Hagee & Hitler
Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.
I wonder what sort of man the Rev. John Hagee must be (see video overview, produced prior to the news that McCain and Hagee were parting ways). That “Rev.” tells us that he is, as they say, a man of God. On the evidence, he’s a man who thinks in large, even cosmic terms – he explains great historical events in terms of vast plans, and he finds, if not specific prophesies, then at least anticipations of them in a book he holds to relate the inerrant word of this same God.
He holds to a view of the history of the world called “premillennial dispensationalism,” which is an impressive mouthful of a label for an elaborate fantasy about The End. This particular figment requires that biblical Israel be restored in order for the drama of end times to play out. So the Rev. Hagee is a supporter of the modern state of Israel, not in the sense that he wishes it well and works to assure that it and its people will continue to exist and prosper despite their many enemies, for he knows that they won’t endure, any more than the rest of the Earth. No, he supports Israel as a tool, a means to get to the end of things along the lines he believes he understands from “Revelation,” the concluding section of that book.
This instrumental view, this seeing of someone or of a whole population as a means to an essentially private end, pops up even earlier in the Rev.’s interpretation of history. As he sees it, and as he believes the prophet Jeremiah (ibid.) indicated so long ago, the Holocaust was also simply a means to an end.
We know, of course, that for Adolph Hitler it was a means to an end, the end being a Europe, a Reich, that was Judenfrei – free entirely of the Jews. But Hagee tells us that it was a means also for God: God wanted the Jews to reestablish Israel and so He whipped up the Holocaust as a way of prodding them – or however many might be left – to abandon Europe for the old homeland. And so they did, and now there is an Israel, and so we can get on with the business of the Second Coming and the consequent eternal bliss promised to the Rev. Hagee and his coreligionists.
As I said at the beginning, I don’t know what sort of man could believe this. And I certainly don’t grasp the notion of a God who could come up with such a plan. Let’s think about it a bit.
If you had wanted the Jews to leave Europe and resettle in the Middle East, how might you have gone about it? Let’s make it easier: Pretend you are God. You are omnipotent. So, taking the softest possible approach, you could just have whispered into each Jew’s ear, “Cheese it! and get thee to Israel.” Some secular or skeptical ones would have resisted, of course, but you didn’t need them all to go anyway, just a good-size core group to get things off the ground. Surely, on hearing a Word directly from God, a goodly number would promptly have upped stakes and gone.
Or you could have been less subtle. There is precedent for a pillar of fire, leading the godly to the promised land. A couple of plagues, precisely targeted, would no doubt have done the trick as well. Or you could simply have caused them all to disappear from where they were and reappear instantly in Palestine. There are four ways right off the top of my head. All in all, it wouldn’t have been an especially hard thing to manage, if you’d been God.
But instead, this God, the God of Hagee, lays out a time-consuming, expensive, ridiculously sloppy program. First, he selects the highly unlikely ex-corporal Hitler as his tool, has him spend more than a dozen years gradually gaining political power in Germany, has him undertake the conquest of Europe so that he can reach all those Jews scattered about the place, and then has him instigate the systematic extermination of six million or so of them by the most brutal methods his minions can devise. Why? Why, pour encourager les autres! A staggering idea, no? Except for the Rev. Hagee, apparently, who recites it with the equanimity that, when it does not proceed from wisdom, is so often the product of derangement.
Well, OK, credit where credit is due: The scheme worked, though I can’t help wondering how the Rev. Hagee accounts for the many obstacles that were thrown in the way of the refugees even then. But – pardon me – this is a depraved tale, told not necessarily by an idiot but by someone whose ideology is morally incoherent.
An idle question or two for the Rev.: In this scenario, exactly what is Mr. Hitler guilty of? Did he not do precisely as instructed, by no lesser an authority than your God himself? Was he free to do otherwise? How do you suppose he was rewarded for his service?
I cannot imagine why anyone would listen to a man who thinks this way. That numbers do is one of the more telling arguments against democracy. Senator McCain is well rid of him.
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/author/rmchenry
