News Intelligence Analysis
Truth or Consequences:
Why America’s Open Society Is Collapsing
By Katherine Yurica
November 24, 2009
O Truth, Truth, how inwardly did even then
The marrow of my soul pant after Thee…
Thee Thyself, the Truth,
In whom is no variableness,
Neither shadow of turning…”
The sad sound of a church bell flutters in the air across the American plains. People have awakened to the realization that the United States of America has changed—that something has happened that diminishes us all—that a piece of ourselves has been disconnected from our continental shelf and is being carried on new currents by a strange and powerful wind. At stake is our future, our American dream as well as our vision of the past and the details of today. As to the tomorrow we hope for—that may never come. For mere men have aspired to rewrite the history of our past and to recreate a new present in order to predetermine the length and breadth of the fields beyond those, which we know. If they succeed, America will become a closed society, dancing to the strange sounds of a new voice proclaiming a new vision of total unity. But before we leap into that future, let me examine some of the telltale facts of yesterday and today.
From 1940 through 1957, NBC broadcast a famous radio quiz show that was originally hosted by Ralph Edwards. It was called Truth or Consequences. The idea was to ask contestants a question—usually devised so that no one would get it right—which had to be answered before the buzzer sounded. If the contestant didn’t answer the question correctly, he or she had to “pay the consequences,” which usually involved a somewhat embarrassing stunt. The show became so popular that Hot Springs, New Mexico was renamed Truth or Consequences in 1950. [1]
The significant thing for us is the famous phrase, which goes beyond the game show, and represents an axiom of life. For unless a person, family or nation honors and practices Truth—there will be an inevitable visitation of negative consequences to reap. Thus, this essay is about “Truth or Consequences.” There is no segment of life that goes untouched by the rule, not even, and perhaps especially, politics.
The Right’s War Manual
Recently, Americans have watched and heard false and outrageous allegations that have been directed against President Obama and congressional leaders who are trying to pass a needed revision of America’s healthcare system, which, according to the Census Bureau, left an estimated 45.7 million people without health insurance in 2007. [2]
The frenzy against the new legislation has reached almost unspeakable heights as political opponents whip up their followers with accusations that the White House leadership along with reform minded legislators, are seeking to duplicate the policies of Adolf Hitler.
This political trend reminds me of a handbook that has been republished on the Yurica Report in its entirety and often dubbed, “Paul Weyrich’s Teaching Manual.” It’s all about ‘How to Win” politically—at any cost. The question is whether or not Religious Right operatives are actually following the outlined tactics that call for verbal bombardment and to “maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left.” The manual, written by Eric Heubeck, states:
“We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment’s rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American.” [3]
I listed four principles derived from Heubeck’s manual in my earlier essay titled, “Conquering by Stealth and Deception”:
1. “Falsehoods are not only acceptable, they are a necessity. The corollary is: The masses will accept any lie if it is spoken with vigor, energy and dedication.
2. “It is necessary to be cast under the cloak of ‘goodness’ whereas all opponents and their ideas must be cast as ‘evil.’
3. “Complete destruction of every opponent must be accomplished through unrelenting personal attacks.
4. “The creation of the appearance of overwhelming power and brutality is necessary in order to destroy the will of opponents to launch opposition of any kind.”
One important underlying fact is that the religious and secular right have an enormous built-in advantage over the political left because they have access not only to the media but also to over 100,000 churches and para church organizations scattered throughout the country. Utilizing their huge communication networks, the spokesmen include the usual talk show political word-twisters, starting with Glenn Beck [4] and Rush Limbaugh. [5] (Click on the footnotes for links to videos and published material.)
Rush Limbaugh
However, on August 6, 2009 Rush Limbaugh raised the stakes by not only casting the President of the United States under the cloak of moral evil, but he also utilized bold falsehoods to complete his fabrication. Limbaugh asserted this: “Obama’s got a healthcare logo that’s right out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook.” Then he proceeded to describe the ways Democrats are like Nazis:
“Well, the Nazis were against big business — they hated big business. And of course we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn. They were against cruelty and vivisection of animals, but in the radical sense of devaluing human life, they banned smoking. They were totally against that. They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables, as we all know, and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare.”[6] (Emphasis added)
Once analyzed, Limbaugh’s verbal dance emerges as a performance based upon falsity and half-truths. For example, the Nazis actually developed strong relationships with big business, and had no objection to capitalism. [7] Not only did they abolish trade unions, they instituted forced labor camps. And the Nazis were in fact against abortions for the nation as a whole, closely following the positions taken by the Protestant and Catholic churches of Germany. [8] But the Nazis were also obsessed with “racial purity” and under that banner sought to eliminate the “undesirables,” consisting of the mentally retarded and others who were forcibly neutered and pregnancies forcibly aborted. The implementing of the “racial purity policy” then resulted in the Holocaust with the execution of six million Jews, plus Slavs and other “undesirables.” Limbaugh’s inaccurate statements minimized and in effect denied the Holocaust. But he also misstated the facts on healthcare: Nazis had nothing to do with establishing a nationalized healthcare system—that was instituted in the 1800’s under Bismarck. [9]
Following closely on Limbaugh’s heels, however, another player walked out on the stage: Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin declared on August 7, 2009, that the President’s health care reform plan would create “death panels” consisting of bureaucrats that would ration care to the elderly and chronically ill based on “their level of productivity in society.”
Richard Land
If these voices were not enough, there is yet another faction to be added to the well-known Limbaugh-Beck-and- Palin-group. It is all the more surprising because it consists of a bloc that is usually thought of as more educated and more sophisticated than the others. The group includes Catholic bishops and Protestant officials who signed the 1994 historic agreement that united Evangelicals and Catholics in a joint “political-union” as well as the men who signed the latest, 2009 agreement, titled the Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience. Significantly, the latter two groups include Richard Land, who was not only a participant in the writing of the 1994 declaration, but is also a signatory to the Manhattan Declaration, which I will discuss later in this essay. For now, what may strike us as surprising is that Richard Land also joined in the Third Reich comparison contest.
Consider this: Land, who serves as the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, was named by Time Magazine as one of the Top 25 Evangelicals in America, and is not only a graduate of Princeton University but also holds a doctorate from Oxford. So we can conclude that this is a man who ought to know better than to manipulate people by making false comparisons between Adolf Hitler and President Barack Obama. Yet that is exactly what he has done.
According to the Florida Baptist Witness, Land, in a keynote address presented at the 20th anniversary of the Christian Coalition of Florida, stated that Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress are advocating healthcare reform “that will result in rationing of care, making them guilty of the same ideology that fueled the Nazi Holocaust.” Land said:
“I want to put it to you bluntly. What they are attempting to do in healthcare, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did.”
Moreover, Land was not ashamed to admit that he had bestowed on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the president’s chief healthcare advisor, the “Dr. Josef Mengele Award” for his alleged advocacy “of healthcare rationing.” Land asserted, “We are faced with what I call ‘biological bigotry’ and it is every bit as pernicious, every bit as evil, every bit as destructive as the racial and ethnic bigotry that has plagued us in the past.”
Land warned that Americans are at a “desperate fork in the road. And it’s not a fork that goes left and right; it’s a fork that goes up and down. We will either reclaim our country or we will live to walk the streets of our cities and they’ll have the same names, but we will be strangers in a strange land. And we’ll not recognize it, but only remember the America that was.”
Open Society
Whether he intended it or not, Land’s statements impose an investigative duty upon all those who heard or read them. Because he did not offer proof of his statements, the hearer assumes the statements are true not only at his own peril but also at the peril of our open society. For Land, like everyone else who asks that his statements be taken at face value, voluntarily places himself in the position of either assuming the role of God as truth-teller or as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. However, knowing that only a rare person is likely to investigate the truth or falsity of his statements—the Serpent feels that he has nothing to lose by giving out false information, whereas the God of the Bible, cannot and will not lie under any circumstances since He is the personification of reality and the search for truth is the single most important aspect of those who live for and seek after God.
Therefore, in an open society, if the speaker does not provide proof of his assertions, the burden of investigation rests upon the shoulders of each and every hearer. Unfortunately, sometimes investigating can be arduous. In this case, the issue is whether or not Dr. Land and the talk show hosts are telling the truth about the proposed health care plan and whether they are telling the truth about the democrats who are proposing it. This investigation requires studying not only what the Nazis actually did but also what they believed and if that were not enough, it requires the investigator to make accurate comparisons between the Third Reich and the current American political scene. Our open society does not usually punish errant statements, so the truth may never emerge and that is the primary reason why America’s open society is collapsing: there seems to be no apparent reason to search for truth. And what is worse, the churches and religionists have ceased teaching the need to search for truth—instead they have adopted propagandists’ techniques themselves. For once religion enters the public square of politics, it necessarily leaves Truth and He who is Truth behind.
It may be that man was born with a disease called “mental laziness,” and at this late date in history, it remains largely untreatable because science hasn’t yet discovered what the fall of man in the Garden of Eden showed—that laziness might be the root of all illness. Certainly ignorance kills, but not many realize that knowledge heals. There is, however, still another fly in this ointment.
The Holy Reich
After reading Land’s statements, I began doing research on the topic and discovered an important book: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall. In fact, I recommend not only reading the book but also suggest that it be carefully studied. What Steigmann-Gall reveals is that contrary to popular belief, the Nazis incorporated Christian beliefs on certain issues into their agenda and the Christians in Germany not only supported Nazism, they became a crucial part of its political structure. The churches—that is the believers— both Protestants as well as many Catholics—became a core foundation of the movement.
I should point out reviewers praised The Holy Reich. For instance, Helmut Walser Smith wrote: “The Holy Reich is a brilliant and provocative work that will recast the whole debate on Christianity and Nazism. We have come to realize that Christianity embraced Nazism more than we used to believe...Richard Steigmann-Gall shows us that the embrace was more than reciprocated.”
The Holy Reich is invaluable, particularly in order to understand how much of the Nazi program—including its horrendous anti-Semitism—was rooted in the teachings of German Protestant Christianity.
Hatred for the Jews ran like a disease in Europe and it existed for centuries. Just as Spinoza (born in 1632) and Voltaire (b. 1694) were vehement anti-Semites, Martin Luther, (1483-1546) the great Reformation leader who founded the Protestant churches, inexplicably was one too, though born a century and a half before Spinoza and over two centuries before Voltaire. Luther wrote one of the most notorious and appalling anti-Semitic documents ever penned. He literally called for the deaths of Jews—using unforgettable metaphors justifying the extermination of the Jewish people in his 1543 tract titled, “On the Jews and Their Lies.” In other words, the founder of the Protestant movement, a man whom I have admired, also penned one of the worst diatribes against the Jewish people ever written. No wonder then that outright hatred for Jewish people was taught in the churches, spread by ministers, and was accepted by Protestants in Germany, and as Steigmann-Gall reveals, was a partnership that helped bring the Nazi party to power.
In fact, as Steigmann-Gall shows with actual quotes from the Reich’s leader—far from being “anti-Christian,” Hitler regarded the teachings of Christ as direct inspiration for the German fascism advanced by the party! Hitler, in fact, needed to unify both Evangelicals and Catholics and blend them together for the purpose of forming a powerful political movement. As history shows, he succeeded. However, must we not also ask if he was the progenitor of today’s Evangelical-Catholic political union?
The Signed Agreements
The major question facing all proponents of open society now, is whether or not the churches are once again supporting a closed society that seeks to impose their philosophy upon the nation and the peoples of the world. Consider just three significant agreements signed by proponents: The first was an historic world wide agreement led by Billy Graham that established Evangelical legitimacy in politics; the second was an historic agreement uniting Evangelicals and Catholics in America. While the most recent third agreement not only continues the Evangelical-Catholic marriage, this time it pledges to disobey laws the signatories only anticipate will be written.
Beginning then with the historic first, Billy Graham led Evangelicals from 105 nations in the signing of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974. That covenant introduced a new understanding of the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:19-20. In the Introduction, the signers pledged this:
“[W]e are determined …to obey Christ’s commission to proclaim [the Gospel] to all mankind and to make disciples of every nation.” (Emphasis added.)
First, in the usual text of Matthew 28:19 it states, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them…” In the usual interpretation of the Great Commission, however, the word “nation” is interpreted to mean a tribe or a group of people, since following the word “nations,” in the various versions of the Bible, the verse goes on to say, “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Now one cannot baptize a nation state. However, while the meaning of the word “nation” was questioned and debated at the time, the final statement adopted was “to make disciples of every nation,” which necessarily includes nation states. This leads to a new political concept, which can be seen in Section 5 of the document, where, for the first time ever—Evangelical Christians—signed the statement acknowledging that socio-political involvement is a component of ones’ “Christian duty.” Thus the document discreetly created and affirmed the theological grounds for establishing the “Church” as the worldwide dominant power that is to function as a dominatrix over all the nations. It marked a major theological change among Evangelicals.
Then came the second historic event, which focused solely on U.S congregations: it was the signing in 1994 of a document titled, Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium. It consists of an agreement between Protestant and Catholic signatories to work together politically in order to impose certain religious based political beliefs upon the American public, including legal status for the unborn, rejection of birth control, religion in schools, and the instilling of character traits, plus national policies of a laissez faire (free) market place, unity over pluralism, anti-welfare programs, and a strong foreign policy reflecting military defense for “democracy.” One hundred fifty eight Roman Catholic Bishops and religious right fundamentalists signed the contract, including Richard Land and Chuck Colson who were participants and Pat Robertson, who endorsed it.
The third historic agreement was announced on November 20, 2009, and titled the “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.” It too represents a joint Evangelical and Catholic political union. Like its predecessor, it was signed by 148 signatories that included Catholic bishops as well as Protestant pastors and other well known Evangelical leaders in America (such as Richard Land, James Dobson, Jonathan Falwell, Chuck Colson, and Marvin Olasky), but unlike the preceding documents, it consists of a pledge to disobey or refuse to comply with any law or edict “purporting to force us to participate in abortions, embryo…research, assisted suicide, euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent…” The document then alludes to Nazi practices:
“A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are discardable. As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began with abortion has now metastasized…The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called ‘therapeutic cloning.’ This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues. At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and ‘voluntary’ euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons. Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben (‘life unworthy of life’) were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-twentieth century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of ‘liberty,’ ‘autonomy,’ and ‘choice.’”
Then in a sentence that is the antithesis of what it says, the authors declare:
“Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for mother and child alike.”
Nevertheless, their refusal to support a universal medical plan that would pay the costs and treatments of the “problem pregnancies” cannot by any imaginative leap be considered “love and care for mother and child alike.” Therein lies the dichotomy that divides those who actually love from those who simply claim they are loving!
Regardless of the political motives behind the union of Evangelicals and Catholics, it is not the first time in history such a union was formed. It is an historic fact that a similar movement occurred in Nazi Germany. Steigmann-Gall explained it this way: “Like German nationalists before them, the Nazis saw the confessional divide in Germany as the strongest impediment to true national unity.” It was therefore, “an attempt to create a new syncretism” in effect, “a new national religion that would bind Catholic and Protestant in Germany in elective affinity.” However, as Steigmann-Gall pointed out, “Like previous generations of nationalists, their attempt was based not on doctrine but on a value system.” [10]
Steigmann-Gall wrote:
“More than just a useful slogan, positive Christianity was a religious system that not only tied racial anti-Semitism and the Nazi social ethic to Christianity, but suggested that both these aspects of the movement’s ideology flowed from a particular understanding of Christianity…. Leading Nazis appropriated Christ, not just as a socialist or anti-Semite, but as the original socialist and anti-Semite. In various ways, the Nazis examined here staked a discursive claim to represent the ‘true’ political manifestation of Christianity. They all held that Christianity was a central aspect of their movement, shaped its direction, or in some cases even helped explain Nazism.” [11]
Significantly, Steigmann-Gall pointed out, “none of the Nazis who proclaimed a positive attitude toward Christianity in public revealed themselves as anti-Christian in private.” [12]
Propaganda Techniques
At this point we need to study some of the mechanisms that advertisers and specialists use to sway people toward liking or disliking a product or a political position.
There are several passages from my plenary address given at a New York conference at the CUNY in 2005 that examined the agenda of the religious far right, which I would like to quote here and below. Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s Minister for Armaments, said at his trial at Nuremberg:
“Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.” As a result, Speer concluded, there arose in Germany a “new type” of individual, ‘the uncritical recipient of orders.’”
The people to fear then, are not only the skilled propagandists who capture people’s minds, but perhaps the greatest threat is from the masses who refuse to exercise their critical faculties and fail to search for the truth. Inherent laziness is a disease of modern man but it may also represent a failure of our educational system. The master propagandist must know which psychological keys should be played in order to motivate them. Hitler acknowledged: “To be a leader means to be able to move the masses.” One hates to admit that our great open society may collapse solely because of the inherent intellectual laziness of the masses, who have no idea how to discover truth for themselves! As I stated in my plenary address:
“… Aldous Huxley pointed out in Brave New World Revisited that Hitler’s aim was first to move the masses and then, having pried them loose from their traditional loyalties and moralities, to impose upon them … a new authoritarian order of his own devising.
“Nevertheless in order to manipulate them, Hitler knew that one must find the key that would sidestep the critical guardian to their subconscious minds. It was his genius to perceive that of all the tremendous revolutions in history, none were propelled and driven by scientific teachings. Truth seemed incapable of gaining power over the masses.
“Hitler also believed something else was historically at the bottom of great human upheavals. And he described it as some kind of ‘devotion, which inspires them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them into action.’ The issue then became, how best to utilize it? He saw that the passions—the zeal as well as the hatreds, frustrations and paranoia of the masses must be manipulated by flattery and passion. Partisan loyalty must be encouraged. Enemies must be identified and attacked. The masses are always convinced that ‘right is on the side of the active aggressor.’ This active aggressor role refers to both wars launched by nations and to verbal attacks launched by ones’ operatives. He said, in the ranks of ‘supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.’”
“Hitler, himself, wrote his formula for gaining political power in Mein Kampf. He had quickly learned the value of what he called ‘spiritual terror.’ He said it consisted of unleashing ‘...a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down...This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses,’ he declared ‘and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty...’”
Today another man has emerged as perhaps one of the world’s greatest propagandists. Frank Luntz is the man I have called “the propagandist of the century.” He helped Newt Gingrich with his “Contract With America” campaign. And he has worked consistently with Republican candidates ever since then. Luntz shows Republicans how to win important campaigns by using words that trigger the right emotions. He redefines words! He says, “Words with emotion can change destiny.” On a TV show … the word “logging” was thrown at him as a pop quiz: He responded immediately: “Healthy Forests!” If you want to see the Luntz propaganda techniques, see the Playbook for the Bush administration’s game plan for the 2006 elections, which is posted on this web site.
Luntz also admitted his outright admiration and love of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, presumably for its propaganda techniques, which he undoubtedly absorbed. Here is a brief exchange in an interview with David Brancaccio on the Bill Moyers Now show:
BRANCACCIO: “Well, you know what Orwell writes, he says, ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
LUNTZ: “And I get that. And you know what? Language, it’s just like fire. It can either heat your home or it can burn it down. In the hands of someone like a Ronald Reagan, it’s used to illustrate a philosophy and a principle. In the hands of less decent politicians, it is used to obscure or even lie.”
If we include Paul Weyrich’s Manual, which adopts unremitting personal attacks on every political opponent, we may be sadly observing the end of our open society and our democratic way of life. With these facts in mind, it is not entirely unthinkable to suggest that present day political professionals may be willing to utilize any means in order to gain political power and in fact, may have also mined the literature of the Third Reich.
However, not everyone believes that the religious right is a threat to America’s democracy. The N.Y. Times published a fourteen-page essay by David Kirkpatrick in October of 2007 that declared the religious right is dead! (It was titled, “The Evangelical Crack-up.”) But I think a careful examination will show that the religious right is not dead, nor does it sleep, and in fact its political machinations are growing to a new intensity of what could be called “verbal terrorism.” It appears the Right seeks (by projecting their own drives onto sane Americans) to raise Hitler from the dead and use the story of the Third Reich to paint their opposition covered with Swastikas when they themselves have had a history of adopting these tactics. That is, the religious right has either found a way to utilize the tools and duplicate the successes of the propaganda techniques of National Socialism or they are reinventing them—out of political expediency. Either way, America is in trouble and it is best not to ignore lessons from history--lest we doom ourselves to repeat them!
Just before I started writing this essay, I watched a documentary about Joseph Goebbels titled, “The Goebbels Experiment,” (2005) and in it, an astonishing quote was read from his diaries:
“October 16, 1928. What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius, capable of uprooting out-moded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My party is my church and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do His will and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery—that is my Gospel!”
Choosing Issues
Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich was originally written as a dissertation for his doctorate, his work is actually a comparative analysis of the religious and political beliefs of leading Nazis and their connection to either Protestantism or to Catholicism.
A German Lutheran bishop proclaimed in 1931, “Many members of the Protestant Church live with their complete thought and feeling in the National Socialist movement...” [13] And after Hitler’s appointment, Paul Althaus, a prominent protestant theologian asserted the following issues which both the church and the Nazis advocated. While they were for “single marriage,” they were against:
Contraception
Abortion
Liberal capitalism
Marxist spirit in economy and society
Pacifist effeminacy ethos
The destruction of penal law
The surrender of the death penalty as the order of God. [14]
In addition, Protestant women’s groups actively supported Nazi legislation that increased penalties for the following:
Abortion
Pornography
Prostitution
Homosexuality [15]
Does this sound familiar to you? The Nazi movement also embraced “anti-Marxism, and anti-liberalism” and Hitler maintained that the movement’s goal was to “translate the ideals of Christ into deeds.”
Battle for the Mind
Significantly, the Religious Right movement in America adopted amazingly similar issues. According to Tim LaHaye’s Battle for the Mind (1980) any office holder that supports these issues “should be removed from office”:
Abortion-on-demand
Equal Rights Amendment
Decriminalization of prostitution
Approval of homosexuality and lesbianism
Leniency on pornography
Child’s rights over parents’ rights
Infanticide and Euthanasia
Legalizing of marijuana or drugs
Gambling
National weakness through disarmament
Religious Humanism [16]
Let me make it very clear—these issues, whether or not they are cloaked in religious belief, do not make one a Nazi, but they do expose how seemingly simple issues can create a powerful, effective and emotional propagandistic tool, which history shows was also utilized by the Nazis. One simply has to ask oneself about the appropriateness of using a “moral” or religious means to justify the ends—because—make no mistake—the end is political power!
My concern is that the propaganda techniques of Goebbels are in full force today and are enunciated with the same objective: to build a holy, pure, righteous Christian Nation again. Of course they avoid the Jewish question! But look at the similarities—instead of naming “Jews”—the enemy to destroy is the Humanist who might just be a Jew!
As Tim LaHaye put it:
“No humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office in America—United States senator, congressman, cabinet member, State Department employee, or any other position that requires him to think in the best interest of America. He is a socialist one-worlder first, an American second.” [17]
“Anyone familiar with humanist writers is struck by their consistent hostility toward Americanism, capitalism, and free enterprise. But at the same time, they extol the virtues and benefits of socialism, without acknowledging its historical failures.” [18]
“They often become obsessed with the idea that they render a service for humanity by stamping out Christianity, forcing its exclusion from public education and blocking every biblical moral principle they can.”[19]
“There is no greater evidence of the humanists' obsession with sexual license than the fact that the leaders of the sexual revolution of the ‘70s were overwhelmingly humanists.” [20]
“The humanists want to control the lives and destinies of the world’s peoples, and they intend their takeover by the twenty-first century.” [21]
“[T]he humanists of the past 100 years have been working increasingly for mind control, by assuming command of our government, education, commerce, the media, and in some cases, liberal churches.” [22]
If we don’t confront this ideology with powerful arguments and fact-centered research—Richard Land’s prophecy may come true—only it will be the sane, good and decent people of the country who will be lost forever when freedom is curtailed in the name of God and morality!
Paranoia Strikes Deep
I think it appropriate to conclude this essay with an excerpt of a short, but brilliant critique titled “Paranoia Strikes Deep” written by Paul Krugman for the New York Times, dated November 9, 2009:
“Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau, with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque—and it was also ominous.
“The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership—in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.
“…. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing—but that rump remains being enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.
“The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here—and it’s very bad for America.”
Notes:
[1] See the article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_or-Consequences
[2] For a breakdown of this figure, see FactCheck.org at http://www.factcheck.org/2009/06/the-real-uninsured/
[3] Titled, “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement” by Eric Heubeck. The complete document may be found here: https://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/FreeCongressEssay.html
A synopsis may be found here: https://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/WeyrichManual.html#anchor474909
And Katherine Yurica’s article and analysis on the “Manual” may be found here:
https://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheSwiftAdvanceOfaPlannedCoup.htm
[4] See the following data and videos on Glen Beck: http://mediamatters.org/research/200910130061
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXKoql-VnQ
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrQ5LORstIQ
[5] “Limbaugh compares Obama’s new health care symbol to the Nazi swastika,” from the Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2009 at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/08/rush-limbaugh-compares-new-health-care-logo-to-nazi-swastika.html
[6] Ibid.
[7] Arthur
Schweitzer, Big Business in the Third Reich, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1964 at page 288. And see the article
“Economy of Nazi Germany” at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
[8] Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., PhD. “National Health Care: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945” at: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/national-health-care-medicine-in-germany-1918-1945
[9] Ibid.
[10] Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Cambridge University Press, New York, paperback 2004.
[11] Ibid. p. 48.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid. p. 48
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid. p. 204.
[16] Tim LaHaye, Battle for the Mind, Fleming H. Revell Co. Old Tappan, New Jersey, 1980, at pp. 137-138, and 194.
[17] Ibid. at p. 78.
[18] Ibid. at p. 73.
[19] Ibid. at p. 30.
[20] Ibid. at pp. 66-67
[21] Ibid. at p. 95
[22] Ibid. at p. 100
Katherine Yurica was educated at East Los Angeles College, U.S.C. and the USC school of law. She worked as a consultant for Los Angeles County and as a news correspondent for Christianity Today plus as a freelance investigative reporter. She is the author of three books. She is also the publisher of the Yurica Report.
Katherine recorded and transcribed 1,300 pages of Pat Robertson’s television show, The 700 Club covering several years in the mid 1980’s. In 1987 she conducted a study in response to informal inquiries from the staff of the Subcommittee on Oversight of the House Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representives, which was investigating whether television and radio ministries were violating their tax-exempt status by conducting grass roots political appeals, endorsing candidates, and making political expenditures as defined under Section 527 of the IRS code. The Subcommittee on Oversight published Katherine’s study in Federal Tax Rules Applicable to Tax-Exempt Organizations Involving Television Ministries on October 6, 1987, Serial 100-43. (Published in 1988.)
Send a letter to the editor about this Article and be sure to include the title or the url. See other essays and articles:
Copyright © 2009 Yurica Report. All rights reserved.