Christianity
Beyond the Shadow of Hitler
Beyond the Shadow of Hitler
The West can only escape its supernatural hatred of Hitler in the Cross.
By: Phillip Lede đť•Ź | 02/19/2025
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For all the modern West's attempts to diminish Hitler, it has deified him to mythic proportions. Like Greek tragedy, the architects of the open society, Karl Popper and his contemporaries, in attempting to bury the man's ideas, have made him immortal. The rise of fascism and the German Reich, Popper believed, was enabled by an ancient strain of thought that drew the world up in the inseparable lines of purpose and nature. Indeed, in rejection of the bitter fruit of the authoritarianism of the 20th century, he identifies its roots in the philosophy of classical man, beginning with Plato.
Popper's objection to Plato may appear to rest on the surface of his political philosophy but strikes at the heart of his metaphysics. The conception of an eternal and intransigent Republic, as Plato theorized, whose traditions and norms are to take precedence over the liberties of passing individuals, he saw as the seed of the totalitarian state that emerged most forcefully in the 20th century. A Platonic schema of forms, all containing the immutable and ideal content of things, Popper considers an existential threat to the liberal project. This is because, while present in simple categories of color, shape, and number, forms apply to the very structure of society; there is a structure of the family, the race, and the nation—all essences that situate individuals in the world, and for Popper, restrain them. Individuals are only part of a larger collective body, and for Plato, they are merely realized through their assigned function within the corpus (Plato, Republic, 369b–370c). Their agency is secondary to the welfare of the Republic, which sees children seized from their parents and reared by a guardian class to ensure their devotion to the whole (Plato, Republic, 460b–461e). In Plato's utopia, individuals are classified according to their competence, forming a hierarchy sustained by a "noble lie." This myth suggests that each person possesses a precious metal within their soul: gold, silver, or bronze, which determines their respective role in society (Republic 415a–415c). The divisions of hierarchy, grouping people into succeeding categories, with some castes ordained to rule over others (the chief among these being the philosopher-kings), Popper decries as fascist. He posits that from the seed of Plato's political idealism, in its triumph over a fragile Weimar Republic, the atrocities of the Holocaust and all other forms of oppression have sprung. Popper's philosophy, contextualized by the persecution of his own people in his Austria, insists that "Never Again" will the conditions be met to facilitate another industrial tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust, and so it not only dispenses with hierarchy but any form of closed society capable of exclusion: one family over another, class over another, one nation over another, or one truth over the other. Any identity that defines itself in fixed essence, excluding that which lies outside, Popper flatly rejects. After all, exclusive identities could be used to identify and oppress outsiders. The only excluded thing in the open society that Popper envisions is that which seeks to exclude. This is to say that all is tolerated except for the intolerant, what he calls in The Open Society and Its Enemies, the Paradox of Tolerance (Popper 226). The modern world, which has come to pass out of Popper's imaginings, has indeed rejected all forms of essentialism and intolerance, regarding racism (except against Whites), sexism (except against men), xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia as mortal sin. A constructivism, which has outlived Popper, has outlawed any recognition of category, whether genetic, racial, national, or now even sexual, with many on the left unable to give words to what a man or woman is without devolving into semantics. This is the price, ostensibly, that the West must pay to avoid falling into its unique vice of regarding people as lesser for their intrinsic differences; it must deny the realism of these differences altogether. Those who would espouse the loyalties of nation, people, and blood as more than muddled perception have no place in Popper's metropolis of unmoored individuals.
As the arch nemesis of the Open Society, the modern West has exiled Hitler along with any vestige of human essentialism from academia and polite society. Still his name is invoked more than any other historical figure by pundits and partisans in allusion to some alleged evil in their opponents. Democrats call the Republicans Nazis for any slight echo of nationalism, only for Republicans to retort that it is the Democrats who are the real Nazis, the real fascists. It is peculiar that a political party from another continent nearly a century ago maintains such staying power in modern American discourse. What did Hitler do to deserve such enduring infamy?
The twentieth century saw a litany of strongmen, from Stalin to Mao, whose body counts stretched to the hundreds of millions. Yet Hitler is surrounded by an almost religious mystique, not as one tyrant among many, but as a permanent threat against which liberalism must always remain vigilant. In a world that has abandoned essence for construction, his militant determinism—whether historical, genetic, racial, or sexual—is utterly antithetical. He is the perfect enemy for a secular cosmos that, despite having rejected miracles, still craves a founding myth, much like the Promethean theft of fire or Odin's sacrifice on Yggdrasil. But unlike ancient mythology, this narrative must be written not in prehistory but in historical ledger.
In modern America, these historical myths recall Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Paul Revere as the lone midnight rider to Concord, warning of the Redcoats. In reality, Washington never chopped down the cherry tree, and Revere never shouted "The British are coming" and was captured on the way to Concord. These myths inspire, evoking a sense of destiny and great men who outlive their times, as if to magnify their particularist origins to universal grandeur. But unlike the noble lies of a particularist West, whether in ancient pantheism or the founding of America, the "original sin" of the West, as perpetrated by Hitler in the Holocaust, is not justified by its capacity to inspire or affirm.
"Never Again," proclaimed by a modern West, negates its own essence, its history, and its character as ever praiseworthy. America’s Founding Fathers and great men, once hailed as noble heroes, are now recognized only as slave owners and bigots; Jefferson was a racist, and Henry Ford an antisemite. All is swallowed by a narrow skepticism that can only critique but never create. In the liberal eschatology, the trajectory of an essentialist West only culminates in the Holocaust, and so its particular identity must never be celebrated again.
All of the foundations of essentialism, nationalism, and particularism, in providing an orderly and coherent world, have been desecrated to usher in an unprejudiced West only prejudiced against itself. The Holocaust, even as a cautionary narrative, maintains the order and victory of a rational liberalism over a romantic world of destiny and myth. Progress, borrowing from the sciences, insists that what is new must be true, with the latest discoveries displacing all that came before and assuming a determinism of their own. In this, Popper's open society conceals a deeper irony: the modern West must mythologize Hitler and proclaim its triumph over his ideology to affirm its own legitimacy. It must invent an 'enlightened' historicism, crowning itself in the laurels of inexorable destiny, to displace a prior historicism that it dismisses as irrational.
It must be maintained that the perpetrator of this grave act of genocide—the most important of all genocides in history as to awaken the world from its bigoted stupor—is not merely a flawed man who did great wrongs but the evildoer of all evildoers. Having abolished the metaphysical, Hitler has been inaugurated as the secular Satan of the modern West. In the strangest of twists, Hitler exerts a negative tyranny over the modern world, where all flee from his long shadow lest they be painted in the stain of his sins. An icon of shrouded myth, he is not merely a human being fallible as any, misguided in his wrongs, and upright in his virtues, but an ontological menace to transcend time and place. His unique exclusion from polite society has magnified him beyond all recognizability, like an omniscient spirit that haunts the corridors of modern life. That any figure vaguely resembling him, in policy or rhetoric across the West, from America's Trump, Hungary's Orban, or Russia's Putin, is declared by the press as his reincarnation, is proof of his dominion. In Hollywood, Hitler and the Nazis have become fixtures of cartoonish revilement in film, from the butt of jokes in Spielberg's Indiana Jones to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. The Holocaust has its own genre of fiction devoted to it, from The Boy in Striped Pajamas to Zone of Interest, a most unsubtle 'concept film' featuring the screams of tortured Jews at Auschwitz while SS officer Rudolph Höss and his family go about their daily lives next door. A cultural fixation with Hitler and the Holocaust, despite a rabid insistence on scientific rationality, traffics in the same fantasy that it condemns. Under Popper's caution, it has attempted to bury an old world that regarded people in tribes and, in its place, anointed an individualism where any notice of a fixed collective is heresy. Fearful that a homogenous nation might recognize the face of a minority that undermines it in the same terms as it recognizes itself, it has abolished the nation-state. At least with no home, none can be called homeless. Without roots, none can be deemed rootless. And with no insiders, there can be no outsiders to oppress.
The world has been transformed by Popper's rebuke. Yet ironically, he and his followers have torn up the foundations of the West, only to permit its rediscovery, exposing its starved roots to fresh sunlight. That the essentialism of Plato and the partisanship of the past have been excluded has only invited a rebellious, and even progressive, curiosity. The ruins of an old world now regarded as racist, tribal, superstitious, and most of all intolerant are under the excavation of a generation to which they are entirely unfamiliar. Disillusioned by individualism, they have sought its opposite. Darkened under the shadow of the old world, they have seen the faint lines of its silhouette—all that which has been anathematized under the ironclad reign of a liberal world—and they have turned their face towards the sun to make out its shape.
Forced into a disenchanted dialectic with the realization that Hitler lacks the pure villainy attributed to him by contemporary society, some have idolized him as an unblemished hero. A liberal mythologizing of Hitler, as the icon of a racially essentialist and particularist ethos, has inadvertently sowed the conditions for its own demise. That the West has attributed all the baggage of the old world, all discriminations of sex, race, culture, nation, and faith to him, has made an effigy of him, permitting not only an uncritical hatred but also an uncritical worship. There is an irony that a youth still under the spell of progress may, unlike their grandparents, encounter Hitler as new, yet still maintain him in ontological absolutes. However, both the liberal reaction to Hitler and its nascent, and mostly online, counter-reaction fall into the same category. Both paint him in moral extremes.
In a secular world, the tendency to mythologize history and historicize mythology has created a void that demands to be filled. With what CS Lewis called the 'true myth' of Christianity dismissed as an artifact of the past, society has turned to false ones.
Hitler and Goebbels were guilty of this same worldly mythologizing, perceiving their struggle as a war against flesh and blood, rather than principalities. This is not to deny that the Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School or the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union committed repugnant evils—in the perpetration of pornography and the pioneering of transsexual ideology—but rather to recognize that they were not the architects of such evil, only its instruments. Liberals make the same mistake in diagnosing Hitler and the Nazis, construing their reaction to said 'intellectuals' as unprovoked malice. Yet, the Nietzschean naturalism of the Schutzstaffel and the liberal hubris of the progressives forget a metaphysics which ascribes good and evil to a reality beyond individuals. Having done away with God and natural law, both must find absolute morality within the hearts of mere men.
Rejecting the modern, the Nazis sought to resurrect an Aryan prehistory through crimson banners, stoic sculptures, and Nordic runes of antiquity. Their efforts, even if awkwardly self-conscious, hearken back to an era where the divine was seen within nature rather than beyond it, immanent in its presence and particular to its worshippers. Yet its successor, a self-critical liberalism, makes the contrary mistake. While denying faith, it imagines itself as a universal critic looming over the West, tasked with deconstructing it for the sin of existing. Both render man an irredeemable enemy, either through a total embrace or absolute rejection of his own essence, fashioning him into a Faustian god or a Faustian devil. For Hitler, this mortal enemy takes the shape of the subversive Jews of Weimar; for the post-Hitler West, its own European essence. One casts blame on the outsider, while the other, the insider.
In a futile attempt to free itself from the sins of its ancestors, the West has gnawed at its own flesh, desperate to escape its own body. It hopes to rid itself of all the impure tones of 'eurocentricism' and 'bigotry' that have distinguished it in ages past. This bid has proven profoundly undesirable for its inhabitants. It has inspired some to seek a return to a world of particularism, hoping to climb back inside the walls of the blissfully ignorant polis. Yet this is still impossible in a world transformed by Christianity, where the inner self has supplanted an external existence purely defined by roles and duties to the Republic. In the modern West, Popper and Hitler present two tracts: a cold universality disguised as reason, and a self-glorifying particularism justified in sentimental myth. By transcending the dialectic offered by each, the West may enter a grander narrative: one that encompasses both myth and history, universal truth and particular essence.
The symbolic allegories discernible today were not seen as such but as plain realities, and where these myths diverged, they could not be grasped as a unified whole. While their meanings: heroic justice, romantic tragedy, and fleeting glimpses of the eternal, could be apprehended by philosophic abstraction, they remained unrealized in history, suspended in a realm of forms and mirrored only in imperfection. While playwrights and philosophers from Aristophanes to Aristotle attempted to draw out these meanings, they had yet to escape their own cultural confines. Later, Rome, guided by ruthless pragmatism, assimilated the world’s ancient myths and deities into a vast pantheon, yet made little attempt to reconcile them.
It was only with the emergence of the Christian story—a true myth—that these scattered fragments of meaning could be reconciled. Before Christendom, tales from Apollo to Baldur, valued as they were, all remained trapped in their particularities, their names and narratives contradicting one another. However, it was not haughty strength, but boundless selflessness, through which this lofty universality was emptied into history. In Christ, the union of man and God transformed the meaning of myth into concrete reality. Without this reconciliation, the West’s stories would have remained mere echoes in the dark, shadows dancing on the wall of Plato’s cave. They would have remained buried in philosophical treatises, estranged from man’s own story.
The West must remember that Christ revealed Himself not through self-glorifying myth, but through humble sacrifice; not as God in the habits of man, but as man in the habits of God. His presence was not recorded in the fading ink of history, but sealed in a covenant of blood. In the crucifixion, Christ does not stand over humanity in heroic repose like the marble statues of Rome or Athens, but descends into its suffering to make good of it. Yet, it seems the West has forgotten this. Having banished Christ in favor of ideologues like Popper, it has found only the means to condemn itself. The myth that burdens its discourse, the weight of "essentialism" in slavery, colonization, and the Holocaust, can only accuse, never forgive. This narrative has cornered the West in self-loathing, trammeled with a guilty conscience but no confessional booth. In liberalism, a secular world inherits a sense of original sin, but lacks any confessor to absolve it. Paralyzed by the false notion that European identity and history are a Pandora’s box to be desperately sealed, it condemns its few flaws while remaining blind to its countless virtues.
The essence of the West does not find its perfection in self-negation nor self-idolatry but in the embrace of a selfless God—an Absolute who does not abolish particular essences but humbly enters into them. In the Christian story, He comes as the adopted son of a carpenter, wandering the Levant in dusty sandals, not as a Heraclean hero or a Caesarian tyrant. In entering a particular world, Christ did not surrender His perfection or universality; instead, He perfected all particulars through Himself.
The compelling myths of old, then, are not condemned for their proximity to evil but are transfigured in relation to the Good, just as light does not destroy color but reveals its fullest brilliance. By marrying the infinite and finite in His incarnation, Christ offers the West a path beyond its current dialectic of prideful glorification and self-loathing guilt. In His Passion, the West’s folk stories, its heroes, and traditions are no longer superficial truths or noble lies, but made witness to a greater revelation. They need not yield their romantic beauty to cold rationality, for both romantic story and static reason are reconciled in Christ, a God as magnificent as He is intimate.
The Holocaust should not dominate history as the original sin of the old world but be confessed as one atrocity among many in the wartime period, not exclusive to the Axis powers, nor its period in Europe. From Churchill's Bengal Famine of 1943, which claimed two million lives, to the brutal firebombing of German civilians in Dresden, and the two million rapes committed by the oncoming Soviets in their march toward Berlin from 1944 to 1945, the wartime period was littered with atrocity. From the tens of millions lost in the Great Leap Forward to the atrocities of the Rwandan and Armenian genocides and even the current abuses in Gaza by the Jewish state, Europe, nor the Second World War, can be accused of a monopoly on civilizational sin.
Nevertheless, it was the Second World War that broke Europe's back, a war from which the supposed victors have yet to recover. In its aftermath, Jewish postmodernists and Popper have sought to root out any quality that could reproduce the Reich in the West. As a result, the postwar West sees itself as fundamentally irredeemable. The only perceived route to rid itself of its puritanical guilt is to destroy itself. And in this self-destruction, nothing will be left to appraise, only the ruins of a once-proud civilization that was slain by its own hand.
Liberalism attempts to cleave history in two—dividing an old world dominated by intolerant, hierarchical essentialism from a new one cleansed in self-effacing skepticism. In rejecting the old world that supposedly gave rise to such horrors, it seeks to codify a nihilism that holds all as equal, striving to expunge any remnants of a prior essentialism. Yet behind this veneer of equality lies a profound self-loathing, a compulsion to erase its own history in an effort to atone for the oppression it believes it inflicted upon minorities, most starkly revealed in the Jewish suffering of the Holocaust. It demands that the West disarm itself to cure its conquering hands. Christianity offers a radical alternative: the West need not sever itself from its past to atone for its sins, but can instead seek acceptance in the arms of a suffering God who fashioned an instrument of death into one of life. While its flesh and its flaws may be vessels for error, Christ has formed them into means of redemption.
The West cannot accept Hitler as the embodiment of ontological evil, for to do so is to embrace a vision of history where man is cast in absolute terms, severed from redemption. Liberalism has cast 1945 as the turning point of history, and thus condemned all that came before as racist. The paradox of tolerance, which dictates that intolerance cannot be tolerated, has morphed into a broader paradox: the West, in rejecting its own essentialism, has become essentialist about its own guilt. It no longer believes in the virtues of its civilization but only in its sins. Yet, the rejection of essence is itself an essence, a rigid construct that permits no deviation. The open society has, in practice, become a closed system: one that tolerates only those self-hating Westerners who chastise their own ancestors in favor of an amorphous, ever-shifting progressivism. Popper’s vision sought to liberate individuals from oppressive structures, yet in doing so, it has left them without any refuge at all—no nation, no heritage, no truth.
The West stands at an unfamiliar dialectic, compelled to choose between a conscious suicide and an unconscious survival. Neither path offers it both affirmation and authenticity, as one grants cynical truth without forgiveness, and the other forgiveness without truth. It is clear that the West, with America as its beating center, has no means to forgive itself nor slip into an amnesia of the past. It is caught in the crosshairs of a liberal historicism which eschews all naturalist remnants of the old world, having had its epiphany in 1945, the very end of its short history. But neither the Holocaust nor the swastika can serve as the turning axis of its history, for the West has already has received its center upon the Cross. Where heaven and earth meet upon two beams of hallowed wood, the West, and the world, finds its fulcrum. It marks not only the union of the particular to the universal, but folkish myths to reasoned truth, and historical fact to eternal revelation. Unlike the Holocaust, the Christian story does not abolish that which preceded it, but rather transfigures it; not to swallow all particular essences in a liberal universality, but to enliven them in Catholic verity. By this true chronicle, the West’s stories, its heroes, and traditions are no longer condemned as superficial truths or noble lies, but testament to a greater revelation— a God who saw fit to receive them into Himself. Embracing the dignity of a forgiving God, the West need not condemn itself or others to moral absolutes, damned to either worship its own particularity as universal or the universal as particular. Baptized in Christ’s selflessness, it may escape the twin snares of self-hatred and self-idolatry to recognize itself anew.
Popper's Rejection of Plato
Popper's objection to Plato may appear to rest on the surface of his political philosophy but strikes at the heart of his metaphysics. The conception of an eternal and intransigent Republic, as Plato theorized, whose traditions and norms are to take precedence over the liberties of passing individuals, he saw as the seed of the totalitarian state that emerged most forcefully in the 20th century. A Platonic schema of forms, all containing the immutable and ideal content of things, Popper considers an existential threat to the liberal project. This is because, while present in simple categories of color, shape, and number, forms apply to the very structure of society; there is a structure of the family, the race, and the nation—all essences that situate individuals in the world, and for Popper, restrain them. Individuals are only part of a larger collective body, and for Plato, they are merely realized through their assigned function within the corpus (Plato, Republic, 369b–370c). Their agency is secondary to the welfare of the Republic, which sees children seized from their parents and reared by a guardian class to ensure their devotion to the whole (Plato, Republic, 460b–461e). In Plato's utopia, individuals are classified according to their competence, forming a hierarchy sustained by a "noble lie." This myth suggests that each person possesses a precious metal within their soul: gold, silver, or bronze, which determines their respective role in society (Republic 415a–415c). The divisions of hierarchy, grouping people into succeeding categories, with some castes ordained to rule over others (the chief among these being the philosopher-kings), Popper decries as fascist. He posits that from the seed of Plato's political idealism, in its triumph over a fragile Weimar Republic, the atrocities of the Holocaust and all other forms of oppression have sprung. Popper's philosophy, contextualized by the persecution of his own people in his Austria, insists that "Never Again" will the conditions be met to facilitate another industrial tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust, and so it not only dispenses with hierarchy but any form of closed society capable of exclusion: one family over another, class over another, one nation over another, or one truth over the other. Any identity that defines itself in fixed essence, excluding that which lies outside, Popper flatly rejects. After all, exclusive identities could be used to identify and oppress outsiders. The only excluded thing in the open society that Popper envisions is that which seeks to exclude. This is to say that all is tolerated except for the intolerant, what he calls in The Open Society and Its Enemies, the Paradox of Tolerance (Popper 226). The modern world, which has come to pass out of Popper's imaginings, has indeed rejected all forms of essentialism and intolerance, regarding racism (except against Whites), sexism (except against men), xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia as mortal sin. A constructivism, which has outlived Popper, has outlawed any recognition of category, whether genetic, racial, national, or now even sexual, with many on the left unable to give words to what a man or woman is without devolving into semantics. This is the price, ostensibly, that the West must pay to avoid falling into its unique vice of regarding people as lesser for their intrinsic differences; it must deny the realism of these differences altogether. Those who would espouse the loyalties of nation, people, and blood as more than muddled perception have no place in Popper's metropolis of unmoored individuals.
Hitler as the Arch Nemesis of the Open Society
As the arch nemesis of the Open Society, the modern West has exiled Hitler along with any vestige of human essentialism from academia and polite society. Still his name is invoked more than any other historical figure by pundits and partisans in allusion to some alleged evil in their opponents. Democrats call the Republicans Nazis for any slight echo of nationalism, only for Republicans to retort that it is the Democrats who are the real Nazis, the real fascists. It is peculiar that a political party from another continent nearly a century ago maintains such staying power in modern American discourse. What did Hitler do to deserve such enduring infamy?
The twentieth century saw a litany of strongmen, from Stalin to Mao, whose body counts stretched to the hundreds of millions. Yet Hitler is surrounded by an almost religious mystique, not as one tyrant among many, but as a permanent threat against which liberalism must always remain vigilant. In a world that has abandoned essence for construction, his militant determinism—whether historical, genetic, racial, or sexual—is utterly antithetical. He is the perfect enemy for a secular cosmos that, despite having rejected miracles, still craves a founding myth, much like the Promethean theft of fire or Odin's sacrifice on Yggdrasil. But unlike ancient mythology, this narrative must be written not in prehistory but in historical ledger.
In modern America, these historical myths recall Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Paul Revere as the lone midnight rider to Concord, warning of the Redcoats. In reality, Washington never chopped down the cherry tree, and Revere never shouted "The British are coming" and was captured on the way to Concord. These myths inspire, evoking a sense of destiny and great men who outlive their times, as if to magnify their particularist origins to universal grandeur. But unlike the noble lies of a particularist West, whether in ancient pantheism or the founding of America, the "original sin" of the West, as perpetrated by Hitler in the Holocaust, is not justified by its capacity to inspire or affirm.
"Never Again," proclaimed by a modern West, negates its own essence, its history, and its character as ever praiseworthy. America’s Founding Fathers and great men, once hailed as noble heroes, are now recognized only as slave owners and bigots; Jefferson was a racist, and Henry Ford an antisemite. All is swallowed by a narrow skepticism that can only critique but never create. In the liberal eschatology, the trajectory of an essentialist West only culminates in the Holocaust, and so its particular identity must never be celebrated again.
All of the foundations of essentialism, nationalism, and particularism, in providing an orderly and coherent world, have been desecrated to usher in an unprejudiced West only prejudiced against itself. The Holocaust, even as a cautionary narrative, maintains the order and victory of a rational liberalism over a romantic world of destiny and myth. Progress, borrowing from the sciences, insists that what is new must be true, with the latest discoveries displacing all that came before and assuming a determinism of their own. In this, Popper's open society conceals a deeper irony: the modern West must mythologize Hitler and proclaim its triumph over his ideology to affirm its own legitimacy. It must invent an 'enlightened' historicism, crowning itself in the laurels of inexorable destiny, to displace a prior historicism that it dismisses as irrational.
Hitler as the Secular Satan
It must be maintained that the perpetrator of this grave act of genocide—the most important of all genocides in history as to awaken the world from its bigoted stupor—is not merely a flawed man who did great wrongs but the evildoer of all evildoers. Having abolished the metaphysical, Hitler has been inaugurated as the secular Satan of the modern West. In the strangest of twists, Hitler exerts a negative tyranny over the modern world, where all flee from his long shadow lest they be painted in the stain of his sins. An icon of shrouded myth, he is not merely a human being fallible as any, misguided in his wrongs, and upright in his virtues, but an ontological menace to transcend time and place. His unique exclusion from polite society has magnified him beyond all recognizability, like an omniscient spirit that haunts the corridors of modern life. That any figure vaguely resembling him, in policy or rhetoric across the West, from America's Trump, Hungary's Orban, or Russia's Putin, is declared by the press as his reincarnation, is proof of his dominion. In Hollywood, Hitler and the Nazis have become fixtures of cartoonish revilement in film, from the butt of jokes in Spielberg's Indiana Jones to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. The Holocaust has its own genre of fiction devoted to it, from The Boy in Striped Pajamas to Zone of Interest, a most unsubtle 'concept film' featuring the screams of tortured Jews at Auschwitz while SS officer Rudolph Höss and his family go about their daily lives next door. A cultural fixation with Hitler and the Holocaust, despite a rabid insistence on scientific rationality, traffics in the same fantasy that it condemns. Under Popper's caution, it has attempted to bury an old world that regarded people in tribes and, in its place, anointed an individualism where any notice of a fixed collective is heresy. Fearful that a homogenous nation might recognize the face of a minority that undermines it in the same terms as it recognizes itself, it has abolished the nation-state. At least with no home, none can be called homeless. Without roots, none can be deemed rootless. And with no insiders, there can be no outsiders to oppress.
The Old World as New
The world has been transformed by Popper's rebuke. Yet ironically, he and his followers have torn up the foundations of the West, only to permit its rediscovery, exposing its starved roots to fresh sunlight. That the essentialism of Plato and the partisanship of the past have been excluded has only invited a rebellious, and even progressive, curiosity. The ruins of an old world now regarded as racist, tribal, superstitious, and most of all intolerant are under the excavation of a generation to which they are entirely unfamiliar. Disillusioned by individualism, they have sought its opposite. Darkened under the shadow of the old world, they have seen the faint lines of its silhouette—all that which has been anathematized under the ironclad reign of a liberal world—and they have turned their face towards the sun to make out its shape.
Forced into a disenchanted dialectic with the realization that Hitler lacks the pure villainy attributed to him by contemporary society, some have idolized him as an unblemished hero. A liberal mythologizing of Hitler, as the icon of a racially essentialist and particularist ethos, has inadvertently sowed the conditions for its own demise. That the West has attributed all the baggage of the old world, all discriminations of sex, race, culture, nation, and faith to him, has made an effigy of him, permitting not only an uncritical hatred but also an uncritical worship. There is an irony that a youth still under the spell of progress may, unlike their grandparents, encounter Hitler as new, yet still maintain him in ontological absolutes. However, both the liberal reaction to Hitler and its nascent, and mostly online, counter-reaction fall into the same category. Both paint him in moral extremes.
In a secular world, the tendency to mythologize history and historicize mythology has created a void that demands to be filled. With what CS Lewis called the 'true myth' of Christianity dismissed as an artifact of the past, society has turned to false ones.
Hitler and Goebbels were guilty of this same worldly mythologizing, perceiving their struggle as a war against flesh and blood, rather than principalities. This is not to deny that the Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School or the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union committed repugnant evils—in the perpetration of pornography and the pioneering of transsexual ideology—but rather to recognize that they were not the architects of such evil, only its instruments. Liberals make the same mistake in diagnosing Hitler and the Nazis, construing their reaction to said 'intellectuals' as unprovoked malice. Yet, the Nietzschean naturalism of the Schutzstaffel and the liberal hubris of the progressives forget a metaphysics which ascribes good and evil to a reality beyond individuals. Having done away with God and natural law, both must find absolute morality within the hearts of mere men.
Rejecting the modern, the Nazis sought to resurrect an Aryan prehistory through crimson banners, stoic sculptures, and Nordic runes of antiquity. Their efforts, even if awkwardly self-conscious, hearken back to an era where the divine was seen within nature rather than beyond it, immanent in its presence and particular to its worshippers. Yet its successor, a self-critical liberalism, makes the contrary mistake. While denying faith, it imagines itself as a universal critic looming over the West, tasked with deconstructing it for the sin of existing. Both render man an irredeemable enemy, either through a total embrace or absolute rejection of his own essence, fashioning him into a Faustian god or a Faustian devil. For Hitler, this mortal enemy takes the shape of the subversive Jews of Weimar; for the post-Hitler West, its own European essence. One casts blame on the outsider, while the other, the insider.
The Redemption of the Particular West
In a futile attempt to free itself from the sins of its ancestors, the West has gnawed at its own flesh, desperate to escape its own body. It hopes to rid itself of all the impure tones of 'eurocentricism' and 'bigotry' that have distinguished it in ages past. This bid has proven profoundly undesirable for its inhabitants. It has inspired some to seek a return to a world of particularism, hoping to climb back inside the walls of the blissfully ignorant polis. Yet this is still impossible in a world transformed by Christianity, where the inner self has supplanted an external existence purely defined by roles and duties to the Republic. In the modern West, Popper and Hitler present two tracts: a cold universality disguised as reason, and a self-glorifying particularism justified in sentimental myth. By transcending the dialectic offered by each, the West may enter a grander narrative: one that encompasses both myth and history, universal truth and particular essence.
In the old myths of the Germanic and Greek worlds, the divine did not so much uplift humanity as it reflected it, entangled in a web of small traditions. The gods surpassed men in strength but were only equal to or lesser in virtue. Zeus, in his spurious infidelity, and Poseidon, in his mercurial wrath, stood beneath Athenian scholars and noble statesmen in moral stature. As different as the gods were from one another, so too were the tribes of old, imprisoned by their own particularity. Yet, their intricate myths, taken as universal, could justify themselves only within their own insular worlds—an ethical life bound to each peculiar people, drawn in blood and soil.
The Insufficiency of Ancient Myth
The symbolic allegories discernible today were not seen as such but as plain realities, and where these myths diverged, they could not be grasped as a unified whole. While their meanings: heroic justice, romantic tragedy, and fleeting glimpses of the eternal, could be apprehended by philosophic abstraction, they remained unrealized in history, suspended in a realm of forms and mirrored only in imperfection. While playwrights and philosophers from Aristophanes to Aristotle attempted to draw out these meanings, they had yet to escape their own cultural confines. Later, Rome, guided by ruthless pragmatism, assimilated the world’s ancient myths and deities into a vast pantheon, yet made little attempt to reconcile them.
It was only with the emergence of the Christian story—a true myth—that these scattered fragments of meaning could be reconciled. Before Christendom, tales from Apollo to Baldur, valued as they were, all remained trapped in their particularities, their names and narratives contradicting one another. However, it was not haughty strength, but boundless selflessness, through which this lofty universality was emptied into history. In Christ, the union of man and God transformed the meaning of myth into concrete reality. Without this reconciliation, the West’s stories would have remained mere echoes in the dark, shadows dancing on the wall of Plato’s cave. They would have remained buried in philosophical treatises, estranged from man’s own story.
Christ as the True Myth
The West must remember that Christ revealed Himself not through self-glorifying myth, but through humble sacrifice; not as God in the habits of man, but as man in the habits of God. His presence was not recorded in the fading ink of history, but sealed in a covenant of blood. In the crucifixion, Christ does not stand over humanity in heroic repose like the marble statues of Rome or Athens, but descends into its suffering to make good of it. Yet, it seems the West has forgotten this. Having banished Christ in favor of ideologues like Popper, it has found only the means to condemn itself. The myth that burdens its discourse, the weight of "essentialism" in slavery, colonization, and the Holocaust, can only accuse, never forgive. This narrative has cornered the West in self-loathing, trammeled with a guilty conscience but no confessional booth. In liberalism, a secular world inherits a sense of original sin, but lacks any confessor to absolve it. Paralyzed by the false notion that European identity and history are a Pandora’s box to be desperately sealed, it condemns its few flaws while remaining blind to its countless virtues.
The essence of the West does not find its perfection in self-negation nor self-idolatry but in the embrace of a selfless God—an Absolute who does not abolish particular essences but humbly enters into them. In the Christian story, He comes as the adopted son of a carpenter, wandering the Levant in dusty sandals, not as a Heraclean hero or a Caesarian tyrant. In entering a particular world, Christ did not surrender His perfection or universality; instead, He perfected all particulars through Himself.
The Transfiguration of Western Heritage
The compelling myths of old, then, are not condemned for their proximity to evil but are transfigured in relation to the Good, just as light does not destroy color but reveals its fullest brilliance. By marrying the infinite and finite in His incarnation, Christ offers the West a path beyond its current dialectic of prideful glorification and self-loathing guilt. In His Passion, the West’s folk stories, its heroes, and traditions are no longer superficial truths or noble lies, but made witness to a greater revelation. They need not yield their romantic beauty to cold rationality, for both romantic story and static reason are reconciled in Christ, a God as magnificent as He is intimate.
The Holocaust should not dominate history as the original sin of the old world but be confessed as one atrocity among many in the wartime period, not exclusive to the Axis powers, nor its period in Europe. From Churchill's Bengal Famine of 1943, which claimed two million lives, to the brutal firebombing of German civilians in Dresden, and the two million rapes committed by the oncoming Soviets in their march toward Berlin from 1944 to 1945, the wartime period was littered with atrocity. From the tens of millions lost in the Great Leap Forward to the atrocities of the Rwandan and Armenian genocides and even the current abuses in Gaza by the Jewish state, Europe, nor the Second World War, can be accused of a monopoly on civilizational sin.
The Postwar West's Self-Destruction
Nevertheless, it was the Second World War that broke Europe's back, a war from which the supposed victors have yet to recover. In its aftermath, Jewish postmodernists and Popper have sought to root out any quality that could reproduce the Reich in the West. As a result, the postwar West sees itself as fundamentally irredeemable. The only perceived route to rid itself of its puritanical guilt is to destroy itself. And in this self-destruction, nothing will be left to appraise, only the ruins of a once-proud civilization that was slain by its own hand.
Liberalism attempts to cleave history in two—dividing an old world dominated by intolerant, hierarchical essentialism from a new one cleansed in self-effacing skepticism. In rejecting the old world that supposedly gave rise to such horrors, it seeks to codify a nihilism that holds all as equal, striving to expunge any remnants of a prior essentialism. Yet behind this veneer of equality lies a profound self-loathing, a compulsion to erase its own history in an effort to atone for the oppression it believes it inflicted upon minorities, most starkly revealed in the Jewish suffering of the Holocaust. It demands that the West disarm itself to cure its conquering hands. Christianity offers a radical alternative: the West need not sever itself from its past to atone for its sins, but can instead seek acceptance in the arms of a suffering God who fashioned an instrument of death into one of life. While its flesh and its flaws may be vessels for error, Christ has formed them into means of redemption.
The Paradox of Liberal Guilt
The West cannot accept Hitler as the embodiment of ontological evil, for to do so is to embrace a vision of history where man is cast in absolute terms, severed from redemption. Liberalism has cast 1945 as the turning point of history, and thus condemned all that came before as racist. The paradox of tolerance, which dictates that intolerance cannot be tolerated, has morphed into a broader paradox: the West, in rejecting its own essentialism, has become essentialist about its own guilt. It no longer believes in the virtues of its civilization but only in its sins. Yet, the rejection of essence is itself an essence, a rigid construct that permits no deviation. The open society has, in practice, become a closed system: one that tolerates only those self-hating Westerners who chastise their own ancestors in favor of an amorphous, ever-shifting progressivism. Popper’s vision sought to liberate individuals from oppressive structures, yet in doing so, it has left them without any refuge at all—no nation, no heritage, no truth.
A Christian Path Beyond the Dialectic
The West stands at an unfamiliar dialectic, compelled to choose between a conscious suicide and an unconscious survival. Neither path offers it both affirmation and authenticity, as one grants cynical truth without forgiveness, and the other forgiveness without truth. It is clear that the West, with America as its beating center, has no means to forgive itself nor slip into an amnesia of the past. It is caught in the crosshairs of a liberal historicism which eschews all naturalist remnants of the old world, having had its epiphany in 1945, the very end of its short history. But neither the Holocaust nor the swastika can serve as the turning axis of its history, for the West has already has received its center upon the Cross. Where heaven and earth meet upon two beams of hallowed wood, the West, and the world, finds its fulcrum. It marks not only the union of the particular to the universal, but folkish myths to reasoned truth, and historical fact to eternal revelation. Unlike the Holocaust, the Christian story does not abolish that which preceded it, but rather transfigures it; not to swallow all particular essences in a liberal universality, but to enliven them in Catholic verity. By this true chronicle, the West’s stories, its heroes, and traditions are no longer condemned as superficial truths or noble lies, but testament to a greater revelation— a God who saw fit to receive them into Himself. Embracing the dignity of a forgiving God, the West need not condemn itself or others to moral absolutes, damned to either worship its own particularity as universal or the universal as particular. Baptized in Christ’s selflessness, it may escape the twin snares of self-hatred and self-idolatry to recognize itself anew.