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And what did the Catholic church at least used to do with people denouncing their faith?

Ok but that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact they targeted Catholics.

Nonsense.

The GOP has gay members yet it is 100% accurate to say the GOP does not believe gay people should have equal rights with straight people, so even though the GOP is targeting gay people they still have gay members.

Straw man.

Catholics being part of the Nazi party doesn’t have the significance you think it does.

Lie: 20% Catholics in the party is significantly more than the one or two alibi open homosexuals in the GOP.

As n aside why are you calling them anything other than the Nazi party? I get NSDAP was the name they preferred but why grant Nazis respect?

Diversion.

All the numbers and historical circumstances I layed out are easily verifiable facts. Your compulsive urge to cling to a false narrative in the presence of irrefutible evidence and attempt to dance around that by picking out fragments of what I said and attempting to ridicule everything by extension is preposterous. And everybody with the reading comprehension of a high schooler should see right through it. I’m out of your bad faith (or ignorant) excuse for a conversation.

Well, they also didn’t during his lifetime, did they? And that while being aware of the Holocaust: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-find-evidence-pope-pius-xii-ignored-reports-holocaust-180974795/

Maybe from a revisionist perspective. ~20% of NSDAP members were Catholic. Keep in mind that the NSDAP was founded in deeply Catholic Bavaria. ~400 Catholic priests from Germany ended up in concentration camps, out of 20.000. It was no attack on the Catholic church, but on individuals within the church who publicly opposed the Nazis. That’s political persecution, not religious persecution. Any claim to the contrary is historical revisionism.

95% of the German population was either Catholic or Protestant. And so was the NSDAP and their voter base. It tilted more to Protestants, but Catholics were not excluded. The Reichskonkordat benefitted the Protestant and Catholic churches equally.

This is more of a reply to everybody and not just your comment specifically. Where do you people think the antisemitism in 1930s Germany came from? Hitler and the NSDAP came around and turned “everybody” into anti-Semites? No. The Christian antisemitism was already there and the NSDAP tapped into it. Especially, but not limited to, from the Protestant side: Martin Luther was a raging anti-Semite. Pogroms had been taking place all over Europe for hundreds of years before the NSDAP arrived. The NSDAP “only” brought it to the next level. The entire anti-Semite NSDAP movement was deeply rooted in Christianity. If any Christian individual was persecuted by the Nazi regime it was for political opposition, not for their Christianity. If a fringe Christian sect was persecuted by the Nazis, they were persecuted by other flavors of Christianity! That the Nazis (who were by and large Christians) persecuted Christians for being Christians is complete revisionist nonsense!

Remember the past or you are condemned to repeat it!

That’s simply not true. They didn’t target Catholics, they targeted parts of the Catholic church (the institution) for political opposition. That’s a very different thing.

And are to this day not even considered a religious group, but a sect monitored by the intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz) in Germany. In Germany in the 1930s, ~95% of the population were either Catholic or Protestant; other Christian denominations only accounted for .5% of the population. Don’t nitpick in the .5% when talking about Christianity in Nazi Germany. Red herring much …

Indeed.

Oh that’s great news, maybe you should go ahead and tell the families of the 2500 priests who were incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp …

… for opposimg the Nazis. They were incarcerated for political opposition, not for being Christians. The entire persecution of the Jews only worked because of the cooperation of the Christian churches with the Nazi state. There was no central birth register at the time. It was the church books that determined how (non-) jewish you were. Especially the Catholic church facilitated the fleeing of Nazis to Argentia and other places at the end of the war. Lots of the Christian churches actively supported the Nazis, many did not oppose them, and the few that did were persecuted for that; not for being Christian. This is all very well documented.

They will be so happy to know that they weren’t discriminated against for their religion. I’m sure those long term plans from the Nazi party to de-christianize Germany were just Nuremberg propaganda.

This is plain and utter nonsense. That article is pure garbage, misrepresenting what actually happened. Never did the Nazis (as a whole/party line) want to replace Christianity. They wanted to replace the existing denominations with one state run church, with a Nazi-flavored Christianity, but still Christianity. They created new versions of the Bible where they adjusted some parts to better reflect their ideoligy. When they failed to establish that, they intensified their cooperation with the existing churches. Again, this is all very well documented. These top secret documents don’t really provide any new information, unless, like that “news article” you lie about their content and misrepresent “replacing existing churches with a state church” as “replacing Christianity”. What a heap of garbage. You should adjust your bullshit filter and read some proper history books about Nazi Germany and the involvement of the Christian churches. There was just a tiny fraction of Nazis with Himmler on the top who would have liked Christianity gone, who were neither representative of the party line nor in a position to realize that. Representing anything they said as “the Nazis wanted to …” is disingenuous at best.

Still doesn’t make sense to me. The way I’m reading what you’ve written is that you’re insinuating that peoples’ Christianity played a role in them being discriminated by Hitler and his cronies, which was never the case. Peoples’ beliefs played no role in political persecution and hence I don’t see the point in emphasizing Christianity here. He also had no trouble discriminating against Atheist, agnostic, Pagan, … people if they were politically opposed.

Then what’s the point of saying “Christian German” instead of just “people”?

No Christian in Nazi Germany was discriminated for being Christian. Hitler referred to himself as Christian, had a catholic upbringing and was never excommunicated, not even retroactively to this day. The two big Christian denominations received very favorable laws (see Reichskonkordat) which they are very fond of to this day. The antisemitism in Nazi Germany was an aggravation of centuries old Christian antisemitism which could be found all over Europe. All claims that any Christian was discriminated by the Nazis for being Christian is patently absurd. It was a deeply Christian movement with some occult/pagan elements (see Himmler & Co).

Thanks.

Thanks for the kind feedback. I’m happy I made sense. I don’t always do ;-)

This article was posted elsewhere, so I’ll just copy my comment from there over here:

I generally enjoy listening to/reading Sam Harris and always go away from his pieces with the feeling of having learned something new, some fact or perspective, however small. It’s kind of the same here, but, I think his arguments are, at least in part, deeply flawed here.

I find the distinction between victims of terror and collateral damage problematic. Under the line what he’s saying here, is that their quantities are not comparable because they are of very different nature. I can’t agree with that. Dead people are dead people no matter how they died. They had lives, family, friends, … To them it makes no difference if they died because of terror or as collateral damage. Thinking back to the WTC attack and the wars that followed Sam Harris’ notion suggests, that the >3.000 victims of terrorism could be worse than the >1.000.000 collateral in the following wars, because of their quality and the quantity not being comparable. In my book, that’s plain nonsense.

I tend to agree with his stance on “us” (western world/democracies) having a set of higher moral standards than Hamas and others we would consider failed states or dictatorships. Though, he and I share a compatible set of morals in our upbringing. I am personally opposed to absolute morals as they are usually provided by religious texts. But in the spirit of democracy I acknowledge that a majority could decide and settle on a set of morals incompatible with mine. I could argue all I want and never claim to be objectively correct. But, more importantly, especially when looking at Gaza and Hamas, as he points out himself, our moral compass wasn’t that different in sometimes very recent history. “Our” progress on the moral front was made in times of peace (at least at home) and economic stability and success. If “we” deny a group of people (I’m deliberately not saying society here) the conditions we had to achieve what we consider our superior morals, we can’t be surprised if they don’t share them. And I would go a step further and argue, that we are not in a morally justifiable position to criticize them for their “lack of morals”.

Sam Harris isn’t really saying much contrary to what I’m saying here. He’s just conveniently leaving out the angles I’m bringing up. Knowing lots of what he’s said/written and being familiar with his eloquence and rhetorics, I’m tempted to assume it is very deliberate. Hence I’m pretty disappointed in him for this particular piece.

Obviously we have only testimonies of that from officers and volunteers and confirmation from Israeli authorities,

No, we have the testimony of one IDF member who promoted Palestinian genocide in the past. Everybody else who was on the scene and gave a statement could not confirm that one testimony lie. All the newspapers back-paddled on that story; maybe you should too.

What is there to benefit from faking such document? Is it not obvious that Hamas targeted civilians and children?

Yes. Children are civilians. The repeated claim is that children were not targeted as part of the populace but specifically. In the eyes of most people that would be even more sinister. And Israel needs Hamas and the Palestinians who supported them to look as bad as possible to distract from their retaliation.

Do I really need to spell it out like that?

You quite obviously do not understand how propaganda and dehumanization works.

That’s a child’s way of seeing things.

That’s rich coming from somebody who just said what you said.

Wait so if I understand you correctly: […]

You don’t.

even if these documents are genuine and prove that Hamas explicitly wanted to target children, it’s still a big media conspiracy to make Hamas look worse than they are?

No. But I don’t see that from those pictures. They targeted a residential area, which happened to contain a school (big surprise). Like with the “beheaded babies”, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. From the provided information I’m not convinced that Hamas targeted children specifically.

Targeting civilians is already bad. The way I suggest they spin a story is by setting the focus on children, babies, women, … to appeal to emotions rather than just reporting facts. And I think they do that to dehumanize Hamas and by extension Palestinians to justify the retaliatory atrocities of an even bigger magnitude in the eyes of the world.

It’s really not that hard of a concept to grasp … remember the babies taken out of the incubators in Iraq?

Have you ever heard of propaganda and dehumanization? Have you also noticed how Israel has already killed at least three times more civilians in the past few days?

Hamas targeted residential district …

Hamas target school in … to kill children!!!

Spot the difference. What feels more like honest reporting and why would one choose the other option?

Fake evidence to spin a narrative??? We have all seen the result of these plans

We have have seen the result of some plan. I’m questioning whether it is 1) the plan that was depicted here and 2) even if it was whether the reporting on its content is accurate.

I like that you also moved to goal posts […]

Not really.

[…] since you clearly couldn’t stomach your own shit take on how the plans must be false flag plants, […]

Um, no. You do not seem to understand what false flag means, and nowhere did I suggest any false flag operation.

[…] but my favorite part was when you felt able to say that even if they were genuine, that SIMPLY REPORTING IT would be an intelligence attack on Hamas/palestine.

I did not say anything even remotely like that.

Like are you fucking kidding me??? Shall they only report on things that look good for Hamas?

They should report stuff they have fact checked and not transform ‘the general populace’ into ‘babies, kids, women, cripples, …’. The entire point/concept of terror is hitting soft targets. Reporting only on the ‘very weak’ caters to emotions, not transport of information. And why would they do that …

Cut the dull act; the answer is literally in my previous comment:

Look, devices have serial numbers. Manufacturers keep track of where devices are sold to.