The civilized men in the country did not know what to do. In the words of one historian, the moderates voiced desperate "appeals to reason… [But] their techniques were distinctly out of tune with the wild emotionalism that seemed to have gripped a large part of the nation" The civility cherished by the civilized men had finally been defeated by their ideas, although they did not know that this was the cause.
After years of preaching contradictions and of evading principles with an anti-ideological shrug, these men were astonished to see the nation conclude that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. After years of institutionalizing interest-group warfare, which they had justified as sacrifice or collective service, these men were astonished to see hostile gangs take to the streets and demand one another’s sacrifice. After years of undercutting the mind by preaching the primacy of gentle feeling (whether ‘progressive’, religious, or skeptical), these men were astonished to find that they had nothing more to say, and that there was no one left to listen. The moderates were helpless. The authorities were helpless. The killers were taking over.
On January 30, 1933, after due attention to every requirement of German law and of the Weimar Constitution, Nazi rule was made official… It took six months for the Chancellor to transform the country into a totalitarian state."
Leonard Peikoff - The Ominous Parallels
The Holocaust
Some historians are of the view that Hitler had in mind the mass killing of all the European Jews from the earliest times.
This “Intentionalist” school of thought is now a minority perspective, though not without adherents.
One clear piece of evidence comes from Josef Hell, a retired Major active as a journalist in the 1920s, who interviewed Hitler in 1922 [”Aufzeichnung,” 1922, ZS 640, p. 5, Institut Zeitgeschichte. Der Gerade Weg.]
Hitler said “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit.
As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.”
But Hitler never left a written order (”Fuehrerbefehl”) pertaining to this question.
Another view, called the “Functionalist” position, suggests that Hitler’s initial plan was perform what would later be called “ethnic cleansing”, embarking on the total annihilation of the Jews only after deportations had failed.
In this view the Nazi’s Jewish policy emerged after a series of failures in getting Jews out of Europe, rather than as a premeditated plan.
By the time of the Wannsee directives of January 1942, large numbers of Jews had already been killed in various ways. These formal directives for the Final Solution were more a matter of providing definition and clarity for a program that was already under way.
The “Intentionalist” and “Functionalist” dichotomy is overly simplictic, and neither excludes the other. The “Intentionalists” are probably correct that Hitler appears from the outset to have sought the physical extirpation of the Jews, though without having clearly thought out how this might best be accomplished.
The “Functionalists” are probably correct that the German state apparatus only arrived at the final solution once a variety of other schemes had been found wanting.
On the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938 gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods throughout Germany and parts of Austria breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting.
In all 101 synagogues were destroyed and
almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed.
26,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, Jews were physically attacked and beaten and 91 Jews died. This event became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
On 12 November 1938, Hermann Goering called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during Kristallnacht and place responsibility for it. It was decided that, since Jews were to blame for these events, they be held legally and financially responsible for the damages incurred by the pogrom.
Kristallnacht turned out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of what is now called the Holocaust. In the meeting, Goering announced, “I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer’s orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.”
The path to the Final Solution had been chosen, to remove Jews from the German economy. And all the bureaucratic mechanisms for its implementation were now in place.
On July 31, 1941 SS Obergruppenf Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reichssichterheitshauptamt (RSHA), the main police authority in Hitler’s Reich, secured a ten-minute interview with Reichsmarschall Hermann, who was head of the Four Year Plan, and obtained his signature on a Vollmacht (authority) empowering Heydrich to draw up arrangements for a solution to the Jewish Problem.
“As a complement of the task which was assigned to you by the decree of 24/1/1939, in other words to obtain the most advantageous solution possible to the Jewish question by way of emigration and evacuation given the circumstances, I charge you by the present letter to proceed with all the necessary preparations... to reach an overall solution (Gesamtlesung) of the Jewish question in the zone of German influence in Europe...
I charge you with the rapid submission of an overall project (Gesamtentwurf) bearing on the measures of organization and the material and concrete dispositions to realize the final solution of the Jewish question to which we aspire. (Endlosung der Judenfrage.)”
Endlosung is frequently translated as “final solution” but might also be translated as “overall solution”, “complete solution” or “total solution”
In a memo which circulated in March 1942 in Heydrich’s office, the ministers were informed that the Jews of Europe were to be concentrated in the East, “while awaiting to be sent to a distant territory like Madagascar after the war, which will become their homeland... “
Final solution to the Jewish problem was one of those conventional phrases used to designate the Hitlerian plan to exterminate the European Jews.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/ww2/holocaust.htm
Germany is slightly smaller than the state of Montana. You might get away with an armed rebellion in a country of that size. How would you be able to do with the size of the US?
I did a search on Leonard Peikoff and it turns out he is a follower of Ayn Rand, below are two links. Obviously he’s correct about his history as you quoted. But he apparently thinks “conservatives” are almost as bad as liberals in creating a Nazi-like state!
Some of the “ominous parallels” between pre-Hitler Germany and the United States that Peikoff identifies are:
Liberals who demand public control over the use and disposal of private property — social security, more taxes, more government control over the energy industry, medicine, broadcasting, etc.
Conservatives who demand government control over our intellectual and moral life — prayer in the schools, literary censorship, government intervention in the teaching of biology, the anti-abortion movement, etc.
Couple of his positions:
http://www.peikoff.com/essays_and_articles/abortion-rights-are-pro-life/
Abortion Rights are Pro-life
Abortion rights advocates should not cede the terms “pro-life” and “right to life” to the anti-abortionists.
Abortion Rights are Pro – Life
By Leonard Peikoff
This week hundreds of anti-abortionists will demonstrate outside Buffalo’s abortion clinics, bookstores and high schools. Where is their moral opposition? Today, no one is defending the right to abortion in fundamental terms, which is why the pro-abortion rights forces are on the defensive.
Abortion rights advocates should not cede the terms “pro-life” and “right to life” to the anti-abortionists. It is a woman’s right to her life that gives her the right to terminate her pregnancy.
Nor should abortion-rights advocates keep hiding behind the phrase “a woman’s right to choose.” Does she have the right to choose murder? That’s what abortion would be, if the fetus were a person.
The status of the embryo in the first trimester is the basic issue that cannot be sidestepped. The embryo is clearly pre-human; only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat this clump of cells as constituting a person.
We must not confuse potentiality with actuality. An embryo is a potential human being. It can, granted the woman’s choice, develop into an infant. But what it actually is during the first trimester is a mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman’s body. If we consider what it is rather than what it might become, we must acknowledge that the embryo under three months is something far more primitive than a frog or a fish. To compare it to an infant is ludicrous.
If we are to accept the equation of the potential with the actual and call the embryo an “unborn child,” we could, with equal logic, call any adult an “undead corpse” and bury him alive or vivisect him for the instruction of medical students.
That tiny growth, that mass of protoplasm, exists as a part of a woman’s body. It is not an independently existing, biologically formed organism, let alone a person. That which lives within the body of another can claim no right against its host. Rights belong only to individuals, not to collectives or to parts of an individual.
(“Independent” does not mean self-supporting — a child who depends on its parents for food, shelter, and clothing, has rights because it is an actual, separate human being.)
“Rights,” in Ayn Rand’s words, “do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born.”
It is only on this base that we can support the woman’s political right to do what she chooses in this issue. No other person — not even her husband — has the right to dictate what she may do with her own body. That is a fundamental principle of freedom.
There are many legitimate reasons why a rational woman might have an abortion — accidental pregnancy, rape, birth defects, danger to her health. The issue here is the proper role for government. If a pregnant woman acts wantonly or capriciously, then she should be condemned morally — but not treated as a murderer.
If someone capriciously puts to death his cat or dog, that can well be reprehensible, even immoral, but it is not the province of the state to interfere. The same is true of an abortion, which puts to death a far less-developed growth in a woman’s body.
If anti-abortionists object that an embryo has the genetic equipment of a human being, remember: so does every cell in the human body.
Abortions are private affairs and often involve painfully difficult decisions with life-long consequences. But, tragically, the lives of the parents are completely ignored by the anti-abortionists. Yet that is the essential issue. In any conflict it’s the actual, living persons who count, not the mere potential of the embryo.
Being a parent is a profound responsibility — financial, psychological, moral — across decades. Raising a child demands time, effort, thought and money. It’s a full-time job for the first three years, consuming thousands of hours after that — as caretaker, supervisor, educator and mentor. To a woman who does not want it, this is a death sentence.
The anti-abortionists’ attitude, however, is: “The actual life of the parents be damned! Give up your life, liberty, property and the pursuit of your own happiness.”
Sentencing a woman to sacrifice her life to an embryo is not upholding the “right-to-life.”
The anti-abortionists’ claim to being “pro-life” is a classic Big Lie. You cannot be in favor of life and yet demand the sacrifice of an actual, living individual to a clump of tissue.
Anti-abortionists are not lovers of life — lovers of tissue, maybe. But their stand marks them as haters of real human beings.
http://www.peikoff.com/essays_and_articles/why-christmas-should-be-more-commercial/
Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial
It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas.
< snip >
America’s tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate — and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.