Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes. The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror is a superb read. He deals with a subject overlooked by most historians.
Totalitarian Political Religions
51) Communist birth dedication liturgy: “We cover thee not with a cross, not with water and prayer—the inheritance of slavery and darkness—but with our Red banner of struggle and labour, pierced by bullets and torn by bayonets . . .We bid the parents of the newborn child: bring up they child to be a devoted fighter for the liberation of the toilers of the entire world, an advocate of science and labor, an enemy of darkness and ignorance.”
57) Mussolini: “Fascism is not only a party, it is a regime, it is not only a regime, but a faith, it is not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the labouring masses of the Italian people.”
75) Stalin-era poem:
95) Goebbels in “quasi-autobiographical novel Michael”: “It is almost immaterial what we believe in, so long as we believe in something.” (similar to Madame de Stael)
116) “The Nazis intended to strip Christmas of its Christian associations, turning it into a general celebration of goodwill and advent of the New Year, a goal pursued nowadays in Britain mainly by local government.”
Churches in an Age of Dictators
127) Miguel Primo de Rivera, ruler in Spain 1923-1930: “Had I known in my youth that I would one day have to govern this country, I would have spent more time studying, and less fornicating.”
165) “Fascist enthusiasm for the ancient Roman Empire grated with a Church that liked to stamp such sites of pagan barbarism as the Colosseum with proclamations of its gospel of universal love.”
Catechism of fascist youth movement parody of Christian liturgy: “I believe in Rome the Eternal. . .”
180) “Protestantism was generally more prone to worrying about seeming out of step with scientising modernism—and other secular trends—than a Catholicism steeped in Natural Law doctrines, and in which the autonomy and integrity of the family was so central.” (discussion on Nazi sterilization policy)
Apocalypse 1939-1945
226) “When in March 1940 Müller informed his Vatican contacts of the date of the May offensive in the West. Pius immediately passed that informed in encrypted form to the nuncios in Brussels and the Hague who relayed it to London and Paris as well as to the governments directly threatened.”
229) “A decade earlier, the papacy had condemned eugenic sterilization with the US—rather than Germany—in mind.”
244) Leon Berard, Vichy ambassador to the Vatican, September 2, 1941 report: “There is a fundamental antithesis between Church doctrines and ‘racist’ theories . . . Every human being has an immortal soul which is upheld by the same grace and is summoned to the same salvation as all other souls . . .”
275) Turkish government offered to ship Jews to Haifa in 1943
The Imposition of Communism after 1945
341) Czeslaw Milosz: “Churches were the only places that could not be penetrated by official lies. . .”
Time of the Toy Trumpets (1960s)
345) 1955-59 highest church membership in Europe
354) “. . .religious parents only have a fifty-fifty chance of replicating their beliefs among their children, . . .”
355) “The Churches and the more semi-detached tribe of theologians often responded to rapid changes in the wider world by trying to assimilate secular cultural and social enthusiasms.”
“Centuries-old liturgies were abandoned in favour of ‘happy clappy’ church services, . . .”
Northern Ireland 1968-2005
380) “The fact that both antagonistic communities in Northern Ireland have a very developed sense of their own victimhood partly explains why they have such difficulty in understanding the victim status claimed by their opponents, a pathology that bedevils the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Churches and the Collapse of European Marxist Leninism 1970-1990
418) “It has become fashionable to deprecate the role of ethics, religion and people power in tha anti-Communist European revolutions.”
422) Commenting on Reagan and Thatcher: “Bother leaders were highly informed about eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, relying on the knowledge of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes, rather than the dazzling political insights of Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Pinter and the entire field of academic international relations.”
423) Commenting on Leszek Kolakowski in Currents of Marxism: “Why, he asked, bother with a substitute religion when Christianity provided a real one?”
430) “We want God, we want God, we want God in the family circle, we want God in books, in schools, we want God in government orders, we want God, we want God.” Crowd responding to Pope John Paul’s mass in Warsaw, 1979.
436) Bishop Otto Spulbeck of Meissen (1956): “We live in a house, whose structure we have not built, who basic foundations we even consider false. We gladly contribute, living worthy and Christian lives. But we cannot build a new storey on this house, since we consider its foundations false. We thus live in a diaspora not only in terms of our Church, but also in terms of our state.”
438) “The chief effect of attempts to ‘build socialism’ in the GDR was that people upped and left.”
442) October 1958 Karl Barth “wrote an extraordinary letter to Protestant pastors in the GDR, claiming that since West Germany was in the grip of former Nazis and NATO warmongers, they should have no hesitation in giving their loyalty to the East German Communist regime.”
Europe after 9/11
465) Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services had “fitful contacts” with al Qaeda
467) On Clinton administration response to terrorism: “Each possible response was also
‘lawyered to death’ by those anxious about collateral casualties.”
471) “Militant Islam shares something of the cultural pessimism of nineteenth-century Western critics of mass urban industrial society.
473) Religion “provides a warm hearth for people in a vast and highly mobile
society. . ..”
474) Regarding Rocco Buttiglione’s appointment as EU justice commissioner and the controversy surrounding “one European politician who did not dissemble his conservative religious convictions. . ..” He “was the subject of a gay cum secularist media witch-hunt which refused to acknowledge that . . . he would be as capable of separating his private beliefs from his official brief as he had been in every earlier appointment. That the political thugs and gangsters of the ETA, IRA-Sinn Fein and various neo-Fascists are represented in the European parliament is apparently deemed less shocking than the appointment of a single Catholic professor.”
475) Draft 2004 European Union Constitution: “This document grandly traced Europe’s ethos and telos from Thucydides to the Enlightenment. Vociferous objections from Italy, Poland, Span and pope John Paul II forced the drafters to concede the scantest reference to the continent’s fifteen centuries of Christianity.”
Aleksander Kwasniewski (atheist president of Poland): “There is no excuse for making references to ancient Greece and Rome, and to the Enlightenment, without making reference to the Christian values which are so important to the development of Europe.”
“Liberal and secular politicians, . . ., decided to omit a religion that made a major contribution to the dignity and sacred identity of autonomous individuals regardless of their ethnic origins, as the greatness of one God paradoxically lessened human dependence. Its transcendental focus has set bounds to what the powerful could not or, more importantly, should not do by providing moral exemplars of good kingship and evil tyranny.”
“As the British socialist politician Roy Hattersley, pointedly asked, when have committed rationalists ever operated soup-kitchens, hotlines for the suicidal or hostels for crack addicts?”
476) Dutch immigration authorities produced a video “to convey to immigrants the quintessence of ‘Dutchness’. This consists of snippets from the life of William of Orange, tulips and windmills, naked sunbathers and a gay wedding.”
477) “In other words, the call for sharia-conforming banks is part of a strategy for expanding Islam’s space within the host country in conscious rejection of any notion of accommodation.
478) British Muslims: “often unsympathetic to the victimhood of other victims.” (commenting on reactions to Holocaust Day in England)
479) Turkey: “. . .one of the few countries in modern Europe capable of fighting a war.”
480) “The voices of militant rationalism and scientistic stridency have become shriller, with Darwinism’s high prophet, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, behaving like the hotter sort of seventeenth-century English Protestant in his zeal to mock the faith of people who believe in miracles.”
482) The United States does a better job of assimilating immigrants when compared to Europe: “Does the absence of a welfare state diminish the opportunities for resentments about how the cake is shared out?
483) “No measures will appease Europe’s Islamist radicals. . .”
Totalitarian Political Religions
51) Communist birth dedication liturgy: “We cover thee not with a cross, not with water and prayer—the inheritance of slavery and darkness—but with our Red banner of struggle and labour, pierced by bullets and torn by bayonets . . .We bid the parents of the newborn child: bring up they child to be a devoted fighter for the liberation of the toilers of the entire world, an advocate of science and labor, an enemy of darkness and ignorance.”
57) Mussolini: “Fascism is not only a party, it is a regime, it is not only a regime, but a faith, it is not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the labouring masses of the Italian people.”
75) Stalin-era poem:
- And so—everywhere. In the workshops, in the mines
In the Red Army, the kindergarten
He is watching. . .
You look at his portrait and it’s as if he knows
Your work—and weights it
You’ve worked badly—his brows lower
But when you’ve worked well, he smiles in his moustache.
95) Goebbels in “quasi-autobiographical novel Michael”: “It is almost immaterial what we believe in, so long as we believe in something.” (similar to Madame de Stael)
116) “The Nazis intended to strip Christmas of its Christian associations, turning it into a general celebration of goodwill and advent of the New Year, a goal pursued nowadays in Britain mainly by local government.”
Churches in an Age of Dictators
127) Miguel Primo de Rivera, ruler in Spain 1923-1930: “Had I known in my youth that I would one day have to govern this country, I would have spent more time studying, and less fornicating.”
165) “Fascist enthusiasm for the ancient Roman Empire grated with a Church that liked to stamp such sites of pagan barbarism as the Colosseum with proclamations of its gospel of universal love.”
Catechism of fascist youth movement parody of Christian liturgy: “I believe in Rome the Eternal. . .”
180) “Protestantism was generally more prone to worrying about seeming out of step with scientising modernism—and other secular trends—than a Catholicism steeped in Natural Law doctrines, and in which the autonomy and integrity of the family was so central.” (discussion on Nazi sterilization policy)
Apocalypse 1939-1945
226) “When in March 1940 Müller informed his Vatican contacts of the date of the May offensive in the West. Pius immediately passed that informed in encrypted form to the nuncios in Brussels and the Hague who relayed it to London and Paris as well as to the governments directly threatened.”
229) “A decade earlier, the papacy had condemned eugenic sterilization with the US—rather than Germany—in mind.”
244) Leon Berard, Vichy ambassador to the Vatican, September 2, 1941 report: “There is a fundamental antithesis between Church doctrines and ‘racist’ theories . . . Every human being has an immortal soul which is upheld by the same grace and is summoned to the same salvation as all other souls . . .”
275) Turkish government offered to ship Jews to Haifa in 1943
The Imposition of Communism after 1945
341) Czeslaw Milosz: “Churches were the only places that could not be penetrated by official lies. . .”
Time of the Toy Trumpets (1960s)
345) 1955-59 highest church membership in Europe
354) “. . .religious parents only have a fifty-fifty chance of replicating their beliefs among their children, . . .”
355) “The Churches and the more semi-detached tribe of theologians often responded to rapid changes in the wider world by trying to assimilate secular cultural and social enthusiasms.”
“Centuries-old liturgies were abandoned in favour of ‘happy clappy’ church services, . . .”
Northern Ireland 1968-2005
380) “The fact that both antagonistic communities in Northern Ireland have a very developed sense of their own victimhood partly explains why they have such difficulty in understanding the victim status claimed by their opponents, a pathology that bedevils the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Churches and the Collapse of European Marxist Leninism 1970-1990
418) “It has become fashionable to deprecate the role of ethics, religion and people power in tha anti-Communist European revolutions.”
422) Commenting on Reagan and Thatcher: “Bother leaders were highly informed about eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, relying on the knowledge of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes, rather than the dazzling political insights of Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Pinter and the entire field of academic international relations.”
423) Commenting on Leszek Kolakowski in Currents of Marxism: “Why, he asked, bother with a substitute religion when Christianity provided a real one?”
430) “We want God, we want God, we want God in the family circle, we want God in books, in schools, we want God in government orders, we want God, we want God.” Crowd responding to Pope John Paul’s mass in Warsaw, 1979.
436) Bishop Otto Spulbeck of Meissen (1956): “We live in a house, whose structure we have not built, who basic foundations we even consider false. We gladly contribute, living worthy and Christian lives. But we cannot build a new storey on this house, since we consider its foundations false. We thus live in a diaspora not only in terms of our Church, but also in terms of our state.”
438) “The chief effect of attempts to ‘build socialism’ in the GDR was that people upped and left.”
442) October 1958 Karl Barth “wrote an extraordinary letter to Protestant pastors in the GDR, claiming that since West Germany was in the grip of former Nazis and NATO warmongers, they should have no hesitation in giving their loyalty to the East German Communist regime.”
Europe after 9/11
465) Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services had “fitful contacts” with al Qaeda
467) On Clinton administration response to terrorism: “Each possible response was also
‘lawyered to death’ by those anxious about collateral casualties.”
471) “Militant Islam shares something of the cultural pessimism of nineteenth-century Western critics of mass urban industrial society.
473) Religion “provides a warm hearth for people in a vast and highly mobile
society. . ..”
474) Regarding Rocco Buttiglione’s appointment as EU justice commissioner and the controversy surrounding “one European politician who did not dissemble his conservative religious convictions. . ..” He “was the subject of a gay cum secularist media witch-hunt which refused to acknowledge that . . . he would be as capable of separating his private beliefs from his official brief as he had been in every earlier appointment. That the political thugs and gangsters of the ETA, IRA-Sinn Fein and various neo-Fascists are represented in the European parliament is apparently deemed less shocking than the appointment of a single Catholic professor.”
475) Draft 2004 European Union Constitution: “This document grandly traced Europe’s ethos and telos from Thucydides to the Enlightenment. Vociferous objections from Italy, Poland, Span and pope John Paul II forced the drafters to concede the scantest reference to the continent’s fifteen centuries of Christianity.”
Aleksander Kwasniewski (atheist president of Poland): “There is no excuse for making references to ancient Greece and Rome, and to the Enlightenment, without making reference to the Christian values which are so important to the development of Europe.”
“Liberal and secular politicians, . . ., decided to omit a religion that made a major contribution to the dignity and sacred identity of autonomous individuals regardless of their ethnic origins, as the greatness of one God paradoxically lessened human dependence. Its transcendental focus has set bounds to what the powerful could not or, more importantly, should not do by providing moral exemplars of good kingship and evil tyranny.”
“As the British socialist politician Roy Hattersley, pointedly asked, when have committed rationalists ever operated soup-kitchens, hotlines for the suicidal or hostels for crack addicts?”
476) Dutch immigration authorities produced a video “to convey to immigrants the quintessence of ‘Dutchness’. This consists of snippets from the life of William of Orange, tulips and windmills, naked sunbathers and a gay wedding.”
477) “In other words, the call for sharia-conforming banks is part of a strategy for expanding Islam’s space within the host country in conscious rejection of any notion of accommodation.
478) British Muslims: “often unsympathetic to the victimhood of other victims.” (commenting on reactions to Holocaust Day in England)
479) Turkey: “. . .one of the few countries in modern Europe capable of fighting a war.”
480) “The voices of militant rationalism and scientistic stridency have become shriller, with Darwinism’s high prophet, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, behaving like the hotter sort of seventeenth-century English Protestant in his zeal to mock the faith of people who believe in miracles.”
482) The United States does a better job of assimilating immigrants when compared to Europe: “Does the absence of a welfare state diminish the opportunities for resentments about how the cake is shared out?
483) “No measures will appease Europe’s Islamist radicals. . .”
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