For example, the justification for locking up gays, Jews, and other undesirables was Goering’s often successful propaganda line that this has made the trains run on time and kept the streets safe. Where in other nations you have corruption and crime, in Germany things are safe.

Now whether that was actually true or not, doesn’t matter, just like reporters didn’t care what was really going on in Soviet Russia or in 2007 Iraq.

What matters is that it feels good. It feels true. It feels like something that “should be right”. That’s what matters to people. But only to the people not currently suffering.

That was fantastic. Thank you.

Similar to how there are Christians who don’t believe you need a military to protect America cause you need to “turn the other cheek” or as Helen noted before, Jesus would have been a Democrat.

Book, I would like to add one more item to Neocon Hippie’s list: Tikkun Olam – the idea that it is a person’s duty to “repair” or “perfect” the world. From my understanding (which, as a gentile, may be very limited, I confess). The prayer, I believe, is linked specifically to the goal of “repairing the world under God’s sovereignty”, so it is in a spiritual sense. However, many many marginally religious (if at all) synagogues apply it in a non-spiritual sense and this is where human fallibility, hubris and narcissism come into play to create visions of secular utopias and all their attendent evils.

To truly repair the world, you must first repair yourself.

Awesome job spelling it out, Danny!

What these enlightened individuals cannot confront is that the Hitler was actually quite a brilliant man and the National Socialist vision was not all that different from the Leftwing Socialist visions held today (including by many Democrats): Hitler was a vegetarian environmentalist (environmentalism was a major tenet of the Nazi youth movement) atheist who loved animals and children and believed in national health insurance, national retirement plans, national work safety rules, subsidized services, universal education, nationalization of industry, full employment, shovel-ready infrastructure projects (autobahns), and material well-being for all (not only would everybody owning their own homes, they would own their own Volkswagens). So, from a Democrat perspective, what’s there not to like? National socialism was a credo actively supported by German and Austrian academia. Dissenting professors were driven from the University. Of course, the “people” had to be mobilized by community organizers (…they were easy to spot with distinguishing arm bands) in order to achieve all these aims. Sacrifices had to be made for the State to achieve its goal.

The only problem was there were people in the way of creating this Utopia on earth. They were called Jews, disabled people, Slavs and other inferior races. Today, they might be Republicans, Evangelicals and, of course, Jews.

As Ecclesiastes says, there really isn’t anything new under the sun.

So, all those idealistic, well-educated, intellectual Jews seeking Utopia on earth of whom you speak…we’ve seen them before. They went by another label then.

For example, Carl Jung had some opinions about Jews as a group that were typical of people of his class and time. (And these opinions seem rather benign compared to the bilge our progressive elites now disgorge.) Jewish shrinks get very exercised about this. It is, in real life, a tiny issue of no significance any longer. Ann Coulter opines that Jews should convert to Christianity because it is the fulfillment of the Torah. (Hardly a novel idea.) They become apoplectic.

But these same bright, passionate, curious people become hesitant and highminded and empathetic and guilt-ridden when having to deal with the reality of Muslim masses who truly loathe Jews and who, when given the chance, murder them, sometimes torture and slaughter them, and boast about it.

I have a gay Jewish colleague who condemns me as “a self loathing fag” for having voted for George Bush and who then goes out and raises money for Palestinian Arabs!

It is a disconnect that I avoided looking at because it is so frightening. These folks are in many ways the cream of the crop.

If these people, who not only have a personal history of achievement and intellect and familiarity with the labyrinths of the human psyche, but also a communal history which now includes genocidal Arab hatred of the only piece of land on earth Jews might call their own….if these people are so unable to look reality in the face, it makes me very very nervous about the mind and spine of the West.

After the shock of looking at such a color-coded map, a lesson about bullies, threats, murder, holocaust, and extinction could shortly follow.