From: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)
Subject: Re: Heidegger and Nazism
Originator: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 12:57:22 GMT
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.


Some remarks perhaps of a tangential nature ...

In article <memo.586381@cix.compulink.co.uk>, shaman@cix.compulink.co.uk (Leo Smith) writes:

|> Christianity has been bent round many objectionable attidudes and
|> used as justification for them. All that is necessary is to a priori
|> take that which you wish to discredit, and associate it with
|> Anti-Christ in some way - be it black man, homosexual, womankind or
|> the democratic party :-)

Hmmm!  Hadn't considered this hypothesis about the Democrats, but it
does explain a lot.

Well, any ideology can be (perhaps is doomed to be) perverted.  Still,
it seems that some ideologies (the Nazi one, for example) have
perversion built-in in a way that many others don't.

|> I am not sure where this leaves us, except with even more distaste
|> for the politics of religion, and the religion of politics.

Well, it's both the politics and religion of *people* that seem to
be the problem.

|> Nazi Germany was looking for somewhere to lay the blame for its
|> problems, needing a unifying myth that didn't offend the Christian
|> principles of the Volk. Nazism flattered the German pride in
|> efficiency: If one thing has emerged from the holocaust, it is the
|> realisation that the world is riddled with prejudice and bigotry, for
|> which there is no answer but information and free discussion.

Yes, and the "somewhere" it found was pretty broad since "non-Aryan"
had a pretty wide scope.  This makes the alleged compatibility of
Nazism and Christianity even more puzzling.  It is one thing to claim
(for the Nazis to claim) that the Jews in particular were somehow
unpure (or whatever).  After all, they weren't Christians.  But then
you look at the actual implementation of the Final Solution and you
see that about 11 million people were murdered -- of which about
6 million were Jews.  This is a bit over 50%.  The remaining victims
were targeted because of other types of "impurity" (ethnic impurity,
or whatever) but I believe that most of them were Christians (many,
in fact, were Lutheran or Catholic).  I have a friend who nearly died
in camp at the age of 12, and his (his family's) only sin appeared to
be that they were of Hungarian ethnicity (Catholics) living in Germany.

Well, this just seems to demonstrate again that historically Christians
don't seem to have had any more moral difficulty in killing Christians than
non-Christians.  However, itt does make the claimed Christianity/Nazism
compatibility appear to be more a matter of rhetorical convenience than
fundamental ideology.

Some readers may be interested in an article in the latest _Atlantic_
magazine describing civil protests in Nazi Germany and their success.
The article is not without a certain bias, but it does document events
of which I was previously unaware.  Part of this involves the activity
of certain Christian clerics in blocking parts of Hitler's program.


|> In some ways the Nazi dream was like the American Dream. To bring
|> peace, prosperity and democracy to the world, German style (or US
|> style). Both have proved to be empty dreams built on narrow colonial

Whatever the American Dream is and whether it is empty I will not
debate here, but the comparison to the Naxi dream is quite a distortion.
The Nazi dream had at its base the concept of racial purity.  However
much discrimination has taken place in the U.S., such an ideology cannot
be ascribed to the American Dream or the principles of the legal and
political system that have attempted to implement it.  Again, as above,
I would point to clear distinctions between ideologies that are fundamentally
flawed and those that are not.

|> ideas, and requiring the suppression of alternative cultures to bring
|> them about. Of course we British are well qualified to comment on
|> this, having built an empire on a purely commercial basis, and
|> relinquished it as too expensive to maintain. At least we never _had_
|> any Good Intentions ...... :-)

Oh sure you did.  And don't sell yourselves short.  One tends to overlook
many improvements that British colonialism brought to various parts of the
world (and the people in them) in the fashionable "mea culpa" rush: "We
did some bad things, so *everything* we did was bad and the result was
bad overall."  I think this is arguable.





-- 
Gary H. Merrill  [Principal Systems Developer, C Compiler Development]
SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC  27513 / (919) 677-8000
sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com ... !mcnc!sas!sasghm