Progressive Liberalism Is Responsible For The Spread Of Islamic State Among U.S. Youth

Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ – Colossians 2:8

I vividly recall a former professor of mine who described the personal impact of his visit to Auschwitz.  The thing that hit him hardest, he said, was when he looked into the rooms where the Nazis had collected all the possessions of the death camp victims: a giant room filled with suitcases here, another room filled with human hair there.  And the thing that hit him at that moment was that ideas have consequences, and that the virus that created Auschwitz and all the camps like it had emerged decades before they were constructed.  It was ideas like atheism, Darwinism, Nietzscheism, existentialism and deconstructionism that became the intellectual foundation upon which those camps were built.  The virus began in the halls of academia – just as our most cancerous and most toxic ideas spread here and now – and spread throughout a German culture which had abandoned belief in God beyond any culture around it.  Because of the work of German liberal theologians such as Julius Wellhausen, Franz Delitzsch, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althous, Emanual Hirsch, among others, the reliability and integrity of the Bible was stunningly undermined to the degree that the Bible was nothing more than a collection of myths and fables.  Oh, there were true Christian intellectuals such as the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer – who himself would perish in the camps – but these were too few and far between to counter the toxic avalanche of secular humanism all around them.  And as the impact of the vile philosophy and theology of Nazism began to spread, there was simply nothing substantial to counter it.

THAT is precisely where our culture is today and it is coming from the same theological and philosophical traditions.

Martin Heidegger was and actually remains a darling among liberal academia.  It is only a slightly embarrassing fact that the man’s existentialist philosophy enabled him and even drove him to be one of the most ardent Nazis in Germany – such that he first became a member of THE most radical Nazi faction and ultimately lost his rectorate at Frieburg after his political patrons were purged for being TOO extreme before Hitler was ready to take the next step.  Heidegger formally abandoned his Catholicism – which conflicted with both his philosophy and his Nazi politics.  His existentialism drove him to determine to break with “Hebraism” as well as all “metaphysics,” “But to achieve such a rupture, Christian and humanist values would have to be discarded too” [from The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue by Ernst Christian Helmreich, 1979, p. 215].

Christian humanism and secular humanism went to war – and secular humanism won in pre-World War II Germany.  And then proceeded to murder all its Christian rivals.

Martin Heidegger was a profound influence upon many of THE most prominent atheists over at least the next thirty years.

Another example of this very same phenomenon is seen in the deconstructionist philosopher Paul De Man.  His work in deconstructionism was adored by the political left and the man was a devout Nazi

And then you’ve got Ezra Pound, the famous literary theorist – and Nazi – who denounced Christianity as something “riddled with semitism” as Hitler himself directly quoted in his Mein Kampf.

These men, along with Hitler, had the project of first tearing Christianity down and ultimately tearing it out by its roots and burning it.  They construed a conflict between “nature” and “anti-nature” (which is one of the reasons why Nazism – and its adherents such as Heidegger – was an environmentalist movement.  On their narrative, Judaism and Christianity were both “anti-nature” because of their focus on a transcendent God and transcendent moral values that restricted the freedom of man and nature.  Whereas nature is immanent.  The Nazi project was to forge a counter-spirituality that would enable the people to find fulfillment even as the Nazis were freed to exercise their power of will.  The Nazis attacked Christianity from hypocritical premises: on the one hand, they assailed Judeo-Christianity for its intolerance and its fostering of guilt even as they, on the other hand, attacked it for its altruism, for its protecting the weak against the strong, for its clear political implications resulting in liberty and equality.  Ezra Pound argued that there was “no sense of social order in the teachings if the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament” (quoted in The Geneology of Demons, Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound by Robert Castillo, 1988, p. 95].  The Nazis blamed the Protestant Reformation for the revival of Hebrew texts (the Bible) and ways of thinking, and thus for the decline of Europe.  Even though the so-called “Enlightenment” began AFTER and BECAUSE OF the Protestant Reformation.

When the epidemic virus of Nazism became a full-fledged pandemic in German culture, it was because Judeo-Christianity had been weakened, if not eradicated, and because there was no competing intellectual, philosophical, religious, theological alternative to prevent, stop, or even slow down its rise.

And the same thing not only IS happening but already HAS happened in the United States.  And we are seeing the consequences all around us as the National Socialist German Workers Party is reborn as the National Socialist American Workers Party driven by the identical philosophical and religious notions.

The same philosophical traditions – if not the same actual philosophers themselves – that enabled the rise of Nazism continue to dominate the leftist intellectual tradition today: postmodernism, existentialism, deconstructionism, logical positivism, religious liberalism.

It’s all too easy to document the American progressive liberal disdain for Judeo-Christianity and for the integrity and reliability of the Bible which informs it and is its source and foundation:

Obama mockingly asks, “Whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?”  Because Christianity is nothing more than a man-made religion and it is completely relative and totally bound by culture and subject to constant change for the simple reason that there is and can be no eternal, everlasting God to make it permanent.  And Obama mocks, “Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?”  Because the Word of God is nothing more than the word of man and bigoted, intolerant, racist man at that.  And it is immoral to allow Judeo-Christianity or the Bible to have ANY role in our culture as a result.

And we all shouted, “Sieg Heil!  Sieg Heil!  Sieg Heil!  Heil Obama!  Heil Obama!  Heil Obama!”  Because there is nothing left BUT Obama to hold this culture or this nation together.  Or to put it another way: if this nation has a God or a moral code that Obama has NOT mocked and undermined and ignored, I’d like to know who He or she or it is.  (In this age where the left has embraced the transgender man-woman shemale, I suppose you have to consider all the myriad possibilities).

So we’re seeing the same deterioration of “God” in the American political socialist left that we observed in the German political socialist left as it rose to power.  Just like Obama, Hitler began talking about his “Christianity,” but it sure didn’t take long before – the same way Obama promised that “as a Christian” he was opposed to same-sex marriage to imposing the very thing he said that “as a Christian” he was opposed to.  Hitler told his inner circle that he was a devout atheist who had abandoned any notions of a God other than himself.  What he said in his speeches wasn’t any more true than what Obama said in his speeches.  And Christianity has been annihilated in America much the way it was in Germany leading up to the Nazis who took the next logical step with the worldview of Darwinism.

I also find it striking how liberal Democrats are exploiting race versus how the Nazis exploited race.  Both rose to power by making race and racism an issue and encouraging people of race to politically rise against another race due to perceived injustices.  The Nazis screamed, “The Jews have usurped power and they’re oppressing you!”  The liberal Democrats scream, “The whites (particularly white men) have usurped power and they’re oppressing you!”

Now we’re seeing the assured results of leftist-progressive Democrat Party rule as criminality and violence skyrocket wherever liberalism touches.  Liberals are demagoguing race to turn our justice system against our system of justice – and justice is being raped and tortured and murdered as a result.

I mean, “why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?”  I mean, after all, Hitler showed us how to do it with the Jews.

The Jesus whom the Nazis and whom Obama mocked told us, “In the last days, race will rise against race.”  but what did that white-male-embraced Jew know, anyway?

Crucify Him!  At least that’s what the Nazis did.  That’s what Islamic State is doing now.  And as for liberal Democrats, they not only are fine with crucifying Jesus, they’ll stick Him in a jar of urine while they do it.

Progressive liberals demanded that – back when America was STILL overwhelmingly Christian and believed in God – that in the cause of “free speech” we allow such vileness.

Now the same liberals who demanded the right to immerse Christ in piss demand that now that they’ve got the upper hand free speech should be abolished.  It’s who they are.  Again, because they’re just like the Nazis.  Who are just like Islamic State.

The Christianity of our founding fathers – and our very founding fathers themselves – – have been torn down in scorn.  And so the Constitution based on that Christian worldview is the next casualty.

“I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.” — Barack Obama, Sept. 6, 2001

To me it is absolutely no surprise whatsoever that our first president to classify America as “a Muslim nation” prophetically declared the complete separation between America and its founding fathers and their Constitution a matter of FIVE DAYS before the very Islam that he would embrace and elevate to a status directly alongside Christianity would attack us.

The rise of Islamic State and the rise of Obama are hand-in-hand.  The former could never have arisen without the latter.

The men who wrote our Constitution declared in their basis for it – the Declaration of Independence – that our rights come from God, not from any government.  But that didn’t work for liberal Democrats who wanted sodomy-perversion marriage and sixty million murdered babies.  So they agreed with the Nazis that there is “no sense of social order in the teachings if the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament” and threw Christianity out.  So that “social order” could be whatever THEY declared it to by exercising the same power of the human will that Hitler exalted.

Precisely what is it that our liberal-Democrat-hijacked public schools are teaching our children about our God or our culture that will provide a powerful force for them to fight for what is right and fight against what is wrong?  Or to put it in Obama’s mocking terms, “Whose morality would we teach in the schools?”  Do we teach the morality of an everlasting God or do we teach the constantly adapting Darwinian bug morality of Obama?

We are watching the world unravel from without even as we are watching our very cities unravel from within.  Because this is a nation that stands for NOTHING that is transcendent just as Nazi Germany stood for nothing that was transcendent before us.  And we rabidly reject the very NOTION of transcendence because it interferes with our adoration of homosexual sodomy erected upon our altar of sixty million murdered babies.

Kids in liberal Democrat public indoctrination centers aren’t being taught to revere our foundations – they have been taught to mock and despise them.

So why not embrace the values of Islamic State?

Violence is encouraged by liberal Democrats.  First the rioters were given literal permission to riot.  The police were ordered to stand down and allow them to riot.  Then it became racist to criticize the rioters.

Hey, if you like violence you’ll LOVE Islamic State.  Why not join up and spread the love?  You can burn and loot and murder to your heart’s content.

In the rise of Islamic State, we are watching what the liberal-Democrats of Hollywood created: a culture of violence that stands for NOTHING BUT DEATH act out its “values.”

I keep seeing snippets of the numerous videos that Islamic State recruiters are spreading all over the internet.  And you know what I keep seeing?  I keep seeing a video game.  The Islamic State videos look just like what I see when I see the snippets of the video games that liberal Democrats of Hollywood and Silicone Valley pumped into our kids’ brains.

Hey, kids!  You can live our your video game fantasies!  Join Islamic State and you can actually BE in the video game world!

And why not?  Why shouldn’t you?  I mean, murder isn’t really all that “wrong” given that we’ve murdered sixty million babies and that’s “right,” right?  And the same intolerant Christian God who says murder is wrong also says homosexuality is wrong and we ALL know that’s right, right?  And I mean, seriously, whose version of Christianity are we going to teach?  Whose passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?

Come on, why not try the Qur’an instead, kids?  I mean, after all, this IS a Muslim nation, you know.

I’ve been talking about how the liberal-progressive Democrat WORLDVIEW has actually directly participated in the rise of terrorism.  But let’s not forget Obama’s miserable national security and foreign policy performance that have allowed Islamic State to rise from a virtually unheard of tiny offshoot group based in Syria when Bush was president to owning the largest terrorist caliphate in the history of the world because of Obama.  I’ll quote one of my own titles that I back up with facts ad nauseam: No One On EARTH More Responsible For Rise In Islamic Terrorism Than Our Own Terrorist-in-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama.  And it is an easy-to-document FACT that Barack Obama DIRECTLY enabled Islamic State to spread by refusing to deal with Syria after cowardly retreating from his own “red line” AFTER cutting-and-running from Iraq in abandonment of EVERYTHIG his own generals WARNED WOULD HAPPEN if Obama did what Obama in fact did.

You need to go back and remember history – something IMPOSSIBLE for a liberal to do – to see how Obama and his mouthpieces claimed credit for the Arab Spring (and see here and here for more proof of that) that the terrorists used to massively advance their own cause.  It is also a matter of history that the Arab Spring that Obama claimed so much credit for actually WERE the result of Obama in the form of FOOD RIOTS he created throughout the Middle East due to the fact that all the Arab states that sell oil have to be tied to the U.S. dollar – with Obama’s massive debt massively devaluing the values of Arab currencies leading to rioting.

It doesn’t matter HOW you slice it: it comes up Obama and the vicious failure of liberal progressive Democrat Party ideology.

What I’m saying here is that the fact that for all practical purposes, Barack Obama and the Democrat Party have completely surrendered to radical Islam – whether you talk about Obama allowing and even outright encouraging Islamic State to spread by a) doing NOTHING in the Syria that now thanks to Obama controls more than half of that country and b) Obama’s completely cutting-and-running from Iraq in abandonment of EVERYTHING our generals demanded we do to preserve the security of that country; or whether you talk about Obama allowing and even outright encouraging Iran to develop a nuclear bomb and the ballistic missile system to deliver it and therefore encourage nuclear proliferation in the remaining Muslim countries as they talk about their bomb – the real crisis was already present and already metastasizing in our culture.

Islamic State is rising.  And neither so-called “moderate Islam” itself or the defiled formerly “One Nation Under God” America that is now “God Damn America” have anything to fight it with.

Which is why the once greatest nation in the history of the world – a nation that uniquely called upon the God of the Bible – will go down so hard, so violently, in such an ugly, awful manner.

It’s funny.  Progressive liberals claim to be anti-rape, but as a direct result of their moral system, we have seen rapes and sexual assaults SKYROCKET.  And I’m sure it’s a complete surprise to you, unless you first consider that it’s kind of obvious that the inevitable result of teaching children that they are NOT created in the image of God, that they WILL act like the animals their teachers claim they are.  I mean, Muslims love to slander Jews by labeling them “the descendants of apes and pigs.”   But according to evolutionary theory we are that and worse: the descendants of flies and roaches.  And surprise, surprise that our kids would start acting like what liberal progressives have said they are all along.

In the same manner, it’s the same way with the economy: should we really be surprised when the liberal progressive Democrats’ embrace of an economic system based entirely on atheistic godlessness (where omnipotent Government takes the place of God), class-warfare-incited envy and bitterness would necessarily fail every single time it is tried no matter how many times it has failed before?  And yet here we are, with Obama’s miraculous “wreckovery” sinking America year-by-year under Obama into the WORST labor participation rates – measuring the percentage of working-age Americans who actually have a job – we have seen in forty years.  Right now the labor participation rate – six years into Obama’s so-called “recovery” – has more than 93 million Americans without a job and little hope of ever finding one in a rate that is the worst we’ve seen since Jimmy Carter’s socialism was destroying America in 1977.  I wrote about the metastatic spread of the Obama economic cancer in a nice little summary in a different article I wrote in 2013:

Again, I talked about that when I pleaded with the American people to NOT choose stupidity and suicide in the 2012 election:

In 2010 – and this was AFTER we supposedly were out of the recession in Obama’s “wreckovery” –  the labor participation rate was 64.5%, which was at a 25-year low (i.e., lower than it had EVER been under Bush).

In 2011, the labor participation rate dropped to 63.9%, the lowest level in 27 years.

Last year in 2012 under Obama’s failed policies it fell to the lowest level in 30 years.

And here we are today.  You’ve got to go back to the dismal failure of the Carter era in the late 1970s to get such an awful participation rate.  It’s now the worst its been in 34 years.

Now it stands as the worst America has seen in 38 years.  But who does Obama demonize for his fail?  Bush.

It is a fact that “If the workforce participation rate today were as high as it was on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate in this country would be 9.7 percent.”  His current unemployment rate is based entirely on statistical shenanigans and outright lies.  Under Barack Obama’s economic miracle “The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400.”  Obama has literally robbed us blind while telling us he’s making us rich – and pure fools believe his lies.  Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that Obama has demagogued class-warfare more than any president in history, his actual record has produced the widest gap between the rich and the poor in his economy EVER MEASURED.  Meanwhile, Obama’s destruction of our health care system is closing down hospitals, driving doctors out of medicine and leaving the poor with “insurance” that leaves them unable to get healthcare outside of clogging up our emergency rooms.  The scourge of chronic homelessness is a giant plague beyond anything we’ve seen in the most liberal-Obama-friendly cities.  Homeless camps are sprawling across the city of the Angles.   In fact, “the number of tents, makeshift encampments and vehicles occupied by homeless people soared 85%, to 9,535, according to biennial figures from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.”  Cities are going BANKRUPT with debt in numbers not seen since the Great Depression under Obama.    I wrote about that massive problem in 2012.  It was still a massive problem in 2013.  It’s still a massive problem now as Chicago goes bankrupt under one of Obama’s chief acolytes due of course to Obama-style debt and insane socialist spending policies.  Cities like Detroit look like World War II bombed out war zones.  Race riots dominate the Obama presidency as the vile, toxic bitterness of the left metastasizes in violence.  I wrote about the liberal stupidity of liberal Baltimore  and how liberals have proved last-days prophecy is coming upon us – and look at the impact of their foolish, wicked “management” of the crisis they created.  Obama depicting himself or his policies as being the savior to the poor is rather akin to Adolf Hitler depicting himself and his Third Reich as the savior for Jews.  And I state that as a categorical FACT that I just documented at length above if you look at the FACTS.

To the extent that the economy or jobs has anything to do with the rise of terrorism and the Islamic State, as liberal progressives keep telling us, again, look no farther than at THEM for producing the miserable economy and the awful jobs performance.

The beast is coming.  And he is coming because liberal progressives have “fundamentally transformed” America into a nation that WILL NOT reflect the image of a good God, but will rather exalt their will over Him.  Which is a prescription for judgment and doom.

 

Leftist Thought Led To Fascism – And Is Doing So Again

Liberals think that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron.  They’re wrong.  Goldberg himself writes:

“For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” [page 175].

“Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, Hitler’s “revolt against reason.”  All fed into a movement that believes action is more important than ideas.  Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all these ideas had the same purpose–to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered.  These were ideologies of the “movement.”  The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 176].

It turns out that most of the moral and philosophical assumptions of liberalism have been shared by not only the Marxists, but the Nazis as well.  NAZI stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party,” and was merely a rival brand of the clearly leftist political ideology of socialism.  And given the fact that Marxism was in fact every bit as totalitarian and murderous as Nazism, in hindsight it seems rather bizarre that “Marxist” was ever an abracadabra word that the American left was willing to bear to begin with.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the foundational ideas that liberals uphold as being the opposite of fascism in fact actually fed the monster of fascist Nazism, and how the modern American left continue to fall prey to fascist premises and outcomes to this very day.

It is particularly interesting that the supposedly highly individualistic and influential school of thought known as “existentialism” became so ensnared by fascism and Nazism.  On the surface, existentialism would seem to be the very polar opposite of fascism and Nazism.  After all, a philosophy of radical freedom centered in the individual would surely be incompatible with a totalitarian social system that denies political liberty in the name of the community.  One would assume that existentialism would be a philosophy of rebellion against all such external authority.  And yet the Nazis quoted Frederich Nietzsche at great length in support of their ideology (see also here).  Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost existentialist thinkers in history, turned out to have been a proud member of the Nazi Party.  And even famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre – who fought to resist fascism in his Nazi-occupied France during WWII – ultimately merely chose another totalitarian ideology in its place (Sartre identified himself as a Marxist and a Maoist).

Georg Lukács observed (in The Destruction of Reason, 1954, page 5) that tracing a path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Weber.  Rather than merely being amoral monsters, the Nazis emerged out of a distinguished liberal secular humanist intellectual tradition.

Max Weinreich documented in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, an exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime.  Far from opposing the Nazi regime, we find that German academia actively provided the intellectual justification for Nazi fascism as well as the conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Weinreich does not claim that German scholars intended the Holocaust, but he argues that the Holocaust would not have been possible without them.

He asks, “Did they administer the poison?  By no means; they only wrote the prescription.”

How could such a thing happen?

Very easily, it turns out.

The existentialists (along with the secular humanists and the liberals), deny the transcendent, deny objective truth, and deny the objective morality that derive from transcendence and objective truth.  Rather than any preordained system – whether moral or theological – existentialist anchored meaning not to any ideals or abstractions, but in the individual’s personal existence.  Life has no ultimate meaning; meaning is personal; and human beings must therefore create their own meaning for themselves.

One should already begin to see the problem: since existentialism, by its very nature, refuses to give objective answers to moral or ideological questions, a particular existentialist might choose to follow either a democrat or totalitarian ideology – and it frankly doesn’t matter which.  All that matters is that the choice be a genuine choice.

Existentialists didn’t merely acknowledge this abandonment of transcendent morality, they positively reveled in it.  In his book St. Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated the life of a criminal.  Genet was a robber, a drug dealer, and a sexual deviant.  By all conventional moral standards, Genet was an evil man.  But for Sartre, even ostensibly evil actions could be moral if they were performed in “good faith.”  And since Sartre’s Genet consciously chose to do what he did, and took responsibility for his choices and his actions, he was a saint in existentialist terms.

And the problem becomes even worse: by rejecting the concepts of transcendence, objective meaning, truth, and moral law, and by investing ultimate authority in the human will (i.e. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Hitler’s “triumph of the will”), existentialism played directly into the hands of fascism — which preached the SAME doctrines.  If fascism can be defined as “violent and practical resistance against the process of transcendence,” as Ernst Nolte defined it, then it’s affinities with existentialism are crystal clear.  The two movements became part of the same stream of thought.

Modern Nietzsche followers argue that Nietzsche was not a racial anti-Semite.  For the sake of argument maybe he wasn’t; but he was without any question an intellectual anti-Semite, who attacked the Jews for their ideas and their ethics — particularly as they contributed to Western civilization and to Christianity (which he also actively despised).  And in addition to Nietzsche’s intellectual anti-Semitism was his utter contempt for any form of abstractions — particularly as they related to the transcendental categories of morality and reason.  Nietzsche maintained that abstraction of life resulted from abstraction of thought.  And he blamed Christianity – which he rightly blamed as a creation of the Jews – for the denial of life manifested in Christian morality.

And, unlike most pseudo-intellectuals of today, Nietzsche was consistent: in his attack against Christianity, he attacked Judeo-Christian morality.  He attacked the Christian value of other-centered love, and argued that notions of compassion and mercy favored the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness.  Don’t you dare think for a single nanosecond that Hitler didn’t take the arguments of this beloved-by-liberals philosopher and run down the field with them toward the death camps.

The Nazis aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against the the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian morality the Jews represented.  A transcendent lawgiving God, who reveals His moral law on real tablets of stone for mankind to follow, was anathema to the fascists.  They argued that such transcendence alienates human beings from nature and from themselves (i.e., from their own genuine choices).  The fascist intellectuals sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, focused upon nature, on human emotions, and on the community.  The fascists sought to restore the ancient pre-Christian consciousness, the ancient mythic sensibility in the form of the land and the blood, in which individuals experience unity with nature, with each other, and with their own deepest impulses.

Gene Edward Veith in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian worldview writes:

The fascist rebellion against transcendence restored the ancient pagan consciousness.  With it came barbarism, a barbarism armed with modern technology and intellectual sophistication.  The liquidation of the transcendent moral law and “Jewish” conscience allowed the resurgence of the most primitive and destructive emotions, the unleashing of original sin (page 14).

Nietzsche argued that God is dead, and Hitler tried to finish Him off by eradicating the Jews.  What is less known is that he also planned to solve the “church problem” after the war.  Hitler himself  said:

“The war is going to be over.  The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem.  It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” [From Hitler’s Tabletalk (December 1941), quoted in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak, 1990, page 105].

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion.  It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”  And Himmler said, “Men who can’t divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are ‘holy’ and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS.”

With the creed “God is dead” and the resulting “death of God,” Nietzsche predicted that energizing conflict and revolution would reemerge in a great wave of nihilism.  Human beings would continue to evolve, he said, nodding to Darwinism.  And man would ultimately give way to Superman.  And Nietzsche said that this Superman would not accept the anachronistic abstract, transcendental meanings imposed by disembodied Judeo-Christian rationalism or by a life-denying religion.  Rather, this Superman would CREATE meaning for himself and for the world as a whole.

The Superman, according to Nietzsche, would be an artist who could shape the human race – no longer bound by putrefying and stultifying and stupefying transcendence – to his will.  “Man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor,” he wrote.  Such a statement did not merely anticipate the Darwinist-based Nazi eugenics movement.  It demonstrated how the exaltation of the human will could and would lead not to general liberty, as one might have expected, but to the control of the many by the elite — with those of the weaker in will being subjugated to the will of the Supermen.

Nietzsche’s new ethic became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities that would follow.  As Nietzsche himself put it, “The weak and the failures shall perish: the first principle of OUR love of man.  And they shall even be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity” (in “The Anti-Christ” in Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).  We see here also the exemplification of yet another legacy left behind by Nietzsche that was picked up by the Nazi and afterward by secular humanist atheists today: the Nietzschean attitude of flippant, sarcastic contempt for all the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity.

One of the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity was the fundamental sanctity of human life.  But the Nazis had their own concept – Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).  And nearly fifty million of the most innocent and helpless human beings have perished as a result of an existentialist philosophy that survived the fall of the Nazis in liberal thought, which celebrates pro-existentialist “pro-choice” above human life.

Nietzsche’s philosophy underlies the thought of all the later existentialists, and the darker implications of his thought proved impossible to ignore.

And Martin Heidegger, in his own personal choice to commit himself to National Socialism, did not ignore them.

There is more that needs to be understood.

Martin Heidegger invoked Nietzsche in his 1933 Rectoral Address, in his speech entitled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he articulated his commitment to the integration of academia with National Socialism.  He began by asking, if Nietzsche is correct in saying that God is dead, what are the implications for knowledge?

As Heidegger explained, if God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority or reference point for objective truth.  Whereas classical thought, exemplified by the Greeks, could confidently search for objective truth, today, after the death of God, truth becomes intrinsically “hidden and uncertain.”  Today the process of questioning is “no longer a preliminary step that is surmounted on the way to the answer and thus to knowing; rather, questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing.”

Heidegger’s conclusion became accepted to the point of becoming a commonplace of contemporary liberal thought: that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.  With the death of God, there is no longer any set of absolutes or abstract ideals by which existence must be ordered.  Such “essentialism” is an illusion; and knowledge in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be challenged.  The scholar is not one who knows or searches for some absolute truth, but the one who questions everything that pretends to be true.

Again, one would think that such a skeptical methodology would be highly incompatible with fascism, with its practice of subjecting people to an absolute human authority.  And yet this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism.  In fact, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address was warmly endorsed by the National Socialists for a very good reason: the fascists saw themselves as iconoclasts, interrogating the old order and boldly challenging all transcendent absolutes.

We find that in this same address in which Heidegger asserts that “questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing,” Heidegger went on to advocate expelling academic freedom from the university:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.  The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the university.”

Heidegger argued that the traditional canons of academic freedom were not genuine but only negative, encouraging “lack of concern” and “arbitrariness.”  Scholars must become unified with each other and devote themselves to service.  In doing so, he stated, “the concept of the freedom of German students is now brought back to it’s truth.”

Now, the claim that freedom would somehow emerge when academic freedom is eliminated might be sophistry of the worst kind, but it is not mere rhetorical doublespeak.  Why?  Because Heidegger was speaking existentially, calling not for blind obedience, but for a genuine commitment of the will.  Freedom was preserved because “to give oneself the law” was a voluntary, freely chosen commitment.  Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” parking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent.  The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice.  In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community.  Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.

And what this meant in practice could be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution” (Hans Schemm, quoted in Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, tr. Ernest A. Menze, 1978, p. 99).

I point all of the above out to now say that it is happening all over again, by intellectuals who unknowingly share most of the same tenets that made the horror possible the last time.

We live in a time and in a country in which the all-too modern left has virtually purged the university of conservatives and conservative thought.  This is simply a fact that is routinely confirmed.  And as a mater of routine, conservative speakers need not apply at universities.  If they are actually invited to speak, they are frequently shouted down by a relative few liberal activists.  And leftwing censorship is commonplace.  Free speech is largely gone, in a process that simply quashes unwanted views.  We have a process today in which a professor who is himself employing fascist tactics calls a student “a fascist bastard.”  And why did he do so?  Because the student gave a speech in a speech class choosing a side on a topic that the professor did not like.

We live in a society in which too many of our judges have despised a system of objective laws from an objective Constitution and have imposed their own will upon both.  Judicial activist judges have largely driven transcendent religion and the transcendent God who gives objective moral laws out of the public sphere.

Today, we live in a society that will not post the Ten Commandments – the epitome of transcendent divinely-ordained moral law – in public schools.  And why not?  Because judges ruled that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” which, the Court said, is “not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

One can only marvel that such justices so cynically debauched the thought of the founding fathers whose ideas they professed to be upholding.

Justices of the Supreme Court agreed with this fallacious ruling even as the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments rules atop the very building in which they betrayed our nation’s founding principles.

And thus the left has stripped the United States of America bare of transcendent moral law, just as their intellectual forebears did prior to WWII in Nazi Germany.   And thus the intellectual left has largely stripped the United States of America from free debate within academia largely by pursuing the same line of reasoning that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to do the same in Nazi Germany.  We saw this very feature evidenced by leftist scientists who threw aside their scientific ethics in order to purge climatologists who came to a different conclusion.

The climate that led to fascism and to Nazism in Germany did not occur overnight, even though the final plunge may have appeared to be such to an uninformed observer.  It occurred over a period of a half a dozen decades or so, with the transcendent and objective moral foundations having been systematically torn away.  And after that degree of cancer had been reached, it only took the right leader or the right event to plunge the world into madness.

How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 1)

It is hard to talk to talk to people who believe that truth is relative. And there are more and more such people all the time.

C.S. Lewis described the fallacy of any theory that rejects the connection between thought and truth. In his book Miracles he said “All possible knowledge … depends on the validity of reasoning,” and developed his argument thus:

No account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, itself be demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound – a proof that there are no such things as proofs – which is nonsense.

To disbelieve in truth is patently self-contradictory. To “believe” means to think that something is true; and to say, “It is true that nothing is true” is fundamentally meaningless nonsense. The very statement, “There is no absolute truth,” is a statement of absolute truth. In the past, this pseudo-intellectual exercise was little more than a parlor game for the vacuous and simply not taken seriously. But it is very serious today, indeed. Today these views are held not only by much of academia, but by the average man on the street.

The rejection of absolutes is not merely a fine point of philosophical debate. Relative values accompany the relativism of truth. Today, we are a morally velocitized culture. What was unthinkable decades ago is openly practiced today; and what is unthinkable today will surely be openly practiced within a few years’ time.

What we have today is not merely immoral behavior by virtually all previous standards of conduct, but an abandonment of moral criteria altogether. More, we have an abandonment of meaning itself; and so today, we look for meaning in ways that would have bewildered, saddened, and shocked our forefathers.

The intellect is being replaced by the will. Reason is being replaced by emotion (which is one reason our kids are falling so far behind in math and science, and why so many are so passionate about a political candidate whose positions they cannot even begin to articulate). Morality is replaced by relativism. Reality itself is becoming viewed as little more than a mere social construct that can be manipulated by language. It all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

Today, I frequently encounter people who hold mutually inconsistent ideas. I literally wonder how their heads do not explode from the contradictions they spout. It might simply be ignorance or confusion, but it really doesn’t matter: holding to mutually inconsistent ideas is a sure sign of believing that there is no such thing as absolute truth.

Where did all this come from?

Postmodernism as any form of coherent intellectual discipline largely developed from the field of literary criticism, especially from deconstructionism. So it is no surprise that postmodern scholars stress the importance of “contextualizing,” putting an author or an idea in the context of the times and showing its connections to all of the other “texts” that constituted the culture. But it turns out that one can deconstruct this deconstructionism to see where this thinking has been before, and where it will surely go again unless we turn away from these ideas. It is revealing, for instance, to contextualize Martin Heidegger, who originated the anti-humanism of both the academic theorists and the environmental movement that is so significant in the postmodernist academic circles of today. David Levin has written that Heidegger criticized humanism for tolerating totalitarianism. But Levin was quite disingenuous; the fact is, we now know that Martin Heidegger was a Nazi (see Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, tr. Paul Burrell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 253).

Heidegger’s active involvement in the Nazi party and his shameless promotion of its ideology puts a very different light on his rejection of the individual, his repudiation of traditional human values, and his glorification of nature and culture. We find that EVERY SINGLE ONE of these postmodernist concepts were central tenets of fascism. It should be no surprise that the deconstructionist critic Paul de Man has also been revealed as an apologist of Nazism (for the connection between Heidegger’s Nazi ideology and his philosophy, see Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992). The fact is, postmodernism as a philosophy shares the same underlying concepts as fascist thought.

Postmodernists of today and the fascist intellectuals of the 1930s BOTH embrace a radicalism based not so much on economics but on culture. They BOTH reject identity in favor of cultural determinism. They BOTH reject moral values in favor of the will to power. They BOTH reject reason in favor of irrational emotional release. They BOTH reject a transcendent God in favor of an impersonal, mystical nature.

In Gene Edward Veith’s book, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, he discusses in detail fascist ideology, its intrinsic opposition to the biblical worldview, and its survival in contemporary culture and postmodernist thought. He demonstrates that the irrationalism, the cultural reductionism, and the anti-human values of the postmodernists have already been tried once, and the result was catastrophic. Fascism is coming back. Communism has fallen, but throughout the former Soviet empire democracy is opposed by a new alliance of ex-Marxists and nationalists, who are trying to forge a new National Socialism (witness Vladimir Putin’s shutting down a newspaper for publishing his secret divorce and remarriage to a young Russian gymnast). American academics see themselves as pro-Marxists (or neo-Marxist, or post-Marxists, or however they sell this utterly failed system to themselves), but their desire for a government controlled economy, their cultivated irrationalism, and their reduction of social issues to questions of culture and race are actually more similar to Mussolini (i.e. fascism) than to Marx. If Marxism is modern, fascism is postmodern. And, as per the title of another of Veith’s books on the subject, we are living in Postmodern Times.

In addition to Gene Edward Veith’s insightful works, a further excellent reference is the book The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin (whose study substantially agrees with this paper). A review of Wolin by George Crowder available online is also very much worth reading. Although Crowder disagrees with the conclusion that fascism is implicit in postmodernism, he nevertheless acknowledges that the philosophical premises between the two ideologies are virtually identical. There is a genuine interrelatedness between fascist and postmodernist thought that simply cannot be denied.

For all their earnest championing of the oppressed, and their politically correct sensitivities, postmodernist intellectuals, no doubt without realizing it, are actually resurrecting the ways of thinking that gave us World War II and the Holocaust. Perhaps the postmodernists think their good intentions will mitigate the implications of what they are saying. But intellectuals thought this once before, with terrifying consequences. David Hirsch has warned, “Purveyors of postmodernist ideologies must consider whether it is possible to diminish human beings in theory, without, at the same time, making individual human lives worthless in the real world.” Ideas have consequences.

The Tenets of Postmodernist Ideology and The Political Implications of Postmodernism (Understand that this is a presentation of what postmodernists believe and the corresponding implications of these beliefs):

• Existentialism. Existentialism provides the rationale for contemporary postmodernism. Since everyone creates his or her own meaning, every meaning must be equally valid. Religion becomes merely a private affair, which must not be “imposed” on anyone else. The context of one’s meaning makes no difference, only the personal commitment – to give otherwise meaningless life some subjective degree of meaning. Jean Paul Sarte chose communism; Martin Heidegger chose Nazism; Rudolf Bultmann chose Christianity. Everyone inhabits his or her own private reality. Thus, “What’s true for you may not be true for me.” In today’s youth culture (and video/computer games are a classic example), we find a growing dark side to this existential subjectivism; we see a growing cynicism, pessimism, and dislike for reality as more and more people elect to create their own private realities and “tune out” to the world around them.
• Moral Relativism. Moral values, like all other kinds of meaning, are created by the self. The best example of this existential ethic can be found in those who call themselves “pro-choice” in their advocacy of abortion. To them, it makes no difference what the woman decides, only that she makes an authentic choice (whether or not to have her baby). Whatever she chooses is right – for her. “Pro-choice” advocates are astonishingly disinterested in any objective information that might have a bearing on the morality of abortion or the status of the unborn. Data about fetal development, facts about the despicable ways abortion is performed, philosophical argumentation about the sanctity of life – all such objective evidences from the outside world are meaningless and can have no bearing on the woman’s private choice. As we can see in the “One child per family” policy of forced abortion in China, however, this view of individual choice cannot stand for long in a larger community that accepts the premises of abortion. Ultimately, as we shall see, one’s will must be subsumed into the will of the majority.
• Social Constructivism. Meaning, morality, and truth do not exist objectively; rather, they are constructed by the society. The belief that reality is socially constructed is nothing less than the formula for totalitarianism [as David Horowitz pointed out in “The Queer Fellows,” American Spectator, January 1993, pp. 42-48. For a similar discussion applied to Hollywood values in K.L. Billingsley, The Seductive Image: A Christian Critique of the World of Film (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1989), pp. 112-113)]. Democracy presumes that individuals are free and self-directed. They are capable of governing themselves. But postmodernism holds that individuals are NOT free and in fact are directed by their societies. If the members of a society are passively and wholly controlled by societal forces, then self-governance would be impossible. Furthermore, if reality in fact is socially constructed, then the power of society and those who lead it becomes unlimited. We see this carried out to its logical extreme in Orwell’s 1984, in which the all-powerful state totally shaped the culture and controlled the very thoughts of the masses.
• Cultural Determinism. Individuals are wholly shaped by cultural forces. Language in particular determines what we can think, trapping us in a “prison house of language.” Whereas Christian religion teaches that God constructs reality and creates man in His image to comprehend that reality, to see society as the creator (of reality) is to divinize culture. With these postmodern assumptions, every problem must have a societal solution, and nothing would escape the control of those who direct such a society. “Totalitarian” means that the state controls every sphere of life, which is exactly what postmodernism implicitly assumes in its presuppositions!
• The Rejection of Individual Identity. People exist primarily as members of groups. The phenomenon of American individualism is itself a construction of American culture with its middle-class values of independence and introspection, but it remains an illusion. Identity is primarily collective. Postmodernism minimizes (even subsumes) the individual in favor of the group. This can only result in a collectivist mentality in which the claims of the individual are lost within the demands of the group. An ideology that that believes that personal liberty is an illusion can hardly be expected to uphold, allow, or tolerate human freedom. Subscribing to the former view ultimately must rule out the latter.
• The Rejection of Humanism. Values that emphasize the creativity, autonomy, and priority of human beings are misplaced. There is no universal humanity since every culture constitutes its own reality. Traditional humanistic values are canons of exclusion, oppression, and crimes against the natural environment. Groups must empower themselves to assert their own values and to take their place with other [human as well as non-human] planetary species.
• The Denial of the Transcendent. There are no absolutes. Even if there were, we would have no access to them since we are completely bound to our culture and imprisoned in our language. Moreover, excluding transcendent values places societies beyond constraints of moral limits. There is no God outside, above, or transcendent to society that holds a society accountable. Society is not subject to the moral law; it makes its own moral law.
• Power Reductionism. All institutions, all human relationships, all moral values, and all human creations – from works of art to religious ideologies – are all expressions and masks of the primal will to power. If there are no absolutes, the society can presumably construct any values that it pleases and is itself subject to none. All such issues are only matters of power. Without moral absolutes, power becomes arbitrary.
• The Rejection of Reason. Reason and the impulse to objectify truth are illusory masks for cultural power. Authenticity and fulfillment come from submerging the self into a larger group, releasing one’s natural impulses such as honest emotions and sexuality, cultivating subjectivity, and developing a radical openness to existence by refusing to impose order on one’s life. Since there is no ultimate basis for moral persuasion or rational argument, the side with the most power will win. Government becomes nothing more than the sheer exercise of unlimited power, restrained neither by law nor by reason. One group achieves its own will to power over the others. On the personal level, the rejection of all external absolutes in favor of subjectivity can mean the triumph of irrationalism, the eruption of raw emotion, and the imposition of terror.
• A Revolutionary Critique of the Existing Order. Modern society with its rationalism, order, and unitary view of truth needs to be replaced by a new world order. Scientific knowledge reflects an outdated modernism, though the new electronic technology holds great promise. Segmentation of society into its constituent groups will allow for a true cultural pluralism. The old order must be swept away, to be replaced by a new, as yet undefined, mode of communal existence.

(Note: Although I do not provide citations, and my own ideas are interspersed throughout this paper, much of this three part series emerges directly from the influence of two works by Gene Edward Veith, Jr.: Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, and Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture. At some future time I intend to add page references. Veith’s penetrating analysis of culture needs to be considered as we enter into what are incresingly perilous times.)

See How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 2)

How Postmodernism Leads To Fascism (part 3) is available here.