The Cold War is being talked about in the media because of the situations in Iran and Syria. I am concerned about the Lukewarm War. Most Americans and Britains are asleep while their rights and freedoms have been eroded by financial decisions made either in Congress or in the EU, and by the liberal and indeed, Marxist ideologies which control almost all aspects of society. But, the change has been gradual and most Catholics have not realized, as they have forgotten their history, how tyrants get into power. All it takes is one event.
In the horror of Kristallnacht, German Stormtroppers killed 91 Jews and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues, after the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, by a Polish Jew. The violence had been brewing for years, with stricter controls over the Jewish population of Germany, and only one event was necessary for the Government to kill, destroy, round-up 30,000 Jews and send them to the concentration camps. which were ready for them.
Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, burst out like puss out of a putrid sore. a sore which was created by the Lukewarm War. For years, almost the entire population of Germany had been made into automatons by the systematic destruction of many cultural stays-- classical education, the influence of the Catholic Church, and the family. The hatred of the Jews was not created by the Nazis, but fanned into flames by that party, using old prejudices and legal means to create a sub-class.
The Lukewarmness of the German people, greed, and the mediocrity of many of the ministers of religion created an atmosphere of complicity. How many people turned a blind eye to persecution and genocide? Most.
Even in small towns, such as Zeven, a town of 2,300 people or so, witnessed degradation of the Jews, destruction and death. That ordinary people would collaborate with the SS was the result of years of Lukewarm acceptance of the steps of persecution. Read this chilling description of the Night from the Daily Telegraph, from Wiki:
Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the "fun".
Note the dates here.
| SS-Brigadefuehrer Reinhard Heydrich at his Munich office during his tenure as deputy chief of the Bavarian Political Police (photo at site above). As Himmler's assistant in securing control of the Munich and then the Bavarian police after the Nazi seizure of power, Heydrich assured the successful "synchronization" [Gleichschaltung] of the political police in the other German states during 1933-34. In 1934, he became Chief of the Berlin Gestapo and by 1936, he was given command of the Security Police [political and criminal police forces] throughout the Reich. In 1941, Heydrich oversaw the murderous activities of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) in the Soviet Union, and in keeping with Goering’s instruction to implement a "total solution" to the "Jewish Question," convened and chaired the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, to discuss and coordinate the coming fate of Europe’s Jews. Heydrich was mortally wounded by members of the Czech resistance on May 27, 1942 near Prague and died several days later. |
Such changes happened over several generations, where the True Faith of the German people was exchanged for neo-paganism, financial security, and greed. The phrase itself was a mockery of the horror which occurred. Note:
So, it appears, the term "Kristallnacht" or "Crystal Night" was invented by Nazis to mock Jews on that black November night in 1938. It is, therefore, another example of Nazi perversion. There are numerous other examples of this same tendency in the language of the Nazi perpetrators: Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment") for gassing victims, Euthanasie for a policy of mass murder of retarded or physically handicapped patients, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes you Free) over the entrance to Auschwitz. When the Nazis launched their plan to annihilate the remaining Jews in Poland in the fall of 1943, they called it "Erntefest," or Harvest Festival. While this may have been a code word, as Froma Zeitlin has observed, it had the same grim and terrible irony that is reflected in Kristallnacht as in so many other instances of the perverted uses of language in the Third Reich. Perhaps most cynical of all is the use of the term, "Endloesung der Judenfrage" (Final Solution of the Jewish Question), for what is now known as the Holocaust. Goebbels frequently used such terminology to amuse his audiences (usually other Nazi officials) and to further demoralize his victims.
Gradual hatred, gradual marginalization, systematic change of culture and breakdown of Western Ideals. Sound familiar?
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How do such racial hatred and hysteria control a people who live in a democracy? How does such callousness and violence strike at one group of people without consequences?
You can answer those two questions by looking at the financial and cultural chaos of our present time, both in America and in Europe. Who will be blamed? Those who are not politically correct, those who supposedly use hate speech, those who are perceived as intolerant. The Catholics, the real Catholics.
