Here’s Hollywood’s take on the meaning of the Battle of the Bulge in 1949, four years after the shooting stopped:
(Battleground, 1949)
“We must never again let any force dedicated to … a super idea or a super anything become strong enough to impose itself … We must be smart enough and tough enough in the beginning to put out the fire before it starts spreading.”
What a super idea! I just hope we can be strong enough to impose it …
Is this a New Year’s joke?
Is this a New Year’s joke?
“This must never happen again” as the impetus behind tyranny
Doesn’t this argue for the “contingency of historical events” that you want to deemphasize? This sort of “this must never happen again” thinking was quite common among those in charge after the war.
Generally agree
One of the big arguments for PC (the tyranny of pluralism) in my kids’ high school was “I’ve studied history, and acts of extreme intolerance like Nazism always start with speech.” So the way good people control future history and prevent bad things from happening is by controlling thought and speech. Indeed, that view was implicit in the pastor’s remarks.
(As to historical contingency, I’d say that choice and particular events do sometimes make a difference but people often overestimate particular causation—e.g., PC is caused by the Jews, or by what the Nazis did, or by the Frankfort School, or whatever.)
Each to his own God
Rather odd phrasing for a chaplain who seems to be aware of no greater religious diversity among the men than Jews, Lutherans, Catholics, and various Christian denominations: “Let us each pray in his own way, to his own God.” These men believed in different Gods?
Good point!
It’s clear then that he thinks of God as a personal creation, as such different for every human being, rather than a reality variously understood.