Fiat Lux

This one deals with religion, if you want to create a flamewar of atheist v. Christian, this is not the place to do so and any such comment threads will be frozen when they start.

Now....forward to the post:

I think one of the forgotten goods of history has been the actions of the Pope John XXIII during the Shoah. Pius XII was and is a bit controversial, but John XXIII should be one of the Righteous Among the nations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_XXIII

He was one of those who saved the honor of the Church.

Others who deserve mention are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

^This man was one of the leaders of the German resistance to the Nazis.

Then there's ol' Pius XII himself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII#The_Holocaust

He hid Jews in the monasteries of the Church, saving them from Nazi evil.

And last but not least is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews where Denmark deliberately defied the Nazis and saved most of its Jewish population.

Even in the midst of darkness and evil, there was light. And the light was good.

In the 1940s, when Adolf Hitler was in the process of killing the Jews, it was known about and publicized at the time. People would not believe it, because white men were more decent than that. Hitler was killing Jews, Gypsies, and Russians at an alarmingly quick rate in 3 years, and nobody could bring themselves to stop it, or to care about it one way or the other. The Nazis turned entire towns into smoldering ruins and charnel houses, and the democracies and dictatorships alike did nothing to stop it. The Nazis slaughtered millions, industrializing death the way so much else had been, and nobody raised a voice to complain about it. The Allies knew of the camps, knew of what was in them. Nothing was done until Hitler's empire was crumbling. One of the things that I'm proudest of that the Allies did was that American forces arrived at Dachau and saw those vermin dumping the corpses of the Jews, saw it, and slaughtered every last one of the viri that had been corrupting their own souls that way.

Similarly, Japan invaded China in 1931, and fought a war with it for 14 years. It performed biological warfare experiments, intending to create bubonic plague bombs. It engaged in suicide war tactics against the US Army. The IJA killed hundreds of thousands in single incidents, acting like their European barbarian counterparts, reducing ancient cities to graveyards. Japan ruled its empire with equal barbarism to the Nazis, both treating their contemporaries like subhuman beasts, which is what Chinese, Koreans, Acehnese, Javanese, and so many others were to Japan, and Russians, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Byelorussians, and Ruthenians were to the Germans. The Army intended a last hurrah of Japan that would have meant the death of an entire culture, all in their fanaticism and fire.

And Italy, the ones that are mocked as incompetents? People forget that Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, fighting people armed with oxhide shields and spears with poison gas and tanks, dealing immense death to the Amhara and the Oromo. The Italians also acted with brutality in their North African colonies, and the Mussolini regime was the most tyrannical in Italy since the days of Augustus Commodus.

That was the Axis Powers. Remember that, the next time you call someone a Nazi. Remember that the Axis were not a meaningless term, they were a very real coalition of genocidal expansionist nations that would have left all Earth in ruins had they won.