The Journal of American Greatness:
How many times since 9/11 has some pundit—some of them very learned and experienced—asserted “Here, finally, is the wakeup call that will change everything”? The calls keep coming and no one ever wakes up.
Why not? The reasons are legion. For the moment, let’s try to understand just one. Decades of self-hating propaganda have been not merely internalized but in a very real sense have replaced religion as a source of unquestionable faith. There are many sources for this self-hatred. Probably the most significant is what Peter Brimelow calls “Hitler’s Revenge.” The West emerged from World War II less with a triumphant sense of its own victory (a sizeable portion of the conflict was after all intra-Western and one of the victors was non-Western, over a Western power) than with a tremendous sense of guilt. One part of the West had perpetrated the Holocaust while another came to feel that it could have stopped it but didn’t.
In his memorable preface to Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss writes of the Allied victory and subsequent German intellectual victory that “It would not be first time that a nation defeated on the battlefield, and as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.” (The other times Strauss has in mind, we speculate, would include the Romans and the Greeks, the Romans and the Jews, and the rest of Europe and Revolutionary France.)
No doubt German nihilism is a contributor to our present malaise. We wish to focus here on another, not unrelated, German import.
The left, in the aggregate and within its various subdivisions, has perfected the art of projecting its own internal conflicts outward. This has the double benefit (for them) of avoiding civil war while enhancing in-group cohesion by focusing hostile energy on an external enemy. As Steve Sailer has put it, whatever wounds the left inflicts on itself or on the rest of us are “the fault of the traditional white male power structure and people in Peoria better feel guilty about it, even if they are not exactly sure what they did.”
Something similar resulted from World War II. David Goldman has written than Angela Merkel’s insistence on welcoming millions more “refugees” even after her initial hospitality has proved a disaster to her country, coupled with her fellow Germans’ unwillingness to stop her, amounts to a German death wish. Germany wishes to die because it thinks it deserves to die.
Why do we wish to die? Slavery, of course. Jim Crow. The Indians. Japanese internment. Colonialism. There is no shortage of reasons, and the rest of the West shares in all of them or at least in something like some of them. We are all guilty and so we feel in some subconscious way that we deserve to die. It’s surely odd that nations which liberated Nazi camps feel particular guilt about the Holocaust. But as noted, the hectoring that we could have done more and didn’t has taken its toll and now we feel that we are only a few rungs below the Germans on the guilt ladder. Besides, from the 30,000 foot level, it’s the West itself that’s guilty; intra-Western apportionment of degrees of guilt is a trivial detail.
