CAN WE TRUST OUR INSTITUTIONS?

Can we trust our great Western institutions to safeguard the truth? Along with many German intellectuals, Albert Einstein had thought that he could. However, he learned otherwise before his flight from National Socialistic Germany in the late 1930s:

·       Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced.  Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks…

·       Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth.  I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.  I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. (“German Martyrs,” Time magazine, 23 December 1940)

All of the great German institutions had quickly capitulated to Hitler despite his mounting atrocities. Sometimes, Hitler’s propaganda was enough to have the nation walk in lock-step behind him. At other times, the Nazi warnings where quite blatant. For example, Munich professors had been warned:

·       From now on it is not up to you to decide whether or not something is true, but whether it is in the interest of the National Socialist Revolution. (Noakes and Pridham, Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945, vol. 1 (New York Schocken, 1983) 446)

Could the same capitulation be happening in the West today? In When a Nation Forgets God: 7 Lessons we must Learn from Nazi Germany (2010), Erwin Lutzer has argued that we have fallen prey to the pressures of militant Leftist agendas:

·       Our universities will promote freedom for pornographers, haters of Amne3rica, and homosexual activists. But don’t expect them to extend such freedom to Christian students who reveal their convictions, or speakers who would defend family values or a Christian view of the world.

Under Hitler, fearful professors knew better, but remained silent in the face of Hitler’s directives:

·       “German youth must no longer…be confronted with the choice of whether they wish to grow up in a spirit of materialism or idealism, of racism or internationalism, of religious or godlessness, but they must be consciously shaped according to principles which are recognized as correct…according to the principles of the ideology of National Socialism.” (Noakes and Pridham, 432)

German professors did not raise a protest. If they did, they were eliminated. Contempt for traditional values is now shared by many Western academicians. Harvard University Professor and humanist, Chester Pierce, made a speech before 2000 teachers in 1973, in which he claimed:

·       Every child in America who enters school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government that we have. Patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty, all that proves that children are sick because a truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things, and is truly the international child of the future.

(http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Chester.Pierce.Quote.FF38)

Of course, if the Church and family were making their children “mentally ill,” the duty of the teachers was to resist and to impose a radically new ideology to make the children well. In order to undermine parental influence, schools introduced “Values Clarification” exercises. Lutzer claimed that:

·       Many teachers exploited the child’s natural desire to be independent from parents and from the church. “It appealed to the desire of youth to be independent of the adult world and exploited the conflict of generations and the typical tendency for young people to challenge authority figures, whether parents or teachers.” [Tammy Bruce] Parents who tried to contradict what their children were being taught were punished. (Lutzer, 103)

“Values Clarification” also exploited the youths’ growing sexual desires by encouraging them, especially when they ran against Church and parental norms. “Values Clarification” taught the children that their own values and feelings should be supreme and should not be determined by any allegedly objective considerations.

However, was there any even-handed dialogue about the costs and benefits of this innovation? Of course not! Our trusted institutions had long capitulated. Dialogue had been replaced by threat and shaming techniques.

Tammy Bruce is the former president of the LA chapter of the National Organisation of Woman. She is also a pro-abortion feminist and a lesbian. But she is greatly alarmed by homosexual activism:

·       “Today’s gay activists have carried the campaign a step further, invading children’s lives by wrapping themselves in the banner of tolerance. It is literally the equivalent of the wolf coming to your door dressed as your grandmother. The radicals in control of the gay establishment want children in their world of moral decay, lack of self-restraint, and moral relativism. Why? How better to truly belong to the majority than by taking possession of the next generation? By targeting children, you can start indoctrinating the next generation with the false construct that gay people deserve special treatment and special laws. How else can the gay establishment actually get society to believe, borrowing from George Orwell, that gay people are indeed more equal than others? Of course, the only way to get that idea accepted is to condition people into accepting nihilism that forbids morality and judgment.” http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10923

This is an activism that has become viral as a result of the capitulation of media, schools, and universities to this militant and sometimes violent agenda, which shows no concern for the welfare of the children and their families. Bruce writes that this activism is about “sexualizing children”:

·       “It also promises a sex addicted future consumers on which the porn industry relies. By destroying these lives, they strike the final blow to family, faith, tradition, decency, and judgment.” (Lutzer, 110)

There are no studies available that show that such activism, including activism in favor of transgenderism, will not destroy the children. Where then are the scientific community, the media, and the universities? They are no more to be trusted than the institutions under Hitler’s National Socialism.

Although too little and too late, the Church had been the one institution to oppose Hitler, and they were heavily persecuted for their opposition. It is no different today!