Echoes of the 1930s and the Deeper Malaise

The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost

‘Moral Leadership missing in action’.

                                                                                                                            Paul Kelly

 During the second world war, in the countries occupied by Hitler’s armies, Jewish families were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. At Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centres, camp authorities sent the vast majority of young Jewish children directly to the gas chambers upon arrival.

As many as 1.5 million Jewish children alone were murdered or died at the hands of Nazi officials or their collaborators.

***

If we fast forward to today when at Christmas, we have just celebrated the birth of Jesus our saviour in Bethlehem around 2000 years ago, in a nation then under the boot of the Roman occupying forces, there is a tragic irony. For once again we see the rise of an ancient pernicious evil in western society. It is called antisemitism. An, if not the, extreme example of this obscene evil was Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, known as the Holocaust.

One thing that we must not forget, in the context of the current explosion of antisemitism in the West, is that Jesus came into the world as a Jew.

***

In a previous article titled the ‘The Degradation’, I pointed to the fact that western society has now intentionally rejected the Biblical ‘Built-In-Operating-System’ (BIOS), the world view that, admittedly often imperfectly, served western countries as a moral guidance system for centuries. This has created a spiritual-cultural vacuum which has now been filled with a hotchpotch of other religions, cultures, and alternative world views, which has created a ‘Tribalized’ society. Such have been generally embraced under the banner of multiculturalism, even though some are not only mutually exclusive but incompatible with the Biblical one which generally shaped western societies. Consequent to the formation of this vacuum, we now see the ‘chickens’ forecast by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (amazingly an atheist) coming home to roost, viz-

“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”

Well, the ‘right to Christian morality’ has now well and truly been ‘pulled’ from western society. The ejection of God, especially from the public square, means that the ‘whole’ is now broken, and having sown the wind we are now reaping the whirlwind, in a society with an ‘Amputated (Christian) Soul’. (See Here)

A Deeper Malaise

‘Anti-Semitism signals a deeper malaise in West’s democracies.’

                                                                                                                   Greg Sheridan

***

One of the ‘chickens’ now happily roosting in western society is rapidly increasing antisemitism. The degree of moral degeneration has really been highlighted by the response to the October 7^th killing, butchering, maiming and, in some cases, decapitation of around 1200  innocent Jewish men, women, children and even babies, by an organization officially listed by the Australian government as a terrorist group, namely Hamas. This event represents the greatest slaughter of Jews since the holocaust, a horror about which large numbers of Australians especially younger ones, including in most cases the media, seem to be appallingly ignorant.

Those events have uncorked a bottle of, clearly previously hidden but simmering, antisemitism throughout the former Christendom countries of the West. This has manifested itself by abuse, violent threats against Jews in public places, schools and universities; school children becoming afraid to wear their Jewish-identifying school uniforms; Nazi Germany-echoing cries of ‘gas the Jews’; the abusing and harassing of Jewish families at a Melbourne hotel, whose loved ones had been taken as hostages, many killed, by Hamas.

Yet much of the Australian media refuses to call out this antisemitism. This, as Greg Craven former Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University recently wrote, can be summed up as a-

‘Moral frailty that ignores evil’.

The Lessons of History

‘Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it’.        Winston Churchill                               

***

History tells us that the Jews have been a persecuted people for most of their existence. Arguably, the Jews came into being as a distinct people when they were slaves under the Pharaohs of Egypt in the middle of the second millennium BC. Under Moses and Joshua, they were freed from that slavery and led out of Egypt in the 13^th century BC, finally arriving in the Land that God had promised them namely Israel, which was the territory encompassing land on both sides of the River Jordan including Gaza. It was a much larger area than the Israel of today.

Thus, it should be noted that Jews have been in the strip of land we now call Gaza for over 3000 years.

Throughout its history, Israel was constantly under threat from other nations, including from the Assyrians at the end of the 8^th century BC, then by the Babylonians around 600 BC, followed by the Persians and the Greeks. Then in Jesus time, Israel was occupied and oppressed by the Romans who destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD.

This leads us up to the 20^th century and a time of growing Jewish persecution in various countries, the most severe being in Hitler’s Germany from the early 1930’s to 1945.

There seems to a general amnesia to the fact that Western nations fought World War Two at huge cost, in part to eradicate (as was believed) the pernicious evil of Hitler’s Nazis and their extreme Jew extermination policies which incarcerated millions of Jewish men, women, children and babies in concentration camps. There, they were sent to mass execution chambers where they were gassed to death. It is against this background that we saw a great crowd of ‘Australians’ outside the iconic Sydney Opera house shouting the obscenity of ‘gas the Jews’.

The photo at the head of this article is of Jewish women and children, separated from the men, lining up for ‘selection’ in Auschwitz concentration camp, in May 1944.  ‘Lest we forget’.

We have recently seen many protests in western countries at which the cry ‘from the River (Jordan) to the (Mediterranean) Sea, Palestine will be free’ is heard. This amounts in effect to a call for the extermination of the state of Israel and Jews generally. Such a goal is the stated mission of Hamas, a goal of which Hitler would have been extremely proud.

The estimate of 20,000, and rising, dead in Gaza is truly appalling, and there should be no attempt to minimise the suffering of the Gazan people which is undoubtably a human tragedy. However, protests against Arab suffering seem to be highly selective. For example, over 350,000 mostly Arabs have been killed by President Asaad’s forces (helped by Russia) in 10 years of war in Syria according to the UN. Yet despite this Arab carnage, that far eclipses anything carried out by the Israelis in Gaza, there has been little sign of protests in the streets. Why is this? The only explanation can be that the recent protests are not actually so much as pro-Palestine as anti-Israel, i.e. antisemitic.

Response

One of the most concerning things in all of this has been the response of governments and the Church. Indeed, it is possible to see that in current events we are experiencing echoes of the 1930s, when western governments and politicians for years largely stood by and allowed an incremental escalating oppression of the Jews in Germany. This ultimately resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews (men, women and children) many in the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. At the same time a large proportion of the German Church stood by mute, or even complicit, and watched this happen.

Of course, to have some understanding of this requires some understanding of 20th century history, yet younger generations appear to be largely historically illiterate and so quite prone to repeating the mistakes of history. Those who, at terrible cost (many losing their lives or suffering life-long physical and mental trauma such as my father), fought against this anti-Jew obscenity in the second world war would be appalled to see what is now taking pace in the cities of the West.

A number of points need to be noted here. First, there is no intention to minimise the suffering of the Gazan Palestinian people which is truly a human tragedy.

Second, western Governments and many politicians have shown a very muted response to the rising antisemitism, their words and decisions often appearing to be driven more by a desire to shore up their voter base than by morality. There is a lot said about stamping out racism, but when faced by the growing blatant racism of antisemitism in the streets, in a clear reflection of their 1930’s counterparts, the political authorities say little and do even less.

Third, as it was in the 1930s, the Church is largely silent. I have been to many Christian gatherings in recent weeks, but there has been little to no reference to the rising antisemitism in lur society.

Is There an Antidote to the Malaise?

What we see in the West is a society that has lost its Soul, its Christian Soul that is, and the biblical moral guidance system, such that if Jesus and his disciples (all Jews) lived in Australia today, they too would be in danger of experiencing the current wave of antisemitism.

However, we must see that there is a bigger picture. The current rising antisemitism is but one consequence of the collapse of Christianity in Australia and the West generally, as Greg Sheridan has commented it is a ‘signal of a deeper malaise’. This deeper malaise is the result of a catastrophic plunge into a now pagan moral bankruptcy, George Orwell’s ‘Cesspool full of barbed wire’, as the Bible-shaped world view and moral guidance system is expunged from all centres of influence i.e. politics, the media and education.

The only entity capable of providing an antidote to the spiritual-cultural sickness that has allowed and the 1930s-reflecting resurrection of antisemitism in the West marked by its inaction in the face of cries of ‘gas the Jews’, is the body of Christ, the Church. However, the western Church is now but an impotent rump of its former self. It is not just that it has been a dismal failure in its primary goal of making disciples of Jesus since the last century, but that the result is that its influence in its role as ‘Salt’ in society (Matthew 5:13) is so small as to be negligible.

The spiritual and cultural regeneration of society can only take place when Christians move from the current paying of lip-service to disciple-making and acting as spiritual and moral Salt in society, to energetic, passionate and sacrificial prosecution of these Jesus-mandated reasons for our existence.

The current ‘Echoes of the 1930s’ is but one symptom of a ‘Deeper Malaise’, to which the only antidote is for Leaders and members of the Body of Christ to wake up and act.