H. W. CROCKER III: The Cross Still Stands Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror
Burleigh, Michael
BOOKS IN REVIEW century, individual Americans in large numbers were moving into an empty continent whether anyone liked it or not. There was plenty of discussion about what this should mean....
...Nazis and Communists had a liking for other progressive ideas that continue to have currency...
...For about a six-year period at the turn of the 20th century, there was indeed a debate among Americans about whether Americans should take on “the white man’s burden”—the last version of European imperialism...
...It is the difference between a Satanic power on the march and a group of thuggish theoreticians (recognizable on many college campuses today) who at last can take academic politics to the level of mass extermination they’d always wanted...
...When Protestant pastors dissented from the Nazification of their churches, they did so on the grounds that such a merger of people and religion amounted to a hateful—wait for it—Zionism...
...B URLEIGH IS AN EXPERT on Nazi Germany, and, for this reader at least, the rise and beliefs of the National Socialists make for much more compelling and horrifying reading than do the dread and bloody ideologues of Soviet Russia, whose crimes are also recounted here...
...Similarly, while the Bolsheviks happily trashed churches and synagogues, they thought it wise to leave mosques well enough alone...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW gospels, some truly bizarre, others that seem less so only successfully presented themselves as the sword of an because we know they succeeded...
...Like many leftists today, too, they had a comparative soft spot for Islam...
...So he cut a deal with the Catholic Church, just as Napoleon Bonaparte did in his time for similar reasons...
...It is a back-handed tribute to the Italians that the fervently anti-clerical Mussolini felt he could not effectively rule them without some measure of concession to the Church...
...Christianized areas) and the “oriental” Kremlin...
...They had been catechized in the idea of a German church for the German people...
...The masses were important, for not only was this the age of the dictators, it was the age of the masses...
...In the course of doing so, Burleigh convincingly refutes and dismisses with contempt the calumnies heaped on Pope Pius XII...
...In Germany, things were different...
...And the focus, in this period, is not on Britain, but on the Continent...
...Protestants found themselves not only stripped of state preference in the Republic, but felt politically homeless, until, Burleigh notes, “the Nazis emptions), were members of a universal, cosmopolitan Church that transcended borders, and were beholden to an authoritarian (and authoritative) pope in Rome (who had explicitly condemned eugenics and “the pagan worship of the state”), German Protestants had for Hitler the advantage of not shying away from national destiny...
...while the Soviets preferred a fully fledged anti-Christmas with mockeries of Christianity and religion in general that would not be out of place in San Francisco, many modern art galleries, or perhaps a Dan Brown novel...
...a cautious optimist...
...This multiplies misunderstanding...
...There was plenty of discussion about what this should mean...
...There is an invigorating section on Cold War church politics in the West, a welcome reminder of when three German-speaking and veteran anti-fascist Catholics—Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, and Robert Schuman—reconstructed Continental Europe 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 But the Catholic Church wholeheartedly supported this pro-American tilt, as well as endorsing German rearmament, military conscription (with one Cardinal stating that “conscientious objection to military service is not compatible with Christian teaching ”), and deployment of nuclear weapons to counter the Soviet threat...
...The authors tell us that they got some of their inspiration from a forum in Washington that calls itself “the empire salon...
...And they can mock religion— through the Bolshevik League of Militant Godless and other “people’s” organizations—to their progressive hearts’ content, which, being the sort of people they JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 BOOKS IN REVIEW are, means unearthing the holy dead to prove that even on lines that rejected “alien” Prussianism (which was saints’ bodies decay, detonating cathedrals into ruins, now locked up in Communist East Germany, incorpoand imprisoning or killing clergy as appropriate to rid rating, as Adenauer pointed out, the historically least the world of superstition...
...testants were much more interested So it did...
...Who then should decide about peace and war, in a way that is likeliest to clarify alternatives...
...The authors seem to assume that diplomacy is a message as well as a medium...
...Catholics felt much more at home in the Weimar Republic than did German Protestants...
...They can order mock trials, extracting truly pathetic confessions...
...How superficial that debate was and how misunderstood it continues to be may be seen by the fact that Henry Cabot Lodge, once called an Imperialist, became known as the arch Isolationist, though his ideas had hardly changed...
...Sacred Causes is just as powerful—written as it is by a professor spilling over with erudition, entertaining arcana, magisterial summary judgments, and sarcastic asides, in a style that is both rococo and shot full of adrenalin...
...B URLEIGH CLOSES HIS BOOK with the radical Muslim death cult that now threatens the West, and ties that threat to Britain’s experience with the IRA (the Troubles are given their chapter as well...
...This explains why the authors think their kind can manage China...
...From all the wreckage, Burleigh emerges a cautious optimist...
...Americanism...
...The West remains at war with itself, with secularists apparently still keener on attacking Christianity than facing up to the threat of militant Islam...
...For instance, the Nazis tried to replace Christmas with a Yule Festival (Winterval anyone...
...A Franciscan friar writing from Germany in 1924 Hitler, liberal Christians will be interested to remarked that the “war of Christianity know, was not only an animal-lovagainst Teutonic paganism” had never ing, non-smoking, vegetarian, artist, ended, “the battle continued as a guerrilla and former member of the homewar in the souls and the beliefs and religious less community, but was “indulgent customs… and there were always men who towards Protestantism, especially preferred Wotan to Christ...
...For Halper and Clarke, the answer is the “professionals,” who will manage choices out of existence...
...No matter how swept up the masses might be by the fascist religion, many of them still wanted their Masses as well...
...perhaps they could be confident that no Muslims would actually be present during these celebrations...
...The gloomy spires of Fermanagh and Tyrone will continue to haunt us… but they may well be outnumbered by the gleaming domes of Europe’s proliferating mosques, in areas from which the state has quietly retreated...
...The battle raged across Euthan Catholics in keeping up with rope, with different gods competing for “science” and “progress,” they provdifferent countries...
...But first things first, and first things here are what Burleigh deems “the political manifestations of what could be called mass spiritual need in deranged times”— those times being the years following the First World War...
...This is where “realist” ideology and “libertarian” ideology intersect...
...His prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey and his books Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000Year History and Robert E. Lee on Leadership are available in paperback...
...Europe (particularly Germany and Italy) found itself awash with prophets, preaching new H. W. Crocker IIIis the author most recently of Don’t Tread on Me: 400 Years of America at War, from Indian-Fighting to Terrorist-Hunting...
...The Nazis’ anti-Semitism never incorporated the Arabs, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a keen ally in the cause of Jewish extermination, wishing only that it could be accelerated...
...That implicit message, the premise of the authors’ misunderstanding, is that the several governments’ interests are compatible in the end, and that they, skillful professionals, can manage the world by teaching its parts that it is in their best interest to get along...
...That was true in Rome, true in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, true in the Protestant (and kingly and princely) revolt against the Pope, true in the period of the French Revolution, true in the secularizing regimes of the 19th century (and in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf), and certainly true in the 20th century, which is the taking off point for historian Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes, a breathtaking examination Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror by Michael Burleigh (HARPERCOLLINS, 557 PAGES, $27.95) Reviewed by H. W. Crocker III but was crucial to bringing down its longest-lived oppressor, the Soviet Union...
...They should realize that most Americans would be aghast that such an outfit exists on our soil...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW century, individual Americans in large numbers were moving into an empty continent whether anyone liked it or not...
...But much though they dominate the story, Nazis, fascists, and Communists are not the whole of Burleigh’s tale...
...Yes, comrades, I know it is ridiculous, and it means nothing to me, but I was married in a church, I confess, but I agreed to the church comedy only because of my wife,” is an abbreviated paraphrase of one such confession...
...Fair enough...
...It does not occur to them that the Chinese may have priorities with which they disagree...
...Much of the book, inevitably, covers the Second World War and the fate of the churches behind the Iron Curtain...
...But although the book rails foremost against the use of military force, and secondarily against pushing for democracy—pointing out, correctly, that the means are not conducive to the ends—it advocates a foreign policy at least as intrusive and even less mindful of the need to match ends and means...
...While Catholics party, it is a regime, it is not only a regime, were tutored in natural law (from but a faith, it is not only a faith, but a reliwhich there were no national exgion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people...
...Real Americans are far less tolerant of this Megala Idea than the authors...
...In both cases, it was an uncomfortable relationship—one wielding a gun, the other wielding moral rebukes—that ended with the flight of the dictator...
...Though they did include effigies of Mohammed in their bonfires of religion...
...The Europe the Church supported in the 1950s is the Europe George W. Bush no doubt wishes he had today...
...Burleigh covered the period from the French Revolution to the Great War in his previous book, the highly acclaimed Earthly Powers...
...Nevertheless, many politicians—and certainly many Europeans—are alive to the threat, and so in particular, notes Burleigh, is the Catholic Church, the faith (honored or not) of the majority of Europeans...
...As he writes, We are horribly wrong in imagining that Northern Ireland is some atavistic throwback to the religious wars of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries...
...Not only, perhaps, because of the Catholic tendency to laissez les bon temps rouler, but because they had Catholic parties to vote for...
...In Italy, Benito Mused much more amenable to ideas solini, author of that famous pre-Richard about eugenics and “orders of creDawkins tract, God Does Not Exist, explication” (in one version of liberal Proitly stated that “Fascism is not only a testant theology...
...But to accept, as the book does uncritically, any similarity between that and European imperialism takes effort...
...Today it seems as in its theologically liberal and socialthough this century-old skirmish will again ly conscious varieties...
...awakening semi-religious German spirit...
...T HIS LEADS US TO THE MAIN POINT: The book is all about chastising Bush II for violent imperialism—and incompetence too...
...It has the additional fillip of closing with the battle we’re in now: the clash of militant Islam versus the West...
...Its model of the state surrendering “communities” to the tender mercies of their socalled leaders may presage the future, except it will involve minorities who worship another God...
...and covers the waterfront of every European country from Portugal to Franco’s Spain to Czechoslovakia to the nether reaches of Eastern Europe, with some definite surprises along the way (including how even in East Germany, the most successfully secularized of the Eastern bloc states, churches were the focal point for defeating Communism...
...highlights how Polish Catholicism (and Pope John Paul II) effectively undermined the Soviet empire...
...Because Probecome an open battle...
...In short, it advocates no less than managing the world—but by diplomacy and economic incentives...
...The Cross Still Stands I F YOU WANTED TO SUMMARIZE the history of the West, you could do worse than say it’s the story of the conflict between Church and State...
...By contrast, America’s Founders vested that power exclusively in Congress, by the representatives of those 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 of how the age of the dictators was an age of political religion trying to exterminate the real thing—and how the real thing, one would almost say miraculously, not only survived who bear the consequences of the decisions...
...We would do better to return to their ways...
...Germany was predominantly Protestant, with a long anti-Catholic tradition, not only with Luther, but with Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and, as Burleigh points out, while German Catholics “had been as patriotic as the next man in the recent war, some, ignoring the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and the role of Protestant Britain and the U.S., regarded the victory of, inter alia, France, Belgium and Italy as a delayed triumph of Catholicism over the Lutheran Reformation...
...Burleigh, a Briton, does not end on this note, but I will because it is addressed to us: “Those Americans...
...The West remains at Adenauer, de Gasperi, and Schuman From all the wreckage, Burleigh emerges were not only ardent Catholics but profoundly pro-American, to the disgust of the European left (and the disgust of some war with itself, with secularists apparently Protestants, including leftist pastors like still keener on attacking Christianity than Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller, who disliked both their religion and their profacing up to the threat of militant Islam...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
