Notice that the late Dutch politician and thinker Pim Fortuyn completely escapes categorization based on any of Meyjes’ implicit or explicit categories. Perhaps this is why the left here (and the woefully testosterone-challenged lapdog right, of course) has maintained a total silence, ever since Pim’s assassination, on that momentous event in modern European history — none of them understands what Pim was or how to take what happened to him.

Another comment: the left’s perpetual “putting down” of Ronald Reagan as being “a B movie actor” is akin to that shocking crack James Carville made about “dragging a twenty-dollar bill through a trailer park” in his attempt to put down and totally discredit Paula Jones — the left are snobs, and disdain lower-class people except the ones who accept their overlordship. It matters not whether the humble or lower-class people in question are hard workers and do everything they’re supposed to do — in the left’s eyes they remain vulnerable to the charge that they have “humble” livelihoods. William Shakespeare was also a B actor. Does the left feel he was trash because of that? Being a B actor is honest and respectable employment. St. Paul, surely one of the greatest men of the past three thousand years, was a humble tentmaker by trade, and one could easily put together a list a mile long just off the top of one’s head, of the truly great who had humble livlihoods. Once again, the left indicts only itself with that particular criticism of Reagan.

The significance in the Times story for me doesn’t lie in what Meyjes thinks is the good. Yes, he’s wrong about that, but the significant point for me is that he does not deny that Hitler made a moral choice. At some point in time, Meyjes thinks, Hitler chose to follow Mayr instead of Max, and thereby sowed the seeds of his later actions. In point of fact, at least so far as we can tell from the piece, Meyjes’ story is an utterly conventional morality tale: frail, fallen man chooses evil over good. It’s been done to death (though it’s no less true for all that).

The reason I find this to be the more significant point can be seen by contrasting it with a statement about the film taken from a JDL website and quoted in this same Times article with a completely straight face, as if it says nothing remarkable:

“The film is in bad taste. There is nothing human about the most vicious, vile murderer in world history.” — JDL website

Oh, really? There was nothing human about Adolf Hitler? What was he, a German Shepherd?

What does this say about the JDL? According to them, Hitler was not a human being, but something less; a lower life form. He didn’t make a free and rational choice, but simply followed where his dirty, subhuman nature led him. Doesn’t that sound remotely familiar? Isn’t this what someone would say who thinks he’s so far above and beyond human frailty that he’s entitled to write other men out of the human race completely? Isn’t this in fact what Hitler himself would have said?

While I wouldn’t particularly object to someone saying that about Hitler when he was in power, it is funny to think of someone saying that even when speaking of the young Hitler before he became what he became. It’s almost as if people think that even when Hitler was a kid he had to have been non-human, a total demon.

Also, the JDL view would make it impossible to discuss Hitler in a rational way. If you said, for example, that “When Hitler began giving speeches for the German Workers party, he discovered remarkable oratorical powers in himself,” that would be treating Hitler as a human subject who possesses noteworthy talents, which would make you presumptively pro-Hitler for saying it (just as Pat Buchanan was called a Nazi for saying that Hitler had been a brave soldier in World War I).

There is something in the modern mind that wants to treat men with transcendent qualities—either for good or evil—as non human. Thus Mozart and Shakespeare are treated as though they were impersonal forces or vehicles of some natural talent not involving their own consciousness, rather than artists creating out of themselves and their experience. Thus each writer about George Washington, even though he says he wants to “go beyond the marble monument and find the man,” ends up treating Washington, once again, as a marble monument (though Washington was in fact one of the most interesting men who ever lived). And the same is true for a monster of evil such as Hitler. His evil came out of a specific human personality. We cannot understand that evil—his choice of evil—unless we understand him as a person. But, for some reason, this is something modern people don’t want to do.

This new movie does seem to attempt do so, but, unfortunately, in a predictably liberal way.

“It’s almost as if people think that even when Hitler was a kid he had to have been non-human, a total demon.” — Lawrence Auster

No, but that’s the point. There’s no “almost” about it. The JDL is literally claiming that Hitler was less than human, and that’s what they mean to claim. Consider: the very matter at issue here is Meyjes’ portrayal of Hitler as a fallen human being. This is what the JDL is objecting to. To portray Hitler as a tragically flawed human being is, they are saying, to make him a more sympathetic figure. But this they can’t have, and so they resort to the only course available to them, which is to lie: to write Hitler out of the human race entirely.

One thing at work is that Nazism and the Holocaust are a religion today, the earthly manifestation of an absolute. Like God they explain everything while also being utterly different from everything. It is therefore blasphemous to assimilate them to ordinary worldly events. If you talk about them in the wrong way in Europe for example you go to jail.

Mr. Newland’s relativistic description of Hitler as merely a “tragically flawed human being” unfortunately demonstrates why the forces of correct opinion feel justified in wanting to suppress any free discussion about him. As soon as normal discussion is allowed, someone will come along and treat Hitler as though he was no worse than Hamlet or Lear or Nixon or LBJ, who were also “tragically flawed.” The absolute condemnation of Nazism had been one area of the post-war West that had been a bulwark against relativism. Here at least was one thing that everyone would agree was evil, not just “tragic,” not just “mistaken,” not just “excessive.” But since, as Mr. Newland demonstrates, people can no longer be trusted to have that moral grasp any longer, the forces of liberal orthodoxy are not without reason in wanting to place any discussion of Hitler off the table.

Just to clarify what happened in this exchange, I said that the fact that Hitler was a human being should not be denied and that he ought to be understood as a human subject who chose evil. But when I said Hitler was “human,” Mr. Newland translated that into “tragically flawed,” as though one could not be both a human subject and evil.

I did not take Mr. Newland’s post quite the same way as Mr. Auster did (and as an aside, I apologize for the few times that have carelessly misspelled Mr. Newland’s name — I am incorrigible in that regard).

The infant Hitler was an innocent babe, the young Hitler was tragically flawed, and the old Hitler was a human monster who chose evil. It is the notion that this historicity is just inexplicable evil that we shouldn’t talk about that I take to be ths subject of the current discussion. So my own inclination would be to grant participants the benefit of the doubt on terminology and clarify what is actually meant.

I think that Matt is really on the mark here. When Hitler was a child, how could anyone know the path he would eventually choose to follow? Likewise, as a young man, one could discern ‘tragic flaws’ but the path to utter evil was yet to come. Only in full maturity is the naked face of evil visible for all the world to see.

I am honestly curious as to why Hitler is considered to be the most evil person who ever lived, as opposed to Stalin or Mao (who were actually responsible for a greater number of deaths). Of course, once this level of sheer wickedness is reached (commanding the slaughter of millions), it really gets difficult to set a standard by which we can judge who is the worst.

I’m not so sure the movie (which I haven’t seen) can claim historical accuracy in the first place. I have read accounts of Hitler’s early years that paint him as moderately successful in his Vienna years as a painter - that it provided him with a modest income. What is clear from all accounts is that the aftermath of World War I lit a fire in a man totally possessed by two ideologies. One was the worship of the state, a 19th century notion not limited to Germany but certainly promoted by German intellectuals. The second notion controlling Hitler’s mind had descended straight from Darwinism. Europeans had embraced evolutionary theory because it placed them at the apex of the human pyramid, a most rewarding feeling. There was plenty of supporting evidence too: Europeans led in science and technology, European colonialism dominated much of the world… Few liberals today would wish to recognize that the late-19th century German philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the father of the revered Waldorf schools, held the opinion that blacks living in the African jungle would need to go through considerable evolutionary development before ever being able to perform algebra.
A movie like this may be comforting to many liberals because it enables them to avoid asking the hard questions, such as: Wasn’t Hitler the product of a lot of bad ideas still current? Isn’t it leftists today who worship the state? Isn’t it leftists who are most dogmatically committed to Darwinism? And was Hitler’s movement really “far right”, or was it really more of a leftist movement if we consider (1) Hitler’s unquestioned commitment to all sorts of social welfare schemes (national health insurance, social security, etc.; and after all, Nazi stands for National Socialism); (2) the many similarities between Nazism, Soviet communism and the French Revolution, the latter two undisputed leftist movements. Hitler himself admired Stalin’s system and admitted to having borrowed a lot of his ideas.
Today one is almost worried about describing Hitler as anything but subhuman, but the danger of such doctrinaire thinking is that we won’t recognize the next Hitler when he comes along - as he already has, in Cambodia, in the Balkans, in several places in Africa. People are people, and all make bad choices. Some make expremely bad choices.

Wim asks:
“Wasn’t Hitler the product of a lot of bad ideas still current?”

An excellent observation.

Hitler certainly described himself as a freedom loving man who wanted equal rights among the Volk; an ideal thwarted in his estimation by evil international Jewish capitalists who had corrupted democracy into a tyranny. Looking at Hitler objectively as an historic human being is impossible for the modern leftist in part because of close ideological proximity. Hitler saw the Jews as the demonic subhuman Other preventing the prosperity of equal freedom among the Volk, and it is one of the great ironies of history that Hitler and the Nazis now provide for the Left an actual demonic subhuman Other to substitute for the one he had to contrive out of the Jews to make his ideology work. Formally the ideology is almost identical but the Nazis really were demonic, so the longer the Left can maintain them as the subhuman demonic Other juxtaposed to the freedom and equality loving Left the longer leftism itself can remain viable. That is part of the reason why anything on the Right just HAS to be ultimately Nazi.

“Mr. Newland’s relativistic description of Hitler as merely a “tragically flawed human being” unfortunately demonstrates etc…” — Lawrence Auster

There is nothing relativistic about describing Hitler as exactly what he was: a tragically flawed human being. It is the tragic, fallen, flawed condition of man that in fact makes him susceptible to the temptations of the devil. Why Mr. Auster thinks that admitting this fallen, tragic condition of humanity implies that no one is culpable for their actions is unclear.

“As soon as normal discussion is allowed, someone will come along and treat Hitler as though he was no worse than Hamlet or Lear or Nixon or LBJ…” — Lawrence Auster

*All* men are tragically flawed, Mr. Auster. All men. That’s the whole point. That doesn’t mean all men choose to do what Hitler did. But it does mean that all men may *potentially* choose to do what Hitler did…including those who make up the JDL. To say otherwise is to put oneself at odds with Catholic truth. Being at odds with Catholic truth, of course, will not concern the JDL much, but it ought to be of some concern to Catholics.

“But since, as Mr. Newland demonstrates, people can no longer be trusted to have that moral grasp any longer” — Lawrence Auster

This is a serious accusation and a direct attack upon my moral character, Mr. Auster. As such, I feel justified in demanding that you put up or shut up. Please demonstrate for the studio audience here where I have tried to excuse Hitler from responsibility for his crimes, or have tried to downplay them in any way. I have not done so, and the reason I know I have not done so is that doing so would reflect the exact opposite of my opinion of the matter.

“Just to clarify what happened in this exchange…” — Lawrence Auster

Excuse me, Mr. Auster, but your “clarification” is pure fantasy. I wasn’t reacting to anything you said other than what I quoted. That’s why I quote things—because I have (perhaps stupidly) assumed that some people will make the connection between the quotation and my response to it. In the quotation, you used the word “almost,” and that’s what I was objecting to. It’s not “almost” as if the JDL (and others) think Hitler was not human. It’s *exactly* as if they think Hitler was not human. That was the sum and total of my response, as I think you will see if you go back and read it.

Mr. Newland and others have been pushing along a very good pointe, the Times story demonstrates just how pervasive is the notion which drove Hitler himself. The entire pantheistic notion that men are subsumed in the State and a person’s value is derived through the state.

Under this pantheistic notion personhood ceases to exist and natural rights and natural law have no place. Nazi national socialism was certainly not unique, the entire notion of nation states is based in the same principle. This pervasive nationalism, so intimately bound to socialist pantheism affects every major nation.

In the industrialized states, like the US, it is socialism where means of production and distribution are subsumed in the state and are in part delegated to and controlled by major industrialists and bankers. We may see ourselves as having private property, but try to use that private property without the proper permits, or without following the myriad of guidelines assigned to every conceivable type of production.

This same delegation by the nation state was how Hitler was able to bring in line the industrialists, and for the same reason it works in the US. It also is and was effective because it cynically used a proper right of man, that is right to property to boost production. When a man sees the means of production as his own, he will work to produce.

Negative eugenics and the reduction of certain persons to life “ devoid of value” was a logical direction of the pantheistic nature of hegelian socialism and pragmatically useful for the industrialists and state. When all people are subsumed within the nation state, it is also a logical direction that the nation state be a police state as well as useful for bringing into line the military.

Hitler was a child of his times, the Times article is a product of the same time; and while Hitler was perhaps far more vicious than most, he perhaps was only more powerful. Can we honestly know he was far more vicious than those beneath him?

We have seen total war practiced so many times by the nation states on their own populations and enemies as well as other horrors such as abortion on demand. The culture of death is the natural outgrowth of pantheistic nationalism, to place Hitler as somehow unique, is to deny our own culpability. Maybe not personal culpability, but certainly the nation state’s. The firebombing of Tokyo, was no less vicious than the gas ovens, it only received better press.

I found F. Salzer’s post quite reasonable (though not without areas in which I might quibble) up until this point:

“The firebombing of Tokyo, was no less vicious than the gas ovens, it only received better press.”

In the spirit of my own earlier comment, and in opposition to my instinct to condemn this remark in strong terms, I will instead simply ask what on earth F. Salzer intends in discursively setting up this obviously false moral equivalence?

“The firebombing of Tokyo, was no less vicious than the gas ovens, it only received better press.”

Nothing at all done by the Allies can nor does compare to the holocaust. The holocaust did not simply recive “better press”. It was genuinely more evil, to an incomparable degree, than anything dome by the Allies and America. Attacks on Japan by the U.S were legitimate acts of war against an enemy that had carried out an unprovoked attack and was bent on enslaving Asia and the Pacific. The holocaust was an illegitimate attempt to commit genoicde. There is no comparison. This kind of shallow moral equivalence is popular with the left and it demonstrataes a true lack of moral judgement. It is disturbing to find it being used on a forum devoted to the Right and to moral restoration.

Every poster in this thread would be advised to bring their concept of war into the 21st Century of post 911 reality.

The distinction between military and civilian operations has disappeared after an all too brief time in the human psyche.See:

http://www.counterrevolution.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi

for a reality check.

Correct url is:
http://www.denbeste.nu/essays/civilians.shtml

Matt writes:
“In the spirit of my own earlier comment, and in opposition to my instinct to condemn this remark in strong terms, I will instead simply ask what on earth F. Salzer intends in discursively setting up this obviously false moral equivalence?”

First off, I think this area of discussion would be better served over on the Struggle Continues Forum, so as to not get too far off track of mine and others somewhat narrowly issue.

But let me briefly write a few words,

The statement I made breaks down into several parts.

First I choose the firebombing versus gas ovens because the method of death was similar, as was the volume. Volume is relative, but I would contend the Cultural Revolution was not 5 times more vicious than the holocaust because it was 5 times the volume.
Second, was the Firebombing of Tokyo Just? I contend it violated Just War Doctrine. This makes the act materially vicious.
Third, is genocide, i.e. a form of eugenics more vicious per se than unjust vengeance against the innocent, which I contend played a decisive rational in the firebombing of Tokyo, ? St. Thomas writes:

I answer that, Vengeance consists in the infliction of a penal evil on one who has sinned. Accordingly, in the matter of vengeance, we must consider the mind of the avenger. For if his intention is directed chiefly to the evil of the person on whom he takes vengeance and rests there, then his vengeance is altogether unlawful: because to take pleasure in another’s evil belongs to hatred, which is contrary to the charity whereby we are bound to love all men. Nor is it an excuse that he intends the evil of one who has unjustly inflicted evil on him, as neither is a man excused for hating one that hates him: for a man may not sin against another just because the latter has already sinned against him, since this is to be overcome by evil, which was forbidden by the Apostle, who says (Rm. 12:21:”Be not overcome by evil, but overcome by good”

If Hitler’s motive was vengeance, as some contend, then they are morally equal, if it was on the other hand pragmatic and eugenic, vengeance is the greater evil per se. But because of all the unknowns of both the holocaust and firebombing, I place them as somewhat morally equal.

But my primary pointe for mentioning the firebombing versus holocaust is the overall cause, which is pantheistic view of man and the rise of the nation state. And to pointe out the pervasiveness of it.

Matt also writes:
“(though not without areas in which I might quibble)”
Please give your objections, I come here to learn, and the most affective way is for my thoughts to be contested when they are in error.

Looking back on it, I probably should have used the firebombing of Dresden, but chose Tokyo because my previous parallel example to national socialism was the U.S. and the fireboming of Dresden was under British command. Vengeance is much more clearly recognized as the reason for the firebombing of Dresden.

So if you all would prefer for the sake of arguement, substitute Dresden for Tokyo. The pointe I hoped to make works either way. And with Dresden perhaps better. Also it come less home to roost.

Sandy, I got through the first few paragraphs of the article you refer to and could go no further. If the author was trying to show that past history from antiquity to the start of the modern era means we should trash all attempts at making warfare less uncivilized, I’m really not interested. By that sort of logic, anything “can be” (and indeed “has been”) “proven.”

I couldn’t disagree more with a certain part of what Mr. Salzer says. In his post, he says and/or implies a few times that the nation-state boils down to, or leads automatically to, Nazism. Is Mr. Salzer saying that we can’t have distinct nations without putting other peoples, and other nations, into gas chambers? On the contrary, it is precisely OUR side — the side which acknowledges the right of nation-states to exist as such — which most highly honors the right of all distinct nations to continue to exist as distinct nations if they so wish, and the absolute absence of any right of government to erase any nationality without consulting that nationality. (This sounds ridiculous to say — utterly fantastic, even. To merely say what I just said is to sound like a crank — like the people who tell about getting beamed up to flying saucers … “erase nationalities? that guy must be nuts!” But no less than this very thing is now taking place here and in Europe, totally without the referendum-proven consent of the existing majority nationalities. I refer any doubters to Mr. Auster’s and Mr. Kalb’s relevant archives on VFR, or to Vdare.com for example, or to any of their myriad relevant links.)

The forces which are tearing down this country’s traditional nationality, including its traditional ethnic mix and proportions (not to mention its culture), have never put what they are doing to an explicit national referendum — “Do you wish to have the traditional majority ethnicity and culture of your country erased by massive incompatible immigration and other means, and replaced by (X, Y, or Z)?” — because they know perfectly well that if they did, it would be defeated more overwhelmingly and decisively than any referendum was ever defeated in the history of the world.

Governments have no right — NO RIGHT — to do what they now are doing all over the west. None of this has aught whatsoever to do with putting peoples or nationalities into gas chambers. In fact, if anything, it is the forces who are perpetrating this travesty — NOT those who oppose them — who are related in a sense to what the Nazis did. (But we all know the old adage — the best way for a pickpocket to deflect all suspicion from himself is to run down the street yelling “STOP THIEF!” at the top of his lungs.)

Unadorned:

I am of the belief that we in the U.S. idealize a fatally deceptive view of war,one based on a “romantic” model we spoke of in an earlier thread.It matters little what one believes about such matters.The force and sweep of history is contary to our refined notions of “civilized rules” of combat. Such a thing never, I repeat NEVER existed anywhere except in our fevered imaginations.

Six million jews killed by Hitler is a drop in the bucket compared with Stalin’s elimination of the millions of Kulaks of Georgia,the huge Cambodian slaughter, the re-education of South Vietnamese etc.We are myopically distracted by conflicts where the damage was constrained, not by men, but by circumstances.
If refined warfare is not a reality. We teach everone of our our troops about Chemical, Biological and Radiological warfare and have since ever since 1949.

Only Radiological warfare remains out of the hands of individuals and is currently possessed solely by states, and that for not too much longer. Pandora’s box is already open.

It only remains for us to decide how much we want to survive into the future.

I’d like to say something else, if I may, about the Catholic Church in relation to some of these questions, because I have the feeling Mr. Salzer is coming to the table of this and of previous VFR discussions from a Catholic point of view. I find the Catholic Church’s tendency to oppose what Vdare.com stands for extremely irritating, and I suspect it is one reason Catholics like Bill Buckley, Joe Sobran, and Ann Coulter seem clueless about what Vdare.com stands for, or even troubled by it — or at any rate (in the case of Sobran and Coulter), mute about it.

OK — TWO can play THAT game. The Catholic Church hierarchy aren’t the only ones who can play THAT game. LET’S ALL PLAY! Vatican City is a (tiny) country, right? Fine. Let’s flood IT with excessive incompatible immigration and multi-culti for a change, and see how IT likes it. Let’s bring in tons and tons of Arabs and other Muslims, and utterly ovewhelm the local population, whatever the local population may be, both displacing it and forcing it to kow-tow to every whim and “hurt feeling” claimed by the immigrants. Let’s see the Vatican put its money where its mouth is. Let’s take down every cross from every church there, and every Michaelangelo statue, because they hurt the feelings of the immigrants, and efface every religious mural from every wall, and every fresco from every ceiling, so no one will feel intimidated or have their feelings hurt by a sense that they “don’t belong,” or are “excluded.”

Anyone wanna bet on the speed with which Vatican theologians will suddenly discover all sorts of Thomistic and other justifications for … (wait for it …) … for Vdare.com’s position on immgration?

And I’m not done. Next time the Catholic Bishops or the Vatican or whoever it is in the Catholic world pipes up about how all these high taxes going to pay for failed social theories are just and proper, THEY — THE CATHOLIC CHURCH — should immediately lose their tax-exempt status and start paying the taxes everyone else pays. THEN would we see theologians coming out of every nook and cranny with discoveries from St. Thomas, St. Paul, and St. Augustine about how the Libertarian tax policy is actually the most Catholic.

It’s easy for ignorant leftist know-nothings among the Catholic hierarchy both here and in Rome to be aloof and holier-than-thou when it’s not their ox that’s being gored.

Sandy, what civilian population was slaughtered wholesale during the American Revolution? during all the wars of Frederick the Great? during all the Napoleonic Wars?

“Nothing at all done by the Allies can nor does compare to the holocaust.” - Shawn

Really? Our principal ally, the Soviet Union, had been butchering people by the millions before Hitler had ever heard of the German Worker’s Party. The Soviets continued to do so during and after the war with the EXPLICIT blessings of the US and UK when they surrendered the Cossacks, Vlasov’s men and Soviet POWs to the murderous impulses of Stalin. But who cares about Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles they are, after all, merely Slavs. How moral of an enterprize was WWII if your chief ally was Josef Stalin?

F. Salzer writes:
“If Hitler’s motive was vengeance, as some contend, then they are morally equal, if it was on the other hand pragmatic and eugenic, vengeance is the greater evil per se. But because of all the unknowns of both the holocaust and firebombing, I place them as somewhat morally equal.”

Lets stipulate that Just War Theory was violated, and that therefore both the firebombing of Dresden and the Holocaust were morally wrong. The fact that they fall into the same category as moral wrongs obviously does not make them EQUAL moral wrongs, and F. Salzer introduces the motive of vengence as one of the accidents (external attributes) of the two acts that may imply equivalence, and the elemental method (fire) as another accident. Does that in fact plausibly make the two actions substantively morally equivalent?

Obviously not. On motivation, Hitler embarked on a lengthy cold-blooded attempt to round up and completely exterminate a population that he saw as the primary impediment to a free and equal German people. Cold-blooded premeditated ideological vengence was no doubt part of the motive; also part of the motive was the utter dehumanization of his victims. On method, he dragged men women and children out of their homes, took them off to camps, put them through unspeakable tortures and terror, and methodically exterminated them.

Objectively comparing this to the hot blooded firebombing of a civilian population in response to military attacks intended to utterly destroy and overrun Britian seems to me completely untenable. That the firebombing of Dresden may have been objectively wrong based on just war theory, and that there are a few accidental similarities, does not seem to make a claim of substantive moral equivalence more plausible.

I agree completely with Mr. Eubanks that if we include Stalin with the allies, and it is only just that we should, then it is not at all obvious that the allies taken as a whole were objectively better (less bad?) than the Axis. If anything the moral cover of being with “the good guys” while committing quite similar atrocities paved the way for far greater excess on the part of Communism.

I agree with Unadorned that much of the postconciliar Catholic programme is just unprincipled leftism trying desperately to advance itself while at the same time not violating any express de fide dogma; I also think that this effort is doomed to internal collapse. _The Great Facade_ by Ferrara and Woods provides an excellent source of perspective, although I wouldn’t at this point endorse it comprehensively as a traditionalist Catholic manifesto.

“…the Times story demonstrates just how pervasive is the notion which drove Hitler himself. The entire pantheistic notion that men are subsumed in the State and a person’s value is derived through the state.” — F. Salzer

I think this is right, because I think it’s right that once one ceases to find one’s value and reason for being in God, the state is the next highest authority in line waiting to claim jurisdiction. I don’t know that that’s pantheistic so much as atheistic, although it’s certainly pantheistic (or animistic) in the sense that one is choosing to grant to part of God’s creation what properly belongs only to God Himself.

“Negative eugenics and the reduction of certain persons to life “ devoid of value” was a logical direction of the pantheistic nature of hegelian socialism…” — F. Salzer

It seems only likely that if we can’t put a value on our lives, someone will come along to set the value for us.

“The firebombing of Tokyo, was no less vicious than the gas ovens, it only received better press.” — F. Salzer

I confess I wasn’t aware of this incident. But I just went to the first link that came up on Google, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0310-01.htm to read about it. It seems hard to understand how deliberately firebombing a city full of civilians can be justified in war. The most striking thing to me was the comment of that American POW being held in Tokyo at the time. Hearing the screams, he said, “I prayed for myself, and I also prayed for them too.” That’s the comment of a man who believes a lot of innocent lives have been taken, if you ask me.

At the same time, let’s not forget how bloodthirsty and heartless the Japanese government and soldiers were in WWII. They certainly knew little restraint in China, nor toward our soldiers in war. Remember the Bataan Death March? Also, let’s remember that the war was begun by a sneak attack upon an American base filled with American sons. Whether FDR knew about it beforehand or not, he didn’t drive those aircraft carriers over here. Nevertheless, the question remains, as you say, whether the firebombing of Tokyo was a necessary and justified act of war or a vicious (as in, springing from vice) act of vengeance.

I guess we’d have to see a report of the military objectives we hoped to achieve at the time in order to make that judgment. If it was only to terrorize the Japanese people, that doesn’t seem a good enough reason. If there was some other reason or reasons, though, then maybe there was cause, or at least room enough to plausibly argue cause.

If there *wasn’t* cause, though, then I can understand your equation of the bombing with the death camps, since the unjustified murder of one person isn’t more or less important than the unjustified murder of another. Yet even then we have to be mindful of circumstance, since a man under stress may do things he wouldn’t normally do, and if the stress was brought on by the aggression of another, then the fault for his actions is ameliorated somewhat, though not always necessarily excused. I think that’s what people are reacting to: the notion that, even on its worst interpretation, there was an absolute equality between the bombing as an act of the defenders and the death camp murders as acts of the aggressors.

P.S. I understand your argument that it’s the existence of the modern state that’s responsible for the horror (or the scale of the horror?). But even if it is, the fact would still remain that there wasn’t an exact equivalence of moral fault between the bombing and the death camps. Both nation states may have been enraged, but one was provoked and enraged by the other. At least that’s the way I see it.

Mr. Newland says:
“If there *wasn’t* cause, though, then I can understand your equation of the bombing with the death camps, since the unjustified murder of one person isn’t more or less important than the unjustified murder of another.”

I think it is possible that the modern modes of thought about equality may be at work here. The fact that two acts may fall into the same category as wrong acts in no way implies substantive equality between those acts. Formal correspondence of (some) accidents does not imply substantive equality, and correspondence of category does not imply substantive equality.

Once again liberal equality is the demon within our thoughts, the great deceiver. Until we repent and shake it off it will dominate our destiny.

In Re Mr. Newland:

First, on the side issue of whether I was incorrect to say “It’s ALMOST as if people think that even when Hitler was a kid he had to have been non-human, a total demon,” on which Mr. Newland puts so much emphasis, I was not, pace Mr. Newland, mischaracterizing the JDL’s position on Hitler, for the simple reason that I wasn’t characterizing the JDL’s position. I had gone on to a different and more expansive illustration, that liberals would deny that Hitler was human even in his childhood. Since I don’t know for a fact that they would do that, and since the JDL doesn’t do that in their quoted statement, I used the subjunctive mood, and said “it’s almost as if.”

And now to the main matter between us. Mr. Newland wrote:

“This is a serious accusation and a direct attack upon my moral character, Mr. Auster. As such, I feel justified in demanding that you put up or shut up. Please demonstrate for the studio audience here where I have tried to excuse Hitler from responsibility for his crimes, or have tried to downplay them in any way. I have not done so, and the reason I know I have not done so is that doing so would reflect the exact opposite of my opinion of the matter.”

The answer is very simple. Mr. Newland said, both originally and then repeatedly after I had criticized him for it, that Hitler was a “tragically flawed human being.” We do not speak of evil mass murderers as “tragic.” A tragic flaw is a flaw in a basically good person that brings about his ruin. Tragedy also connotes a disaster that stems not from a deliberate choice of evil but from some inherent flaw in the nature of existence. Modern non-judgmental Americans have lost this classic and traditional understanding of tragedy. They systematically describe evil and criminal acts as “tragic.” Even the 9-11 attack is routinely called a “tragedy,” when in fact it was a crime, an attack, an atrocity, an act of terror, a mass murder. It was all those things, but it was not, in the proper meaning of the word, a tragedy. What the savage Carr brothers did to their victims in the Wichita massacre was not a tragedy; it was a monstrous crime. Calling crimes “tragedies” is one of the standard devices by which non-judgmental modern people avoid making moral judgments, even about Hitler. (Thus college professors have reported that their students decline to call Hitler evil, saying instead that whether Hitler was evil or not “depends on your point of view,” or, “He was evil if you were Jewish.”)

Obviously I did not attack Mr. Newland’s moral character in the sense of saying that he had done something immoral. I made exactly the same criticism of him that I have repeatedly made of modern America at large: that he doesn’t want to call evil evil so he calls it by some nonjudgmental euphemism like “tragic.”

Now, if Mr. Newland wants to demonstrate to us that he is not practicing non-judgmentalness, he can do so very simply: by stating, without any ambiguity or escape phrases, that Hitler was evil.

I don’t follow you, Matt. What I said was that if there wasn’t just cause *I could understand* Mr. Salzer’s equation of the two acts. I didn’t equate them myself. I then went on to insist that the circumstances surrounding the respective acts had to be considered.

Moreover, I said that this was so only *if* there wasn’t just cause (please reread my statement that you yourself quoted back to me). That is to say, *assuming* that the firebombing of Tokyo was an act of murder, then such and such follows. So I am already, at that point in the argument, completely beyond the question your response is intended to address.

Finally, it’s hard to see how my answer reflects indoctrination into modern, liberal notions of equality, since the doctrine it reflects dates from the 13th century.

To approach my point from a more concrete angle, Mr. Newland said:

“…since the unjustified murder of one person isn’t more or less important than the unjustified murder of another.”

It was precisely this to which I disagreed. Even given that two acts are murder, the justice system and the moral law on which it is based recognize that murder comes in different kinds, e.g. premeditated, crime of passion, protracted torture to death of innocents, etc. I have already stipulated for the sake of argument that both acts (the holocaust and the firebombing) are murder. Even if so, the supposed moral equivalence manifestly does not apply.

It is true that Mr. Newland was expressing sympathy for a point of view rather than agreement with it, and I acknowledge that. However, it remains ludicrous in my view to substantively _equate_ the holocaust and the firebombing. I wouldn’t object to someone who condemns both acts (or that is, if I would it would be because of disputation over facts and criteria) as in violation of the just war theory. I DO however object to the notion that they were, as unjust acts, substantively equal. My objection is on the basis that general category and accidental similarity do not constitute substantive equality.

“We do not speak of evil mass murderers as ‘tragic.’” — Lawrence Auster

Who is “we?”

“A tragic flaw is a flaw in a basically good person that brings about his ruin.” - Lawrence Auster

Such as the flaw in man that inheres in him due to original sin. That is Christian doctrine, Mr. Auster—something you seem to be somewhat unacquainted with.

“Calling crimes “tragedies” is one of the standard devices by which non-judgmental modern people avoid making moral judgments…” — Lawrence Auster

Quite true, and I haven’t done this, as you implicitly admit by your inability to produce any evidence of it. In fact, I have explicitly said that calling a human being “tragically flawed” does *not* relieve him of culpability or condemnation for his crimes. But that’s not good enough for you. Evidently, like the JDL, you want me to declare that Hitler was a devil. Well, I won’t declare that because it isn’t true, and if you think it is true, it seems to me that the burden is on you to make *your* case, not me. Hitler was a human being, albeit a human being who freely chose to do very many very evil things. It’s hard to imagine a man more habituated to performing, or ordering, evil acts than Hitler was, although as some have said, there have been others, such as Stalin and Pol Pot.

“Obviously I did not attack Mr. Newland’s moral character in the sense of saying that he had done something immoral. I made exactly the same criticism of him that I have repeatedly made of modern America at large: that he doesn’t want to call evil evil so he calls it by some nonjudgmental euphemism like ‘tragic.’” — Lawrence Auster

You have no basis whatsoever for making that accusation, Mr. Auster. You have spun it out of the whole cloth of your ideological noodlings. I call evil what is evil: the act. Men are not, in their nature, evil. If they were, then our Lord’s admonition to love our enemies would be an absurd command. But men perform evil acts, and the more they perform them, the more they become habituated to them—rather the way you seem to be habituated to slandering people. In that sense, we (Christians) call men “evil,” but in that sense only. And in that sense, and that sense only, I will happily oblige you by openly, proudly, and with no hesitation whatsoever, screaming from the rooftops that Adolf Hitler was an evil man—indeed, Adolf Hitler was one of the most evil men who ever lived. I have never held otherwise, nor have I even intimated otherwise here. Your accusations against me have been and continue to be completely baseless and unjust.

“Even given that two acts are murder, the justice system and the moral law on which it is based recognize that murder comes in different kinds, e.g. premeditated, crime of passion, protracted torture to death of innocents, etc.” — Matt

You’re quite right. But these differences are accidental differences, not substantial ones. The substance of the act is murder. You said yourself that all these are forms of murder. Therefore, they all share the same essential nature. Whatever distinctions are drawn between them are drawn on the basis of the circumstances surrounding the crime, and circumstances are as accidents to the substantive crime of murder.

Mr. Newland’s contention that any one murder is always morally equivalent to any other is simply false, despite his protestations. A man who kills his wife and her lover when he accidentally discovers them copulating receives a different designation, and a different sentence, from e.g. a man who plots, kidnaps, tortures, and murders innocent children over a period of years for kicks. All crimes are crimes, and all murders are murders, but some are objectively more heinous than others and those objective differences have consequences.

I can’t imagine what motivates the attempt to equate the two acts, but whatever the motivation the equivalence is objectively false; just as a supposed equivalence between the holocaust and the firebombing of Dresden (even if we stipulate for the sake of argument that the latter was murder) is objectively false.

Reply to Unadorned,
Unadorned writes:
“Mr. Salzer says. In his post, he says and/or implies a few times that the nation-state boils down to, or leads automatically to, Nazism. Is Mr. Salzer saying that we can’t have distinct nations without putting other peoples, and other nations, into gas chambers?”

What I am stating is that the there is a pervasive acceptance that there is no such thing as natural law and natural rights, but only civil rights. Further, the modern national socialist nation-state sees the good of its citizens as secondary to the good of the state. The citizen is subsumed in the state and exists for the good of the state. The citizen doesn’t have intrinsic value, but only relative value given him by the government.

Further, this is not accidental to the size of the state, thus I use the term nation-state, or if you wish leviathan. So what I am advocating is not the removal of state boundaries but the putting of them up. The advocation of the Aristotelian polis. The small state which is naturally a state, not a populous which is coerced into unity.

This lack of unity in leviathan causes the citizen to not see the common good as his own good, and thus will act in Hobbesian manner in relation to his distant neighbor. In a republic, because of distance, lack of unity, and size, the citizens are set against each other. So in a republic you end up with a very odd occurrence, national socialism developing out of Hobbes. Where the populous votes to subsume their neighbors into the state for the Hobbesian good.

All of this will not out of necessity lead to gas chambers, but neither is it contrary to gas chambers, because the underlying foundation is in place.

I don’t know what Mr. Newland is so steamed up about. If he wanted to avoid being thought of as non-judgmental and relativistic (a criticism that he considers nothing less than “slander”), he could have done so a while ago by saying (as he finally has done now, though with some resentment), that Hitler was extraordinaly evil or that Hitler chose to do extraordinarily evil acts, instead of (even after I challenged him on it) repeatedly describing Hitler as merely “tragically flawed.” In the real world, as distinct from Mr. Newland’s picture of it, a person who insists on calling Hitler “tragically flawed,” and who must be pushed to the wall before he consents to call Hitler evil, and who when he does finally call Hitler evil does so with rhetorical excess that suggests sarcasm or resentment at being forced to say what he didn’t want to say to begin with, is going to be thought of as someone who wants to avoid making moral judgments about Hitler.

By the way, I have no investment in the formulation “Hitler was evil” in preference to “Hitler did evil.” That’s another of Mr. Newland’s inventions.

Reply to Matt,

If the objects of a sin are the same, such as the substance of a ma’s life in murder, and the only remote cause was impulse. And further, if the impulse of one is dispassionate and the other is passionate, then the more passionate sin is less grievous because of the greater impulse.

So if the only difference is hot blooded versus cold blooded, then the cold blooded is more grievous.

But my contention was that Great Britain’s act of unjust vengeance is a more grievous remote cause than Hitler’s remote eugenic cause. The objects of these causes are hatred and the debasement of man’s natural intrinsic worth. With hatred being the more grievous because it is contrary to charity. Whereas debasement is contrary to God’s creation.

But frankly, I’m not going to live or die defending a position of an issue which is at best only remotely knowable. As far as I can tell, even the objectively knowable remote causes are not very knowable.

The sentence on Firebombing versus gas ovens was only a throw-in sentence at the end of the arguement. And was not an arguement over which sin is more grievous but meant as an example of the pervasiveness of the effects of the dehumanization of man by the state. Firebombing as example of total war against an enemy versus negative eugenics as example of total war against the citizenry.

“A man who kills his wife and her lover when he accidentally discovers them copulating receives a different designation, and a different sentence, from e.g. a man who plots, kidnaps, tortures, and murders innocent children over a period of years for kicks.” — Matt

You’re absolutely right and I’ve never intended to dispute this. It’s terminology that’s gotten in the way. I was looking at it from the point of view of the genus, murder, and from that perspective even a specific difference can be considered a kind of accident. With regard to the various species of murder, however, you’re right. The differences are specific differences and not accidents. I stand humbly corrected.

Perhaps seen in that light my answer to Mr. Salzer will make more sense to you, since you and I are not in disagreement and never were. What I was saying to him was that even if we grant that both cases were murder, there are still different types and grades of murder, and the differences surrounding the burning of Tokyo may well render it less evil morally than the other acts mentioned.

In replying to me, Mr. Salzer says, ” … there is a pervasive acceptance [in today’s world] that there is no such thing as natural law and natural rights, but only civil rights.” So far, so good: I think I understand this, and I agree. But in his very next point, Mr. Salzer loses me completely: ” … the modern national socialist nation-state sees the good of its citizens as secondary to the good of the state. The citizen is subsumed in the state and exists for the good of the state. The citizen doesn’t have intrinsic value, but only relative value given him by the government.”

What “national-socialist nation-state” is Mr. Salzer talking about? I don’t know of any currently in existence. The communist states of China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, Laos, Cambodia, and elsewhere, do closely approximate the description Mr. Salzer goes on to give of what he calls “the modern national socialist nation-state.” But each of them, following Marxist theory, puts more emphasis on “class enemies” than on “race enemies,” the exact opposite of Nazi Germany (the country everyone thinks of as “the modern national-socialist nation-state,” and a country which no longer exists).

Mr. Salzer’s post only gets more garbled. I don’t understand his third paragraph at all. In it he seems to say that, in presenting his criticism, he prefers the term “nation-state” to “Leviathan” because the criticism he is making applies to big and small states alike, whereas the latter term implicitly limits the thing which he is criticising to only the larger governments or countries. But he still hasn’t said why he confounds the idea of “nation-state” in the Auster sense with “national-socialism,” which as far as I know means Nazism. The two have no basis in common.

In the same paragraph, I don’t get at all what Mr. Salzer means about “not wanting to remove state boundaries, but put them up.” He goes on to say he advocates “the Aristotelian polis: the small state which is naturally a state, not a populace which is coerced into unity.” This gives the impression he wants sub-populations to have the right to secede from larger conglomerate countries and exist, if they want, as more homogeneous ethno-cultural entities. But this only brings us back to the idea of the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the nation-state in the Lawrence Auster sense, in contrast to the Nazi national-socialist set-up, which Mr. Salzer has yet to explain his reason for introducing into the discussion.

In his fourth paragraph Mr. Salzer seems merely to repeat without evidence his original thesis, in seeming to claim that nation-states inevitably become Nazi states. In his succeeding paragraph he partly backs away from this by saying, “All of this will not out of necessity lead to gas chambers, but neither is it contrary to gas chambers, because the underlying foundation is in place.”

I’m sorry, Mr. Salzer, but I see no “underlying foundation in place” in any of the following nation-states which is even remotely congenial to Hitlerian gas chambers: England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Italy, Israel, New Zealand, Iceland, Japan, South Korea, the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, the nations of Walonia and Flanders contained within the Kingdom of Belgium, the several nations contained within the Swiss Confederation, or the United States of America which was a nation-state pre-1965 before Sen. Teddy Kennedy and Rep. Emanuel Celler got their filthy hands on it — and I could go on citing counter-examples to your outrageous, ignorant, and, frankly, totally moronic thesis.

To quote the language used in a recent post on this VFR thread: Put up or shut up, Mr. Salzer. (And please make your next post intelligible.)

“I don’t know what Mr. Newland is so steamed up about.” — Lawrence Auster

Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps being unjustly accused of something for which there was, and remains, no evidence, has something to do with it.

“If he wanted to avoid being thought of as non-judgmental and relativistic (a criticism that he considers nothing less than “slander”)…” — Lawrence Auster

I couldn’t care less about being thought of as non-judgmental and relativistic or any other of the grade-school categories you think rule the world. I do care about having my views invented for me out of thin air by an ideological hack and then held up as supposed evidence of my lack of a “moral grasp” (by which I understand you to mean adherence to objective moral truths). You never at the point in question asked me for my opinion about Hitler’s actions; you just blithely jumped to a wild, unwarranted conclusion and then used it to beat me over the head.

“In the real world, as distinct from Mr. Newland’s picture of it, a person who insists on calling Hitler “tragically flawed,” and who must be pushed to the wall before he consents to call Hitler evil…” — Lawrence Auster

Pushed to the wall, my ass. You asked me once, and I immediately, in the very next post, obliged. I never imagined that that was the test of my purity in your mind, so it never dawned on me that there was any need for me to chant a “Hitler is evil” mantra until you demanded one.

Moreover, you have yet to demonstrate that my calling Hitler “tragically flawed” is inaccurate. You can try to ignore Catholic dogma all you want, and you’re even free to reject it outright, as I’m beginning to believe you do, but I’ve made it very clear from the beginning what I meant, and only the most insensible or disingenuous of men would try to deny it.

“…and who when he does finally call Hitler evil does so with rhetorical excess that suggests sarcasm or resentment at being forced to say what he didn’t want to say to begin with…”

Do you know why I said what I said? Because if I had only said “Hitler is evil,” you would have accused me of grudgingly saying the bare minimum I had to say because I was covering something up or hiding my true agenda. Everyone reading this knows it. That’s the way you operate, or at least that’s the way you’ve operated with me. So I tried to say it in a way that would leave no wiggle room for myself later on, to try and set your mind at ease and leave no doubt that I really, truly think Hitler was an evil man. But what good did it do? As expected, you have come right back and insinuated that perhaps I employed such rhetoric because I resented being forced to say something I didn’t believe. You, in essence, are now accusing me of lying (or slyly suggesting that “maybe” I’m lying), which only compounds the injustices you’ve already done me.

Well, there’s no way to reason with an irrational man, Mr. Auster, so we’re done talking. You’ll get the last word, which is what you want, to try to paint an inaccurate picture of our exchange. That’s fine. Paint away. The record is there for those who want to read it.

Mr. Newland:
The authors of classical Greek plays always reserved the expression “tragic” to mean, precisely, a flawed BUT NOBLE character,caught up in conflict and reduced to ignominious ends by life’s complexities.This meaning is still in use in colleges and universities the world over.

A modern and imprecise use of the term applies it as describing EVERY conflict or event resulting in death,destruction or downfall.

Conservatives see the modern use of the phrase as an implication of nobility in the personage(s) to whom the term is applied.

This, I think, is the crux of Mr. Auster’s pique to your use of the term.

Precise language should not be objected to where avoids misinterpretation or otherwise proves useful.

“Really? Our principal ally, the Soviet Union, had been butchering people by the millions before Hitler had ever heard of the German Worker’s Party.” — Jason Eubanks

I meant specifically in the context of the war against the Nazi’s. What was done by the Soviet Union was of course evil.

“How moral of an enterprize was WWII if your chief ally was Josef Stalin?” — Jason Eubanks

Totally moral. Hitler was the immediate and more dire threat. Abd had Hitler been allowed to survive, the Nazi regime would have made the Soviet Union look like a picnic by comparison. Sometimes it is necessary to choose unsavoury allies to defeat a greater evil.

“It’s easy for ignorant leftist know-nothings among the Catholic hierarchy both here and in Rome to be aloof and holier-than-thou when it’s not their ox that’s being gored.”

Personally I get tired of a church that is complicit in the horrific organised sexual abuse of ten’s of thousands of children, and then attempting to cover it up by moving predator priests priests to new jobs where they can abuse even more children, waving it’s psuedo-moralistic finger at any aspect of American policy, and a good example of why we should never submit to the yoke of Rome as a nation.

Thanks to Sandy for pointing out the common understanding of “tragic flaw,” a concept which comes from the Hellenic, not the Christian, part of our heritage, and with which Mr. Newland seems to be unfamiliar. He incorrectly applied “tragic” to the Christian concept of man’s fallen nature. But even if he had avoided the term “tragic,” and just spoken of “fallen,” the impression he gave would still have been the same, i.e., that he was trying to assimilate Hitler to a general humanity in which we’re all involved. But to say that Hitler was human in the general sense is not to say anything distinct about Hitler, and thus is implicitly to relativize his acts or to give the appearance of intending to doing so.

Mr. Newland felt I was mistreating him because he felt he was responding to the JDL’s point that Hitler should not be regarded as human and I jumped on him for that. But I had completely agreed with Mr. Newland that it was wrong to treat Hitler as simply non-human. I said that Hitler was indeed a human being who chose extraordinary evil: “And the same is true for a monster of evil such as Hitler. His evil came out of a specific human personality. We cannot understand that evil—his choice of evil—unless we understand him as a person.” In response, Mr. Newland then gratuitously introduced the concept of our tragically fallen human nature. He wrote: “To portray Hitler as a tragically flawed human being is, [the JDL] are saying, to make him a more sympathetic figure.” But this was Mr. Newland’s invention. The JDL had not objected to portraying Hitler as a “tragically flawed” human being; they had objected to portraying Hitler as a human being, period. They had written: “There is nothing human about the most vicious, vile murderer in world history.” Thus at that point in the discussion Mr. Newland was no longer responding to just the JDL, he was responding to me. I had said: It’s incorrect to say Hitler was not human; Hitler was a human who chose monstrous evil. And Mr. Newland responded to that by saying that Hitler was a tragically flawed or fallen human being, as we all are. And that’s why I jumped on him the way I did.

Mr. Newland is correct in the Christian sense that men, inluding Hitler, are endowed with God given free will, and as they exercise it they remain human and fallen with Adam. The gravamen of such a view is that there is no hierarchy of evil, and it all is of a piece making all men equally tragic.

In the modern religio/secular view, by Hitler’s well publicized and historical mass murders,he has renounced any entitlement to be called human and anyone else calling him a fallen tragic human being is practicing “moral equivelancy” by the implied inclusion of Hitler in the ordinary modern sense of Human choice.

And once again, in the Classic Hellenic Greek sense, to call Hitler a tragic flawed person is at one and the same time christologically correct but classically inaccurate and unacceptable to conservative thought..

“I meant specifically in the context of the war against the Nazi’s. What was done by the Soviet Union was of course evil.” -Shawn

No. Not merely evil. Communism is the moral equivalent of Nazism. And I specifically cited examples of Soviet atrocities during and immediately after WWII in which millions would die. Are you now an apologist for your dear old “Uncle Joe”?

“Totally moral. Hitler was the immediate and more dire threat. Abd had Hitler been allowed to survive, the Nazi regime would have made the Soviet Union look like a picnic by comparison.” -Shawn

I offer a counter historical hypothetical - Hitler would have been removed from power by the Wehrmacht in the event of a German victory. And it’s just as unprovable as yours. In the end, we are left with the fact the Stalin killed around 30 million people and Hitler’s tally is near 12 million. Why do you consider them unequal in terms of evil?

F. Salzer writes:
“If the objects of a sin are the same, such as the substance of a ma’s life in murder, and the only remote cause was impulse. And further, if the impulse of one is dispassionate and the other is passionate, then the more passionate sin is less grievous because of the greater impulse.

So if the only difference is hot blooded versus cold blooded, then the cold blooded is more grievous.”

F. Salzer’s notion that the objects of sin are the same is already suspect, since the residents of Dresden were citizens in good standing of a country that was exterminating the Jews and ruthlessly attacking Britian (and British civilians) militarily. But even if we stipulate identical objects (the lives of innocent persons extinguished) it seems more than a little wrong to assert that once we’ve established that the only relevant accident is hot- versus cold-blooded, if that is what F. Salzer intends. The differences between the two acts are enough that we could write a shelf full of books on them, so the burden of showing equiality is on those who assert equality. If this were the posture we took toward assertions of equality in general it would go a long way toward calling into question the liberal hegemon.

Reply to Unadorned,

This pervasive acceptance that there is no such thing as natural law and natural rights, but only civil rights, underlies all of what follows. Civil rights are given to men by the state, they are not intrinsic in men, that is, they are not inviolable. In order for a man to loose his civil rights, it is not necessary for him to forfeit them, but it is only necessary for the state to remove them at its own discretion. If only civil rights are granted, then natural law is not the governing force, but only the state.

This means that murder is not defined by the natural law but only by the state.

If the people and representatives in a republic are virtuous, then the laws will be just and in accord with the natural law and natural rights. But if the people and representatives are not virtuous, then the laws will not be so. The best example in the US, of civil versus natural rights as the only underlying rights of men, is the abortion on demand laws. These laws violate the natural law, they violate the natural rights of the unborn. The state has determined that abortion is not murder. The unborn are not granted the civil right of personhood by the state.

The U.S. does not force abortion on individuals, except for the retarded, but it does grant an intrinsic evil as a good. The civil “right to privacy”.

This may not be gas ovens, but it is in the same genus.

The genus being states which deny the natural law and natural rights.

You listed Denmark as an example of a country that is not even remotely congenial to Hitlerian gas chambers, but 68% of the people support ending the lives of aged, mentally ill, and handicapped people.”” http://www.constitution.org/js/js_000.htm.

The termination of the mentally ill and the handicapped is exactly where Hitler began his own euthanasia programs. The were called “lives devoid of value” With value defined by the state.

This defining was not contrary to the state, because it considered itself to have the right to define the value of each of its citizens. The same process is presently going on in Denmark.

Eugenics is also alive and well in the US. paid for by the Department of International Development, USAID. If you’re not familiar with how they operate in conjunction with Planned Parenthood which itself was founded in order to promote eugenics, you should look into it.

Since people don’t have natural intrinsic value beyond what is granted them by the state, they are below the state, that is not prior to the state. This is exactly contrary to the Aristotelian and Catholic understanding of the nature of men. Men were seen as prior to the state. The state existed as an instrumental cause to fulfill man’s natural social nature. Because man was prior, each man was not subsumed into the state but had inviolable rights.

The modern state in contrast, does not recognize the priorness of men, and so sees the good of each man as existing in the good of the state. With the good of the state known through its laws. Abortion, euthanasia, socialism ect, are not good for the individual who is denied his inviolable natural rights, and thus must be seen as existing for another’s good, i.e., the state.

I hope this more clearly explains a part of your problem. There isn’t much point in addressing the other issues until this part is more clearly understood.

Reply to Matt,
The hot versus cold blooded was taken from your post. Where you write of Britain as hot blooded versus Hitler as cold blooded. I certainly don’t claim to know who was hot or cold.

My arguement centered on other remote causes and circumstance. Namely unjust vengeance whose object can be hatred, and I think was, versus eugenics whose object is the debasement of men’s intrinsic worth.

If you wish to rearrange the sins and their objects and catagorize them according to remote caused and circumstances feel free to do so. As far as I’m concerned both act were most grievous.

I suppose the notion that the Nazis didn’t hate the Jews and, among other things, seek revenge upon them for perceived wrongs seemed so utterly implausible that I did not feel it necessary to discuss it. If we pile up accidents into accounts in order to attempt an evaluation of the species of the two acts it is quite clear that whatever goes on the Dresden pile also goes on the Holocaust pile; and that the Holocaust pile has innumerable additional accidents in its account. So it may be (though I can’t say so with confidence) that F. Salzer and I simply disagree on the facts rather than on moral theory.

Reply to Matt,

My moral theory is rather straight forward, I’m a Catholic and I see the world through Scholastic eyes by formal education. Perhaps not with very good eyes, since I havn’t done very much reading in the field in a number of years, but such is life.

Also remote causes, circumstances, et all are not accidents per se when determining the grievousness of sin. My previous example of fire vs fire was of course only accidental.

And yes, I think we disagree about the Holocaust and its secondary underlying causes. With the prior underlying cause being the denial of natural law and rights.

I quote the following for the benefit of F. Salzer:
“… BEHIND every murder stood the same power which is responsible for this murder; behind these harmless insignificant fellow-countrymen who were instigated and incited to crime stands the hate-filled power of our Jewish foe, a foe to whom we had done no harm, but who none the less sought to subjugate our German people and make of it its slave - the foe who is responsible for all the misfortune that fell upon us in 1918, for all the misfortune which plagued Germany in the years that followed.”
Adolph Hitler, SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 12, 1936

This is, of course, merely a sample of thousands of words that could be quoted indicating that vengence (against a falsely accused enemy) and hatred were immediate causes of the Holocaust. Is it really possible to dispute this point-of-fact in good faith, or is there something lurking beneath this discussion that dares not raise its head into the light?

I will point out, additionally, that the above quote was delivered by Hitler at a funeral speech. The “harmless insignificant fellow countrymen” were the murderers who killed the interred.

Mr. Salzer, I see better now what your ideas are.

You wrote, “If the people and representatives in a republic are virtuous, then the laws will be just and in accord with the natural law … [and if they aren’t, the laws won’t be.] … . The best example in the US of civil versus natural rights … are the abortion-on-demand laws, [which] violate … natural law … [and] grant an intrinsic evil [to be] a good [, justifying it as] the civil ‘right to privacy.’ “

I agree with all this, the sole qualification I would make being that the main outrage on the subject of abortion was the Supreme Court’s arrogation unto itself, in the Roe v Wade decision, of arbitrary power never delegated to it, in a pure and unbelievably brazen and outrageous usurpation. Its delegated authority was limited to interpreting the Constitution’s provisions and never extended to arbitrarily inventing entirely new ones out of whole cloth. Had the Court remained within its proper bounds we still might be where we are today with respect to abortion (through the actions of the several states) or we might not. But wherever we’d be, we’d be there legally instead of as the result of totalitarian leftist government arbitrariness rammed down our unwilling throats.

You wrote, “[The abortion laws] may not be gas ovens, but [are] in the same genus [of immoral laws made by countries] which deny the natural law and natural rights. You listed Denmark as an example of a country that is not even remotely congenial to Hitlerian gas chambers, but 68% of the people support ending the lives of aged, mentally ill, and handicapped people: http://www.constitution.org/js/js_000.htm . The termination of the mentally ill and the handicapped is exactly where Hitler began … . These were called ‘lives devoid of value.’ … The same process is presently going on in Denmark.”

I completely agree that the sort of euthanasia which is being foolishly experimented with in liberal Denmark, liberal Holland, and elsewhere today is absolutely immoral and, furthermore, risks putting us all on the slippery slope toward behavior which is in the same league as what every mass-murdering dictator of the last century was guilty of.

You wrote, “The modern state … does not recognize the priorness of men [or the pre-eminence of God-given rights over the authority of the state], and so sees [the interests of the state coming before those of people]. … Abortion, euthanasia, socialism etc., are not good for the individual — who [through them] is denied his inviolable natural rights — and [exist] for another’s good, i.e., the state’s.”

In the first line of your comment here is where we disagree. Not all modern states are as you describe, and therefore not all have the potential to descend toward “Hitlerian gas chambers.” There is no intrinsic reason why nation-states should be more susceptible to this sort of degenerate transformation than any other type of state, and there is even reason to think they would in many cases be less susceptible. The nation-state of England, for example, if allowed to continue as it traditionally has, and left untampered-with and unpolluted by the importation of noxious ideology from a degenerate E.U., from the Muslim world, from the multi-culti academic world, or other source, not only would be impervious to Hitlerian-type behavior, but would be the world’s best and perhaps only bulwark against such degeneracy.

Where we do agree is in opposing those wrongheaded societal and political trends — leftist post-modern ones, for the most part — which have the potential to lead us straight in the wrong direction. This web-site is one of many today which are in the vanguard of opposition to such trends.

Pray God they have an effect.

Re-reading my post just now, it sounds self-contradictory, in that I say “Denmark and Holland might descend the slippery slope toward monstrous behavior,” and also, “not all modern states have this potential.” The apparent contradiction is due to clumsy construction of my post. What I want to say, finally — and this will clear up the apparent contradiction — is that if anything has the potential to put countries on that evil path, it is not their being nation-states, but rather their following certain ideologies, or certain trends which lead to those ideologies, which are, in today’s world, for the most part modern leftist/liberal trends. My whole post was ultimately meant to answer Mr. Salzer’s seeming claim that the fact of being a nation-state led to Nazism. I have sought to continue to assert that it does no such thing. Other things have the most potential to lead to that, in fact (in today’s world) mostly leftist and liberal ones like the euthanasia-culture mentioned by Mr. Salzer, a trend championed by liberals and leftists.

Previously my eyes had just glanced over the long exchange involving F. Salzer, and I kept picking up odd and disturbing things about it without being able to justify my impressions. Now I’ve gone more carefully through this long discussion, and see that my superficial impressions were, unfortunately, correct. Let’s look at some of F. Salzer’s statements.

“Mr. Newland and others have been pushing along a very good point, the Times story demonstrates just how pervasive is the notion which drove Hitler himself. The entire pantheistic notion that men are subsumed in the State and a person’s value is derived through the state.

“Under this pantheistic notion personhood ceases to exist and natural rights and natural law have no place. Nazi national socialism was certainly not unique, the entire notion of nation states is based in the same principle. This pervasive nationalism, so intimately bound to socialist pantheism affects every major nation.”—F. Salzer.

What I detect here is a bizarre attempt, apparently driven by libertarian or anti-statist ideology, to equate Hitlerian evil with a belief in the state. Hitler, we know, embarked on a course of tyranny, war, and the destruction of human beings which he exercised through his total control of the German state; but, according to Mr. Salzer, “the entire notion of nation states is based in the same principle.” The suggestion here is to equate the Nazi regime with all existing national governments. This has the simultaneous effect of making all national states seem evil and illegitimate, while lessening the actual evil of Nazism.

“Hitler was a child of his times, the Times article is a product of the same time; and while Hitler was perhaps far more vicious than most, he perhaps was only more powerful. Can we honestly know he was far more vicious than those beneath him?”—F. Salzer.

Again we see the ideological, relativist mindset at work; the real villain is not Hitler’s drive for power, his intent to destroy the rule of law and crush all opposition, his divinization of the German race, and his dehumanization of the Jews as the enemy of all things German. No, all THAT is merely a function of the REAL problem, which is “the times,” namely the 20th century with its belief in the state. Which, by the way, all of us equally participate in. And therefore Hitler is just like us.

“The firebombing of Tokyo was no less vicious than the gas ovens, it only received better press.”—F. Salzer

There are no words to condemn this statement sufficiently.

“If Hitler’s motive was vengeance, AS SOME CONTEND [emphasis added], then they are morally equal, if it was on the other hand pragmatic and eugenic, vengeance is the greater evil per se.” [i.e., then the “vengeance” of the bombing of Tokyo is a greater evil than the Holocaust.]—F. Salzer.

The mind reels at this. In reality, the purpose of the bombing of Japan was to get the Japanese government—one of the most aggressive, cruel, and murderous regimes in history—to surrender. And the moment that it did surrender, peace descended on the land, the U.S. helped Japan rebuild itself and construct a decent government and Japan became a strong, stable, peaceful ally of the U.S. All of this suggests, not a motive of vengeance on the part of the U.S. against the Japanese, but a motive of defeating a criminal militarist regime that COULD BE DEFEATED BY NO OTHER MEANS THAN MASSIVE FORCE.

Further, since F. Salzer calls it unjust, what would HE have counseled the U.S. to do instead? A person who denounces the very means by which a society has preserved itself from defeat at the hands of a cruel and expansive tyranny, while offering no feasible alternative of his own, is a nihilist, in the same sense that (as David Horowitz has written) Marxists who denounce free enterprise and the American political system and the lives of ordinary people in that system, but who have nothing to offer in its place but slavery and tyranny, are nihilists whose only end is the destruction of the human good that actually exists.

But it gets worse. What Salzer is saying here is that it is only “contended” that Hitler’s motive against the Jews was hatred or vengeance, while, he continues, it is equally possible that Hitler’s motive was “pragmatic and eugenic.” Pragmatic and eugenic? What kind of mind would describe the darkness that engulfed Europe in such terms? Furthermore, since he believes the bombing of Japan was motivated by vengeance, it would follow that the bombing of Japan was worse than Hitler’s mass murder of European Jewry.

“But my contention was that Great Britain’s act of unjust vengeance is a more grievous remote cause than Hitler’s remote eugenic cause.”—F. Salzer.

The need for any guesswork is over. F. Salzer has made his position explicit. There is a word for the type of mind that could describe the dehumanization and destruction of European Jewry in such antiseptic, abstract terms, but I won’t use it here.

Finally, in response to Unadorned’s question whether his anti-state philosophy would allow distinct nations to exist, F. Salzer replies that it’s the large size of states that makes them objectionable, and that he believes in something along the lines of the Athenian polis. Here again, we see the subordination of morality and common sense to ideology. F. Salzer prefers the small state, he thinks it’s the only moral form of state, and that the large state is inherently evil, from all of which it follows that the citizens of a large state are necessarily engaged in an evil enterprise simply by virtue of being citizens of a large state, and, of course, they are much more evil if they use deadly force to defend themselves from an aggressor who can be defeated in no other way.

In fact, the bombing of Japan (or of Dresden—I tend to agree from that the bombing of Dresden was wrong and probably a war crime, largely because it was not necessary) was not the expression of a “state”—it was the expression of people—OUR people, the people of America and Britain—who were facing the greatest threat to their civilization, their freedom, and their very existence they had ever known, and who therefore had no choice but to defeat the enemy completely. But to all this, to the common experience of the people of Great Britain and the United States in the greatest crisis of their history, Salzer is cold and deaf. The only calculations that exist for him is statism, and in terms of statism, there’s no essential difference between America and Britain on one side and Nazi German and Imperial Japan on the other. The ideological mind, whatever its bête noire, whether it’s the state (libertarians), or bourgeois capitalism (Marxists), or the Jews (Nazis), exhibits no normal human understanding of people living in an actual society and of the concerns of responsible leaders dealing with real-world problems. For the ideologist, every act and phenomenon must be evaluated solely in terms of its closeness to the particular evil thing that the ideologist has singled out as the source of all problems in the world and therefore seeks to destroy.

F. Salzer is free to reply if he chooses, and others of course are free to continue their discussions with him, but I have nothing further to say to him.

Reply to Matt,

Matt writes:
“is there something lurking beneath this discussion that dares not raise its head into the light?” I’m not very good at guessing games, so if you wish to share your surmise, please do so.

I assume your quote which I’m unfamiliar with is directed at the Jews, and if so, it does fit Hitler’s general method of attack, and if he actually believed what he was saying, so be it.. And although such quotes might be useful for understanding Hitler, depending on us knowing why he made them. They explain very little in terms of why the German euthanasia programs could take place.

One of my favorite quote on the subject because it says so much in so few words is from a camp survivor, the camps were a “fantastically well-organized spin-and-span hell”; from the chapters on the German euthanasia program, A Sign for Cain, by Fredric Wertham. This quote is so noteworthy because it speaks to the whole German mind set of indifference and callousness . There was of course the passionate evils of sadism, hate and so forth. But if you read the accounts of those Germans who were involved, they are barbarically non passionate. They are lengthy, detailed, precise and completely removed from all human emotion and compassion. The camps were also efficient, methodical and sterile.

It is also false that the German people were separated from the camps, the camps were for the most part going industrial concerns located around towns and villages. The people who worked and operated those camps weren’t mad men, they were ordinary people, just as those who carried out the previous euthanasia of the retarded and insane were ordinary doctors or just as the soldiers who rounded up entire villages and executed them were ordinary soldiers. Large segments of the population were complicite and profited from the camps. The inmates were bondage labor rented from the state at a $1 a day.

This rented labor had immense value both to the Nazis and to the industrialists. But the profit was not just from the labor but from confiscated property, furnishings, and belongings. All these were carefully collected, sorted and liquidated. Then there was the profit to be made after death by turning the bodies into sellable products.

The camps produced an immense profit for all concerned; these all, included the Nazis, the industrialists, the banker, and the ordinary citizens.

Which finally brings me to my contention, the gypsies, ( who were most completely exterminated ), the Jews, ( who were killed in the largest numbers ) the political prisoners, the Slav and the undesirable citizens were worked to death and killed, not because of hate, but for profit.

What made so many capable of such barbarism is two fold, first they lost sight, as I mentioned before, of the natural law and the natural rights of men. This was somewhat already in place prior to the Nazis gaining power, and the foisting of a pagan religion and nationalism and socialism pushed it even further. Secondly they came to see their fellow man as somehow less than human. This was accomplished by the constant descriptions and vilifications of certain people and segments of the citizenry as less than human. This is why Hitler vilified the Jew and others. It is also why the abortion industry in our own country and the press refuse to acknowledge what is obvious to all to see.

Before a man can kill the innocent and deny the natural law which is so intricately bound to his very soul, he must first deny the humanity of his fellow man. He must blind himself or be blinded by others. This denial or blinding is the nature of vice.

In Nazi Germany, this blinding was so complete that the people became complete devoid of compassion for certain fellow men. In the US we have the sterile abortion operating room.

There are two opposites to love, one is hate, the other is indifference. Dresden was firebombed out of hatred. The holocaust took place from indifference and a lust for the material world, money and power.

I don’t have time right now to reply and correct Mr. Auster’s rather surprising assertions. But I do look forward to it.

Thinking back over my reply to Matt, I should have added :

The Jew, the Gypsies and to a lesser degree the Slavs. were chosen for extermination because there was already a strong animosity towards them. This animosity was further cultivated by Hitler. They were also of course non Aryan.

Exterminating the Jew was also more financially advantageous because they had greater possessions to liquidate and were competition to the industrialists and bankers. .

On the question of whether it was vengeance or the desire to purify the race/nation that motivated the Nazis, it seems to me that it was the latter. Their primary end was political power and the hegemony of the Reich. In order to achieve that end, they needed to cleanse their race of “undesirables.” In order to cleanse their race of undesirables, they needed to invoke the rhetoric of revenge as cover.

So vengeance can be considered a primary cause in the order of action, but it actually served the end of cleansing the race, which in turn served the end of establishing and maintaining the Reich.

F. Salzer says:
“I assume your quote which I’m unfamiliar with is directed at the Jews, and if so, it does fit Hitler’s general method of attack, and if he actually believed what he was saying, so be it…”

You don’t have to assume it. It is in the quote itself, in which the Jews are defined as the “foe” referred to in the rest of the quote (excusing the actual murderers as harmless fools driven to commit murder by the Jews):

“…stands the hate-filled power of our Jewish foe, …”

Literally hundreds or even thousands of quotes like this can be produced. For someone who claims to be able to pass the judgement that the Nazis were not motivated by hate and revenge (among other things) F. Salzer seems remarkably unfamiliar with the primary source material. To be frank, I am struck by the notion that I am dealing either with complete ignorance or with a world view that is one step away from holocaust denial.

Now if F. Salzer wants to argue that the sacrifice of 40 million children on the altar of Moloch in the sacrament of abortion is morally comparable to the Holocaust, I will not be the one to dispute with him. If F. Salzer is arguing that the growing potentiality of that evil existed in the Britian that perpetrated the firebombing I will not dispute that either. But F. Salzer surely knows as a Thomist that a growing social potentiality to commit an evil act is not the moral equivalent of actual commission, and that the fact that someone’s descendents will in the future commit a horrible sin does not sacramentally transubstantiate current acts into those future sins-of-the-sons.

A comparison between the actual sacrament of abortion and the Holocaust is not the comparison we were making. We were making a comparison of the holocaust initially to the firebombing of Tokyo, and then F. Salzer suggested that Dresden was a better exemplar of the sort of moral comparison he wished to make so I stipulated. Anyone with rudimentary familiarity with the facts (not to mention an ability to extract meaning from text, e.g. the quote I provided) will conclude that the Holocaust and Dresden are in utterly different categories, with the Holocaust manifestly in the _by far_ more evil category. Denying this does not advance the cause of dealing with Hitler and ourselves objectively; it has precisely the opposite effect.

False equality is the province of liberalism; leave it to the liberals. Shake the dust off your boots!

Reply to Matt,concerning the vile nature of euthanasia, and eugenics amongs others which should not be discounted as possible causes.

Matt writes in his last post:
“You don’t have to assume it. It is in the quote itself”

You are correct and I stand corrected. In laziness, I read the first few words of the quote before beginning of my post. But since I assumed correctly whom the quote referred to, and since I further assumed correctly the nature of the quote, it’s a rather minor point whether I read it more carefully or not.

Matt previously wrote in an earlier post what appears to be a sticking point of the disagreement.

“This is, of course, merely a sample of thousands of words that could be quoted indicating that vengeance (against a falsely accused enemy) and hatred were immediate causes of the Holocaust. Is it really possible to dispute this point-of-fact in good faith, or is there something lurking beneath this discussion that dares not raise its head into the light?”

Matt further wrote in his last post:
“Literally hundreds or even thousands of quotes like this can be produced. For someone who claims to be able to pass the judgement that the Nazis were not motivated by hate and revenge (among other things) F. Salzer seems remarkably unfamiliar with the primary source material. To be frank, I am struck by the notion that I am dealing either with complete ignorance or with a world view that is one step away from holocaust denial.”

Since you failed to address my last post except to address the Hitler quote, and since you further inferred that the Hitler’s quotes are of such grave importance in themselves, that my not accepting their meaning at face value lead you to be struck by the quixotic “notion” of holocaust denial, I think it is best to address more carefully Hitler’s quotes.

Although you apparently consider it not a question which can be raised in “good faith”, for me a question still remains that must be resolved, which is: what does your quote from Hitler, along with the hundreds or thousand others you mention, prove?

You state that these quotes are “indicating that vengeance (against a falsely accused enemy) and hatred were immediate causes of the Holocaust.” While I grant that the Jews, as your quote indicates were falsely accused; and while it is possible that the quotes do indicate an “immediate cause”, what is our degree of certitude that such an indication is the correct one?

How reliable is the source of these quotes, ( that is, how reliable is Hitler ), for determining certitude?

Since you are familiar with “primary source material”, I will take it as a given, and that you will grant my point that using Hitler as the sole source for determining the nature of Nazi thought, has its own failings. This is especially true given the structure of German government under Hitler, where he dramatically increased the bureaucracy with the various and redundant departments which acted autonomously. For instance the euthanasia program of killing the insane, epileptic etc, was carried out without prior orders from Hitler. The driving force behind the early euthanasia programs was the combination of the imbuing of the intelligencia with an Hegelian understanding of the nature of government, and the widespread acceptance of such negative eugenic books as “Permission to Destroy Life Not Worth Living” and “Fundamental Outline of Racial Hygiene”.

It is fairly certain though, from the mere volume and vitriol of the quotes, that Hitler wanted to make a lasting negative impression of the Jews on the Germans. It is further granted, Hitler may actually have hated the Jews, and he may have desired to stir up the people to hate them also because he hated them, and not merely to use the Jews as a useful scapegoat.

But what of our own experience when quotes are taken alone, as you take Hitler’s alone, for determining the truthfulness of a person’s words, or as a means of gaining insight into a person’s beliefs and intentions?

From our experience with politicians, it is difficult to conceive that many politicians actually believe what they are saying when they advocate the ending of abortion. There is too great of a disjunction between their words and their other actions for us to take their words seriously. It is common experience that politicians will deceive pro-lifers in order to be reelected because they know a few pro-life speeches, and a few token gestures will satisfy them sufficiently. They save their political capital for the voters and pacs who demand action, as opposed to hollow promises and phrases reserved for the pro-lifers. Remember Clinton’s phoney comments on how abortion should be rare, how many foolish Catholics believed him?

Neither is it possible to conceive that the “death peddlers”, on the cutting edge of the eugenics movement in the U.S., believe what they are saying when they use the language of crypto-eugenics ( http://www.eugenics-watch.com/#strategy ), or when they say the baby is not a separate living human being? The evidence to the contrary is insurmountable. Their arguments for infanticide via denial of personhood, and arguments for euthanasia via “death with dignity” & “live without meaning” have a long history, well known to all who have worked in pro-life on the national level. The eugenics movement’s objects are very straight forward to those who have eyes to see: negative eugenics and money. Plain and simple, their arguments about tissue and so forth is nothing more than eyewash for the gullible, along the same lines as a politician’s “personally opposed” argument. The eugenics movement deceive the gullible in order to maintain abortion on demand, while they push us further down the slippery negative eugenic slope.

It wouldn’t be difficult, only tedious, to gather thousands of deceptive quotes by such politicians and those in the various fields of the eugenics movement. But what do the quotes alone and taken by themselves prove? The quotes alone certainly don’t prove their deceptiveness nor do they prove that the disseminators believe what they are saying and writing. But we do know with a high degree of certitude the disingenuous deceptive nature of their quotes & intents because there is too much other evidence to the contrary. And it is this other evidence which proves the lack of reliability of the quotes as a means of discerning the true inner thoughts of the quote disseminators.

So on the face of it, we have politicians who will deceptively lead astray others for the further end of gaining and or maintaining power via votes and money, and we have the eugenics movement which will deceptively lead astray others for the further end of maintaining and foisting upon others their vicious eugenic desires, and lust for blood money.

So what can we conclude from all this? If not that quotes, no matter how abundant, are not always reliable when attempting to gain a valid insight into a disseminator’s true beliefs or intentions; and that we must also look to other evidence when attempting to gain that true insight.
We further know from Aristotle and St. Thomas that those who are virtuous can be trusted not to lie because it is contrary their habit of virtue. And likewise that the vicious man cannot be trusted to tell the truth because he will lie in order to fulfill his habit of vice.

Now, it is taken as a given that Hitler was more vicious than the common death peddler; but since it is granted that death peddlers will deceive in order to further their eugenic vice. So it must be granted in accord with the degree and type of viciousness, that Hitler would also have been capable of deception to a greater degree in order to further his vice.

It is further taken as a given that Hitler,( not unlike the common politician who sacrifices the unborn for political capital ), strove for political power over the German state, and was not afraid to sacrifice others, such as sacrificing the brown shirts to the industrialists, in order to further gain and stabilize his political power.

Since we know the German people had been long imbued with German Romanticism with its idealism of the Aryan race and religion of nature. But we also know of the modern philosophical understanding of government had also taken hold, of which Hegel played a pivotal role, and which subordinated the individual’s good to the good of the state. It is not unexpected that the German people and the euthanasia movement would see those who do not fit the German romantic notion of the ideal Aryan as less than desirable. And since all members are subsisting in the state, and derive their value through the state it is not unexpected that the undesirables would be reduced to lives devoid of value. So certain members of society became to be seen as lives devoid of value because they didn’t fit the romantic notion of what German culture should be. They corrupted and diluted the idealized German culture and thus became expendable.

As I mentioned before there wasn’t a frothing hatred, but a spic & span sterile expunging of the expendable.

There was also, as mentioned before an underlying tension between the Jews and other members of the German state. And as I mentioned before a profit motive, which was used to bring the industrialists into line. Just as the brown shirts were sacrificed to the industrialists, so were the gypsies, Jews and others sacrificed to greed, and the Jews were a scapegoat because of the underlying tension which could be used.

Since Hitler’s words cannot be taken as sufficient proof of his inward thoughts, we must look elsewhere to other evidence when attempting to discern Hitler’s intents and beliefs.

German Romanticism, Eugenics, Modern Philosophy, Profit and Scapegoating, these are the other evidence which all must be accounted for, or dismissed with reasoned arguments, when reading Hitler’s quotes since they all played a role in the development and actions of the Nazis..

If you wish to accept Hitler and his words at face value, so be it. Or if you do have primary source materials which proves hatred is the first cause, then please produce it.

As to your argument about sacraments and abortion at the end of your last post, I found it unintelligible. I haven’t any idea what you mean by “sacrament of abortion” although I did find the term repulsive.

And to the last point which is also where we began, the bombings of Tokyo and Dresden were vindictive and driven by unjust vengeance, the attempt was to destroy noncombatants as completely as was humanly possible. When a better killing machine came along, it was in turn used on the innocent to annihilate the two most Catholic cities in Japan. The attempt was to destroy the innocents as completely as possible, that bespeaks hatred, which is the desire for complete destruction of another.

Euthanasia, and desire for the material world and the other vices and corruptions, are grave sins but not as grave as hatred. And so far, no reliable proof of Nazi or Hitler hatred has been presented beyond what is common to any sin. The former will earn a man a place in Hell, but the later will send him to where it is colder.

But given all that is unknown about the extrinsic and remote causes and circumstances, I find it difficult to determine which acts were the more evil per se.

I simply find them all repugnant and vile crimes against humanity which call for our complete and unreserved condemnation. Along with all the other crimes against humanity which occured this last 20th century.

But more importantly than trying to determine which is the greater crime against humanity, we should seek out the underlying causes which alowed such crimes to be acceptable. Which by the way, was the entire point of my first post on this thread.

F. Salzer’s lengthy post amounts to a change of subject, since not once is the supposed moral equivalence between Dresden and the Holocaust addressed in it; and it is specifically that comparison that has been refuted as invalid.

Much of his post seems to present the thesis that primary source material doesn’t unequivocally show that the Nazis hated the Jews; and that because Hitler was a liar he was lying about hating the Jews. When I stop laughing perhaps I’ll have some substantive comment. By the same logic Bill Clinton is actually against oral sex and the Masons are really Catholic.

Mr. Salzer didn’t understand my comment about the secular sacrament of abortion. The critical point for the argument is that I object to the assertion of moral equivalence between the Holocaust and Dresden, not between the the former and the sacrament of abortion. I specifically said that if F. Salzer asserted that the sacrament of abortion and the Holocaust are morally equivalent I wouldn’t argue it. As to why I refer to abortion as a sacrament, I do so because that is precisely what it is. Abortion is sacred and untouchable to liberals; it involves the sacrifice of an innocent victim to the liberal god; it brings those who perform it closer to the liberal god; it makes it difficult for one who has had the sacrament to turn away from the liberal god, and the more so the harder; etc etc. Abortion is the liberal Mass, the sacrifice of an innocent victim on the altar of transcendent evil in order to cement the relationship between that transcendent evil and the immanent world. So I refer to it as a sacrament, and it may well be morally equivalent to or worse than the Holocaust.

“As to why I refer to abortion as a sacrament, I do so because that is precisely what it is. Abortion is sacred and untouchable to liberals; it involves the sacrifice of an innocent victim to the liberal god; it brings those who perform it closer to the liberal god; it makes it difficult for one who has had the sacrament to turn away from the liberal god, and the more so the harder; etc etc. Abortion is the liberal Mass … ” — Matt

That was extremely well-put, and truer words were never written. That cut right to the heart of the matter, in a mere handful of words. (If, that is, the left can be said to possess a heart … which, on second thought, it can’t. Let’s change that, then, to, “That cut right to the *core* of the matter,” as in the *core* of a festering, putrifying, pus-running abcess — the core which must be cut out, as the abcess is incised and drained, if the patient is to have the best chance of recovery. Yes, then … that cut right to the core of the abcess … )

Reply to Lawrence Auster’s rather surprising comments:

Mr. Auster writes:
(““Previously my eyes had just glanced over the long exchange involving F. Salzer, and I kept picking up odd and disturbing things about it without being able to justify my impressions. Now I’ve gone more carefully through this long discussion, and see that my superficial impressions were, unfortunately, correct. Let’s look at some of F. Salzer’s statements.”
“Mr. Newland and others have been pushing along a very good point, the Times story demonstrates just how pervasive is the notion which drove Hitler himself. The entire pantheistic notion that men are subsumed in the State and a person’s value is derived through the state.
“Under this pantheistic notion personhood ceases to exist and natural rights and natural law have no place. Nazi national socialism was certainly not unique, the entire notion of nation states is based in the same principle. This pervasive nationalism, so intimately bound to socialist pantheism affects every major nation.”——F. Salzer.
What I detect here is a bizarre attempt, apparently driven by libertarian or anti-statist ideology, to equate Hitlerian evil with a belief in the state. Hitler, we know, embarked on a course of tyranny, war, and the destruction of human beings which he exercised through his total control of the German state; but, according to Mr. Salzer, “the entire notion of nation states is based in the same principle.” The suggestion here is to equate the Nazi regime with all existing national governments. This has the simultaneous effect of making all national states seem evil and illegitimate, while lessening the actual evil of Nazism.”)

Mr Auster completely fails to consider the underlying philosophical principles of the nation-state which is what I was addressing, but instead chose to concentrate on the actions of a particular nation-state. The consequences of these philosophical underpinnings are not always imbedded in the constitutional type laws of the state but have been accepted the people as the underpinnings. For instance, nationalism has replace federalism in the U.S. Nationalism is not constitutional but it is how the U.S. functions today.

I further do not “equate Hitlerian evil with belief in the state”, ( although I do find the use of “belief” very interesting ), but instead equated certain philosophical principles with the nation-state. The Nazi German state may be a good exemplar of what the nation-state is capable of degenerating into, but it is no better of an example than France after the French revolution.

If Mr. Auster had read my posts even more carefully than he claims to have, he would know that I did not use arguments of fittingness, I did not make a “suggestion’‘ to equate the Nazi regime with all existing national governments”, but instead stated outright the philosophical relationship between Nazi Germany and other nation-states. Nor does the fact that nation-states have similar philosophical underpinnings make Nazism more of less evil than it actually was. But quite to the contrary, a failure to know philosophy and its implementation in government, and thus a failure to recognize similarities, will leave people helpless to defend themselves intellectually against bad philosophy and its implementation which helped lead to Nazism. The nation-state is not intrinsically evil or illegitimate, but neither is it a preferable form of government, because of its inherent flaws. Federalism, properly understood and practiced, on the other hand is a very good form of government.

Mr Auster writes:
(“”Hitler was a child of his times, the Times article is a product of the same time; and while Hitler was perhaps far more vicious than most, he perhaps was only more powerful. Can we honestly know he was far more vicious than those beneath him?”——F. Salzer.Again we see the ideological, relativist mindset at work; the real villain is not Hitler’s drive for power, his intent to destroy the rule of law and crush all opposition, his divinization of the German race, and his dehumanization of the Jews as the enemy of all things German. No, all THAT is merely a function of the REAL problem, which is “the times,” namely the 20th century with its belief in the state. Which, by the way, all of us equally participate in. And therefore Hitler is just like us.”)

Do you deny Hitler was a child of his times? History says otherwise. The denial of the natural law and natural rights along with eugenics and the rise of the nation-state all lead to Hitler’s rise to power, but more importantly, it lead to the Nazis being able to carry out their desires. To deny the role of modern philosophy played in Hitler’s crimes is silly. It is not accidental that somewhere between 100 to 200 million people were kill in the 20th century by their own governments, which is, by the way, estimated to be more people than were killed by aggressors in all wars previous to the 20th century.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“”The firebombing of Tokyo was no less vicious than the gas ovens, it only received better press.”——F. Salzer
There are no words to condemn this statement sufficiently.”)

I’m disappointed you didn’t attempt a condemnation. But you could at least have tried a rational argument, our language is sufficient for that. As it is, I have nothing to reply to.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“”If Hitler’s motive was vengeance, AS SOME CONTEND [emphasis added], then they are morally equal, if it was on the other hand pragmatic and eugenic, vengeance is the greater evil per se.” [i.e., then the “vengeance” of the bombing of Tokyo is a greater evil than the Holocaust.]——F. Salzer.

The mind reels at this. In reality, the purpose of the bombing of Japan was to get the Japanese government——one of the most aggressive, cruel, and murderous regimes in history——to surrender. And the moment that it did surrender, peace descended on the land, the U.S. helped Japan rebuild itself and construct a decent government and Japan became a strong, stable, peaceful ally of the U.S. All of this suggests, not a motive of vengeance on the part of the U.S. against the Japanese, but a motive of defeating a criminal militarist regime that COULD BE DEFEATED BY NO OTHER MEANS THAN MASSIVE FORCE.”)

The type of pragmatism I speculated the Nazis of committing is at the expense of the natural law and rights, which makes it an grave evil. The same can be said of negative eugenics.

But more to the point the remote object of unjust vengeance can be hatred. Hatred is a greater evil than killing of the flesh alone. Just as blasphemy and unbelief are greater evils than murder because they are directly against God.

Further, because the method of attack on Tokyo was so massive and violent and very similar to Dresden, and because we know that the atomic bombs were dropped without just cause on noncombatants after Japan had already sought surrender, although not unconditionally, it is not unlikely that the US attacked the noncombatant population of Tokyo with vindictive intent. Since that was the intent of the firebombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bombs on Japan along with the attempt to cause Japan to unconditionally surrender. It has also been speculated that the US dropped the atomic bombs in order to test them, because the cities were Catholic, and because we wanted to demonstrate to the world the US’s capacity to use the bomb. All of which violate just war doctrine.

The very least that can be said is that the US violated just war doctrine, and intentionally killed the innocent. The object of attempting to cause a country to surrender using unjust methods is just that, Unjust.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“Further, since F. Salzer calls it unjust, what would HE have counseled the U.S. to do instead? A person who denounces the very means by which a society has preserved itself from defeat at the hands of a cruel and expansive tyranny, while offering no feasible alternative of his own, is a nihilist, in the same sense that (as David Horowitz has written) Marxists who denounce free enterprise and the American political system and the lives of ordinary people in that system, but who have nothing to offer in its place but slavery and tyranny, are nihilists whose only end is the destruction of the human good that actually exists.”)

Only God can bring good out of evil. St. Augustine, for one, in the City of God condemns the practice of committing evil to bring about a future good. The just war doctrine is not a suggestion, but a requirement which must be obeyed. If we wish to be more than barbarians, than we must not act like the barbarians. The firebombing of Tokyo was the act of barbarians.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“But it gets worse. What Salzer is saying here is that it is only “contended” that Hitler’s motive against the Jews was hatred or vengeance, while, he continues, it is equally possible that Hitler’s motive was “pragmatic and eugenic.” Pragmatic and eugenic? What kind of mind would describe the darkness that engulfed Europe in such terms?”)

Pragmatism is not a mild term, Machiavilli’s treaties on “The Prince” is pure pragmatism. Pragmatism at the expense of God’s law is a very grave abrogation of justice. Negative eugenics is also a very grave error. Both are condemned by the Church and all civilized mankind, as was demonstrated at the Nuremberg Trials. I am sorry that only those men who were part of the Axis were tried for crimes against humanity.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“Furthermore, since he believes the bombing of Japan was motivated by vengeance, it would follow that the bombing of Japan was worse than Hitler’s mass murder of European Jewry.”)

Not vengeance, but unjust vengeance. Further, the graver error is hatred not unjust vengeance, because the object is a greater evil.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“But my contention was that Great Britain’s act of unjust vengeance is a more grievous remote cause than Hitler’s remote eugenic cause.”——F. Salzer.
The need for any guesswork is over. F. Salzer has made his position explicit. There is a word for the type of mind that could describe the dehumanization and destruction of European Jewry in such antiseptic, abstract terms, but I won’t use it here.”)

Evil and the nature of sin is known by very well understood and defined laws, theology and philosophical principles. You apparently think that my refusal to use emotional laden words is a sign of a lack or compassion, but you are incorrect. I simply find emotions inappropriate for rational debate. Letting emotions get in the way of the intellect will only cloud our thoughts. And since some people throw tissy fits over terms such as bloodthirsty and war party, I find it best to avoid those types of phrases also, no matter how appropriate and fitting they might be.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“Finally, in response to Unadorned’s question whether his anti-state philosophy would allow distinct nations to exist, F. Salzer replies that it’s the large size of states that makes them objectionable, and that he believes in something along the lines of the Athenian polis. Here again, we see the subordination of morality and common sense to ideology. F. Salzer prefers the small state, he thinks it’s the only moral form of state, and that the large state is inherently evil, from all of which it follows that the citizens of a large state are necessarily engaged in an evil enterprise simply by virtue of being citizens of a large state, and, of course, they are much more evil if they use deadly force to defend themselves from an aggressor who can be defeated in no other way.”)

No, I wrote that the larger nation-state is based on bad principles, which makes it inherently flawed. These flaws make it more susceptible of committing the errors of state which became rather common place in the 20th century. But which were rarely committed in prior centuries by civilized countries. I don’t consider those error to be accidental.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“In fact, the bombing of Japan (or of Dresden——I tend to agree from that the bombing of Dresden was wrong and probably a war crime, largely because it was not necessary) was not the expression of a “state”——it was the expression of people——OUR people, the people of America and Britain——who were facing the greatest threat to their civilization, their freedom, and their very existence they had ever known, and who therefore had no choice but to defeat the enemy completely. But to all this, to the common experience of the people of Great Britain and the United States in the greatest crisis of their history, Salzer is cold and deaf. The only calculations that exist for him is statism, and in terms of statism, there’s no essential difference between America and Britain on one side and Nazi German and Imperial Japan on the other. The ideological mind, whatever its bêête noire, whether it’s the state (libertarians), or bourgeois capitalism (Marxists), or the Jews (Nazis), exhibits no normal human understanding of people living in an actual society and of the concerns of responsible leaders dealing with real-world problems. For the ideologist, every act and phenomenon must be evaluated solely in terms of its closeness to the particular evil thing that the ideologist has singled out as the source of all problems in the world and therefore seeks to destroy. “)

A war crime or a crime against humanity is just that, and it matters not who commits such a crime. Is the crime more justifiable because “OUR people” committed it. The final authority of our country rests in its people, this is both as God designed men and also in the DOI and in our constitution. We are a republic with elected representatives not elected sovereigns. That means that all crimes and improper government actions by the US are committed in my name and yours. The responsibility finally rests on us, because the sovereignty rests in us.

Further, I consider such crimes to be even less justified because I expect us to be better. Just as I expect my self and my family to be better.

And you are correct, Dresden wasn’t firebombed because it was a military target, it was firebombed with the sole intention of destroying that city because London had been earlier bombed by the Germans.

Further, I don’t think the leaders of our country or, any other that I’m familiar with, are acting responsibly. Can you honest say that our country was reduced to the state it is in, in spite of responsible leadership?

Cold and deaf? Interesting terms, but rather inappropriate. But as I wrote before, letting emotions get in the way clouds our capacity to think. My intention from the beginning was to discern the underlying causes, and one of the most affective ways to make such a discernment on a forum, such as this, is to present an argument and wait for the replies . And then to proceed to hammer out an issue in hope of a resolution. Intellectual honesty without fear of our ox being gored will lead to a better understand of the issues.

The issue at hand is modern philosophy which pervades our European and American culture, and our governments, and it is best we understand its roots, causes and effects, because if we don’t discern and understand them, we are no better off than the illiterate pagans who are incapable of affective insight, and act from shallow and inappropriate causes of which they are unaware.

One effect of modern philosophy is the culture of death foisted upon us by the eugenics movement, which as I noted before was the overriding cause of the German euthanasia and eugenics programs. And while the eugenics movement was outspoken and pervasive in the US prior to WWII, it is of course now much more underground because the Nazi holocaust gave the common man a very good insight into the vile nature of the movement.

But the eugenics movement is still very much among us in the form of such crypto-eugenic organizations as the Pioneer Fund, Manhattan Institute, FAIR, the Population Council, Planned Parenthood and the genome projects. And of course they can’t advocate outright anymore their favorite pet project of sterilization, where over 85,000 Americans were for forcibly sterilized, but they are still up to their old tricks of playing their own version of the race card and promoting immigration control to keep out the impure rif-raf. Hitler even modeled, his own sterilization program after that of the US.

But their biggest successes to date are the population explosion myths, abortion and contraception. You will, of course, no longer find the eugenics movement paying poor Irish Catholics and Slavs to carry placards saying they shouldn’t have been born, such Margaret Sanger used to do. But then eugenics movement no longer needs to, those same Irish and Slavs, along with the targeted Hispanics and Blacks, now pay the eugenics movement to kill their babies by abortion and sterilize themselves via contraception. It’s amazing what good advertising and better public relations can accomplish. And it’s much more profitable to boot.

And although I won’t get into it at the moment, the worst offenses occur overseas where US exports its eugenic culture of death to the third world.

But then again, I suppose I shouldn’t compare Nazi Germany to the United States, because after all, the US is as pure as the driven white snow..Or at least that what the eugenics movement hopes to accomplish.

Mr. Auster writes:
(“F. Salzer is free to reply if he chooses, and others of course are free to continue their discussions with him, but I have nothing further to say to him.”)

Gnostic accusations, emotional arguments, ad hominems, and this particular anathema of having “nothing further to say” are silly & childish, and are certainly inappropriate for the rational debate of a forum. In my undergrad. years where every class was a discussion, from freshman year on up, I never once heard such a childish comment. Although I do suspect more than one freshman over the years has been taken to task by his tutor for such nonsense. And of course later on, there has been the occasional lib. who stormed about and refused to argue any further; but from you, I expected better. And expect to see better in the future.

Reply to Matt,

I think you are probably correct, I went back and did a fair amount of reading and although Hitler was obsessed with eugenics and power, I does seem likely that he hated the Jews as well. As absolutely irrational as that hatred may be.

So although I still don’t think he hated all the others who were targeted for extermination, but with the Jews, it does seem probable.

So in light of that, I would say there is not a moral equivalence between Dresden and Tokyo and the extermination of the Jews.

But the equivalence still remains with the others.

A sacrament is a sign of an inward act, as you know. Which was how I read your post.

And as to your other comments, I don’t think it is worth persuing.