. 'But instead they largely kept quiet, out of fear.'

 

ROF's Worldwide Freedom Initiative Event Draws VIPs From the Entire Western World to Paris

Text by Evelyne Joslain. Patron d'émission du Libre journal du Nouveau Monde à Radio Courtoisie, Evelyne Joslain est l'auteur d'une poignée de livres sur les États-Unis. Son prochain sortira d'ici quelques mois.

Photos by Republicans in France members Marie-Thérèse Foreau (MTF) and video by Paul Reen (PR). Several speeches can also be seen on the website of Republicans Overseas France and on the YouTube page of ROF's WFI 2023 TV. 

Par ailleurs, sous la signature de Etienne Fauchaire, l'édition française de The Epoch Times présente deux articles sur l'Initiative Mondiale pour la Liberté et sur son invité surprise.

Une fois n'est pas coutume… In France, where usually nothing of interest ever happens for us people of the right, a fascinating conservative conference was held on November 10, under the aegis of Republicans Overseas France or ROF, a conservative American group, and the Danube Institute, a think tank created in Budapest by John O'Sullivan, an Anglo-American who began his political and literary career as a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. 

The event was initially planned at the town hall of the 6th Arrondissement in Paris but, only two days prior to the conference, the city councilors cavalierly dis-invited some 200 people without explanation and without apology, for the convoluted reason, it would seem, that the panelists and guests registered included “controversial personalities”. Randy Yaloz, head of ROF, managed to pull off the feat of quickly rerouting all those dangerous right-wing extremists to the 56th floor of la Tour Montparnasse, thus ensure the smooth running of the conference. A nice swap, as it happens, what with magnificent panoramas of the French capital that the town hall could not have offered. 

Edy Iverson and Paul Reen on the 56th floor of la Tour Montparnasse (MTF)

The general theme was libety and more precisely our individual freedoms, all of which are under serious attack on a daily basis by that domestic enemy which is known as Wokism, the undisguised goal of which is the destruction of our traditions and our civilization and which turns out to be never anything other than pure neo-Marxism. Evil being at work in all our Western democracies, the meeting was international with speakers hailing from the United States and from all over Europe. 

Organized by Republicans Overseas France and the Danube Institute, the Worldwide
Freedom Initiative drew VIPs to Paris from the USA and every part of Europe (MTF)

Emphasis was placed on the forms taken by censorship and the suppression of the right of free speech which are rife first and foremost in the media, duly aligned with the narratives of left-leaning governments. André Bercoff reminded us that we must constantly censor ourselves to avoid that our remarks be "judicialized" and that if there is no gulag, the modern world's dissidents are nevertheless dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" at the slightest misinterpretation of a single word. All because “we must not weaken the social consensus”, as they said during the Covid terror, explained Florian Philippot wryly (in fact a political consensus against the citizenry) and that on all subjects. Thus, debate is prohibited on one subject after another, from climate and immigration to race and sexual orientation, with the EU dominating the roost. On this side of the Atlantic, “daring to talk about FREXIT would be an obscenity”. Les Pariotes' Philippot, who had discretely put his anti-Americanism in his pocket (as had Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan), also noted that the national media engage in the systematic denigration of Donald Trump while the Bidens' mafia clan is treated to the respect and the hand kissing of a Sicilian Godfather. 

But FREXIT is possible, assured Charles Gave without convincing anyone! This indirectly, when the United States, weighed down by its external deficit and inevitable dedollarization will have to abandon Europe, thus forcing us to reactivate our military and our nuclear forces, which will lead to an explosion of the detested super state... 

Another theme was precisely that of international organizations, the EU, the UN, supranational courts, and NGOs, all of them so corrupt and harmful. Rob Roos of Holland's MEP demonstrated how the erosion of true democracy is the end result of "the social engineering of non-elected technocracies and bureaucracies, extremely busy within these organizations to create from the top down absurd regulations which take precedence over the rights of nations in their desire to impose the same legislation and common standards on all of us." The frenzied environmentalism of Eurocrats now demand the sacrifice of Dutch livestock and the depoldarization or removal of the dikes protecting the flat country (much of which is under sea level), all of which is to restore the rights of Mother Nature or Gaia, if you prefer...

Rob Roos's Dutch compatriot Sieta van Keimpema added that the green EU puts our food security at risk. She emphasized that Ursula von den Leyen was the zealous agent of the Davos Forum and the Green New Deal which demands the elimination of insecticides and agricultural de-fertilization! The madness must stop because rebuilding after the ecological damage will be extremely difficult if not impossible. Jeremy Stubbs, deputy editor at Causeur magazine and head of British conservatives in Paris, a fine connoisseur of the sexual ideologies dear to the left, specified that the decline of the West went hand in hand with the economic decline generated by climate myths whose real goal is the final destruction of capitalism by condemnation of all "extractionism", the act of "extracting our carbon-based energies from the sacred body of Mother Nature" — obviously a capital environmental sin, even a double sin because it turns out also to be "an eco-feminist crime" committed by the patriarchy! 

Mike Johnson was supposed to appear via Zoom, but because the new Speaker of the House had
laryngitis, his speech was read by Republicans Overseas Vice-President Jim Gosart (MTF)

Romania's Dorin Jacob and Hungary's Balaz Orban informed us about the Visegrad group: former Soviet republics are more resistant to wokism "quite simply" because they duly recognize it as communism reincarnate and they have already been through that once, thank you very much! No question "of destroying our traditions, our identities and our sovereignty" this time around through the insanity of “cancel culture”. And we know everything Soros is capable of when it comes to subversive immigration, himself a stateless Hungarian Jew and the "worst import ever to hail from the America." Israel's Mark Zell insisted on the incestuous alliance (typically Islamo-leftist) between environmentalists and Hamas terrorists, to which he could have added the "transgender" movement since Judith Butler, high priestess of the "gender" movement, publicly supported the "Queers for Palestine" group … Zell pointed out that the conflict unleashed on October 7 is well in the woke (Marxist) line, with "oppressors" and "oppressed" (and too bad if the two can be easily happily reversed) and he affirmed that this attack targets the Free World and not Israel alone. 

Another theme extensively covered was the ravages of Wokism in education. Reconquête's Éric Zemmour deplored that General de Gaulle completely missed the cultural fight and let the communists take over national education. However, the craziest and most dangerous woke theories are constructed in the academic world, resulting in "studies of gender, race, and other “devastated minorities”," with diplomas and a pseudo-scientific status allowing elected officials an excuse to develop laws! “Would you dare challenge science? Infernal, implacable machine whose goal is absolute power over populations.” Laurence Trochu, founder and president of a brand new “conservative party”, recalled that "the deconstruction of our traditions and values (and therefore our inevitable decline) has been institutionalized from Mitterrand onwards: suppressing classical culture so that everyone is equal" (the famous woke equity) and the vague educational theories of Adorno (from the Frankfurt School) introduced a the time. All this, aggravated by the intensive use of digital technology in the past ten years, resulted in the abolition of critical thinking and in impoverished language, therefore impoverished thought, therefore impoverishment of the very aptitude for reflection. America's Quisha King, president of Moms for Liberty, present via a Zoom screen, explained how parental rights have been violated since the Biden Administration has insisted on the mandatory teaching of Critical Race Theory which “teaches children to judge others by the color of their skin” alongside another compulsory subject in school, transgender theory.

Videoconferencing, generally speaking a boring process, also allowed us to have the surprise of the day, Donald Trump live at 4 p.m. sharp, who congratulated us all on our presence and on our determination to fight against the malignant forces of Wokism. 

Among the attendees was Corey Lewandowski, who helped organize a special guest call-in (PR)

The 45th president was followed by Nigel Farage who recounted how he had been punished for having organized BREXIT, finding himself from one day to the next "debanked", banned from his bank accounts like a common criminal, but whose counterattack has proven its effectiveness since a court has just condemned the bank to an apology and a fine. The UK Independence Party honcho recommends that everyone "attend the general meetings of their bank and question the choices aligned with interests opposed to those of the depositaries". This echoed the statement of Canada's Tamara Lich who described how Canadian truckers were mercilessly deprived of access to their bank accounts, on the completely illegal order of Justin Trudeau, for daring to organize a massive demonstration in 2022 against his cabinet's vaccination dictates, since woke governments monopolize power by launching collective fears (Covid, climate…) which allow them to exercise undue rights". This confirmed the warnings of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan earlier in the morning on the aims of the EU and the French government for 2028: a digital euro and the imposition of a Chinese-style control system. Control our money first, said the Debout la France leader, and thereafter all our decisions with "the establishment of a spider's web without our knowledge". 

Surprise guest at the Paris event (MTF)

On the question of manipulated elections, another strong point of Wokism, David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski assured the audience that the pivotal states could not repeat the electoral theft of 2020 because "precautions have been taken with lawyers ready to intervene in each polling station". Fine, but recalling that the left has all the billionaires of its side, it is hard no to but wonder if the Republicans will not be ready in 2024 for the 2020 election instead of for the 2024 election, and if the Democrats have not come up with an even more diabolical plan than its successful 2020 conspiracy.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (PR)

The day ended with a speech from Kristi Noem. This young woman, Governor of South Dakota, spoke of her personal, impressive experience, then confirmed that food insecurity is a national and even an international security risk. The threat to America does not come from the EU but from the great friend and partner of the elites' transnational corporations, Comrade Xi at the head of the CCP, which buys millions of acres of arable land without encountering obstacles, which shows that the question of leadership is essential. For example, Noem was the first in her state to ban "the Chinese application TikTok which is to the mind what [Chinese] fentanyl is to the body." Then she reminded everyone that America owes a lot to France, its thinkers, philosophers, and artists, and that the Statue of Liberty bears the inscription "Lady Liberty enlightening the world". "Also, we must re-educate the people who have been brainwashed and who let themselves be carried away by their emotions." Then she concluded with strong words: "Freedom is this which characterizes true democracy, also when you defend freedom and true values against the wokist crowd, know that you will have lived a life full of meaning".

These are the terrorists and the conspiracy theorists that a woke French town hall attempted to muzzle.

ROF's Randy Yaloz and the Mount Rushmore State's Kristi Noem (MTF)