German Nazism and Italian Fascism were right-wing responses to left wing Bolshevism in the early 20s. This is historical fact, and Adolf Hitler’s own utterances prove it. Hitler had the support not only of Germany’s 1 Percent, but of the Church – Protestant and Catholic both.
Right-wingers today love to invoke Hitler and insist the ideologies are identical, which makes a mockery of history, but also of the claim these people know what they’re talking about.
So when televangelist Jim Bakker says “we have outlawed God,” we immediately find our old pal Rick Wiles claiming that the United States government is run by Nazis. Anything remotely unfriendly to the Religious Right’s plans for an American theocracy must be Nazi, believes Wiles.
According to Wiles,
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“When you have a Antichrist man in the White House, whether it is this one or a future one, and he tells an atheistic, God-hating military, ‘These Christians are enemies of the state,’ do you think it would be hard for them to round us up?”
Yes, those Nazis hate Christians and they’re not shy about it. You know, like that “God [is] With Us” belt buckle worn by the Wehrmacht, the German army, during the Nazi Third Reich. Or these wonderful Christmas ornaments.
“There is a criminal cabal that runs this country, our beloved America has been taken over by a bunch of lying, thieving, murderous criminals, I don’t know what else to call them; they’re Nazis, I really believe it, they’re Nazis. The CIA brought 10,000 Nazis from Germany to the United States after World War II. We didn’t bring them over here to make them Boy Scouts. We brought them over here for them to tell us: how did Hitler do it? We brought their mad men over here to teach us how to build that Third Reich. What we’re dealing with in this country, you’re asking how did this happen. This Third Reich is here. This Nazism is here.
Yes, the United States brought Nazis to America after the war. And no, we did not bring them here to “make” Boy Scouts. A lot of people were helping Nazis escape in those days, for a variety of reasons. If there was one group who should not have been, it is Christians, at least, if you take that whole “Christianity is Nazism’s enemy” meme seriously.
To show you how hostile Christians were to the Nazis, most Nazis were Christians, simply because most Germans were Christians, and everybody else was in concentration camps.
Wiles talks about the U.S. military becoming a “pagan atheist army,” but the Wehrmacht was anything but Pagan or atheist. Pagans got thrown in concentration camps too. Freethinkers were no more popular, and secular schools were closed. No, the German army was Christian. Even Hitler was a Christian – a Catholic.
The Vatican was very friendly to Hitler. There are even allegations that the Vatican aided in the scape of Adolf Eichmann after the war, that German Bishop Alois Hudal helped him to obtain the necessary documentation.
Bishop Hudal may or may not have helped Eichmann escape, but the bishop was so oppressed by and hostile to the Nazis that he helped a bunch of them escape justice after the war via Vatican “ratlines,” including SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke, the man responsible for the Ardeatine massacre in 1944 in which 335 Italian civilians were murdered in retaliation for a partisan attack.
You will undoubtedly have been sent this alleged quote by Adolf Hitler to prove his dedication to socialist ideology:
We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
Unfortunately – and this is one of those awkward moments people write memes about – Hitler never said it. Instead, it appeared in Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future by Gregor Strasser, on June 15, 1926.
Hitler killed Gregor Strasser. Because he was a socialist. Because, unlike Hitler, he took the “socialism” in National Socialism seriously.
The Religious Right wants to pretend Nazism is their enemy even when they hold so many hatreds in common, even when both are ethnic nationalist ideologies.
The truth is, Freethinkers like David Niose were rounded up by the Nazis. So were socialists like Gregor Strasser, and his brother, Otto, who escaped the massacre of the Nazi Party’s “leftist wing” in 1934’s Night of the Long Knives only to be labeled by Joseph Goebbels as Public Enemy Number One.
But not people like Jim Bakker and Rick Wiles. They were the people standing by the road with their arms thrust out in the Hitlergruß, or “Hitler Greeting,” as Der Führer drove by. No, our government is not run by Nazis, but I have no doubt that if it was, Jim Bakker and Rick Wiles would be the first to join.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
