When We Showed Up Hitler
Learning to return to the Standard for our standards
One of the plays the left runs on Christians today is taking our twentieth-century “givens” and turning them against us.
By a “twentieth-century given” I mean those truths that are self-evident to us as a result of the cataclysmic events two world wars, a depression, a war in Vietnam thrown in, the onset of mass immigration, mass death by communism, and a sea-change in governance, from one of responsibility to one of “rights.” The last century was world-changing, and when the tide receded it left behind certain assumptions about good and evil.
One of those givens that then gets turned on us is that Adolf Hitler is the great embodiment of evil. To demonstrate this is true, consider your own questions and expectations of me, the writer, in what I do next. Your question is, Do you, Jed, think Hitler was good? Are you an antisemite? Are you a white nationalist? And my answer is no, no and no. Hitler was bad. Let’s not have more Hitler’s. He killed many, many people.
And because of that, it is now a given that he is the standard, the embodiment of evil. Then that label gets turned back on us, when we are labeled “fascist.” This is convenient for any leftist group, because it justifies (at least in their mind) any behavior done against us. Because “fascist” means “just as bad as Hitler,” and Hitler does not deserve anything else but a Time Machine for someone to go back and kill him.
Of course, if you ask anyone for a definition of “fascist,” you will get one no sooner than you will get a translation of when Biden summed up America in one word: “Asufutimaehaehfutbw.” But that doesn’t matter, because they need only use our definition. When we say, “Hitler is evil,” they say, “Right, and you’re Hitler.” And they are half-right.
Huh?! Yes, they are half-right. For if Hitler is the embodiment of evil, then what about Stalin and Pol Pot, who looked at Hitler’s death numbers and said, “Oh that’s child’s play.” And if Hitler is the great embodiment of evil, then maybe the Ayatollah was right when he said America is the great Satan, for since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973, we have killed more people and in more gruesome ways than Hitler could ever dream of. To be specific: we have killed at least seven times as many people by abortion than historians estimate Hitler did. We who fashion ourselves as progressive and modern looked at Hitler and the Mayan blood sacrifices and said, “That ain’t nothin’.”
To the point: our assumption that Hitler is the great embodiment of evil is thin, mythic and untethered from any timeless standard. Which we should expect of masked Antifa bros or Hollywood, but not from people with Bibles. For the Bible gives us clear and deep standards for evil. War, on the other hand, in all its fog and chaos, produces myths created by the victors that are often untethered from timeless truth. After all, we write book after book about Dachau - but never mind Dresden.
Solzhenitsyn was right: the line between good and evil is not found “out there,” in our enemy’s camp. It runs through every human heart - which is what Scripture has said all along. Perhaps when he wrote that he was thinking of Jeremiah 17:9, or Paul’s quoting the Psalms in Romans 3:10-18. David knew that men’s mouths are like open graves long before Hitler left art school.
If Antifa bros were smart in their slander, they should either call us “Communists” or “Post-War Americans.” For most of our battles today are over definitions. Things have definitions, and they matter. And we can demand a definition because Christ is risen from the dead, proving that there IS a standard - there IS a timeless, immoveable yardstick by which all truth, goodness and beauty is measured.
Then we can take those definitions and respond more constructively to the game being run on us.
First, we can ask ourselves, honestly: well, AM I fascist? (Checks definition.) No? Then we can respond to Antifa bro: Well, sorry my dear masked, unemployed fellow. That pickle won’t stick to this wall.
But, my dear Antifa bro: if you’re really, sincerely interested in knocking down tyrannical evil that slaughters the weak by the millions, check out Planned Parenthood’s numbers. And notice how they systematically place their charnel houses in poor, black neighborhoods. Look at how they are more successful eugenicists than Hitler ever was. If you really want to knock down idols of evil, just picture behind every Planned Parenthood a great altar of Molech, his gaping mouth consuming children by the dozens. Every day.
And notice, my dear Antifa bro, how this has happened right under our noses. So yes, you are half-right. This has happened in a land chock full of churches. We Christians are not much different from the German villagers who did not question what was happening in that facility outside of town.
For the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century did not define evil; they only revealed and magnified it. They revealed that evil infects us all. And it magnified our ability to do it, aided by military technology that was - ironically - often invented and refined during America’s Civil War.
If all of this is depressing and confusing, my dear Antifa bro, understand that evil does not get the final word. For God in Christ entered time and space and defeated evil on his cross. For there Jesus absorbed all the wrath God rightly has against evil on Himself. But that evil could not keep Jesus down - he was raised three days later. We can therefore look at any evil with hope that whatever comes to Christ by faith will be both forgiven and then raised from the dead.
So my dear Antifa bro, full of righteous rage and energy to set the world right - you have the right idea, but it must be pointed in the right direction. Come home, to Christ. And then you fill find the standard, and then all your other efforts will be pointed in the right direction. Come from behind the mask - come clean, come home, to Christ.