Politico: I Watched Orban Destroy Hungary's Democracy. Here's My Advice for the Trump Era.

[Irish_Dem]

54. The Hitler analogy is quite appropriate.

I did not realize the extent of Hitler's use of religious dogma to further entice his cult followers.

Interesting, Japan had an extreme version of this propaganda method. They had been taught that their emperor was divine. God's human representative on earth. They would die for him on command. And indeed the kamikaze soldiers did fight to the death in WWII. The soldiers in the field fought to their death and rarely surrendered. Because of this the fighting was beyond horrific in the Pacific islands.

As the Allied forces approached Japan, preparing to invade, the emperor and military were telling the women and children to fight to the death. Giving them sword and hand to hand combat lessons. Covert intelligence reports indicated to Truman that if the Allies invaded Japan, the death count would be over 2 million. Allied casualties would be very high as would
deaths in the Japanese civilian population, many of them women and children. Truman was running out of good options.

Yes religion is such a strong force in people that it can be used against them, used to trick them into doing all kinds of things. The Jesuits, the intelligentsia and proselytizing arm of the Catholic Church was superb at this. When they went into a foreign land to foist Catholicism on the indigenous people, they would use existing pagan rituals and words and roll those over into the persuasive sales pitch. So we see pagan rituals as part of the Christian ritual system and holidays to this day.

And of course we see a psychopath criminal like Trump use religion as a weapon and cult strategy. This is a man who is the least religious person we can think of. His personal bible sales are laughable if not so tragic.

Someday people will be writing articles about how religious manipulation was part of losing American democracy. If such topics are allowed to be written that is.