nazism

Five Minute History

Christians Surviving Fascism in World War II: What Were the Major Concerns of the Church?

09/02/2022 Bruce Strom 0

Many Christians are confused about what spiritual warfare means, but the definition of spiritual warfare in a relatively free modern society is simple: the spiritual battle is an eternal contest of who is going to influence whom. Will Christians push back on the godless influences surrounding them, slightly improving the virtues of those who they meet? Or will Christians allow the godless influences surrounding them to corrupt their love for their neighbor? Will their politics increase in them their love for their neighbor, or will their politics decrease their compassion for the poor, the sick, the immigrant, the unemployed, the imprisoned, the elderly, and those who do not look like them? […]

Ladder of Divine Ascent

St John Climacus: Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 5, Repentance, and Perseverance of Winston Churchill

04/20/2022 Bruce Strom 1

Repentance is not merely a quick apology to St John Climacus. Repentance is not quick in the Ladder of Divine Ascent. The first four rungs, where we renounce the world, detach ourselves from worldly things, become an exile and pilgrim from the affairs of the world, and with daily discipline internalize God’s will in holy obedience, these first four rungs prepare us for the rung of repentance. Repentance is more an attitude and a process than an event. An attitude of humility and repentance will prepare us for the slow ascent up the remaining twenty-five steps of the Ladder of Divine Ascent. Without daily heartfelt repentance we cannot continue the climb to a godly life. […]

Civil Rights

Comparing Martin Luther King’s Letter From the Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil

04/13/2022 Bruce Strom 7

Many Americans are either unaware or do not want to make the connection between the Jim Crow system of racial segregation and the Nazi ideology of the master race. In fact, the Jim Crow statutes enforcing segregation was used as precedents by the Nazi lawyers drafting the Nuremberg Jewish Race Laws soon after the Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. […]

AntiSemitism

How the Racist Jim Crow Laws Were Precedent for the Nazi Nuremberg Race Laws

10/02/2021 Bruce Strom 5

The Nazis were not simply demons who erupted out of some dark underworld to shatter what was good and just within the Western tradition, until they were put down by force of arms and the authentic humane and progressive values of Europe were restored. There were traditions of Western governments within which they worked. There were continuities between Nazism and what came before and after. There were examples and inspirations on which the Nazis drew, and American race law prominent among them. […]

AntiSemitism

Christians Under Hitler’s German Nazi Regime

07/26/2020 Bruce Strom 7

How could most Christians either tolerate or support the totalitarian Nazi regime of Hitler?  We cannot help but ask that question because we see bulging eyes of the skeletal concentration camp victims looking up in those black and white photographs, but we must realize that nobody in the prewar years could have predicted that the concentration camps would come to define Nazism.  In the prewar years many saw a reawakened national German pride and family values after the humiliation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. […]