Op-ed:
Religion in War...A Factor Overlooked
By: Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor /
Right Side Patriots / Right Side Patriots Radio
The article posted here is the authors opinion alone, and does not
necessarily represent the views of blogspot.com
or Google
Religion...“organized religion”
to be more precise...has a long and somewhat sorted
history...man-made to those who are non-believers...the “One
Most Holy” who has dominion over us all to those who do
believe. And yet neither side, to date, has been able to offer
tangible here and now proof positive of either the existence of God
or the lack thereof.And while to the Christian faithful the
Holy Bible is all the proof they need of God's existence, yet that
proof is actually not tangible proof for the Bible in reality is but
the words of mortal men...men “inspired” by the words of
God yet not written by the hand of God. That deed alone belongs to
the Jewish faith...which preceded Christianity by thousands of
years...for it was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who, with his
own hand, set the words of the Ten Commandments upon rock tablets
giving them to Moses after he led the Jews out of bondage in Egypt.
And while both “Abrahamic” religions...Judaism and
Christianity...do believe in but one God who rules over
all...monotheism it's called...the belief in one God alone does not
make it fact nor does it negate what many believe to be fact, thus
continuing the ongoing centuries old argument between believers v.
nonbelievers.

But this article is not about ones
personal religious beliefs nor is it about any of the religious
collectives to which one might or might not belong, yet religion
itself is this article's core topic as it relates to the realities of
war...including Iran's ongoing war chant “death to Israel, death
to America,” and how it's the
calling card for Iran's what they believe to be a “Holy
War.” And this key factor is being overlooked by far too many
folks as this is the most dangerous type of war for when ones enemy
believes that God is on their side alone, they think they can do no
wrong.In fact, history itself has shown that
religious “tensions,” if you will, is what contributed to
the rise of extremist ideologies as witnessed by the Crusades, what
was the Papal initiated religious wars of “reclamation”
fought during the Middle Ages; the Thirty Years War (1618-1648)
between Catholics and Protestants; and islam's numerous still ongoing
wars of hoped for“islamic conquest.” But the most vile of
all wars having religion as one of its driving forces was, in my
opinion, World War II, for not only did one evil man promote
anti-Semitism to justify what was to become the “Holocaust,”
but he, Adolf Hitler, deemed an entire group of people...the Jewish
people...to be “sub-human” and in need of “extermination,”
thus claiming that in doing so it would help to “purify”
the so-called “Aryan race.” Remember,
Hitler was obsessed with “racial
purity” and used the word
“Aryan” to
describe his idea of a “pure
German race.”

And
Hitler's personal hatred for the Jewish people...the people he
identified as “enemies of the state”...became the very people he foolishly held responsible for both Germany's economic and
cultural decline. And when it was coupled with Hitler's all but consuming jealousy of the Jews economic and personal
successes...the Jews fate was sealed. And when Hitler's hate fueled
rhetoric morphed into his selling the justification for murdering six
million+ Jews, even the most devote and faithful of religious believers
legitimized and gave credence to what was truly the saddest chapter
in this, the most unholy of wars.
Simply, Hitler was
able to unify the vast majority of the German people together in an
act of cleverly crafted preordained hate, thus laying the groundwork
for the creating of selectively targeted victims hidden within a most
vile of masqueraded causes, while at the same time negating...or at
the very least masking...for way too many of the faithful the guilt
factor that some must have carried...guilt for their having remained
silent about the unspeakable acts knowingly being committed while
they willingly and shamefully looked away.
And
Hitler did relish in using the influence of Christian religious
leaders...religious leaders too afraid to stand up against the man
who literally threw aside the Biblical concepts of knowing right from
wrong, good from evil... and did so to garner their help in keeping
the faithful in line...as in loyal to Hitler's party line that is. And so
the clergy became but one of the propaganda arms of the “Third
Reich.”
So
here the question then becomes, why did the majority of Germany's
religious leaders...why did the majority of Europe's religious
leaders...not stand up against the evil that walked amongst them? The
answer is really not at all that surprising in that once Nazi Germany
was able to manipulate both religious rhetoric and its clerical
deliverers, churches became gathering places by which Hitler
successfully spread Nazi propaganda while instilling in the faithful
what he believed to be the “legitimization of his
actions.” And he did so while
at the same time fostering a sense of what some call “divine
support” for the eliminating
of those deemed “unholy”...as
in the Jews...the now easily and frequently blamed “Christ
killers.”

And so
for too many countries of Europe “Jew hatred”
became a then quite acceptable norm for way too many folks, while the
systemic murdering of six millions Jews...babies and children amongst
them... morphed into a complex play between Biblical teachings of
religious doctrine, and the fact that on some level both the German
people and the people of Europe had to know what was really going on.
Why so...because Nazi Germany became experts in manipulating
religious rhetoric to help propagate its hate filled ideology and
propaganda.
Simply,
Hitler was successful in using religious musings to turn neighbor
against neighbor, friend against friend, all in an effort to not only
place blame on those who were actually blameless, but to use the
religious faithful as one of the means by which to help spread the
doctrine that became known as the “Final Solution.”
Churches across Germany and Europe were forced to align their
teachings with Nazi state rhetoric and propaganda, and unfortunately
too many of the faithful did fall sheepishly in line no matter that
the smell of death reeked even inside houses of worship, And while
some stood strong against this most perverse style of indoctrination,
those who did so were also deemed “enemies of the state,”
and like the Jews they tried to protect their bodies joined that of Jews piled high inside the anything but “work
camps.”

And Germany of the 1930s and 1940s clearly shows that when religious
idealism and fervor is entwined within the reasons for war, a most
dangerous of combinations is created for it causes divisions and
hatreds amongst people that might not have existed before. And this
in turn gives birth to radical extremism which can easily morph into
immeasurable suffering and loss of life with God's holy name becoming
anything but holy. And when a U.S. president is faced with such a
quandary their actions, or lack thereof, becomes part of history
itself with both religious and secular history melding into one and
the same.Such
is the case with then
war time President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) who simply ignored
what was deemed to be the “industrial scale killing”
of Jews taking place in Europe. Believed by some to be an anti-Semite,
FDR's actions...or lack
thereof...did speak for themselves then as they do now that history
has been written.
FDR was a practicing Episcopalian who not only embraced a “Jesus
based theology,”
but one who mentioned God and religion in his war time speeches, yet he literally turned his back on Hitler's systemic
annihilation of Europe's Jewish population. And in Roosevelt's taking no
actions to help save the Jews, his disdain for the Jewish people
and their faith was on full display for all to see if only their
eyes had been open.

And
so, the claimed to be “man
of faith”...never
once publicly spoke out against Hitler's systemic murdering of
Europe's Jews not even after “The
Auschwitz Protocal”* was
released to the American press in the fall of 1944. Briefly,
this document described, in detail, the atrocities committed at
Auschwitz and Birkenau by three camp escapees, and how Auschwitz and others like
it needed to be bombed. In fact, in the summer and early fall of
1944, the “World Jewish Congress” along with the “War
Refugee Board” (WRB) forwarded requests to bomb Auschwitz to the
US War Department. These requests were denied by both the department
and by FDR himself. And this was no matter that the US Army Air Force
had recently carried out a heavy bombing raid of the I.G. Farben
synthetic oil and rubber (Buna) factory which was less than five
miles away from the “Auschwitz-Birkenau
killing center.”
A truly sad
commentary indeed, and no excuses made can mask the fact that the
plight of European Jews was of little to no concern to Roosevelt or
to those in his eyes closed administration.
Simply, religion...the Jewish religion...did indeed
color the landscape of WWII and in the way we fought. And while our
military shoulders no blame, the fact remains that World War
II...especially in the European Theater... was indeed a
religious colored war, making this war even uglier than it already was. In fact, if it was not for the “extermination camps” still
operating unimpeded, and Roosevelt not allowing the bombing of said
camps or the rail lines continuing to bring Jews to what he well knew
were the gas chambers...the war might
have been over sooner and countless Jewish lives would have been
saved, and the children murdered would have been able to grow up.In
fact, in a February 2013 edition of the Jerusalem Post, former South
Dakota Senator and 1972 Democrat presidential nominee, George
McGovern spoke about his having piloted a B-24 “Liberator”
in December 1944, and how his squadron bombed Nazi oil facilities
less than five miles from Auschwitz. And in an earlier interview in
2005, McGovern stated that, “There is no question we
should have attacked Auschwitz,” adding
that, “ There was a pretty good chance we could have
blasted those rail lines off the face of the Earth, which would have
interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a
pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”

Could
have, should have, would have...no tangible reason not to have bombed
both Auschwitz and the rail lies except for the “no-go”
from Roosevelt himself with his flimsy excuses being that our
priority was to defeat the Axis powers before anything else. Sure
some “collateral damage” would have happened, but that would have
been a small price to pay for the “ovens” and “crematories”
to be permanently rendered out of commission.So
when some say there was no basis in religion for WWII...when some
evil sorts still say the Jews got what they deserved and that the job
Hitler started needs to be finished; when supposed men of God throw
their faith aside in order to focus on the perpetrators instead of
the victims; remember that religion is indeed a first, last, or
somewhere in the middle...and probably forever...factor regarding all aspects of war.
And really why
shouldn't it be for God seems to have done nothing to help stop hate, war,
or injustice. God basically walked away from us after (what some
believe) to be creation for it seems, at least to me, that “He”
never intended to be “hands on” if you will, as “free
will” was given to us for a reason. Case closed.
________________________________________________________________
Footnote
* “The Auschwitz Protocol” was originally published as “The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau,” and
is a collection of three eyewitness accounts from 1943–1944 about the
mass murder that was taking place inside the Auschwitz concentration
camp in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War. The
eyewitness accounts are individually known as the Vrba–Wetzler report,
Polish Major's report, and Rosin-Mordowicz report. Read the actual “The Auschwitz Protocal” here. Copyright © 2025 Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor / All rights reserved.
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For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Craig Andresen's blog The National Patriot to read his latest article Liberalism...Stupid on Steroids.
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