Be sober, be watchful.
Your adversary the devil prowls around
like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour.
1 Peter 5:7-9
Why Bother About Homosexuals? Homophobia and Sexual Politics in Nazi Germany - 2001
Geoffrey J. Giles
Why should the Nazis bother about homosexuals?
After all, some of the most loyal supporters of the Nazi movement were homosexual, and
Hitler refused to condemn the sexual preference of Ernst Röhm, even after it featured prominently in the opposition’s campaign against the Nazis in 1931.
Tolerance for homosexuals had increased in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century to the extent that an open gay culture flourished in cities such as Berlin in the 1920s, and parliament seemed well on the way to abolishing §175, the clause of the penal code dealing with homosexual offenses.
So why bother about them?
First, because Nazi opposition to this emancipation sought to appeal to the conservative backlash that the Nazis wished to co-opt. In terms of immediate action when Hitler came to power, there were well-publicized closures of gay bars in big cities.
But homosexuals were a somewhat elusive minority…Most homosexuals were relatively invisible.
The fact was that the Nazi leadership never figured out conclusively how to define a homosexual, or how to locate them. That in itself would have made it impossible for the Nazis to implement a “gay Holocaust” were any such decision ever to have been taken.
The more the leadership convinced itself of the magnitude of a homosexual conspiracy, however, the greater the likelihood of drastic action.
On the eve of World War II, there were fewer than a quarter-million Jews in Germany.
In 1934 the police believed there to be at least two million homosexual men in the country.
By 1939 the army’s chief psychiatrist was suggesting as many as three million, or four percent of the population.
At the end of 1942 the figure of four million was being discussed. This was turning into a potentially huge problem, and it is hard to imagine that a demonstrably paranoid Nazi leadership would have dismissed this in the long run. The more serious the problem, the more likely it was to be met with what the Nazis generally referred to as a “radical solution,” which usually meant murder.
Another major complication to any quick fix, however, was the fact that many apparently racially pure and ideologically sound National Socialists, and even officers of the elite SS, turned out to be homosexuals. That was sufficiently confusing to Himmler and others as to bring the blanket application of drastic persecution into question.
In its search for imagined enemies, however, the Nazi leadership knew that the entrenched refusal to accept sexual otherness in broad sectors of German society provided a bedrock upon which to build a popular anti-homosexual campaign.
The propaganda machine attempted to add credibility by portraying the average homosexual as fitting a “dirty old man” image, someone who principally targeted young teenage boys.
Prejudice was vividly present inside the prisons and camps of Nazi Germany, too. Both gay and straight survivors have provided testimony that homosexual inmates of the concentration camps were treated worse than prisoners of any other category apart from the Jews, not only by the guards but by other inmates…
Saul Friedländer refers to the plight of Leopold Obermayer as an exemplary case of the “system’s particular hatred of homosexuals.” The letters of this middle-class, Jewish homosexual with a law degree, complaining to his own lawyer about the illegality of his being held without trial, never got past the camp commandant’s office, and were simply filed away, allowing us a precise look at his maltreatment…
It may fairly be stated that Leopold Obermayer was treated with particular brutality, because he was Jewish as well as homosexual. But other detailed evidence has recently been published about the deliberate torture and murder of homosexual inmates in Sachsenhausen. The brick works attached to the camp offered an isolated location for the murderous sport of the SS guards. In one case around October 1941 five homosexual prisoners were singled out and taken to the wash room…[graphic description of human torture follows]
…In July 1942 alone, seventy-nine homosexuals were deliberately killed at the brick works site, at the rate of three or four per day, and this anti-homosexual vendetta continued until September 12, 1942. It is probable that well over 200 homosexuals died in this campaign…[graphic description of human torture follows]
…These are tiny numbers compared with the murder of Jews, but that is no reason to brush them aside altogether. Research has indicated a death rate of sixty percent among the pink triangle inmates of Nazi camps…
…From all we can tell, though, Hitler did not spend a lot of time thinking about the “homosexual problem.” His remarks were negative, but infrequent.
The main protagonist here was the man at the head of the SS, and who also became chief of the entire German police force. The young Heinrich Himmler was rather prudish about sex, and felt most comfortable in the shelter of all-male army or fraternity circles. When he encountered the subject of homoeroticism in his reading, Himmler was demonstrably confused…
…With Himmler, unlike any other Nazi leader, we have the advantage of knowing not only the books he was reading, but his opinion of them, because he recorded his thoughts in a notebook. We therefore have a fascinating insight into the ideas that were shaping his thinking and his prejudices. During September and October 1927 Himmler read Herwig Hartner’s book Erotik und Rasse (Eroticism and Race) [Hartner’s book not based on scientific evidence]…
…What, if anything, did Himmler take away from this book? Even if he had not yet perhaps made up his mind about the criminality of homosexual persons, they constituted nonetheless a dangerous phenomenon of devastating possibilities. The whole Aryan race was threatened by homosexuality, and it would spread inexorably, not least through the pernicious efforts of the Jews, who would actively and successfully seek to drag Germans down these perverse paths in their efforts to destroy the German people.The metaphor of homosexuality as a disease that, if unchecked, would reach epidemic proportions, became a staple expression of Himmler’s in later years…
…Himmler remained adamant that harsh punishment should be meted out to presumed homosexuals, as a deterrent to spreading this “plague.” It is virtually certain that Himmler himself was behind the November 1941 introduction of a mandatory death penalty for homosexual offenses in the ranks of the police and the SS.
Hitler promptly and decisively sabotaged the full thrust of the ordinance, which was quite evidently one of deterrence by means of the threat of a death sentence, at the moment he signed it…[graphic description of human torture follows]
…Why bother about homosexuals? …To minimize or ignore their suffering, as many if not most scholarly historians have largely done till today, is to perpetuate the view upheld after the war by the Allies, and subsequently even by the West German Supreme Court, that former pink triangle prisoners were sex criminals who essentially deserved punishment.
If a detailed examination of the Nazi vendetta can bring us closer to an understanding of that continuing prejudice, then we can truly say that we have contributed to the mission of this Museum. Gay-bashing, and even the murder of homosexuals, still are prevalent in Western democracies.
An historical analysis of what happened in Nazi Germany is not going to halt that entirely. But it may suggest to thoughtful people that “to be a bystander is to share in the guilt,” in the words of one of the Museum’s publications. The well-known test of any democracy is how well it treats its minorities.
The awful example of the Third Reich shows us how easy it is for a government to make scapegoats out of such a minority, by branding homosexuals as sex criminals, pederasts, and even treasonous conspirators, so that most Germans could feel comfortable about looking the other way while the Nazis went about their repression, torture, beatings, incarceration, castration, and outright murder of homosexuals. It is fitting for us to commemorate these victims, but that should not be an end in itself.
The crucial lesson of commemoration of the victims of Nazism is vigilance.
Virtually no one today believes that there could possibly be a descent to that appalling level of violent repression against homosexuals. Germans in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power, felt much the same way. Wholesale castrations of homosexuals were unimaginable, let alone state-sanctioned murder. And yet they happened by the thousand. We should strive to be better citizens than were Germans in the 1930s, if only on an individual level, in protecting fellow citizens who happen to be gay from the homophobic attacks, whether from private or public figures or institutions. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum sets a fine example of inclusiveness. Let us try to live up to its vision…
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Pope: Be on guard against pursuit of power and wealth - November 8, 2016
(Vatican Radio) We cannot serve God well if we hunger after power and wealth…
Pope Francis began his homily by saying that if we want to be good and faithful servants of the Lord, we must guard against dishonestly and the pursuit of power. But how often, he said, do we see or hear ourselves saying, even in our own homes, that “I’m in charge here?” Jesus taught us that leaders are those who serve others, and if we want to be first, we must become the servant of all. The Pope stressed that Jesus turns the values of our world upside-down, showing that the search for power is an obstacle to becoming a servant of the Lord.
A second obstacle, he continued, is dishonesty which can also be found in the life of the Church. Jesus told us that we cannot serve two masters – God and money, the Pope warned, so we have to choose to serve one or the other. Dishonesty, he continued, is not just being a sinner, since we are all sinners and can repent of those sins. But dishonesty, he said, is being duplicitous and playing one hand off against the other, playing the ‘God’ card and the ‘world’ card at the same time…Read more: http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2016/11/08/pope_be_on_guard_against_pursuit_of_power_and_wealth/1270801
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+ Religion = Truth = L O V E
On Gay Priests “Who am I to Judge?”
We have to find a new balance; otherwise
even the moral edifice of the church is likely to
FALL LIKE A HOUSE OF CARDS,
losing the freshness and fragrance
SCIENCE can purify religion from error and superstition;
RELIGION can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Each can draw the other into a wider world,
a world in which both can flourish.
For the truth of the matter is that the Church and the scientific community will inevitably interact; their options
DO NOT include ISOLATION.
…TRUTH is the light that gives meaning and value to CHARITY. That light is both the light of REASON and the light of FAITH, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as GIFT, acceptance, and communion. WITHOUT truth, charity degenerates into SENTIMENTALITY. Love becomes an EMPTY SHELL, to be filled in an ARBITRARY way. In a CULTURE without truth, this is the FATAL risk facing love. It FALLS prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted,to the point where it comes to MEAN the opposite. Truth FREES charity from the constraints of an EMOTIONALISM that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a FIDEISM that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word…
REASON always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself OMNIPOTENT. For its part, RELIGION always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development…
Pope Benedict XVI 2007 2009
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All propaganda must be popular and
its intellectual level must be adjusted to the
most limited intelligence among those
it is addressed to. Consequently,
the greater the mass it is intended to reach,
the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be....
The function of propaganda is…not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people…Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1924
Hitler's Basic Principles
Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions.
Constantly repeat just a few ideas.
Use stereotyped phrases.
Give only one side of the argument.
Continuously criticize your opponents.
Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification.
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These principles are abstracted from Jowett & O'Donnell.
Propaganda and Persuasion, Fifth Edition 2012
Jowett and O’Donnell’s Definition of Propaganda
“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”
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Is the Tea Party becoming a religious movement? - October 27, 2010
(CNN) -- The question of whether the Tea Party will have a real impact on American politics (yes!) has evolved into a new debate: Is the Tea Party really about more than taxes?
Glenn Beck, who invokes the semi-mythical "Black Robe Brigade" -- fighting preachers he claims led the American Revolution -- as a model for a new generation of activists seems to think so.
On public radio, Bryan Fischer, a leader of the fundamentalist American Family Association, sternly instructed a libertarian Tea Party activist that her movement was religiously rooted whether she wanted it to be or not. A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute backs him up, revealing that 57 percent of self-identified Tea Partiers agree that "America is and always has been a Christian nation."
So is the Tea Party a religious movement, too?
…The rhetoric of the Tea Party is populist in style, but its economic vision so neatly aligns with the interests of the wealthy that big business is abandoning the old Republican establishment for the "insurgents" who promise to free the market's "invisible hand" from the safety net of the minimum wage and health care.
And for DeMint and the new disciples he hopes to bring to Washington, that invisible hand ultimately belongs not to the market but to God.
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The Grand Ole Party Is Just the Anti-Obama Party - March 16, 2016
Obstruction of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland showcases how the GOP discards all principle at the chance to stop Obama.
Two years into President Barack Obama's first term, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made an ominous declaration: Republicans' "single most important" priority was making Obama a failed president. We've reached the pinnacle of that effort with the fight over Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court.
Even before Obama announced Garland, chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as his pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the high court, Republican senators vowed to ignore any nomination until after the 2016 election.
And despite both admissions that they don't know anything about Garland's record and explicit praise of Garland as one name Obama could nominate that conservatives might get behind, Republicans doubled down on their plans to refuse him confirmation hearings after learning Garland would be the nominee…
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GOP Blocks Probes Into Trump-Russia Ties - 9/30/16
Russian hackers are apparently trying to mess with our elections. But congressional Republicans are crippling any investigations—while their probes of Hillary Clinton continue.
Suspicion is mounting about Donald Trump’s ties to Russian officials and business interests, as well as possible links between his campaign and the Russian hacking of U.S. political organizations. But GOP leaders have refused to support efforts by Democrats to investigate any possible Trump-Russia connections, which have been raised in news reports and closed-door intelligence briefings. And without their support, Democrats, as the minority in both chambers of Congress, cannot issue subpoenas to potential witnesses and have less leverage to probe Trump.
Privately, Republican congressional staff told The Daily Beast that Trump and his aides’ connections to Russian officials and businesses interests haven’t gone unnoticed and are concerning. And GOP lawmakers have reviewed Democrats’ written requests to the FBI that it investigate Trump before they were made public.
But the lawmakers in both chambers have declined to sign on to them. Republicans have no appetite to launch inquiries into their party’s presidential nominee, and they continue to believe the FBI flubbed its investigation into Clinton and her aides, who should have been charged with mishandling government secrets, the staffers said.
Instead Republican lawmakers appear far more interested in probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, nearly three months after the Justice Department declined to press charges against her or her aides. FBI Director James Comey has been called to testify to Congress three times about the email investigation, and Republicans have launched a separate inquiry into whether the former secretary of State committed perjury when she testified before Congress about her unorthodox communications system…
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Sandra Day O’Connor chides Republicans on Supreme Court nomination fight - February 18, 2016
Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has criticized the Republican party for their obstructionism in the process of finding a successor for Justice Scalia. In an interview with Fox 10 Phoenix, she said she believed President Obama should nominate a replacer for the recently deceased Justice, saying: “I think we need somebody there now to do the job, and let’s get on with it,” rejecting the GOP argument that as a ‘lame duck’ president, he should not be allowed to make the appointment. “You just have to pick the best person you can under the circumstances as the appointing authority must do, and one that we care about as a nation and as a people,” the 85-year old former Justice added. “And I wish the president well as he makes choices and goes down that line. It’s hard.”
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Republicans’ mindless obstruction has helped create something far worse - March 11, 2016
It has been an annual rite in Washington since the modern budgeting system began in 1974: The president sends his budget to Congress, and lawmakers hold hearings on it.
But not this year.
The chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees announced, for the first time since their panels were created more than 40 years ago, that they would not have hearings on the president’s budget or allow administration officials to testify. They decided this before President Obama released his budget, refusing to contemplate any budget from Obama — sight unseen.
This declaration, like the Senate Republicans’ vow that they will refuse to consider — or even meet with — any Supreme Court nominee Obama sends them, is the very definition of blind obstruction…
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Unchecked Trump?- November 10, 2016
NEW YORK – How has the 2016 election in the United States – which gave the Republican Party control of the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives – affected the much-touted system of checks and balances as set out in the country’s constitution? In my view, it has virtually eliminated them.
The checks and balances generated by the judicial branch are certainly in danger. Anything less than constant Democratic filibusters will allow Republicans to fill the vacancy in the Supreme Court that they have blocked Democratic President Barack Obama from filling. And the aging Supreme Court may soon have more slots open – slots currently held by liberal and centrist justices. Republicans therefore have a good chance of creating a conservative majority on the nine-member Supreme Court that may last for decades, especially if they win the presidency again in 2020.
That majority may erode democratic checks, such as the campaign-finance limits that were dealt a devastating blow by the 2010 Citizens United decision. In a 5-4 majority, the Court ruled that corporations are “associations of individuals,” and thus that any limits on the amount of money corporations could spend on political campaigns violated their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
Republican obstructionism in the Senate has also put other levels of the federal judiciary at risk. During President Barack Obama’s second term in office, the rate at which vacancies in the US District and Circuit Courts were filled fell to its lowest point in 50 years. Trump can now fill rapidly these vacancies with conservative judges who may well erode checks and balances further.
State-generated checks and balances will not escape unscathed, either. Indeed, given new partisan alignments at the state level – Republicans now control an all-time high of 68 of the 99 state legislative chambers and 33 of the 50 governorships – the possibility that states will challenge the federal government is substantially reduced…
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Reid: Trump a 'sexual predator who lost the popular vote’- November 11, 2016
The retiring Senate minority leader unloads
President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi — all of them offered conciliatory statements about Donald Trump's election victory.
Then there was Harry Reid.
In a blistering statement Friday, the retiring Senate minority leader attacked the president-elect as a "sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate" and said that he fears for the treatment of Latinos, African-Americans, gay people, Muslims and young girls under a President Trump. He also criticized the media for covering the transition to Trump as normal, even as Obama and Trump had a civil meeting on Thursday and Schumer, the incoming Democratic leader, spoke with Trump on Wednesday.
“We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them," Reid said. "Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African-Americans. Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces.”…
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