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e32d551
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"[ :] Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. 's thought was not taught in Germany; was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, , and were alike despised by the National Socialist regime. Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms - the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome - if it's an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of , that says that he's doing God's work and executing God's will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making
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evolution
science
albert-einstein
barbaric
fascistic
fuhrer
mein-kampf
superstitious
separation-of-church-and-state
einstein
nazi
charles-darwin
sigmund-freud
freud
pope
vatican
nazism
catholicism
united-states
hitler
darwinism
darwin
fascism
jewish
germany
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Christopher Hitchens |
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05684d7
|
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
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post-factual
totalitarianism
nazism
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Hannah Arendt |
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1fac093
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They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate -- confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
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agency
ego-inflation
god-is-dead
nazism
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Philip K. Dick |
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711fa7b
|
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.
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racism
islamic-banking
somalia
caliphate
death-of-osama-bin-laden
nazis
theocracy
nihilism
osama-bin-laden
jihad
nazism
fascism
islam
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Christopher Hitchens |
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84f5b26
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Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always--and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject--what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming--I want to say 'unsettling'--precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then--belatedly you may say--to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not be a moral or ethical action.
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andalusia
ariel-sharon
azmi-bishara
bosnia-and-herzegovina
caliphate
chemical-weapons
fatah
halabja
halabja-poison-gas-attack
israelis
knesset
leftists
politics-of-israel
takbir
gaza
national-security
iran
henry-kissinger
balkans
hamas
plo
noam-chomsky
catholics
war-crimes
theocracy
bosnian-war
oil
kosovo
kosovo-war
bill-clinton
christians
muslims
baath-party
saddam-hussein
nazism
edward-said
spain
imperialism
united-states
fascism
islam
islamism
propaganda
antisemitism
fanaticism
israel
palestinians
religious-extremism
cia
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Christopher Hitchens |
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7b1cfd8
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No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.
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nazism
nietzsche
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Walter Kaufmann |
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b906f72
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Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And--how many of us do know it?
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future
psychosis
german
totalitarianism
nazism
government
fascism
power
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Philip K. Dick |
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a115bb2
|
Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief.
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freedom
nazism
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Erich Fromm |
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6408119
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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest--fractionally more brave, one might say--about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.
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prejudice
racism
history
bravery
honesty
accuracy
belarus
berlin-wall
operation-reinhard
polish-jews
slavic-peoples
timothy-d-snyder
yale-university
national-socialism
massacre
historians
ukraine
poland
holocaust
nazism
stalinism
antisemitism
jews
russia
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Christopher Hitchens |
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702b062
|
What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so . I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.
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war
revenge
genocide
eastern-european
ernest-gellner
germans
poland
stalin
holocaust
nazism
stalinism
world-war-ii
ethnic-cleansing
jews
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Christopher Hitchens |
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2af040c
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Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Not of honorable men but of itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they--these madmen--respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid
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abstraction
the-abyss
racism
nihilism
nazism
|
Philip K. Dick |
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31a88fd
|
When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine , George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany , or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended--to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia--this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all--and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours--Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.
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holocaust
holocaust-denial
jewry
nazi-germany
nazism
george-orwell
world-war-ii
antisemitism
germany
|
Christopher Hitchens |
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7a06e30
|
Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation ... On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm
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nazism
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William L. Shirer |
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7dbb10b
|
"First and foremost, we want a good clean fight." He adress only yhe Fuhrer now. "Unless, of course, Herr Hitler, you begin to lose. Should this occur, I will be quite willing to turn a blind eye to any unconscionable tactics you might employ to grind this piece of Jewish stench and filth into the canvas."
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nazism
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Markus Zusak |
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6665f60
|
All of us in the West, our political leaders and our newspapers above all, had underestimated Adolf Hitler and his domination of this land and its people. His ideas might seem half-baked and often evil - to me they did. But the unpleasant fact was not only that he believed in them, fanatically, but that he was persuading the German people to believe in them. He might seem like a demagogue... but his oratory, his drive, his zeal, his iron will and the power of his personality were having an immense impact on the citizens of this country. He was convincing them that the new Germany...under his leadership, was great, was strong, and had a manifest destiny ... I heard no mention...of the loss of personal freedom and of other democratic rights. Apparently this was not much of a sacrifice. They couldn't have cared less. They had committed themselves to Adolf Hitler and his barbarian dictatorship.
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history
politics
nazism
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William L. Shirer |
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fa97561
|
Goebbels was unbelievably ignorant of the world outside Germany. He appeared to know absolutely nothing of the history, the literature and the people of any foreign land. He understood no modern foreign language. His ideas of America, for instance, were childish. This was a weakness shared by all the Nazi bigwigs, beginning with Hitler, and it began to occur to me that it might have ominous consequences for the Third Reich, and unfortunately, for much of the rest of the world. There is nothing more dangerous in the shaping of foreign policy than ignorance - of foreign lands and people.
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history
goebbels
nazism
|
William L. Shirer |
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48d73e0
|
"The second part of the motto of the left-hand path, "Love is the law', love under will," became for the Nazis: "Hatred is the law, hatred under will"--a powerful formula indeed. The inescapable historical parallel to all of this is to be seen in the innumerable cruelties committed by Christians against Jews, pagans, witches, heretics, and each other: a disgrace to the Solar tradition, as the Nazis are to the Polar. Yet many of the worst offenders were pious, and believed themselves to be sincere Christians; some of them were even "mystics". All this goes to show that any religious tradition can do more harm than good, unless it is tempered by the simple humanity and compassion that come more readily to women than to men. When the Dalai Lama says with his characteristic smile, "My religion is Kindness," he is pointing the way to the Golden Age more surely than any priest, shaykh, or esoteric pundit."
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eastern-religion
nazism
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Joscelyn Godwin |
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d5b8b35
|
A una chica la han echado hoy de la piscina. A inge Hachmann. Nos han dicho que no podemos nadar con mestizas, que es poco higienico. Una mestiza, Werner. ?No somos nosotro stamiben mestizos? ?La mitad de nuestra madre y la otra mitad de nuestro padre?
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mixed
nazism
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Anthony Doerr |