World War II

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

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning, His Life in a Nazi Concentration Camp in WWII

08/24/2021 Bruce Strom 6

Most books progress, with many chapters, each chapter tell different events, or different people, or different phases of life, usually progressing in some manner.  But the story in Viktor Frankl’s account of life in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II is one long dreary struggle for survival, unrelieved misery, each day running into the next, no weekends, for a precious few a monotonous few years until the war ended, for some many, many months of misery, for most, for nine out of ten Jews, they had left only days before they stripped for showers not of streams of life-giving water but showers spewing noxious fumes into gas chambers.

Viktor Frankl was one of the few of the ten percent whose first shower in Auschwitz sprayed life giving water over their naked bodies, one of the few who survived years of what was the most brutal slave society the world had ever seen, where formerly free men and women were torn away from their families, whose luggage and their jewelry and clothes were taken, even their hair shorn from them.  The Nazis even strove to steal from them their humanity, taking away their names, tattooing on their wrists the numbers they would be their new identity. […]

AntiSemitism

Christians Coping Under Fascism in WWII: Warnings for Christians Today

08/18/2020 Bruce Strom 4

You need a strong moral compass to do what is right.  Like Trump, Mussolini did not have a strong, he did not even have a weak moral compass, his compass had no morals at all.  Shortly before the start of World War II Mussolini started looking up to Hitler, Mussolini visited Berlin, Hitler visited Rome, and Mussolini started to value the values of Nazi Germany over the values of the Catholic Church.
Starting in 1938, the Fascist government under Mussolini started to implement many of the same anti-Semitic race laws that had earlier been passed in Nazi Germany.  In the years before 1938 the Catholic Church prospered in its partnership with Mussolini.  In the remaining years of Mussolini’s rule these relations were more and more strained.  The Pope had started hearing disturbing reports from his churches in Germany and across Europe, disturbing reports on the fate of the Jews and the disabled and dissenters, priests, and believers.
Pope Pius XI started to have regrets about his compromises with Mussolini, Pope Pius XI was elderly and in poor health, Pope Pius XI started to worry about his salvation. […]

AntiSemitism

Vatican II Declaration on Freedom of Religion, Embracing Democracy, Rejecting Fascism

08/18/2020 Bruce Strom 7

The Church Fathers of Vatican II believed that the Catholic guarantee of Religious Liberty was crucial for regaining the respect of many believers and the modern world.  History had evolved so that the Catholic Church was not on the side of truth regarding religious liberty.  From ancient times the Catholic Church was supported first by the Roman emperors starting with Constantine, and then the royalty of medieval Europe, but the absolute monarchies had all disappeared, giving way to dictators and republics, some of which were constitutional monarchies.  The Jacobism of the French Revolution and its grandchild communism were the enemies of the church, and the church supported fascism to combat communism.  World War II totally discredited fascism, now the Catholic Church saw democracy as the bulwark opposing communism, and religious liberty was a cornerstone for democracy. […]

Facism

Spanish Civil War and the Catholic Church

08/10/2020 Bruce Strom 3

In hindsight, the Republicans were doomed to lose the Civil War.  The Great Stalinist Purge Trials that decimated the officer corps and political and bureaucratic class of Russia occurred at the same time in history, being a lackey of Stalin was valued far more highly than professional competence.  This attitude also affected only intensified the inflexible ideology of the far-left in the Spanish Civil War, battles were valued more for their propaganda victories than for their actual military victories.  Strategic retreats were ideologically suspect, once you committed troops to a battle you never retreated, you just kept committing more troops until your armies were either victorious or all dead or captured.  And after all battles the dead always leave their guns and trucks and tanks behind. […]

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. […]

AntiSemitism

Mussolini’s Fascist Regime and the Catholic Church

07/21/2020 Bruce Strom 5

Although Mussolini’s totalitarian regime was brutal, and although Mussolini was not a practicing Catholic himself, he did cooperate with the Pope and the Catholic Church.  Mussolini did not enact Nazi style anti-Semitic race laws until he fell under the spell of Hitler after 1938.  Until then, the Catholics in the pews were not morally forced to choose between obeying the church and the state. […]

Facism

Vichy France, Blog 4, Christianity in Vichy France

01/02/2019 Bruce Strom 3

Hitler shrewdly allowed the rump Vichy regime nominal autonomy in the third of France that was unoccupied by German troops. Marshal Petain and the Vichy regime had moral legitimacy in the early years of the war. Since the church teaches that the political authorities should be respected, the regime had the support of the elderly bishops throughout the war. The British were urging the French to fight on, from North Africa if necessary, but the Church Hierarchy felt that an attitude of repentance and acceptance was more appropriate. The humiliation of the German conquest was seen as an opportunity for moral and religious transformation. […]