Some may wonder how and why propaganda works and oft works so very well. It is often a combination of factors such when a society is very rigidly controlled. In such cases the powers that be control access to information, promulgate misinformation and thus, leave the populace not knowing any better or different.
Yet, just as often, such as occurs in free information saturated societies, people fall for propaganda because they want to fall for it. They want to because it is advantageous to their worldviews to accept certain bits of information, or misinformation. For example, within Atheist skeptic circles Nazi propaganda is alive, well and still being promulgated by Atheist [actually pseudo] skeptics themselves because it feeds Atheist activism and Atheism is combination of anti-Christian support groups.
Just as that old serpent the devil has not had an original idea in millennia. The real tragedy is that he has not had to because we keep falling for the same old idea: the appeal of being like God (such as the Atheist goal of self-deification).
Well, Nazis, neo-Nazis or otherwise, have not had any new ideas and they do not have to because Atheist pseudo skeptics are doing the work of promulgating portions of their propaganda for them. This has been detailed in detail in the essay, About.com, Austin Cline, Adolf Hitler and the Continued Promulgation of Nazi Propaganda.*
Let us consider a few facts and popular Atheist pseudo skeptic well-within-the-box-group think-talking points-de jour.
Atheist pseudo skeptics tend to claim that Adolf Hitler was a Christian because of certain statements which he made. Now, the premise behind this lapse in logic is the shocking premise that Hitler was such an upstanding and honest fellow that, by golly, if he said it, it must be true: he said it, I believe it and so it is. This is a shocking level of gullibility (and no wonder considering that the word “gullible” is not in the dictionary) as it denotes a lack of historical and cultural context.
Adolf Hitler was a politician and manipulated the populace by using terminology with which they would relate and agree. Yet, that terminology was just that: words. Like a true political propagandist, Hitler employed terms which he then defined in a manner that was actually foreign to their traditional meanings. For example, Adolf Hitler made references to “Jesus” (in various forms such as “my Lord,” etc.). Yet, this was not the one, true, real, actual, biblical, historical, Jesus. Yes, this is so even if Hitler quoted the Bible (un-contextually, of course, see Hitler as Bible Expositor). Think of it this way, Atheist pseudo skeptics expect us to believe that the world’s most infamous anti-Semite worshiped a Jew as his Lord, God and Savior. The lack of intellect, or basic common sense, that is regularly displayed by Atheist pseudo skeptics is no less than astonishing. This is a lesson in terms or words versus definitions.
Now, what about the Atheist pseudo skeptic talking point about the supposed proof, stamped into metal no less, that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Christians motivated by Christianity, the Bible, Jesus, etc. Look at the belt buckles, they say, which had the words Gott Mit Uns / God With Us engraved upon them.
There are a variety of problems with this view, a view which is historically ignorant, intellectually bankrupt, nonsensical, illogical, and yet, useful to Atheist pseudo skeptics.
1) The German Army did, indeed, have Gott Mit Uns / God With Us upon their belt buckles. Yet, the German Army was not Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army. Hitler’s army was the Waffen SS.
The German Army’s (the Wehrmacht) motto was inherited from Otto von Bismarck, whose imperial standard contained the motto in 1870. The motto of the Waffen SS was Meine Ehre heißt Treue / My Honour is (or, is Called) Loyalty.
2) Atheist pseudo skeptic demand that wearing a Gott Mit Uns belt buckle means that the wearer was a Christian yet, they never seem to ask who the referred to Gott is?
3) The Atheist pseudo skeptic demand that wearing a Gott Mit Uns belt buckle means that the wearer was a Christian it tantamount to demanding that urban cowboys who wear Professional Rode Cowboy Association belt buckles are bull ridiners.
Now, in order to be consistent, which appears to be asking too much, Atheist pseudo skeptic would have to take the wearing a Gott Mit Uns belt buckle means that the wearer was a Christian claim and likewise apply it to the most well known Nazi symbol: the swastika. They would have to claim that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were Hindus, or Buddhists, or any of the many other cultures and religions for whom the swastika (facing one direction or another) hold (benevolent) meaning because they shared a common symbol.
Actually, if Atheist pseudo skeptics were to claim that Nazis were Hindus, Nazis were Buddhists they would actually be closer to the truth than they appear to realize. Sadly, in our modern ear of an overabundance of information which is accessible at the speed of your particular internet connection, Atheist pseudo skeptics insist on getting their marching orders from the likes of Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins asserts that Communists were not Atheists and it is so. He claims that the only things that Hitler and Joseph Stalin had in common was that they were both mustachioed and so it is. He claims that Hitler was a Christian and it somehow re-writes history in order to be true. One is tempted to state that Atheist pseudo skeptics have reached unfathomable levels of ignorance by denying history as recent as the previous century. Yet, the information is as clear as the noonday Sun in a cloudless summer day. They deny the recent historical facts because it is convenient to their malicious worldviews. The fact that in doing so they only end up discrediting themselves is virtually irrelevant as the point is not to be credible but to convert the gullible and encourage the in-group.
Richard Dawkins included an entire section in his book The God Delusion to the issue of Joseph Stalin and Communism and Adolf Hitler and Nazism (Stalin and Communism actually had but a blurb). Yet, there are mountains of evidence again Hitler being a Christian and in favor of that which actually motivated him which Dawkins, for some odd reason (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), neglected to include.
Some influences upon Hitler were:
Norse mythology
Aryan mythology
Hindusim
Buddhism
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
Thomas Malthus
Francis Galton—eugenics
Friedrich Nietzsche
Theosophy
The occult in general
And much, much more, find details in What Smith and Dawkins Did Not Bother Mentioning.
For more on Nazism, Communism and the Atheist connection, see here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* Note that Sam Harris (The End of Faith—Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 2004 AD ed., p. 93) blames the Holocaust on the Jews:
The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves.
This is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth.
Consider also that, for example, Atheist pseudo skeptics condemn the Jews for practicing slavery (see here) but never condemn the Egyptians for enslaving the Jews. They condemn the Jews for committing human sacrifices, which they never did when they were actual practicing Jews, but never condemn Gentile Pagans who actually did commit human sacrifices and did so in keeping with the dictates of their theologies.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby. If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help out. Here is my donate/paypal page.
Due to robo-spaming, I had to close the comment sections. However, you can comment on my Twitter
page, on my Facebook page, on my Google+ page and/or the “Share/Save” button below the tags.