Europe's Extreme Swing From Auschwitz to 'Allahu Akbar'

The post-World War II European war on nationalism has made it a safe space for antisemitism.

photo: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay written by Maral Salmassi, an Iranian-German artist, engineer, and skeptic.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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European governments are walking a tightrope over an active volcano.

After decades of importing tribal, theocratic, and antisemitic ideologies, our societies have fragmented in ways we haven't seen since the Second World War. The only political beneficiaries are the Far-Left and Far-Right, whose appeal grows exponentially as the establishment erodes its credibility.

At the heart of this breakdown lies a uniquely European neurosis (post-World War II guilt) and its ideological offspring, neo-universalism. Made in Germany, this moral and psychological phenomenon is the source of Europe’s refusal to deal honestly with Islamic extremism and uncontrolled migration and defend its own cultural identity.

Germany has long been a crucible of powerful ideological systems — some brilliant, others catastrophic. One must understand the German need for predictability, moral order, and system-building to understand its post-war mindset. This national character has produced both Beethoven and bureaucratic genocide.

When ideas take hold in the German mind, they’re rarely moderate. They are developed with rigorous precision, often to their logical (and illogical) extremes. Calvinism and Lutheranism, though born in Wittenberg and Geneva, both took deep root in German soil. These traditions embedded notions of moral rigor, predestination, and an inseparable relationship between divine order and political authority.

Centuries later, we see echoes of these traits in ideologies like Nazism (with its twisted sense of moral destiny) and Marxist communism, conceived by another German thinker, Karl Marx. Today’s neo-universalism, which tries to erase all differences in the name of equality, is merely the latest chapter, an eerie mirror image of old German universalism. Instead of one Reich, we are now offered one global justice paradigm.

Each new ideology emerges as a “corrective” to the last, but always with a new blind spot, a new form of moral arrogance, and a new potential for destruction.

In “Escape from Freedom,” German-Jewish psychologist Erich Fromm traced the authoritarian personality back to Protestant roots and argued that Lutheranism and Calvinism planted the psychological seeds for fascism: an all-powerful God, predestination, and the individual’s desperate need for external validation in a chaotic world provided fertile ground. These movements stripped away the comforting rituals of Catholicism, leaving individuals alone with their guilt — anxious, morally isolated, and primed to seek relief in authority.

The fascist state became a psychological surrogate, a new father figure offering certainty and moral clarity.

Nazism, then, was not a historical accident but a culmination of a long ideological arc. After the collapse of Nazi Germany, the pendulum violently swung back toward socialism and, later, postmodernism.

Postmodernism became popular just as the West had started confronting its past demons. Where guilt had once been internalized through religious authority, it promised freedom through dissolution: no norms, judgment, or cultural superiority. This was, of course, irresistible to a culture desperate to escape its past.

But instead of erasing guilt, postmodernism outsourced it, replacing repentance through truth with penance through relativism:

• If all cultures are equal, none can be blamed.

• If all truths are subjective, none can be defended.

• If all identities are fluid, then national identity becomes outdated and dangerous.

In this moral vacuum, neo-universalism emerged as a secular religion. It promised redemption through openness, diversity, and supranational governance. Its creed was simple: “Welcome the Other, no matter the cost to yourself.”

Thus, in a tragic twist, Islam (the most entrenched patriarchy and imperialist force in recorded history) was recast as the ultimate victim. Despite its rigid theological hierarchy, supremacist doctrine, and 1,300-year history of conquest, Islam became the sacred “Other”: unassailable, untouchable, and immune to critique.

What the West could no longer condemn in itself, it now projected outward, turning its civilizational guilt into a pathological act of appeasement.

Nowhere is this psychological overcorrection more visible than in Germany. After 1945, the nation was not only physically devastated but morally dismantled. The Holocaust and the crimes of National Socialism Left behind a traumatized elite determined to create a utopia, preventing even the possibility of future fascism.

And in every Eden, there is always a serpent — and an original sin.

From this trauma emerged two core beliefs. First, national identity is dangerous. If Hitler used nationalism to justify genocide, then nationalism itself must be inherently toxic. Germans must never again see themselves as unique, sovereign, or special.

And second, universalism equals redemption. The cure for nationalist evil was to dissolve identity altogether through openness, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and integration into supranational structures like the European Union and the United Nations.

This worldview became a civil religion, complete with its metaphysics:

• Original Sin → Colonialism, racism, the Holocaust

• Saints → Refugees, migrants, minorities

• Heretics → Patriots, critics of Islam, defenders of Western values

• Dogma → Equality, multiculturalism, inclusivity

• Inquisition → Media shaming, cancel culture

This doctrine fundamentally ties moral redemption to welcoming the Other — at any cost. Germany is no longer post-national; it is anti-national by design. Its education system, constitution, and public rituals are tailored to curb pride, promote shame, and sacralize diversity.

The state’s leaders speak less of Germanness than European responsibility, global justice, or welcoming culture. The very concept of a cohesive national identity is treated with suspicion, if not outright disdain.

This deep cultural aversion to national identity in Germany finds an unlikely ideological mirror in Islam, a political-theological system that has governed Islamic empires for centuries.

Islam, in its original form, is a supranational project. It denies national allegiances and favors a global Ummah, the community of believers governed by divine law (sharia) — not local custom, secular authority, or ethnic tradition. While Germany sacrifices nationalism to avoid the repetition of fascism, Islam rejects nationalism as heresy against divine unity.

In both cases, the nation-state is delegitimized. In Germany, it is a moral hazard. In Islam, it is a theological obstacle. Where Germany seeks redemption through cosmopolitanism, Islam claims authority through divine universalism.

Yet both frameworks erase the idea of national self-determination and demand submission to a higher, abstract moral order — whether that be global “humanity” or the will of Allah.

This is not to say Germany has “converted” to Islam, but instead that it has created the perfect ideological climate in which Islamism can thrive. The German state has become so allergic to its own identity that it now prefers the presence of anti-nationalist Islam to the resurgence of native cohesion.

In this way, post-World War II guilt and Islamist ideology don’t collide; they converge, creating a power vacuum in which European values are not just eroded but systematically replaced.

In this moral paradigm, Islam is not treated like any other ideology; it is post-colonial, marginalized, non-Western, forever framed as a victim rather than an agent.

But, this could not be further from the truth. Islam is more than a religion; it is a patriarchal civilizational system, a theocratic legal code, and one of history’s most enduring imperialist forces. It colonized vast swaths of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Southern Europe. It forcibly converted populations, enslaved millions, and institutionalized second-class status — known as dhimmihood — for non-believers.

And yet, in Germany, criticism of Islam is met with accusations of hate speech. Foreign-funded Islamic associations are subsidized under the guise of integration. Dissenters are prosecuted under laws like Volksverhetzung¹. And antisemitic pro-Hamas demonstrations are permitted under the banner of “free expression.” This is the reversal of moral logic: The guilty must be punished, the foreign must be protected.

But this ideological structure is now buckling.

Human beings crave identity, not abstraction. Cultures are not equal, and some, like Islam, actively reject pluralism. Tolerance without reciprocity leads to submission instead of harmony, and Europe’s younger generations are beginning to understand this.

What began as a noble refusal to repeat history has violently metastasized into a self-harming moral fantasy — blind to reality and deaf to the suffering it creates, especially for women, Jews, gays, and ordinary citizens trapped in the ideological ruins of Western self-hatred.

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1. A concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population