For whatever reason, this combo of posts is about as funny as anything I've read on BigSoccer for a long time. Sir Wrexy! The Royal Ducks!
Well wrexy is important, but then so are the Ducks. I do know how you feel, the Bears did lose in the Super Bowl.
Hitler rejected neo-Paganism. He probably wasn't a Christian, but as I said in another thread, the topic of National Socialism and religion is a complex one and certainly far away from the usual clichés you can find in popular culture. Neo-Paganism and Occultism, while being favoured by some high ranking officials - Heinrich Himmler would be to name - were far from being majority views. The Nazis never rejected Christianity and made wide use of Christian symbolism. The German Christian movement is also of note here. As a start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_beliefs
That's a question that's impossible to answer. People had various reason for joining the Nazis, and the Nazis targeted various demographics. There were Nazis who were radical atheists and held anti-Christian believes, on the other hand there can be no doubt that there also were many Nazis who saw themselves as faithful Christians. Of course there were core "values" (anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism, rejection of democracy, extreme nationalism, racism, militarism...) of the Nazi ideology, but those didn't mean that they had to be shared by everyone. There were NSDAP members who joined the party because they were Nationalists, but didn't feel comfortable with the party's position on anti-Semitism. One of the biggest mistakes non Historians often do when dealing with National Socialism (as well as Italian Fasciscm, btw) is to assume there was ONE ideology. An article on the German Christian movement, from the website of the University of Marburg, mostly in German, but with an English abstract: http://web.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/kleine.html#1m
Surely, the one defining element of many high ranking nazis is that they were all as nutty as a fruitcake. I don't think we can establish much from their belief systems, such as they were.
Yeah, I'm really getting sick of all the Holocaust denial comparisons (a favorite of some Iranians, for some reason). A little common sense, please! Should Rushdie be knighted? Like everyone else on the planet (save a couple of mullahs and 5-10 others), I've never actually read his books. I assume he wins the prize for least read best selling author of all time. The key question is whether his work is as meritorious as Elton John's.
Yeah, good shout. One is an interpretation, (albeit totally one-eyed), of 'fact', (sort of), and the other is a piece of literature. Hey! Nobody's as meritorious as 'Dame' Elton's!!!
Thinking about it further I think that's essentially my point... that I doubt many will consider a lot of the literature created today 'great' in any lasting sense. In other words I don't think Rushdie will be read, (or enacted), as long Joyce, Proust or Ibsen.
Impossible? I doubt that. Ugh. I don't think anyone has ever implied anywhere that there was ONE ideology shared by every single person who joined the Nazis. I'll be blunt. Your answer implies a very stupid question. Either you think I'm a moron or you are unwilling to give a quality answer.
PS - I find it amusing that the link you provided specifically goes out of it's way not to make the same mistake you did. "German Christians" an expression which of course does not include all and any German Christians, but only those who specifically sought to combine Germanness with Christianity during the Nazi period"
The Nazis weren't a homogenous group. Especially in religious matters, which I thought to be the main topic of interest here, there is no clear consensus among historians. The core believes of National Socialism are layed out in Hitler's Mein Kampf - those are the believes one can expect to be shared by most members and supporters. Other than that, you had various sub-ideologies ("left-wing national socialism", Occultism, Neo-Paganism, Positive Christianity, Atheism) - and especially on the local level official party policy had far less influence than generally thought. I can quote the party program on religion, but this program lost almost all of it's importance after 1933: "We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: The good of the state before the good of the individual." I'm not exactly sure what kind of "quality answer" you want. One can list the widely recognized major ("mainstream") characteristics of NS, like anti-semitism, but those can also be looked up in every book on the topic or even on Wikipedia. But for a question like "what did the Nazis believe in" you'll either get a very general answer or a list of various fractions - if you are especially interested in the topic of NS and Christianity/religion, there are also various books that cover this subject: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=55161057430311 (I haven't read this one myself, but judging from the reviews, this should be an interesting read). When it comes to religion, one would need to list the believes of individual persons, or at least sub-groups. And finally, there was the big majority of party members who continued to believe in the same they did during the time of the Republic. Here we have statistics, e.g. when it comes to the party voters, the party was especially successful among protestants, far less so among Catholics, but I don't think that "the average Nazi was a protestant, small town middle class nationalist anti-semite who was opposed to Socialism and democracy" was the kind of answer you were looking for either.
What mistake did I make? I was talking about the German Christians - which is the specific name of an organization who combined their idea of Christianity with National Socialism and had a membership of arround 1 million people in 1933. http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Ar...erger2/The_Double_Cross/the_double_cross.html Ok, I didn't give a definition - the German Christian movement is not the same as Christians in Germany as a whole, but other than that...
That's the thing. It was a highly overrated book. It probably would have been long forgotten by now had it not been for the fatwa fuss made over it.
because someone thought his literature made him worthy. Maybe it was because of his services to the private security industry. I don't know, but I do know it wasn't for angering muslims. Hitler used Christianity for his own ends. He did not carry out his acts because of Christianity, nor did he pretend to be doing so. There is no comparison to those who call for murder and claim it is required by their religion. Besides, an awful lot of christians were widely opposed to Hitler's acts. I assume there must be large groups of muslims speaking out against muslim extremists. Perhaps you could tell me about them.
One thing to remember is that a lot of this is simply political theater. For example, whenever there is some issue that annoys radical Moslems, you can count on "Islamic Rage Boy" to show up. Fist in the air, nostrils flaring in self righteous rage, he is the very model of the Third World Moslem angry at the deprecations of the West against his poor society. Yet is you pull back, it usually is the case that it is all a put up job -- at some of these demonstrations of rage, the photographers outnumber the protestors. But before we chalk it all up to the press or the neocons or the Jews trying to defame Islam to justify a war on terror and more depreciations, innocent people have died from this anger, priests in Turkey, nuns in Somalia, Christians in Pakistan, Shia Moslems in Iraq for example. And Rushdie still has a price on his head.
There's a British (Iranian) stand-up comedian called Omid Djalili. As he says, he often appears in films playing 'third terrorist from the left'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkBQEfxJ58 Watch from about 1 minute in or, if the sounds too bad, the one below from about 4 minutes. It's part of the same tour so it's the same material, obviously. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmRRC4QU-As&mode=related&search=
I never claimed that the Nazis were a Christian or even religious organization, as I said before leading figures like Hitler and Himmler certainly weren't Christians. Especially among high ranking officials there were also various known Atheists. But my whole point is that we shouldn't claim that all crimes that were committed were done by a few prominent figures because it makes us feel better. The majority of party members was at least nominally Christian (we are talking about a mass party here), there were thousands of priests in Germany that were known Nazis and preached that "the Jews murdered Jesus". The party's religious wing had one million members at one time. Religion wasn't the primary cause of the Holocaust - sure. But it's way to easy to claim that "the Nazis were Pagans/Atheists etc. just like Stalin".
I think the issue is that the Nazis exploited an undercurrent of anti-Semitism that has existed in Europe since the Roman days. This anti-semitism was sometimes connected with Christian, sometimes not. By the same token, the communists could be just as anti-semetic and used it for their advantage too (and in an extremely ironic fashion, as many of the communist leaders starrting with Marx himself were themselves ethnically, though not practicing Jews). But Nazism was somewhat more. While communism was the bastard child of the Enlightenment, and the Flanagism of Franco harkened back to a pre-enlightenment "Catholic Spain", Nazism harkens back further, to a pre-Christian Europe. It contains elements of ancient paganism and gnosticism with modern nationalism and a sort of confused socialism, all tapping into the undercurrent of resentments that built up over 1500 years.