Vor ein paar Tagen hat der New Statesman das letzte Interview mit Christopher Hitchens von 2011 online gestellt, indem er mit Richard Dawkins darüber diskutiert, ob Amerika auf dem Weg zu einer Theokratie ist und wie besorgniserregend der Erfolg der Tea Party ist.
Gleich zu Beginn geht Hitch aber auch auf die Behauptung ein, Hitler und Stalin seien Atheisten gewesen:
RD As an Orwell scholar, you must have a particular view of North Korea, Stalin, the Soviet Union, and you must get irritated – perhaps even more than I do – by the constant refrain we hear: “Stalin was an atheist.”
CH We don’t know for sure that he was. Hitler definitely wasn’t. There is a possibility that Himmler was. It’s very unlikely but it wouldn’t make any difference, either way. There’s no mandate in atheism for any particular kind of politics, anyway.
RD The people who did Hitler’s dirty work were almost all religious.
CH I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
RD Can you talk a bit about that – the relationship of Nazism with the Catholic Church?
CH The way I put it is this: if you’re writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word “fascist”, if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with “extremeright Catholic party”. Almost all of those regimes were in place with the help of the Vatican and with understandings from the Holy See. It’s not denied. These understandings quite often persisted after the Second World War was over and extended to comparable regimes in Argentina and elsewhere.
