Hitler utilized the democratic system during his rise to power. Why did so many Germans support him? One reason was that he promised to restore order in a country afflicted by gross disorder. In his early days of power he seemed to fulfill this promise.
      In 1941 I was a Science teacher in an Australian rural town called Warwick. Lillian and I were a young married couple. One student was a recent migrant from Austria, named Edgar Blau. We became friends and he accompanied us on a vacation. He told how his aunt was the widow of an officer in the German Army who was killed during the First World War. She formerly received a small pension, but this had been wiped out by massive inflation. Street fighting between the Nazis and Communists was common and his aunt needed to walk 2-3 miles every evening to meet her daughters returning from work, to protect them during the walk home. His aunt said, “When Hitler came to power, and we had law and order once again, it was like heaven.”
       Here again we see the similar programs of Communism and Nazism during their early stages. The program of Communism is, “Find out what people want, promise it to them, work hard to get it for them temporarily and thereby win their support. Take it from them and impose tyranny once power has been attained.” Both Lenin and Hitler used this strategy.
      Hitler was an eclectic Leninist. He selected and copied certain strategies of Lenin and repudiated others.
      One strategic difference between Lenin and Hitler was in their attitude to the existing state. Lenin set out to destroy the Russian state and succeeded in so doing. Hitler set out to conquer and utilize the German state and succeeded also.
      The state controls the army and police. Lenin wrote the book, The State and the Revolution, in which he stressed that the state must be destroyed. His successful Bolshevik Revolution led to the destruction of the Russian army and its replacement by the Red Army.
      In contrast, Hitler aimed to become Commander-in-Chief of the existing German army and to transform it into the instrument of his will. To achieve this, he maneuvered brilliantly and purged his private army, the Storm Troops, known as the Brown Shirts or S.A., because its commander, Roehm, wanted to use his Storm Troops to fight and defeat the German army. The massacre of Roehm and his officers took place on June 3, 1934, in what became known as “The Night of the Long Knives.”

By this action Hitler removed a major obstacle to his being accepted by the German army as the President of Germany and Commander-in-Chief of the German army.
      Hitler resembled Lenin and Stalin in his willingness to retreat in order to advance. His strategy was often dialectical. His enemies, and sometimes his friends, interpreted these retreats as weakness, and often paid the penalty for their misjudgment with their lives.
      Was Hitler mad? He certainly seemed to show the symptoms of megalomania, but his early achievements seemed to validate the grandeur of his self-esteem. Concerning him, it could be said,

He doth bestride the narrow world
Like a colossus, and we pretty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
      (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

      Possessing and acting upon strong delusions is certainly a sign of madness. Hitler had strong delusions and the actions to which one of them led caused infinite human suffering.
      He believed that the Jews were the enemy of the German people and therefore of mankind. He therefore hated them with passionate ferocity. He set out to destroy every man, woman, and child of the Jewish race. His maniacal frenzy of limitless hatred, the Holocaust, engulfed Europe. Hitler called it his “final solution.”
      Had Hitler succeeded in attaining his objective, I would have been a victim and probably our entire family. My father was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. He became a Christian as a teenager, moved to Australia, married a Christian woman of British heritage, and fathered a family of eleven children. His Christian faith dominated his life and he gave his family a rich Christian heritage.
      Nevertheless, by Hitler’s standards, I was the inheritor of Jewish blood and therefore merited death in the gas chamber.
      The strength of Hitler’s delusionary hatred of the Jews is shown by his continuance of the Holocaust till his final defeat in the Second World War. Though his forces were desperate for manpower and supplies, he continued to use personnel and resources to transport Jews to the chambers to the very end. Madness ruled.

      During his lifetime, Hitler rose to great heights of personal power, but his life and death were well described by the English Poet, Thomas Gray, in his classical poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard:”

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

      Hitler died by his own hand in abject defeat. He was a broken man. His empire lay in ruins. The World Book Encyclopedia reports:
      His head, hands and feet trembled, and he was tortured 

by stomach cramps.
      His historic legacy has been that his name has become a symbol for that which is insanely cruel, treacherous and degraded. Even here we have a paradox. Anyone who supported Hitler during a rebellious youth is tarnished throughout life and rejected by decent society, while those who supported the equally murderous Stalin are often regarded as temporarily misguided idealists.
      There is currently a Communist-led campaign to have one Communist who supported Stalin, and welcomed the Stalin Prize, honored by having a U.S. stamp in his honor. That man is the great singer, Paul Robeson.
      Supporters of Stalin merit the condemnation that supporters of Hitler receive.

The “Good” in Communism  
by Dr. Fred C. Schwarz

      The deadly toxin of the most venomous snake undoubtedly contains some nutritious ingredients.  Do these lessen the danger from snakebite?
      The defenders of Communism like to focus attention on the “good” ingredients in Communism.
      In 1961, on Channel 11 Television Station in Los Angeles, I debated Ben Dobbs, at that time the Executive Director of the Communist Party of California.  He commenced the debate by asking this series of questions:
      Dr. Schwarz, what’s wrong with Communism?  We Communists believe in full employment; what’s wrong with that?  We Communists believe in medical care for the sick and elderly; what’s wrong with that?  We Communists believe in the end of war for all time; what’s wrong with that?  We Communists believe in universal peace and human brotherhood; what’s wrong with that?
      Looking directly into my eyes, he asked, “Don’t you believe in these things, Dr. Schwarz?”
      I replied, “That reminds me of a mackerel swimming in the ocean that spies an attractive piece of fish.  It thinks, ‘Delicious aroma, it should taste great; what’s wrong with that?  Highly nutritious; what’s wrong with that?  Just the right size, I can swallow it easily; what’s wrong with that?  It will build splendid fish tissue; what’s wrong with that?’”

      Looking Ben straight in the eyes I said, “What’s wrong with it is the hook it contains; the hook of monopoly, dictatorship, and tyranny.”
      The addition of good to evil often magnifies the evil.  Consider a bare hook.  From the fish’s viewpoint it is pure evil.  There is not a trace of good in it.  Now consider a piece of succulent bait.  It is pure good: nourishing and delectable.
      When the piece of good bait is added to the evil hook, does it magnify or dilute the danger to the fish?  So it is with the mixture of good and evil in Communism.
      It is necessary to “see things steadily and see them whole.”  A complex entity is more than the sum of its component parts.  A heap of bricks and mortar does not constitute a house.
      The “good” in Communism magnifies the evil, just as the “good” elements in snake venom magnify the danger from snake-bite.
      Communism presents the dilemma, “Shall we do good so that evil may come.”  The Communist system is built upon atheism.  Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  Lenin stressed that “atheism is a natural and inseparable portion of Marxism, of the theory and practice of Scientific Socialism,” and Mao Zedong affirms “There is nothing in the world apart from matter in motion.”
      The Psalmist tells us, “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.  They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.”  (Psalm 14).  The history of Communism confirms the insight of the Psalmist.

Keynesian Economics and the Hubris of the Social Engineer
by Richard M. Ebering

      In September 1936, John Maynard Keynes prepared a preface for the German translation of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  Addressing himself to a readership of German economists, Keynes hoped that his theory would “meet with less resistance on the part of German readers than from English” because the German economists had long before rejected the teachings of both the classical economists and the more recent Austrian school of economics.  And, said Keynes, “If I can contribute a single morsel to the full meal prepared by German economists, particularly adjusted to German conditions, I will be satisfied.”
      What were the particular “German conditions” to which Keynes referred?
      For more than three years, Germany had been under the rule of Hitler’s National Socialist regime.  And in 1936, the Nazis had instituted their own version of four-year central planning.
      Toward the end of his preface, Keynes pointed out to his Nazi economist readers:

The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than...under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire.  This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory...Although I have, after all, worked it out with a view to the conditions prevailing in the Anglo-Saxon countries where a large degree of laissez-faire still prevails, nevertheless it remains applicable to situations in which state management is more pronounced.

      On what moral or philosophical basis did Keynes believe that policy advocates such as himself had either the right or the ability to manage or direct the economic interactions of multitudes of peoples in the marketplace?  Keynes explained his own moral foundations in Two Memoirs, published in 1949, three years after his death.  One of them, written in 1938, was on the formation of his “early beliefs” as a young man in his 20s at Cambridge University in the first decade of the 20th century.
      He and many of the other young intellectuals at Cambridge had been influenced by the writings of philosopher G.E. Moore.  Separate from the actual arguments made by Moore, what is of interest are the conclusions reached by Keynes from reading Moore’s work.  Keynes said:

Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his [Moore’s] religion was that it made morals unnecessary....Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own.  These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or consequences.  They consisted of timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to “before” and “after.”

      In this setting, traditional or established ethical or moral codes of conduct meant nothing.  Said Keynes:

We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules.  We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its own merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully.  This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held....We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdoms.  We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term immoralists...We recognized no moral obligation upon us, no inner sanction to conform or obey.  Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case.

      Keynes declared that he and those like him were “left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good.”  Now in his mid 50s, Keynes declared in 1938, “Yet so far as I am concerned, it is too late to change.  I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist.”  As for the social order in which he still claimed the right to act in such unrestrained ways, Keynes said that “civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilely preserved.”

      On matters of social and economic policy, two assumptions guided Keynes, and they also dated from his Cambridge years as a student near the beginning of the century; they are stated clearly in a 1904 paper entitled “The Political Doctrines of Edmund Burke”:

Our power of prediction is so slight, our knowledge of remote consequences so uncertain that it is seldom wise to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future....We can never know enough to make the chance worth taking.
What we ought to do is a matter of circum-stance....While the good is changeless and apart, the ought shifts and fades and grows new shapes and forms.

      Classical liberalism and the economics of the classical economists had been founded on two insights about man and society.  First, that there is an invariant quality to human nature that makes him what he is; and if society is to be harmonious, peaceful, and prosperous, men must reform their social institutions in a way that sees to it that the inevitable self-interests of individual men are directed into those avenues of action that benefit not only themselves but others in society as well.  They therefore advocated the institutions of private property, voluntary exchange, and open, peaceful competition.  Then, as Adam Smith had concisely expressed it, men would live in a system of natural liberty in which each individual would be free to pursue his own ends but would be guided as if by an invisible hand to serve the interests of others in society as the means to his own self-improvement.
      The second insight was that it is insufficient in any judgement concerning the desirability of a social or economic policy to focus only upon its seemingly short-run benefits.  The laws of the market always bring about certain inevitable effects in the long run from any shift in supply and demand or from any intervention by the government in the market order.  Thus, as the French economist Frederic Bastiat had emphasized, it behooved us to always try to determine not merely “what is seen” from a government policy in the short run but also to discern as best we can “what is unseen,” i.e., the longer-run consequences from our actions and policies.
      The reason it is desirable to take the less immediate consequences into consideration is that the longer-run effects may not only not improve the ill the policy was meant to cure but instead make the social situation even worse than if it had been merely left alone.  Even though the specific details of the future always remain beyond our knowledge to fully predict, one of the uses of economics is to assist us to

at least qualitatively anticipate the likely contours and shape of that future with the aid of an understanding of the laws of the market.  
      Keynes’s assumptions deny the wisdom and the insights of the classical liberals and the classical economists.  The biased emphasis is towards the benefits and pleasures of the moment, the short run, with an almost total disregard of the consequences that will only be fully felt tomorrow.  It led F.A. Hayek in 1941 to refer to Keynes’ short-run myopia “as a betrayal of the main duty of the economist and a grave menace to our civilization.”
      But if every action and policy decision is to be decided in the context of shifting circumstances, as Keynes insisted, on what basis shall decisions be made and by whom?  Such decisions are to be made on the basis of the self-centered “state of mind” of the policymakers, with total disregard for traditions, customs, moral codes, rules, or the long-run laws of the market.  Its rightness or wrongness was not bound by any independent standard of “achievement and consequence.”  Instead it was to be guided by “timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to ‘before’ and ‘after.’” The decision-maker’s own “intuitions of the good,” for himself and for others were to serve as his compass.  And let no ordinary man claim to criticize such actions or their results.  “Before heaven,” said Keynes, “we claimed to be our own judge in our own case.”
      Here was an elitist ideology of nihilism.  The members of this elite were self-appointed and shown to belong to this elect precisely through mutual self-congratulations of having broken out of the straightjacket of conformity, custom, and law.  For Keynes in his 50s, civilization was a thin, precarious crust overlying the animal spirits and irrationality of ordinary men.  Its existence, for whatever it was worth, was the product of “the personality and the will of a very few,” like himself, naturally, and maintained through “rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilely preserved.” 
      Society’s shape and changing form were to be left in the hands of “the chosen” who stood above the passive conventions of the masses.  Here was the hubris of the social engineer, the self-selected philosopher-king, who through manipulative skill and guile directed and experimented on society and its multitudes of individual human residents.  It is what made Keynes feel comfortable in recommending his “general theory” to a Nazi readership.  His conception of a society maintained by “the personality and the will of a very few,” after all, had its family resemblance to the Fuehrer principle of the unrestrained “one” who would command the Volk.
      (Reprinted from the August 1998 Freedom Daily with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation, Fairfax, VA.)

True and False Liberation Theology, part 1
by Dr. Ronald Nash

      Most of the economic errors that are the concern of [Poverty and Wealth] come to a head in the writings of representatives of the movement known as liberation theology.  In its most narrow sense, liberation theology is a movement among Latin American Catholics and Protestants that seeks radical changes in the political and economic institutions of that region along Marxist lines.  There also exist other versions of liberation theology which relate to feminist (the liberation of women) and racial concerns (black liberation).  Various individuals seeking a Christian use of Marx or a Marxist use of Christianity in Asia and Africa have recently begun to use the liberation banner for their cause.  It is interesting to note that Christians in Eastern Europe (for example, Polish Catholics) who seek freedom from Communist repression never use the phrase liberation theology to describe their movements.
      Liberation theologians do more than promote a synthesis of Marxism and Christianity; they often attempt to ground the radical political and economic changes they seek on their interpretation of the Bible.  They insist that the Biblical ethic condemns individual actions and social structures that oppress and harm people and that favor some at the expense of others.  One does not have to be sympathetic to liberation theology to agree with this last claim.
      The fundamental objective of most liberation theologians is Christian action on behalf of poor and oppressed peoples.  Only recently . . .  has it become apparent that in some situations, liberation theology is being used as a tool by committed Marxists-Leninists to justify the establishment of left-wing dictatorships.
      Liberation theology comes in a variety of packages.  But regardless of how extreme its commitment to Marxism may be (or which variety of Marxism it promotes), and regardless of how extreme its commitment to the use of violence may be in the pursuit of its revolutionary ends, liberation theology seeks to replace the economic and political structures alleged to cause poverty and oppression.  Ignoring for the moment the question of how much violence (if any) Christians should be prepared to use in support of allegedly just causes, liberation theologians insist that the church should be at the very center of the revolutionary activity they promote.
      For liberation thinkers, the “radical political transformation of the present order is a central component of the living out of Christian faith.”  As Humberto Belli, a former Marxist explains,

Reactionary political action becomes, in theologies of liberation, the way to make Christian love for the poor truly effective.  Failure to engage in the revolutionary struggle would be failure to respond to the poor’s yearning for liberation and would place Christians in the camp of the oppressors.  Since it is in the poor that Jesus dwells in a hidden but real way, for Christians not to commit themselves to the revolution would be to turn their backs on Christ.

      Commitment to the revolution, then, is an essential part of what it means to be a Christian—according to liberation theologians.
      It is important to understand that Christian opponents of liberation theology do not dispute the Christian’s obligation to care for the poor and to seek means to alleviate poverty and oppression.  What is in dispute is the agenda by which liberationists insist this duty must be fulfilled.  In the case of the most extreme representatives of this ideology, the so-called “revolutionary Christians” in Nicaragua, support for the Sandinista revolution is not simply permissible; it is a duty.  “There is no other way to be a Christian in Nicaragua than by supporting the Sandinista Revolution.”
      The professed liberationist goal of helping the poor and oppressed is a legitimate Christian objective.  But a growing number of people are beginning to wonder about other elements of liberation thought.  Tough questions are being asked about the commitment of liberation thinkers to essential Christian beliefs, about their understanding of economics, about their commitment to democracy, and about their opposition to violence and totalitarianism.  Since the movement calls itself liberation theology, it is proper to inquire into the soundness of its theology.  Since it calls itself liberation theology, it is legitimate to inquire about the soundness of its economics and political theory.  Is its theology sound?  Is its economics sound in the sense that it really does pursue means that will deliver people from poverty?  And is its understanding of political power sound in the sense that it will deliver people from tyranny?
      An important distinction must be drawn between two kinds of liberation theology: true liberation theology and false liberation theology.  Traditional Catholics and Protestants have five important criteria at their disposal that they can use to test the legitimacy of liberation systems.  The first three tests are theological: is the liberation theology being proposed theologically sound?  The last two tests relate to its alleged emphasis on liberty: will it really deliver people from poverty (economic liberation) and will it deliver people from tyranny (political liberation)?

(continued next month)

q    “Today the [Communist] Sandinista’s leadership is struggling not to protect their revolution—that is already gone—but to keep the private properties they first seized in the name of their revolution—and then gave as gifts to one another in a 1990 land grab known as LaPinata.  A former top Sandinista privately estimates the value of properties grabbed by the top 10-15 Sandinistas at over $3 billion, high stakes indeed.”   The Washington Times, January 5, 1998, p. A13

q    “Married: Tom Hayden, 53, former radical student leader, ex-husband of Jane Fonda and current California state senator; and Barbara Williams, 40, actress; in Tofino, British Columbia.  The couple were married by a Buddhist priest.  Wedding vows included a passage in which the pair committed themselves to the preservation of old-growth forests.”  Time, August 23, 1993

q    “During the 1980s, the Congressional Black Caucus and civil-rights groups demonstrated in front of the South African embassy as they led the call for economic sanctions against the nation’s apartheid regime.  Without question apartheid and its support system were cruel and unjust.  But if you look at what’s going on in other African countries, both then and now, South Africa’s apartheid was child’s play by comparison.  Between 1900 and the end of apartheid, fewer than 10,000 blacks died in civil conflict with the South African government.  That compares favorably with government slaughter of millions in black nations such as Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda and Nigeria, not to mention chattel slavery in Chad, Sudan and the Mauritania.  Have you seen the Black Caucus and civil-rights organizations picketing the embassies of these brutal and tyrannical regimes, demanding sanctions?  To the contrary, they heap praise on the tyrants that run these murderous regimes.  Jesse Jackson said Nigerian tyrant Ibrahim Babangida is ‘one of the great leader-servants of the modern world in our time.’  Jesse Jackson, Louis Sullivan and Douglas Wilder fawned over Sierra Leone’s dictator Valentine Strasser at a conference in Gabon.  Benjamin Chavis, former NAACP director said, ‘We in the United States must support the...African understanding of democracy rather than attempt to superimpose a Western standard of democracy..’  You can bet that Chavis didn’t ask us to support the South African understanding of democracy.  Black politicians and civil-rights leaders seem to be less concerned about what’s done to blacks than who’s doing it.  Whites brutalizing blacks calls for action, but when blacks brutalize blacks there’s either silence or nonsense talk about root causes.  Conservatives and white people should take heart with these double standards.  They simply mean that blacks hold white people to higher standards of conduct than black people.”  Walter E.Williams, The [Colorado Springs] Gazette,   February 26, 1998, p. N6

q            “After growing up an exile in Europe and America, Dali Tambo returned to South Africa in 1990 to discover that apartheid was only part of the story.  Along with white political supremacy came an official code of sexual behavior rooted in conservative Afrikaner Christianity.  ‘I found it primitive, Calvinist and Victorian, a spiteful angry, intolerant culture,’ recalled Tambo, now the host of an eclectic television variety show. ‘And totally hypocritical.  I mean, how could a country that was slaughtering the children  of

white rule has brought a rapid relaxation of the sexual taboos enforced by the old order.  Shielded by a new constitution that protects free expression and forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, South Africans have seen the unbanning of sexually explicit films and magazines, uninhibited celebration of homosexual pride and culture, and a proliferation of sex clubs.  Censorship has been eased pending a complete rewriting of the laws.  There is even speculation that South Africa, one of the last to legalize Playboy magazine, could be among the first to legalize gay marriage.  Tambo, whose father, Oliver R. Tambo, preceded Nelson Mandela as president of the African National Congress, now considers himself part of a second liberation movement that has arisen in the victorious wake of his father’s.  This one is aimed at freeing the national libido.  As the host of a television program that is part Arsenio Hall, part Oprah Winfrey, he has brought to the staid flagship channel of state television such previously unthinkable spectacles as male strippers, frank discussion of gay sex and a contest in which audience members raced to put condoms on cucumbers.  ‘The most important part of the transfer of power for me is that we tackle the cultural domination of the past, which has been Calvinist and European,’ Tambo said in an interview.”  Bill Keller, The New York Times News Service,  The [Colorado Springs] Gazette, January 1, 1995

q    “Believe it or not, Iraq owes its existence to a promise made by Lawrence of Arabia to an obscure desert sheikh.  If the Sharif of Mecca would join the British against the Ottoman Turks in World War I, Lawrence promised that he and his sons, Abdullah and Faisal, would have their own kingdom of Hejaz on the west coast of the Arabian peninsula.  But in the aftermath of the war, a Bedouin chief from nowhere, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, conquered the Hejaz, consolidating it within his territory which he called Saudi Arabia.  As a consolation prize, the Brits made up two countries from Ottoman provinces, called them Trans-Jordan and Syria, and gave them to Abdullah and Faisal.  Abdullah’s grandson, Hussein, runs Jordan to this day.  But the French, claiming Syria was theirs, kicked Faisal out; so the Brits made up a third country out of thin air, called it ‘Iraq,’ and made Faisal the King.  His family ran the place until the Soviets supported a military coup in 1958.  One of the agents involved was Yevgini Primakov, who was also the Soviet bag man for George Habash and Yassir Arafat so they could blow up school buses in Israel.  Primakov developed a relationship with an Iraqi military officer named Saddam Hussein.  Primakov talked the Kremlin into a major arms supply deal with Iraq; in turn Saddam deposited many millions of dollars in kickbacks in Primakov’s Swiss bank accounts.  By 1979, Primakov was the Central Committee’s top Middle East policy maker, authoring the CPSU’s formal ideological justification for the invasion of Afghanistan, designing Soviet policy to support Libya’s Muammar Qadafi and Syria’s Hafez alAssad, and guiding Saddam to seize power.  Director of the entire KGB by 1991, he oversaw the KGB’s seamless transition from Soviet to Russian control.  Four years later, Yeltsin named him Russia’s Foreign Minister.  Primakov is the Godfather of Moslem terrorism and Saddam’s regime.  He has engineered the entire crisis with Iraq, so that Russia can be seen by Arabs as Iraq’s (and by extension the Arab world’s) protector from American aggression.”  Jack Wheeler, Strategic Investment, March 18, 1998, p. 6