Twisted Sisters: Marxism and Fascism
Australian law professor Augusto Zimmermann, in his chapter in Wokeshevism that he and Joshua Forrester edited (Connor Court, 2023), discusses the Marxist roots of Nazi-Fascism. “There are, therefore, important commonalities between Nazism and Marxism. It is patently wrong to assume the Marxism is the polar opposite of Communism, or that the Nazis were “reactionary capitalist counter-revolutionaries”. As a matter of fact, the Nazis were committed socialists…”
One common feature of tyrannical governments is state ownership and confiscatory powers. This is a hallmark of both communist states and fascist states. I will explore this in more detail in a moment, but in order to show that this is not just a theoretical discussion, let me mention a frightening case of this actually happening here in Australia.
In the leftist, socialist ACT, the statists there have decided they will take over a Catholic hospital. It has various cheap excuses for this, but it is really because the hospital thinks healthcare does not include murder – whether of the unborn or the elderly. So the government, led by chief minister Andrew Barr, has decided to nationalise Calvary Public Hospital with almost no discussion or consultation.
The Archbishop of Canberra-Goulburn Christopher Prowse said this about the Soviet-style capture: “It’s a very sad day when governments can simply decide to mount a take-over of any enterprise they like without any justification.” Yes, and we have seen all this before.
While leftists try to tell us that Hitler and the Nazis were a bunch of conservatives, capitalists and probably even Christians, better minds know that the National Socialists were just that: socialists, who had modelled themselves on the secular Communist tyranny that preceded it.
Many authorities can be appealed to here. Let me start with political science professor, Waller Newell. His Cambridge University Press volume Tyrants: Power, Justice and Terror (2016, 2019), makes it clear that Nazism was a socialist movement, and not some capitalist right-wing affair. That claim he says was invented by leftists in the 1940s, and it “persists to this day.” Instead, National Socialism “was above all a millenarian revolutionary movement like Bolshevism.” He continues:
Thinking people recognized that they were two variants of the same movement, “the revolution of nihilism” to use Rauschning’s term, and people in both movements also recognized this about each other. (Recall Von Ribbentrop’s feeling right at home among Stalin’s henchmen). But many people on the Left were embarrassed by this similarity, just as they were embarrassed by the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Their response was to convince themselves (who can say with what degree of sincerity?) that there was no resemblance whatever between these two in fact closely kindred movements, claiming instead that Nazism equaled the naked face of capitalism stripped of its pretensions to democracy. That way, they could paint the Hitler-Stalin Pact as the Soviet Union’s morally justified need to fend off the Nazi threat so as to safeguard the gains of socialism, instead of what it really was – two wolves agreeing to devour the sheep before turning on each other for the final showdown between their two totalitarian world-views. In reality, the Nazis detested capitalism every bit as much as they did Bolshevism, equating both with the “Jewish world conspiracy” that could don either hat at its convenience in its mission to destroy the wholeness of the people with its materialistic values….
The Nazis regarded Bolshevism as a false version of socialism, which they believed should be nationalistic and patriotic, not international. But they themselves believed in a “classless society” (as Hitler’s speeches in The Triumph of the Will stress repeatedly) and central planning (aping Soviet vocabulary, they had their own “five-year plan”)….
Nazism’s mission was based on the mobilization of mass hatred and the destruction of all traditional social, religious, and cultural bonds. In its drive to complete the collectivization of all social forces within “the community of destiny” – a process they called “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) – National Socialism’s true forbear was the Jacobin Terror and its true counterpart was Bolshevism’s similar agenda for destruction in Russia.
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Regime Change: “Transgender Day of Visibility” Replaces Easter Sunday
According to progressive politicians and their press allies, however, noticing the epochal shift between New York City illuminating skyscrapers with the crosses of Calvary and the New York governor ordering landmarks lit up to celebrate cross-dressing men, gender confusion, and the medicalization of confused children is creating a culture war rather than responding to the latest iteration of it.
Two columns from The European Conservative, on the descendants of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and other villains: “The Long Island Hitlers (and other children of evil).” On one of the greatest writers of the 20th century: “Sigrid Undset’s Powerful Portrayal of the Consequences of Sin.”
Regime Change: “Transgender Day of Visibility” replaces Easter Sunday
Over the weekend, we once again witnessed one of the LGBT movement’s key strategies in action. First, a major assault on intergenerational norms is conducted. Then, people respond with upset and outrage. Those responding are then accused of engaging in a “culture war” for daring to notice that anything has changed; the change itself, we are told, is normal. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Thus, we saw President Joseph R. Biden, LGBT activist and alleged Catholic, declare Easter Sunday to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.” A call to endorse a radical and wicked ideology which advocates the mutilation of children on the day Christians commemorate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is an obvious provocation, but the press hastened to insist that the “Transgender Day of Visibility” was there first, actually. Former CNN anchor Brian Stelter posted a long thread explaining that we always celebrate transgender ideology on March 31, and Politico summarized the collective coverage with the title: “Sunday marks both Easter and the Transgender Day of Visibility. Cue the culture war.”
As Rod Dreher noted, it would be nice to have a transgender day of invisibility, for a change.
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Salvation
Written by R. Scott Clark |
Saturday, February 18, 2023
The social gospellers taught that we may and must “save” ourselves “through love.” For Machen, however, such a doctrine was just “semi-Pelagianism.” For the social gospellers, the hope of the world is to “apply the principles of Jesus” to it, as though He were a mere teacher or prophet. For Machen, however, the “redeeming work of Christ which is at the center of the Bible is applied to the individual soul . . . by the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, we “find no permanent hope for society in the mere ‘principles of Jesus’ or the like, but we find it in the new birth of individual souls.”World War I turned Europe on its head, brought crashing down the optimism of the Enlightenment, and ushered in post-Enlightenment Europe. In America, however, young people undeterred by the war set about attempting to bring to earth the kingdom of God through social action. They called their message “the social gospel,” and its principal preacher was Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), who endeavored to address the poverty he found in Hell’s Kitchen (in New York) by preaching a “gospel” of social improvement and working toward bringing about the kingdom of God on the earth through social action. This was their definition of salvation.
J. Gresham Machen (1881–1936), however, also survived World War I and defended a different doctrine, which held that the visible church represents Christ’s spiritual kingdom on the earth and that Christians exist in what John Calvin had called a “twofold kingdom” (Institutes 3.19.15). For Machen, salvation was too grand an idea to be brought utterly to earth. He recognized that Christianity was “certainly a life,” but how was it produced? The social gospellers thought that they could bring about that life “by exhortation,” Machen wrote, but such an approach always proves “powerless.” “The strange thing about Christianity was,” he explained, “that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.” He recognized that such an approach seems “impractical.” It is what Paul called “ ‘the foolishness of the message.’ . . . It seemed foolish to the ancient world, and it seems foolish to liberal teachers today.” Nevertheless, the “effects of it appear even in this world. Where the most eloquent exhortation fails, the simple story of an event succeeds; the lives of men are transformed by a piece of news.”
The social gospel reduced the human problem to material poverty. For Machen, a student of Paul and an Augustinian, our problem is much more profound. In his 1935 radio addresses, he explained that sin is much more than “antisocial conduct,” as the progressives and the social gospellers had it. The true definition of sin is “disobedience to a command of God.” It is, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism so wonderfully says, “any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God” (Q&A 14).
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The Remarkable Story of Katharina von Bora, wife to Martin Luther
While the marriage didn’t begin as a standard love match, a true romance of mutual respect and affection soon grew between Martin and Katharina. Martin, at times, consulted her on church matters and allowed her to deal with his publishers. Because she oversaw the household, Martin could devote his time to the church and the University. He developed a sincere respect for his wife and loved her deeply.
On Easter Day, April 4, 1523, Leonhard Köppe smuggled a group of nuns who were hiding in herring barrels out of a Cistercian convent in Nimbschen. One of these nuns was Katharina von Bora, who later became the wife of Martin Luther.
Katharina had lived in convents since she was very young, placed there by her parents who were too poor to supply her dowry. Unhappy there, Katharina found both the opportunity and inspiration to escape when the Protestant Reformation began to spread. She and several other nuns secretly contacted Martin Luther and asked for help to escape the monastery. Luther obliged.
At first, Luther and Köppe attempted to convince the nuns’ families to take them back. Their families refused, possibly because it was against canon law to take in an escaped nun. Instead, they found employment for as many as possible, and several others were married off to students training for the pastorate.
After two years, only Katharina remained. After neither of the two potential marriages arranged for her worked out, she told Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Luther’s friend and coworker, that she would only marry him or Luther. No one else.
Luther was reluctant to marry. After all, he had been declared an imperial outlaw at the Diet of Worms (1521), so anyone who found him could legally kill him. Understandably, he expected his life would end burned at the stake as a heretic. Nonetheless, he eventually agreed to marry Katharina in a small, private ceremony on June 13, 1525.
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