We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living.
The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all.
Therefore, we demand:... an end to the power of the financial interests.
We demand profit sharing in big business.
We demand a broad extension of care for the aged.
We demand... the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of national, state, and municipal governments.
In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education...
We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents... The government must undertake the improvement of public health—by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor... by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth.
We combat the... materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good.
Yep, it was the Nazi Party, Munich, February 1920.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed 28 June 1919. It demanded reparations from Germany not fully paid until 4 Oct. 2010 per Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteBut in the wake of WWI devastation, the debt must have appeared insurmountable and unjust to many impoverished Germans by February of 1920 (per the date cited in the above post), especially as the treaty entirely blamed defeated parties and granted various German-claimed territory for victors.
German nationalist jealousies were stirred, leaving the National Socialist party a political market ripe for promised better solutions. Would that the "die Leuten" (the people) in the main had turned to the Trinitarian God of their (especially Lutheran) fathers for deliverance rather than to nationalist sentiment and militant state powers.
In the US in the early and uncertain years of the 21st century, State idolatry appears highly popular as well, but it is a historical fallacy to paint ourselves necessarily with the same brush colored by the NAZI war and holocaust.
In abortion as one example, particularly in its racist application by the founders of Planned Parenthood, ours is a kinder, gentler, more efficient genocide, though thanks in part to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, we would not dream of doing to black (and other) babies on the outside of the womb what we do to them on the inside.
And our national debt, if seemingly insurmountable, is not colored at present by nationalist partisanship as after Versailles, though pointing fingers has only just begun. What will our children's children think of us?
May Jesus the Son of David have mercy on us.