[UPDATE: this post is on a dark, dark subject. I always seem to write dark material. So, to counterbalance this - here's a shorter, very upbeat post on how one town rallied to fight similar sorts of hatred as discussed below.]
Introduction
I've written this in response to controversy over a post I made yesterday which was quite controversial.
My intent wasn't to demonize anyone, and because my post hit some on a visceral, or a personal emotional, level I've decided to engage with the issue personally as well.
Two of the most haunting images I have ever seen are posted below.
They are relevant to the issue at hand because the same sort of hateful cultural narrative that helped incite the Holocaust is now being promoted by leaders of the American Christian right, even to the extent that I have, sitting on my desk, a book that was mailed out, in 2004, to hundreds of thousands of Jewish-Americans and which, among the many anti-Jewish slurs contained in the book, appears to accuse Jewish-Americans of ritually slaughtering their children and also contains the following narrative, startlingly similar in nature to the anti-Jewish invective of the most notorious work of anti-Jewish film propaganda ever made, the Nazi-produced film "The Eternal Jew". [ see end of post ]
Prior to this Fall I had not delved deeply into the history of the Holocaust and so I had never encountered the images, below. I can't look at them without crying and I really don't know why. As far as I can tell reaction seems to be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder with no obvious, logical source.
I encountered the images on a web page alongside a superb piece of analysis, on an incident that occurred last summer in which the Governor of California, Arnold Scharzenegger, chose to appear on the cover of Time Magazine wearing a belt with a buckle that appeared similar to the various "Death's Head" Nazi symbols employed by the SS Totenkopf ("Death's Head") Division and other German Army Units. A close analysis showed that the belt buckle was not the exact image used by Nazis but that the buckle also had other symbols on it which were used by the Austrian Kaisers and which traced back to Karl Der Grosse, AKA Charlemagne - Kaiser of the 1st German Reich. Schwarznegger incurred no significant penalty for the display, which the author of that essay called (and I concur) "the mainstreaming of hate".
The women, holding her child, who is about to shot in the back, as well as the naked women and children shown in the other picture, below, being forced to lie down, holding their crying children, atop the corpses of others who had previously been shot, could well have been members of my wife's extended family who were, for the most part, all wiped out in the Holocaust.
I do not post these images casually. They are directly relevant to the controversy at hand because the narrative of cultural accusation and hatred that fueled the anti-Jewish hatreds which in turn led in turn to the Holocaust has been replicated, in a strikingly similar form, in present day America, on the American Christian right. There are, of course, differences but the similarities are striking enough that last year, in 2006, a prominent and well respected conservative Evangelical scholar raised the issue in a series of public lectures.
A Returning Nightmare
Many of the leaders of the American Christian right, including the Founder Of Campus Crusade For Christ, Bill Bright, have for over two decades held and promoted (and still do) a 'narrative of cultural complaint' very similar to that which fueled the hatred, in Pre-World War Two Germany, that led to the Holocaust.
I take the abuse of religion, to justify killing, very seriously. For about the past two months I've been studying specific aspects of the Holocaust quite heavily. Part of my motivation stems from the fact that my wife is, on both sides of her family lineage, Askhenazi-Jewish and part of the baggage which comes with that background is that she will inherit, one day, a shoe box filled with photographs of her dead relatives whose names, even, are mostly no longer known - all that remains of most of her extended family which lived, prior to World War Two, in Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
My wife does not choose to make a major point of that part of her personal family history. But it is significant to me because many of the leaders American Christian right have, for years now, been promoting a narrative of cultural complaint that is startlingly similar to that which facilitated the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party and also fueled the hatreds that led to the Holocaust. Christianity played a far greater role in feeding the hatreds that led to the Holocaust than has generally been acknowledged, and I take the religious indoctrination - of US soldiers in training - very seriously both on its own terms, as the teaching of a theology of war - but also because those who are doing the teaching very likely are also promoting a cultural narrative that is very similar to that which led to much of my wife's extended family being wiped out in the Holocaust.
What happened in pre-World War Two Germany ? How was Christianity involved ? Meet the "Storm Troopers Of Christ", a new one-hour video documentary by Steve D. Martin:
That the narratives promoted by many leaders of the American evangelical right are very similar to the narratives promoted within German society prior to World War Two and the Holocaust is not merely my own opinion - that view was aired, prominently, in a series of talks given by the conservative Baptist scholar David P. Gushee in 2006. [link to PDF file of an Address Gushee gave at the Andover-Newton Theological Seminary]:
It was this cultural despair—a toxic brew of reaction against secularism, anger related to the loss of World War I, distress over cultural disorientation and confusion, fears about the future of Germany, hatred of the victorious powers and of those who supposedly stabbed Germany in the back, and of course the search for scapegoats (mainly the Jews)—that motivated many Germans to adopt a reactionary, authoritarian, and nationalistic ethic that fueled their support for Hitler's rise to power. A broadly appealing narrative of national decline (or conspiratorial betrayal) was met by Hitler’s narrative of national revenge leading to utopian unity in the Fuhrer-State.
Conservative American evangelicals in recent decades have been deeply attracted to a parallel narrative of cultural despair. Normally the story begins with the rise of secularism in the 1960s, the abandonment of prayer in schools, and the Roe decision, all leading to an apocalyptic decline of American culture that must be arrested soon, before it is too late and "God withdraws his blessing" from America. While very few conservative evangelicals come into the vicinity of Hitler in hatefulness, elements similar to that kind of conservative-reactionary-nationalist narrative can be found in some Christian right-rhetoric: anger at those who are causing American moral decline, fear about the future, hatred of the "secularists" now preeminent in American life, and the search for scapegoats. The solution on offer—a return to a strong Christian America through determined political action--also has its parallels with the era under consideration.
Further, as I've recently written, the founder of Campus Crusade For Christ, Bill Bright, embraced and furthered the very narrative of cultural complaint described by David P. Gushee.
What is most notable to me, in terms of the way the American Christian right seems to regard Jewish-Americans and, indeed, all Jews is this - Jews are held, somehow, to have different souls that chain them to a peculiarly Jewish fate that, as spelled out in the theology of Christian Zionism - is to be mostly killed during the "Tribulation" and "Armageddon". A tiny "remnant" - Jews who convert to Christianity - will be all that survives of Jews and Judaism. That is the role Christian Zionism envisions for Jews.
The notion - that certain ethnic groups embody different souls is the essence of racism. I don't think I truly understood racism, in a deep way, until I watched Steve D. Martin's "Storm Troopers Of Christ : The Jews and Baptism in Nazi Germany" but, towards the conclusion of Storm Troopers Of Christ, Susannah Heschel, author of "The Aryan Jesus" explained it this way :
Racism in itself is a kind of theological or spiritual argument, and Ill give you an example of what I mean. A racist will say The Jewish nose, look how horrible it is, and they have pictures of it and so forth, a big Jewish nose. Well, what is it about a nose ? A nose in itself isn't a dangerous thing. If someone has a big nose, a little nose, what difference does it make ? It doesn't harm me. Do you even notice, when you talk to somebody, the size and shape of
the nose ? Of course not. Is this going to jump out, the nose, and shoot me ? Of course not.
So what is it about a nose ? Maybe the way racism works is this : the body is a manifestation of something deeper, of a spirit. What was of concern to racists was not the nose itself but the nose as bearing within it a degenerate moral spirit, a degenerate spirit that was dangerous for society, and it was a moral degeneracy that wasn't visible. You cant see it and touch it. But it was there nonetheless. And, you have to be careful because thats what can destroy you, moral degeneracy. And Germany, racists claimed, was being undermined by Jewish immorality, by Jewish degeneracy, exploitativeness and so forth.
And so, in that sense, my understanding of racial theory is that its a kind of incarnational theology. It says that the moral degeneracy is incarnate in the body, in the nose or the lips or the hair, and what a racist tells you is ; you have to know how to read the body and interprete it properly so that you know the moral degeneracy that adheres in that body, that's incarnate in that body.
She was right. My Jewish grandmother-in-law (who died several years ago) viewed the marriage of my uncle-in-law to a Goy as a very successful breeding experiment. Like many Ashkenazi Jews, many (or even most) people in my wife's family have bad backs. My uncle-in-laws children do not - Ashkenazi Jews have in-bred for a long time, and new genetic material seems to counteract certain typical Ashkenazi genetic disorders. But, that's the physical component. My grandmother-in-law would not have, as far as I can recall, asserted that people in her family line had distinct Jewish souls that were somehow categorically different from those of gentile souls. That's the difference.
***
My point, in my controversial post that juxtaposed American soldiers, in basic training, holding automatic weapons and bibles alongside an image of a Hamas suicide bomber holding an automatic weapon and a Koran, wasn't to stigmatize American soldiers but, rather , to underline the fact that they are being taught a theology of war and that there is ugly precedent for the teaching of the theology of war, within the Christian tradition, that goes back all the way to the First Crusade. And, the founder of Campus Crusade For Christ held, as I've written, that very narrative David P. Gushee described, above.
Although I did not mention this in my original post, the "Military Ministry" at Fort Jackson has been advertising its course, "God's Basic Training", using the flier below:
The Crusades...
Indeed, Gary Bussey's course, taught at Fort Jackson, was advertised with a flyer using imagery that's evocative of the Crusades especially given that the parent organization behind Bussey's ministry is named Campus Crusade For Christ.
The use of the word "crusade", to describe evangelical campaigns aimed at religious conversion, is endemic to contemporary Christianity and especially on the American Christan right. But that invocation of the historical Crusades is deeply anti-Semitic in light of what the Crusaders did ; in the first Crusade, as described below, the Crusaders, upon breaking through the defenses of the city of Jerusalem, slaughtered the Jews and Muslims living in that city. They hacked those defenseless civilians apart with swords, and burned them alive as well, so that the streets of Jerusalem were filled with blood.
Evangelical campaigns might not, some would argue, be inherently anti-Semitic but use of the word "crusade" as a term for evangelical conversionary campaigns is deeply, inherently anti-Semitic in the most accurate, comprehensive sense : it is both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim.
Let's look at what the Christian Crusaders did in the First Crusade:
"Along their bloody swath through the region towards Jerusalem, the crusaders hacked apart Muslims with abandon and, on arrival, locked Jews into synagogues and burned them alive. In the First Crusade, after breaking through the walls of the city of Ma’arra, starving crusaders boiled residents in cooking pots, roasted impaled children on spits, and feasted."
Soldiers in basic training at Fort Jackson are being taught theological justification for killing, and here is an historical example of where the abuse of religion, the authority of the Christian church in particular, can lead:
Who killed Anne Frank ?
That was not a casual question for Doris Bergen, author of "Twisted Cross"; it was an exercise Bergen designed for teachers in a course she was leading, for schoolteachers, that was called "Teaching The Diary Of Anne Frank", to raise their awareness of the "chain of complicity" that led to the Holocaust...
Bergen wrote out, on cards she passed out one by one to the teachers, "identities" of different people who each played a part in the death of Anne Frank - Hitler, Himmler, the person who snatched a scrap of bread from Anne Frank's hand in the concentration camp, the Dutch couple who turned Frank's family in to the Nazis, and so on. There were about 15 teachers, 15 cards. The assignment was that the teachers, based on their given "identity" written out on their card, should line up in order based on the relative responsibility each bore for Anne Frank's death, from greatest responsibility to least responsibility.
As Bergen describes the results, in Steve Martin's documentary "Theologians Under Hitler":
"My expectation was that the person who held the card that said 'Adolf Hitler' would immediately march to the front of the line and stay there and the others would line themselves up behind that person. That's not what happened. Instead the teacher who had a card that said 'a German pastor who preached hatred of Jews, from the pulpit, in the 20s and 30s', that person marched immediately to the front of the line and refused to cede that position. No matter who came along, the person with the 'Hitler' card, the person with the 'SS' card... that woman said 'this person is the most responsible, this person who used the power of the pulpit, who used the authority of the Christian Church, of Christian tradition, to teach that it was not only acceptable but desirable to hate fellow human beings, to hate Jews, to fear Jews, to fight against them to attack them - this person is as responsible and more responsible than anyone else.' "
That is where such abuses of religion can lead.
***
If you were one of the half million or so Jewish Americans who received "Let My People Go: The Struggle Of The American Jew To Come Home To Israel" in the mail the first thing you probably would have noticed would have been the cover of the book, which features a somewhat crude drawing of a man in a business suit, with a briefcase, straining against numerous ropes tying him to a signpost which reads "Wall Street". There are so many of these ropes that it's quite obvious the man will never be able to break them simply by straining. If you had bothered to read the book, rather than simply tossing it in the trash, you'd have found no ambiguity ; the book says the the man on the cover is supposed to be Jewish, and it's hard to escape the implication that "Let My People Go" begins, and quite noisily so, with the premise that Jews, as a people, are bound to materialism, selfish and greedy.
The book was in English, not German, but otherwise recipients might have wondered if they were staring at a piece of 1930's era anti-Jewish propaganda, commissioned by the Third Reich, that had become somehow displaced in time, thrust into our era by a freak temporal anomaly, a wormhole or sinister wrinkle in time, because the picture on the front cover of "Let My People Go..." suggests that Jews, perhaps more so than any other ethnic group, are bound, against all their best efforts or intentions, to money. The book goes on to ask why the greatest concentration of Jews in any urban area on Earth can be found in New York City, which Tom Hess claims may be the World center of "hedonism and perversion". He even evokes the myth of Jewish ritual sacrifice.
By Tom Hess's own reporting, in 2004 his ministry, the Jerusalem House Of Prayer, sent "Let My People Go! - The Struggle Of The American Jew To Return To Israel" to about 550,000 Jewish-Americans and, per Hess's account, perhaps 800,000 copies of the book - urging Jews everywhere around the globe to return to Israel before they are annihilated in a rising wave of anti-Jewish hatred Hess predicts - have gone put since the book was first published in 1987.
Did the myth of the "greedy, materialistic Jew" die with the Third Reich ? Of course not. The cultural trope is alive and well, thanks in part to Christian Zionism. Neo-Nazi groups could never get away with sending hundreds of thousands of pieces of anti-Jewish literature through the US mail. Christian Zionists can apparently do so with impunity, and cost of mailing their literature - if sent out by registered 501c(3) nonprofit organizations - can be federally subsidized
Whether by accident or by intent, "Let My People Go!..." is packed with many of the most vicious and pervasive anti-Jewish slurs to ever have been coined.
For example, on page 32 of his book Tom Hess seems to invoke the Medieval myth that Jews sacrifice children to the Devil. Discussing the legalization of abortion in America, he writes:
"There is so much blood on American soil it is a miracle that we have not already been destroyed as a nation! Many secular, reform, and conservative Jews have encouraged abortion despite the fact that the killing of their future generations will affect [sic] the future of the Jewish people. There is little difference between child sacrifice in the Old Testament and abortions today."
"There is little difference... " - the tone of that assertion fits quite readily with the pseudo-sociological narrative that accompanied the soundtrack of one the most notorious pieces of propaganda ever filmed, The Eternal Jew.
In his discussion of abortion, Hess does not mention Gentiles who, by most accounts, are reported to also engage in the practice of abortion. By likening Jewish abortion to "child sacrifice in the Old Testament" Tom Hess evokes the obvious - those Jewish women so heartless as to have their own children, the future Jewish generation, ripped from their wombs... and to whom do they sacrifice those children ? Moloch ? Satan ? From them myth of Jeiwsh ritual child sacrifice, it is only a short hop to the legend that Jews have vestigial horns atop their heads.
The idea that Jews embody singular, singularly repugnant traits becomes increasingly distinct as one reads the book. On page 53, we learn that York York City may incarnate the most extreme sins of our age, and on page 55 readers encounter the terrible truth that NYC has the greatest concentration of Jews on Earth !.
What are reasonable readers to conclude ?
"The two characteristics that most exemplify Babylon in Revelation are materialism and hedonism. New York City is not only the leading city in the world regarding money and materialism (with the World Money Market centered there) but also may be the leading city in the world regarding perversion and hedonism.
New York City and America are the heart of Babylon today..."["Let My People Go! - The Struggle Of The American Jew To Return Home To Israel", "New Millennium" Seventh Edition, 2004, by Tom Hess, P.53]
Tom Hess's book makes no attempt to factually substantiate those claims. Turning the page of Hess's strange book, mailed unsolicited to hundreds of thousands of Jewish Americans in 2004, we're confronted - on page 55 - with the following:
"Why are there more Jews in New York City than in any city in the world and more Jews in American than any nation in the world?"
Author Tom Hess provides no answer for that alleged riddle, even though the answer is quite mundane and widely-known :
There are more Jews in New York City than anywhere in America because New York City was long the central immigration route into the United States. There are more Jews in American because America had, for a time, liberal immigration policies that allowed Jews- who were fleeing the terrible Russian and Eastern European pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries -to become American citizens.
***
From Storm Troopers Of Christ
(Introduction)"During the years of the Third Reich, every German carried with them a document that had to be on their person at all times. It was not a driver's license, not a passport, not even proof of citizenship but a record of their racial heritage as attested to by their pastors and their baptismal certificates. Baptism had once stood as a sign of equality. In the Third Reich, baptism became a dividing line - between heroes and heretics, between compassion and catastrophe."
"It's just upsetting to me, as a daughter of a Protestant theologian, who was taught that Nazism was - that Christians were anti-Nazi... to actually discover that when I read documents from the Third Reich, medical doctors, legal theorists, they kind of throw in anti-Semitism to please the regime, you can tell they're instrumentalizing it, they're doing their little - granting the regime it's wanting to hear the little anti-Jewish thing. You don't really believe them. They're not really anti-Semitic. It's not viscerally felt. You read the Protestant clergy and the Catholic clergy... they hate the Jews. They really do... You feel the hatred coming off the page. They're deeply threatened. It's scary to them, and they blame Jews not just for sexual immorality but also for secularization, for doubt about the truth of the Gospel." - Dagmar Herzog, author "Sex After Fascism"
"Why wasn't this written about sooner ? Why wasn't it written about by the people right there, that is by German Protestants themselves ? Why did it take an American Jew ? And why was it seen as offensive to write about this, why was the reaction hostile ?" - Susannah Heschel, author The Aryan Jesus
"There was the reaction in German culture - partly it was a racist anti-Semitism - but also partly it was that leading German philosophers prior to the time of fascism had said that Germany is getting polluted by ideas of the Enlightenment - the French Enlightenment which is secular, and by modernity, and the cities, and modern civilization and Democracy. And human rights. And we've got to reject all that and instead we've got to come back a kind of a German blood and soil nationalism and so forth and recover our real identity instead of this foreign, secular democracy stuff. And, they blamed Jews for being one of the carriers of the spirit of democracy and human rights." - Glenn Stassen, Fuller Theological Seminary
"Early on the Nazis have no idea that they're going to get so much popular support. They initially, of course, have to beat the left - which they do physically, violently, put leftists in prison and beat them up on the streets, they have to get rid of the opposition. They also urgently need the support of the churches. They work towards a Concordat with Rome, they are very concerning at getting Protestant church leaders to endorse them and support them, and its very useful, in this context, to run a campaign against sexual immorality. The churches are thrilled. They have been losing their congregants support on this issue of sex for quite some time. Germany had the most liberal sexual culture in the world in the early 20th Century, and the churches are deeply threatened by this. They are deeply threatened by gentile secularization. Socialism, social democracy, was part of the threat, the threat of Bolshevism and a, you know, a Russian Revolution happening in Germany was threat... certainly, many church leaders shared nationalist views with the Nazis, but anti-Bolshevism and nationalism don't explain it. The gentiles were running away and the Christians blame it on the Jews, and they're happy, happy to see the Nazis claim to be solving the problem." - Dagmar Herzog