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Los Angeles 2025 and Dresden 1945 — Cities Burned by Politicians’ Evil Choices 

Wikimedia/Deutsche Fotothek‎ (CC BY-SA 3.0 de), cropped

By John Zmirak Published on January 10, 2025

No decent American feels anything but empathy for the victims of California’s fires, whose origins are murky and may in fact come down to arson.

I’m getting emails from colleagues and friends who live in the affected region; they are scrambling to gather their children, their pets, and family photos and heirlooms as quickly as possible, then flee to safety. On X, I see people keening as their churches, schools, and neighborhoods all crumble into cinders. I remember how I felt when my historic parish church, St. Agnes, burned down before my eyes in 1992, but I can only just begin to imagine Angelenos’ suffering.

Obviously, we should be calling on God to bless all these Americans, and looking for ways to help them. It’s tempting to leave things there, at the level of “thoughts and prayers,” perhaps with a check sent to some reputable charity or an offer of shelter to someone you know who needed to flee his home.

But we can’t stop there forever.

Democrats, You Did This

People might tell you not to “politicize” this tragedy, as some are telling Donald Trump — who’d issued repeated warnings over the years that California’s crackpot policies were practically guaranteeing a disaster exactly like this one. (Indeed, Californians themselves have been saying the same thing for years, as deadly wildfire after deadly wildfire has decimated parts of the state that aren’t LA on the regular for the last decade.) The people who say you must remain politically silent are lying through their teeth. This is not a natural disaster but an entirely man-made one, even if we discover that the fire resulted from lightning strikes. As intrepid journalist Emerald Robinson put the issue succinctly:

And then there’s the invaluable Libs of TikTok:

We absolutely should use the outrage that results from this manufactured tragedy to attack the root causes behind it:

  • The globalist cult that blames “climate change” for everything from illegal immigration to male erectile dysfunction.
  • The phony environmentalism that blows up dams and reservoirs, allegedly to save a minor subspecies of fish — and refuses sane forest management because it’s offensive to Gaia or Indian tribes.
  • The fetish of Diversity, which sees fire chiefs and mayors selected based on their skin color, genitalia, or sexual preferences (or all three), then sends them gallivanting to Africa as virtue tourists while the city for which they are responsible burns behind them.

Just like the wildfires that consumed Americans and their homes in Maui, and the hurricane victims in Appalachia whose MAGA yard signs led FEMA agents to deny them assistance, this chaos and misery is mostly traceable to lazy, corrupt, or evil human choices.

Don’t Gloat

God forbid that we gloat or mock on such an occasion. Is it true that a majority of locals voted for the public officials who not let all this happen, but practically guaranteed it would? Yes. But millions didn’t, and they are simply innocent victims of the bad votes of their neighbors. God sends the rain (and the fires) on the just and unjust alike.

Is it appropriate, then, to gloat just a little when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s largest donors lose their $3 million homes? No, it isn’t. We all sin, and most of us don’t pay such a monstrous price in this life (and we hope by God’s grace not to pay one in the next).

Did Dresdeners “Deserve” to Burn?

Looking at the fire-ravaged streets of one of America’s most beautiful regions, I’m reminded of the fate of Dresden in 1945. As I wrote about that long ago:

On Feb. 14, 1945 — on Shrove Tuesday, as the children and parents of Dresden returned in their carnival costumes from the last festival before Lent — British bombers descended upon a city of no military significance, crowded with tens of thousands of civilian refugees who’d fled the onslaught of Russian armies to the East. (Those Russian armies, to avenge the real atrocities committed by the Germans, routinely raped and killed German women in their thousands as they conquered. Our air campaign was meant to speed their advance — thus ceding to Soviet control larger swathes of postwar Germany.) Using incendiary bombs which ignited thousands of wooden buildings before sucking out all the oxygen to asphyxiate any survivors, the Anglo-American air forces created a self-sustaining “fire storm” which sucked people into the blaze. In two days, as many as 35,000 people, nearly all unarmed civilians, were killed — a small portion of the 400,000 non-combatants who died during Allied bombings of Germany. Ash Wednesday dawned on a city of cinders.

Did Christians in America gloat over those Germans who died in the war their leaders provoked? I certainly hope not. Most knew that Hitler had risen to power on the back of chaos and crisis, powered by propaganda and mass-repeated lies. Most realized that at no point in any free vote did the Nazis win even 51% of the vote. As much as we treasured anger and a desire for strict earthly justice — it was right to hang the Nazi leaders at Nuremburg, no matter what Pope Francis says — our grandparents felt compassion for at least the women and children.

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That didn’t blunt their justified hatred of the false religion that started the war, slaughtered the innocent, and provoked such awful retribution as happened in Dresden that day.

And we must remind people (even Californians after a decent interval) that this man-made disaster flowed from a false religion, too. Like National Socialism, it was crafted as a replacement for the Gospel. It made a cult of race simply by inverting the Nazi formula, making whites into “Untermenschen.” It took the Nazis’ social Darwinism and simply turned it on its head. Instead of mindless natalism and the patriarchal family, the new creed worships sterility and perversion.

Say what you want about Satan: He has a wicked sense of humor.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.