re: #631 dave aaa

Suicide is a mortal sin. In that tiny fraction of a second between the time he pulled the trigger and the bullet destroyed brain function, Hitler had better have done some massive repenting. Let’s just say that seems more than a little unlikely. Former seminary student Stalin, on the other hand, apparently had some hours to contemplate his afterlife at the end. He may well have realized he’d messed up very badly for most of his life and despaired at the thought he’d offended God. I wouldn’t put much money on it though.

Theoretically, it’s possible for a person who has embraced evil for much of his life to honestly repent on his deathbed, but what’s the real odds of that happening? There’s more to repentance than simply saying it - one has to actually be repentant to the bottom of one’s soul. Being sorry for being caught isn’t the same as being sorry you done it. You can’t BS God. If you don’t mean it, He knows, and you’re toast.

So the millions systematically murdered aren’t the catch; it’s the sincerity of one mass murder’s last-second repentance? That shit just ain’t right. Or decent. Or moral. In the fucking least.

As for Gandhi, I’m moderately comfortable with sending him to Hell, if for no reason than his odious belief that Jews should have gone peacefully into the ovens.

Gandhi was nonviolent from the beginning to the end - which is why he failed in South Africa, and was deported from there, before he began agitating in India. India was the perfect environment for him to succeed, as its occupier, Great Britain, was populated by people with social consciences. Had he tried in any nation occupied by Hitler or Stalin or Mao what he did in India, he would have had a bullet in his brain the moment he became a nuisance.

Gandhi actually seemed to believe that Jews peacefully going to the ovens would shame the Nazis into halting their extermination, but as it happens, most of them DID go peacefully, and shaming didn’t work. Once one’s target population is demonized, they can be dehumanized, and seen not as fellow human beings, but as either parasitic liabilities to the welfare of decent society or as actual threats to the realization of one’s own culture’s perceived destiny, and their genocide can be viewed as either a public service or a holy calling, or both, and thus justified in one’s mind. Conscience thus never became an issue with most Third Reich Germans. Not even the Christian 85% of them.