And didn't the CDU regain some of their power they now have by opposing the "foreign workers" a few years back? So the upcoming election is a win-win for anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Germany. It seems to be coming from the left (the Left Party), the right (the CDU), and the center (SPD) - if it can be said that Germany actually has a "right" to speak of since the CDU and SPD are now looking to link up. As it was the Germans could choose Socialism, Socialism lite, or Nazism in the upcoming election, now even Socialism-lite is out of the picture.

He liked the old antisemitism better.

His ascription of the murders to neopaganism was a typical, if unusually sickening, prevarication.

There were no good neighborhoods for a Jew during the period he refers to, but proportionally it was far riskier to be a Jew in wholly Roman Catholic Croatia than anywhere else.

Next, no doubt, Orrin will instruct us how the Croatians were all darwinists.

Harry:

Anti-semitism is common. Exterminationism is, in fact, a function of applied Darwinism.

It is good to be the Pope. You always get a respectful hearing, even
when you are talking nonsense.
Speaking to young Catholics over the weekend in Europe, Benedict XVI
gave a welcome warning against the revival of violent antiSemitism in
Europe. But at the same time he slipped in a sly piece of revisionism,
blaming the really violent slaughter of Jews in the 1930s and ‘40s on
"neopaganism."
Like everything else in history, but especially this history, things
were more complicated than that. The slaughter of Jews was actually most
intense in places where there weren’t any neopagans, or not many.
But to back up a bit, during Europe’s Christian centuries, Jews were
persecuted and killed routinely. Not until the Enlightenment (Aufklarung
in German) did Jews begin to receive civil rights. No thanks to the
Roman Catholic Church, which was still preaching against the Aufklarung
when I was at St. Pius X High School in the 1960s. (While I well
remember being taught Pius X’s Syllabus of Errors of modernism, I had
not realized until researching this column that our priests had actually
had to take an oath not to believe in modernism. No wonder PiHi was such
a strange place.)
The Enlightenment progressed more slowly in some places than others.
(Croatia, where we will go soon, did not grant civil rights to Jews
until 1873.) But for about a century, Jews, although they were widely
despised, lived quietly in Germany.
Many people were dismayed when Germany started reverting to medieval
policies toward Jews in the early 1930s. But no one at the time
considered this was "neopaganism."
Robert Ross, a historian and "active Protestant churchman," reviewed the
American reaction to the early antiJewish decrees of the Hitler regime
in "So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi
Persecution of the Jews." In the earliest report he found, in "The
Evangelical Visitor" for February 1933, the persecutions in Germany were
compared to the Jewish persecutions already familiar in Catholic Poland:
"The atrocities have assumed a new form," reported the "Visitor."
"Tear-gas bombs have been thrown into Jewish stores and cinemas in
several cities in Germany, in (Catholic) Romania and in Poland."
Much worse was to come.
Later, when the news got out, Christians made (and are still making)
strained arguments to absolve themselves, by pushing all the atrocities
off on gauleiters, the SS, commissars and "neopagans."
In "Lost Victories," German Field Marshal Eduard Manstein claimed that
his army was innocent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and that
such behavior would have been against the honor of a Prussian officer
and a Christian. (He did not claim such virtues directly for himself,
instead ascribing them to his son, who had been killed in Russia.)
It did not seem to oppress his Christian honor to find himself a
thousand miles inside a country that had never done him any harm,
burning its villages and stealing its grain and killing its peasants.
But Manstein was not unaware that for other people there was perhaps
some question of conscience about what he was doing.
In looking back at the period after the conquest of Poland, he wrote,
"Another very doubtful point is how Germany could have achieved an
honourable peace without Hitler at that time . . . all I can say is that
(any German opponent of the Nazis) would have found even less support
among the troops than in autumn 1938."
In spite of their famous efficiency, the Germans, Christians and
neopagans working together, managed to kill only about two out of three
Jews they got their hands on.
The Croats, allied to the Nazis but left to themselves because the
Germans were busy elsewhere, killed four out of five. (They would have
made it five out of five, but one Italian general interfered.)
The Croats were, and are, Roman Catholics and no friends to Jews, whom
they expelled in the 14th century. Jews returned to Croatia 450 years
later, but only under the Emperor Josef II's Toleranzpatent, an early
high point of the Aufklarung..
The literature on the Croatian Holocaust is highly partisan. The
position of the Roman Catholic Church is that the Croatian bishop (later
cardinal) Alojzije Stepanic, spoke out against the killing.
Very softly, it would seem, since eyewitness accounts of Croatian mobs
attacking Jewish communities describe how they were led by Catholic
priests carrying the cross.
A measured assessment comes from Menachem Shelah of the University of
Haifa, who wrote, "The ambivalent position of the Croatian Catholic
Church towards the barbaric regime of murderers known as ‘The
Independent Croatian State’ (1941–1945) determined that church's
attitude to the murder of Croatia's Jews.
"As in other German satellite countries, the church tried,
unsuccessfully, to defend converted Jews. On the other hand, it remained
unperturbed in the face of the persecution of the Jews, the seizure of
their property, elimination of their rights, and ultimately, their
banishment to camps where they were murdered.
"Only towards the end of the war did the heads of the Croatian Church
raise their voices in protest against the murder of the Jews, but that
was after the almost total destruction of Croatian Jewry.
"Not only that — the church did not so much as censure, nor did it
eliminate from its ranks, priests and men of religion who took part in
the incitement against the Jews and in their murder."
John Cornwell, in "Hitler’s Pope," goes even further and provides
evidence that Croatian Jew killers were sheltered inside the Vatican
after some genuine neopagans, the Red Army commissars, put a stop to the
slaughter at the end of the war.
(Stepanic is now a blessed, on his way to being a saint, for his postwar
persecution by the Communists; he’s been given a pass for his, at best,
unsaintly behavior during the war.)
According to taste, you can find plenty of polemical arguments to back
you up, whether you want to exculpate the Catholics for what happened in
Croatia during World War II or accuse them of it.
But there are two things nobody can deny: There weren’t any neopagans in
Croatia, only Catholics; and by 1945 there weren’t any Jews either.

Harry:

Nazism, or applied Darwinism, is simply neopaganism. You worship Nature as a god.