Inside the Nazi Mind - Parallels With the Christofascist Mind?

This blog has frequently noted that many of the anti-gay Christofascist organizations have modeled their anti-gay propaganda on that of the Nazi propaganda campaign against Europe's Jews.  Among the common threads are that gays/Jews are diseased, the gays/Jews are a threat to children, and that gays/Jews seek to undermine Christian society.  Likewise, gays are depicted as a small, powerful minority that weld undue influence - e.g., "the powerful homosexual lobby."  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at some of the findings of American psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed the 24 of the highest-ranking Nazis then in captivity at Nuremberg.   Among the most chilling findings was the complete lack of any sense of personal responsibility for the mass murder and denigration of other humans.   What strikes me is the parallels with today's Chritofascists - e.g., Tony Perkins, Maggie Gallagher, Bryan Fischer, the list goes on - and the Russian regime that seemingly feel that they are "doing the right thing" and/or "following orders" be they from the Bible or the Russian legislature.  Here are highlights from the piece:

Why do men commit evil? Were the kommandants who ran the Nazi death camps psychopaths? Did they have subnormal intelligence? Were they just ordinary men who made appalling decisions?

These were also the questions that a team of American psychologists and psychiatrists were directed to answer during the Nuremberg Trials that opened on November 20, 1945, six months after the war’s end.

Charges of crimes against humanity were read out against 24 of the highest-ranking Nazis then in captivity, including Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reich Security Main Office and the highest-ranking SS officer after Himmler’s death.

With so many senior Nazis held in one place at the same time, the Americans instructed a panel of psychologists to conduct exten­sive interviews and tests with the defendants. Such horrific crimes were committed surely by damaged men, men different in some fundamental way from the rest of humanity.

Among the defendants examined was Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz. Unlike the others held in Nuremberg, Höss had been intimately involved in the design and day-to-day operations of the extermination camps. 

The American asked how it was possible to kill so many people. “Technically,” answered Höss, “that wasn’t so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.” Gilbert then pressed him for an emotional response, but Höss continued in a similar tone: “At the time there were no consequences to consider. It didn’t occur to me that I would be held responsible. You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible.” Gilbert started to ask, “But what about the human—” before Höss interrupted, “That just didn’t enter into it.” After a few more questions, Höss said, “I suppose you want to know in this way if my thought and habits are normal.” “Well, what do you think?” Gilbert asked. “I am entirely normal,” said Höss. “Even while I was doing the extermination work, I led a normal family life.”

Rudolf Höss replied: “I feel less nervous now than I did.” He was then asked if he felt upset over what he had done in Auschwitz. “I thought I was doing the right thing,” said Höss. “I was obeying orders, and now, of course, I see that it was unnecessary and wrong. But I don’t know what you mean by being upset about these things because I didn’t personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination program at Auschwitz. It was Hitler who ordered it through Himmler and it was Eichmann who gave me the orders regarding transports.”

When Goldensohn asked if he was haunted by nightmares—by images of the executions, gas chambers, or burning corpses—Höss replied: “No, I have no such fantasies.”

The conclusion of the psychologists and psychiatrists at Nuremberg was clear: they both decided that though Rudolf Höss was intelligent, he was mentally ill: a psychopath, psychotic, amoral, lacking empathy.

But Rudolf flatly denied this to be the case. He declared himself to be normal.  He regretted, at most, doing something unnecessary.  Overseeing the murder of over a million people had left him unhaunted by “fantasies.”

The impression of the mental health professionals was also contradicted by two of the intelligence officers who interrogated Rudolf Höss.

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.

To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.

Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions.

Note the reference to "not thinking."  Nothing is more disturbing to the Christofascist than having to think or rebut objective reality which demonstrates that their "deeply held beliefs" are false and which would require them to accept responsibility for the harm done to others.  Are the Christofascists as bad as the Nazi regime?  No - or at least most are not.  But the same frightening refusal to think and mindless inclination to "follow orders" are certainly a part of the Christofascist make up.  Or, so I believe.

 

Conservative Jewish Group Approves Gay Weddings

I continue to believe that anti-gay laws - such as DOMA and DADT before its repeal - and bans on gay marriage are unconstitutional violations of the right to freedom of religion for all, not just Christofascists.  None the less, conservative Christianity continues to enjoy illegal special rights by forcing its religious dogma (one based principally on hate, fear and bigotry) on all of American society.  Adding fuel to the argument that bans on same sex marriage improperly impact on religious freedom of non-Christianists, the Conservative branch of American Judaism has formally approved same-sex marriage ceremonies.   But the Christofascists continue to believe that their beliefs get to trump all others.  It makes me want to vomit.  Here are highlights from Fox News of all places: 

 The Conservative branch of American Judaism has formally approved same-sex marriage ceremonies, nearly six years after lifting a ban on ordaining gays and lesbians.

The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards issued the ruling Thursday on a 13-0 vote with one abstention, said Rabbi Elliot Dorff, the committee chairman. The panel of scholars approved two model wedding ceremonies and guidelines for a same-sex divorce. Rabbis can adapt the marriage ceremonies for the couples.

"We acknowledge that these partnerships are distinct from those discussed in the Talmud as 'according to the law of Moses and Israel,' but we celebrate them with the same sense of holiness and joy as that expressed in heterosexual marriages," the legal opinion states.

Conservative Judaism is the second-largest Jewish movement in North America and holds a middle ground between liberal and traditional groups. The Reform and Reconstructionist branches accept gay relationships, while the stricter Orthodox Jewish movement does not. The Conservative law committee lifted the ban on gay ordination in December 2006.

Called the "Covenant of Loving Partners," the Conservative same-sex marriage document bases the ceremonies on Jewish partnership law. In the covenant, the couple pledges to be faithful. A ring ceremony binds the pair.

"The result is still a Jewish marriage," the legal opinion on gay marriage states.  Dorff, an author of the ruling, said the committee's discussions with gays and lesbians as the ceremonies were developed found a split in opinion that led the two templates for same-sex marriage. One adheres more closely to the traditional Jewish ceremony, while the other doesn't.

Of course we all know what the Christianists and far right evangelicals really think of those of Jewish descent:  their only purpose is to help bring about Armageddon at which time almost all of them will be annihilated.  Thus it baffles me as to why pro-Israel Jews in this country don't grasp the fact that the Christianists are NOT their friends.  In fact, they despise them and only are using them for their own horrid purposes.

Questions Obama Must Answer

A little while ago, I was listening to Rachel Maddow discussing Rick Warren's latest video to his church congregation wherein he stated out right lies and accused his gay critics being "Christi-phobes." Using past video taped interviews, Rachel basically made Warren look like a pathological liar and the one who is trafficking in hate speech as opposed to his critics. Rachel's segment also looked at the way in which the Warren "scandal" seems to be growing rather than diminishing. I continue to ask myself WTF was Obama thinking?
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More scathing, however is Christopher Hitchens' column in Slate which not only rightly looks at all the things that make Warren a poor choice on Obama's part, but also asks questions that Obama now needs to answer given his disastrous pick of Warren. I suspect that unless Obama acts quickly to eliminate the Warren problem, it will continue to fester and increasingly harm Obama's image. Here are some column highlights:

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If we must have an officiating priest, surely we can do better than this vulgar huckster. . . . It is theoretically possible to make an apparently bigoted remark that is also factually true and morally sound. . . . However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken.

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That's all in a day's work for the wonderful world of the American evangelical community, and one wishes them all the best of luck in their energetic fundraising and their happy-clappy Sunday "Churchianity" mega-feel-good fiestas. However, do we want these weirdos and creeps officiating in any capacity at the inauguration of the next president of the United States?

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It is a fact that Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., was present at a meeting of the Aspen Institute not long ago and was asked by Lynda Resnick—she of the pomegranate-juice dynasty—if a Jew like herself could expect to be admitted to paradise. Warren publicly told her no.

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It is also a fact that Rick Warren proclaims as his original mentor a man named Wallie Amos Criswell, who was the inspirational figure in the rightward move of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1960s. Rightward in that time and context meant exactly what you might suspect it did—a cold hostility to any civil rights activism on the part of the churches.

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I think we are all entitled to ask and to keep asking every member of the Obama transition team until we receive a satisfactory answer, the following questions:

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1. Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews?

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2. Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons?

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3. Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and an already nuclear Pakistan, by a half-educated pulpit-pounder raised in the belief that the Armageddon solution is one to be anticipated with positive glee?

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As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. . . . However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors. This quite simply cannot stand.

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[I]f we must have an officiating priest, let it be some dignified old hypocrite with no factional allegiance and not a tree-shaking huckster and publicity seeker who believes that millions of his fellow citizens are hellbound because they do not meet his own low and vulgar standards.