Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

ROD DREHER: Au Revoir, Madeleine Lebeau

I am borrowing a blog post from Rod Dreher containing a movie clip I found very moving.

 

Dreher:

Madeleine Lebeau has died. She was the last surviving cast member of Casablanca, and she had an iconic role in what for me is the greatest scene of all cinema. See above. She’s the character you see crying while singing “La Marseillaise”. From the story:

It was for her third American film however that she is most remembered. Signed to a Warner Bros contract in 1942, she was quickly cast in Casablanca as Yvonne. Introduced as yet another spurned conquest by main character Rick Blaine, she is next seen as a collaborator on the arm of a German soldier. However, during the iconic cast performance of “La Marseillaise,” Yvonne tears up as she sings along and then shouts “Viva la France!”. Like many of the film’s cast who were also refugees from Nazi terror, Lebeau’s tears, and her shout, were absolutely genuine.

Madeleine Lebeau was a Jewish refugee. May her memory be eternal, and may her memory be a blessing.

And: Vive la France!

Paul Robert Schneider - Martyred Christian Pastor in Nazi Germany

Timothy George tells the story of this breathtakingly courageous hero of the faith.

Paul Robert Schneider (1897-1939) was the first Protestant pastor to die in a concentration camp at the hands of the Nazis. His story is one of unmitigated courage, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom. Only in recent years has he begun to receive some of the recognition he deserves. 

Me:  I value stories like this, and many more like it, for continual inspiration towards faithful living.

The Incredibly Depressing Answers College Students Gave When Asked What the Holocaust Was and Where it Began

Sharon Schwartz writes in The Blaze -

A Pennsylvania woman set out with a video camera to learn what college students in her state know about the Holocaust — and discovered an incredible lack of knowledge not only of the genocide of the Jews, but of basic facts about U.S. history and World War II.

Rhonda Fink-Whitman visited college campuses in Pennsylvania this fall, including the venerated Ivy League institution the University of Pennsylvania, where she was repeatedly faced with a remarkable ignorance about events that took place in the last century. 

Students didn’t know where Normandy was, why U.S. forces landed there, why the U.S. even entered the war or who was president at the time. (Wilson, Eisenhower and JFK were among the guesses.)  One student didn’t know who Anne Frank was, because he said he never read the book.

Another student thought African Americans may have been targeted in the Holocaust.  [more . . .]

Me: The ignorance uncovered by Ms. Schwartz is eye-opening and scary. 

9

WAS HITLER A CHRISTIAN?

It's amazing that this question gets raised, but it does.  See Wintery Knight's good blog post drawing on Jonah Goldberg's coverage in Liberal Fascism. - http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/was-hitler-a-christian-is-nazism-similar-to-christianity-2/

Update: See Erwin Lutzer's book,   When a Nation Forgets God: 7 Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany

Related posts:

     - IRENA SENDLER - SAVIOR OF 2,500 JEWISH CHILDREN

     - DIETRICH BONHOEFFER - THE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN WHO STOOD AGAINST NAZI GERMANY

     - JONAH GOLDBERG ON "MEIN KAMPF," "THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO," LEFT-WING PRESS AND THE TUCSON KILLINGS

     - "THE SHAME OF ACADEME AND FASCISM, THEN AND NOW"

     - JONAH GOLDBERG - HITLER & CHRISTIANITY

IRENA SENDLER - SAVIOR OF 2,500 JEWISH CHILDREN

 From an e-mail:

Remember this woman...

 

 

Irena Sendler

Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98)

Warsaw, Poland

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.

Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids.

Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.

Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazi's broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out, in a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and tried to reunite the family. Most had been gassed.

Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.  She was not selected. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.

Later another politician, Barack Hussein Obama, won for his work as a community organizer for ACORN.


In MEMORIAM - 65 YEARS LATER

I'm doing my small part by forwarding this message. I hope you'll consider doing the same.

It is now more than 65 years since the Second World War in Europe ended.

This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!

Now, more than ever, with Iran, and others, claiming the HOLOCAUST to be 'a myth'. It's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.

This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide!

Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world. Please send this e-mail to people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain.

Snopes:  http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/sendler.asp

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER - THE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN WHO STOOD AGAINST NAZI GERMANY

I've posted two videos of an interview with biographer, Eric Metaxas.  The first is a condensed version (8:32 minutes) and the second one longer and with less editing (34:34 minutes).

 

 

JONAH GOLDBERG ON "MEIN KAMPF," "THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO," LEFT-WING PRESS AND THE TUCSON KILLINGS

Since I've never read Hitler's Mein Kampf, I was happy to read Jonah Goldberg's overview with comments relevant to the Tucson killings.  He writes:

Lots of friends and foes have been emailing me to talk about Liberal Fascism in  light of the fact that Loughner liked both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. I’m taking a pass on all that largely because I think it’s entirely irrelevant. Also, I have zero interest in hawking even a single book in this context.

But about those other books. When I meet young people who brag about having read Mein Kampf, my first reaction is that they’re lying, for one reason or another. And after further conversation, I usually come away feeling my initial reaction was justified.

"THE SHAME OF ACADEME AND FASCISM, THEN AND NOW"

That's the title of Carlin Romano's Chronicle of Higher Education article that takes a look at Stephen H. Norwood's just-published, "brilliantly researched, utterly thorough and morally upsetting The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press). 

The book, Romano says, shows how academic leaders got it wrong in the 1930s.

 A chilling chronicle of pro-Nazi enthusiasm, shabby indifference, and amoral tolerance toward Hitler in elite American academe of the 1930s, this book should exert direct impact in this season of cracking heads and bones in Tehran. It relentlessly names names, depositing fact after sordid fact before the reader in a way that leaves its implications for then and today overwhelming.

The book chronicles how Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and university after university failed utterly to respond appropriately to Nazi Germany.  Quite the opposite. 

In one remarkable chapter, Norwood exposes how "many administrators, faculty, and students at the elite women's colleges known as the Seven Sisters—Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard—shared a sanguine view of Nazi Germany and enthusiastically participated in academic and cultural exchanges with the Third Reich."

Writer Romano asks if academic leaders will get it right regarding Iran today.  I would be very surprised.  More here...  (HT: Jonah Goldberg at the Corner)

JONAH GOLDBERG - HITLER & CHRISTIANITY

In a series of posts (here and here) Jonah Goldberg has excerpted pages from his book Liberal Fascism that deal with "Hitler &  Christianity."  If you read further down this post, you will see tie-ins Goldberg makes with neo-pagan and New Age thought.  Goldberg writes:   

From pages 364-365 of my book:

Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis
worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional
Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish
this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung
while at the same time shrinking traditional religion’s role in civil society.
To this end, Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German
historian Götz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with
lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for
with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned
religious charity, crippling the churches’ role as a counterweight to
the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to
state authority. “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves,”
Hitler cackled. “They will betray their God to us. They will betray
anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”5
Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional
Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with