Ping! </center?
Posted on 05/24/2004 10:00:50 AM PDT by NYer
I teach courses in humanities and military history at Grove City College, an “enthusiastically Christian” college in rural northwestern Pennsylvania. This morning I concluded my Humanities 302 course with the Home Box Office movie Conspiracy which depicts a conference held on January 20, 1942 in a mansion in the posh Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Evil in Disguise Knowing Good and Evil
In the dining room of this mansion, which once belonged to a wealthy Jewish businessman, SS Obengruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, hosted 14 other top Nazi officials charged with devising the final solution to the Jewish problem. In two hours, while enjoying a sumptuous buffet, they determined what constitutes a Jew and what categories of Jews would be “evacuated.”
The old, infirm and very young were to be “evacuated” immediately — turned into smoke in the ovens of death camps like Auschwitz. Healthy Jews were to be transported to German-occupied Russia, there to be worked to death building roads. The goal was a racially pure, Jew-free Europe. To achieve this end, the conferees planned the deaths of 11,000,000 Jews. By the time the war ended three and a half years later, the Nazis had achieved 60 percent of their goal.
This video concludes a course that began with the Renaissance and Reformation, moved on to the scientific revolution and the contributions the Enlightenment made toward fostering political revolutions in America and France. Students then studied the evolution of Darwinism and Social Darwinism, the advent of socialism and Marxism before considering linkages between German nationalism and anti-Semitism. Closing in on the 20th century, we discussed the relationships between capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and imperialism. For the last two weeks we focused on World Wars I and II.
At the end I asked, “At Wannsee, how could 15 well-educated men, most of them lawyers, devise something as horrendous as the holocaust while eating roasted turkey and glazed hams washed down with vintage wines and the finest cognac?” Ultimately, the answer resides in mankind’s perennial efforts to create heaven on earth.
From the time Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, to Adolph Hitler’s rise to power in the chaos of post-World War I Germany, to the reasons Osama bin Laden gives Islamic militants for jihad, evil always disguises itself as good. Hitler promised the German people redemption from defeat in the Great War. Nazis believed that eliminating European Jewry (as well as other “undesirables”) would strengthen the human race. Accordingly, they filmed and photographed the holocaust to document it for posterity.
Tomorrow I will conclude my course on World Wars I and II. In that final lesson, after reviewing the reasons for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki and summarizing the changes that resulted from the two greatest blood-lettings in human history, I will ask, “How could a century that began so optimistically based on rapid advances in science and technology so quickly turn to global slaughter?”
We will start by looking back to the ninth century when Charlemagne divided his empire among his three sons. Then I will direct my students to the shift from a God-centered weltanschauung to our post-modern, human-centric worldview; a process that began with the Renaissance and continued through the Enlightenment to play out on the battlefields of two world wars and thereafter mushroomed into post-modernist moral relativism. I will review how the Enlightenment fostered revolutions intent on gaining individual freedoms and political rights. These revolutions led to the rise of nationalism fed by ethnic pride rooted in cultural and racial identities. Almost simultaneously, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution inspired imperialism with an accompanying international competition that drove an arms race among the European powers. Finally, advances in communications mobilized the masses while modern industry provided the weapons for global war. From that point, one world war led to another.
Those factors aside, the ultimate cause for human suffering is as ancient as mankind’s earliest folly revealed in Genesis 3:4: “And the Serpent answered, ‘Eating of the fruit, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” Eve never would have been tempted if the Serpent told her what really lay ahead — an end to paradise, the pain of childbirth followed by fratricide between her sons, the sufferings of aging culminating in the ravishment by disease and, finally, death. The Serpent lied... Eve suffered and died.
From Hitler’s vision for a Thousand-Year Reich and Lenin’s promise to use the dictatorship of the proletariat to build a workers’ paradise, to abortion depicted as a “women’s health issue” and homosexual behavior justified as an “alternative lifestyle,” evil always comes to humanity disguised as good. The results are just as invariably consistent — destruction, suffering and death. Beware the Serpent’s promises.
Ping!
One of the best things I read recently.
MoodyBlu
Beware the Serpent's promises. No kidding!
Not at all off topic! Here's an opportunity to gain some insight into the caliber of professor hired by that institute.
BTTT
Interesting that it was published in the Catholic Exchange, considering that Hitler had the Pope in his vest pocket.
Very good article. Wouldn't it be good if there were more professors like him?
I agree with the premise - that peoples' desire for perfect happiness, when invested in the mortal world, results in a perfect hell. That desire has to be directed towards a relationship of loving service to God, or it becomes a poison.
(I don't necessarily accept Adam and Eve as literal fact, but have no problem if others do. The moral of the story is what is important.)
read later
Bump
The serpent is there to lie and tempt us at every turn. A dear old pastor used to say, "If the devil doesn't bother you, it's probably because you're walking with him!".
Ping for your consideration.
Roger, I know you don't usually show up on these type of threads, but the article is imo, very well written. I think it has relevance to the social ills plaguing our society today.
Thanks for pinging me, NYer. Great article! Pretty scary, too...
The greatest trick that satan ever did was to convince some people that he doesn't exist.
" ... evil always disguises itself as good." There is no clearer example of this in today's world than the democrat's chosen mantra of 'a woman's right to choose'. Evil disguised as women's rights, reproductive rights (serial killing of already alive unborn children is way beyond 'reproduction' and fully into infanticide), or freedom to reject care for children.
The democrat party has chosen to serve evil. But the people voting blindly for democrat candidates are yet to realize for whom they are truly casting their votes. And yet they insist they're Catholics, etc. Catholics/Christians defending infanticide? It makes one shudder at the blatant nature of Evil's parade.
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