The German Catechism article dovetails with the reassessment of World War II among some on the right:
a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy.
I once heard this described as “guilt pride”: some Germans feel they are superior because of their self admission of guilt, something not be possible were they not guilty in the first place. It’s the same as many admissions of privilege in identity politics. As with guilt, contemporary talk of privilege rather than the older emphasis on disadvantage takes the spotlight.
The genocidal Nazis in World War II is essentially the contemporary liberal creation myth. The Nazis were evil of course, but the new founding amounts to the declaration of a Year Zero. Liberalism has historically crises and radical movements to destroy existing structures and relations, leaving the ground clear for colonization by the market. The new founding of World War II discards memory of everything that came before as a dark age of superstition. Hitler is Satan and the evil of the Nazis is sui generis, beyond forgiveness: one is tainted for even trying to understand it.
The myth has strengthened: I believe it wasn’t even until the 1970s that the Holocaust became seen as the ultimate crime. Because as the contradictions of the liberal capitalist regime have intensified, the need for a myth to justify them has grown. But the myth is only a story: it does not actually resolve injustice or inequality. Like any such myth it must be repeated – more, it must be reenacted. Just as the Eucharist repeats the Jesus’s sacrifice for our sins, Hitler must continually be defeated to justify the regime. Continual accusations that name new fascists, Nazis and Hitlers (e.g. Saddam, Putin) are not ideological excess: they are necessary to maintain legitimacy. Thirty years ago fascism was not a major threat: today it is. Many of those fascists are imaginary, some are real – it doesn’t matter: liberals construct fascists because they need fascists.
This is one of the many intersecting causes of woke, a movement I consider essentially liberal. Obviously many on the right are doing the same thing with accusations of communism, using the same Year Zero to justify a slightly different order. I believe someone on here at the start of the Palestinian genocide said there was a Jewish saying: love your enemy, for you will become him. (If you know the source of this, please tell me.) Enemies mirror each other. I see little difference between fanatics of the right and the left. All are driven by the same psychological urges, they just happen to belong to different tribes. It is most obvious with the mirroring of fundamentalist Christians and atheists, for whom certainty, not thought, is all that matters. It’s tragic. I see left and right as necessary complementary movements in a healthy whole.
I think the myth of World War II is collapsing, and with it the ideological culture of the post war era. Boomer culture, basically. I’ve mentioned this before. I think it’s high time. Every myth serves a purpose: for a time this one supported the development of more humane institutions. But the world changes, the myth is forced to paper over more contradictions, and it becomes a hindrance to addressing the underlying problems.
I see three overlapping Year Zeroes, in different domains. The first is Christianity itself. Nearly all factions in the west, no matter how secular or bitterly opposed, regardless of whether they live up to their expressed ideals, are essentially Christian. MacIntyre talks about this in After Virtue. Our core morality that cares about victims and equality (however differently defined) has its roots there. Jesus still marks the moral founding.
The second is the Enlightenment, the intellectual re-founding: materialist, disenchanted, defining humanity in terms of what we create rather than any essential nature that we can realize. I think this era is ending. Many aspects of woke are explicitly anti-Enlightenment, as is a lot of thinking on the right. I think these respond to a real failure: the Enlightenment view of humanity has become inhuman and resulted in recurrent crises of meaning. It is, after all, the basis for the economic order.
The third is World War II, which founded the economic order. When that order faltered in the 1970s, neoliberals redefined freedom as market freedom. This is thin gruel compared to the thick freedom of community, let alone of a transcendent human nature. From the crisis of 2008 that freedom ceased to deliver, was threatened by Occupy, so the moral justification of the World War II myth has been amplified ever since.
Darn, I told myself I was going to write a short comment.
