More fun from Pharyngula: Which books were banned in Nazi Germany?

[trotsky]

Those atheist/Darwinist Nazis surely must have banned religious books and replaced them with Darwin's works, right?

Oops. Try the reverse.

http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/documents.htm

Prinzipelles zur Säuberung der öffentlichen Bücherein (Principles for the Cleansing of Public Libraries)

...

6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

...

c) All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Any Jewish author and poet.

Modern art
Jazz and modern music
Modern architecture

[trotsky]

2. All true, however I should have specified in my OP...

this is a continuation of criticism against Ratzinger's recent statement that the Nazis were atheists trying to remove god from public life.

[DeSwiss]

3. K&R

- In addition to aiding and abetting the commission of the felony crime of pedophilia and criminal conspiracy to cover-up said crimes while perverting the course of justice -- Pope Ratzy has also become positively famous for his attempts at re-writing history:

"The nations of Latin America and the Caribbean were silently longing to receive Christ as their savior. He was "the unknown God" whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it. Colonization by Spain and Portugal was not a conquest, but rather an adoption of the Indians through baptism, making their cultures fruitful and purifying them. Accordingly, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture." ~ http://www.thestar.com/News/article/213883">Pope Benedict XVI May 13, 2007 - Inaugural Session of the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean

[hatrack]

4. Wow, he actually SAID that?

That quote is one of the biggest steaming piles of shit I've ever read. Stunning.

[DeSwiss]

9. Not only did these piles......

...issue forth from his mouth but they did so while he was visiting the "longing faithful" in their own country. And he further ignored their complaints about his comments later, because.... well because he's the Pope and he knows what's best. For everybody. And because he's tight with god.

- And besides, he'd never lie. Right???

[trotsky]

5. Hey, a few DUers have become pope Ratzi's biggest fans as of late.

I wonder what they think of this? Too bad they are certain to ignore it.

[DeSwiss]

10. Yes, I'm familiar with many of the Pope's apoligists here.....

...most of them I have on IGNORE. I did so after coming so close to death last year that I decided later to no longer suffer fools gladly. Well actually I never suffered fools gladly, but I did lower the bar. For my health.

However, they can ignore the facts all they want, but it won't change them. Sticking their collective heads into a hole in the ground is a good way to get your butt kicked. Figuratively speaking, of course. Would that the Catholics weren't so fastidious with their record-keeping and they could have denied it ever happened altogether. But the smoking gun documents undermine Pope Ratzy's lies and his follower's ability to cop-out completely.

The below Papal edicts are little more than "licenses" granted by the Catholic Church to Spain and Portugal and to the Conquistadors who undertook The Church's little dirty work in order that they could receive their cut of the takings. It was a religious authorization for the theft of the riches and the lands of "pagans" on pain of death. Of course not to be totally unfeeling, The Church gave the people they conquered a choice - either convert to Catholicism or face slavery or death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum_Diversas">"Papal Bull Dum Diversas"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanus_Pontifex">"Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera">"The Papal Bull Dudum siquidem" (AKA - The Inter caetera and/or The Papal Bull of 1493 also referred to as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513">El Requiremento)

Excerpt from El Requiremento:

"Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the ruler and superior of the whole world,

But if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their highnesses; we shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him: and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513#Text_of_the_document">MORE

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

- And to hell with all the rest......

[struggle4progress]

6. Since the Nazi state had essentially no real law except decree, and since

the entire administrative and legal apparatus was controlled completely by the party, one should interpret a phrase such as "All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion" as signifying whatever the Nazis wanted to claim it signified -- as suggested by vague wording like "things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk." That is, such a phrase, on one of these lists, may simply indicate a spin given when certain materials were banned

A few others examples of Nazi bans on printed materials:

The Jehovah Witnesses were persecuted almost from the beginning, and it was illegal to possess their publications
In 1936, the Nazis shut down 2/3 of the Catholic diocesan newspapers, forbid publication of pastoral letters, and (under threat of shutting down the remaining papers) further consolidated control over those media
The Catholic Youth organization, Quickborn, had a national journal dedicated to theology and culture Die Schildgenossen, under the leadership Romano Guardini; Quickborn was shut down and the journal was banned

[The Magistrate]

7. They Voted For It,Sir: Sometimes You Get What You Want....

It was the votes of the Catholic Center Party that put Hitler's Enabling Decree over the top in the Reichstag, and established Nazi dictatorship as legal government in Germany.

[struggle4progress]

13. Perhaps for US a good analogy to Germany in March 1933 is the period

immediately after 9/11, since all of this occurs immediately after the Reichstag fire: Bush immediately got his PATRIOT act, and if the third plane had damaged the Capitol I suspect he might have gotten much more; and if moreover Bush had arrested a number of Representatives (as the Nazis then arrested communist and Social Democratic deputies), the Congressional mood could have been even worse. A lot of us, of course, were gravely alarmed by the hysteria and promptly obtained copies of the PATRIOT act to read critically, but Congress itself was not nearly so careful -- and this is, unfortunately, not too uncommon for such groups of politicians

Most of us naturally like to think that we would have been in the opposition, had we been there, but Who would I really have been if I had been someone else in a different time and place? is an imponderable and nonsensical metaphysical query: the best we can do, some seventy-five years later, is carefully to scrutinize the era and hope to understand the mechanisms well enough to avoid some repetitions of the serious mistakes made by others

The former Catholic Center Party Chancellor, Franz von Papen, probably played a significant role in the Catholic Center's strategy. Papen, who had been appointed Vice-Chancellor when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, seems to have believed at the time that Hitler was thoroughly boxed in and would last only a few months. Papen was quite conservative, and an aristocrat, but several of his staff were considered threatening enough to Nazi goals to warrant murder on the Night of Long Knives in 1934, at which time Papen resigned as Vice-Chancellor. Other of his staff members ended in concentration camps. Papen himself continued to serve the Nazi state in a diplomatic capacity and was tried at Nuremberg but acquitted (though the court explicitly noted a moral failure). His age is probably instructive: Papen was born in 1879; while he himself would not remember Bismarck's kulturkampf against German Catholics, or the associated persecutions and deportations of Catholics in the 1870s, the generation that educated him and his contemporaries remembered it well and was shaped by it; many Catholic Germans of Papen's generations were taught from childhood that whatever disagreements they might have with the government, they should always be good German patriots

[onager]

14. Hey, you forgot that all-important CONTEXT...

...for the kulturkampf.

Until the mid-19th century, the Catholic Church was still a political power.

WAS? It still is a political power. Along with being a Fake Sovereign State, thanks to that Evil Atheist Benito Mussolini. But I digress...

The Pope's Papal States were supported by France but ceased to exist as an indirect result of the Franco-Prussian War. The Catholic Church still had a strong influence on many parts of life, though, even in Bismarck's Protestant Prussia.

In the newly founded German Empire, Bismarck sought to bolster the power of the secular state and reduce the political and social influence of the Roman Catholic Church by instituting political control over Church activities...

Since the Protestant reformation, the German states were divided into Protestant states in the North and Roman Catholic states in the South. When the German Empire was founded in 1871...Bismarck saw the addition of the southern states (especially Catholic Bavaria) as a possible threat to the Empire's stability...

Moreover, Bismarck had deliberately formed the German Empire against interference from Austria, a more powerful Catholic country...

Bismarck's attempts to restrict the power of the Catholic Church, represented in politics by the Catholic Centre Party, were not entirely successful. In the 1874 elections, these forces doubled their representation in the parliament. Needing to counter the Social Democratic Party, Bismarck softened his stance, especially with the election of the new Pope Leo XIII in 1878...

No one however was killed and few were injured, as Bismarck did not seek to extinguish Catholicism in his land, but rather sought to assimilate the Polish peasants and saw international Catholicism as an enemy of the "still fragile German Reich".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulturkampf

[struggle4progress]

16. I doubt if Bismarck's political philosophy would have been much more to my liking

than the general political stances of the Catholic church in the 1870s

[The Magistrate]

19. The Old Fella Might Have Surprised You, Sir

He is pretty much the father of the pension and health insurance structures we see in Europe today....

[struggle4progress]

20. That might be more a tribute to the organized power of the German working class

than to Bismarck. "King and Country" is not a progressive political view, nor is "Iron and Blood" an especially pleasant political strategy. The man was an extremely conservative warmonger and attempted to stifle liberal, progressive, and socialist movements whenever possible, by whatever means were expedient, including press censorship, though he apparently knew when it would be useful to compromise with his opponents

[The Magistrate]

21. Co-Option Was Certainly Part Of It, Sir

A man deserves some credit, in my view, for having the wit to see people feeling a greater security to their lives, and knowing that owes to laws of their country, will be better workers, and more reliable patriots, than otherwise.

We seem to be embarking nowadays on a grand experiment in the opposite direction here. The greatest problem any nation ever faces is purblind idiocy setting in in its ruling classes.

[trotsky]

22. The pope favors censorship, and stifles many liberal/progressive movements.

Why do you ally yourself with him and defend him?

[The Magistrate]

15. Social Democrats, Sir, Voted Against, And Many Died For Doing So

They were the secular types, many of them atheists.

The Catholic Party voted for the decree, and did so in a combination of anti-Communist delusion and craven hope of favors from the man they gave unbridled power to. Standing against this world in the name of and hope of the next does not seem to have occurred to any as a basis for action in crisis.

The fact remains the Catholic Church put Hitler over the top as dictator. It did so in full knowledge of what it was doing, and has never taken proper account of its institutional guilt in the matter. The spectacle of a pope at this late date, a pope of the most reactionary stamp, more to the right even than Pius, posturing as an enemy of Nazism, and attempting to smear his secular opponents today as kindred of the Nazis, is, put bluntly, a disgusting sight, though hardly, given this man's retrograde character in other matters, a surprising one.

This shabby September business you try is beneath contempt in serious discussion of Hitler's rise, and does not deserve engagement in the slightest.

[struggle4progress]

17. There were about 440 votes for the act, about 30 of which came from Catholic Center

The Nazis were already shutting down the Catholic press and sending stormtroops to disrupt Catholic Center rallies and beat up their speakers; some members of the Catholic Center thought they were receiving guarantees of non-interference in return for their vote; they soon learned that they had been played for fools, since the party was dissolved a few months later. You are of course correct to note that the Social Democrats and communists ended up in concentration camps, but so did thousands of Catholic Center activists in the 1933 wave of arrests of opponents to the Nazis

Catholic Center Party (Zentrum, or, Z)
... While it had a left-liberal trade union wing, and a right-conservative nationalist wing, the weight of its support placed the party at the center of the political spectrum. The Center Party was vital to the stability of the Republic, and it was a part of every Weimar government. Its leaders served as chancellors for nine administrations and were included in each of the twenty-one cabinets that ruled during the fourteen years of the Republic ... http://www2.facinghistory.org/Campus/weimar.nsf/FormPathDocuments/08C1D876685DEC6485256D17000198D2?opendocument#catholic

[The Magistrate]

18. And They Provided The Margin, Sir

No one else's vote was in doubt going in. History's verdict has long been rendered, and is quite clear. The Church sat down to sup with the devil; that they neglected to measure the spoon only adds the charge of foolishness to the fact of craven cowardice. They thought they had a bargain to remain a separate power in the Nazi state, the Vatican reflected that at least Hitler was a stalwart opponent of Bolshevism, and underneath it all was the institutional Jew-hate that has been a leading mark of Catholicism and Christianity ion Europe since its inception.

[trotsky]

8. Perhaps you could answer a simple question.

Do you agree with the pope when he describes WW2 Germany as "a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society"?

[TZ]

11. Funny how the Nazi's never went around smashing and burning Churches

But they had NO PROBLEM doing that to Synogogues hmmm. BTW, It seems like the Nazi Apologist Pope knows nothing about the events of KristalNacht or he would not say such bullshit.

[trotsky]

12. Well it's quite simple, you see.

Super smart people aren't fooled by what the Nazis actually *did*. They know exactly what the Nazis *really wanted to do* despite all actual evidence to the contrary. Burning synagogues was a literal smokescreen for their true mission to destroy churches by, uh, not destroying them. Yeah, like that.

[trotsky]

23. Did you have time to answer my simple question yet?

Just wondering. Thanks!