1

GRAFFITI ON A WALL OF SHAME

NAZISM, MARXISM, CAPITALISM

2

THE BERLIN WALL

• The Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev tried to turn back the surge of East Germans fleeing to West Berlin. When travel restrictions did not work he erected a twenty six miles of barbed wire and concrete across the city.

• On the east side of the wall of Berlin stood Communism, with it gospel of an earthly utopia in some future classless society. On the West were shops and movies, with an endless search for wealth and happiness now.

3

POST CHRISTIAN GODS FOR THE MASSES

• There are three post Christian ideologies that replaced the space religion had in the lives of people. Nationalism, communism, and individualism. Each of these became the faith of a large part of society.

• The totalitarian government which is always led by some dictator, who commands a political police force, by using a sophisticated, psychological methods the rulers are able to direct the minds and emotions of the people against the regime.

4

WORLD WAR I

• The new religion of the early twentieth century Europe was nationalism. Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism brought the great powers of Europe into conflict in the Balkans. The spark to ignite it came on June 28, 1914, when a young student inspired by Serbian nationalism assassinated the Crown Prince of Austria Hungary.

• By August Germany and Austria were arrayed against France, Russia, and Britain. Before the war was over twenty seven nations were caught up in the conflict ranging from Tokyo to Ottawa.

5

THE RISE OF NAZISM

• The Nazis were a right wing version of dictatorial rule. They were the definition of totalitarianism. Today we call it fascism, such governments counter personal frustration and alienation. As well as social and economic tensions by stressing class unity.

• After World War I German National Socialism better known as Nazism began to rule. The protestant church in the hands of Luther lost millions of people to this new political religion.

6

THE NAZI’S DOCTRINE• Nazi theoreticians developed a barbaric doctrine of

anti-Semitism. To regain the lost innocence of the past, Germany they argued had to purge the present of it impurities. The Jews served as the scapegoats.

• Hitler declared that even the Christian faith was a Jewish plot. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.

• In 1940 the Nazis designed a new type of camp for their final solution, the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe. The largest was Auschwitz in Poland.

7

CHRISTIANS UNDER HITLER• Christians and Jews were under the same persecution

in the Nazi world. Hitler was born and reared Catholic, he completely forgot God and all Christian principles.

• Hitler tricked the churches to receive their support by emphasizing national pride and pretending to favor the churches role in the state.

• Hitler and the Pope signed an agreement in 1933 to allow Catholics the freedom to practice the religion which he did not keep. A new form of Christianity arose among Protestants called German Christianity aimed at having closer ties with the Nazi’s.

8

THE COUNTER CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT

• To counter the German Christians movement a group of ministers led by Martin Niemoller formed the Pastor’s Emergency League and set up and alternative church government known as the Confessing Church.

• In May 1934 the Confessing Church spelled out its theological convictions in the Barmen Declaration, written by Karl Barth. The church planned no campaign of resistance to Nazism. It was mainly directed against the heretical distortions of the German Christians, and in fact the church continually confessed it loyalty to Hitler

9

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION• Meanwhile through the same troubled twenties and

thirties the Russian Bolsheviks (or Communists) created another totalitarian system.

• Communist ideology emphasized the working class, revolution as a means of social change, and the utopian ideal of the classless society. The mastermind of the Russian Revolution Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-1924). We call him Lenin, and exiled socialist leader.

• The chief weapon of Marxism was violence. And he took nothing for granted to destroy capitalism. Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin in power and ruthlessness. He used secret police terror and labor camps to suppress any potential rivals.

10

COMMUNISM AND ATHEISM• Communism is based on atheism. The Marxist

Leninist theory claimed that religion is false consciousness, and illusory reflection of the world resulting from class divisions. When society is restored to a normal state then religion will die.

• For centuries the Russian Orthodox Church had been the state church. When they took from the people the right to teach their own children, violence erupted. Patriarch Tikhon declared war on the state. The first six years of the Revolution twenty eight bishops and over one thousand priest were killed.

11

SOVIET CONSTITUTION

• In 1936 the new Soviet Constitution restored the voting rights to the clergy, but the servants of religion continued to be second class citizens.

• By 1939 the atheistic propaganda, the rigid antireligion laws, and the Stalinist terror brought the Russian Orthodox Church to the brink of disintegration. The Lutherans were almost wiped out, and Baptists and Evangelical Christian denominations were ravaged.

12

THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II• World War II broke out in 1939 when German forces

invaded Poland. Hitler had made common cause with Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy and a militaristic clique ruling in Japan.

• In the occupied areas of eastern Europe priests and pastors, along with devout laymen were treated as common criminals. Thousands were executed or sent to concentration camps.

• The situation in wartime Soviet Russia was a striking contrast. Stalin realized the value of the churches contribution to public morale in the war, and how it could help integrate the territories acquired during the war and promote later Soviet foreign policy.