"Atheist Manifesto" ~ Michel Onfray. Part 2

Vatican hierarchs in 30's XX c.

Young Joseph Ratzinger (Benedictus XVI in Hitlerjugend)

Hitler, Saint John's disciple

Adolf Hitler thought highly of the story of the Temple moneylenders, taken from the Gospel according to John. A Christian who never renounced his faith, Hitler praised the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, marveled at its creation of an unrivaled civilization, and prophesied its continued vigor in the centuries to come.

For the moment, I shall merely note that in Mein Kampf (volume 1, chapter 11, page 307),* he mentions Jesus's actions in the Temple and refers explicitly to the whip (scourge) — Saint John was the only evangelist to provide this detail. This was the kind of Christianity Hitler admired: true Christianity (loc. cit.) and apodictic faith (volume 2, chapter 5, page 454). Apodictic, the exact word Hitler used, meaning "expressing essential truth or absolute certainty."

A Christian who does not deny the dual message of his Bible can also draw on Exodus (21:23—25) to evoke the lex talionis. As we know, it calls on us to exchange an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but also hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. And as we have seen, Jesus proposed turning the other cheek as an alternative to this ancient tribal formulation. But if we abrogate this Gospel parable and replace it with the vengeful Old Testament prescription, and couple this with the New Testament episode of the Temple moneylenders, the worst of excesses can easily be justified. With such a cargo of sophistries, we could justify Kristallnacht as a modern-day eviction of the moneylenders—let us remember that Jesus reproached them with transacting business and money-changing . . . Then, pursuing the same hysterical line of argument and invoking the lex talionis, the Final Solution becomes the logical response to the National Socialists' nightmare of the racial and Bolshevik Judaization of Europe . . . Unfortunately, the metaphoric scourge permits the dialectician and the determined theoretician to legitimize the gas chambers. Moreover, Pius XII and the Catholic Church succumbed to the charms of these Hitlerian contradictions from the very beginning. Indeed the church continues to do so, if we accept as an admission of collusion its enduring unwillingness to acknowledge the error implicit in the Vatican's support for Nazism. I shall return to this later.

Allah's problems with logic

Hitler—Abu Ali in Arabic —admired the Muslim religion in its very essence, virile, warlike, conquering, and militant. And many of the Muslim faithful subsequently repaid that kindness: there was the pro-Nazi grand mufti of Jerusalem during the Second World War, of course, but there were also the eternally anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist militants who recycled former Nazis into the highest ranks of Middle Eastern military staffs and secret services after the Second World War, who protected, concealed, and cared for many of the Third Reich's war criminals in their territories — Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine. Not to mention an unbelievable number of conversions of former Reich dignitaries to the religion of the Koran.

Pursuant to our examination of the Torah, New Testament, and Koran, let us consider additional contradictions and examples of selective borrowing from the sacred texts as a pretext for evil deeds. The Old Testament prohibits killing but simultaneously condones the annihilation of certain enemies of the Jews. Christian brotherly love is juxtaposed with sanction of violence, when dictated by God's anger. The Koran, too, is full of inconsistencies. The mixed messages in all three monotheistic books have the potential of leading to monstrous consequences.

A Muslim example, then: an extremely imprudent sura (4:82) states that the Koran issued directly from Allah. The proof? The absence of contradictions in the divine book . . . Alas! It takes no time at all to conclude that every page teems with contradictions! At several points, the Koran refers to itself with evident self-satisfaction: "intelligently exposed" (6:114) —just like Spinoza! — "coherently narrated" (22:16) — like a proposition by Descartes! — and with "no hint of tortuousness" — like a page out of Bergson! Except that the book abounds in contradictory statements. Figuratively speaking, you have only to bend down and gather them up.

The Koran consists of one hundred fourteen suras or chapters. Except for sura 9, each chapter begins by repeating the first line of the first sura: In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Duly noted. According to Islamic tradition, God has ninety-nine names; the hundredth will be revealed only in a future life. Many of these names are variations on the theme of mercy and compassion. Al-Rahîm: the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate. Al-Ghaffâr: the All-Forgiving, the Absolver. Al-Ghafûr: the Pardoner. Al'-Adl: the Just, Equitable, Impartial. Al-Latîf: the Subtle, Gracious, Refined. Al-Halîm: the Lenient, Clement, Most Serene, Most Kind and Gentle. Al-Karîm: the Generous, the Bountiful. Al-Barr: the Gracious Benefactor, the Source of Goodness. Al'-Afûw: the Eraser of Sins, the Remover of Error, Fault, and Wrong Action. Dhû'l-Jalâli wal-Ikrâm: the Lord of Majesty and Generosity.

"Mercy" may be defined as "forgiveness extended to those one might punish." The specifically religious definition is "the goodness through which God extends his grace to men and to sinners." In that case, how is it that, among the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah, there is also Al-Mudhill: the Humiliator, the Degrader, Bringer of Dishonor and Disgrace. Al-Mumît: the Taker of Life, the Creator of Death. Al-Muntaqim: the Avenger, the Inflictor of Retribution. Al-Dârr: the Punisher, Bringer of Harm to Those Who Offend Him. Debasing, killing, avenging, harming—strange ways of showing mercy! But justified on page after page of the Koran.

Jozef Tiso (13 October 1887 – 18 April 1947)
In the years 1939-1945 directed the a puppet, pro-Nazi Slovak state.Responsible for sending 60 thousands Jews to death camps.In the efficient deportation of them eagerly helped Father Tiso other senior members of the Catholic clergy in Slovakia.
On photo above: Jozef Tiso with Adolf Hitler

 

 

Christian anti-Semitism

It is hard for a Christian to love his neighbor, particularly if the neighbor is a Jew . .. Saul-become- Paul channeled all his passion into dismantling Judaism — the same passion that (before the road to Damascus) he brought to persecuting Christians, helping mistreat them, and even hastening their encounter with the beyond. To sell the sect he had newly embraced, he had to persuade his listeners that Jesus was the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament, and that Christ had abolished Judaism by fulfilling the prophecy. Since Yahweh's faithful did not buy the nonsense about a Son of God who died on the cross to save humankind, Jews emerged as fundamental adversaries. Then, very quickly, they became the enemy.

It is said that the Wandering Jew was afflicted with his curse because the first of them refused to slake Christ's thirst on the path to Golgotha. For this failure to help the Crucified One, the curse fell upon him—not very charitable of Jesus — but also and above all on his kind, his descendants, his people. This was all the more portentous because the Christian version of Jesus's death assumes that the Jews were responsible — not the Romans. . . And Pontius Pilate? Neither responsible nor guilty. Paul affirmed it when speaking of the Jews who "killed the Lord Jesus" (1 Thessalonians 2:15). The Gospels abound in openly anti-Semitic passages. Daniel Goldhagen lists forty or so in Mark, eighty in Matthew, one hundred and thirty in John, one hundred and forty in the Acts of the Apostles . . . Jesus himself, gentle Jesus, described the Jews as being "of your father, the devil" (John 8:44). In such circumstances, loving one's neighbor was difficult.

From the first Christian transformation of the Jews into a people of God-killers to the long-delayed recognition of the state of Israel by John Paul II at the end of 1993 (and taking into account the church's long love affair with every manifestation of anti-Semitism in history, including most significantly the twelve years of German National Socialism), the picture is clear. The extreme expression of this hatred was the active collaboration between the Vatican and Nazism. And then—which is less widely known — that of Nazism with the Vatican. For Pius XII and Adolf Hitler shared a certain number of points of view, in particular the loathing of Jews in all their guises.

‘Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now called Pope Francis, was reportedly involved in the 1976 kidnapping of two priests by fascist elements of the Argentinian Navy.
This was during Argentina’s Dirty War. The priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, were found drugged and semi-naked, five months after being kidnapped. Yorio accused Bergoglio (Pope Francis) of handing them over to the death squads.’ (Link)

The Vatican admired Adolf Hitler

The love-marriage between the Catholic Church and Nazism cannot be denied. Instances — and they are not minor ones — abound. Their complicity did not reside in unspoken approval, explicit omissions, or calculations made on the basis of partisan positions. The facts are clear to anyone who approaches the issue by interrogating history: it was not a marriage of reason, determined by concern for the survival of the church, but a shared loathing of the same implacable enemies: Jews and Communists — most often packaged together in the same grab bag labeled Judeo-Bolshevism.

From the birth of National Socialism to the extrusion of the Third Reich's war criminals after the regime's collapse to the church's silence on these questions ever since, the domain of Christ's heir Saint Peter was also that of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, German Nazis and French fascists, collaborators of the Nazis, Vichyites, fascist militias, and other war criminals. Even today, it is still impossible to consult the Vatican's archives on the subject.

The facts, then. The Catholic Church approved the rearmament of Germany in the 1930s, which was of course contrary to the spirit of the Versailles Treaty but also to a part of Jesus's teachings, particularly those celebrating peace, mildness, love of one's neighbor. The Catholic Church signed a concordat with Adolf Hitler as soon as the chancellor took office in 1933. The Catholic Church held its tongue over the boycott of Jewish businesses, remained silent over the proclamation of the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935, and was equally silent over Kristallnacht in 1938. The Catholic Church provided the Nazis with its genealogical records, which told them who in Germany was Christian, and therefore non-Jewish. (On the other hand, the Catholic Church did invoke the principle of "pastoral secrecy" in order not to communicate the names of Jews converted to Christ's religion or married to Christians.) The Catholic Church supported, defended, and aided the pro-Nazi Ustachi regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia. The Catholic Church gave its absolution to France's collaborationist Vichy regime in 1940. The Catholic Church, although fully aware of the policy of extermination set in motion in 1942, did not condemn it in private or in public, and never ordered any priest or bishop to condemn the criminal regime in the hearing of his flock.

The Allied armies liberated Europe, reached Berchtesgaden, discovered Auschwitz. What did the Vatican do? It continued to support the defeated regime. The Catholic Church, in the person of Cardinal Bertram, ordered a requiem Mass in memory of Adolf Hitler. The Catholic Church was mute and showed no disapproval at the discovery of the mass graves, the gas chambers, and the death camps. Even better, the Catholic Church did for the Nazis (shorn of their Führer) what it had never done for a single Jew or victim of National Socialism: it set up a network designed to smuggle war criminals out of Europe. The Catholic Church used the Vatican, delivered papers stamped with its visas to fugitive Nazis, established a chain of European monasteries that served as hiding places for dignitaries of the ruined Reich. The Catholic Church promoted into its hierarchy people who had performed important tasks for the Hitler regime. And the Catholic Church will never apologize for any of these things, particularly since it has acknowledged none of them.

If there is ever to be repentance, we shall probably have to wait four centuries for it, the time it took for a pope to acknowledge the church's error in the Galileo affair. Chiefly because the doctrine of papal infallibility proclaimed at the first Vatican Council in 1869—70 (Pastor Aeternas) forbids challenging the church — for when the supreme pontiff speaks or makes a decision he does so not as a man capable of being wrong but as the representative of God on earth, constantly inspired by the Holy Spirit — the famous doctrine of "saving grace." Are we to conclude from all this that the Holy Spirit is fundamentally Nazi?

While the church remained silent on the Nazi question during and after the war, it missed no chance to act against Communists. Where Marxism is concerned, the Vatican has given proof of a commitment, a militancy, and a vigor better expended in fighting and discrediting the Nazi Reich. Faithful to church tradition (which, through the grace of Pius IX and Pius X, condemned human rights as contrary to the teachings of the church), Pius XII, the pope so famously well-disposed toward National Socialism, excommunicated the Communists of the whole world en masse in 1949. He asserted collusion between the Jews and Bolshevism as one of the reasons for his decision.

To recapitulate: no run-of-the-mill National Socialist, no Nazi of elevated rank or member of the Reich's staff was ever excommunicated. No group was ever excluded from the church for preaching and practicing racism or anti-Semitism or operating gas chambers. Adolf Hitler was not excommunicated, and Mein Kampf was never put on the Index [Ps. Also today, when after 70 years the same book is on the bestseller list - Vatican still silent. Maybe because the present anti-Pope Francis loudest encouraged to love nazi-muslim illegal immigrants?]. We should not forget that after 1924, the date Hitler's book appeared, the famous Index Librorum Prohibitorium added to its list — alongside Pierre Larousse, guilty of the Grand Dictionnaire Universel (!) — Henri Bergson, André Gide, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Adolf Hitler never appeared on it.

Anti-pope Francis washes and kissing feet of nazi-islamic refugees

Hitler admired the Vatican

A widely held notion that fails to stand up to the most rudimentary analysis, still less to a reading of the texts, represents Hitler as a pagan fascinated by Nordic cults, a lover of Wagnerian horned helmets, of Valhalla and of generous- breasted Valkyrie, an antichrist, the very antithesis of Christian. Apart from evoking the difficulty of being at once atheist and pagan — denying the existence of God or gods while at the same time believing in them — to believe this means that we must ignore Hitler's writings (Mein Kampf), his political action (the Reich's failure to persecute the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, as opposed, for example, to its treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses), and the Führer's private confidences (his published conversations with Albert Speer), in which he consistently and unambiguously expressed his admiration for Christianity.

Was it an atheist Führer who decided to stamp the words Gott mit uns on the belt buckles of the Reich's soldiers? Do people know that the slogan comes from the scriptures? Notably from Deuteronomy, one of the books of the Torah, which says, "For the Lord thy God is he that goeth with you" (Deuteronomy 20:4). These words were lifted from the speech Yahweh addressed to the Jews leaving to fight their enemies, the Egyptians, to whom God held out the promise of unspecified extermination (Deuteronomy 20:13).

Was it an atheist Führer who ordered all schoolchildren in the National Socialist Reich to begin their day with a prayer to Jesus? Not to God, which might have made a deist of Hitler, but to Jesus, which explicitly labels him a Christian. The same supposedly atheist Führer asked Goering and Goebbels, in the presence of Albert Speer who recorded the conversation, to remain within the bosom of the Catholic Church, as he himself would until his dying day.

Muslim thirst for blood

A worthy synthesis of the two monotheisms that preceded it, Islam acclimatized them to an Arabian desert conditioned by the tribal and the feudal. It also adopted as its own the worst legacies of the above-mentioned Jews and Christians: a community of the elect, a sense of superiority, the local transformed into the global, the private expanded to the universal, submission of body and soul to the ascetic ideal, the cult of the death instinct, theocracy indexed to the extermination of everything different, slavery, raiding, total war, punitive expeditions, murders, etc.

Let us remember that Moses slew an Egyptian foreman with his own hands. And that Muhammad and his followers regularly slaughtered people, beginning with the killing of an unarmed merchant at Nakhla (Saudi Arabia) in 623. He continued to kill until the day he died on June 8, 632. It is not possible to list all of the wars, battles, raids, surprise attacks, sieges, and other feats of arms by Muslim warriors. Battle of Badr (March 624): three hundred and fifty Muslims from Medina defeated an army of nine hundred commanded by Amr ibn Hisham, one of the polytheist leaders in Mecca. Also known as Abu Jahl, meaning "father of folly and ignorance," he was the one who had killed the first Muslim martyr (an old woman named Sumayyah), and he was himself killed at the battle of Badr. Uhud (March 625): Muhammad wounded; a few dozen martyrs. East Medina (late 626—early 627): Jews slain. The battle of the Trench (627): a "Jewish plot." The conquest of the Khaybar oasis (May-June 628). The raid on Mu'ta (September 629). Readers of the Koran do not seem to be overly concerned with verse 32 of sura 5: "Whoever slays one soul, it is as though he slew all men." (Paraphrase: To kill one man is to kill all men.)

Nearly two hundred and fifty verses — of the six thousand two hundred and thirty-four of the book—justify and legitimize holy war, jihad. Enough to drown the handful of very inoffensive phrases recommending tolerance, respect for one's neighbor, magnanimity or nonrecourse to violence in questions of religion (!). In such an ocean of blood, who can still take the trouble to linger over two or three sentences that recommend tolerance over barbarity? Particularly since the Prophet's biography bears eloquent witness: murder, crime, the sword, and the punitive expedition constantly recur. Too many pages encourage anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews, despoiling and exterminating them, for a Muslim fighter not to feel justified in putting them to the sword.

The Muslim community thought like the children of the Covenant. They too proclaimed themselves the chosen people, singled out by Allah, preferred by him (9:19 but also 3:110). But two claimants to elite status are one too many! Believing that others are of inferior race, that subhumans exist, that God establishes a hierarchy among humans by distinguishing the small designated community from the rest of humanity, means that the Other may not claim the same status as ourselves. Yesterday's hatred of the Hebrews for the Canaanites generates today's hatred of the Palestinians for the Jews, each side believing itself summoned by God to dominate the other—the others — and thus seeing itself as empowered to exterminate them.

For Islam in its essence rejects metaphysical, ontological, religious, and therefore political equality. The Koran teaches it: at the top, Muslims, below them Christians, because they too are people of the book, and then Jews, who as monotheists are also members of the group. Finally, after the Muslim, the Christian, and the Jew, comes the fourth group, all lumped together in general disapproval, unbelievers, the infidel, miscreants, polytheists, and of course atheists . . . The Koranic law, which forbids killing, committing crimes against, or massacring one's neighbor, is strictly confined to members of the community of the book: the ummah. As with the Jews.

But at the very heart of the Muslim community of supposed equals, hierarchy still prevails: men dominate women, the clergy dominate the faithful, pious believers dominate the lukewarm, the old dominate the young. Male supremacy, theocracy, gerontocracy, the original tribal and primitive models have remained unchanged over thirteen centuries. Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the societies that arose from the Enlightenment. The Muslim is not brotherly: he is the brother of his coreligionist, granted, but not of the others, negligible or hateful quantities, counting for nothing.

Socialists (commies) Eurocrats who love and invited muslim immigrants to Europe

Putin (whose father was pro-nazi) and his best relations with muslim communities in Russia, but also in the Middle East

Multicultural (Islamic) richness!THEY ALL LOVE WESTERN CIVILIZATION SO VERY MUCH.... ISN'T?

Yellow stars and Muslim tattoos

Of equal importance to the communal logic of inclusion and exclusion was the distinguishing mark or sign. Wearing the distinctive color yellow — sometimes as a turban — on one's person initially resulted from a decree by an eleventh-century caliph in Baghdad (the usual way of characterizing that period is to speak of the golden age of Islam), who sought to distinguish Jews and Christians by an outward sign that swiftly became one of opprobrium. Muslims have a concept known as dhimma, which originally referred to the pact of surrender between non-Muslims and their Muslim conquerors. Today, a dhimmi is a non-Muslim citizen of a country governed in accordance with sharia, Islamic law. At one time, the status of dhimmi was available only to people of the book (Jews and Christians), but later it was extended to include Zoroastrians and certain others. Muslims characterize dhimma as a contract that protects dhimmis, allowing them to retain their religion and guaranteeing their personal safety and the security of their property. In theory, Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. In practice, dhimma imposes an extra tax on the Jew, Christian, or Zoroastrian for the privilege of living in Islamic territory. Forcing non-Muslims to pay for protection is financial extortion.

Armed with this protection (!), the dhimmi enjoys civic rights that are almost nonexistent. In a tribal society, where ownership of a horse makes it possible to exist, to travel, to fight, to display one's social rank, the non-Muslim owns no such thing. He is permitted to ride an ass or mule (degrading mounts), but he has to ride sidesaddle, woman-style. He may walk in the street, but is not allowed to overtake a Muslim. Bearing arms is of course categorically forbidden — more or less implying that, being disarmed, the dhimmi is at the mercy of the first bandit to cross his path. Sometimes, beyond wearing the yellow fabric of sinister memory, he has a lion tattooed on his forearm, just as a later generation of Jews sported a tattooed number there.

In theory, the abolition of dhimmitude dates from 1839. In fact it was not until the end of the First World War that the Ottoman Empire finally abandoned a practice whose observance it was no longer able to impose . . . Obviously, the famous protection guaranteed on paper was not invariably granted — not by a long shot — to non-Muslim believers, who nevertheless conscientiously paid the tax and consented to live as subhumans.

Against the closed society

Islam has evolved within its own hermetic set of assumptions — within a history of its own that in effect ignores and denies the overall sweep of history. This has generated a closed, static society, shut in upon itself, fixated on the immobility of death. Marxism once claimed to be fulfilling history by abolishing it: its adepts professed a quasi-religious cult of history the better to achieve that goal. In the same way, the Muslim ambition to rule the planet aims ultimately for a frozen system, a system running counter to the flow of history, abandoning the dynamic of the real and of the world in favor of a universe conceived in the manner of an afterlife. A society applying the principles of the Koran would give us a universal nomad encampment, astir with the distant echo of subterranean spasms and the song of the spheres, dead husks orbiting themselves in celebration of nothingness, emptiness, the meaninglessness of a long-defunct history.

Every theocracy that refers back to the model of a timeless, dimensionless fictional universe seeks to impose on an immanent world a carbon-copy reproduction of that conceptual archetype. For the blueprints of the city of men are stored in the city of God. The Platonic Idea, such close kin to the idea of God (with no date of birth, no expected time of death, without answerability of any kind whatsoever, impervious to time or entropy, flawless, perfect), engenders the mirage of a closed society, it too endowed with the attributes of the Concept.

Democracy lives on movement, change, on contractual agreements, flexible time frames, enduring dynamics, dialectical interplay. It creates itself and thrives at the behest of a will that stems from living forces. It relies on the use of reason, on dialogue among the parties concerned, on active use of communication, on diplomacy and negotiation. Theocracy lives by the opposite principle: it is born, lives, and thrives on immobility, death, and the irrational. Theocracy is democracy's most dangerous enemy — the day before yesterday in prerevolutionary Paris, yesterday in Tehran in 1978, and today every time Al-Qaeda gives violence a voice.

 

Muslim fascism

The question of fascism still exercises a handful of contemporary historians, unable to agree on a firm and final definition. Was French marshal Philippe Pétain fascist? He was certainly a nationalist, and according to some a patriot, but although his Vichy regime pursued extreme right-wing policies, they were not necessarily fascist . . . These are byzantine debates, for there were many brands of fascism in the twentieth century, each with its own specific attributes. Indeed, we could call the last hundred years the fascist century. Brown and red in Europe and Asia, military khaki in South America. But green as well, which we too often overlook.

For the overthrow of the shah of Iran in 1978 and the seizure shortly thereafter of all powers by the Ayatollah Khomeini (and by one hundred and eighty thousand mullahs) gave birth to an authentic Muslim fascism. A quarter century later, with the blessings of a silent and forgetful West, it is still in the saddle. Because far from heralding the emergence of the political spirituality so lacking in the West (as Michel Foucault wrongly believed in 1978), the Iranian revolution gave birth to an Islamic
fascism never before associated with that religion.

_____________________

The End of Part 2
(Part 1 - HERE*)


(The rest of the text can be found only in the original book, because,  internet - free version - has been heavily censored!)