Category Archives: Loose thoughts and musings

Herman Goering 

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

On July 31st 1941, barely over a month into the Nazi invasion of Russia, which at the time looked to be another sure win in the Nazi column. The Red Army had suffered immense losses. Hitler and the German High Command could sense victory in the offing, and on that day Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy sent a message to the head of the Reichs Security Main Office, SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich giving him express orders to plan for what the Nazis referred to as the Endlösung, or the final/total solution to what they called the Jewish problem. 

Georing wrote:

“Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24th 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of evacuation and emigration in the best possible way by according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlosung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.

Where the competency of other organizations touches on this matter, the organizations are to collaborate. 

I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for the carrying out the desired final solution (Endlosung) of the Jewish question.”

It was an order that Heydrich and his successors following his assassination by Czech partisans in 1942 would follow with deadly consequences to the Jews of Europe.

Reinhardt Heydrich 

But the reality was set many years before when Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites declared the Jews to be vermin, and sub-human. The German word is more sinister sounding, untermenschen. They simply refused to admit the Jews were fully human, and instead believed that the Jews were an alien subspecies, an infestation that had to be eradicated. In fact the very same kind of language that President Trump and many of his followers use to describe racial and religious minorities today: American blacks, Mexican Americans, Asians, Arabs of all religious beliefs, even Jews when they desire. They also use such language to describe political opponents.

The late Christopher Hitchens wrote:

“Die Judenfrage,’ it used to be called, even by Jews. ‘The Jewish Question.’ I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish ‘problem.’ Again, the word ‘solution’ can be as neutral as the words ‘question’ or ‘problem,’ but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.”

Hitchens, an Atheist was absolutely correct, when so many modern Christians, and other religionists of various types fail to see the danger. In fact, many of Trump’s most devoted religious followers, especially some supposedly conservative Christians blissfully embrace that ideology as would the members of any cult of death.

 

So much for their insistence of being pro-life when they join heavily armed White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi Groups, or at the minimum do nothing to condemn their overt acts of racist violence against Blacks, immigrants of all types, and LGBTQ people. They follow conspiracy theories blindly, reject science but not necessarily technology. Many deny the Coronavirus and refuse to comply with measures that could minimize the spread of the pandemic and treat it if it is a hoax. If I wasn’t a Christian there is nothing that these malignant  sociopaths could ever do to make me follow their “no-god,” because their God is not Jesus the Christ but Donald the Deceiver, a man with more traits of an Anti-Christ than any American leader in history, with the possible exception of Jefferson Davis.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer Said of such alleged Christians:

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”

Bonhoeffer’s words are a warning to everyone who abandons the Gospel in order to gain political, economic, and even police power to achieve their goals.

The fact is that once a people, be they Germans, Americans, English, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Persians, or so many others throughout history determine that any racial, religious, or political group, that they loath is less than human, that in time their words will express their thoughts, and direct their actions. That my friends is a historic, religious, psychological, and sociological truth.

I hate to keep shouting this warning, of Yehuda Bauer who wrote:

“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.” 

With every, tweet and every statement the American President continues to stoke the fires of race hatred, just as he did the past three days as Civil Rights hero lay in state at the U.S. Capital, as he crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge for the last time and as he was laid to rest. Sadly, his followers seem to feed on it. I will not ever be a perpetrator, or a bystander, but it is possible that for speaking my views, I may someday be a victim, but I will go down fighting.

I hate cowardly bullies like the President, who dodged the draft five times, denigrates combat wounded, former POWs, and those suffering TBI, PTSD and Moral Injury as weak, while pardoning convicted war criminals. I show honor to the office that he holds, but have no respect for him as a person because he is worth of no respect.

In 2015 I realized exactly who he was and what he would do if he ever became President and I lost a lot of people who I thought were friends over it. He is an unrepentant racist, a White Supremacist, and a malignant narcissistic sociopath who has no empathy for anyone. He is his father’s horribly damaged child. Everything I said about him before he was elected in 2016 has proved to be right. My Oath of Office is to the Constitution, not him. He may occupy the office but he has ripped up and pissed on his oath to support and defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  When he took that oath he lied and followed it with a dystopian Inaugural Address that was fictional when he spoke it but has become fact during his reign of terror and death. As of today over 155,000 Americans have died of COVID 19, our Gross Domestic product declined by the most it ever has, and tens of millions of Americans are out of work as he overturns Civil Rights laws, sends DHS storm troopers to kidnapp American citizens off the street with no probable cause and no chargers. He attacks peaceful demonstrations using massive force in order to get a photo op, he intentionally repeats conspiracy theories, and debunked cures for Coronavirus, and he sells out American national security to Vladimir Putin, the former Soviet KGB Agent who is now President of Russia for life. He is worse than Vidkun Quisling, Henri Laval, Marshal Petain, and every other traitor who ever lived.

Gustave Gilbert, the American psychologist to the major Nazi War Criminals wrote of them words that could be equally applied to President Trump, his Administration, the vast majority of elected GOP representatives and senators, at Federal and State levels:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Gustave Gilbert and Christopher Hitchens words are as true today as when they were written, as are Yehuda Bauer’s.

However, I think that the most damning indictment comes from the First Pamphlet of the White Rose Resistance to Hitler written by a twenty-two year old German University student named Sophie Scholl. She wrote:

“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day.” 

One day we will see them all in their horrible and inhuman reality. The sooner the better. If not anyone who opposes Trump might end up disappeared in a Nacht und Nebel or Night and Fog operation, or end up in a camp without any charges, and with an indefinite sentence, purely based on the whim of an amoral malignant narcissistic sociopath President and his equally sadistic Administration, Party, and Cult.

I have to tell to truth, it is my first duty to my faith and to my oath to the Constitution. General Ludwig Beck who resigned his post as the Chief of Staff of the German Army in the face of Hitler’s planned invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and died in the failed attempt to kill Hitler and end Nazi rule on July 20th 1944 said:

“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees his duty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”

And as Major General Henning Von Tresckow said:

“I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.” One could easily substitute the name of Donald Trump for Hitler and it would not be much different. He also said “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.” The same is true today. But do we have the courage to stand?

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+