Scott Lively is not slowing down. He spoke recently to the Murrieta/Temecula Republican Assembly about his book, the Pink Swastika. This meeting was a slated for one venue but was moved due to worries about a possible protest from gay groups – in particular PFLAG.
The whole speech is now on YouTube via the account of the GOP group, Bob Kowell.
In this installment, Lively says he spoke to 10,000 people in Uganda. He also describes his battle with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Because of his advocacy of the thesis that homosexuals were behind the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, two groups he is involved with (Abiding Truth Ministries and Watchmen on the Walls) are on the SPLC list of hate groups.
In his speech, Mr. Lively has answered back his critics at SPLC. He also recently launched a new blog called HateWatch Watch. He claims his groups are unfairly placed on the list.
I asked Grove City College colleague and history prof, JonDavid Wyneken, to evaluate Lively’s thesis. Dr. Wyneken pointed me to a couple of resources which help refute the idea that a homosexual cult was the organized, driving force behind Nazism. One is in a book by esteemed historian Richard Evans, titled, The Third Reich in Power. On pages 529-535, Evans provides information which gives necessary perspective. Specifically, Evans indicates that the Nazis toughened laws against homosexual contact and stepped up their arrests of homosexuals between 1936 to 1938. Evans notes,
“The raids and arrests were co-ordinated from 1 October 1936 by a new Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homsexuality and Abortion, building on the Gestapo department created to deal with the same area in the wake of the Roehm purge, which gave fresh impetus to the wave of persecutions.” (p. 533, 2005).
Dr. Wyneken also provided a link to a document published by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., by historian Geoffrey J. Giles. Note this brief excerpt describing the views of Himmler about homosexuals. Himmler was not gay. In his young adult years, Himmler read a book by an author – Hartner – and approved of the perspective.
Hartner’s thesis was that an unchecked expansion of the phenomenon of homosexuality would lead quite literally to the “destruction of mankind” (Untergang der Menschheit). He lost himself in speculation about a giant conspiracy, inspired of course by Jews, among whom there was “contrary to Hirschfeld’s assertion, a greater [proportion of homosexuals] by far than in the German population” as a whole. What was the aim of these Jewish homosexuals? They were trying to push Germany down the slippery slope of “increasing infertility” that the French had been sliding down for ages.
You may well wonder whether, if more homosexuals meant fewer babies, that would not have an equally or even more damaging effect on the “heavily homosexual” Jewish people. No, because they, and especially the hated Ostjuden, were still positively infused with a
Zionism that provided an unquenchable fuel for an “unbroken will to fertility” (ungebrochener Fruchtbarkeitswille). The heterosexual Jews would simply produce more babies. Germans lacked this sense of nationalistic mission. Hartner declared in a closing flourish to his chapter that this spread of homosexuality would “surely dig our
graves.” One can almost sense young Himmler (still only twenty-seven years old) shuddering in agreement with these sentiments.
I warn you this paper is not for the squeamish but it gives a perspective regarding homosexuality and the Nazis in contrast to that of Scott Lively. Giles makes it clear that homosexuals were not behind the Nazi movement but rather the victims of it.
Scott Lively is the same scumbag who tried to use racketeering tactics against Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council treasurer several years ago at the request of Latino Catholic scumbag activists Mary and Hugo Pacheco. They had been fighting construction of the AIDS Wall in Lincoln Park by passing out flyers that falsely stated that gay men had sex with apes in Africa and brought the AIDS virus to America as a consequence. So that’s it in a nutshell, folks, the sex fantasies of Mary and Hugo Pacheco — gorilla penises. Now THAT would go over real swell at their Sacred Hearth Church in East L.A.!
@ Zoe,
Nothing inconvenient…just a power hungry man seeking alliances when he needs them and then disposing of them when he doesn’t…
It is kind of like his alliance with Russia…
Or do you see more here?
There’s also the inconvenient little matter about the “Night of the Long Knives”
@David B
Thanks, there’s a lot to be said on this link between political order and individual inner life. Not enough time…
thanks for your hard work, Evan. Interesting reading.
Warren, I have a comment on this topic that awaits moderation.
Warren and readers,
There are lots of details one needs to process to get a grasp of the context in which these people moved around and shaped their beliefs and behaviours. For instance, why did the Nazis come to power and does that have anything to do with the state of mind among Germans?
I have a few thoughts on that. There was a sense of decadence in Europe at the end of the 19th century and that was reflected in culture. The decadent man, involved in arts and leisure, was a figure that was despised by some for being too refined and passive during a period of political struggle (nations tried to redefine themselves in the wake of the French Revolution, communism threatened to attract many followers, …). When the first World War broke out, many young men were eager to enlist and assert themselves in combat missions, as if the war was the opportunity they were waiting for… Now, what kind of man would you be if you tried to stay away from the war and continue with your refined interests?
In his youth, Hitler had been struggling to become a painter in Austria, living on his mother’s money. He was rejected twice by the academy of arts, which forced him to reconsider his future. He moved to Germany to escape conscription in Austria, but was eventually arrested and sent to undergo the physical exam for the military service. He was found unfit and rejected, but later petitioned the king and was accepted in the army.
One brief reminder from his biography. When he was a child, Hitler went to the same school with future philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The boy Hitler was always trying to impose himself in front of the class, but was outshone by a frail, aloof and a bit effeminate Wittgenstein, a very bright child who came from a rich Jewish family.
So, one might say that it’s easy to find causes when you look very hard to confirm a bias, but there are some things that were known about Hitler in his circle of friends: the failed dreams of becoming a painter, his difficulty in dealing with women (a few dark stories there too…), his poor background. Whatever made him conflicted about his life, he found his mission in setting an order in what he perceived as a chaotic period of time. The fact that Germany was defeated in WW I was unbearable for him, who actually faught in that war and earned a few decorations.
That was a bit about Hitler, but there is more about how he found a mentor and a sense of affiliation with an occult society, how he learned to use his oratorical skills to impress others and make them see a leader in him. Motivations are complex and depend on the larger picture of that historical period and on how each of the future Nazis found a political vehicle to revenge their frustrations with their time.
Why did they tolerate some men who were known to be gay among the ranks of the Nazi ruling party? I think once the party came to power, the romantic period of occult myths, speaches and tactical plans to infiltrate other parties was over and the overarching motivation of the Nazi party became that of any political elite in power: to maintain power and use it for their own interests. So, the sexual orientation of party members became secondary to that.
But it is interesting that the subject of homosexuality was a preoccupation for party leaders like Himmler and that somehow that was related to Jews, their officially defined target. Why would he agree with Hartner that if left unchecked homosexuality would spread in society and lead to the extinction of mankind? Considering that Himmler was not gay and neither were most Nazis, it’s a bit strange that he perceived it as a threat of such big proportions. Hitler seemed more concerned with fighting with the spirit of weakness I alluded to earlier, that decadent spirit present in his new-found home, the German nation.
Here are a few passages from his book (‘Mein Kampf‘, ‘My Struggle’ in German), where he attacks his political enemies:
Bear with me for another round of quotes, in which Hitler directs his frustration from his unfulfilled artistic past and his present enmity with Social-Democrats against Jews that infiltrated both artistic and political life:
To conclude with, Hitler was engaged in a larger war with what he perceived as human weakness in his German fellows. He thought that Jews took over the nation in many fields of public life, like arts and politics. Like other leaders or political thinkers of the past (Plato, f.i.), he thought that this individual weakness cannot be cured without changing the political organization of the community (the polity). He took it upon himself to address this problem by becoming the inspirational figure and the leader of a political elite that was supposed to cure the illnesses of the society of that time. From the quotes I provided, it’s easy to see that he was also frustrated that he couldn’t find a method to deal with this madness that he tried to address using reason and later learning more about psychology and the masses. A very strict organisation of society included integrating the young in youth camps, setting very clear separate roles for genders based on archaic nationalistic myths, eliminating ‘the weak and corrupted’, directing a nation’s ‘vital force’ into work and waging war against ‘inferior races’, etc. So, for Hitler it was more than an issue of power, as it probably was for many of his fellows in the Nazi political elite. As he said, it was an issue of ‘to be or not be’ (weak, we might add). As I wrote in the beginning of this message, at the end of the 19th century Europe was decadent and torn by political conflict. We all know what happened in both world wars, how much human destruction they brought about.
Ironically, after the first world war, Einstein was preoccupied with finding ways to avoid any future war. He wrote a letter to Freud to ask him about the possibility of such enterprise. Freud replied in a long and very carefully explained answer that mankind is torn between conflicting drives, like an individual and physically bonding drive (Eros) and a destructive and outward drive of aggression (Thanatos). According to Freud, humans found ways to work around this conflict by finding less dangerous outlets. Men’s aggressive instinct could be directed into war or it could be tamed by the communal bonds of laws and other individual bonds. On the other hand, a diminished aggressive drive contributed to and promoted man’s cultural progress in history. So the future was uncertain, according to Freud, and men of “cultural disposition” like Einstein and him could only hope that the cultural drive will eventually prevail if there was any hope for wars never to occur again. That was ironic for the exchange between these two Jewish thinkers, because after Freud sent his reply in July 1932, by the end of the year Einstein had to flee Germany and find a new home in the United States, just one month short of Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933.
Now enters the stage this man called Scott Lively that I understand wrote a book in which he claims a homosexual cult was the driving force behind Nazism. I haven’t read the book and therefore cannot comment on his arguments, but if this is what he claims, from the arguments I exposed here one can get an idea that it was a larger picture that motivated Nazis, in which homosexuality per se was not such a big public issue. On the contrary, like so many things in life, the elite itself was mixed and the policy of dealing with homosexuality was contextual, not strictly defined. So if this is Lively’s thesis, there are more reasons which contradict this idea, by all appearances.
Thanks Warren, I appreciate you following this up with your resources at the university.
There is much work for Christian universities to do to claim their authority as truth seekers…a role they have abdicated to picking a smaller goal of “equipping the saints.”
There is much intelligence, power and curiosity unharnessed at these universities, it is narrowly focused against secularism, rather than broadly focused toward truth seeking and integrity.
Christianity has so much to offer, in the academic setting it has been defensive and resentful since the Scopes trial.
@David Blakeslee:
Thanks, Dave. There is much more. Here is a short version. Lively looks for and find a rational plan in the mind of the Nazis where there was madness. There were gays in positions of power – and there were straights. Hitler and Himmler did what many prejudiced people do, they had some “good” members of hated groups who were allowed to live while the rest were treated cruely. Lively finds gays in Nazi positions but ignores the straights and ignores the fact that there was no master rationality controlling the Nazis. It is confirmation bias to the extreme.
Thanks Warren, for actively using the University departments to debunk this trash…this is what “Christian” universities should be doing.
I’ve had some nightmares and hallucinations under the influence of morphine [in a clinical situation] like Giles’ paper.
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10,000 people? I got the impression there were about 50 and 5 of those were gays and lesbians.
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Lastly, I suspect there is more on the plate concerning the designation as a hate group than Lively’s book. But if there isn’t, I should suppose it is enough.