A board member of the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies at Keene State College has written an email to Ms. Marie Tremblay (who has contributed to FaithfulVoice.com) and has admitted that the Holocaust may not be attributed to Catholic teaching. However, in his email, this board member asserts that, "..many of the worst perpetrators of the Holocaust were Catholics from Germany and Italy...including Adolph Hitler."
But was Hitler really a Catholic? We read here: http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=32525 that Hitler desired "to trample the Catholic Church 'as one does a frog.'" Additionally, on September 9, 1943, Hitler said, "I'll go into the Vatican when I like. Do you think the Vatican worries me? We'll grab it. Yes, the whole diplomatic bunch is in there. I couldn't care less. That bunch in there, we'll drag them out, the whole swinish pack of them. What does it matter? We can apologize afterwards, that's nothing to worry about."
Contrary to what some may believe, the Nazis and the Italian Fascists knew that the Catholic Church and Popes Pius XI and Pius XII were their enemies. For example, Benito Mussolini told his foreign minister Count Ciano (on August 8, 1938): "I do not underestimate [Pius XI's] strength, but he must not underestimate mine either....A sign from me would be enough to unleash all the anti-clericalism of the Italian people who already find it hard enough to swallow a Jewish God." And Roberto Farinacci, the editor of Italy's official Fascist newspaper, Regime Fascista, wrote the following in October of 1942: "The Church's obstruction of the practical solution of the Jewish problem constitutes a crime against the New Europe."
In 1998, Cornell University released documents from the Nuremberg Trials which revealed that Hitler planned to end Christianity at the end of World War II: http://library.lawschool.cornell.edu/WhatWeHave/SpecialCollections/Donovan/index.cfm). Furthermore, General William Donovan, a senior member of the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, as part of his work documenting Nazi war crimes, compiled copious amounts of documentation which show that the Nazis planned to systematically destroy Christianity: http://org.law.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion/articles/RJLR_3_1_2.pdf)
But was Hitler really a Catholic? We read here: http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=32525 that Hitler desired "to trample the Catholic Church 'as one does a frog.'" Additionally, on September 9, 1943, Hitler said, "I'll go into the Vatican when I like. Do you think the Vatican worries me? We'll grab it. Yes, the whole diplomatic bunch is in there. I couldn't care less. That bunch in there, we'll drag them out, the whole swinish pack of them. What does it matter? We can apologize afterwards, that's nothing to worry about."
Contrary to what some may believe, the Nazis and the Italian Fascists knew that the Catholic Church and Popes Pius XI and Pius XII were their enemies. For example, Benito Mussolini told his foreign minister Count Ciano (on August 8, 1938): "I do not underestimate [Pius XI's] strength, but he must not underestimate mine either....A sign from me would be enough to unleash all the anti-clericalism of the Italian people who already find it hard enough to swallow a Jewish God." And Roberto Farinacci, the editor of Italy's official Fascist newspaper, Regime Fascista, wrote the following in October of 1942: "The Church's obstruction of the practical solution of the Jewish problem constitutes a crime against the New Europe."
In 1998, Cornell University released documents from the Nuremberg Trials which revealed that Hitler planned to end Christianity at the end of World War II: http://library.lawschool.cornell.edu/WhatWeHave/SpecialCollections/Donovan/index.cfm). Furthermore, General William Donovan, a senior member of the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, as part of his work documenting Nazi war crimes, compiled copious amounts of documentation which show that the Nazis planned to systematically destroy Christianity: http://org.law.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion/articles/RJLR_3_1_2.pdf)
There can be little doubt that the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies at Keene State College is staffed by individuals who suffer from an anti-Catholic bias. Let's continue to pray that the Center will issue an apology for the anti-Catholic remark issued by Mr. Henry Knight [the Director of the Cohen Center] which was posted at the Cohen Center Blog.
16 comments:
How was Hitler a Catholic? Would a true Catholic want to trample the Church while referring to the hierarchy at the Vatican as being a "swinish" group? Would a true Catholic want to dismantle Christianity? Where is this board member getting his or her information? The revisionist history at Keene State is just revolting.
It is common knowledge that Hitler was Catholic as a child and that he served as an altar boy. But it is also common knowledge that he left the Church and railed against her as an adult. How can one seriously suggest that he was still a Catholic as an adult when he wanted to crush the Church and destroy Christianity? As you noted, he even considered taking over the Vatican. A little known fact is that the Nazis wanted to kidnap the Pope (Pius XII). Keene State College needs to fire the staff of the Cohen Center and replace them all with serious academics who aren't crippled with anti-Catholic bias. There is a very serious credibility problem there at the present.
Why doesn't this organization just openly declare its anti-Catholicism? It may as well. It's not exactly a secret any longer.
Keene State College should remove Henry Knight and Tom White and replace them with individuals who don't possess an anti-Catholic agenda. I cannot help but notice that it's only the Catholic Church which is insulted and slandered and not other faith traditions.
Golda Meir, in a cable to the Vatican expressing condolences at the death of Pope Pius XII, said:
"When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths."
And she was the Prime Minister of Israel. And yet, Tom White over at the Cohen Center [in a comment left at this Blog] has said that the wartime record of Pope Pius XII is not out yet.
Thanks to Paul for exposing yet another lie from a liberal "Catholic" anxious to smear his Church and to engage in historical revisionism.
What a travesty!
At a new thread posted at The Keene Sentinel blog, I posted the following as a response to liberals who are denying the worst Holocaust in history perpetrated by Atheistic Humanists:
" Now it may be seen by all that it is not only the SBC which has engaged in Holocaust denial but liberals who possess an anti-Catholic/anti-Christian agenda.
The following article was written by Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for The Boston Globe, on December 7, 1995. It is titled, "To The Victims of Communism, Lest We Forget":
"In 1993, President Clinton signed Public Law 103-199, authorizing a memorial in Washington to those who died in the ``unprecedented imperial Communist holocaust'' that began in 1917. It is a memorial long overdue. And it is well-suited to Washington, the capital of the Free World and the headquarters of what President Kennedy called the ``long twilight struggle'' against the totalitarians of the Left. When completed, the Victims of Communism Memorial will include a museum documenting the crimes committed by the disciples of Marx and Lenin; original artifacts from the bitter night of Communist brutality (a piece of the Berlin Wall, a cell from the ``Hanoi Hilton''); and a database preserving the names of those wiped out in history's greatest slaughter.
Or at least as many of those names as can be identified. It is impossible that we shall ever know them all. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of Cossacks butchered on Lenin's orders in 1919? Every Miskito Indian killed in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas? Every Chinese peasant, all 2 million-plus of them, obliterated during Mao Zedong's ``land reform'' in the early 1950s? Impossible.
For pure murderous evil, there has never been a force to compare with Communism. The Nazis didn't come close. The Holocaust was uniquely malignant - never before or since did one people construct a vast industry of death for the sole purpose of rounding up and destroying every single member of another people. But the Nazis exterminated 11 million innocents; the Communist death toll surpasses 100 million. Nazi power lasted from 1933 to 1945. The Communist nightmare began in November 1917, and continues to this day.
Savagery has always been a hallmark of Communism. It is an ideology that requires the destruction of human beings. ``We have never rejected terror in principle,'' wrote Lenin in 1901, ``nor can we do so.''
Half a century later, even as he denounced the extremes to which his predecessors went, Nikita Khrushchev vowed that the terror so esteemed by Lenin would go on. ``The questioning of Stalin's terror,'' he cautioned the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, ``may lead to the questioning of terror in general. But Bolshevism believes in the use of terror.'' Not long afterward, Khrushchev sent 3,000 Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian freedom fighters.
Communism equals murder. Everywhere. Always.
In Ukraine, for example, where 7 million people were starved to death on the Kremlin's orders. ``If you go now to the Ukraine or the North Caucuses,'' wrote British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge in 1933, ``exceedingly beautiful countries and formerly amongst the most fertile in the world, you will find them like a desert; . . . no livestock or horses; villages deserted; peasants famished, often their bodies swollen, unutterably wretched.'' Farmers who took grain or vegetables from their own land were shot. Dead bodies littered the streets of Kharkov, the capital. ``It was,'' an eyewitness later recalled, ``as if the Black Death had passed through.''
Communism equaled murder in Ethiopia, where Mengistu Haile Mariam became dictator in 1977 and embarked on what he called his ``Red Terror.'' Tens of thousands were massacred, including the graduating seniors of almost every high school in Addis Ababa.
Communism equaled murder in North Vietnam as far back as 1945, when Ho Chi Minh resolved to annihilate his Nationalist rivals. ``It was appalling,'' recorded the historian Lucien Bodard. ``Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of men had been liquidated . . .. The intention was that horror and dread should extinguish the last trace of respect for them among the masses: Their execution had to be both shameful and terrifying. That was the reason for the mass executions of hundreds at once, the fields of prisoners buried alive, the harrows dragged over men buried up to the neck.''
Communism equaled murder in Tibet, where Mao's campaign to extirpate Buddhist culture turned 1.2 million Tibetans into corpses. It equaled murder in gentle Cambodia, where the bloodlust of the Khmer Rouge vaporized one-third of the nation in less than four years. It equaled murder in Cuba, in East Germany, in Afghanistan. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic - murder. In the Gulag and the laogai - murder. At Tienanmen Square - murder. In the Korean War and the Vietnam War, in the forest of Katyn and the dungeons of the Lubyanka - murder.
One hundred million victims of Communism. And those are only the victims who were slain. It doesn't include those who were maimed or driven mad. Those whose lives went dark when a loved one was butchered. Those who spun out their years in potato queues, in vodka stupors, in daily fear. It doesn't include those who wasted 30 years as slaves in Siberia. The boat people who flung themselves into the South China Sea. The stifled poets, the gagged priests, the tormented refuseniks, the exiled democrats.
Rarely do we think of them, or of the hundred million. We forget how pathologically evil Communism has been, or why we poured so much blood and treasure into fighting the Cold War. It is to correct that amnesia that the Victims of Communism Memorial will be built.
For information, contact:
VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION
P.O. Box 1997
Washington, DC 20013
202-785-0266
202-785-0261 (fax)"
http://www.gulag.hu/jacoby.htm
Atheism kills. In fact, it killed more than 100 million in the 20th century alone. These victims were honored by a Bill signed BY PRESIDENT CLINTON acknowledging the unprecedented Holocaust at the hands of Atheistic Humanists.
Ellen Wironken is right. The fact that Keene State College and its "Center for Holocaust Studies" (actually a center for anti-Catholic propaganda) refuses to acknowledge THESE VICTIMS of Atheistic Humanism is just damnable."
And the Walter Duranty Award for denial in journalism goes to....
Sally M, who apparently is a fan of the Cohen Center, is attacking you Paul. I responded to her at the thread where she is slandering you.
It comes as no surprise that Sally M is once again attacking Paul Melanson without cause. She attacked him at the Cohen Center Blog with false accusations. Now she writes "I just looked at his (Paul Melanson's) website. It is NOT about Jesus, it is about Paul. He is fixated with certain things at certain times and just goes on and on and on about people he doesn't know. How can he judge like that?
The Jesus I believe in would NEVER rip another person to shreds the way these people have. The Jesus I believe in would NEVER make false accusations about individuals He doesn't even know. The Jesus I believe in would NEVER use the cruel words used to describe others. The Jesus I believe in is kind, compassionate, patient, considerate, loving.
I urge you to stop this in the name of Jesus. This has gone too far."
I call upon Sally M to provide some shred of evidence that Paul Melanson has used "cruel words to describe others" or has made "false accusations" against people. Mr. Melanson has exposed the anti-Catholicism of the Cohen Center. Mr. Knight DID level a false accusation against the Church and Mr. White DID try to defend his accusation. The slanderous accusation made by Mr. Knight remains at the Cohen Center Blog to this day. Even though it has been refuted. Now, another member of the Cohen Center has suggested that Hitler was a Catholic when he carried out his "Final Solution" against the Jewish people. Mr. Melanson has exposed this as a fallacy as well.
"The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a non-profit organization, was established by an Act of Congress to build a memorial in Washington, DC to commemorate the MORE THAN 100 MILLION victims of communism; to honor those who successfully resisted communist tyranny; to educate current and future generations about communism's crimes against humanity; and to pay tribute to those who helped win the Cold War." - http://www.victimsofcommunism.org/about/
Atheistic Humanism or Communism killed more than 100 million in the 20th century. Atheism kills.
William, don't expect them to admit their prejudice. The hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Isn't it funny how those who are so quick to castigate the SBC for Holocaust denial are themselves guilty of ignoring the Holocausts which were carried out by atheistic regimes and of prejudice against Catholics?
Stewart, I just posted this at the Sentinel Blog:
The link which Stewart posted: http://www.victimsofcommunism.org/about/ takes one to a website which reads:
"The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a non-profit organization, was established by an Act of Congress to build a memorial in Washington, DC to commemorate the MORE THAN 100 MILLION victims of communism; to honor those who successfully resisted communist tyranny; to educate current and future generations about communism's crimes against humanity; and to pay tribute to those who helped win the Cold War."
And, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote in that newspaper, "For pure murderous evil, there has never been a force to compare with Communism. The Nazis didn't come close. The Holocaust was uniquely malignant - never before or since did one people construct a vast industry of death for the sole purpose of rounding up and destroying every single member of another people. But the Nazis exterminated 11 million innocents; the Communist death toll surpasses 100 million. Nazi power lasted from 1933 to 1945. The Communist nightmare began in November 1917, and continues to this day."
As evil as Nazism was, it pales in comparison with Atheistic Humanism and the genocide it inflicted throughout the twentieth century. But we hear nothing about the atrocities committed in the name of atheism over at the Cohen Center. Why is this? President Clinton signed into law a Bill the purpose of which was to build a memorial to honor the more than 100 million murdered in the atheistic Holocausts of Communism in the twentieth century.
It would seem that the Cohen Center - and certain people at this forum - are Holocaust deniers just like some at the SBC. While they acknowledge the 11 million killed in the Nazi Holocaust (and we all should), they deny the far greater Holocaust inflicted by Atheistic Humanism.
This is because such people are really motivated by politics and not a real concern to educate people about Holocausts so that these horrible slaughters will never happen again.
This is yet another reason why the Cohen Center has forfeited any and all credibility.
I posted this just now at the Keene Sentinel weblog....
"
Blake, the fact that the Cohen Center condemns the totalitarianism of the right (Fascism) while ignoring the totalitarianism of the left (Atheistic Humanism/Communism) says it all. The Center is apparently not concerned with all Holocausts, but only those committed by political parties they oppose.
I just don't see how anyone can take the Center seriously at this point. Especially with all of the documented anti-Catholicism there.
Instead of replying to the serious, legitimate concerns of those of us who are Catholic, defenders of the Cohen Center accuse us either of being "followers of Paul Melanson" or "members of Saint Benedict's Center." This, after discovering that their efforts to portray us as "overly sensitive" had no merit and failed to work.
Facts are facts. And the fact remains that atheism has been responsible for far more dead in far more Holocausts than any other ideology or belief system. The Cohen Center should address the Holocausts committed in the name of Communism/Atheistic Humanism and also its own prejudice in the form of anti-Catholicism."
Thank you all for your comments. Mr. Loiseau, well said. Mr. Tom White of the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies has asserted that, "..any interpretation of his Papacy [Pius XII's] are at best, ongoing, as the Vatican has only recently totally opened their archives on this subject." In a response posted here:
http://lasalettejourney.
blogspot.com/2007/
12/call-for-apology.html,
I cited a link from the Catholic League which exposed his assertion as false. The link may be found here: http://www.catholicleague.
org/pius.php?id=6
Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Palestine issued the following statement on February 28, 1945:
"The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness [Pius XII] and his illustrious delegates , inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for our unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world."
Where was Mr. White at this time? Had he even been born? Is he suggesting that Rabbi Herzog was engaging in falsehood or was simply confused? If so, where is his proof?
A petition of twenty-thousand Jewish refugees from Central Europe was sent to Pope Pius XII in the summer of 1945. This petition stated: "Allow us to ask the great honor of being able to thank personally His Holiness for the generosity he has shown us when we were persecuted during the terrible period of Nazi Fascism."
I could go on. But what would be the point honestly? There are some who, like Mr. White, simply refuse to view certain facts of history with objectivity at times. Especially when these facts contradict their own personal agenda or preconceived notions of reality.
I came across your articles on the Cohen Center at Keene State College while visiting the Catholic News Network. You are to be commended for highlighting the anti-Catholic bias found at Keene State. It would appear that this Henry Knight is not very diplomatic and that others on staff at the Cohen Center also have an axe to gring when it comes to Catholicism. Hopefully Catholics will remember this and choose not to send their children to Keene State or to support that institution in any way.
Somebody named Craig just posted the most ridiculous comment at the Keene Sentinel Blog. My response: "Craig writes, "I think a closer observation of history will show that Any mass murders, the Holocaust, the whole history of the middle east, even the soviets hundreds of millions dead,will show that it was pretty much the government that was resposable for those crimes against humanity."
And what Craig, governments are faceless entities that kill and no human persons are responsible? Your statement is asinine. Governments are MADE UP OF PEOPLE. And people decided to follow a particular ideology which led to violence. In the case of Nazi Germany it was National Socialism. In the case of the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia etc...it was Atheistic Humanism.
Atheistic Humanism is responsible for Holocausts which far surpassed all others combined. Don't try to suggest that the blame lies on some faceless bureaucracy. Governments are made up of people. And when people chose to follow the anti-God ideology of Atheistic Humanism, blood flowed on the streets and people became murdered corpses.
If you refuse to condemn Atheistic Humanism for its crimes, you have no right condemning the killings which resulted from National Socialism. You cannot have it both ways."
At the Keene Blog:
"Craig is obviously an anti-Christian fanatic who engages in Holocaust denial. He is driven by ideology (like his atheist friends) and flat out refuses to acknowledge what the United States government has: that Atheistic Humanism was responsible for killing more than 100 million in the 20th century. He therefore cannot be taken seriously.
As for the anti-Catholicism of the Cohen Center and Keene State, this has been proven. It is now an established fact. It is irrefutable. If one could posit an intelligent argument otherwise, one would have by now. As it is, no one is able to provide a response to Paul Melanson's posts at La Salette Journey.
QED: Therefore, the thing is proven.
"For pure murderous evil, there has never been a force to compare with Communism. The Nazis didn't come close. The Holocaust was uniquely malignant - never before or since did one people construct a vast industry of death for the sole purpose of rounding up and destroying every single member of another people. But the Nazis exterminated 11 million innocents; the Communist death toll surpasses 100 million. Nazi power lasted from 1933 to 1945. The Communist nightmare began in November 1917, and continues to this day." - Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe columnist, http://www.gulag.hu/jacoby.htm"
Post a Comment