Many Evangelicals Are Holocaust Deniers. They Should Repent of That.

No, not that holocaust. The other one. The worse one. The coming one.

Hitler is bad.

The level of ingratiatingly obnoxious super-duper moral pronouncements against Hitler, the Nazis, and fascism in social media has been hard to watch this election cycle. But mostly, it comes from the right in the form of “like-fishing,” which is what I call it when Samuel Sey or Owen Strachan or the Babylon Bee guys feel the need to distance themselves from people who aren’t quite sure they agree with post-war consensus.

Hitler is bad. Please reward my moral courage by hitting the ‘like’ button.

It’s not that Hitler wasn’t bad. He was, as mother says emphatically, evil (she might be worried I’m going over the edge on this topic). He did murder a bunch of people, after all. And by a bunch, I mean he murdered reportedly six million Jewish people, which would have been 2/3 of the Jews living in all of Europe. And that figure, six million, is about 12 times the amount of Jews living in Germany in 1933 (but not all Jews killed in the Holocaust lived in Germany). Beyond that, Hitler also killed a bunch of non-Jews, murdering 11 million civilians in total (almost as many civilians as the Allies killed).

It’s just that, as a society, we’re not quite ready to put what occurred in the build-up of WWII into any kind of historical context to be understood (so that it can be avoided in the future).

That aside, it’s become the mortal sin to be accused of holocaust denialism. You don’t have to actually deny the holocaust to be imputed with this sin, mind you. You just have to be accused. Usually (but not always) the accusation is unwarranted.

My daughter recently got an assignment in school to use several references, which were assigned to her, to practice citation. The topic was Winston Churchill, and the paragraph she was to cite said (and I quote), “Winston Churchill was a selfless hero with deep moral conviction who sacrificed greatly to save lives and liberty.”

I’m not sure what cardboard storage box holds my Masters Degree in History, but I am sometimes vaguely reminded the difference between history and propaganda.

Before popping off an email to the instructor asking her to either be excused from the assignment or let her choose her own references, I thought long and hard about how much we wanted to be known as the Nazi family. The fear of being labeled pro-Russia or pro-Putin or pro-Hitler or pro-holocaust or pro-Nazi for the slightest crimes of evading group-think, is very real.

But with us (the Western world) having been able to take a firm vote and all agree that the holocaust was real and Hitler was bad (both are true), let me describe another, very real and impending holocaust that evangelicals should be in agreement about. But largely, we don’t think about it. And we don’t think about a coming holocaust because we get so much dang reward for denouncing (rightly) the holocaust of days gone by.

One of the roles of polemics, after all, is tuning out the loudest echos in the echo chamber to focus on important issues that are mostly ignored. So let’s do that.

The Realities of a nuclear holocaust are more horrific than you can imagine.

I explained a bit of this in my post on X, but let me do it more thoroughly here.

When my new herding pup is too hard on a critter, I have to take its face and point it at the dead chick and say, “Do you see this dead chicken? Look! Look at this dead chicken! Bad, dog! Bad!”

My method of teaching gun safety to our children is the same. Every November, upon the first deer kill of the year, I bring home the animal, completely gutted. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it’s pretty horrific unless you’re used to it. I make the children get down and look at it and I say, “Do you see this? Daddy’s gun did this. And daddy’s gun can do this to you, if you touch it when you shouldn’t.”

One man’s child traumatization is another man’s ounce of prevention. It seems to work, because they’ve never touched a gun without permission.

But admittedly, it’s hard to look at something we’ve not seen. So let me describe what nuclear war looks like for evangelicals too caught up in matters of far less importance.

In six minutes, the death certificate for a vast sum of humanity will be signed in a uranium pen.

American nuclear response policy is not unknown. It is largely de-classified, and what we know about the nuclear response policy of at least eight of the nine nuclear powers (North Korea is the exception), is also de-classified. Although it is subject to change, these policies have not changed since the start of the Cold War. No one took their finger off the button after the collapse of the Soviet Union, surprisingly.

When a singular nuclear missile is launched from anywhere in the world, unless it is from one of the five other nations that own a nuclear sub fleet (Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, and India), the STRATCOM commander will know almost immediately from our 24/7 monitoring of missile sites around the world. Currently, the STRATCOM commander is Anthony J. Cotton. Interestingly, no one is higher in command of America’s nuclear response, except for the U.S. President, including even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense.

Within seconds of a launch, STRATCOM will attempt to reach the U.S. president, presupposing he’s not asleep, eating ice cream, or trying to eat babies’ feet. From the time of launch, POTUS has six minutes to make a decision as to whether or not we strike back.

Policies regarding nuclear response can indeed be over-ridden by the president, but national security and nuclear policy experts highly doubt that they would be. The policy in place, which began under Eisenhower, is that that United States will launch its nuclear arsenal upon warning that another nation has fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (which may or may not carry a nuclear warhead) in our direction. The reason for this is simple; if America waits, its nuclear capacity will certainly be hit before any civilian targets. Just as we know where their missile sites are, they know where ours are.

Our “enemies,” like China and Russia, have policies that mirror our Launch on Warning (LOW) policy.

The consequences for this are catastrophic. Consider, for example, if North Korea launches a warhead toward the United States. Our missiles, sent in response to North Korea, will travel over Russia. But as soon as Russia is alerted we’ve a launched a warhead in their direction, they will not wait to see if it is hitting North Korea or them. They will launch back.

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Six minutes is the time (first explained in Reagan’s autobiography) it’s presumed that POTUS has to make a decision, before it will be too late to make a decision. That’s the amount of time the president has to determine whether or not to make humanity extinct because it’s our national policy to go down fighting (as it should be). If we die, everybody dies. That’s the policy, which frankly, is worth the prevention.

It takes 26 minutes for an ICBM launched from Russia to hit the United States, and 33 minutes from North Korea. This short time frame is why six minutes is all the president has to give the launch order, because missile launches take roughly 20 minutes (or so) to happen through a string of necessary protocol, before our silos are swallowed by mushroom cloud.

Keep in mind, if a nuclear sub off our coast (they are already there according to a 2021 Defense Department budget request, and also because Russian subs just showed up off the coast of Florida earlier this year) launches, there is no 6 minute timeframe, at least in no meaningful way. Then, it’s just over.

In a traditional air-born strike, experts believe that within 72 minutes, every nuclear weapon on the face of the earth will have been launched. It is doubtful that any nation’s central command will be functional (or alive) for those full 72 minutes, so our nuclear launch functionality is automated (and has been since the Cold War) to continue launching if human operators are dead or don’t respond. Called “Dead Hand” or “Dead Man Switch,” it’s largely assumed, although not proven, than today’s nuclear arsenals are controlled by AI to pick the best targets to inflict the most damage, without a living human left to operate it.

The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima were 10.5 kilotons. Today’s thermonuclear weapons are 10.4 megatons, or roughly 1,000 times more destructive. One of these bombs, impacting American soil, would burn nearly a square mile of land in fire instantly. Creating winds far exceeding Hurricane force, every living creature within nine miles would die just a moment later, from the air collapsing their lungs and killing them almost immediately.

The flash, called a nuclear thermal flash, would - according to the Defense Department - vaporize, just a moment or two after that - every living creature, whether flora or fauna. Non-living things, like rocks and concrete and steel, would burn like cardboard. Fires would then burn within (depending on the natural geography) a 300 square mile area around the blast, strong enough to consume all man-made structures and boiling alive those unlucky enough to find their way into a tornado bunker or traditional bomb shelter. For them, it will be no better than crawling into an oven.

Now imagine the horror of that scene, as more than 6,000 bombs from China, Russia, and North Korea pound America, each with 300 square miles of wanton destruction.

Living in rural America will not help you avoid targeting, as primary and secondary targets might surprise you. The first targets would be nuclear missile sites, the bulk of which are in rural America. Americans are living atop these missile locations, unknowingly to them, but very, very known to our “enemies.” On more than one occasion, Chinese migrants have been suspected of doing surveillance on these sites, only discovered because “if you see something, say something” Americans have noticed Chinese migrants, sticking out like a sore thumb, living near these sites with no known income, watching them daily in a routine schedule, sometimes through binoculars.

Hit first would not be major population centers like New York or Los Angeles, or political centers like the D.C. Beltway, but the states of Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado.

Hit second would be America’s nuclear testing facilities and Air Force bases, which could scramble our bombers to deliver warheads in person, not relying on only our silos. These locations would also include Montana and North Dakota, but in addition, New Mexico, Missouri, and of rural America. Territories or states not in the lower 48, including Alaska and Guam, would also be hit in priority. Along with these bases, our doomsday bunkers like Cheyenne Mountain, Rave Rock, and the White House bunker would also be lit up like a radioactive Christmas tree.

Third would likely be nuclear energy plants, which would inflict even more civilian damage. There are 54 of these nuclear plants, centered heavily in the American south, including states like Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Texas, and in the midwest, including Ohio, and in the Pacific northwest, in Washington State. Each one would melt-down, creating a constant stream of radiation, much worse than a single nuclear bomb. Dams would also likely be hit in this phase to do the most damage.

Fourth would be state capitols, embassies around the world, and Washington D.C. in an attempt (a successful one) to sever government control and remove any hopes for a continuity of government. During this phase, the commander of STRATCOM will have been in the air already for nearly an hour, trying to organize a strategic nuclear response. He will not have anywhere to land, should he survive, except perhaps an aircraft carrier at sea, if operational security somehow makes its location unknown to our “enemies.”

At this point in time, it’s assumed by almost every defense analysts that the president will already be dead, unless he is either at the White House or in the air (or on the runway in Air Force One) when the missiles were launched. The amount of time it takes from the ground, unless he’s already on a runway, will prevent him from getting to a safe location nearby. Even if the secret service has the Marine One helicopter blades already spinning, as opposed trying to move him in “The Beast” presidential limo, it simply doesn’t allow him time to get to the nearest runway where Air Force One is located before the ground he’s standing on will be evaporated. If reports of the sophistication of the White House bunker system are to be believed, located between the White House and Pentagon, it could withstand a 20 megaton bomb. However, it’s suspected that the reports are inaccurate, because those inside the president’s security apparatus have claimed the contingency plan for nuclear war is to move him, not keep him under the White House.

Assuming the president is safe under the White House or at a bunker similar to Raven Rock, the STRATCOM commander has found a place to land, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have made their way successfully to Cheyenne Mountain (each one is less likely than the one before it), there would still be no one left to communicate with except, perhaps, America’s nuclear fleet.

Hell on earth, but colder.

The debris from the explosions would put into the air somewhere around 300 billion tons of contaminants, blocking out up to 80% of sunlight. This would lower the earth’s temperature close to 40 degrees, no matter the latitude. Almost all bodies of water distant from the equator would turn to ice. The American midwest would not reach temperatures above freezing for a half-year or longer. Up to 90% of the earth’s mammals in these latitudes would go extinct. The fish in the world’s oceans, except perhaps those we’ve never seen in the ocean’s mysterious depths, would go almost completely extinct and do so faster than mammals on the earth’s landmass. Agriculture would be impossible for at least a decade.

The famous quote from Nikita Khrushchev to Kennedy was, “After a nuclear war, the living would envy the dead.”

Imagine those conditions, plus dealing with radioactive fallout from the world’s nuclear plants in a perpetual state of meltdown, wildfires across continents with no one to stop it, and radioactive fallout contaminating both land and water.

Yes, it can happen. And it’s surprising it’s not happened already.

It may seem that nuclear war is as horrific as fiction, but only because it has not yet occurred. The psychological phenomenon of “Normalcy Bias” is when someone assumes that whatever situation they are facing is fanciful or imaginative, because their brain is not able to compute that just because it’s never been like this before, doesn’t mean it’s not like this now.

The most tragic scene portraying normalcy bias is in the 1983 movie, The Day After, when one of the main characters can’t seem to get his wife to understand that she doesn’t have time to make the bed (nor does it any longer matter) because they have to get to the basement before the world ends. Watch below (51.06 time stamp).

Humans naturally presume that the world as they know it will always be that way. And we have never experienced nuclear war, so as illogical as it seems, we naturally presume it will never occur.

However, in threat assessments given through various nuclear agencies, international organizations, and the Department of Defense, experts believe that we are closer now to nuclear war than at any time since (well before) the end of the Cold War. The U.S. Defense Department’s intelligence analysts warned in 2022 that there is “a 50-50 chance Russia would launch a nuclear strike if Ukraine threatened to regain Crimea, according to the Times. The nuclear threat also hangs over conflicts in the Middle East, the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula.”

And none of this assessment speaks to the capacity for a “dirty bomb” placed in a shipping container bound for a U.S. port or, perhaps, even a briefcase, that might provoke all-out nuclear war.

EVANGELICALS NEED TO CONSIDER FOREIGN POLICY A PART OF OUR VALUES VOTING.

In all of my years as both an evangelical and a politco, I’ve never encountered a serious effort on the part of Christian America to focus our attention on foreign policy. While we have spent countless sums and incredible energy on the issues of abortion and human sexuality, paying attention to our country’s foreign policy hasn’t even been an afterthought. But, it really should be.

The more one studies American foreign policy, the less convinced you are that there is a domestic policy at all. It seems that all domestic policies are to be understood in the light of world politics. The influence foreign governments (or industries) impose upon Americans, through our representatives (in theory, they are our representatives) in incredible. This is, perhaps, what makes Trump’s “America First” messaging so offensive to the political establishment.

The United States has been, for quite some time, the most war-hungry nation on the face of the earth. Despite the Cold War ending, we only persisted in agitating insurrections and fostering hostilities around the world. When the Soviet Union collapsed, our policies toward Russia didn’t change one bit, much different from when we conquered Germany and Japan after WWII and turned them into allies. Almost every cause of the current American proxy war with Russia, fought through Ukraine, was provocation. We have consistently broken our own treaties to push the nation further and further to the brink of conflict. We have signaled the desire to put our missiles on their border with Ukraine, aimed at Moscow, despite Russia not acting in any way adversarial to us (they are, however, a trade competitor, which is what has driven our behavior; the same as Churchill’s motivations in turning a regional conflict involving Germany into a world war).

Our Military Industrial Complex has done exactly what Eisenhower warned us it would do; continuously chug the engines of war to enrich war profiteers. The Biden Administration (and many Republicans, ranging from Lindsay Graham to Nicki Haley) are so brash as to tell us not to worry about billions of our tax dollars being given for a war nowhere even closely connected to our national interests because “that money goes back to American industry” (the war industry).

We don’t seem to blush that Dick Cheney’s Haliburton, for which he was CEO before becoming Vice President, was enriched many billions of dollars (and him, many millions in continuing contracts) as the de facto logistical company providing services for American military engagement. Neither do we put two-and-two together, that his opposition to Donald Trump is that Trump promises to prevent wars rather than engage in them.

We seem unconcerned that our wars are rolled out like Hollywood sequels, with the next war being planned as one war is being wrapped up (just as the battle plans for Ukraine were in the works before Afghanistan was finished, and that Biden’s hurried, disastrous retreat from Afghanistan was rushed because we had to hurry up and get to the next war).

The United States maintains 750 military bases in more than 80 nations, much to the chagrin of both foreign allies and adversaries, as well as to their native populations. We have 228,000 American soldiers overseas, despite not having enough enlistment to adequately support the homeland, and that doesn’t account defense contractors. Our military budget is $852 billion, or roughly 14% of our national budget. That amount of money could subsidize the food budget of every American to purchase quality, fresh food (either as subsidies to farmers or directly to the consumer) in an age of morbid obesity and rampant diabetes caused by our diet of inexpensive goyslop food-like products, which is the only thing many Americans can afford. Or, it could be used to subsidize school choice. It could buy every American a Spacelink internet connection and a decade of service. Or, best yet, it could be spent on virtually anything besides killing people in wars that don’t benefit our country (or given back to the taxpayer).

But the problem isn’t just government waste. The problem is, we are spending fortunes to engage in very, very dangerous, possibly civilization-ending military conflicts with other nuclear powers. Liz Cheney’s trust fund could very likely be the cause of Nuclear Winter.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has tried to overthrow the government of at least 72 nations (or at least 72 attempts) just during the Cold War. But when the United States won the Cold War, we didn’t stop trying to use coups as the foundation of our foreign policy. Many of the regimes we have toppled, or attempted to, were of democratically elected leaders. The CIA’s main function today is interfering in foreign elections and engaging in covert military operations against nations with which the United States Congress has not declared war. They successfully assassinated John F. Kennedy because he threatened to curb their activities abroad. And in recent years, they have meddled in U.S. elections, as they did in 2016 with coordinated attacks against incoming president, Donald J. Trump. And egregiously, they have wiretapped literally every American citizen for every phone call, email, and text they send.

And yet, evangelical leaders are regularly beating war drums on behalf of the Military Industrial Complex, repeating untruths to their followers about both Russia and atrocities in Gaza. They seem to act in utter disregard for the realities and hellishness of war when they advocate for killing people, or most atrocious of all, speak of killing civilians as nothing more than “collateral damage.”

These are infants, women, and children. They are, as evangelical leaders like to remind us about our migrant invaders, the “Imago Dei.”

But beyond the callousness of evangelicals failing consider the vast sum of lives taken by American foreign policy, is the failure to understand that wars have consequences. We are not only making enemies of foreign people for no reason other than the enrichment of war profiteers, we are making enemies of generations of people who will come to hate our children. This is not to mention the hatred we invoke of Christ and Christians overseas, we they see that our most publicly religious leaders speak of turning their homelands “into glass.”

…then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved (2 Peter 3:10

One day, God will destroy the world by fire. And those descriptions, given in many places, sound more like the Nuclear Holocaust than ever before.

How sad, and pathetic, it will be for evangelicals to have helped bring that judgment upon the Earth.