Dear David F.,

As stated in 'The New KGB,' :

"There is no dispute about the enormity of Hitler's
Holocaust. But it is equally important to be as
aware of the accomplishments of the Soviet secret police,
which brought death to at least four times as many
Russians, Poles, Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians,
Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Gypsies, and Romanians, as
Hitler did in his eleven years as a leader of the
"1,000-year Reich..."

Mention should also be made that there were also,
numerous courageous men and women who refused to
participate in the subjugation and destruction of
the targeted groups and individuals. There were
Christians who died in their attempts to save Jews,
there were Jews who interceded with their lives
to save persecuted Christians. They died, some
along with their entire families, or accepted their
fates in concentration camps rather than betray
their fellow men. Some are known, but most perished
and are known only to God.

These heroes embody human nobility in its highest form
and stand as beacons in the other wise bleak history
of World War II.

Among those who, out of greed or cowardice, chose to
collaborate with the evil minions of the NKVD (KGB)
and the Gestapo were Christians, Jews, Germans and
Russians, members of all nations caught in the
merciless war. No faith, no nationality, no race was
free of cowards or collaborators. No group was spared
from killers and traitors in their midst.

While half of the criminals, the Nazis, have been pursued
all over the world for their crimes, the other half,
the communist criminals, were allowed to go free.

They were in effect given tacit permission to continue
the operation of their concentration camps to expand their
draconian systems to include psychiatric wards, thereby
raising torture, suppression, and murder to a science.

The fact that this process persisted was vividly disclosed to
the free world by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn in his book,
"The Gulag Archipelago."

For once I have to agree with Foxy. When it comes to sheer evil Stalin and his henchmen are the equal of Hitler.

Truly those on the Left who sought to deny or minimise Stalins' crimes may best be described as "useful idiots".

See:

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

Of course the useful idiots have outlived Lenin, Stalin and the system they built. There is never a shortage of useful idiots.

Dear Foxy and Stevenlmeyer,

We should consider not only the crimes of Stalin, but the crimes of the communist world. It is estimated in the "Black Book of Communism" that at least 100,000,000 people were murdered as a result of that ideology. The original Marxist criminal was not Stalin but Lenin. He restored the secret police,set up the first gulags, presided over the Cheka reign of terror etc. Stalin inherited a reign of terror which he amplified. Part of the emphasis on Stalin comes from Marxists such as the Trotzkyites who revere Lenin but want to portray Stalin as the evil man who hijacked a revolution rather than recognising that it was rotten to begin with.

However, the point of my post was not to whitewash the Communists. I didn't mention them because they were not relevant to the point.

The point was the lack of most Christians to understand the role of their religious teachings and their responsibility for the Holocaust. Like the Bolsheviks I feel there was much that was rotten in Christianity to begin with.

Although there were Christians who opposed it as there were communists who opposed Lenin and Stalin by and large the Holocaust was applied Christianity.

David f

I am not going to argue with you about whether the Holocaust is applied Christianity.

But, by the same logic, is honour killing, female genital mutilation and the oppression of women in Muslim countries generally and 9 / 11 applied Islam?

Is "Event Horizon" and the collapse of Lehman Brothers applied capitalism? Perhaps the last-named could best be described as "misapplied" capitalism."

To me the problem is totalitarian ideologies generally. Nazism and Communism are both examples of totalitarian ideologies as is contemporary Islam.

Whatever may have been the case in the past, taken as a whole, contemporary Christianity does not seem to me to have the characteristics of a totalitarian ideology. That being said, just as there are liberal strains in contemporary Islam so there are totalitarian strains in contemporary Christianity.

However, I stand by what I said. If we compare the character of (probably mythical) Jesus to the character of (probably mythical) Muhammad there is really no comparison. People who ignore this difference are revealing their own biases. That is not to excuse the horrible deeds perpetrated by individual Christians or to deny the good done by individual Muslims.

stevenlmeyer wrote: "But, by the same logic, is honour killing, female genital mutilation and the oppression of women in Muslim countries generally and 9/11 applied Islam?"

The 9/11 atrocity is applied Islam as its origins can be traced to the Jihadist mentality which sees the world outside of Islam as an entity which must be subjected to Islam. I agree with Severin that Islam can be tamed by merely being treated as another religion in a pluralistic society, but 9/11 definitely has its origins in Islamic theology and practice. It is therefore applied Islam.

However, I would not say honour killing, female genital mutilation and the oppression of women in Muslim countries are applied Islam. These attitudes predate Islam and are not found in all Islamic countries. The most populous Islamic country is Indonesia which, as far as I know, does not engage in these practices. In countries which practice female genital mutilation the practice is not restricted to Islamic believers and is cultural rather than Islamic.

From http://www.religioustolerance.org/fem_cirm.htm:

During 2007, FGM was banned in Eritrea. The Egyptian Health Ministry is seeking a law banning FGM in that country. That would leave Somalia, which lacks a central government, and Sudan as the two main countries where the practice will remain legal.

Were it considered Islamic it could not be banned in Egypt or Eritrea.

As far as the oppression of women goes it is only within the last hundred years that women have attained the right to vote in most western countries and have been regarded as other than male chattels.

Like female genital mutilation honor killings are not restricted to Muslims.

They indicate the low status of women and also perpetrated in India and Latin America by non-Muslims.

Christianity and Islam are missionary religions which share the belief that they have the truth and an obligation to spread that truth to unbelievers. Sometimes they murder nonbelievers. Where Christianity is tamed as it is in the secular democracies it is mostly reasonable. However, outside of those areas it can be as unreasonable as Jihadist Islam.

Dear David and Steven,

Thank You for your comments.

David, I had always assumed that
anti-Judaism was not an exclusive
Christian stance historically. I never
thought that Christian society alone has
marjinalised and oppressed Jews. I had
thought that Anti-Judaism preceded
Christianity.

I had also believed that Stalin and Hitler,
both despised and mistrusted democracies.
Both were not religious, and both.
abhorred Christians, Jews,
and organized religion.

As for the world ignoring the plight ot the
Jews. As I tried to point out, many Christians
tried to save Jews, and vice versa.

Let us also not forget the veil of silence that shrouded
the tragedy of Soviet occupied Nations in both the
East and the West. Let us not forget that the policy of
Western democracies, although formally was one of
non-recognition of the Soviet occupation, (for example,
of the Baltic Nations), the reality as their people found
out the hard way was a totally different story. Western
democracies did not want to offend the Soviet Union.
They closed their eyes and ears to those people's suffering.

This attitude prevailed up to the 1990s.
Lithuanian President V. Landsbergis, was told to
"Negotiate," that "unruly Lithuanians should respect and
follow orderly Soviet constitutional procedures."
And this, despite the fact that the world recognized
that Lithuania was illegally incorporated into the
Soviet Union.

In other words, that Lithuania was not seeking to
establish independence. It was seeking to restore an
independent nation that was illegally suppressed by a
foreign power and its army.

As President V. Landsbergis pointed out, "This was not
a legal nicety, but the basic and non-negotiable
premise of the March 11th 1990 declaration of independence."

But, President Landsbergis was still urged by the West,
"To find, a fair and objective way out!"
and as he continually confirmed, "the offered solutions were
neither fair nor objective."

After all, Lithuania (and other
nations) were betrayed by the agreement entered
into on Feb. 11th 1945,
at Yalta, by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, which sealed the
fate of all the nations of Central and Eastern Europe!