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In a speech that he gave at Columbia University, Umberto Eco spelled out fourteen features that he considered were typical of “Eternal Fascism” (which he also calls Ur-Fascism), and I have shown that all fourteen features were present in Islam.[1] Charles Watson,[2] and G.-H. Bousquet[3] refer to Islam as a totalitarian system tout court, while Bertrand Russell[4], Jules Monnerot[5], and Czeslaw Milosz[6] compare Islam to various aspects of communism, and finally, there are those who note the resemblance of Islam to Nazism, among others, Carl Jung[7]. Jung was asked in the late 1930s in an interview if he had any views on what was likely to be the next step in religious development. He replied, referring to the rise of Nazism in Germany, “We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam [emphasis added]. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.”
Karl Barth[8] also reflected on the threat of Hitler, and his similarities to Muhammad:
Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill—with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam [emphasis in original], its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet.
A prayer for the ruling National Socialism and for its further expansion and increase simply cannot be uttered—unless one wishes to strike his confession in the face and make nonsense of his prayer. But there is one prayer with regard to the ruling National Socialism which may be uttered and ought to be uttered. It may and has to be prayed, in all earnestness, by Christians in Germany and throughout the whole world. It is the prayer which was uttered right into the nineteenth century, according to the old Basel Liturgy: “Cast down the bulwarks of the false prophet Muhammad!”…And there we have it—we stand today, all Europe, and the whole Christian Church in Europe, once again in danger of the Turks [emphasis in original]. And this time they have already taken Vienna and Prague as well. “Thy will be done!” “If I perish then I perish!” They really knew that at the time of the old Turkish menace. They knew it better, knew it with more resignation to the will of God and less querulousness than we today do.
Thus Carl Jung, and Karl Barth[9], but also Maxime Rodinson[10], and Manfred Halpern[11], all recognize Islam’s similarities to fascism or National Socialism (the latter two terms often used synonymously); and, last but not least, Adolf Hitler.[12]
Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote a memoir of his World War II experiences while serving a 20-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg tribunal. Speer’s narrative includes this discussion which captures Hitler’s racist views of Arabs on the one hand, and his effusive praise for Islam on the other:
Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. [emphasis added] Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire. Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking, ‘You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?’”
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[1] Umberto Eco, The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, pp.12-15, and my article “Islam, the Middle East, and Fascism”, in Virgins? What Virgins? And Other Essays, Amherst (NY): Prometheus Books, 2010, pp.255-288.
[2] The Muslim World, January 1938 (Vol. 28 Issue 1 Page 1-107), p.6.
[3] G.-H.Bousquet [1900-1978]. L’Ethique sexuelle de l’Islam. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. 1990 [Ist edn.1966], p.10.
[4] Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1920 pp.5,29,114.
[5] Jules Monnerot. Sociologie du Communisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1949. [English translation by Jane Degras and Richard Rees. Sociology and Psychology of Communism, Boston: Beacon Press, 1953]
[6] Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind. Translated from the Polish by Jane Zielonko. New York:Vintage Books, 1959, pp.51-77.
[7] Carl Jung. The Collected Works Volume 18, The Symbolic Life, 1939, Princeton, Princeton University Press p. 281.
[8] Karl Barth. The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day, New York: Scribner, 1939, pp. 43; 64-65.
[9] I owe the references for Jung and Barth to Dr. Andrew Bostom.
[10] Maxime Rodinson. Islam Resurgent? Le Monde, December, 6-8, 1978, quoted in Janet Afary and Kevin B.Anderson. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, p.233.
[11] Manfred Halpern. Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963, quoted at Martin Kramer’s Wesbsite: http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/2006_09_20.htm, Accessed October, 22, 2007.
[12]Albert Speer. Inside the Third Reich. 1970, New York: The Macmillan Company, p. 96.
Satan is the master of disguises, the first instance being as a serpent in the Garden of Eden. He is also a liar who deceives the gullible.
Good article, thanks!
Hitler admired both Islam and the Catholic Church, not their teachings but their methods.
By the time Hitler and the Nazis came along even they had forgotten just how violent and brutal Christianity actually was and is in its pure, serious, and consistent, medieval form. Christianity, like Islam, is always weaponized for the brutality of theocracy. But unlike Islam, Christianity by the start of the 20th century had been eviscerated by the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, and the Age of Enlightenment.
Had Islam undergone those historical periods it too would have been tamed, leashed, and eviscerated by the ascendancy and dominance of reason over faith.
Hitler made the common mistake of thinking modern, eviscerated, Christianity is true Christianity, it isn’t. True, serious, pure, and consistent Christianity is the Christianity of the Dark Ages, it is medieval Christianity. And medieval Christianity is just as brutal and violent as medieval Islam. Medieval Islam is the Islam we still have today.
Thank God you don’t have a PhD….in anything.
That way we can take your ever present crackpot bigoted historical analysis of Christianity and throw it on the ash heap of history. Because your opinions basically mean nothing.
Look where your version reason over faith has gotten this country.
Atheism is rising, leftism is on the march, censorship is the order of the day, we are at war…..again, the border is wide open, child and drug trafficking are rampant, the Bidens continue their China/Ukraine grift, Conservatives are being arrested as political prisoners, the judicial system is a two tiered one, the Constitution is under perpetual attack, and the federal government is corrupted almost beyond repair because of Uniparty politics.
But hey, as long as you can write your lies about Christianity, free from being arrested and jailed because of your atheism, all is well, right.
Objectivism isn’t simply and only atheism. You are wrongly equating atheism with evil and monotheism with the good. Those are simply non-sequiturs. It doesn’t follow that because a man believes in God they will be good by a rational definition of the good. And it doesn’t follow that if a man is an atheist they will also be a Marxist. You can be an atheist and not be a Marxist, you could be an Objectivist that believes in freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
John List, a Christian and a Lutheran, killed his family because of, “his perception that his family members were straying from their religious faith, as his motivations for the murders. He believed that killing them would assure their souls a place in Heaven, where he hoped to eventually join them.” Christians have committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Christ such as the Massacre At Beziers in 1209, the murder and dismemberment of the pagan Hypatia.
The crucial issue when it comes to religion, any religion, is how RATIONAL is the interpretation of that religion in the mind of the individual believer? John List was NOT biologically, genetically, brain-damaged, insane when he murdered his family. His interpretation of his religion led him to the conviction that murdering his family was virtue, was good, just like a Muslim Jihadist interprets his religion.
Islam believes in an Almighty Creator does that make Islam peaceful and loving? No. But now you’ll say the Muslim God is really Satan and the Christian God is all good, those that believe in the Christian God would never do evil in his name — but the fact is they have.
Men can be good or evil according to their loyalty to the facts of reality. When men abandon reason, they abandon reality.
Actually Objectivism, in your world, is the essence of atheism, because that is really all you ever talk about.
You use your “religion” as a cudgel to build yourself up by belittling everyone else. I basically know nothing of Objectivism except for how you portray it, which is mostly religious bigotry.
You use one-offs in history to imply that is how all any group is that you want to ridicule.
Fortunately for the rest of us. Objectivism has no real history so it’s very easy for you to tell us how great it is, except there is no foundation for you to prove how great it is. Just your warped version of history to show us what it isn’t.
Objectivism is a fraudulent philosophy built on shifting sands that can molded to the moment. Today, it’s religion. Tomorrow it will be how Western Civilization would be nothing without the Greeks. The next day it will be the religious wars in Europe.
The only think you ever do is hold up Objectivism as a solution against the straw man of Christianity and Judaism.
The day you figure out how to push Objectivism on its own without tying it to your religious bigotry will be the day you lose your raison d’etre.
I am not sure why you constantly avoid the study of Christianity at its source, the bible. You speak of “true Christianity” but you never make a comparison of biblical Christianity and the professing church, with its somewhat checkered history. The reformation was actually seeking a return to biblical Christianity after centuries of the development of the traditions of men in the church. Catholicism, to this day, has never fully reformed. Even Protestantism has had additional reforms since the time of Luther, Calvin, and the rest of the early reformers.
“True, serious, pure, and consistent Christianity is the Christianity of the Dark Ages, it is medieval Christianity. And medieval Christianity is just as brutal and violent as medieval Islam.” The first sentence is completely false and shows a distain for actual history as well as the bible. Medieval Christianity was not even close to Islam in doctrine and action. You seem to think that the politics of the time, in relation to the distinct national positions of the various European powers, played no role in the history.
Until you take the time to actually study the New Testament, as well as the actual history of the Middle Ages, you will continue to make false statements about Christianity and its history in the west. You might want to take a look at a summary of the history of the time to start your education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
The Nazis were neo-Christians and neo-Pagans, and they were neither, ultimately it didn’t matter to them because mysticism, supernaturalism, and mythology are based on fantasy, and a supernatural fantasy can be changed as needed. Syncretism, the melding of different religions into a new religion, has always been a part of religion.
What was crucial for Hitler and the Nazis to endure and thrive was the METHOD of religion — faith and self-sacrifice.
“Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three philosophical fundamentals in the Western mind, in metaphysics the worship of the supernatural, in epistemology the reliance on faith, and in ethics the reverence for self-sacrifice….
Given their commitment to the method of faith (and their tendency to imitate the Catholic Church), it is not astonishing that some Nazis went all the way on this issue. A tendency never given official ideology yet fairly prominent in the movement was voiced in a demand made by several of its leading figures (although Hitler himself regarded it as impractical until the Nazis won the war): the demand that Nazism itself be turned into a full-fledged religion. These voices urged a state religion supplanting the older creeds, with its own symbols, its own rituals, and its own zealots avid to convert Christians into fanatic Hitler-believers, as, once, ancient missionaries had converted pagans into fanatic Christians. “Adolf Hitler,” exclaimed one such believer (the Nazi Minister of Church Affairs), “is the true Holy Ghost!”
The Nazis did not survive long enough to complete this development. To the end, they could not decide whether to retain Christianity, construing Nazism merely as its latest, truest version (“positive Christianity,” this wing often called it) — or to concoct a distinctively Nazi creed out of a hodge-podge of elements drawn from pagan Teutonic mythology and romanticist metaphysics. In either case, however, whether as advanced as a form of or successor to Christianity, what Nazism did unfailingly demand of its followers was the essence of the religious mentality: an attitude of awed, submissive, faithful adoration. “We believe on this earth solely in Adolf Hitler….” intoned Dr. Robert Ley to a reverent audience of 15,000 Hitler Youths. “We believe that God has sent us Adolf Hitler.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels”
Uh-Oh. School’s in session. Prof. THX has just proffered up yet another treatise (spam) by his favorite fake historian and Christian Basher Leotard Peikoff’s Ominous Parallels.
Once again Peek-a-Boo’s crackpot theory about Christianity “preparing the ground for modern totalitarianism” is dragged out for the millionth time.
It’s THX’s version of the Big Lie. Sorry T. This big lie, however, doesn’t seem to be catching on, no matter how often you repeat it.
But he does have a website. Well, doesn’t everyone except for you?
I guess Peikee has a PhD. Funny how you don’t like the credentialed class unless they agree with you. But he is thrice divorced
“Hey I wonder what the teacher’s gonna look like this year. I brought my pencil. Gimme somethin’ to write on” Van Halen — “Hot For Teacher”
Ayn Rand didn’t have a PhD.. Galileo had no university degree. Neither did Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Archimedes, Galen.
Michael Faraday, Benjamin Franklin, Ramanujan, Thomas Edison, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Leonardo Da Vinci, had no university degrees.
A genius is a genius, and a moron is a moron, with or without a university degree.
You are absolutely correct. A moron is a moron. And you don’t have any accomplishments worth noting.
Rand didn’t have PhD and it shows. How’s that “radical” revolution of hers coming along, with you as it’s chief spokesman
So once again, you mention John List as the supreme example of a Lutheran crank who murdered his family, in a lame attempt to link all Lutherans with this act. One guy. I would bet if you talked to the average Lutheran he/she wouldn’t know or care who List is. But that is always your M.O.
The whole guilt by association screed works both ways, considering that atheism has the blood of 100,000,000 on it’s hands in the 20th C. alone. Hitler and his SS slaughtered millions of Jews, Slavs, Catholics and Lutherans. They would have sent you to the oven as well. The whole attempt to tie Lutheranism and Christianity in general to Nazism has been done so much by you is possibly the lamest of lame attempts to tie them all to Nazism, which is your safe space. Is it any wonder you couldn’t get a PhD?
Are you really saying I am responsible for something that happened in 1209?
The objectivist/atheist religion will eventually have to answer for the 100,000,000 deaths you keep trying sweep under the rug. You are a fraud. You build yourself up by tearing everyone else down.
No one is ever going to take you seriously as an intellectual, or as a person. Reading a slew of books all day and repeating your lies basically means nothing.
I don’t think he’s read “a slew of books.” He’s read Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. That seems to be “it.” I wrote a perspective on Christianity and the Holocaust in 1994 (“Resurrecting the Third Reich: Are We Ready for America’s Modern Fascism?” (1994, Huntington House, Lafayette, LA). In it, I did quote Peikoff briefly. I now consider that somewhat of an embarrassment, but hope it does not undermine the whole.
Oh yeh, Richard Terrell, NOT.
Richard… who?
Islam is far more evil than nazism and communism combined.
Muslims have killed far more people and destroyed far more civilizations than nazism and communism combined. Muslims have established brutal dictatorships far more than nazism and communism combined.
Islam is the ideology of savages who are hell bent on world domination. It’s way of survival is based on invading and plundering advanced civilizations.
Nothing short of a full blown war has stopped mulims from their destructive invasions. The history is the undeniable proof and evidence of that.
WWIII will be the ultimate war against the islamic savages and the civilizations united against them.
We have been warned about False Prophets and there are very many out there to be careful of the Pope is total phony as authentic as a three dollar Bill
I think we should take the teachings of Jesus as the measure of Christianity and not the medieval church or any sect of Christianity, since there are many wrong interpretations of what Jesus said. In the case of Islam, the surviving documents can also be taken as saying what Islam is, using the Prophet and his sayings and deeds as the measure of that religion. I would think that the authentic sayings of Jesus are better than the ones of the Prophet in the scriptures. Insofar if there is a totalitarian religion, it would seem to be the latter.
Hilter, China joe biden illegitimate regeme et al and public enemy number one CAIR Is Hsmas all wanted and desire to destroy the Catholic Church and America. However the only one to defeated communist Islamic jihadist and the American DNC and whom never can be hurt by these demonic and malodorous enemies the Mary the mother of God soon her favorite president of Donald Trump’s return will corroborate thas MAGA and HOOK EM all the live long day God bless y’all
Good article with references which are important for many who are unfamiliar to see and check out.
I wonder when the discussion will begin about forming something new for those unwilling to live under totalitarianism whether couched in religion or Marx or pretending to be a “democratic’ system (“2020 was the best election ever”).
We will need somewhere to be, security, sustenance.
Its good to vent but it wont protect the children.
(Snarking responses asking what I’m doing about it are irrelevant).
Richard… who?
Speaking with a young German recently I mentioned that I believe islam is a Fascist Religious Cult to which he jumped up and said you cant say that, so I said I believe the Vatican Church is the anti Christ in drag and he seemed to be happy with that.
So I said islam is very violent and right away he replies that the Vatican has a history of violence also, so I said the Vatican has a history of violence and then I mentioned to him that he didn’t chime in with islam being also violent.
This is the one way alley young Europeans, and North Americans, think today, defend a religion that despises their existence and denigrate the value system you were born into.
There can be no stranger Alliance than those Of The Left and those who follow the teaching of islam..