Right-wing pundit William S. Lind: “Christianity has never officially approved of forced conversion. The Church has always acknowledged that belief must come from the heart and the mind. This is different from Islam where once somebody has said the formula, even under threat of death, they are a Muslim, and if they ever decide they are not a Muslim, they are an apostate and under the threat of death.”
“If the culture goes, it takes everything with it.”
Q: “Is Christianity required for Western civilization? Republican Rome and ancient Greece produced wonderful civilizations.”
William: “Our culture is a product of Athens and Jerusalem.”
Q: “A lot of alternative Right types look to pagan religions, such as the Norse or Celts or Anglo-Saxons, and are inspired because the underlying culture is based on honor, loyalty and strength.”
William: “Christianity through most of its history was capable of fighting. That goes back to the early Christians enlisting in the Roman legions to show they were capable of fighting for empire.”
“In this neo-pagan revival, you see two things at work, one philosophical and one religious. Philosophically, and this lies at the heart of fascism, seeing the enormous weakness in the society around us, people on the right are looking for something that preaches strength. They look to the values of the ancient world where power was the greatest good and an act of will was a great virtue. The ancient Greeks could never conceive of a hero who lost. Almost everyone knows internally there’s something beyond this life.”
Q: “Pagan revivalists see Christianity as an outside influence that has destroyed their civilization.”
William: “This was the fascist view between the wars. They believed Christianity was a slave religion. Fascism is about rejecting the Judeo-Christian tradition and returning to the value system of antiquity. That’s what brought it down. It brought up a philosophical flaw that was fatal. Fascism said that the act of will is good in itself regardless of what is willed. Under stress, Fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler made bad decisions as an act of will. Mussolini’s fatal decision was to enter the war.”
“With the Nazis, it was a series of disastrous decisions including Hitler’s declaration of war on America and the decision in 1942 to undertake the Holocaust. The Nazi’s initial goal was not to kill the Jews. They wanted to get them out of Germany and later out of Europe. They were happy to have them go to Israel. One of [Adolf] Eichmann‘s last acts in Budapest was getting a thousand Hungarian Jews to Palestine. The British were preventing that from happening. The Nazis looked at the solution and saw they had no place to put the Jews. The British controlled the seas. What was the act of will? To kill them all.”
Q: “The Final Solution was not the first solution.”
