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Eric Mader's avatar

Theodor Adorno famously wrote that to write poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric”. He later somewhat took it back, but in fundamental ways his take on the possibilities of art in the West became normative for all “decent” people.

The problem with both Europe’s bien pensants and our own is they assume there is some inherent evil encoded in the West, and therefore, mirror-wise, the non-West is what can liberate us from it. Of course it’s idiotically shallow. The first *real* lesson that might be taken from the 20th century’s nightmares—namely that totalizing projects to remake society are per se going to end badly—remains unlearned. The second, older lesson—that evil is not European but *human*—is likewise resisted, because it too closely echoes that older European teaching, Christianity.

So we see German elites as busy as ever.

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John of the West's avatar

It is ironic that the Nazi practice of “sippenhaft” - collective, family, and general guilt - has been carried into the modern day. No, no one is being thrown into a concentration camp or beheaded, but it does feel like the world has decided there will be no atonement for Germany. I sometimes wonder if this is because how the demands of the Cold War made people reluctant to really excise war criminals from German life. Some familiarity with war crimes besides the camps is necessary to fully grasp how lightly most of the notorious criminals escaped justice, but far too few people in the Nazi government and military paid a real price for what they had done. I would guess, in many circles, that this shortcoming is recognized and so trying to import barbarians and ruin the lives of Germans who had nothing to do with the war seems like a fair approach.

Or maybe it is a delayed implementation of the Morgenthau plan. Proposed by Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s secretary of the treasury, it would have de industrialized Germany, so that it could no longer have any industry related to the military. In short, pretty much all industry. The proposal likely stiffened German resistance due to soldiers wishing their nation and families be reduced to peasant farmers.

On Islam, it is very hard to find consistency in the positions of the left. If you oppose Islam, you are a racist, even though there is no Islamic race. If you oppose Islam, you are intolerant, even though intolerance is practiced by Muslims more than anyone else in the world these days. If you are a Christian, you clearly wish for the Handmaid’s Tale to become reality, even though Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states are quite close to that.

Like the privileged folks who stood in solidarity with George Floyd (and never ever have had dealings with anyone like him), most of the “fellow travelers” with Islam have never really had candid conversations with anyone who is Muslim. It is very much a supremacist worldview and jihad is not some sort of goofy “internal struggle,” unlike what some morons believe. Islam is a totalitarian system, in the sense that it combines economics, governance, religion, all things in life into one package. When people in the West decide to bring in immigrants from Muslim nations, they are either ignorant of this aspect or don’t care. What it means is that Islam is incompatible with the Western ideals of governing, that government should be secular and religion a personal matter. It is like oil and water.

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