Word: hitleritis
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There are theologians and historians who have made this point. Most explicit are those who have called him God's punishment of European Jews for their secularization, then gone on to argue that it was mainly because of Hitler and the Holocaust that the biblical prophecy was fulfilled and the state of Israel born--only Western guilt on so massive a scale could have cleared the way to the Promised Land...
There is a political version of this equation: that at the beginning of the century, the West was ruled mainly by thin-blooded despots, with the exception of the more entrenched democracies of England and the U.S. Hitler did not believe the Western democracies capable of defending the principles they espoused--and as they wavered and appeased and betrayed in the face of his expansion, Hitler appeared to be right...
...Churchill first, and then Roosevelt, who reawakened the West to its core values: freedom, civility, common decency in the face of evil, destructive forces of hate. The challenge that Hitler presented became the occasion for Churchill and Roosevelt and the lovers of freedom to battle the great diseases of the century: nihilism and defeatism. Churchill's apostles argue for him as the century's titan on these grounds. It was by no means obvious, in the dark days of 1940, that the Western Allies could prevail against the Axis. His optimism about victory and his conviction that there were truths...
...take a Hitler, a mortal threat, to move the Allied democracies from complacent enclaves to the global powerhouses that by century's end would embrace most of the world's people? Here is a place to draw the line. "It may be true that we've got great medical breakthroughs, radar, sonar because of war," says theologian Marty, "but I don't like to make a theology out of that; it's an accidental product." Rosenbaum agrees that to focus on the benefits is to risk trivializing the tragedy itself. "There are a lot of people who want...
...that strength still came at a terrible cost. "How much happier a world it would be if one did not have to mount crusades against racism, segregation, a Holocaust, the extermination of 'inferior peoples,'" notes presidential historian Robert Dallek. "We don't need evil. We'd do fine without Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. Think of the amount of money and energy used in World War II--if only they could have been used in constructive ways. Good doesn't need evil. We'd be just as well...