Adolf Hitler anticipates Sarah Palin

Jim Walker has an interesting page about matters related to the frequently heard allegation that Hitler was an Atheist. In everything that Hitler is known to have said or written, Herr Uber-Adolf always emphasizes his allegiance to Christianity and to the ideas of Jesus. The only source for Hitler's alleged anti-religious sentiments is the Martin Bormann version of Hitler's "Table Talk." The original notes by Heinrich Heim and Henry Piker, on which the Bormann version is supposedly based, were destroyed. And the problem with believing anything written by Martin Bormann, is that Martin Bormann was a notorious, pathological liar. Henry Piker wrote explicitly that "no confidence can be placed in Bormann's editing of it," and that the extant version is full of "Bormann's alterations, not authorised by me." There is, however, an alternative (and reasonably reliable) record of Hitler's private thoughts: Wagener, Otto. Hitler--Memoirs of a Confidant. Ed. by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Trans. by Ruth Hein. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, c1985.

Here is Hitler's view of Socialism, Christianity and Jesus, from pp. 139-140 of those memoirs:

Socialism is a question of attitude toward life, of the ethical outlook on life of all who live together in a common ethnic or national space. Socialism is a Weltanschauung!

But in actual fact there is nothing new about this Weltanschauung. Whenever I read the New Testament Gospels and the revelations of various of the prophets and imagine myself back in the era of the Roman and late Hellenistic, as well as the Oriental world, I am astonished at all that has been made of the teachings of these divinely inspired men, especially Jesus Christ, which are so clear and unique, heightened to religiosity. They were the ones who created this new worldview which we now call socialism, they established it, they taught it and they lived it! But the communities that called themselves Christian churches did not understand it! Or if they did, they denied Christ and betrayed him! For they transformed the holy idea of Christian socialism into its opposite! They killed it, just as, at the time, the Jews nailed Jesus to the cross; they buried it, just as the body of Christ was buried. But they allowed Christ to be resurrected, instigating the belief that his teachings too, were reborn!

It is in this that the monstrous crime of these enemies of Christian socialism lies! What the basest hypocrisy they carry before them the cross-- the instrument of that murder which, in their thoughts, they commit over and over-- as a new divine sign of Christian awareness, and allow mankind to kneel to it. They even pretend to be preaching the teachings of Christ. But their lives and deeds are a constant blow against these teachings and their Creator and a defamation of God!

We are the first to exhume these teachings! Through us alone, and not until now, do these teachings celebrate their resurrection! Mary and Magdalene stood at the empty tomb. For they were seeking the dead man! But we intend to raise the treasures of the living Christ!

Herein lies the essential element of our mission: we must bring back to the German Volk the recognition of those teachings! For what did the falsification of the original concept of Christian love, of the community of fate before God and of socialism lead to? By their fruits ye shall know them! The suppression of freedom of opinion, the persecution of the true Christians, the vile mass murders of the Inquisition and the burning of witches, the armed campaigns against the people of free and true Christian faith, the destruction of towns and villages, the hauling away of their cattle and their goods, the destruction of their flourishing economies, and the condemnation of their leaders before tribunals, which, in their unrelenting hypocrisy, can only be described as balaphemous. That is the true face of those sanctimonious churches that have placed themselves between God and man, motivated by selfishness, personal greed for recognition and gain, and the ambition to maintain their high-handed willfulness against Christ's deep understanding of the necessity of a socialist community of men and nations. We must turn all the sentiments of the Volk, all its thinking, acting, even its beliefs, away from the anti-Christian, smug individualism of the past, from the egotism and stupid Phariseeism of personal arrogance, and we must educate the youth in particular in the spirit of those of Christ's words that we must interpret anew: love one another; be considerate of your fellow man; remember that each one of you is not alone a creature of God, but that you are all brothers! This youth will, with loathing and contempt, abandon those hypocrites who have Christ on their lips but the devil in their hearts, who give alms in order to remain undisturbed as they themselves throw their money around, who invoke the Fatherland as they fill their own purses by the toil of others, who preach peace and incite to war....

Change the German stuff to its middle-American equivalents. If the result sounds a lot like what we have been hearing lately from Sarah Palin - essentially everything, except only that Hitler was explicit about Christian Socialism while Palin sticks to euphemisms - it probably isn't plagiarism (I've never heard Palin accused of reading books from Yale University Press) - just similar minds thinking alike.