Who Do You Blame For The Holocaust ?
Bruce Wilson printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Tue Jul 13, 2010 at 08:19:07 PM EST
Who was really responsible for the Holocaust ? It's a question people have been asking since before Milton Meyer's 1950's landmark book, featuring post-WW2 interviews with average Nazi Party members, They Thought They Were Free, hit the press.

Over a half-century later, there's a huge amount of free-floating fear in American society about something called "The New World Order." With the current American president claiming the power to assassinate American citizens, concern about government encroachment on human rights is quite reasonable but conspiracy theory, which usually contains aspects of truth, is easily weaponized.

Which brings us to Patrice O'Neal. In an impassioned speech on PRISONPLANET.TV, an adjunct of Alex Jones Infowars media empire, O'Neal asks,          

"Who do you blame for, like, the Holocaust ? Do you blame Hitler, who essentially was a little crazy man with a mustache ? Or do you blame the thousands and thousands of soldiers who, at the whim of his command, would kill their fellow citizens, kill their fellow people ?"
Back in December of 2006 I wrote the story, How Average Humans Can Be Conditioned To Carry Out Acts Of Mass Political Violence, so I'm familiar with the subject area but I have to say, Patrice O'Neal's question misses the most obvious culprit.

So, let's play "Who killed Anne Frank." This is an excerpt from my story Confronting The Storm Troopers Of Christ:

Who killed Anne Frank ?

That was not a casual question for Doris Bergen, author of "Twisted Cross"; it was an exercise Bergen designed for teachers in a course she was leading, for schoolteachers, that was called "Teaching The Diary Of Anne Frank", to raise their awareness of the "chain of complicity" that led to the Holocaust...

Bergen wrote out, on cards she passed out one by one to the teachers, "identities" of different people who each played a part in the death of Anne Frank - Hitler, Himmler, the person who snatched a scrap of bread from Anne Frank's hand in the concentration camp, the Dutch couple who turned Frank's family in to the Nazis, and so on. There were about 15 teachers, 15 cards. The assignment was that the teachers, based on their given "identity" written out on their card, should line up in order based on the relative responsibility each bore for Anne Frank's death, from greatest responsibility to least responsibility.

As Bergen describes the results, in Steve Martin's documentary "Theologians Under Hitler", "My expectation was that the person who held the card that said 'Adolf Hitler' would immediately march to the front of the line and stay there and the others would line themselves up behind that person. That's not what happened. Instead the teacher who had a card that said 'a German pastor who preached hatred of Jews, from the pulpit, in the 20s and 30s', that person marched immediately to the front of the line and refused to cede that position. No matter who came along, the person with the 'Hitler' card, the person with the 'SS' card... that woman said 'this person is the most responsible, this person who used the power of the pulpit, who used the authority of the Christian Church, of Christian tradition, to teach that it was not only acceptable but desirable to hate fellow human beings, to hate Jews, to fear Jews, to fight against them to attack them - this person is as responsible and more responsible than anyone else.' ".
Even Hitler...even Hitler. I have come to agree.

Allow me tell you who I am, to have these concerns.

In May 2008 I posted an audio excerpt, from a late 2005 sermon by Texas evangelist John Hagee. In the excerpt, Hagee claimed that Adolf Hitler was a "hunter" sent by God to chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine ("the Holy Land") which according to Hagee was the only home God ever intended the Jewish people to have.

A few months earlier, John McCain had appeared in a nationally televised press conference with Hagee in which the presidential candidate and the Texas preacher endorsed each other. My audio excerpt went viral and got broadcast on TV and radio around the world, and within 48 hours McCain had renounced Hagee's political endorsement. Then, Hagee renounced McCain's endorsement. McCain had courted conservative evangelicals, who didn't trust him, for, literally, years. It was a fiasco for the McCain campaign.

So this is relevant how ?

Well, John Hagee claims Jewish bankers rule the financial world. So does Alex Jones, who claims that Rothschild and Rockefeller banker are the Trillionaires of the World. Adolf Hitler made similar claims, that Jews ruled world finance but those claims were anorexic in the 1930's and by now they're positively skeletal. Still, there likely is a world financial elite. Consider:  

As a recent study by Swiss physicists has revealed, 10 financial entities have controlling interest in about 80% of stocks in 48 countries worldwide, but none of the Jewish banking firms traditionally cited in anti-Semitic literature, such as Rothschild financial entities, are on on the list. Seven are American firms and the rest are based in the UK, France, and Switzerland ( PDF of Science News article.)




Display:
I'm glad to see your relatively diplomatic approach to debunking grand conspiracy claims, acknowledging that they contain elements of truth.  Too many "conspiracy theory" debunkers rely just on contemptuous dismissal.

Given how widespread grand conspiracy ideology is these days, we need to get serious about debunking it in ways that have a chance of reaching at least some of the people who believe in it.

Unfortunately, over the past decade or so, belief in the "Illuminati" is now getting popularized outside its natural base of religious right wingers.  This, to me, is a very worrisome new development.  To me the spread of "Illuminati" claims is obviously dangerous, given their vilification of various religious minorities (e.g. Pagans, occultists, atheists, and/or Satanists) in precisely the same way that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion vilified Jews.  It frustrates me that even most "conspiracy theory debunkers" don't recognize the danger and in many cases aren't even aware of the roots of "Illuminati" claims in right wing propaganda and in fundamentalist/evangelical apocalyptic literature.


by Diane Vera on Wed Jul 14, 2010 at 08:42:18 AM EST



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