The Terrorism Of Intolerance

Well, that's why it was called the National Socialist Party - perhaps someone can spell it in German - and abbreviated to NAZI. To say that the Nazis were socialist is like saying that Christians believe in Christianity. Duh! Ardross, I take and understand the point you make, but if we're talking about why the party got its name, we ought to point that out. Its evolution into what it became finally was sadly miles away from its original intent.

Brian - I noticed that historical blooper, too!
 
Ardross said: I still think it is fair comment albeit not a view I entirely share. There is implicit in his reference to a ring of criminals a suggestion it was a small group - when the evidence is now very strong that far more Germans knew about and participated in the Holocaust than once was admitted .

The reference to by destroying Israel Hitler was attacking the taproot of Christianity whilst right in one way is somewhat insensitive. The lack of a repeat of an apology for the appalling behaviour of the Papacy during the war is also disappointing even though John Paul II had made it it would have repeated force from Benedict.
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Ardross, I fail to see how Bunting's article is fair comment.

As I read it, the Pope says in his text that "a ring of criminals" came to office by seducing the German people to worship the golden statue of future greatness and national prestige, and reinforcing their power through terror and intimidation. I see nothing in this passage of the text suggesting that only a small circle was responsible for the Holocaust, or that ordinary Germans were ignorant of it, although he probably believes it was originally dreamt up by a small circle.

I do not see any attempt to absolve the German people of responsibility for what happened. He makes clear from the very beginning of his text that it is particularly difficult and troubling for him as a Christian and a German to speak in this place, but that he had to come "as a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here". Bunting's allegation that he says he is "a son of the Geman people "..."but not guilty on that account", a phrase which she puts in quotation marks but which appears nowhere in his text, is malicious.

The Pope says that the Christian religions stood to lose by letting Israel (i.e. the Jewish people, Brian and Krizon, as opposed to the legal entity) be destroyed, because the Jewish god is also the Christian god and sooner or later the Nazi regime would have come after the Christian churches and replaced them with "a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful". I don't see what's insensitive about saying that, in fact it is an expression of solidarity with the Jewish people which does not in any way sideline their suffering.

Bunting's characterisation of the Pope's text as a claim that God and Christianity "were the real victims of the Holocaust" is clearly wrong and could not possibly be regarded as fair comment.

Finally, the reason I have laboured on about this is because Bunting has missed the main story. Neither at Auschwitz nor Regensburg does the Pope show hostility to the Jewish religion or to Islam per se. Instead he puts himself in opposition to those whose religious belief systems do not allow integration with scientific knowledge and reason. In other words, he is not keen on fundamentalists. I don't know who exactly he includes in this category but it would be interesting to find out.
 
Originally posted by krizon@Sep 20 2006, 09:54 AM
It is a tragic aspect to this that we just don't hear the stories which might now be told of German resisters, isn't it, Grey? There must, of course, have been non-Jewish, non-Nazi Germans who were not just swamped by the tide of Fascism, but killed for their opposing views.
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A few years ago now I did the picture research for a book on the German Home Front, which touched on this subject. The sad fact is that most Germans were brainwashed into support for the Nazis and most of the rest got by as best they could... only a few had the courage to resist. Any resistance was of course punished by death - the police state was entrenched and utterly ruthless, and the young indoctrinated from chldhood. Everyone who dissented lived in fear

Germany had been totally humiliated following WWI, which fact also induced a kind of mad patriotism which made resistance emotionally difficult. And the Germans like many other people in Europe at the time, inc Britian, genuinely loathed minorities inc Jews and queers. But eugenics was more or less a German invention and its logical conclusion was mass murder
 
In one aspect Nazism/Fascism, although a perversion of it, always remained Socialist.
Both creeds subjugate the rights of the individual to the greater good of the collective
 
Well, he (the Pope) would have to exclude rather a lot of Christians, for a start, Grey! The Creationists, to name but one, won't be up for the inclusion of reason or scientific knowledge in their beliefs, while there are plenty of other Christian sects and branches which find certain aspects of the rigours of reason and logic incompatible with 'faith' - which is, of course, the very basis of Catholicism. That looks to hold the possibility of an own goal for His Holiness - best to leave science in the classroom, not in the churches.
 

In one aspect Nazism/Fascism, although a perversion of it, always remained Socialist
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you are slightly wrong here

correct about nazism as that was a political party , national socialist workerss party of germany i forget the german words

however fascism which is not and shouldnt be confused with nazism is not and was not a political party it merely indicates the belief in the collective good of the state (unlike the nazi view the collective good of the race) its a view point that could be held by many of varying political beliefs right across the spectrum of left and right of socialist and capatalist and can come with or without religous or racial prejudices



But eugenics was more or less a German invention and its logical conclusion was mass murder
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the theories on racial superiority was not an invention by hitler the germans or even the austrians of which hitler was but were originated in england
 
Originally posted by krizon@Sep 21 2006, 03:31 AM
Well, he (the Pope) would have to exclude rather a lot of Christians, for a start, Grey! The Creationists, to name but one, won't be up for the inclusion of reason or scientific knowledge in their beliefs, while there are plenty of other Christian sects and branches which find certain aspects of the rigours of reason and logic incompatible with 'faith' - which is, of course, the very basis of Catholicism. That looks to hold the possibility of an own goal for His Holiness - best to leave science in the classroom, not in the churches.
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Well yes, Krizon, I think he does have to exclude a lot of Christians, some of whom might even be in the White House. Here is what he said at Auschwitz on this theme:

The God in whom we believe is a God of reason -- a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness. We make our prayer to God and we appeal to humanity, that this reason, the logic of love and the recognition of the power of reconciliation and peace, may prevail over the threats arising from irrationalism or from a spurious and godless reason.
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At Regensburg he argued that Christianity is religion intertwined with with the reason-based approach of Greek philosophy.

It will be interesting to see how vigorously the leader of the Church which tried to suppress Galileo will apply this yardstick to other religions and their many branches. I think he would admit the majority of Jewish rabbis to the family of reason, but it remains to be seen how many imams and mullahs he is prepared to let through the door.
 
Interesting words, a bit convoluted for the masses and without reading them several times over, but the 'spurious and godless reason' phrase is nearing Dr. Griffin's 'demonic consciousness' in the Serendipity website which Headstrong has quoted several times on the other Middle East topic currently stimulating our leedle grey cells, 'The Path to 9/11'.

There are so many strands in the 'Middle East situation' that one begins to see that each separate issue - such as 9/11, suicide bombers, Al-Queda, or mad mullahs preaching in Finsbury Park - not as entities in themselves, but as the intertwining strands which make up one large thread. Unlike domino theory, where you remove one and the rest collapse in a chain reaction, you can pluck out one strand, yet the rest will hold, and a new one can be stitched in to replace it. The one strand I didn't expect to find in among the many was one which posits the USA as actually WANTING terrorism to continue to exist, in spite of public and official assertions to the contrary.

That theory would imply the crassest possible cynicism and power hunger that I suspect even Genghis Khan or Hannibal might have found a step too far. It implies that an elite really is at work, manipulating situations - possibly creating situations - where public sympathy and outrage will be easily bent to an agenda which will erode civil liberties permanently, and bring in a military state in all but name. Along the way, commercial interests will serve the elite through contracts (viz. the post-bombing contract at the Murrah Bldg. and 9/11 owned by a Bush family member, directorships galore in investment and construction companies, etc.). All dissidence (David Kelly et al) will be stifled or ridiculed, even to the point of oblivion.

If I take it that, indeed, all strands DO twine together, then I can see some sort of rationale in this, even though it sounds like something like The Parallax View. The problem I still have with going along with such notions, although some are undoubtedly factual (but not necessarily part of a 'demonic consciousness') are the fluffy bits like 'it has been PROVED that the (9/11) hijackers are still alive'. Who's proved it, where are they, let's see and hear them speak on television live, then.
 
:lol: :lol: :lol: You forgot 'M'lud!'

Good to see Prez Chavez telling it like he feels it - he's just called Bush 'the Devil' and said there was still a lingering smell of sulphur after his departure. (Or maybe it was just those good ole hot Texan beans?) :lol: He must be a fan of the Serendipity site!
 
Originally posted by prince regent@Sep 21 2006, 07:32 AM
the theories on racial superiority was not an invention by hitler the germans or even the austrians of which hitler was but were originated in england
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I'd argue that that is incorrect. When the inhabitants of these islands were still staining their skin blue with beries prior to a Saturday night out Aristotle noted differences between Greeks and the people of the north, believing that Greek superiority was visible in their medium skin tone, as opposed to pale northerners and dark Africans.

In Rome, not to be outdone, However, Tacitus greatly admired the Germanic tribes, saying that their fair skin and blonde hair were marks of beauty, and that their cultures had retained racial purity, unlike the multicultural Romans.

From the 17th century on, as Northern European countries became more powerful, Northern peoples began to argue for their own superiority. Benjamin Franklin proposed a clear distinction between "white" Europeans and "swarthy" Europeans, stating that immigration to the newly-born United States should favor the "white" Northern Germans and Englishmen rather than the "swarthy" Southern Germans, Russians, Swedes, French, and Italians. Franklin believed the "white" Europeans to be more decorative, at least to his taste.

What came to be known as "Aryanism" emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century when the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau published " Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races". German philosophers Schopenhauer, Poesche, Penka and, most famously, Nietzsche to some degree or another expanded on this.

After World War I . The British psychologist William McDougall, wrote with some confidence about the concept of a masterly Nordic race in 1920, a theory which had become well established. Shortly after this the German eugenicists Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz published their work "Human Heredity", which insisted on the innate superiority of the Nordic race.

Adolf Hitler read "Human Heredity" shortly before he wrote "Mein Kampf", and called it scientific proof of the racial basis of civilization. Its arguments were also repeated by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, in his book "The Myth of the Twentieth Century", published in 1930.

So there are just a few contributors to the "we're superior" racial theories over a span of more than two thousand years - which shows, if it shows little else, that no one nation was responsible for the vile theory.
 
We can throw in the Egyptians favouring jet-black Nubians as castrated palace slaves, too. Egyptians being a more Mediterranean shade, they favoured the lighter tones and regarded the darker skins as inferior. The iniquity continues throughout the Middle East today, with the Saudi Govt. finally stopping the right to obtain brides from abroad in the 1970s, when it realized that those who could afford to were buying (through dowries, of course) very pale brides from not just Jordan and Egypt, but from Thailand and the Phillipines. For a country whose last slave was made a freeman in 1961, and was a descendant of Nubian stock, it's been a long-held (as in centuries) belief in the desirability of pale features over dark.

One of my Saudi female trainees was extremely black and ashamed of it, as it pointed to coming from Nubian or slave parentage. She married a white English man from Halifax, who converted to Islam in order to do so. This was her second marriage (her first was at 13 to a Saudi brute more than 20 years older than her - he told her widowed mother he'd 'take her off her hands, as she's so black, no-one will want her), and she was ecstatic to be married to a white man, and thrilled, as she told me, that she could 'make white babies now!'

Racism continues to thrive within races as much as it does without.
 
brian

i have read nietzshe and would have to disagree with you on this one


i was and i admit didnt make myself clear reffering to ,what i agree is a vile theory and i agree not one nation or race alone is responsible for,using the theory as political agenda

of which the britains hoare belloc and stewart houston chamberlian were amongst the originators
 
I dont know how someone could have a laugh with the perofromance of the muppet Chavez yesterday in the UN.

It is pathetic the way this orginasation is being run in recent years.

At leats koffi will be out very soon, he will have a very rich retirement,
I imagine he will have in a country he hate and not in Venezuela,Libano or Iran.
 
Oh, let's not forget the Belgians performing phoney skull-measuring tests in the Belgian Congo, to prove that one African tribe was superior to another, let alone that the Belgians were superior to all. These, and a range of other useless but pernicious 'tests' were made in order to appropriate the weaker tribe to the cause of rubber-tapping for King Leopold's greed. The rubber made a vast fortune for the King and the country, with the help of one tribe being set against the other in a master-servant situation. It eventually became brutal, as such things do, so that when exhausted rubber-tapping villagers couldn't keep up with ever-increasing quotas, they would have a hand cut off. Eventually, this became something of a sport, with buckets of hands, including those of children, arriving to be counted as proof of the earnest supervision of the 'lazy' tribe, and to claim the money - bounty, as it were - placed by the Belgians on the hands.

When the Belgians hastily abandoned the Congo to its fate in 1960/1, the put-upon tribe visited some vengeance upon the Catholic nuns and missionaries whose authority had been present in the Congo during the brutal Belgian period of colonisation. Having long memories of grand-parents having hands amputated, they returned the favour, as well as other grotesqueries. Then the two tribes turned on each other and the rest, as they say, is history.

Many years later, the same two tribes went to war in Rwanda: the Hutu and the Tutsi. Once again, the cause was because of the false superiority of the Hutu, who had accrued all the best jobs for themselves, as they had once connived with the Belgians in the Congo to do so.

(It's an interesting thread, since the 'terrorism of intolerance' is so pernicious and comes in many guises. While we started off with it involving religion, it's clearly got a far wider remit, through notions of racial superiority and inferiority, the rate of cultural development, wealth, etc.)

PS: and while we're a motley crew on here, we've been able for the most part to discuss and debate this topic without resorting to intolerant personal insults! Perhaps TalkingHorses should rule the world?
 
It's almost tempting to throw another element into the fire of historical causation which at face value is reasonably innocent and difficult to move away from. I believe it was called 'Geo Time' (or something similar) and advocated by Marc Bloch as the basis that determines a races, peoples and ultimately nations characteristics. Essentially it runs along the lines that people are products of their physical environments.

I think its valid to recognise, that the first resistance to rise of Nazism did indeed come from Germany. The likes of Clara Zetkin and Eric Honecker amongst 1,000's of others. I seem to think that a fair number of SPD members ended up in the Nazi party in the fullness of time, and the democratic party itself played an equal part in defeating the natural domestic resistance movement to the fledgling right wing groups (later Nazis) in the 'Winter days' of 1919 that ended at the bottom of the Landwehr Canal.

Mind you it ages since last read on all that, and it takes a thread like this to remind how much I've really forgotten.
 
Your second last 'article' shows the same old intolerance towards Islam that anyone might also reasonably show towards Christianity, which has been as bloodthirsty in suppressing dissidence and in murdering those who refused to convert (viz. the Conquistadores) , prince. It is a very recent phenomenon indeed that the Church has not sought to make hay from the misery of the poor, especialy women. I think we could all go on and on demonstrating that there is no such thing as an entirely 'sweet' religion, and anyone who by now doesn't know that the Koran sets out (as I've said about 5,000 times already) how every facet of Muslim life should be led, is leading a very sheltered life.

If you care to trawl through the Old Testament, you'll find masses of exhortations to smite this and smite that, and generally give unbeleivers a darned hard time of it. Islam is a younger religion and has a few hundred years more to go before perhaps there'll be a little lightening-up on the more draconian aspects of it.

Meanwhile, back at the Indian farm, Hindu widows are still being unwillingly shoved to their deaths onto the blazing pyres of their dead husbands in remote villages. This isn't so much to do with the fact that the religion DEMANDS that they should commit suttee, but that greedy relatives can lay claim to the rest of the dear departed's properties and money. Nice...

Gosh, I'm tired of all this now. Intolerance is wicked and one should not tolerate it.
 
On a related note the other year I acted for a client in a mortgage undue influence case - one of my arguments described as ingenious by the judge ( kind of him but we still lost because he decided my client was lying !!!) was that our law of constructive trusts discriminated under Art 14 ECHR against Muslims due to the requirements to show that one partner had an equitable interest in the legal owner's dwelling .

Anyway, the research for that case included looking up Muslim family law and what was very interesting was that much of the oppression of women justiifed on the grounds of Islam - had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam at all but a lot to do with South East Asian tribal customs .
 
Islamic law actually contains many guarantees for the correct and ethical manner of looking after women, as you found out, Ardross. Sadly, like many laws (such as 30 mph in town!) those which state the percentages of inheritance a widow should have of her husband's estate, etc., can get entirely overridden by unscrupulous families or through community bias. The Saudi Royal Court receives petitioners every Thursday (an interesting sight, oft shown on Saudi tv!), with the king receiving the aggrieved, and they're all about perceived and actual wrongdoings over family, business, inheritance, ownership rights, etc. While women can petition, they usually wait apart from the men while a court usher hands in the petition in writing. Women do, in fact, have real and legitimate written safeguards under Shari'ah, far more than Christianity ever thought to bestow upon womanhood, and even further removed from the appalling suttee enforcable (but now officially banned) under Hinduism.
 
I would've thought that it would be plain, pr, but ALL intolerance is what has killed billions of humans down the centuries, so it should not tolerated. I'll spell it out, shall I? ALL religious intolerance, ALL racial intolerance, ALL tribal intolerance, ALL national intolerance, ALL gender intolerance, ALL sexual orientation intolerance, ALL age intolerance - there might be one or two other forms I've missed, but the first three account for most of the wickedness we humans are capable of.

I can't be arsed to Google and find out all of the countries currently at war with others or within themselves due to sometimes single source intolerance, sometimes dual intolerance (tribal and religious, for example), but if you want to amuse yourself for half an hour, it would show a worldwide map of bitterness, hatred, and cruelty. We were discussing the intolerance of Muslims for criticism of their religion, but we need to remember that Christians were gaily burning people at the stake for heresy not that long ago in the scheme of things, that whiteys are still burning down the places of worship used by African-Americans in the USA, and that the days of lynching goddam niggers ain't quite over yet.

I hope that helps.
 
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