Decline and Fall

On the forty-second page of “Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide” author Bruce S. Thornton, a professor of classics and humanities at California State University in Fresno, wrote (hyperlinks & emphasis added):

disorder, social disintegration, rapid change, moral confusion, and rootless individualism. The revealed truth of this nationalist salvation comes from a messianic leader and prophet who embodies the people's aspirations and identity. If the people submit without question to the messiah's leadership, he can lead them to the earthly promised land of racial regeneration and primacy. And the group's superiority as the chosen saved justifies their domination of others through sacralized violence.

Nazi Germany, of course, was the most destructive and murderous realization of these fascistic elements. One has only to watch Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, her cinematic record of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, to see how Nazism caricatured the trappings of religion to bind its adherents to Hitler's will: the Führer's descent from the clouds, like a god coming to earth; the procession through the old cathedral city's streets lined with adoring postulants Albert Speer's "cathedrals of light" accompanied by the world's largest electric organ; the celebration of and homage paid to the party's "saints" and "martyrs"; the ritualistic Nazi salutes and torchlight parades—all evoke a pseudo-faith in which the individual is absorbed into the collective whole just as the Christian becomes one with the church, the body of Christ. "The fundamental structure of the Nazi creed," Michael Burleigh writes, "Was soteriological, a redemptive story of suffering and deliverance, a sentimental journey from misery to glory, from division to mystic unity based on the blood bond that linked souls."⁴⁷ Yet Nazism was a faith predicated on hatred and death, not love and eternal life, and the toll of its "holy war" vastly outstrips the deaths caused by Christians who over the centuries distorted their faith to kill in the pursuit of more worldly aims.

In Europe the horrors of Nazism have so discredited any political program based on biological racism that a fascist resurgence of that sort is extremely unlikely. Neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist groups

More information about “Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Amazon.com
• Powell's Books
• Barnes & Noble

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