One hears a lot of propaganda from the conservative right (and okay, from the liberal left, too). One of my "favorites" is the one about how Hitler enacted gun control in Germany, and we all know what happened after that! The implication being that gun control was the first step toward the Holocaust, or some such thing.
In point of fact, Hitler didn't enact gun control in Germany. Gun control laws had been implemented by the Weimar government before Hitler and the Nazi party ever came to power. (Interestingly, part of the reason the laws were passed was because of the street violence in Germany between Nazis and Communists.)
But there is one thing that Hitler did enact: prayer in school.
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith. . . we need believing people." (From Hitler's speech, April 26, 1933, during negotiations which led to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933.)
Hitler and Stalin both knew the power of religion. Stalin feared it, and tried to stamp it out amongst his people. Hitler embraced religion, and chose to use it as a tool to further his own aims.
There are those, of course, who refute any suggestion that Hitler was anything but an atheist. They claim that no believer could do the things he did. They insist that the words he spoke above, and in many other speeches, were merely political tools, that he didn't mean them at all. Which way did Hitler lean? I can only say that it wasn't toward atheism.
Nowhere in any collected writings or speeches by or anecdotes about the man is there any indication that he ever identified himself as a non-believer. On the other hand, to be fair, he certainly could have been giving only lip service to theistic faith. But enough evidence exists to indicate that at the very least, he was a deist, a believer in some sort of greater power.
But the point of this isn't to discuss Hitler's faith, but to indicate that Hitler knew quite well that religion can very easily be used to justify atrocity, to pave the way for heinous acts. He and Stalin both sought to control people by controlling religion. Stalin's error was in thinking he could control religion to the point where people wouldn't be religious. Hitler's approach of controlling religion by way of becoming its ally was a far smarter approach.
It was smart because nothing on Earth serves the purpose of inciting people like religious fervor. To do something with the impression that it's being done "in the name of God" is to have the ultimate justification on your side. And to indoctrinate the young to this type of belief, by way of school prayer… Very shrewd. Just like those who are doing it today.
Now, I'm not saying the school prayer movement is a movement toward another Holocaust. But it is undeniably a movement toward the repression of the rights of non-believers, who happen to make up a rather large percentage of the population. And as history has shown, once we begin to repress the rights of anyone, things only continue to get worse, until there is some sort of unpleasantness that has to happen to cause people to open their eyes to how wrong such repression is.
If the German people had opposed mandatory school prayer, maybe things would've gone a little differently for them. For the world. Who knows?
All I do know is that people today should certainly be in opposition to the very idea, and not just in mind, but in action. Pay attention to what your local school board is up to, folks. Most things begin at the local level. If you can prevent the snowball from being tossed down the mountain, you won't have to deal with the avalanche to follow.
