Top 15 Michael Burleigh Quotes

A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow.

In Poland, which was crucified between two thieves, both the Communists and the Nazis sought to extirpate Christianity, although only the Nazis attempted to reduce the Poles to helotry in the remnants of their former state. White Europeans were treated ‘like the blacks in the colonies’, as the metropolitan of Lwów put it. Six million Poles were killed, half of them Christians, half of them Jews.

Some of the most eminent Catholic theologians, such as Engelbert Krebs, Wilhelm Neuss, Karl Rahner and Romano Guardini, lost their university teaching posts under the Nazis. Krebs not only published articles reflecting his positive view of Judaism, but was denounced in August 1934 for saying at a private gathering in his brother’s house, “We are being governed by robbers, murderers and criminals’ a remark that resulted in several years of harassment, the loss of his job, a trial and imprisonment.

The Austrian Catholic newspaper Volkswohl even parodied life in a future Nazi state in a manner that seems extraordinarily prescient. Every newborn baby’s hereditary history would be checked by a Racial-Hygienic Institute; the unfit or sickly would be sterilised or killed; dedicated ‘Aryan’ Catholics would be persecuted: ‘The demonic cries out from this movement; masses of the tempted go to their doom under the Satan’s sun. If we Catholics want to save ourselves, then I can never be in a pact with these forces.’

In the place of democracy, Fascism offered a militarised hierarchy, and the abolition of any distinction between the political and the private, the essential totalitarian aspiration, albeit like most aspirations rarely totally realized. Possession of a PNF card became the key to advancement in virtually every walk of life from inspecting fish to awarding literary prizes; the meaning and value of an individual life was weighed in terms of how it advanced the greatness of the state, a form of state-worship that such Catholic opponents as Luigi Sturzo dubbed ‘statolatria’.

On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'état, the Orthodox Church claimed a hundred million adherents, two hundred thousand priests and monks, seventy-five thousand churches and chapels, over eleven hundred monasteries, thirty-seven thousand primary schools, fifty-seven seminaries and four university-level academies, not to speak of thousands of hospitals, old people’s homes and orphanages. Within a few years, the intuitional structures were swept away, the churches were desolated, vandalized or put to secular use. Many of the clergy were imprisoned or shot; appropriately enough the first concentration camp of the gulag was opened in a monastery in Artic regions.

In 1920 the British philosopher Bertrand Russell spent five weeks in Bolshevik Russia as a member of a Labour Party delegation. The group hoped to discover a promised land, breaking into spontaneous choruses of the Internationale and Red Flag on spying the first Red banners across the border. After twenty-four hours Russell realized that there was not much to sing about.

Historically, of course, as has been pointed out by such thinkers as Marcel Gauchet and George Weigel Christianity had much to do with the notion of the autonomous, sacrosanct individual, with the preservation of a sphere beyond the state that anticipated civil society, with the notion of elected leadership, and with holding rulers accountable to higher powers.

Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experience at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere. This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by the nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties.

The major faultline running through the left wing of the working class, for by no means all workers came under the rubric, was hostility between the Communists and Social Democrats. Between 1928 and 1934 the Communist Party (KPD) adhered to an inflationary use of the term ‘fascism’ to describe not only the Nazis, but also the previous chancellors and the ‘social fascists’ of the ( SPD)

Many of history’s murderers have staked out the moral high ground, killing for love of confession or country, or in the name of social equality.

Just as the SS was the most implacable in its persecution of racially unwanted, so it single-mindedly pursued the goal of integrating all Germans on the basis of racial equality. Himmler sincerely meant it when he warned his German SS men to behave respectfully towards their foreign racial comrades.

Christianity regarded all earthly existence as transient, while the Nazi thought in terms of rendering life eternal through a sort of biological Great Chain of Being. The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the aeons.

Whatever Christianity’s ambivalences and antagonisms towards the Jews, its core concerns with compassion and humility were anathema to a politics of racial egotism, and worship of brutality and strength. These ‘aspects’ of Christianity would have to be expunged. In Nazi eyes, Christianity was ‘foreign’ and ‘unnatural’, or what has been described as the Jews’ ‘posthumous poison’, a notion that Nazis picked up from Nietzsche.

The Nazis despised Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality… Forgiveness was not for resentful haters, nor compassion of much use to people who wanted to stamp the weak into the ground. In a word, Christianity was a ‘soul-malady.’ Many Nazis were also viscerally anti-clerical, up to and including resisting the emergence of a quasi-clerical caste in their own ranks. One would have to visit the Reformation or the extremes of liberal anti-clericalism in the modern era to find anything analogous to their vicious and vulgar attacks on priests.