I was asked for my thoughts on the book, “How do you kill 11 Million people?”
The answer, of course is laid out there in the book, so I suppose the real question is, do I agree with the authors assessment, and the answer is yes. I could not read the book without seeing instantly the correlation with this United States of ours, the nation I describe as a fully loaded freight train, going downhill fast, with no brakes.
On page 19, Andy Andrews makes the statement, “What we need to understand is how eleven million people allow themselves to be killed.” The author goes on to say that “this is an obvious oversimplification”, but is it. I do not think so.
The author is right; you lie to them.
Speeches written to appease the specific audience; pledges to cut taxes; the berating of previous administrations for their abuses of presidential/executive actions, and then the subtle affection for redistribution of wealth, a socialist ideal.
Many of us screamed about the evils of President Obama, but he was elected anyway. Up for reelection, once again, we screamed, decrying the horrors of his first four years, and he was still reelected. What does that tell you? No one really wants to know the truth.
Andrews noted that, an educated population accepted their salaries and avoided the uncomfortable truths, like, an insolvent Federal Reserve, but then those that run it do not care so why should I?
He stated, “And when the Nazis came for their children, it was too late.” I can see the impact on our schools; a change that started long ago, but grossly clear with common core.
It may be too late, but we can still pray.
The theme of this book is what I have told anyone that will listen for several years now. The plans are in place, the papers signed, the armaments distributed, and everything you took comfort in will be gone in a moment of time. We, as a church, foolishly talk about the time of tribulation that is coming. Tribulation is here. It is the one thing that I can assure you of based upon what Jesus said. Yet, we know that impossible as it may seem for some, it will get worse.
A strange irony, on the same day you handed me Andy Andrews book, I picked up a copy of Night, by Elie Wiesel. He describes from a personal point of view, a similar, and yet more horrific scene. One in which, German officers politely took quarter in the homes of the Jews. However, that did not last long.
Wiesel tells of a Jewish man, Moishe Beadle, not Hungarian born, therefore a foreigner, and because he was a foreigner, he was one of the first taken. Watching those Jews being taken people sighed and said, what can we do, for such is war? The deportees were soon forgotten. Rumors would come, saying they are in another city and faring well, but that was not the case. Months passed but somehow Moishe Beadle had made it back into town. Now, no longer quiet as before, he went around telling any that would listen of the atrocities and how they were made to dig their own grave, and then made to offer their necks to German pistols. Moishe Beadle had somehow escaped with only a gunshot through the leg. Still, no one would listen as he told of the atrocities and treated him as if he were a madman.
When the horror began, the community still chose not to believe it, because they were told it was for their own good and they had no evidence to prove the Nazis intended to harm them. Moishe Beadle did.
- Yellow badge Star of David called "Judenstern". Part of the exhibition in the Jewish Museum Westphalia, Dorsten, Germany. The wording is the German word for Jew (Jude), written in mock-Hebrew script. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Stripped of their possessions and identified with the yellow star of David, the Jews were moved into ghettos. Outward facing windows were sealed, the ghettos were surrounded by barbed wire, and yet they felt somewhat secure in this. As threats of death against them rose, they found reasons to think it was logical under the conditions.
They were told they were being moved away from the front lines when the Nazis began to herd them all at the train station. After standing in the hot sun for hours, they were even momentarily grateful for being pushed into the cattle cars and out of the hot sun, where the doors were then nailed shut. These trains took them all the way to Birkenau where many were cremated that very night.
Oddly, one woman on the train eventually began screaming out the flames and pointing in a particular direction. Everyone looked but there was nothing to be seen, and nothing could be done to shut her up. In time, some viciously struck her in the head to shut her up and soon she grew silent. As the trains came closer to the camp and were not yet visible she began screaming once again. This time no one struck her, but as the camp came into view, everyone could see the flames and smell the acrid smell belching from the stacks of the crematorium.
My point is that this woman acted as a prophet; somewhat pointless as there was nothing much that could be done, even if they did understand what God was telling them. Elie Wiesel, told how even as they arrived at the camp, some of the young, strong men, had knives and began to rally an attack against the Nazis, but the elders talked them out of it thinking that all would be okay. It would never be okay.
That screaming woman on the train saw something unexplainable that horrified her and could only communicate it in the manner she did. For that she was treated just as poorly as many of the Old Testament prophets, and there was nothing to confirm her word. Moishe Beadle, a victim and eyewitness of the violence that was to come, was treated as a madman and ignored.
I bought another book that disturbs me even more than these because the underlying motive permeates the church still today.
In the book, When a Jew Rules the World, by Joel Richardson, he opens chapter one with, “Just three years before his death in 1546, Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, wrote an anti-Jewish treatise titled On the Jews and their lies.” Joel goes on to say that this debate about how they should treat the Jews living among them went on for over a thousand years.
Luther offered his solution, holding nothing back about he really felt. In Martin Luther’s, own words:
What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? … First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder of stone of it. And this ought to done for the honor of God and of Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians …
Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. For they perpetrate the same things there that they do in their synagogues. For this reason they ought to be put under one roof or in a stable, like gypsies, in order that they may realize that they are not masters in our land, as they boast, miserable captives…
Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy and taught…
Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more…
To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden - the Jews... Next to the devil, a Christian has no more bitter and galling foe than the Jew.[i]
Having read this for the first time, I will tell you that I am sickened by it. Joel Richardson states, “Most Christians who read Luther’s words for the first time are shocked. Tragically, Luther was far from alone among notable Christian leaders in his hatred and abuse of the Jews. .. his attitude was actually quite common among Christians throughout an overwhelming majority of Church history.”
“Even more tragically, roughly five hundred years after Luther wrote his hateful treatise, Adolf Hitler would rely heavily on Luther’s proposals as the basis of his own ‘final solution,’ resulting in the death of two-thirds of the roughly nine million Jews who were living in Europe at the time.”
While we choose to sing the praises of Luther and the life-changing treatise he nailed to the Wittenberg door, he was at the same time filled with a vile hatred of my people, God’s chosen people. Though God has scattered them, and continues to punish them for ignoring him, they are still the root-stock to which I - as a believer in this Jew that will rule the earth - am little more than a branch. God has never given up on his people, but I am now forever tainted in my thoughts toward this hateful man called Martin Luther.
You will be chased out of the Jewish meeting places. And the time will come when people will kill you and think they are doing God a favor.
(John 16:2 CEV)
[i] Bruce Delmont, ed., On the Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther (1483-1546) (Lulu.com), 165-66
