Reply #107: Stern's speech does NOT actually mention the "Christian right" in the US

[kath]

(unless the online version has been censored). The NYT article states that Stern "warned in a speech about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian right". Strangely, this is not so, again, unless the online version of the speech has been censored. The speech is much more subtle than that. It doesn't directly mention conditions in the US today, but I'm sure that the intelligent audience there could read between the lines and draw parallels to the Bush regime. The only reference to current events is here, in the introduction to his speech (2nd paragraph):
"I am also grateful for the timing of this event. It would be nice to ascribe this to some invisible hand, but I suspect it had to do with the visibly crowded schedule of the Foreign Minister. Still, for me it is felicitous because it is an encouragement at a hard time; events of the last ten days have intensified my reasoned apprehension, my worry about the immediate future of the country that saved us and taught us and gave us so much. I take heart from tonight, since renewed hope is itself a marvelous gift."

The speech is here: http://www.lbi.org/fritzstern.html

These parts of the speech particularly caught my attention (in addition to the quotes in the NYT piece) :

"But the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis."
<snip>
"Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation... Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture... Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth."
<snip>
"People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.” <snip>
"Though modern German history offers lessons in both disaster and recovery, German has remained the language of politics in crisis. And the principal lesson speaks of the fragility of democracy, the fatality of civic passivity or indifference; German history teaches us that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable."
<snip>
"Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this."