tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post8461966829546388683..comments2023-12-14T20:02:51.470-06:00Comments on The Heavy Anglophile Orthodox: Two sides of the same coinMatthew Franklin Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15233216128641267240noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-2155125136100566672013-03-11T23:21:20.843-05:002013-03-11T23:21:20.843-05:00Thanks, John!
You're definitely right about t...Thanks, John!<br /><br />You're definitely right about the messiness of the reality of mid 20th-century Germany. I myself can't make heads or tails of the Nazis. Clearly they were involved in a religious project, just as the Communists were - and clearly that religious project involved incorporating elements of religious symbolism both Christian and Teutonic-heathen. <br /><br />The problem, I think, was that they were materialist in all the wrong ways and spiritual in all the wrong ways. They took the worst parts of the 19th-century civic religion of nationalism, and they took the worst and least noble elements of the Christian intellectual heritage, and created a Frankenstein's-monster which was both liberal and illiberal, Spencerite and technology-fetishist but also sentimentalistic and Romantic, with a cult of personality at its centre.<br /><br />Each of the fundamentalist and New Atheist caricatures of the Nazis holds a grain of truth, but neither adequately reflects the whole reality. <br /><br />Perhaps because the New Atheists don't want to taint their Spencerism and technology-fetishism, and the fundamentalists don't want to taint their sentimentality and reliance on cults of personality.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4251777016037497783.post-47996207072203965042013-03-11T17:59:46.505-05:002013-03-11T17:59:46.505-05:00Great post. The fundamentalist vs. New Atheist deb...Great post. The fundamentalist vs. New Atheist debate about the Nazis is a good example. Both sides use sketchy historical analysis to prove that Hitler and the Nazis were either religious lunatics or atheistic materialists. The reality is a lot messier. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com