Reader says the Holocaust Museum killer is a “Christianityist”

The following came from a reader on June 10 and June 11. Since my exchange with him went into some irrelevant side issues, I have left out my replies. The below is thus a compilation of several of the reader’s e-mails, which may explain the somewhat jerky quality of the text.

The reader writes:

Is the journalism about the murders of Dr. Tiller and the Holocaust Museum guard defective (or worse, contributing to the deterioration of Western Civilization) by failing to point out the religion of the Christianityist terrorists who have been charged with the crimes?

I didn’t check your blog, but if you’re all over the fact that Christianity either caused or contributed to these guys’ madness, or may have done so, then I am remiss. If I point out an inconsistency in the way you react to madness and terrorism based on which religion is involved, you could admit it. You could challenge me on the facts. You could try to distinguish the fact patterns.

Whenever a Muslim nut-job commits a heinous crime, you instantly point out where the MSM has not highlighted his religion. You do so, I believe, for the purpose of showing that the West is self-deluded and self-destructive for allowing Muslims among us and ignoring their ill-will toward the West. It’s only my impression, but it seems to me you raise this intentional hiding of the nut’s religion at the very earliest time, when (to me) it seems the authorities might not even know his religion. When they or journalists learn his religion (not just guess at it), they report it.

Am I wrong so far?

I frequently don’t agree with those observations of yours. But you claim it is a defect of the craft of journalism and a defect in our society that we don’t immediately associate a Muslim nut-job’s religion with his crime. You think his religion provides his own internal justification or explanation or excuse for his crime. (Maybe that’s not strong enough. Maybe you think it provides his motivation or his compulsion. But for this purpose, we don’t have to slice it that thinly. You think his religion is related to his crime.)

I think these two perps thought they were doing God’s—in this case, the Christ’s—work. I suspect they found Christian explanations, justifications, excuses, motivations or even compulsions to kill these two people. Not that Christianity does any of those things, just that the perps think it does.

Am I wrong so far?

So I would think that to be consistent, you might want to associate these acts immediately with Christianityism.

Now with that, you might disagree. You might say that consistency is the hobgoblin and all that. Or you might find factual distinctions between trumpeting the religion of a Muslim nut vs. trumpeting the religion of a Christian nut, so that you’re not, in fact, inconsistent. There’s a ton of ways you could have handled that. What I was really hoping for was an articulation as to why you think it’s urgent to understand when nut-jobs are moved by Islam, but not when they are moved by Christianity.

On the question whether the reporting did include his religion. I’m not about to make a survey, but I just did this quick check. At news.google, there are 7,227 hits for “James von Brunn” and 42 hits for “James von Brunn Christian.” That’s not a perfect answer, for many reasons, but I think it tends to support that his religion was not often mentioned. Just at quick glance, many articles about the Holocaust Museum event that contain “Christian” in them are opinion pieces rather than reportage, and it seems at least some of those are right-wing Christians making (or trying to make) the point that von Brunn was not a right-wing Christian.

In response to my criticism of his word “Christianityist” which he applied to the killers, the reader added:

I’m not crazy about the word either. I didn’t make up “Islamism.” I’m just using the analog.

I replied to the reader this morning :

Are you actually under the impression that this life-long anti-Semite and Nazi type von Brunn is a Christian?

What gave you this idea? Inquiring minds would like to know.

You have thoroughly exposed your ignorant, anti-Christian bigotry. Here’s an article on his background in today’s New York Times. Not only is he not a Christian, but he’s an anti-Christian, having the standard anti-Jewish, anti-Christian view that Christianity is a foreign, Jewish religion imposed on European pagan peoples and weakening them from within.

So the reason you didn’t find news references to Brunn’s being a Christian is that he’s not a Christian; and, further, even if he were nominally Christian, obviously there’s no Christian body he represents or that supports him.

Yet you automatically assumed he was a Christian, because he is an anti-Semite. You have the standard prejudice that Christians are anti-Semites and that anti-Semitism is Christian. You evidently have no knowledge of actual anti-Semitism in this country, how it is composed almost entirely of people who disdain Christianity as much as they do Judaism. Instead, you construct an equivalence between Christianity and Islam, which commands its followers to wage war against, kill, and subdue non-believers and specifically Jews, a commandment that has been followed by innumerable Muslims over the centuries and is being followed by them still, a command that is not contradicted by any acknowledged Muslim authority

As for the murder of the abortion doctor, I haven’t yet read about it, but let’s assume the killer is a Christian. All Christian bodies and all anti-abortion organizations utterly condemn and dissociate themselves from people who use violence against abortionists. So, even if the murderer is a Christian of some kind, and I would assume he is, his act is not typical or representative of Christianity. By contrast, Muslim violence against non-Muslims is typical and representative of Islam.

- end of initial entry -

Sage McLaughlin writes:

It is depressing to me just how many people really believe that Nazism is some sort of vaguely Christian phenomenon. Academic historians do as much as possible to foster this impression in college students, by the way. In a course on German history, a lecture on the Holocaust began with a full twenty-minute slide show on Christian anti-Semitism, complete with yellow-paper sketches of Passion plays, the Inquisition (as if it had any relevance to the subject), and so forth, followed by Nazi iconography and photos from the camps. Just blatantly propagandistic manipulation through quick-moving associative imagery. The students, brain-dead iPod-wearing and cell phone-obsessed Visigoths all, dutifully lapped it up. And this professor was one of the better ones that I had.

People just have no idea how bad it is out there right now.

Alan Levine writes:

I found myself quivering with terror over the threat of Christianityist terror. The very worst, of course, are those damn Amish. They are so daibolically clever that they pose as pacifists and dress much like Hasidic Jews, while pretending to avoid modern technology. They are obviously a lot more dangerous than those Al Qaeda clowns. If they ever get their hands on nuclear weapons…..

I would like to think that Sage McLaughlin exaggerates about the antics of academic historians, but unfortunately he doesn’t, much. It is really remarkable how, instead of pointing to their favorite culprit, “racism,” for everything, many ignore the Aryan race theory and seize on the largely unconnected matter of Christian hostility to Jews while ignoring the Nazis related hostility to Slavs and their actual contempt for Christianity as an ancient form of “Jewish Bolshevism.” By the way, if anyone ever encounters anyone who believes this nonsense about the Nazis and Christianity, just quote Hitler’s warm view of the Christian religion as expressed in “Hitler’s Table Talk”—“Jewish filth and priestly twaddle.”

Mark A. writes:

It honestly disgusts me when people say what this reader has said. The only organized group in Germany that opposed Hitler and the Holocaust was the Church. They were his biggest public problem in implementing the final solution. Even an amateur study of World War II Germany would teach this. This reader needs to get a library card and do some reading.

June 13

LA to reader:

If you show any sign of acknowledging and regretting your (and I use these terms advisedly) shameful ignorance and bigotry against Christians that you revealed in your amazing automatic assumption that the Holocaust Museum shooter was a Christian, I’ll let up on you.

But so far there are no signs that you have it in you.

Here are some things that James von Brunn has written:

“The Big Lie technique, employed by Paul to create the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, also was used to create the HOLOCAUST RELIGION … CHRISTIANITY AND THE HOLOCAUST are HOAXES.”

***

“The New Testament was written in Greek. Paul—who believed the World was flat, that Joshua made the sun stand still, and Jehovah spoke from a burning bush—wrote one-third of it, perhaps more. The events described in the 24 Books are often contradictory, fail the time-line, defy both archaeology’s and nature’s immutable laws, and are suicidal if practiced. Nevertheless, the shamans bought it, taught it, and the illiterate public was coerced, brainwashed, threatened, tortured, murdered, and enthralled… The Gospels profess that only Christians may enter Yahweh’s Kingdom of Heaven. To qualify, among other demands, Christians must LOVE THEIR ENEMIES (Jews); give away their personal belongings; eschew knowledge; judge not, despise nature, abandon earthly pleasures, acknowledge that all YHWH’s children are equal; and above all else worship YHWH, the jealous, wrathful, vengeful, unforgiving, genocidal, anthropomorphic tribal god (Jesus’ father) created by Hebrews in their image and likeness. Omnipotent, omniscient YHWH promises Hebrews that they alone shall inherit the earth, that it is commendable to steal from Gentiles, better yet—kill them. Whereas Gentiles, if they fail to worship YHWH, are transported straight to Hell. And it is written, ‘A little child shall lead them.’ These dangerous, imbecilic, concepts, tenets, and teachings, often treasonous, DESTROYED the Roman Empire and drenched the soil of Europe with Aryan blood for almost 2000 years!”

Ben W. writes:

It appears that the Christianityist who shot the Holocaust Museum guard was a Darwinist.

Ah those goddam Darwinianistyists. But of course the Christianityists are blamed first. However not by VFRistanityists. Never would an Austerianist do that.

LA replies:

There’s nothing on Darwin at the site that Ben linked, but if you follow the links, you will come to a blog entry by David Klinghoffer at Belief.net where he quotes from von Brunn’s manifesto. The bolding is Klinghoffer’s:

Approval of inter-racial breeding is predicated on idiotic Christian dogma that God’s children must love their enemies (a concept JEWS totally reject); and on LIBERAL/MARXIST/JEW propaganda that all men/races are created equal. These genocidal ideologies, preached from the American pulpits, taught in American schools, legislated in the halls of Congress (confirming TALMUDIC conviction that goyim are stupid sheep), are expected to produce a single, superintelligent, beautiful, non-White “American” population. Eliminating forever racism, inequality, bigotry and war. As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels. Throughout history improvident Whites have miscegenated. The “brotherhood” concept is not new (as LIBERALS pretend) nor are the results—which are inevitably disastrous for the White Race—evident today, for example, in the botched populations of Cuba, Mexico, Egypt, India, and the inner cities of contemporary America.

Klinghoffer continues:

This wacko despises Christianity, too, though not quite as much as he does Judaism. Like Hitler in Mein Kampf, he draws lessons from his interpretation of Darwinism. He’s very big on dangers to the Aryan “gene pool.” The subtitle of his book promises: “A New hard-hitting Expose Of The JEW CONSPIRACY To Destroy The White Gene-Pool.”

Other thoughts in this pseudo-scientific vein:

Our Founding Fathers were Aryans, men of good breeding who understood, empirically, the great differences existing between strains of horses; strains of live-stock; races of men; and between individuals: knowledge confirmed today by the natural sciences of Genetics, Eugenics, and Anthropology. Hitler, as American boobs are beginning to learn, was not all wrong.

Also this:

[T]o the astonishment of the world, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, who emphasized genetics and the homogeneity of the Aryan race, led Germany to an amazing spiritual and economic recovery.

No, he doesn’t cite Darwin by name in the part of his book that’s readable online—the first 6 of 12 chapters. But do you get the general drift? And you want to tell me that ideas don’t have consequences?

[end of Klinghoffer entry]

Now there are all kinds of things mixed up here. One doesn’t need to be a Darwinian (meaning a person who believes that all life forms have come into being through a blind material process of random genetic mutations and natural selection) to believe that within a given species one family or population can be degraded by interbreeding with a family or population of inferior qualities. People knew long before Darwin. However, von Brunn, like Hitler (and also like the Darwinian anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and the Darwinian anti-Semites at MajorityRights.com) uses Darwin inspired thinking as the basis for a vision of life consisting of unrelenting race war, particularly race war between Jews and white gentiles.

What is appalling is that the reader, and the secular liberal media whose attitudes and assumptions he echoes, thinks that anti-Semitism in America today comes from Christians, when in reality it comes primarily from anti-Christians, especially from Darwinian materialists who see the Jews as a group commanded by its genes to seek the destruction of white gentile societies. It’s difficult for the secular liberals to grasp this, because they themselves are Darwinian materialists. How can secular liberal Darwinians, who believe that Christian belief is the main source of backwardness and bigotry in America, including murderous anti-Semitism, possibly grasp that the anti-Semitism comes from their fellow materialist Darwinians? They will go through every conceivable mental acrobatics to avoid seeing that.

LA continues:

Also, the reader has written a reply to my previous comment to him which I will post along with my further reply tomorrow.

June 14

LA writes:

I posted a new entry linking to this discussion of von Brunn’s Darwinism. Since it’s relevant here, here is the text of the initial entry:

Holocaust Museum killer is a Darwinian

American liberalism has become a quasi totalitarian political movement that, in totalitarian fashion, routinely employs the Big Lie to generate hatred against its opponents, or, to be more precise (since most conservatives don’t truly oppose liberalism anyway), against its chosen scapegoats. Just as President Clinton blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on Rush Limbaugh and the black church burnings on conservatives, liberals this week have said that James von Brunn, the murderer at the Holocaust Museum, is a conservative Christian. The truth, which we discuss here, is the opposite—von Brunn is a Nazi-type anti-Christian. More specifically, he is a Darwinian in the same manner that Hitler was.

However, in response to the liberals’ Big Lie about von Brunn and conservatives, mainstream conservative websites are going overboard with their own false argument, that von Brunn is not even on the right, but on the left. (See for example Ben Johnson’s article at FrontPage Magazine.) This is but the latest installment in the hackneyed, pitiful argument that Nazism is really a form of leftism, an argument that conservatives cannot let go of because they think it will clear them once and for all of the left’s charge that conservatives are Nazi-like. I’ve debated against the “Nazism is leftism” argument repeatedly over the years, and definitively refuted it here. Conservatives need to suck in their gut and accept the reality. Nazism, notwithstanding its socialist elements, is at its core an extreme and debased form of rightism, not a form of leftism.

June 14

The reader whose comment began this thread replies to LA:

If von Brunn wasn’t Christian, then he wasn’t and I was wrong when I assumed he was. I’m glad if he wasn’t Christian and sorry I said he was. [LA replies: apology accepted.]

By the way, go re-read what I wrote. I never said Christians, real ones in their right minds, would do what either of these nut jobs did. It may serve you to think I’m ignorant about or bigoted against Christians, but to me, it looks pretty much like thoughtless venom for you to ascribe that to me (in bold and advisedly, no less). You’re wrong and it’s a good question why you think it serves you to say those things. I’m not going there. For this purpose, I’ll just note that nothing in this exchange justifies your saying anything like that. But, as I say, if it makes you feel better…. [LA replies: you admit that you were wrong in this individual case, but you still fail to see your larger prejudicial belief of which that mistake was a symptom, namely your belief that the main threat facing Jews in today’s America is conservative Christians. That this is your belief is proved by the fact that the moment you heard about a man attacking the Holocaust Museum, you thought “Christian,” or, rather, “Christianityist,” and wrote to me about it. You seem to have no notion of the real anti-Semitism that exists, which overwhelmingly is not a Christian thing, and not at all a Protestant thing (the main Christian anti-Semites are a small number of traditional Catholics). Instead, the main anti-Semites are anti-religious Darwinians, who think of the Jews as the genetically determined racial enemy of white gentiles in a war in which one or the other group must be destroyed. Not being aware that the real anti-Semites in America happen to be Darwinians like yourself, you simply repeated the liberal prejudice that ignorant unthinking Christians are the main danger, just as you kept saying in another recent thread that proponents of intelligent design are mindless faith-driven robots, and you refused to retract that view even after I showed you the falsity of it. Which also exemplified your … since the word bigotry may sound too offensive, I’ll say your prejudice. But when I’ve used the words ignorance, prejudice, and bigotry I am simply using the words and standards of liberal society. For the last fifty years the main moral thrust of our society has been the campaign against ignorance, prejudice, and bigotry. Liberals are constantly condemning “bigotry,” namely the bigotry of whites and Chrisitians. A liberal should have no objection to a person’s behavior being judged by that standard, even if, as in the present case, the person is himself.]

I have no idea if the website you quote has the info right, or if von Brunn has written other, inconsistent things. (What the hell does that rambling mean?) [LA replies: his quotations are not incoherent, they fit a familiar, standard belief system on the neo-Nazi right.] But let’s say I was wrong, he didn’t think he was fulfilling divine will, or if he did, it wasn’t Christianity. If he’s not Christian, I was wrong to say he was. But I note you haven’t dealt with my question as it relates to Dr. Tiller’s murderer. Wasn’t he Christian? Do you care to articulate why it’s fine for you not to complain about the press’s failure to mention his religion, but you complain bitterly when a Muslim nut-job commits a heinous act? I think I know what your answer is. I’d just like to hear you articulate it. It’s a little suspicious that you’re avoiding it. If you didn’t want to answer, you could have simply ignored it, or said out loud that you chose not to answer. Instead, you repeatedly dream up baseless personal attacks. [LA replies: this is unclear. Based on your earlier e-mails, I gathered that your complaint with me is not that I didn’t complain about the media failing to report that the killer of Tiller is a Christian, since they did report it, but rather that I myself have not pointed to his Christian background, and this, you are suggesting, makes me hypocritical. Why, you ask, do I emphasize the Islamic background of Muslims who commit violent crimes, but not the Christian background of Christian who commit violent crimes. I’ve already answered that. The killer of Tiller is an extremist nut who doesn’t represent any religion or group. All Christian and conservatives condemn him. The Muslim shooter in Little Rock by contrast is doing what Muslims are doing all the time and what they are commanded by their god to do, whether as members of organized groups or as free lance jihadists: they are killing the enemies of Islam. Further, unbelievably, you’re not aware that the Christian murderer of Tiller was all over the media, while the Muslim murderer of the soldier in Little Rock, Pfc. Long, got far less coverage. But you think that Muslim killers are being singled out and that Christian killers are getting a free ride.]

I like to suppose you don’t actually think the bad things about me that you sometimes hurl at me. I know quite well that you think I’m liberal and therefore means I’m irredeemably misguided. People of intelligence and good will can disagree with one another, and I’m happy to continue writing with you on that basis. But if you think I’m the jackass you sometimes say I am, please don’t feel any obligation to blight your day by writing to me. [LA replies: First, every one of our exchanges has begun with you responding to me about a VFR post. Second, I am not using this strong language to insult you, but to attempt to communicate to you that you are violating the standards of your own liberal belief system by entertaining ignorant, prejudicial, wrongful beliefs about people, namely about Christians and conservatives.]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2009 10:48 AM | Send