Kristallnacht & Christabel- The wickedness of hatred

Today is the 85^th anniversary of Kristallnacht [the Night of the Broken Glass] the horrible night in Nazi German when Nazis destroyed Jewish businesses, synagogues, and beat up and killed many Jewish people. There is a movie, Christabel, that I always think of when I hear a reference to Kristallnacht &, The movie is based on the true story of Christabel Bielenberg, and taken from her memoir, “The Past is Myself: Looking Back on the Years 1932-45.”

Christabel, although British married a German lawyer and they lived in Germany during the Nazi years. Her husband was part of the underground that attempted to kill Hitler and was imprisoned in Ravensbrūck. Many of their friends were hanged for their righteous attempt. In the movie I first saw on PBS, although not in the one I own there is a poignant scene where Christabel is in a church on Christmas Eve, they are singing Silent Night, at the same time the viewer is seeing one of the friends being hanged. But this is not why the reference to Kirstallnacht always reminds me of the movie.

There is a scene where Christabel and her husband are returning home from a concert and they come upon a street filled with violence—windows of shops broken, Jewish people being harassed and beaten, buildings on fire. They then know that it is time to act—they must be against the Nazis. They must, although underground, plot to end the horror happening in Germany. Violence in this case is a signal that complacency must end.

As I listen to the various videos of protests against Israel and the Jewish people, and watch the videos of protesters tearing down pictures of those who have been kidnapped by Hamas, I am aware that there is a great deal of ignorance about Israel and the history of the Jews and the Holocaust. One young person being questioned suggests that if the Jewish state is annihilated the Jews just go back to whatever country they came from undoubtedly not realizing that the Jews were chased out of those countries.

 And many of the protestors sound as though they have never heard of the Holocaust or perhaps don’t understand how it was that 6 million Jews were murdered because of the lies told about them.  But at the same time there is a strong whiff of ugliness, wickedness to be exact, in their comments.  Idealism (the attempt to be altruistic or always choose the good), too often turns to wickedness when it is centered in secular paganism; that is a kind of religious bent that is centered in natural super naturalism, a materialism that leaves out the image of God in humanity. So one makes their own decision about right and wrong, emotion is the main authority. What is called good may in reality be evil. Such as celebrating the killing of children and babies, the mutilation and burning of families in the name of helping Palestinians. Right and wrong, good and evil have been turned upside down.

The people I wrote about above, the Bielenbergs and their friends, saw evil and knew evil when they saw it. At first they didn’t realize the enormity of the crimes committed against Jews and others, but their knowledge grew and their courage. After the war they moved to Ireland and the lawyer became a farmer. But this is the scary part: too many today see the evil and think it is good. May there be mercy from a gracious God to fall on us in torrents.

The Traumatizing Stories that Break the Heart

                                                                                         

They say it helps to write, but this is hard, hard to write. Because I often write about anti-Semitism, I have read many of the posts on what happened on October 7^th in Israel. I’ve watched many of the videos. I am traumatized. How does anyone deal with the nightmare image of a family where the father has his eye gorged out, the mother has a breast cut off, the small boy has his fingers cut off and the young daughter has her foot cut off and then they are burned alive.

I read the story of the family of three, a mother and father and their 16-year-old son. The father and mother laid on their son to protect him. He lived. The last thing he remembers from his parents is his father saying, “my arm is gone.” And his mother dying. This struck me very hard because two summers ago I broke my arm at the point where it fits into the shoulder blade, and when I got up from my fall I could see my arm sticking out from my body but could not feel it or control it. I had to take my left hand and reach out to my right arm and move it next to me. I was terrified and how awful one must feel as they are dying to have lost the arm that was probably trying to protect a son.

And the mother who was dying; I watched my husband die with Alzheimer’s. I read all the signs to look for—the breathing is one. As he died he began to breathe with short puffy breaths that one could hear.  And those would probably have been the last sounds of a mother given to her son. My anger and sorrow have not ended; probably will not end until eternity.  

Kevin D Williamson of The Dispatch wrote of how Israeli warriors were not meant to be models of goodness for journalist but were rather supposed to be protecting their people. That a nation’s job was to protect its people.

As a Christian my first duty is “to love my God with all my heart, with all my soul and with all my mind,” and my neighbor as myself—but a nation is called to protect its people before it protects any other. Carefully with concern but still protect its people. It seems too many with a misplaced understanding of history and yes with Jew hatred, with a warped understanding of their own prejudices and biases, believe that Israel is the only nation that should not protect its people.

The darkness that is falling over this world has always been here, it is the reptile hiding in the bushes, twining about the tree, calling out lies to many who allow their hearts to be bittered by anti-Semitism. Even when they smile one sees the hate and bitterness in the face of those who are tearing down the posters of the kidnapped Israelis. Their idealism has turned into a farce. Their activism has turned evil....

G.K. Chesterton in his book The Everlasting Man, with thankfulness that Rome had overcome Carthage, since it was a battle between Rome’s household gods and Carthage’s demons, is not aware when writing of the coming darkness of Nazi Germany. Chesterton explains the relationship of Carthage to Tyre and Sidon, and their god Moloch who could also be called Baal. He explains their method of worship was to throw babies into the great fire of Moloch. The Romans, Chesterton explains, would not understand nor would Chesterton’s contemporaries. He writes:

We can only realize the combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with chimney-top hats and mutton chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted alive.

Such evil returned with the Nazis and now with the Hamas warriors who also roasted a baby alive. There are surely those who are simply concerned about the welfare of Palestinian citizens but far too many are sinking into dark paganism, worshiping the god of anti-Semitism. When protesters won’t cry out against the butchery of Hamas, they stand not with Palestinians but with Hamas, with terrorist, with ancient evil.

Anti-Semitism-Killing People -Killing Our Souls

 by Viola Larson

Around forty years ago my husband and I attended Warehouse Ministries a church which was part of the Jesus Movement. The arts, painting, poetry, acting, etc., was a part of that ministry and one of their events was a play about Dietrich Bonhoeffer a German theologian, who was part of the Confessing Church during the Nazi years. He was one of the Christian martyrs killed by the Nazis toward the end of the war.  This was on my mind as I heard one of our Christian radio stations advertise a speaker with a “great message”; so I listened.  His message was that the Jews were the evilest group of all races and religions. Surprised and angry I called the station to ask about him and they gladly gave me his phone number. That was my first introduction to someone who was a holocaust denier. Thankfully he never spoke on that station again.

Later, folding clothes and watching TV on the Sacramento interfaith station I found they had a speaker whose program went on all day because he was free. The two ladies, one a Science of Mind pastor, the other a Seven Day Adventist, were using his program (for free) and did not know that he was an anti-Semite. He hid it by referring to the Jews as Kenites.  With the help of a Jewish professor at Sacramento State University he was removed from the station.

 I went on to write about these supposedly conservative anti-Semites believing that such racism was simply tied to deceived and deceiving fundamentalist although many were also involved in occultic beliefs. But later, belonging to the Presbyterian Church USA I discovered that progressives could also be deeply anti-Semitic. One organization in that denomination, The Israel, Palestine Mission Network, is simply as anti-Semitic as any of the conservative groups I have written about—publishing slick booklets that tell lies about the Jewish people in Israel.

So I have seen all these pockets of anti-Semitic groups here and there in the United States and elsewhere. But never have I thought that whole sections of our country and other countries, on college campuses, in large cities, in newsrooms with their coverage, would hate the Jewish people so much that they would riot, send death threats, tear down posters of kidnapped Jewish children and praise the terrorist, Hamas, who tortured, murdered, raped women and burned families alive. This is the scourge of Nazism rising again, not in one country, but in the whole world and horribly in our own country.

This kind of hate is deeply evil, like the blackness of hell. It will turn our whole country sour and if we do not stand against it deaden our souls. C.S. Lewis had some dire words to say about how we are either becoming splendid beings or the monsters of nightmares.  Dante places the devil in his lowest circle of hell frozen in ice—and that is perhaps the gravest transformation—so frozen in time and place because we no longer care about any other being but self. I have seen videos of those tearing down posters of kidnapped children, and they are frozen unable to feel shame or sorrow, they can only smirk or sneer.  They are well on their way to finality in that condition. Lord have mercy on all of us.