How
New Age Were the Nazis?
What Eric
Kurlander's Hitler's Monsters Offers
to the Civilizational Debate
Nazis
play a major role in the culture wars. Anyone arguing for the value of Western
Civilization, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Enlightenment, and the
heritage of the Ancient Greeks will eventually be confronted with the Nazis. If
cultural relativism is wrong, if it is wrong to say that Islam or Communism or
New Age are not all equally valuable options on the cultural menu, then what
about the Nazis? After all, the Nazis were Christians, weren't they? Wasn't the
Holocaust informed by Christian theology? How dare Western Christians criticize
jihad or communism's purges? You have the worst crime in history on your team's
scorecard.
About
that claim that the Nazis were the worst. The Nazis were compulsive record
keepers. Hollywood directors and Soviet cameramen participated in the
liberation of concentration camps. Their films have been required viewing for
generations of students. We lack comparable documentation for others' crimes.
When I inform students of the cost of the establishment of communism or the advance
of jihad, they indicate to me that they have never been exposed to these facts
before. Historian Stephen Kotkin's conservative estimate is that communism
cost 65 million lives, while historian David Satter estimates that "the greatest
catastrophe in human history," killed 100 million. Bill Warner estimates
that the death toll from jihad is 270 million. His figure is controversial, but
supported with citations. Any other honest estimate will be similarly overwhelmingly
vast. Tamerlane, the fourteenth century "Sword of Islam," is
estimated to have killed five percent of the entire population of the world. There
are two hundred million untouchables, or Dalits in India, and, even as India
modernizes, their victimization continues. Hinduism mandates that Dalits must
suffer to pay for their sins in their past lives. On November 17, 2018, The New York Times ran an account of a Dalit scalped by higher
caste Hindus. Yes, worldviews besides Nazism have resulted in mass graves. We
are less aware of those mass graves. So we assume that Nazism's mass graves are
the worst.
If
the Nazis did not carry out their crimes as integral and predictable
expressions of Western Civilization and Christian theology, what did ground
them? What were their guiding beliefs and principles? The extent to which
Nazism was informed by neo-paganism is made clear in Eric Kurlander's 2017 book
Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History
of the Third Reich, published by Yale University Press. Hitler's Monsters is a dense, ambitious,
scholarly tome. There are over one hundred pages of footnotes and bibliography.
Kurlander acknowledges that previous authors have documented Nazism's
involvement with New Age ideas and practices, and he draws on these authors'
work. Kurlander also acknowledges that without the perfect storm of historical
circumstances exploited by Hitler, including Germany's defeat in WW I, the
punitive Versailles Treaty, and the Depression, Nazism probably never would
have risen to power. And Kurlander notes that New Age beliefs don't cause a
believer to become a Nazi. But Kurlander is unafraid to state the importance of
his research. "No mass political movement drew as consciously or
consistently as the Nazis on … occultism
and … pagan, New Age, and Eastern religions, folklore, mythology …
Without understanding this relationship between Nazism and the supernatural,
one cannot fully understand the history of the Third Reich … Hitler's Monsters is the first book to
address this rich, fascinating, often extraordinary relationship from the
party's origins to the end of the Second World War … the Third Reich would have
been highly improbable without a widespread penchant for supernatural
thinking."
You
can get a sense of what the Nazis believed by walking through any given New Age
store. On such a visit, you will encounter astrology, reincarnation, hypnotism,
Chinese massage, and yoga how-to books, next to homeopathic flower "cures,"
vegetarian recipes, and magical gardening manuals advising you to harvest your
crops in tune with the movement of celestial bodies. There will be alternative
histories of the universe and planet Earth, including books about the lost city
of Atlantis. For teens, there will be lurid witch, vampire and werewolf novels.
Allegedly
"non-fiction" books will inform you of your secret, spiritual Tibetan
or Indian ancestry or past lives. The Bhagavad
Gita, a Hindu classic, will be in an honored place. There will be books by
or about Madame Blavatsky and Nostradamus, as well as Zoroastrian, Zen, Shinto,
and Buddhist scriptures. Friendly pamphlets will extol the virtues of Islam in
contrast to degenerate, oppressive Christianity. There will be a "serious,"
"scholarly" tome insisting that witches were descendants of a pagan
nature religion, and that the witch trials were really the Catholic Inquisition's
efforts to wipe out paganism.
Gurus
will promise that Enlightenment concepts like objective reality and the
scientific method are mere dogma created and exercised by lesser minds. These
gurus will insist that you are somebody special, with a special destiny, and
you need not be hidebound by conventional reality, science, or religion. Only
lowly people believe in objective reality. You can use the power of your will
to create any reality you want. Gravity is for lesser mortals. You can
levitate.
Continuing
your stroll through the New Age shop, you will encounter invitations to worship
Satan. Satan is misrepresented by those stuffy, Christian prudes. Why should
you, as special as you are, obey a God who orders you to rein in your
appetites? Satan will strengthen your wildest urges. You'll find materials on
ley lines, special magical places exuding special geographic magic known only
to a privileged few. You'll find out how to use ancient runes in divination,
and how to dowse, that is, how to find water, lost objects, and magical
energies using only a forked stick.
Now
imagine yourself a top Nazi, a Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels or Hess. You'd buy every
single one of these products. Himmler "carried around with him" the
Norse Edda, the Hindu Vedas and Bhagavad Gita, and the speeches of Buddha. Nazis
participated in orgies aboard a yacht named after "The Indian goddess of
love" the "Aryan Schakti [Shakti]." Nazi yoga. Nazi Buddha. Yes.
The Nazis were that nuts. And they were that New Age.
An
eclectic mélange of New Age beliefs and practices were in the roots that vomited
up Nazism's toxic tree. These beliefs and practices were harnessed to support
Nazism's most consequential, and most evil, acts. These beliefs and practices
inspired daily life in concentration camps, human medical experimentation that
violated every tenet of ethics and reason, weapons research and development, and
military decisions. New Age beliefs and practices influenced Nazism's bloody
demise. Any understanding of Nazism that does not include New Age's influence
on Nazism is incomplete. Any understanding of New Age that does not take into
consideration its influence on Nazism is incomplete.
Not
all Nazis were interested in New Age beliefs, and not all Nazis were interested
in all expressions of New Age. Some might prefer astrology; others homeopathy.
On May 10, 1941, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, known as "The Yogi from
Egypt," after consulting an astrologer and inspired by a supernatural
dream, flew to Scotland in an attempt to make peace with the British. He was
captured and imprisoned. Less than a month later, beginning on June 4, 1941, Reinhard
Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, launched the "Hess
Action." Heydrich wanted to purge the occult from the Nazi party as well
as the general public. Heydrich's timing of the Hess Action indicates how
seriously he took the issue. Heydrich initiated the Hess Action two weeks
before Germany's ultimately disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union. As a
result of Heydrich's action, some astrologers ended up in concentration camps.
Some of those same practitioners were later released and went to work for top
Nazis. Curt Munch was released from Sachsenhausen in order that he could use
his psychic powers to locate Mussolini.
Hitler
himself, Kurlander argues, didn't want to restrain the occult because it was
meaningless; he wanted to limit and control common people's access to the
occult because of its power. Goebbels exemplified this power-centric approach
to the occult. Goebbels used Nostradamus for propaganda purposes.
Decades
before Hitler arrived on the historical scene, many German seekers had partially
or completely rejected Judeo-Christian cosmology, morality and worldview. They
also rejected Enlightenment values and the scientific method's insistence on
objective facts. Many chose to find meaning and structure in pre-Christian paganism,
Eastern religions, and new gurus like Madame Blavatsky. The Brothers Grimm,
Wagner's folklore-inspired operas, Nietzsche's philosophy, and Herder's writing
on nationalism are partial expressions of, and, in turn, inspirations for,
these trends. Kurlander writes, "Folklore, mythology, and neo-paganism
rushed to fill an important gap in the German spiritual landscape, helping to
occupy 'the transcendental realm of mystic life' vacated by Judeo-Christian
traditions … Folklore and mythology facilitated fascism." "By the end
of the nineteenth century, folklore, mythology, and Ario-Germanic religiosity
was etched into the consciousness of millions of ordinary Germans." In
this search for new paradigms, universal values were rejected in favor of
moralities based on identity, place, and race. "I am a German, therefore I
should or I can …" might be the preface to any moral statement.
The
senseless mass destruction and humiliating defeat of WW I, and rapid
modernization and upheaval, helped the previous century's turn to nationalism, magic,
myth, and folklore take center stage. Nazis saw a ripe opportunity to jettison
the past, adopt a scorched earth mentality, and impose their new paradigm. In
his 1930 book The Myth of the Twentieth
Century, Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg declared the "collapse" of all
that had come before and a "new dawn" and a "new faith" a
"new light" a "new mission:" "blood and blood, race
and race, folk and folk." "That is the task of our century; to create
a new human type out of a new view of life."
Social
Darwinism and biological racism were interwoven with New Age spiritual beliefs.
Not only would old, impure ideas be jettisoned. Human beings deemed racially unfit
to participate in superior souls' upward thrust to perfection also had to be
eliminated. "'One could insist that the race to which one belonged had
primarily to do with one's degree of spiritual maturity' … the lost
civilization of Atlantis was considered to be the prehistoric source of divine
(possibly extraterrestrial) racial and spiritual perfection," writes
Kurlander, quoting another author about Theosophy, a New Age belief system that
predated, and influenced, Nazism's rise. "Cosmic eugenics" blessed
the destruction of that "'which is unworthy to take part in the ascent of
humanity … Humanity has risen by throwing out the lower forms in order to
purify itself … dark skin is due to demonic interference' … Luciferian
remnants' must be elevated 'as a wise guiding force left behind for the
evolution of mankind in general' … Nazi religious theorists would make nearly
identical arguments," Kurlander says, quoting another New Age author who
also wrote decades before Nazism's rise. Other New Age thinkers, again, decades
before Nazism, advocated selective breeding, and the elimination of inferior
races and the handicapped. This culling was supported by a New Age theory that
humanity was the result of breeding between angels and animals. Nordic people
contained a higher percentage of angel. Indeed, New Age thinkers (and Friedrich
Nietzsche) adopted a Hindu caste system term, chandala, for
"untouchable" to talk about "lower races."
A
weakening of the influence of Judeo-Christian morality and a return to pagan
norms appeared to be foreseen by at least one concerned observer. German poet Heinrich
Heine, who was born Jewish but converted to Lutheranism, wrote in 1834 that "When
once the taming talisman, the Cross, breaks in two, the savagery of the old
fighters, the senseless Berserker fury of which the Northern poets sing … will
gush up anew … the old stone god will rise from the silent ruins and … Thor,
with his giant's hammer, will at last spring up and shatter to bits the Gothic
cathedrals."
Hermann
Rauschning, a former Nazi, diagnosed Hitler's success. "Every German has
one foot in Atlantis[and one in Tibet], where he seeks a better
fatherland." Pre-Nazi New Age societies and thinkers sometimes voiced
their awareness that Hitler was mining and benefitting from the paths they had
paved. The Thule Society, or Study Group for Germanic Antiquity, was founded in
1918. Its purpose was an unsavory mix of biological racism and flakey,
folkloric concepts of German origins. The Thule Society symbol was a swastika,
an ancient, pagan symbol often found in Hindu and Buddhist art. Thule Society member and fan of Nordic folklore and "the wisdom of
India," Dietrich Eckart, argued that the "racially superior
'Indo-European people' had been corrupted by the 'Jewish desert spirit'
embedded in mainstream Christianity." Eckhart said on his deathbed that "Hitler
will dance, but it is I who will call the tune." In other words, Eckart
and other New Age Germans saw Hitler as fulfilling their goals. Germany's occult magazines
supported Hitler, even before he took power. They lent whatever legitimacy they
had to his seizure of power by predicting a "'world turning'" "'Third
Reich'" lead by "'a single prophet who preserved the German essence
against all odds.'"
Top
Nazis were not only not believing Christians, they were anti-Christian and
determined to extirpate Christianity from their Reich. As Hitler Youth leader
Baldur von Schirach said, "the destruction of Christianity was explicitly
recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement." Alfred Rosenberg dreamed of
a day when "Nordic sagas and fairy tales will take the place of the Old
Testament stories of pimps and cattle dealers." Nazism's anti-Christian,
pagan worldview was obvious to contemporaries. Christopher Dawson, "the
greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century,"
warned in 1935 that Nazism could "develop a mythology and ethic" that
may "take the place of Christian theology and Christian ethics." On
January 13, 2002, Joe Sharkey, writing in The
New York Times, reported on
then-recently released documents outlining "How Hitler's Forces Planned to Destroy German
Christianity."
In
addition to rejecting, and hoping to overturn, Christianity, Nazis also
rejected the Enlightenment ideal of objective reality. Konrad Heiden, a historian of Nazism, said that Nazism incorporated a
hodgepodge of political theories. Only one feature was consistent throughout,
Heiden claimed. Nazism rejected objectivity and causality; it rejected "a
world in which causal links work themselves out independently of transcendent
forces." That very essence of Nazism can be seen in this quote from
Hitler. "We do not judge by … purely scientific standards … We judge by
the spiritual energy which a people is capable of putting forth … I intend to
set up a thousand year Reich and anyone who supports me in battle is a fellow
fighter for a unique spiritual – I would almost say divine – creation. At the
decisive moment the decisive factor is not the ratio of strength but the
spiritual force employed." Nazism, in the words of author Peter S. Fisher,
"erased the boundary between fantasy and reality." Nazis wanted to
replace Darwinian evolution, Einstein's theories and Genesis with World Ice
theory, that described Aryans as "gods come directly from Heaven to
Earth."
Rudolf Olden was an anti-Nazi
journalist. In 1932, he published Prophets
in the German Crisis: The Miraculous or the Enchanted. Olden insisted that
Nazism's rise was linked to "a German preoccupation with the supernatural,
exacerbated by war, defeat, and depression," as Kurlander summarizes
Olden's work. Politics, according to Olden, is "'an eternal struggle
between rationality and the miraculous … when rationality comes under
pressure" it becomes "mute, it is eaten by doubt, it emigrates or is
restricted … the predominance of miraculous forces' had marginalized 'everyone
that wants to think rationally.'"
Hitler
read kinky author Ernst Schertel's 1923 book, Magic: History, Theory, Practice. It is
one of the most underlined books in Hitler's personal library. Kurlander quotes Schertel as
expressing ideas very similar to the record-breaking, international New Age
bestseller, The Secret, published by
Rhonda Byrne in 2006. Both Schertel
and Byrne insist that thoughts can alter physical reality. In his 1913 book Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud called
this notion "omnipotence of thought." Freud described it as
foundational to animism. Animism is the religious belief system that all primitive
humans probably believed in at one time, before the advent of the Big Five,
Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Animism posits that each
thing has its own spirit, and that humans can change material reality through
relationships with those spirits.
Schertel mocks the concept of
objective reality, and insists that invisible realities supersede visible ones.
Kurlander quotes Schertel: "It would be 'senseless to counterpoise the
empirical perceptions as real opposite the fictive conceptions of the demonic'
Schertel explained, 'for the empirical world is also fictive, resting on an imaginative
synthetic foundation.' What materialists deemed 'empirical reality' Schertel
suggested, was 'in its roots demonic – or magic in nature.'" Schertel
called objective reality a "jugglery of fantasy." After escaping the
bonds of reality, the adept could "intervene in this structure, that is to
say change the world according to our will … to create reality where no reality
exists."
To claim the power that awaits the
adept, he must reject objective reality and invest in the omnipotence of
thought, what Schertel called "an "accumulation of potential and
kinetic world energies … the first stardust" aided by Satan himself. Hitler underlined passages about Satan
in Schertel's book. "Satan is the fertilizing, destroying-constructing
warrior … He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth
to a new world." Another underlined passage: "Horror always lurks at
the bottom of the magic world and everything holy is always mixed with
horror." Schertel
described objective reality as a prison that makes it harder for practitioners
to access their special powers. This formula, again, one highlighted by the
reader Adolf Hitler, constitutes a rejection of the Enlightenment, for which
objective reality was supreme, and Judeo-Christian morality. As described by
Freud, this rejection of objective reality and insistence on the primacy of
omnipotence of thought constitutes a return, as the Nazis themselves hoped for,
to a pre-Christian, pre-Enlightenment, pagan worldview.
Contemporary
New Agers, and Christophobic polemicists, purposely
misrepresent the history of the European Witch Craze. As New Agers
tell it, "During the Middle Ages, the misogynist Catholic Inquisition
murdered nine million women because they still practiced a pre-Christian, pagan
religion. The witch craze only ended when enlightened atheists were able to
convince Catholic clergy that it was irrational." One can find variations
of this so-called history in respected media. These include Barbara Ehrenreich
and Deirdre English's classic feminist manifesto, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, Michael Shermer's The Moral Arc, and the Canadian documentary The Burning Times. Problem: not a word
of this formula is accurate. Modern scholars point out that the witch craze did
not take place in the Middle Ages, but rather in the Early Modern Period, perhaps
40,000 died, and the witch craze was a neighbor-on-neighbor atrocity. Women
often accused other women. At least two Catholic priests, Friedrich Spee and
Alonso Salazar de Frias, played roles in ending the witch craze. And Salazar,
a.k.a. "The Witches Advocate," worked for – wait for it – The Spanish
Inquisition.
Where
did the false narrative emerge? One avid disseminator of the false witch craze
narrative was SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. Himmler founded a "Special Task Force on
Witches" whose job it was to collect, through purchase or theft, archival
material about witches. The SS Witch Division accumulated nearly thirty
thousand documents. Himmler wanted to research how the "dominant
Aryan-Germanic religion of Nature" could "be defeated by the decadent
Jewish-Christian religion." Witches were the "guardians of the German
faith" and "natural healers" of German sagas. For New Agers, and
for Nazis, "Witches
became earth mothers, practitioners of an ancient Indo-Germanic religion that the
Catholic Church … the true monster … sought to eradicate." "My
ancestors were witches and I am a heretic," declared SS Obersturmfuhrer
Otto Rahn. Himmler commissioned "'witch novels in the form of
a trilogy.'" Himmler, just like pagans today, cultivated a sense of
victimization around the witch craze. "The 'martyred and torn apart bodies
of our mothers and girls burned to ashes in the witch trials'" were called
upon to justify the mass murder of Jews. Because, of course, Jews controlled
the Catholic Church, and Christianity sprang from Judaism.
Vampires, spoken of as if real,
were associated, in propaganda, with "Polish danger." Czechs, Serbs,
and Jews were also demonized using vampire imagery. "Slavic vampirism
became a metaphor for racial degeneration and political disintegration.
Racially degenerate Slavic and Jewish vampires met their match in the heroic
Aryan." One group victimized by the Nazis
that is rarely mentioned are Serbs, and yet the USHMM statistics indicate that Nazis
murdered more Serbs than handicapped people, Gypsies, aka Roma, and Jehovah's
Witnesses, other victim groups more frequently mentioned. The mass murder of
Serbs and other Slavs, like the mass murder of Jews, was facilitated by
propaganda depicting Slavs as vampires. In contrast to Slavic vampires, Nazis
encouraged each other to regard themselves as werewolves. Over Goebbels' Radio
Werwolf (sic), listeners could sing along to lyrics encouraging them to bite
and eat their enemies. Some lyrics: "I bite. I eat. I am not tame."
All aspects of Nazism, including
the most evil, were somehow interwoven with some aspects of New Age thinking. "The
Third Reich embraced a range of pagan, esoteric, and Indo-Aryan religious
doctrines that buttressed its racial, political and ideological goals." Leading
parapsychologist Hans Bender, whose work involved researching poltergeists,
joined the Nazi Party to advance his own career and "knowingly
countenanced" evil medical experimentation "to preserve the funding
and independence" of his own research. He continued his career as a famous
parapsychologist after the war and died peacefully in 1991 at age 84.
Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Dachau
concentration camps all had biodynamic gardens. These were based "'on a
holistic view of the farm or garden as an integrated organism comprising soil,
plants, animals, and various cosmic forces, with sowing and harvesting
conducted according to astrological principles.'" The gardeners rejected
fertilizer and pesticides, relying instead on "'homeopathic preparations
meant to channel the etheric and astral energies of the Earth and other
celestial bodies.'" "Berlin's athletic fields for the Summer Olympics
were treated biodynamically."
New Age ideas were consulted in the
most pressing military decisions. "Even during the most desperate moments
of the war, Nazi science was as preoccupied with faith-based fantasies of
'absolute conceptional boundlessness' as it was with practical military
technologies... one can only speculate as to how much more effective German
armaments production might have been without this Nazi proclivity for
miraculous thinking." The Berlin Pendulum Institute attempted to locate
enemy battleships by suspending a pendulum over toy battleships located on a
large map of the Atlantic. This methodology returns to primitive magic as
described by Sir James Frazer in The
Golden Bough. Frazer described homeopathic magic, the primitive belief that
something that looks like something else has magical power over that something
else. This same idea is behind voodoo dolls. Fantastic hopes for, and promises
of miracle weapons encouraged Germans to continue fighting long after the war
was lost.
Kurlander writes, "The Holocaust
was only possible in its scope and severity because of the elision of
biopolitical and circumstantial factors with volkisch-esoteric, fantastical, even magical conceptions of Jewish
monstrosity." "Pagan and occultist" images were used to demonize
Jews. "This conception of the Jews as simultaneously a biological threat
to the racial body politic and vampiric monsters operating outside the bounds
of humanity, invited, in turn, all the more radical and totalizing solutions to
the Jewish question."
In the final days, Himmler was
inseparable from his astrologer, consulting him on all aspects of the war.
Goebbels looked to Nostradamus to find reassuring prophecies. Hitler owned an
original copy of the prelude to Wagner's Gotterdammerung,
or the Twilight of the Gods, and its nihilistic
mythology helped to inform the Nazis' behavior. On March 19, 1945, a bit over a
month before his suicide, Hitler issued his so-called Nero Decree, urging the
destruction of Germany's infrastructure. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann,
and many other top Nazis and thousands of ordinary Germans committed suicide. Nazis
embraced their coming end as a reenactment of Wagnerian and other nihilistic,
mythological themes.
We cannot turn back the clock and rescue
the Nazis' millions of victims. We owe it to those innocent victims to diagnose
the pathology that murdered them. We
say, "Never again." The question becomes, "Never again
what?" What exactly is the perfect storm that gave birth to Nazism? How to
recognize it on the horizon? How to defuse it?
Many attribute Nazism's death toll
to Christianity. The United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a highly influential institution. It reports
that anti-Semitism has plagued the world for two thousand years. This
inaccurate two-thousand-year limit identifies anti-Semitism, and, by extension,
Nazism, with Christianity. Dabru Emet is a September 10, 2000 statement signed
by over 220 Jewish rabbis and scholars. Dabru Emet states, "Without the
long history of Christian anti-Judaism and Christian violence against Jews,
Nazi ideology could not have taken hold nor could it have been carried
out." Many more such statements could be cited.
Books linking Christianity and
Nazism have produced great success for authors like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
James Carroll, and John Cornwell. A database search shows that, just in the
two-year period after its publication, Hitler's
Pope was the subject of over six hundred articles in mainstream and
scholarly presses. These articles weren't just reviews, but calls for thorough
self-examination among Christians. A similar database search turns up merely
thirty articles about Hitler's Monsters
in the year and a half since its publication.
Hitler's Pope became a New York Times
bestseller. Today's Amazon rating for Hitler's
Monsters is 78,231—nowhere near
bestseller status. After the publication of Cornwell's book in 1999, James
Carroll's Constantine's Sword in
2001, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's A
Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its
Unfulfilled Duty of Repair in 2002, Christians worldwide engaged in
protracted and profound efforts at self-examination, apologies, and amends.
I am unaware of any such exercise
among New Age followers. New Agers shamelessly promote some of the very same
falsehoods disseminated by Nazis. There has been no ethical or intellectual
housecleaning around the fake witch craze narrative, the rejection of objective
reality and that rejection's impact on ethics, or the New Age premise that
conventional morality is oppressive and only for little people. Further,
supremacy is alive and well among Neo-Pagans. "Racists Are
Threatening to Take Over Paganism," Vice reported
on April 2, 2018. "Faith, Family, and Folk," the motto of modern
Odinists, would meet with Himmler's approval.
Not only hardcore Neo-Pagans
espouse ideas that would be comfortable in the Nazi intellectual toolkit. One
of the fastest growing groups in the West identifies as "spiritual
but not religious." Just as Nazism did, New Age theology cherry picks from a religious
cafeteria menu. Again, so what? Why does this matter? It matters because this
approach is often accompanied by the elimination of any ethical or intellectual
standards. Truth, and right and wrong, are what the individual says they are. Personal
responsibility is erased. The spiritual-but-not-religious person feels
empowered not only to select religious trinkets from the display case, but also
to choose which history "feels" best. History is rewritten. If the
spiritual-but-not-religious consumer wants to use the word "karma"
and practice yoga and never acknowledge the horrors of the caste system, that's
fine. New Agers might practice dervish spinning without acknowledging the cost
of jihad and gender apartheid. They can attend witch doctor weekend workshops
while ignoring how the very same magical beliefs they've chosen selectively to
adopt and apply endanger albinos in East Africa, living human beings who are
threatened with dismemberment so that their body parts can be harvested for
magic rituals. At the same time, the spiritual-but-not-religious person is
certain that Christianity was responsible for Nazism, and the Crusades were Catholic
war crimes committed against unoffending Muslims. New Agers pick and choose
self-serving moralities and rewrite history no less than did Heinrich Himmler.
Modern, conscious Christians are
denied this kind of tunnel vision. Christians must incorporate crimes committed
in the name of the church into their ethical worldview. New Ages get to float
above the blood spilled in the name of their beliefs. That denial is not a good
thing. We say "never again." To honor this motto, we must confront
what really happened the first time. That confrontation has to include the
crimes of the New Age.
Yes, Christians have stereotyped
Jews negatively. Yes, Christians have committed crimes against Jews. Yes, it is
a good thing that Christians have engaged in self-examination and making of
amends for these crimes. But seeking the cause of Nazism in Christianity is a
dead end; I argue as much in Against Identifying Nazism
with Christianity. Rather, the thought processes that lead to Nazism are getting off scot-free.
If you want to find the criminals who leave the largest mass graves, look to
those who say, "Let's wipe the slate clean. Let's be pure. Let's invent a
whole new hodgepodge system cherry picked from random exotica. Let's decide
that neither the old rules nor objective reality apply to us. We are not
responsible for the sins committed by those who believe what we believe. We can
rewrite history however we want." These are the attitudes that give birth
to the biggest mass graves. They are alive and well in the New Age movement.
You can read the entire piece at Front Page Magazine
here
