OUCH:
And speaking of those grandfathers who “roasted to death in a tank at Kursk,” earlier: Christmas in Nazi Germany: How Nazis Stole Christmas and Turned Adolf Hitler into Messiah (Video).
And: The National Socialists Fought the Original War on Christmas.
Who knew? Other than everyone who read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism in 2008, or this London Daily Mail article the following year. But it’s good to see this sort of thing in the Smithsonian’s house organ. Or as author Dave Shiflett quipped in 2002 at NRO, “A shocking story has been revealed: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian after all. Instead, he hoped to destroy Christianity.”
To borrow a line from another 19th-century born socialist God killer, as a reminder of the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce — while killing time before engineering the next tragedy — I found that above quote in a post of mine from right around this time in 2012. A few years before Angela Merkel turned the lights out on 21st Germany, Yahoo was reporting that “A minister in Angela Merkel’s government has sparked a pre-Christmas row among Germany’s ruling parties by suggesting God be referred to with the neutral article ‘das’ instead of the masculine ‘der.’”
But then, political correctness is what governments do in order to ignore their nation’s real, structural problems.
And in the adjacent world of International Socialism, Peter Hitchens: The last Noël in the USSR.