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Nicolas Berdyaev was a famous Christian philosopher from Russia. He fled the communist rule in Russia, and wrote extensively against Communism and Nazism. In his writings, he observed that the basic human values and moral awareness had ceased to exist. The human race had become inhumane and lost basic sympathetic feelings towards other humans. In his opinion, the new world order had portrayed inhumanity as a noble form of existence. This new phenomenon had replaced the Christian humanistic values with a form of a Nationalistic, Christian pagan society. Berdyaev points out Germany as an example, where he equated the Nazi movement as a nationalistic movement, which had nothing to do with the basis Christian values. The cross was replaced with a swastika, and the German nation turned away from Christianity and started preaching hate towards other nations. Berdyaev believed that nationalism is a form of self-satisfaction, which only results in isolation and denial of ethics. He also equated Nationalism with Communism and considered the nationalistic ideologies as the prime source of all the evil in the world.
In the times of Nicolas Berdyaev, the world witnessed the horrors of the World Wars and the brutal murders of millions of innocent people. As a philosopher, Berdyaev tried to trace the roots of the turmoil he witnessed in the world. He appeared extremely troubled with the mass slaughter of the Jews at the hands of Germans, who were Christians. As a Christian, he believed that the Christianity and Judaism had differences and conflicts in term of the religious origins, but the murder of Jews had no basis in Christianity. He considered the mass murder a direct result of the views based on Nationalistic, Nazist, and Racialist views. Berdyaev believed that the nations shaped through nationalistic ideologies result in blindness towards other nations, religions, and races. All these factors result in the barbarity, which was very much visible in the world affairs at the time when Berdyaev wrote his opinions.
