The New, Improved Sacrifice Society

Transed and Nationless: The Post-Hitler West - Explaining the last three years as the diminishing cultural salience of the Holocaust, Pt 6.

Series notes

Comments on this series will be occasionally pruned for uninterestingness or evident failure to read and reply to the thesis itself. (Anything heavily centered on Jewish “machinations” in modern cultural and political affairs will probably merit removal on those grounds.)

This series begins with part 1, which clarifies my position on Holocaust “Denialism” (I do not deny the Holocaust, but I insist that my understanding of what it was be based on normal historiographical standards, grounded in evidence and open to revisionism; anyone should do the same, the Holocaust should not be understood with a “special kind of history” the way children are given special scissors lest they harm themselves):

Transed and Nationless: The Post-Hitler West: 1

Other parts:

Part 2: Introduction to the forgetting and rediscovery of the Holocaust ↗

Part 3: 1945-1967: The forgetting of the Holocaust ↗

Part 4: 1967-1980: The recalling of the Holocaust ↗

Part 5: Background trends during the “Holocaustianity” era ↗

Part 5 in particular is a complement to this one, reviewing some general differences between the “Holocaustianity” era and what has come afterward.

The goodness project

The argument that the Holocaust “religion” served to insulate and sustain certain mainstream conservative values in American society will be made brief, as the expectation is not to convince the reader, but merely invite reflection on certain contemporary ills. And so in short, the two generations of white, secular-Christian Americans born after 1945, who encountered the Holocaust for the first time in the late 70s - Boomers and Generation X - perceived Jewish deaths as a sacrifice that endowed the project of the white, secular West with meaning.

In 1976, when non-Jewish recall and awareness of the Holocaust is still scant, a student of Notre Dame Law School writes,¹

The ignorance about Nazism is very serious. Not only does it make the sacrifice of so many millions seem meaningless, but unless we are ever aware of the evils and wrongdoings of the past, we are doomed to repeat them.

This doesn’t precisely represent all responses to discovery of the Holocaust, but as the process was organic and often youth-driven (as we have seen in part 4), there is no such thing as a non-illuminating testimony, and this one certainly supports my thesis. It is also roundly similar to comments of other youth already quoted in part 4, for whom merely dropping in a Holocaust class is “the most important day of their lives,” or of teachers who claim that the Holocaust elucidates “a deeper awareness that barbarity is not the whole truth about man.” Above, the Jews killed in the Holocaust were a sacrifice, demanding a meaning, which prompts the invocation of a fear of a future sacrifice of like nature.

Could the political tranquility of the subsequent forty years reflect that for a society which rapidly and in wholesale became obsessed by the Holocaust story after those quotes, mere warding-off of the “doom” of Nazism supplanted loftier progressive goals, without requiring a renunciation of the same? Simply maintaining the status quo came to be seen as good works, and there was no particular need to sincerely pursue the Kingsian “dream” that infused the progressive revolt of the 1960s with so much passion and violence.

Rather than seek to advance society, ennoblement was found in resisting “hatred,” safeguarding Earth from the rise of another Hitler, who was always lurking in the unreformed ignorance of the rural American white. Thus, mere consumerism and GDP-maxing, and piety to a forgiving set of social manners were a sort of progress in themselves, with no need to reform society’s still incurably prejudiced institutions. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

This imbued, and really steeped, both generations with a vulnerable confidence in the goodness of man, which is the whole problem today. It was held both that bigotry and chauvinism were an implacable feature of society, accounting for the eternal failure of desegregation and the civil rights era to bring about equality, but also that as long as overt hate was met with token disapproval, at least we wouldn’t see Nazi Germany again. It was accepted that white, male preferences and patriotic sentiments were prioritized everywhere (movie casting, Super Bowl commercials, the Oval Office), but that elites would constantly justify the same system by appeals to a civic religion of tolerance.

This “civic religion of tolerance,” again, was the whole problem, because it denied the fallen nature of man, setting the stage for the current crisis roiling these two generations (and to a great extent Millennials), in which many no longer see the goodness in the status quo, while a few “classical liberals” are still true believers who imagine that what society needs is simply to remember how brilliant it is to keep employing them to pay lip service to ideals in newspaper columns. The picture below, reportedly of a French woman deploring police response to racially alien rioters in France, is used for illustration of the former group, even though I haven’t provided the reader any satisfactory explanation for Holocaustianity’s influence on Europe beyond a few references to “Americanization.” (Again, I don’t claim familiarity with European cultures.)

The above abject childishness reflects the West’s decades-long internalization of a childish vision of society’s goodness, preserved of course by willful blindness. Even critics of this blindness, however, could not see outside of the illusion of a default to goodness - hence the bitter atheism of Carlin’s “Something is wrong here.” Holocaustianity operated as a stunted religion in which a post-War West challenged with leftist agitation misunderstood itself as “good” for reasons other than tribal preservation, and at first a few lone critics perceived the falsehood of this vision, until at a critical point sometime after 2008 everyone saw the problem, and the subsumed progressive expectation of utopia-on-Earth of the 60s once again became an imperative of the secular soul.

To say anything else on the topics of goodness and progress would be to repeat arguments already worn to the ground elsewhere. As a last note, my thesis proposes that Holocaustianity was a solution to the problem that technology and modern media have made sincere belief in religions a high-friction process to say the least, and so the role of religion - explaining “how things came to be as they are” in a society of disparate outcomes - must be replaced with something.

Modern Western Sacrifice

Less to prove this outlandish thesis than to propose another possible insight, consider that the singular recurring theme of the last three years, echoed in a cruder form in 2017, is the impulse to sacrifice.

In the Me Too era, institutions of all sorts were asked by mob outcry to sacrifice the many male “witches” who had used mysterious forces of status and permission-asking to trick unsuspecting women into sinful acts (as well as more overt transgressions, of course; but these do not seem to be what was singular about the panic).

In the lockdown era, childhood - play, innocence, etc. - was sacrificed for months to years across the West in order to satisfy the childish expectation of Boomers, Gen-X-ers, and Millennials that no one should have to get sick and die.

The sacrificial overtones of George Floyd’s death and the response to it would be called over-the-top if the thing were fiction, and this is the example that will be compared further to the understanding of the Holocaust.

And now in the Trans and Climate Panic era, the adults have again come for the children, eagerly indoctrinating them into an Apocalyptic Castration Cult as a sacrifice to the creed of tolerance and equality - a creed which, ideally, would see to it that not a single unmutilated child walked the Earth (though, to judge from the promotional material, if somehow all unambiguously white children could be admixed into nonexistence first, bonus points).

It is an aspirational genocide of humanity itself - the final conclusion of the impossible spiritual insistence of progressivism that humans should be “good” outside of a referent to one’s own tribe: Since humans aren’t and can never be this thing, well, obviously they should just all be sterilized.

Hitler and sacrifice in Holocaustianity

“Holocaust” has roots in ancient texts as a term for sacrifice by fire, especially of offerings to pagan gods. 20th-century lay use of the term typically invoked scenes of material destruction without any clear offering implied, as in a “nuclear holocaust,” the most frequent employment. Therefor whether the appropriation in the 1960s of the term “Holocaust” for the Holocaust assigned a connotation of sacrifice, as opposed to devastation, is a totally subjective question. Yet the end result seems fitting - the Holocaust as an event became sacred in Western culture, and immediately evoked notions of sacrifice in the comments of young adults and teens encountering the catastrophe for the first time.

In the earlier quote regarding the Holocaust, the “sacrifice of so many millions” is rendered meaningful by remembrance. In another quote already visited, it is said that in the Holocaust “Christ is crucified,” implying subsequent redemption, and a representative Jew is illustrated as being nailed to the cross with Jesus.

Some early responses within both the Jewish and Christian renditions of “Holocaustianity” allude to Israel as the “meaning” in question (brackets in original, implying the author’s clarification of the quoted remarks):

“The Holocaust and Redemption [Israel] constitute the central myth by which American Jews seek to make sense of themselves and to decide what to do with that [sizable] part of themselves which is sit aside for ‘being Jewish.’”

—1980, St Louis Jewish Light (from New York Times)

The first task of the [Christian] church is to confront the dreadful irony that it is the Jewish people who exemplify today the image of a passage from agony of crucifixion to the miracle of rebirth, and that that fact results in part from the contributions of the church to the history of anti-Semitism in the West.

—1976, Montreal Gazette

Nowhere have I found an admission to support the thesis that the rediscovery of the Holocaust not only guilted Western Christians (for the sin of not intervening sooner or directly for Germany’s actions, as explicitly constructed in the above quote) but in effect redeemed the project of America and the West (for the virtue of intervening eventually), especially in terms of the less “deliberate” evils of modern American world-policing, e.g. Vietnam - thereby morally permitting the tacit cultural primacy of the traits of whiteness and of masculine, patriotic values as discussed previously in this segment.

Intrinsically, being “ever aware of the evils and wrongdoings of the past,” as the college student wrote in 1976, is an effective means of diminishing awareness of the evils of the present, as well as grounding one’s understanding of evil with a story that explains the present as repeatedly pointed out throughout this series. Beyond that argument, consider this a wild leap within the thesis.

Another wild leap I will offer is that the Holocaust religion transformed Hitler into the West’s God (the capitalization emphasizing a monotheist conception). Certainly not a loving God embodying spiritual good, in the Western understanding - rather, a wrathful creator who ever threatened to punish humanity for stealing the holy fire of “hatred.” The sacrifice of the “exactly six million Jews, or maybe it was more” held power throughout the late 20th in its extravagance and seeming proximity. This may be the key psychic asset of the Holocaust which modern events and media information-overload have depreciated - does 6 million dead still inspire awe?

Nearly a quarter of that amount sits on America’s excess deaths ledger after March, 2020. Supposedly several times that died during the Spanish Flu; the number is revised upward every time CNN checks in. Supposedly a million times that amount will be killed by Climate Change any second now. It shouldn’t be surprising if the Holocaust’s official death toll just doesn’t impress today as it did fifty years ago.

The idea that an embodied, but still literal God (since the secular West is incapable of believing in a cosmic God) would be sated by six million deaths might now seem quaint. Modern media constantly serves to satisfy a psychic desire to contemplate the almost complete destruction of humanity by zombies. There is a reason for this; nothing else still evokes “hell on earth.”

Lastly, it is arguable that populist rejection of both the liberal and progressive projects has dismantled the idea that mere “remembering” of the Holocaust for ever and ever can satisfy the God of man’s hatred, or that His satisfaction can preserve the West from blood-based genocides (and thereby all genocides, since the civic religion of the West assigned “hatred” as the singular evil that explained all unjust violence, regardless of the historical record).

A wretched substitute

What distinguishes the moral and spiritual logic of the Holocaust as proposed above from the moral and spiritual logic of subsequent sacrifice regimes is what is most important, and will provide the conclusion to this series. It is really the whole point.

First, the Holocaust’s sacrifice was in the past, and, so long as it was remembered, needn’t reoccur. The sacrifices of progressivism lie by necessity in the future for as long as humanity is imperfect, i.e. forever.

Screen-grab of video player at news.sky.com. Parents of 19 year-old son murdered randomly along with others give address under globalist “one city” banner. Mother insists that the suspect, Black, Guinea-Bissau/Portuguese national Valdo Calocane, is “just a person” to the applause of the gathered crowd, completing the ritual for another day.

Second, and related, the logic of the Holocaust offered a lasting redemption, whether in the form of Israel, or the West at large, or Jewish preservation in the same. This conceptual enduring redemption was “the problem” as stated above, in that it nurtured an illusion of human goodness, so that Holocaustianity was a childish rendition of Christianity in which Original Sin didn’t have to be worried about or understood - instead, the only sin was “hatred,” and thanks to the “redemption” represented by destroying Hitler’s Germany, humans could move past this sin, at least by replacing formally discriminatory policies with agnostic policies that didn’t actually bring about better outcomes for unfavored classes.

The redemption of progressive sacrifices, on the other hand, are fleeting. Upon the conclusion of the show trial of Derek Chauvin, Nancy Pelosi spoke the words that were in the minds and hearts of all believers in the then waning cult of Drug-Addled Black Martyrs, “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.” Yet anyone can see with their own eyes that “justice” (in the utopian, inhuman sense of regime slogans) did not come, and more Black criminals continued to be “sacrificed” by the intrinsic chaos and violence of encounters with police, on camera, every day. The redemption of Floyd’s sacrifice proved itself to be completely fictional.

The final problem, again related, is incomprehensibility. In the Trans cult, sexual differences must absurdly be redeemed as not-oppressive by being transposed onto their opposites, and this simply offers the mind no comprehensible “how things came to be as they are.” Rather than offering society a story for why oppressive sexual differences come about, it necessitates and relies on a deconstruction of all identities into morally inert chaff.

In sum, if we understand the Holocaust as offering a coherent real-world narrative to access (childish and naive) Christian understandings of redemption sustaining traditionalist and nationalist mores, it becomes possible to mourn the loss of the Holocaust mythos and its replacement with paradigms of sacrifice that can offer no such access.

Where Holocaust worship either supplemented or reinvigorated Judeo-Christian religiosity, now Trans worship renders Jesus an apostate whose remaining followers must be mocked assaulted, and arrested for heresy at cult parades.

1. Grossman, Michael J. “Americans must be educated to horrors of Nazi holocaust.” The South Bend Tribune. (Jun 7, 1976.) p 11. At newspapers.com