The Religion of World War Two

It turns out the Devil has a birthday. It falls on this very day, 20 April, which represents 137 years since the birth of Adolf Hitler. 

Traditionally, the idea that Hitler was literally an incarnation of Satan upon Earth has been the preserve of mentally ill cranks. One less overtly disturbed voice identifying Hitler as being the Führer of the Flies, however, has recently emerged in Professor Alec Ryrie, a Scottish academic and professor of the history of Christianity, whose interesting book The Age of Hitler: And How We Will Survive It was published late last year. Unlike the loonies, Professor Ryrie does not mean such an identification to be taken literally. His basic argument is that, as Christianity began to decline across an increasingly atheistic post-war Western Europe and America, a new, correspondingly secular replacement appeared, an undeclared ‘Religion of WWII,’ whose chief presiding deity was not a Christ or a God-substitute, but a Satan-substitute instead: Adolf Hitler. 

Ryrie shows how, following WWII’s end, certain theologians, influenced by the murdered German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer, felt ashamed of the way in which certain elements within Europe’s Christian churches had acquiesced or collaborated in Nazi rule. What was supposedly needed instead was a ‘religionless Christianity,’ wherein the heavenly ethics of Christ were separated from the failed institution of His earthly Church. In practice, what this meant we got in its place was a mere empty vessel, a heretical political pseudo-religion. 

Ryrie notes the 1965 Hollywood biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told flopped in cinemas, and not only because of John Wayne’s comically inappropriate cowboy accent; by this point in time, the true greatest story ever told for the majority of the Western public was no longer that of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, but the classic three-act history of WWII, a narrative many cinema-goers had actually lived through. The main reason for the new narrative’s success was simple: in Adolf Hitler, WWII had the best, most easily boo-able franchise villain, a real-life Darth Vader, only somewhat less black. 

Yet there was a problem here. By basing our new religion upon the neo-Devil, not the old God, mankind began no longer to aspire towards the goodness of Jesus but away from the evil of Adolf—which is to say, towards nothing much in particular. Mainstream mankind now absorbed its chief post-war moral lesson as being to avoid Nazi values at all costs … but to then replace them with what, precisely? ‘Tolerance’ became one major answer, but ‘tolerance’ is often just a J.S. Mill-style synonym for ‘anything goes,’ with any specific definitions of what constitutes ‘the good’—heterosexual marriage, say—becoming eroded over time and replaced with an alternative moral regime of what feels like ‘the good’ to you personally—gay marriages or polycules, for example. 

The sacred post-war concept of ‘diversity,’ adopted in part because it seemed so antithetical to the collectivist principles of Nazism, seems to place each individual man in the position of being his own individual god, the arbiter of what constitutes good and evil on a personal level, a living, walking rebuke to traditional Kantian categorical imperative notions that morality was inherently a shared universal quality. And anyone who disagreed? They were, automatically by definition, ‘a Nazi’—a rebuke so common in present-day political discourse that even Communists are now being called it.

Immoral compass

All our public moral lodestones, shows Ryrie, became oriented in the post-war age towards no longer asking “What would Jesus do?” but toward considering instead, “What would Hitler do?” and then doing the precise opposite. Sometimes, this simple rule of thumb worked; when presented with the opportunity to invade Poland, it is generally a good idea not to invade Poland. But at other times, seeking to do the reverse of Hitler causes our moral calculus to become severely scrambled. 

Ryrie gives the example of someone feeling pleased that a historian might discover 100,000 more Jews died in the Holocaust than previously thought, as this sounds like the reverse of covering up that the genocide actually happened. But then, equally, this same pious person might feel deeply disappointed to hear another historian proving 100,000 fewer Jews died in the Holocaust, as this sounds like a step on the road towards Holocaust denial. 

So, the ‘moral’ position to adopt here seems to be to be delighted to hear about the death of a further 100,000 Jews, on the paradoxical grounds of committed anti-Nazism; Himmler, Heydrich, and Hitler would have been pleased to find all of their enemies as dementedly ‘anti-Nazi’ as that back in the 1940s. As Ryrie says, most post-war Westerners no longer want to remember the Holocaust primarily through sympathy with its victims but through hatred of its villains, because that is what makes us feel most virtuous; moral vanity is the sin into which we can all too easily fall when our ethical model becomes one of fleeing evil, not imitating goodness. 

Another example (not given by Ryrie himself) is that of the West opening up its borders to all-comers, as even the past two popes, Leo and Francis, have advocated. Hitler, with his obsessive emphasis upon racial purity, wouldn’t have flung wide the gates of Vienna to refugees, genuine or otherwise, from Africa and the Middle East, so, in order to be truly moral, we have to do the exact opposite and let anyone and everyone in, say contemporary acolytes of the prevailing WWII pseudo-religion. To do otherwise would be to lay the grounds for another Holocaust. 

Yet many of the incomers are radical Muslims, who actively wish to slaughter Europe’s Jews. They still follow a real political religion, not a confected post-modern one. To judge by the bestselling status of Mein Kampf in Muslim lands, in fact, Hitler would be more likely to be their God than their Devil.  

Sins of logic

One other lesson we learned from WWII was never to appease dictators but to remove them; that did not go well for the West in Iraq with Saddam Hussein, nor in Libya with Colonel Gaddafi. Similar thinking with regards to Iran at present also has potential to go badly wrong. Yet look at how Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu chides European countries for not joining in U.S.-Israeli strikes. Europe, he says, “has forgotten so much since the Holocaust.” If Tel Aviv and Washington hadn’t bombed Iran’s nuclear and missile sites, said Netanyahu, then “the names Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, and Parchin would likely have been remembered with eternal dread, precisely like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Sobibor.” But interventionism can go sour equally as much as appeasement can. Drawing absolute, eternal geopolitical lessons from WWII on any and all matters can be unwise.

Ryrie says the age of the Western WWII religion is now ending as time passes and memories fade; the fact that uncooperative European leaders found Netanyahu’s arguments unconvincing may back him up here. Yet the fact is that the two key central moral lessons of the war—that the Holocaust must never repeat, and that (white) racism is the greatest moral evil imaginable—remain firmly in place, even sometimes to the direct detriment of those professing this creed.

For Ryrie, the greatest moral evils are now defined as qualitative, not quantitative; the apartheid regime in South Africa killed far fewer innocents than Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda did, but Amin was a black killing fellow blacks through pure insanity and bloodlust, not a white killing blacks for race-related reasons. Thus, South Africa is deemed more innately ‘Hitlerian’ and hence morally worse. As Ryrie writes, “Had it been another kind of dictatorship, which had shot and tortured its citizens without regard for their skin colour, it probably would have been allowed to go about its business undisturbed. It was not the worst regime in the world: merely the most offensive,” as in most superficially ‘Nazi-like.’

We have here the WWII pseudo-religion mutating into a kind of inverted Calvinism, in which the true moral elect (i.e., self-hating liberal whites) affect a status of godly pre-damnation at birth, simply for being white, rather than of pre-salvation, as in standard Calvinism. Whiteness becomes the original sin, which must be washed away by enacting oppressive anti-white laws like two-tier hate crime legislation within traditional white homelands like Europe, while the borders are prised open and any politicians who dare resist, like Viktor Orbán, are condemned as Hitler-Satans reborn. 

This is where fleeing Hitler gets you—straight into the arms of your enemies. Many such civilisational enemies have even learned to use the theology of WWII against us to get their own way via moral blackmail, with Hamas supporters having the nerve to call Israel genocidal or transgenderists purporting to be suffering a ‘genocide’ even whilst increasing exponentially in number.

Only white European people are disarmed morally from being able to protest their own genuine demographic displacement; Ryrie himself dismisses Renaud Camus’ idea of the Great Replacement (something Camus himself labelled as “The second career of Adolf Hitler”) as being just a “far-Right meme.” Clearly a liberal himself, Ryrie evinces clear sympathy for transsexuals and immigrants, speaking of ‘white’ people in inverted commas and calling this “a meaningless category,” as if Grace Kelly was a Nigerian bush pygmy. Just because Hitler believed in the simple existence of race is no rational reason to rush to affirm the opposite; that would be to fall for the false WWII creed in itself.

But Ryrie, despite his many valid critiques, seems to wish to cling on tight to certain aspects of the blind anti-Hitler cult. “Mercifully,” he says, thanks to demographic change, “white Euro-Americans are going to become less important with every passing year,” even though he has previously implied Camus’ supposed “far-Right meme” is allegedly purely fictional. That is how pervasive the WWII religion has become: even those perceptive enough to be able to identify it do not realise when they themselves are also fellow believers in the faith. 

If this is Hitler’s birthday, when is the West finally going to be allowed to perform his last funeral rites?