The West keeps lying about antisemitism.
Western countries purposely misinterpreted the Holocaust to avoid facing their own guilt. Not much has changed in our post-October 7th world.
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This is a guest essay written by Liah Greenfeld, an Israeli-American Russian-Jewish interdisciplinary scholar.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In our civilization good and evil, right and wrong are defined pretty clearly.
According to our foundational text, the Bible, good is equated with active kindness — helping the helpless, sharing whatever one has, including one’s roof, with widows and orphans, with wanderers coming to one’s door — the derivative of the Hebrew words tsedek (justice), tsdaka (charity), tsadik (righteous, just).
Evil is causing gratuitous suffering. Kindness is always right, it cannot be wrong; gratuitous suffering is always wrong, it cannot be right. Saying that good and evil, right and wrong, “depend on the context” is a sign of moral insanity; that is, of losing one’s mind in regard to morality, becoming incapable of moral judgment, and no longer being a moral agent.
Both active kindness and causing gratuitous suffering are individual actions. What makes these actions moral or immoral is their quality.
It is a sign of moral insanity to measure or quantify morality — confusing the strictly qualitative nature of moral actions or experiences of good and evil with the numbers of those who either benefit from processes not specifically intended to do good to a particular person or persons in concrete need (for example, the invention of penicillin) or are harmed by processes not specifically intended to cause suffering to a particular person or persons (for example, an accidental bombardment of a purely civilian facility mistaken for a military target).
Only people who do not know what good and evil, right and wrong — and therefore cannot distinguish between them — would characterize the invention of penicillin (which greatly benefited humanity) in moral terms, considering it an act of Alexander Fleming’s personal kindness. And only a completely befuddled person would consider the tragic bombing of a Yugoslav hospital in 1999 by NATO planes not just a terrible mistake, but an act of evil.
The fact that such misjudgment of the quality of moral (good and evil) acts as acts measured in large numbers occurs commonly today is the sign of how widespread moral insanity is in our society. The very fact that whether burning babies alive or killing a woman after cutting her breast and while raping her is evil or not is a subject for a debate is a sign of how far our civilization progressed on its way to complete collapse — and a collapse so shameful that it cannot be in good conscience regretted.
It is moral insanity and the substitution of numbers affected for intentionally making individuals suffer which allows for a discussion of the moral equivalency between the patently evil actions of every Palestinian participant in the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, and Israeli war on the instigators of this attack.
Israeli response is considered numerically disproportionate and for this reason evil: Not to be evil, Israel would have to limit its reaction to the killing of a random 1,200 Gazans, the number of people killed in Israel on October 7th by Gazan attackers.
This kind of insane thinking is not new. The symbol of the Holocaust and the measure of its crime is six million of the Jewish dead, a third of the Jewish People. However staggering the figure, the focus on it is misplaced.
It is not the number of the killed, but the targeted killing of Jews, unrelated to any military objective, which makes the Holocaust genocide, but even the perpetration of the genocide is not the main reason for the unique horror of this historical event.
The essence of the Holocaust is the diabolical cruelty of suffering intentionally caused to those who perished in it and those who survived it. This is what makes the Holocaust the very embodiment of evil, the greatest crime in human history.
And it is this intentional and inventive infliction of suffering before and in the process of killing, the only purpose of which is to demonstrate the ability of the murderers to degrade their victims and feel superior to them, which makes the massacre of October 7th strictly comparable in its intention to the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a pivotal event in the history of the West. It is important to remember that it was instigated by a central member of this civilizational community and that every Western country was complicit in it. After-the-fact realization of what they were complicit in bewildered Western societies (especially the more educated, thinking strata in them), turned large swaths of their populations against their culture, made them question their own identities, and caused a jump in the rates of functional mental illness, affected by identity problems.
The interpretation of the Holocaust was the result of this (mentally disturbed) public’s attempt to deal with their personal situation — the function not of the desire to understand the nature of the event as it was, its causes, and how was it possible, but rather of the need for a therapeutic narrative that would make it easier for Western societies to come to grips with their role in it. As a result, it was in a large part a misinterpretation.
The guilt was profound and widespread. But, in the attempt to cope with it, rather than face this greatest crime in the history of humanity for what it was and repent for what it was — the crime against the Jews — this patently antisemitic atrocity was allowed to be misrepresented and covered up as a paradigmatic example of the imaginary tendency of “natural xenophobia” (what humans do to other humans).
The world was divided into the humans likely to be naturally xenophobic (white, of European descent, modern, enjoying the benefits of capitalist economy) in whose vile company Jews were before long included, and the “other humans” (darker in skin tone, poorer, generally lower on the scale of socio-economic achievement) who were imagined and rapidly came to imagine themselves as the natural victims of xenophobia.
This made the West, divided against itself and heavily outnumbered, responsible for all the woes of the world outside it.
The blame for the Holocaust was assigned to impersonal social forces; the event itself was judged to be a terrible but impersonal tragedy whose tragic character was the reflection of the high number of deaths it caused, and the horrifying question of individual moral responsibility that plagued those who refused to see, and thus enabled, the evident evil was resolved.
Mental disturbance in the face of evil led to the misinterpretation of evil which further contributed to the destruction of moral agency. Functional mental illness (including moral insanity) in our society, reflected in very high average rates, mainly affects the privileged, more educated strata, likely to be in and rise to positions of influence and leadership.
The reduced ability of such strata to distinguish between right and wrong, their confusion regarding the ultimate questions of good and evil, bodes ill for the future of the West.
 | A guest post by
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For much of the world there is no difference between the attempted genocide of October 7 and any other terror attack committed by the Palestinians. Neither justifies a military response. Neither is cause for the total elimination of Hamas or even a rethinking of the wisdom of rewarding the Palestinians with a state. I am not referring to the radical Marxists and their fellow travelers who are menacing Jews throughout the Western world. I am referring to the ordinary establishments including the not lamented late Biden administration and most other Western governments as well as all non Conservative media. Within days of the event we heard the familiar demands to reward the genociders with a state of their own.
Your point is very well taken, corroborated by the rush of so many western leaders to express sympathy for Palestinian murderers while excoriating Israel for its response to the invasion of October 7 and the horrific savagery of normal Palestinians. The West is so morally corrupt it has no future; but it does not yet know that.