On refugees, the Holocaust and moral reckonings

In 1938, representatives of many of the world’s countries gathered in the city of Evian to discuss a burning issue. All throughout Europe, Jews were being persecuted — stripped of their citizenship and rights, murdered in the streets and at the mercy of ever escalating hatreds. Despite much faux-sympathy, the answer from pretty much all countries was the same: there’s nothing we can do. You could hear the subtext: there’s nothing we want to do, either.

Despite a flood of post-war apologia claiming otherwise, this attitude remained the same even when the full horror of the Final Solution was apparent to the Allies and neutrals. The question of the feasibility of various rescue options does not change the fact that no-one in serious positions of power placed rescue high on the agenda or even in the middle. At least until 1944, it was closer to the bottom. Whether or not bombing Auschwitz would have helped does not change the fact that no-one in the armies of the USA, UK or USSR was interested in even seriously examining the question.

Nor did most of the world suddenly become more moral and enlightened on V-E day, or after the discovery of the concentration and death camps. A sad example of this was Heinrich Bruning, former “anti-Nazi” German Chancellor who honest to God thought that small scale French atrocities against Germans in the Ruhr in 1923 were the equivalent of Auschwitz and Babi Yar.

For decades, westerners and Soviets desperately tried to bury the reality of the Final Solution in its full horror under all sorts of nice-sounding phrases — kind of like how Communist crimes are laundered to this day. Jews, for instance, were “merely one of the groups that were targeted,” a point meant not to highlight other groups’ suffering but to downgrade the Jewish experience. The Jews were merely “victims of fascism” per the USSR, or of “man’s inhumanity to man.” It’s no coincidence that Hannah Arendt’s work on the Holocaust was so popular despite it being entirely wrong — no-one wanted to admit that this was not some banal phenomenon but a very specific and identifiable instance of evil.

I mention all this to point out that I find the European response to the present migrant crisis heartening. I find it heartening because I know that while there was no chance in hell my people would get a smidgen of that kind of sympathy in the 1940s, at least others will in the 2010s. I believe much of the outpouring is misguided and too much from the heart and not from the head, but I will be the last to condemn basic, bedrock-level humanity. At least in this sense, Europe “learned its lesson” from Auschwitz.

But it also took away another, far more poisonous lesson. It concluded that because Nazi-style nationalism was so destructive (and let’s be honest — standard 1930s German nationalism a la Bruning was not appreciably better), then all nationalism is poisonous. Hence the project of the EU, whose declared purpose is to effectively eliminate nationalities in a kind of forced multicultural brotherhood of man under the rule of benign and unelected bureaucrats.

This lesson has it horribly wrong. Repentance for murder must not involve committing suicide. All you are doing is directing violence inwards instead of outwards. You are dooming yourself to a life of misery and worthlessness, either to be overthrown by those who have not done the same as you or, like Heisenberg of Breaking Bad, end up rebelling against your self-imposed prison to destroy everything around you. Repair and repentance this is not, at least not of the kind I recognize from Judaism and even from the little I know of Christianity.

Patriotism, a proud sense of self, of your people’s accomplishments— these are not things to be ashamed of. I know of no people whose history is exclusively light, but also of no people whose history is nothing but darkness. The memory of the Holocaust — for the world at least — should be an antidote to the excess of xenophobia and paranoid hatreds, not a moral act of auto-euthanasia.

The truth is that the choice is not murder or suicide — it is between murder and virtuous life. It is between using armed force to make the worst and most grotesque mockery of Western values the world has ever seen— and using the same force to defend your country, the peace, and western values. It is the difference between merely despising all other peoples and feeling genuinely positive pride in your own value and abilities. It is the difference between wanting to kill — plunder resources, commit conquest for its own sake, and wanting to live — through families, traditions, cultural vitality and the strength of your own democratic nation state.

The European answers to the civilizational breakdown of WWI were fascism and communism. Democracy and solid national identity just wasn’t strong enough to stay firm in the post-war wreckage. So, in response to one horror, not light but another darkness emerged to “fight Bolshevism.” Today, the very real threat of radicalism in many forms, most especially radical Islamism, stands to overwhelm a Europe intentionally on the brink of suicide. Many in the “enlightened classes” fear this will mean a return to the old hateful patterns of the 1930s.

You have the chance to prove all the skeptics wrong. You have a chance to prove that there is a choice between murder and self-murder: not a muddled middle, but a true golden mean of identity, vitality and virtue. The fate of Europe, and maybe the west itself, depends on it.