A look at advanced regressive societies.

Imagine telling your child about the Holocaust. You go into details about death camps, roaming murder squads, and the conversion of humans into tattooed numbers. The one thing that you don't do is tell him who did all of these horrible things. After you finish, you ask him to guess who the architect of the murder of one-third of all living Jews was. You would forgive him if he suggested some African nation. Africa has known ethnic violence, and your son would conclude that such banal brutality could only come from some backward people, uneducated, and prone to violence. He would be shocked to learn that the most advanced country of its time was the force behind mechanized mass murder.

And Germany was advanced. The land of Beethoven, Goethe, Kant, and Nietzsche was the world leader in culture and science. Some of Nazi Germany's accomplishments before and during the war include the following:

- First cruise missile

- First ballistic missile

- First missile fired from a submerged submarine

- First to field a jet fighter

- Discoverer of fission, the process behind nuclear energy

- First with paratroop-based combat operations

The Germans were technically and culturally advanced. A rabbi recounted that in Vilna, the local SS leader lined up a bunch of Jewish children against the garden wall of the local police station. With one hand, he played Mozart on a piano, and with the other, he fired a machine gun at the children. The story of Nazi Germany is the warning that education of any sort that is uncoupled from any moral program can be extremely dangerous. Just as many suffer from too much food, and others are destroyed by too much money, there are those whose lives are perverted by, if you will, too much knowledge. And this problem did not end with the Nazis. Have you noticed that some of the most intolerable places for Jews, ICE, and........

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