Atheist Governments of the 20th Century: The Death Toll of Godless Goodness

[koshergrl]

Hitler did lip service initially.

Then he started killing priests and Catholics.

"
In February 1933, Hermann Göring banned all Catholic newspapers in Cologne on the claim that Catholics were illegally engaging in politics. The ban was lifted soon after, but Catholics had been sent a message. A short time later, thugs from the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Brownshirts, stormed a gathering of the Christian trade unions and the Catholic Center Party and brutalized many of those in attendance.
The government next banned the other political parties. The Social Democrats (SPD) were prohibited in June. On July 5, 1933, the Catholic Centre Party, and its ally the Bavarian People’s Party, disbanded itself under relentless Nazi intimidation and after empty promises were made promising Catholic freedom in education and for youth groups. On July 14, 1933, Germany became officially a one-party state.
As the parties were disbanded, the Gestapo began rounding up all who might oppose the social revolution. Hundreds of priests were arrested for speaking out against the anti-democratic changes and the persecution of Jews. Thousands of members of the Catholic Center Party were in jails or concentration camps even before the party voted itself out of existence. The Christian Trade Unions were dissolved in late June, and, under mounting pressure, the bishops of Germany agreed to permit members to join the Nazi Party. Needing a permanent statement to clarify legally the Catholic Church’s status in Nazi Germany, Pius XI signed a concordat with Hitler on July 20, 1933. "

http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/catholic-martyrs-of-the-holocaust

 

[boedicca]

KG is spot on.

The death toll of Secular State Totalitarians is HUGE.

Death by Government has the horrifying stats; note these are democides, not standard war casualties.

Definitions:

- Genocide: among other things, the killing of people by a government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language).

- Politicide: the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political purposes.

- Mass Murder: the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government.

- Democide: The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.

61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill
20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime

DEATH BY GOVERNMENT: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER

 

[Vox]

Yeah but it's still exponentially more than the Christian death toll...

of course.

the 500 years of Inquisition ( which they parade as the worst atrocity uder the sun EVER) resulted in ~ 20 thousand deaths.

20 thousands in 500 years.

less than a stupid epidemic of flu in one season.

It was also not a religious event, but a political one.

Cuz when governments think they can tell the churches what to do, the result is always lots of death.

yes. It was Spanish Government Inquisition, not the Church one.

 

[koshergrl]

"On June 6, 1941, Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, private secretary to Adolf Hitler, and one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich, issued a secret decree for all Gauleiters (or regional party leaders) of the Reich regarding the true intentions of the Nazi regime toward the Christian churches.

More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs the pastors . . . Just as the deleterious influences of astrologers, seers and other fakers are eliminated and suppressed by the State, so must the possibility of church influence also be totally removed . . . Not until this has happened, does the state leadership have influence on the individual citizens. Not until then are the people and Reich secure in their existence for all time. ("Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity")
​

The truth is many thousands of Catholic men, women, and children died in concentration camps, SS and Gestapo torture chambers, or in fields and villages across Europe for the "crime" of proclaiming the truth to one of the most evil regimes in human history. "

Catholic Martyrs of the Holocaust | Catholic Answers

 

[Vox]

The Catholic church - 100 million
CofE - 20 million
The Pilgrims - 12 million

And most of those killing events you mentioned were in some way religion based..Hitler was a Catholic for sure..there's even pictures of him leaving a church after a service..

bullshit.

Nope, Hitler even mentions god in Mein Kampf.

Hitler youth: ''At the very time when America’s allies, the Soviets, destroyed most of the Christian churches in Russia and Ukraine, about 2500 new churches were built in Germany. NOT ONE Christian church was closed. It was the law that school and church had priority over service in the Hitler Youth. As late as the fall of 1944, the Waffen SS barracks in Breslau supplied two buses to take youth to either the nearest Catholic or Protestant church every Sunday. To be a registered member of a Christian church did not prevent advancement in the National Socialist Party.''

your figures are bullshit.
Hitler was BORN in the Catholic family, but he himself never was religious and if - it was occult practices.
He persecuted Catholics ones of the first.
Priest Maximillian Kolbe, one of the modern martyrs of the Catholic Church was murdered in Auschwitz in 1941
Maximilian Kolbe | Jewish Virtual Library

 

[koshergrl]

"
One such prominent Catholic victim was the president of Catholic Action in Germany, Erich Klausener. The devout Catholic German delivered a speech in June 1934 against the regime at the Catholic Congress in Berlin. He was shot to death in his office on June 30, during the so-called Night of the Long Knives when Hitler annihilated more of his political opposition, including the leadership of the SA (that had outlived its usefulness), and many conservative politicians. Klausener’s entire staff was sent to concentration camps.
For average Catholic laity, clergy, and nuns in Germany, the rise of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933 and 1934 brought sweeping changes to their daily lives. While permitted to go to Mass, Catholics lived increasingly in an oppressive atmosphere of propaganda, fear of arrest at any moment, and the gnawing worry that everything being said to friends or family might be reported to the Gestapo. Friends, pastors, teachers, and relatives were taken in the night, and only vague and gruesome reports of their deaths or imprisonment followed.
Catholics next witnessed the attacks on the Catholic press and Catholic education. A special "Editors’ Law" was decreed in December 1933 with the intention of curbing all speech by requiring that all editors join the Literary Chamber of the Third Reich. The Chamber, part of Josef Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, decided what could be published. The law essentially ended the Catholic press in Germany. Catholic newspapers and publications closed their doors as they were unable to comply with government limitations on freedom and unwilling to print Nazi propaganda on such horrendous issues as enforced sterilization and euthanasia. "

Kind of rings given we currently have a thread about the politicians who are moving to *investigate* all home schoolers.

Catholic Martyrs of the Holocaust | Catholic Answers

 

[koshergrl]

"German Catholics were next discouraged from sending their children to Catholic schools. Nazi propaganda called the schools disloyal and havens of corruption, and families were eventually required to appear before authorities to declare officially why they had decided to betray the regime. During the ordeal of the interview, parents—especially any working for the government or in the German armed forces—were reminded of the possibly dire consequences should they proceed, including loss of promotion, dismissal, and even prison. Not surprisingly, Catholic schools suffered from massive drops in enrollment. "

Interesting.

Catholic Martyrs of the Holocaust | Catholic Answers

 

[Dot Com]

The Catholic church - 100 million
CofE - 20 million
The Pilgrims - 12 million

And most of those killing events you mentioned were in some way religion based..Hitler was a Catholic for sure..there's even pictures of him leaving a church after a service..

yep. Didn't they officially observe his birthday while he was in power as well?

 

[CharlieH]

Yes..I see you're not all mind controlled religious zombies..

 

[koshergrl]

Hitler killed priests and Catholics by the thousands.

"In the annexed regions of Poland, Nazi officials closed churches, seminaries, convents, and seminaries, and the majority of priests were arrested or executed. Between 1939 and 1945 over 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were killed; 1,992 of them died in concentration camps, 787 of them at Dachau (see "The Priests of Dachau," page 22). "

http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/catholic-martyrs-of-the-holocaust

 

[CharlieH]

No he didn't, stop lying..

 

[koshergrl]

"Indeed, of the 2,720 clergy sent to Dachau, 2,579 were Catholic priests, along with uncertain numbers of seminarians and lay brothers. Most were Polish priests, 1,748 in all; there were also 411 German priests. Of the 1,034 priests who died in the camp, 868 were Polish. The priests were housed in a special "priest block" and were targeted for especially brutal treatment by the SS guards.
It is estimated that at least 3,000 other Polish priests were sent to other concentration camps, including Auschwitz, while priests from across Europe were condemned to death and labor camps: 300 priests died at Sachsenhausen, 780 at Mauthausen, and 5,000 at Buchenwald. These numbers do not include the priests who were murdered en route to the camps or who died from diseases and exhaustion in the inhuman cattle cars used to transport victims. Several thousand nuns were also sent to camps or killed on the way.
The list of victims is a very long one, and the suffering on a daily basis by the priests is unimaginable. For many, the ordeal lasted for years. Adam Kozlowiecki, a Polish priest, was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1939 and was sent to Auschwitz in 1940; transferred to Dachau in December 1940, he spent the next five years there until he was freed by the U.S. army on April 29, 1945. Kozlowiecki was made a cardinal in 1998. A few of the other notable priests at Dachau were Bl. Michal Kozal, Bl. Stefan Grelewski, Bl. Stefan Frelichowski, Bl. Karl Leisner, and Bl. Titus Brandsma."

Catholic Martyrs of the Holocaust | Catholic Answers

 

[koshergrl]

Ah, Hitler, the good Christian, the devout Catholic..well known for his embrasure of religion:

"Children were pressured into joining the Hitler Youth movement rather than stay in Catholic youth associations. An attempt was made to ban the crucifix in schools. From 1936 on, parents were pressured to withdraw their children from Catholic schools and place them in Nazi-approved schools. By 1939, most Catholic-based schools had disappeared in Nazi Germany.

"In 1937, Pius XI was so concerned about the anti-Catholic activities of the Nazi regime that he wrote ‘With burning anxiety’ (Mit brennender Sorge) that was issued by the Vatican on March 14th 1937. It was read out to congregations in Catholic churches on March 21st 1937. ‘With burning anxiety’ criticised the Nazi government’s persecution of the Catholic Church. Pius XI criticised the state for putting ideological beliefs before Christian ones. Priests in Germany were warned not to criticise Hitler or the Nazi regime. However, individual priests did make a stand against the government and between 1939 and 1943, 693 Catholic priests were arrested and tried for “oppositional activity”.

The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany

 

[CharlieH]

They died because they were weak, just like all clergy..weak in head and arm..

 

[koshergrl]

That's exactly what the Nazis thought! You'd make a good Nazi or Red soldier.

Or a killer for Pol Pot.

 

[CharlieH]

The real problem with the Nazis was the fact that they let far too many Jews live..

 

[koshergrl]

"The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. Using the latest techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. Of course if some people - the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, or the handicapped - have to be eliminated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants and their apologists have shown themselves quite willing to pay. Thus they confirm the truth of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's dictum, "If God is not, everything is permitted."

Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history - The Christian Science Monitor - RichardDawkins.net

Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades.

"It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history."

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Mass murderers scapegoat religion all the time. Just as they scapegoat atheism. But that's all it is, scapegoating. Neither side has moral superiority.

 

[JohnA]

Yeah but it's still exponentially more than the Christian death toll...

of course.

the 500 years of Inquisition ( which they parade as the worst atrocity uder the sun EVER) resulted in ~ 20 thousand deaths.

20 thousands in 500 years.

less than a stupid epidemic of flu in one season.

the world population was far less than it was in the 20th century

 

[koshergrl]

Well it if was a Christian problem, it would be continuing into the 20th & 21st centuries.

Of course it hasn't.

Because it isn't a Christian problem...it's an atheist problem.

"..."the assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them."[1] Koukl details the number of people killed in various events involving theism and compares them to the much higher tens of millions of people killed under atheistic communist regimes, in which militant atheism served as the official doctrine of the state.[1] It has been estimated that in less than the past 100 years, governments under the banner of communism have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 to 259,432,000 human lives.[2][3][4][5][6][7] Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987.[8] Richard Dawkins has attempted to engage in historical revisionism concerning atheist atrocities and Dawkins was shown to be in gross error (see also: Atheism and communism and Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union)."

Atheism and Mass Murder - Conservapedia