Where the Hatred Comes From

Following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, in which the terrorist organization not only unleashed the predictable barrage of largely ineffective rockets on the Jewish state, but penetrated the barrier between Gaza and Israel with a large force that killed about 1500 people and took about 150 hostage, we were treated to the disgusting spectacle of progressives gathering en masse in cities and academic campuses around the West, not to protest these despicable acts, but to cheer them on.   This was immediately denounced as a display of anti-Semitism, mostly by neoconservatives many of whom called for such demonstrations to be banned.   While I don’t have much better an opinion of these demonstrators than the neocons have this call to criminalize the demonstrations is extremely foolish.    There is already too much suppression of the expression of thought and opinion, we do not need to add any more.   I don’t agree that this is an expression of anti-Semitism either.   This essay will explain why.

 

A discussion of this sort requires that we define anti-Semitism at some point so we might as well get that out of the way.   H. L. Mencken said that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes the Jews more than is absolutely necessary”.   That is amusing, at least to those who do not have a politically correct pole permanently lodged up their rectums, but not particularly helpful.   Joe Sobran said that “an anti-Semite used to be someone who didn’t like the Jews.   Now he is someone the Jews don’t like”.   This is more helpful as an explanation of the neoconservative use of the term than of what it really means.  

 

Most people, I suspect, use it to mean any dislike of the Jews for any reason.   The late rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusner, objected to this promiscuous use of the term.   In an article entitled “Sorting Out Jew-Haters” that appeared in the March 1995 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture he gave this account of anti-Semitism:

 

According to anti-Semitism, Jews are a separate species within humanity, peculiarly wicked, responsible for the evil of the human condition. A political philosophy formulated in the world of late 19th-century Germany and Austria, anti- Semitism formed the ideological foundation of political parties and served as the basis for public policy. It provided an account of life and how the Jews corrupt it. It offered a history of Western civilization and how the Jews pervert it. It formulated a theory of the world’s future and how the Jews propose to conquer it. People make sense of the world lay appealing to anti-Semitism, and in World War II, millions of Germans willingly gave their lives for the realization of their country’s belief in an anti-Semitic ideal of national life and culture.

 

The term, he argued, should be reserved for Jew hatred of the type that fully meets this description, and to apply it to lesser prejudices trivializes it.

 

Now, you might be thinking that what we are seeing meets Neusner’s requirements to be called anti-Semitism.    The rallies that we have been talking about, after all, are not just in support of the Palestinian people, but of Hamas, the terrorist organization dedicated to the elimination of Israel, and of its actions on 7 October.    Why would anyone support such an organization and such behaviour unless their mind was in the grips of the sort of hatred described in the paragraph from Neusner’s article quoted above?

 

There are a couple of obvious problems with that way of thinking.  

 

The first is that if these progressives, academic and otherwise, were motivated by anti-Semitic hatred we would expect that their support for violent, murderous, organizations and their behaviour would be limited to Hamas and other similar groups.   This is not the case.   The progressive activist crowd has a long history of supporting violent, murderous, groups.   In the post-World War II era of the last century, for example, they supported every Communist group available from the Stalinists to the Maoists to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.   Communism killed 100 million people in the twentieth century.    Pol Pot’s group murdered about 2 million people, a quarter of the population of Cambodia.  Yet Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor who became the guru of the student activist wing of the left and who is regarded by most neoconservatives as a self-loathing Jew for his support of the Palestinians, decades ago was defending Pol Pot and claiming that the accounts of the “killing fields” were American propaganda.   My old friend Reaksa Himm, whose account of seeing his family slaughtered by these brutes and being left for dead himself, was published as The Tears of My Soul: He Survived Cambodia’s Killing Fields, His Family Didn’t, Could He Forgive? in 2003, would no doubt have a few things to say about that.   Then, of course, there are the countless progressive students who thought it “cool” to wear t-shirts or put posters up in their dorm room bearing the image of vile Communist terrorist and mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara.   So, no, this sort of stupidity on the Left, is not all about the Jews.

 

The second problem is that even when progressive bile is directed towards Israel as it is in these pro-Hamas demonstrations it is not against Jews qua Jews.   There is an element of racial hatred in it but that racial hatred is not directed against Jews as distinct from everyone else.   It is directed against Jews as white people.    Some might object to that statement on the grounds that not all Jews are white, Jewishness being primarily a religious identity.   Others, including some Jews who hate whites and Christians and some whites who don’t like Jews, would make the polar opposite objection that in their opinion no Jews are white.   These wildly differing objections aside, my statement is nevertheless true.   The hatred the immature, idiotic, Left is displaying towards Israel is the same hatred they display towards all Western countries, i.e. countries that lay claim to the heritage of Greco-Roman, Christian, white European, civilization, and to the extent that there is a racial element it is that which is on display almost ubiquitously on university campuses in the form of the claim that “whiteness” is a cultural and civilizational cancer that must be “abolished”.   The language used against Israel is the same language used against Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and basically any country and society settled and built by Europeans as an extension of Western civilization.   The only difference is that in this case the settlers were Jews rather than Christians.

 

It is not therefore a case of anti-Semitism.   Anti-Semitism and its counterpart Zionism began around the same time in the nineteenth century.   Both were the result of “Enlightenment” philosophy’s war against God, revelation, religion and faith.  For centuries Christians and Jews had been at odds over a religious issue.   We, rightly, believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah promised in the Old Testament.   They, wrongly, reject Jesus as the Christ.   This was not an insurmountable divide.   Any Jew could become a Christian by believing that Jesus is the Christ and being baptized into the Church.   The “Enlightenment” brought about a loss of faith on both sides but this did not eliminate the divide.   Instead, post-Christian Gentiles and secular Jews began to regard their division as being based on biological racial differences.   Division on this basis is insurmountable.   You cannot change your race.   At least, you couldn’t until the whole “I’m whatever gender, sex, race, species, I want to be” garbage started up in the last few years.   The expression of this idea of an insurmountable race divide was anti-Semitism on the part of post-Christian Gentile Europeans and Zionism on the part of secular Jews.   In the early days of both movements they supported each other.   Each believed that the racial differences between Jew and Gentile prevented them from living in peace together, therefore the solution was for them to live in peace apart.    Whatever else might be said about this way of thinking it is clear that the animosity directed towards the Jews of Israel on the part of the pro-Hamas progressive demonstrators is not this anti-Semitism.   It is based, indeed, on the very opposite concept – that the Jews are fundamentally one with other Western Europeans rather than being fundamentally divided from them by race or even religion.

 

Just in case you mistake this as an attempt to white-wash the progressives, let me assure you my intention is quite the reverse. The progressives’ anti-Israel position arises out of a far more pernicious attitude than mere anti-Semitism.   It arises out of the hatred that is at the very heart of leftism. 

 

The Left is the openly revolutionary form of liberalism.   Sometimes liberalism tries to hide its revolutionary nature behind a mask of reform, of working within the institutions of civilization to accomplish its goals, but when that mask is removed what you get is the Left.   The Left, therefore, is the true face of liberalism, and that face is one of revolution and sedition.   Liberalism is not a constructive force but a destructive force.  In its earliest recognizable form it began as an attack on Christendom or Christian civilization, the heir to classical Greco-Roman civilization.   Its first targets were kings who are the earthly political representatives of the King of Kings Who rules over all of Creation, and the Church, the corporate body of Jesus Christ in which His Incarnational presence is sacramentally continued after His Ascension to the right hand of the Father.   In attacking God’s earthly representation in this way liberalism revealed that its ultimate hatred is of God Himself.   Liberalism is essentially the earthly continuation of Satan’s revolt against God.   After attacking king and Church, liberalism launched its siege on every other tradition and institution of Christian civilization.   From what we have just seen about liberalism’s essential nature its hatred of civilization is entirely explicable.   Liberalism hates kings because they are the earthly representation of God’s Sovereign rule over Creation.   Liberalism hates the Church because the Church is the earthly representation of Christ’s priestly intercession in Heaven.   Liberalism hates civilization because civilization is the product of man as builder and it is in his capacity as builder that man most displays the image in which man was created, the image of God the Creator.

 

That is the hatred that is on display whenever the progressive Left blithers on and on about “colonialism” and “imperialism”.   Man, in his fallen estate, is incapable of building a perfect civilization.   Imperfect civilization, however, is better than no civilization at all.   The Left is no more capable of building a perfect civilization than the builders of the past it is always decrying, sometimes for their real sins but more often for new offences they just made up yesterday, and the Left is not interested in trying to build a perfect civilization.  It is only interested in tearing down the civilization others have built.   It claims to be speaking out for “victims”.   Sometimes the “victims” are people who have suffered actual harm in some way from civilization building.   Other times, they are merely those who have not shared equally in the benefits of civilization with others.   Either way, the Left’s idea that civilization must be razed, its history erased, and its builders “cancelled” and defamed is hardly the answer and in the support they are now showing for the despicable acts of murderous terrorists they show that their motivation is not genuine concern for those who have not fared as well from civilization as others, but a Satanic hatred of civilization builders, for representing, even in an imperfect way, the image of the Creator God.

 

That is a far more vile form of hatred than the extremely banal one of which the neoconservatives are accusing them.

What Word Would You Use?

What word would you use to describe a government that loudly proclaims its belief in and commitment to “democracy” but governs with contempt for the institution of Parliament and the idea that it, that is the government in the sense of the Cabinet of executive ministers, is accountable to Parliament for all of its actions and displays this same contempt regardless of whether it commands a majority or a small plurality in the House of Commons?   

 

What if that same government, while constantly evoking the “common good” when demanding total submission and obedience to every rule, regulation, and restriction it imposes even if these blatantly violate, and not in any way that could objectively be called reasonable or minimal, the most basic of the rights and freedoms that are supposed to be protected by constitutional law, conspicuously governs in a way that rewards those who tend to vote for it and punishes those who tend to vote against it?  

 

Let us say, for example, that a Liberal government on the one hand got itself embroiled in a huge corruption scandal for putting pressure on its Justice Minister to interfere in an ongoing prosecution on behalf of a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party located in the home province of the Prime Minister, and on the other hand did everything in its power to sabotage the energy industry of the province(s) least likely to elect Liberals to Parliament.      Let us add that this same Liberal government in the name of combatting the gun violence that is primarily a problem in urban areas that vote Liberal or NDP, introduced a new gun ban that was completely useless for that purpose in that urban gun violence is almost entirely committed with already illegal handguns, but, like most previous Liberal gun legislation, primarily affected rural gun owners who tend not to vote Liberal or NDP.    Let us also add that this Liberal government keeps targeting parts of the population – like pickup truck owners and prairie grain farmers – who traditionally vote against the Liberals with its tax policies.

 

In other words it displays utter disregard for that grand traditional principle of Parliament that it is the duty of those who hold executive office in government to serve all Canadians – this is what the common good is supposed to mean and what it was traditionally understood to mean – rather than favouring their own supporters, and especially not punishing those who voted against them.   Note that hindering the government from giving in to the temptation to do the latter is a major part of the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and of the reason why Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is an official standing in Parliament and not just a label for the runner-up in the last Dominion election.

 

Suppose that the same government was led by a Prime Minister who refuses to take action when protests conducted in the name of causes that he and his followers support such as the various causes associated with the Green movement or those of the so-called anti-racist – in reality anti-white would be a more accurate description – movement disrupt commerce, movement, and the everyday lives of numerous Canadians or even break out into violence and other destructive criminal behaviour.    Suppose that this same Prime Minister likes to lecture the governments of other countries on the need to allow peaceful protest and to listen to people who disagree with them.   Then suppose that this same Prime Minister, when faced with a protest against his government’s policies and actions and how they have infringed upon Canadians’ basic rights and freedoms and adversely affected the lives and livelihoods of the protesters and countless others, even though the protest is far more deserving of the adjective “peaceful” than any of those that the Prime Minister supports, instead of listening to them hides himself away and like a tantrum-throwing three year old hurls every nasty name he can think of against them, before bringing out the biggest tool available to the government, one designed for use against terrorism and never before used in its current form, essentially putting the country under martial law, in order to crack down hard on the protesters.    While all of this is still expanding upon our initial and primary question it is worth adding a second question here of whether, when this Prime Minister sets up an inquiry into his own just mentioned actions, we can expect this to be impartial and its results credible.

 

Now suppose that immediately after the events described in the previous paragraph the same Prime Minister goes on a foreign tour in which he lectures other leaders about the dangers of a rise in “authoritarianism”.   In his usage, “authoritarian” appears to describe leaders and movements he doesn’t like, whereas “democratic” appears to mean little more than leaders and movements he does like, and the purpose of the lectures would seem to be to encourage the governments of the world to join him in an attempt to recklessly escalate a volatile situation in a volatile part of the world that the Americans had foolishly been fomenting for years into something much worse.   Meanwhile, while condemning “authoritarianism” – again, meaning little more than those whose politics he disagrees with – his own governance displays many of the characteristics of totalitarianism.

 

The distinction between “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism” was made by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would soon thereafter serve as American ambassador to the UN during the Reagan administration, in an article entitled “Dictatorships and Double Standards” that appeared in the flagship journal of American neo-conservatism, Commentary, in November of 1979 and was later expanded into a book that came out in 1982.   While the Kirkpatrick Doctrine is vulnerable to many of the same objections that could be made against American neo-conservatism in general, the distinction is not without merit.    The basic distinction is that an “authoritarian” government claims a monopoly on political power in the country it governs, but a “totalitarian” government claims a monopoly on every aspect of the country – political, economic, social, cultural – and the lives of those it governs.    Consequently, an authoritarian government, while bossier and far less tolerant of dissent than Western liberal democracies are – or like to think they are at any rate – does not attempt to dictate the every thought of those they govern, like a totalitarian regime.   People living under an authoritarian government were thought to be far less free than people living in a liberal democracy but far more free than people living in a totalitarian police state.   Programming the public to think a certain way about everything, spying on everyone’s every move, basically everything out of George Orwell’s 1984, these are the hallmarks of totalitarianism.   The term first caught on as a convenient way of describing the characteristics shared by both the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and the Fascist and National Socialist regimes in Italy and Germany.

 

Totalitarian governments like to rely upon fear to keep their populations under control.   Related to this, one of their favourite tactics to use against dissenters is scapegoating.   Scapegoating is when they point to an identifiable group of dissenters – it works best if the group is small and unpopular – and blames this group for whatever ills are afflicting the population, with these ills often being in reality the fault of the government, and tell the public that “they” are to blame, that these “spoilers” are the reason the regime’s grand and glorious programs aren’t working out as planned.   By doing this the totalitarian regime is able to identify its own enemies in the public mind as “enemies of the people” and turn the public’s fear against them.

 

Let us now return to the Liberal Prime Minister we had been discussing.   Let us imagine that this individual won the first term of his premiership in a Dominion election in which he accused his Conservative predecessor of employing the “politics of fear and division”.  The implication was that it was fear of ethnic and racial diversity and immigration that he was accusing the previous government of in which case the accusation was entirely groundless as that government was similar to his own on such matters.  The public did have good reason to think of the previous Conservative Prime Minister as engaging in the politics of fear in that he had exploited the fear of terrorism to pass a bill making it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on Canadians.   The Liberal leader, however, had been the only other party leader in Parliament to support this bill.   Perhaps his talk about the “politics of fear and division” was just an empty smokescreen.  

 

When it came to his own premiership, however, “the politics of fear and division” could be said to be its feature characteristic.   As one of the new “woke” breed of progressives, he has stoked the fear of such things as racism – racism on the part of whites, he doesn’t care about explicit and even violent racial hatred directed against whites by other people – sexism, homophobia, and more recently transphobia – in order to turn Canadians who have the “correct” opinions on such matters, i.e., those approved by the media and academic left, against Canadians who do not.   When the media generated an unnecessary panic over the spread of a new coronavirus he exploited the situation to get out from under the constraints of Parliamentary accountability which ordinarily would be enhanced by his having been reduced to minority status in the last Dominion election only a few months prior.   He made use of this new situation to spend like a drunken sailor, paying Canadians to stay home for months, so the provincial governments and their public health officers could follow the advice of the Dominion public health officer, which was to implement the experimental procedure of trying to control the spread of the virus by keeping everybody apart.   When this didn’t work, he scapegoated those who objected to the unprecedented curtailing of all our basic rights and freedoms.    Then, when the new mRNA injections were available, he, flip-flopping completely on his original stated position that they would be available to those who wanted them but nobody would be compelled to take them, jumped on board the idea of returning to most Canadians most of their rights and freedoms, converted by the whole process into permissions and privileges, while locking those who had refused the injection – or the required number of injections – out of the new re-opened society in a way that resembles nothing so much as the whole “show me your papers” trope from depictions of Cold War era totalitarian regimes.   His scapegoating of those who refused the injection – those, remember, who are distinguished from other Canadians only by the fact that they were not willing to give the government their unthinking, blind, trust and allow themselves to be injected with a never-before-used-on-humans substance that had not completed its clinical trials merely because the government said it was safe and was heavily pressuring them into taking it – was in language that we would normally associate with how the Bolsheviks talked about the kulaks, or the Nazis about the Jews.   Accusing them of all sorts of “isms” that had nothing to do with the issue, he suggested that we should be asking ourselves as a society whether we should be tolerating them in our midst.   Bizarre as may be to compare something said about the ultra-individualist Ayn Rand to this collectivist creep, his comment nevertheless brings to mind something Whittaker Chambers said in his famous review of Atlas Shrugged in the December, 1957 issue of National Review: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber-go!’”

 

Now suppose this Prime Minister also conspicuously displays another totalitarian characteristic – the urge to control what everyone else thinks.   Indeed, let us further stipulate that this trait was evident in his leadership of his own party before he even became Prime Minister.    Declaring by fiat that the debate about abortion was settled and over – a rather strange way of describing a status quo that exists merely because Parliament narrowly failed in the Mulroney premiership to follow the Supreme Court’s recommendation that it pass new abortion laws to replace those it was striking down and no subsequent government has had the gumption to do anything about despite the fact that there is overwhelming public support for neither the status quo nor the status quo ante – he forbade pro-life members of his own party from voting their conscience on the issue, and refused to sign the nomination papers of any future candidates that did not agree with him on the matter.   It is less surprising, therefore, that a leader who places strict limits on what members of his own party are allowed to think on a controversial issue like this, as Prime Minister would treat the country in the same way.

 

When it comes to Canadians, this not-so-hypothetical Prime Minister is single-mindedly obsessed with controlling both the information that they are allowed to access and the ideas they are allowed to share with others.    When his then-Finance Minister, who shortly thereafter would be forced to resign in disgrace to save the Prime Minister’s skin in a scandal in which both of their families were involved, announced a government bailout of privately owned newspapers, television stations, and other pre-internet media of communication, he declared that this was “to protect the vital role that independent news media play in our democracy and in our communities”.   Predictably, however, it had almost the opposite effect of this.   The newspapers, television stations, etc. that took this money – the vast majority of them – began echoing the same point of view expressed on the CBC overnight and thus could hardly be said to be “independent news media” at all anymore.   The Crown broadcaster itself, which had long been shamefully slanted towards the progressive left and the Liberal party, abandoned even the pretense of the impartiality that Canadians ought to be able to expect from a public, tax-funded, news company and began presenting a narrower range of perspectives on a broader number of issues, one that was coterminous with the spectrum of views the Prime Minister considered “acceptable”.    Yes, this Prime Minister has actually distinguished certain Canadians from others on the grounds that their views were “unacceptable”.    Unsatisfied, however, with over 90% of the Canadian media, public and nominally private, echoing his own point of view, the Prime Minister has taken a hostile, combative attitude towards the few media outlets that present an alternative perspective, thus displaying his true attitude towards “independent news media”.

 

The independent news media that resist conforming to the Prime Minister’s party line are primarily those that operate on the internet.    Before the last Parliament was dissolved the government had introduced a bill that would give the CRTC the same kind of regulatory control over the internet that it already has over radio and television.   Although they pitched this as a means of making streaming services and social media abide by the same Canadian content rules as traditional broadcasting media, it was clearly worded in such a way as to give the CRTC the power to censor online opinions which the government has deemed to be “unacceptable”.   The main target of this, and the government’s more overt attempts at licensing independent media, seems obviously to be the handful of online news companies that have a perspective independent of and often hostile to the Prime Minister’s own.   The government also failed to assuage the concerns of those who feared that the government was trying to tell individual Canadians what they could and could not say when using social media.   Although they insisted that they were not trying to regulate user generated content, they kept removing safeguards against this very thing.   They had also tabled a bill that would re-introduce something similar to Section 13.   Section 13 was the provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act that allowed those who belonged to groups protected against discrimination – although the Act is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects everybody against discrimination on the basis of their race, sex, etc., it has been generally interpreted by the courts as protecting certain groups that are “vulnerable” rather than others, i.e., blacks but not whites, women but not men, etc. – to charge others with discrimination on the basis of words they had communicated over the telephone or over the internet.   It was so loosely worded that virtually anything negative said about someone from a protected group would fall under the umbrella and so a conviction was pretty much guaranteed.   Parliament repealed it after the public became aware of how bad it was.   The proposed replacement would be even worse in that it would allow for a court order to be taken out against someone before he had even said anything.    Both of these bills were re-introduced after the government won re-election.   The new versions are worse than the ones that failed to become law in the last session of Parliament.

 

As if all that were not thought control enough, among many other non-budget related items included in this year’s federal budget – the turning of budget bills into omnibus bills ought to have been banned decades ago, it is far too easy a way for government to smuggle things into law that would not withstand Parliamentary scrutiny and debate if introduced separately on their own merits – was a provision that would criminalize publicly expressing an opinion that disagrees with that of the Prime Minister about historical events of eighty years ago.   To be more precise it will criminalize the denial, condoning, and diminishing of the Holocaust.  Germany, France, and a number of other European countries had introduced similar laws decades ago but this was a very bad example to follow.  (1)  It is not government’s place to tell people what they can and cannot think or say about historical events.   When they attempt to do so they merely set up their understanding and interpretation of the historical event as a dogma in a new state religion.   The very expression “Holocaust denial” illustrates the point.  (2)  When someone denies that a historical event took place this may, depending upon the evidence for the event, call into question his intelligence, but “Charge of the Light Brigade Denial” is an expression that would not carry the moral undertones that “Holocaust denial” does.   This tells us that to those who are obsessed with condemning the latter it involves the denial of an essential tenet of faith.     Yet it is an essential tenet of neither any orthodox form of Christianity nor Islam.   Nor is it an essential tenet of Judaism in any traditional understanding of that religion.   This was a point that the late academic rabbi Dr. Jacob Neusner frequently made when bemoaning the fact that for many American Jews remembering the Holocaust had replaced remembering Moses, the Exodus and the Sinaitic Covenant at the core of their identity.  (3)  If it is not an essential tenet of any of these religions, it is not an essential tenet of any traditional religion.    Surely members of all traditional religions, the tenets of faith of none of which are similarly protected against denial by law, ought to object to such protection being extended to a new state faith and by the party, none the less, which in Canada has been most historically identified with the American doctrine of “separation of church and state”.   (4) I hope that you note the irony – those who think that the appropriate way of responding to “Holocaust denial” is to pass laws of this sort which essentially boils down to telling people with a view they find loathsome “shut up, shut up, or I’ll make you shut up” by doing so make themselves far more closely resemble the Nazi dictator, at least as he is depicted in Hollywood films, than do those they are attempting to silence. (5)

 

This Prime Minister has a habit of condemning opinions that differ from his as “denial”, thus making his own opinion out to be an essential tenet of faith.   With regards to both the climate and the pandemic, for example, he speaks of those he disagrees with as “science deniers”.   Ironically, of course, since it is the very nature of science not to speak dogmatically – to be scientific at all, a theory must be open to being questioned and tested – “science denier” is an epithet that is only meaningful as it rebounds upon the one who uses it.   More to the point, however, when the same Prime Minister justifies his attempts to squash the few remaining independent Canadian media sources that do not dance to his tune and bring the online platforms where Canadians express their thoughts and speak their minds under government regulatory control on the grounds that the spread of “misinformation” and “disinformation” – information, that is, with which he disagrees and of which he disapproves – online causes “harm”, can there be any doubt that having outright banned one form of “denial”, he is moving in the direction of similarly suppressing all of these “denials” he hates.   He does all of this in the name of liberal democracy, although it looks more and more like totalitarianism every day.

 

As an old-fashioned Tory, of course, who believes in time-proven institutions like the monarchy and Parliament and distrusts abstract ideals like liberalism and democracy, this does not seem as contradictory to me as it would to a neo-conservative, since I see the seeds of totalitarianism in both liberalism and democracy.    In the Prime Minister in question and his sycophantic Cabinet these seeds are rapidly coming to a full bloom.

 

So again, I ask, what word best describes such a Prime Minister and such a Cabinet in which such an appalling combination of self-righteousness, arrogance, hypocrisy, disrespect for the constraints of Parliamentary tradition and constitutional law, and totalitarian impulse can be found?

 

A new one might be needed to really do the matter justice.

 

(1)   It might surprise some to learn that such a law was not already on the books in Canada.   The trials of Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra in the 1980s are among the most famous legal cases involving “Holocaust denial” in history and both took place here in Canada.   In both cases, however, the complaints were based on laws that did not speak about “Holocaust denial” specifically.   In Zündel’s case, for example, the law was Section 181 of the Criminal Code which prohibited the deliberate spread of false news.   He was charged twice under this law, and convicted twice.   The first conviction was thrown out on a technicality, but after the second conviction the Supreme Court struck the law down on appeal as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  

(2)   Both words in the expression contribute to this.   Holocaust is ultimately derived from ὁλόκαυστος, the Greek word for “burnt offering”.

(3)   Dr. Neusner argued that the Holocaust was filling a vacuum created by the abandonment of Jewish traditions, beliefs, and practices on the part of many American Jews.    Indeed, he was talking about this decades before the fact became obvious in polls like the 2013 Pew Research Poll in which “remembering the Holocaust” was identified as the main essential to being Jewish by most of the Jewish American respondents.   He spoke of the theology developing around the historical event as the “Holocaust myth”, which, had he not passed away six years ago, could have rendered him susceptible to prosecution as a Holocaust denier on visits to Canada under the proposed law, although he was using “myth” in an academic sense that has nothing to do with the truth or falseness of the story in question.

(4)   I do not believe in the doctrine of “separation of church and state” in either its Anabaptist or its American form.   On one of the last occasions I spoke with my late friend the Reverend Canon Kenneth Gunn-Walberg, he spoke critically of “conservative” support for “religious liberty”, noting that support for clerical reserves for the orthodox, established, Church was the more authentic Tory position.   I agreed, of course, although I might have pointed out that one of the earliest tracts advocating broad religious liberty, not in the form of Church-State separation but that of tolerance of a wide spectrum of opinion (within the limits of the Apostles’ Creed) within the Church and peaceful co-existence with heterodox sects, was penned by none other than the great Carolinian Divine, the Right Reverend Dr. Jeremy Taylor, who based his arguments upon the demands of the highest of the Christian theological virtues.   That having been said, the American doctrine that has historically been associated mostly with the Liberal Party in Canada (the NDP’s predecessor was a “Social Gospel” party, founded and led by a former Methodist minister J. S. Woodsworth, and while the NDP has moved about as far away from Christianity as possible, its first and most famous leader was a Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas, with other prominent NDP MPs including United Church ministers such as Stanley Knowles and Bill Blaikie), which Liberals in the past have frequently mistaken as part of Canada’s tradition, while theoretically unsound, is much to be preferred to the establishment of left-wing dogma as a new state creed to which no public dissent is tolerated.    This is but one of several examples of older liberal – classical liberal – ideas which, while objectionable from the standpoint of a sounder perspective, are nevertheless preferable to what the newer kind of “liberal” is offering.

(5)  The government is pointing to claims that anti-Semitism is on the rise as its justification for doing this.    Almost 70 Christian church buildings were burned or otherwise vandalized last summer, but I see no action being taken to curb the Christophobia behind this largest single spree of hate crimes in Canada’s history, nor would I expect it from a government that seemed to be doing everything it could to throw fuel on the fire of that hatred.   Nevertheless, suppose we cede for the sake of argument the claim that anti-Semitism is the largest growing hate problem in Canada. Even if we also ceded that outlawing the expression of opinions was capable of justification, a concession I am by no means willing to make, this would be an extremely poor justification for this kind of law.  Similar laws have not prevented a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the European countries that passed them.   I suspect that you will find that the countries which passed such absurd laws are also the countries which have experienced the largest growth in anti-Semitism in the years since the laws were passed.   This is because the sort of progressive mindset that thinks banning “Holocaust denial” is a good thing to do rather than an insane, draconian, attack on freedom of speech that involves persecuting a tiny minority for holding an unpopular opinion, is also the same mindset that thinks bringing in immigrants from all over the world without any sort of screening for cultural compatibility – that would be “racist” to these dolts – is sound policy, and consequently, with floods of immigrants coming in from countries with either a deep-seated cultural animus against the Jews or perhaps just a more recent animosity based upon Middle Eastern conflicts of recent decades, finds its cases of anti-Semitic incidents exploding.   Rather than placing the blame squarely where it belongs, on the latter idiotic policy, they pass the former draconian law in order to scapegoat a tiny minority for the consequences of their own stupidity.    The government expects to get away with this because most people will think something to the effect of “This law will only affect neo-Nazis and who cares, they have it coming.”    That is stupidity at its worst.   Laws that the public accepts on the grounds that they only affect such-and-such a despised group never end up only affecting the group in question.   In this instance, I have already demonstrated (vide supra, footnote 3) how the most respected academic rabbi of the Twentieth Century could have run afoul of this law.   He was hardly a neo-Nazi.   Nor is Dr. Norman Finkelstein, the American academic and pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of “Holocaust denial” although his book The Holocaust Industry makes no revisionist claims about the historical event but rather talks about people whom he sees as exploiting the event (both of his parents had been interred in the Nazi camps, incidentally, his mother in Majdanek, his father in Auschwitz).   It is unlikely that Noam Chomsky’s famous protégé would be prosecuted under the new law should he visit Canada but not out of the realm of possibility.    Almost a decade ago, at a Canadian conservative blog I witnessed a well-known progressive activist and blogger pedantically lecture the others present on the difference between “concentration camps” and “death camps” and how the latter were only on Polish soil.   That is a distinction that is made in every serious and mainstream history class and textbook that deals with the subject but he was accused of “Holocaust denial” for this.   The people making the accusation were not generally ill-informed people and perhaps made the accusation tongue-in-cheek because this man was a noted supporter of banning “hate speech”, but the point is that if something that is part of the mainstream narrative can be confused with “Holocaust denial”, a law against the latter, even if were justifiable to make such a law against those it is intended to be used against which it is not,  makes possible the prosecution of a lot of people who have not committed “Holocaust denial” in the conventional meaning of the phrase.   Ironically, had the United States passed such a law in the 1950s or even 1960s, and had it not been struck down immediately for violating their First Amendment, even if only actual “Holocaust deniers” in the conventional sense of the word were rounded up, if all of them were arrested there would have been more Jews than white supremacists arrested.   At that time, “Holocaust denial”, and World War II revisionism in general of which it is a subset, was most widespread among libertarians for the simple reason that these arch anti-statists recognized that the military expansion the United States underwent in World War II, and which continued after the war because of the Cold War, was a massive expansion of the American central state and therefore a threat to the liberty of American citizens.   Therefore the claims of the American government during that conflict were suspect to them.   There were far more libertarians than Nazi sympathizers, then as now, and a large percentage of libertarians were and are Jewish. 

Fulfilment Theology

South of the border, in the secular, liberal, republic founded by deistic Freemasons almost two and a half centuries ago in the first wave of the Modern Age’s revolution against Christian civilization, their current President, Donald the Orange, besieged by the barbaric and uncivilized forces of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party, has been doing what he does best, which is to make waves. On a side note, allow me to say that although I, as a staunch royalist and monarchist, disapprove of the office of President of the United States, as I do of the offices of all elected heads of state, I am rather inclined to think well of Donald the Orange, if only because, like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon before him, he had all the right enemies.

One item that has recently gotten his critics’ dander up, is his having invited Dr. Robert Jeffress to speak at a White House Hanukkah ceremony in which he, that is Trump, vowed to crush anti-Semitism. Dr. Jeffress is a Southern Baptist minister, the present senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, where he occupies the pulpit that once belonged to such homiletical giants as George Truett and W. A. Criswell. This is the church of which the late evangelist, Billy Graham, was a member for over fifty years.

My question for those who say that it was mal à propos for Dr. Jeffress to be invited to speak at this event is whether or not they would say the same thing if a rabbi were invited to speak at a White House Christmas celebration.

Those who are raising a stink about Jeffress point to his having said the following “Judaism, you can't be saved being a Jew, you know who said that by the way, the three greatest Jews in the New Testament, Peter, Paul, and Jesus Christ, they all said Judaism won't do it, it's faith in Jesus Christ.” Which is, of course, the orthodox Christian view of the matter. Anyone who says he is a Christian and disagrees with this is a heretic.

While it is easy to see why Jews would find this offensive and object, therefore, to someone holding these views being asked to speak at an event honouring an important Jewish festival, let us return to the question I raised. Would it be similarly offensive to invite a rabbi to speak at a Christmas celebration?

It ought to be. Christmas is the Christian festival commemorating the nativity of Jesus Christ, that is, Jesus of Nazareth Whom Christians believe to be the Christ, the Son of God. Christ is a Greek word with the same meaning as the Hebrew Messiah. It means “anointed one” and refers specifically to the One Whom God in the Old Testament promised He would send to deliver Israel, make a New Covenant in which His laws would be written in men’s hearts rather than on tablets of stone, and establish the eternal Kingdom of God in which He will reign on the throne of David. Rabbinic Judaism rejects Jesus’ claim to be the fulfilment of these prophesies. Indeed, the suggestion that this rejection of Jesus as the Christ has for almost two thousand years been more central to the identity of Judaism than any positive affirmation, such as descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the deliverance from Egyptian bondage in the Exodus, or the Covenant made at Mt. Sinai, while controversial, is defensible. According to traditional rabbinic teaching, a Jew doesn’t necessarily cease to be a Jew if he loses all faith in God and becomes an atheist, but he does cease to be a Jew is he is baptized a Christian. Traditionally, when a Jew so converts, his family holds a funeral for him.

If Jeffress’ holding the orthodox Christian teaching that Jesus Christ is the only way to God disqualifies him from being a speaker at a Hanukkah event, then the traditional teachings of rabbinic Judaism ought to disqualify any rabbi from speaking at a Christmas event.

In saying all of this, I am, of course, breaking one of biggest taboos of the day in which we live. It is considered, by the bien pensants of the progressive age, perfectly okay to criticize Christianity and especially for ideas and attitudes, traditions and habits, words and behaviour that are considered, rightly or wrongly, to be anti-Jewish, but it is considered unacceptable to criticize Judaism and absolutely verboten when that criticism points out comparable anti-Christian elements of the Jewish tradition. I have no problem with saying that I have no respect, either for this taboo, or for the people of whatever faith – and this includes plenty of nominal Christians – who impose it upon us.

In this taboo, we see precisely what is wrong with the interfaith “dialogue” that has sprung up between Christians and Jews since 1945. I place “dialogue” in scare quotes because this word suggests a two-way conversation and the “dialogue” in question has been anything but. The talk has been entirely about Jewish grievances against Christianity. Any attempt to raise the question of anti-Christian attitudes and behaviour on the part of the Jews runs the risk of being called “anti-Semitic”.

The blame for this belongs almost entirely on spineless “Christians” who are unwilling to stand up for the faith and cower before any attack. These cowards, although there has been no dearth of respectable and scholarly Jewish leaders who have spoken out against the charge that it was the traditional teachings of the Christian Church that generated the animus against the Jews that ultimately culminated in the Holocaust (1), have no inclination to do the same on behalf of their own professed faith. Instead, they jettison essential Christian truth as they bend over backwards to accept the blame for the crimes of a regime built on an ideology that blended nationalism, socialism, Darwinism, and various other strands of the Modern revolt against Christianity and Christendom with elements of pre-Christian paganism and occult mysticism, the Fuhrer of which, ridiculed the faith among his intimate acquaintances. (2)

The truth these “Christians” wish to throw out is that spoken by Dr. Jeffress in the quotation found in the fourth paragraph of this essay. It is a truth spoken by Jesus Christ Himself. Stated positively, it is the truth that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me”. (John 14:6)

What Dr. Jeffress said was the negative side to this same coin.

Then said Jesus again unto them, I go my way, and ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go, ye cannot come. Then said the Jews, Will he kill himself? because he saith, Whither I go, ye cannot come. And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world. I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins. (John 8:21-24)

Earlier this year at its General Synod, the Anglican Church of Canada passed a contemptible and foolish resolution to replace the fourth prayer in the “Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions” section of the Book of Common Prayer, with a “Prayer for Reconciliation with the Jews”. The prayer it is replacing was entitled “For the Conversion of the Jews” and reads:

O God, who didst choose Israel to be thine inheritance: Look, we beseech thee, upon thine ancient people; open their hearts that they may see and confess the Lord Jesus to be thy Son and their true Messiah, and, believing, they may have life through his Name. Take away all pride and prejudice in us that may hinder their understanding of the Gospel, and hasten the time when all Israel shall be saved; through the merits of the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The prayer that replaces it is for the most part the same, but it replaces “Look, we beseech thee, upon thine ancient people: open their hearts that they may see and confess the Lord Jesus to be thy Son and their true Messiah, and believing, they may have life through his Name” with “Have mercy upon us and forgive us for violence and wickedness against our brother Jacob; the arrogance of our hearts and minds hath deceived us, and shame hath covered our face” and similarly alters the final petition to remove any suggestion that the Jews need to accept the Gospel to be saved.

Twenty-seven years ago, the General Synod had voted to remove the third Collect for Good Friday, from subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer. That Collect had read:

O Merciful God, who has made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live: Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

Oddly, the resolution to replace the Prayer For Conversion of the Jews has met with little outcry from those who rightly opposed the resolution, defeated at the same Synod – although one would think otherwise from the behaviour of many within the House of Bishops – to change the marriage canon to allow for same-sex marriages. Yet, it is arguably a much more serious deviation from orthodoxy. Sexual ethics and the sanctity of marriage, important as they are, occupy a lower tier in the Christian hierarchy of truth than “Jesus Christ is the only way to God.”

Not only, however, has there been little outcry over this but some have actually defended it. The Anglican Planet, for example, a generally orthodox newspaper, in June reposted excerpts from a few articles originally published by the Prayer Book Society of Canada written by the PBS National Chairman Rev. Gordon Maitland and the Rev. Chris Dow, both of whom were involved in the revision. Rev. Maitland, attempts to argue that the change does not actually deviate from the truth that Jesus Christ is the only way to God:

None of this implies that the Prayer Book Society is giving up on mission and witness to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and his saving message of peace and reconciliation for all the world. The three prayers “For the Extension of the Church” in the “Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions” section of the BCP (pp.40-41) are not being altered in any way, and we will continue to pray that our Lord’s Kingdom will be extended and that people will continue to be called into fellowship with Christ in his Church.

In other words “Jesus is still the only way to God, but we want to word it in universal terms, rather than singling any particular group out.” That’s all very well and good but I very much doubt that any but a small minority of those who supported the resolution interpret it this way.

Rev. Dow bases his rationale for the new Prayer upon a repudiation of supersessionism. I will explain the meaning of that word shortly. First, I will observe that at the end of Rev. Dow’s essay, which is worth reading in the full, unabridged version, he notes that the original ending of the new prayer “through thy wellbeloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord” was removed because “Our Jewish consultants for this project felt that this implied that the redemption of the Jewish people is to be achieved through Jesus Christ, thus contradicting the project’s stated aim of renouncing supersessionism.” Since the idea that the redemption of the Jewish people can be achieved other than through Jesus Christ is soul-damning heresy, the admission that the committee capitulated on this point ought to be sufficient grounds for any orthodox Christian to repudiate this project.

Rev. Dow, to his credit, goes on to say:

This raises a vitally important question: can Christian theology ever be entirely nonsupersessionist? In my view, this is doubtful. Though hard and hostile supersessionism must certainly be rejected, it would seem that a much softer, irenic and more theologically sophisticated form of supersessionism is inherent to the claims of the New Testament, which presents Jesus Christ as the long-awaited Davidic Messiah, who died for the sins of the whole world and rose again according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-4), thus fulfilling the Law and the Prophets and inaugurating a New Covenant that emerges from the Old.

The distinction between a “hard” and a “soft” supersessionism is not original with Rev. Dow but is borrowed from Rabbi David Novak. He makes reference to Novak’s having said that the soft form of supersessionism “need not denigrate Judaism” and that Christianity cannot be truly Christian without it. Rev. Dow clearly hopes that the noting of this distinction, affirmation of soft supersessionism and rejection of hard supersession is sufficient to deal with any objections that might arise out of orthodox doctrine. In my opinion, it is not, and what is more, it avoids not only addressing the Christian truth that is being compromised here but also the real problem with supersessionism.

It is time now to define supersessionism. Supersessionism is also known as “replacement theology.” As the alternative label suggests it is the idea that God, in judgement upon the nation Israel for their rejection of Jesus Christ, has nullified His Covenant with them and replaced them as His people with the Christian Church. Those who are comfortable with affirming this idea as just stated would claim support for their position in the Parable of the Vineyard and similar passages. In Rabbi Novak’s terminology this is what would be called hard supersessionism. What he calls soft supersessionism, the idea that the New Covenant is an addition to the Old Covenant rather than a replacement for it, is actually a modified form of dual covenant theology. Dual covenant theology, while increasingly popular due to the spread of the very liberalism that William Law in the Bangorian Controversy had correctly argued was Hoadlyism taken to its logical conclusion, is unacceptable to orthodox Christianity.

There are many orthodox Christians who think that supersessionism is the traditional, teaching of the Church. I would argue, however, that there is a difference between what the Church has traditionally taught and supersessionism as defined above, and that supersessionism is something of a caricature of the orthodox doctrine. Consider again how we defined it above: the idea that God, in judgement upon the nation Israel for their rejection of Jesus Christ, has nullified His Covenant with them and replaced them as His people with the Christian Church. The problem with this doctrine, as stated, is that one could argue that it teaches that God has reneged on all of the promises He made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David, many of which, unlike the Sinaitic Covenant itself, are stated in absolute, unconditional, and eternal terms. Taken this way, it is comparable to teaching that God is about to send another world-destroying flood because of the way His rainbow, the symbol of His promise never to do so again, is currently being misused and abused.

The orthodox Christian doctrine is that not that God has reneged on all of His promises to Israel in the Old Testament but that He has fulfilled them. He promised that He would send them a Messiah, a Saviour of the bloodline of David, and He did precisely that when He sent them – and the world - His Son, Jesus Christ. He promised that He would make a New Covenant with them:

Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jer. 31:31-34)

Jesus declared this promise to be fulfilled when, at His last Passover Seder in commemoration of God’s ancient deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage, following the supper He took up the Cup of Blessing and instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist declaring “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:20).

Now think that through. The passage in the prophet Jeremiah, where God tells Israel that He will make a New Covenant with them, is very clearly a promise of blessing not a warning of judgement. To declare that promise to be fulfilled, therefore, hardly constitutes bad news for Israel. Indeed, it is declared to be good news for Israel – the Good News, that is, the Gospel, which is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16). Furthermore, since the promise of the New Covenant is part of the prophetic writings of the Old Covenant, it would have been breaking the Old Covenant for God NOT to have made the New Covenant. Finally, since the promise of the New Covenant explicitly declares that it would be made “with the house of Israel” this allows for no form of dual-covenant theology in which the Jews find salvation through the Old Covenant, and Gentiles through the New.

The Old Covenant, as St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews (3) clearly explains, was never the instrument of salvation in the sense in which we have been using the word in this essay, that is to say, salvation from sin and its ultimate consequences, but was rather an illustration of it. The descendants of Jacob had grown into the nation Israel while they were held in slavery in Egypt. Their physical bondage in Egypt was figurative of their, and the entire world’s, spiritual bondage to sin. God delivered them from that physical bondage in the events known as the Exodus which are recounted in the Book by that name. This salvation from physical slavery was figurative of how God would save them, and the entire world, from spiritual slavery to sin when His Son, Jesus the Christ, would bear the sins of the nation and the world to the Cross and make full propitiatory satisfaction for them through His death. The Old Covenant, which God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai shortly after the Exodus, looked backward to commemorate this physical deliverance that it might look forward in anticipation to the spiritual deliverance that it signified. The sacrifices it required, of bulls and goats, while they could not take away sin in themselves, depicted the sacrifice that would effectually do so.

On the night of the first Passover, when God sent the Angel of Death to strike down the first born of each Egyptian household in the last of the plagues by which He persuaded Pharaoh to release His people, the Israelites were told to slay a lamb and to mark their doors with its blood. Those in houses so marked would be spared from the visitation of the Angel of Death. This pointed to the day – the same day, as it occurred on the anniversary – when He, Whom John the Baptist described as “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world” would become the true Passover Sacrifice. The blood of that Lamb, applied to the metaphorical doorway of one’s heart when received in faith, spares one from something far worse than the Angel of Death. It spares one from what St. John in the Book of Revelation calls the Second Death – the eternal condemnation which awaits all who meet their death bearing the guilt of their sins. The blood of the true Passover was applied retroactively to all who, before the coming of Jesus Christ, had looked forward to the coming of the Messiah in faith, trusting God’s promise that He would send a Saviour. Since He came and accomplished the salvation of the world, His blood is applied through faith to all who hear the Gospel that He has come, died for their sins, and risen again, and who believe in His name. Whatever uncovenanted mercies we may hope are available to those who through ordinary human means have never heard of Him, it is the unmistakable teaching of the New Testament that those who know His name and reject Him, will, unless they repent of this unbelief and turn to Him in faith, perish in their sins.

There is no sane and rational way in which this doctrine can be said to be unfair to the Jews. Imagine if you will, a father, who on his son’s sixteenth birthday hands him an envelope. The boy opens the envelope and inside there is a card. On the card is the picture of an automobile. Outside in the driveway, the car, which is the real gift, sits parked. The son, thinking the card is his gift, thanks his father, has the card framed, puts it up on his wall, and parks himself in his room in front of it, gazing upon it with admiration. His father tries to explain to him that it is the car, not the card, that is the gift, and to hand him the keys, but he refuses to listen. The car rusts away unused in the driveway. Who in their right mind would say that the son had been treated unfairly?

Jesus Christ was given to the nation Israel as the Messiah they had been promised and to the world in general as the Saviour that we all needed. Furthermore, He was given to Israel on the same terms as He was given to the world, not with a special set of stipulations that stood in their way. Indeed, since Jesus was born into national Israel, lived among the Israelites all His life with the exception of the flight to Egypt in His infancy, called twelve Jews to be the Apostles of His Church, and commissioned them to take the Gospel to Jerusalem, David’s capital, then Judea, once the kingdom of Judah that had remained loyal to the House of David, then to Samaria, where the schismatic northern Kingdom had been located, before finally taking it to the rest of the world, it is clear that they were given preference, first dibs if you will, at accepting the Gospel. Nor has the door ever been shut to them. To the contrary, the famous illustration in the eleventh chapter of Romans compares the covenant of everlasting salvation to an olive tree, to which the natural Israelites are the natural branches, and Gentile believers are wild branches that have been grafted in through faith, saying that while the former, excluding, of course, those of the stock of ancient Israel who actually do believe, have been cut off from the tree temporarily by their unbelief, they can and will be grafted back into the tree when they finally come to believe in Jesus as their Messiah.

It would undoubtedly be more prudent to end on that note, but there is one more point that I feel I must address. In the New Testament, after the conversion of the first Gentiles when St. Peter was sent to Cornelius with the Gospel (4), the Apostolic Church met at the Jerusalem Council as narrated in Acts 15, to debate the question of whether the Gentiles needed to become Jews in order to become Christians. Their ruling was no, and St. Paul, who had become the Apostle to the Gentiles, elaborated the theology behind this in several of his epistles. He stressed the point that the ceremonial elements of the Mosaic Law which had been a wall, setting Israel apart from other nations as a kind of object lesson, which she constantly ignored, that she should not fall into their idolatrous practices, had been removed as such a barrier within the Christian Church. As the Book of Acts makes obvious, even as the Apostles were developing the Christian style of worship – meeting on the day of the resurrection, each week, for example - they, including St. Paul, did not see their ruling that the Gentiles need not be circumcised, eat kosher, etc., as prohibiting them from participating in the worship of Second Temple Judaism. Christian liberty was the doctrine, and it went both ways. Christians were free to follow the diet of the Old Testament and keep its festivals, but they were not required to do so.

In the more-or-less useless “interfaith dialogue”, dominated by progressives from both religions, that sprung up immediately after World War II, those “Christians” who have been bending over backwards to take the blame for Hitler’s atrocities – or the Protestants who have been pointing fingers at the “Catholic”, i.e., Roman Church – it has been argued that in the Patristic period a radical reversal on this Christian liberty was brought about, and the Church began to require that Jews cease to be Jews in order to become Christians.

There is, of course, a degree of truth in this but it is incomplete with no discussion of the radical change in the nature of Judaism that took place towards the end of the first generation of Christians. Jesus, His Apostles, and all the pre-Cornelius Christians had been Jews in two senses of the word. First, they were of the ethnic stock of Israel, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Second, they practiced the religion that would later be designated Second Temple Judaism. (5) This was the religion established by the Old Testament – taking that term to include all the history, including the partial return from exile and the rebuilding of the Temple. This was a national religion – practiced by a people who were bound to each other and to the land in which they lived by the ties that set a people apart as an ethnos – led by the clergy established in the Old Testament, the Levitical priesthood, the national worship of which was focused on the Temple in Jerusalem. Both Christianity and what we call Judaism today began within Second Temple Judaism but Second Temple Judaism itself came to an end in 70 AD, when Titus of Rome sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, half-way through the war that would end three years later when Israel’s last besieged defenders committed suicide as their stronghold in Masada fell, and most of the nation was scattered into diaspora throughout the Empire.

As a consequence of this, the rabbis, who had not been the clergy of Second Temple Judaism but a sort of lay teacher, associated especially with the sect of the Pharisees, became the leaders of those who continued to identify as Jews. Accordingly, their interpretation of the Old Testament has been the defining element of the religion known as Judaism ever since. For this reason it is known as rabbinic Judaism or Talmudic Judaism, the Talmud being the written compilation of rabbinic commentary on the Torah, on their own commentary, on their commentary on their commentary, and so on, starting well back in the intertestamental period. Jesus had participated in this traditional dialogue, as evidenced by St. Luke’s account of the incident when He was twelve and His occasional references to the disputes which were raging between the various rabbinic schools at the time of His earthly ministry, but was also a severe critic of it. In Second Temple Judaism, as we see in the Book of Acts, the rabbis greatly differed among themselves in their attitudes towards Christianity, the most positive in the New Testament record being that of Gamaliel, who had been a mentor of St. Paul before his conversion. After AD 70, the party most hostile to Christianity gained the uppermost hand in the rabbinic school, just as it itself became the top tier of post-Temple Judaism.

The explanation for this is not difficult to find. While Christianity could hardly be blamed for Rome’s actions in the Jewish-Roman War, as it had exactly zero political influence in the Empire at that time, and indeed, for a few centuries after, Jesus Christ Himself has both predicted the destruction of the Temple – see the Olivet Discourse, His references to the destruction of the Temple do not all refer to His own death – and proclaimed it to be an act of divine judgement. (6) When these prophecies materialized, the rabbinic attitude towards the One Who had made them, Whom they had rejected as their Messiah, hardened into hatred. Today, nearly two thousand years later, it is not hard to find rabbis who take a more positive view of Jesus, although obviously not accepting His claims to Messiahship. At the time, however, their descriptions of Him were such that Christians could only describe as blasphemous and their attitude towards His disciples was hardly amicable.

It was this new, strongly anti-Christian version of Judaism, aflame with hatred towards the One Who had prophesied the destruction of their Temple, that was denounced so vehemently by Church Fathers such as St. John Chrysostom. Obviously, this in no way justifies mistreatment of the Jews at the hands of Christians. It does, however, show that negative interaction between the two faiths has hardly been the one-sided affair with Christians bearing the sole blame, that the so-called interfaith dialogue of the present day often implies. Until that is properly acknowledged, no real such dialogue can ever take place.

In the meantime, it is hardly right for Christians to compromise the truth that Jesus Christ is the one and only Saviour of the world. Nor is there any good reason to abandon our prayers for the conversion of the Jews. See what the “Anglican Billy Graham” Marney Patterson had to say about this subject in his excellent book Suicide: The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada? (1998) From the genuine Christian point of view, it is refusing to pray for their conversion and abandoning attempts to evangelize them, which would truly amount to Jew-hatred, not loving them enough to pray that Romans 11 would finally be fulfilled and they would embrace their Messiah.

So Merry Christmas everyone. For all the Jews out there, Happy Hanukkah and may you accept Jesus Christ as your Messiah. After all, we would hate to see you go to hell.


(1) See, for example, the late Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s “Sorting Out Jew Haters” in the March 1995 issue of Chronicles Magazine. “For nearly 20 centuries, faithful Christians have maintained that Judaism died at Calvary, meaning, Jesus Christ replaced Judaism and Christianity superseded it. This is anti-Judaism. Until Vatican II (for Catholicism) and its counterparts in Protestantism, that view prevailed universally. Classify this as the quite familiar theological warfare— all against all in God's name…None of these trivialities changes the world very much. None qualifies as anti-Semitism, because, by themselves or all together, none can have led to the holocaust of World War II... But anti-Semitism is not the same thing as casual bigotry, mere dislike of the unlike, let alone theological animus or a spiteful form of politics.” The most extreme version of the accusation that the Church is to blame for the Holocaust of which I am familiar is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, (2002). Goldhagen was also the author of the earlier Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) which displayed a Teutonophobia that fell just short of saying that the Holocaust was caused by something in the German DNA. Goldhagen’s books have been rejected as vile tripe by serious historians, foremost among them being such Jewish historians as Raul Hilberg, Fritz Stern, and Yehuda Bauer.

(2) See Hitler’s Table Talk, a compilation of his private conversations as transcribed by Martin Bormann, Henry Picker, and Heinrich Heim.

(3) St. Peter in II Peter 3:15-16 makes reference to a Scriptural epistle that St. Paul had written to the same people to whom he was writing. Since St. Peter’s epistles were catholic epistles, written to the churches in general at a time when they were majority Jewish, and all of St. Paul’s signed epistles were written either to particular churches, usually majority Gentile, or specific individuals, the only epistle that St. Peter could have been referring to is Hebrews, identifying it therefore, although it is internally unsigned, as Pauline.

(4) Those who heard the Gospel in a multitude of languages at Pentecost in Acts 2, the “Grecian widows” whose neglect led the Apostles to establish the order of deacons in Acts 6, and the Ethiopian eunich whom St. Philip led to Christ in Acts 8, were all Jews.

(5) The word “Judaism”, or rather its Greek antecedent, was already around at the time, but it was used as a cultural description and only later became the proper name of the religion of the Jews.

(6) See, for example, the Parable of the Vineyard. Note, by the way, that while this hardly leaves room for orthodox Christians to argue that AD 70 was not a divine judgement, the preterist view that it fulfilled all Scriptural prophecy, negating both Romans 11 and all New Testament prophecies of Christ’s literal Second Coming in glory is utter heresy.

Man and Machine: Part Four

The True Lesson of the Holocaust

In 1943, a French history professor who was a socialist, pacifist, and member of the resistance movement in occupied France was arrested by the SS, beaten and interrogated, and sent to Buchenwald, and later to Dora, where he was held until the end of the war in 1945. After the war he resumed teaching, and in 1949 published a book about his experiences in the concentration camps. (1) He followed that up with another book, a year later, in which he strongly criticized the published recollections of other camp inmates for containing inaccuracies and exaggerations. (2) From then, until the end of his life in the late 1960’s, he would write several other books in which he attempted to debunk other historians of the war and criticized several aspects of what had come to be the conventional historical account as being false.

Between the World Wars, a new school of American historians, the most famous member of which was Charles A. Beard, achieved distinction for its re-examination and re-interpretation of history. One member of this school, a professor of history at Columbia University, argued against the then-orthodox view that Germany was solely to blame for the First World War. This professor, like his friend and colleague Beard, was a classical liberal who opposed the growing support in American liberalism, and particularly in the Roosevelt administration, for Wilsonian interventionism and internationalism. As World War II approached, he argued that the Roosevelt administration was determined to drag the United States into another European war, and spoke out against this. (3) After the war, he read the French author’s writings and arranged for English translations to be published in the United States.

Meanwhile, a British autodidactic historian had become an international bestselling author for his first book, a 1963 volume about the Allied firebombing of Dresden. This was the first of many books about World War that were both popularly received and showered with critical acclaim. He focused his research upon the war, and especially the Third Reich, writing biographies of several of the German and Nazi leaders, including his magnus opus, a two-volume biography of Hitler that was released in 1977 and 1978, and was praised by Sir John Keegan as being “certainly among the half-dozen most important books on 1939-1945.” (4) While this historian did not make the same claims in his books that the French and American historians mentioned above had made, he made other controversial assertions and later accepted invitations to speak at conferences organized by those who accepted the accounts of the previously mentioned historians.

Then, in the 1980s, the Canadian government put two men, a Canadian born high school history teacher, and a German born graphic artist who ran a publishing house on the side, on trial for disseminating that French professor’s views. The former was charged under the “hate propaganda” provision that the Trudeau government had added to the Criminal Code, the latter under an older law against spreading false news. The critically acclaimed British historian, asked to testify at the trial of the graphic artist, was banned from Canada. He would later be arrested in Austria and sentenced to prison for his interpretation of history. A French professor of literature was also invited to testify at the trial and back in France would be beaten and hospitalized by thugs, and stripped of his academic position for his acceptance of the same interpretation of history. In the United States a small research institute and publishing firm was bombed by terrorists for the same reason, and back in Canada other terrorists plastered Toronto with maps to the graphic artist’s house and instruction on how to make a primitive bomb. The house was eventually subjected to an arson attack and early in the new millennium the graphic artist, who had relocated to the United States to live with his wife, was arrested by American immigration, turned over to Canadian authorities, ruled to be a danger to our national security in a closed hearing that violated all the fundamental principles our justice system was built upon, then deported to Germany where he stood trial and was sentenced to five years in a German prison for expressing his views on history in Canada.

Surely we all agree that it is morally outrageous that men would be subjected to terrorism, violence, and government persecution for advocating an alternative view of history. Would you still agree if I told you that the men of whom I have been speaking were, in order of first mention, Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes, David Irving, James Keegstra, Ernst Zündel, and Robert Faurisson, and that the small research institute/publishing firm was the Institute For Historical Review? How about if I told you that the history they questioned was the conventional account of the Holocaust? Would you still agree that it is morally outrageous that they be subjected to violence and persecution for advocating an alternate view?

The fact that many people would not agree – or would at least hesitate in agreeing and try to qualify their agreement – demonstrates that the historical occurrence known as the Holocaust is more than just a historical occurrence; it is also a religious dogma. Suppose you were to challenge the conventional history of the United States by claiming that Clint Eastwood was actually president from 1981 to 1989 instead of Ronald Reagan. You would undoubtedly be ridiculed as a nut, but it is highly unlikely that you would be made the target of terrorist violence or subjected to state persecution. That is not the way we customarily treat people who are in error on a point of history, even if the error is huge and ludicrous. That is, however, the way the men mentioned above have been treated. Their dissent from conventional history is treated, not as an error, not as something worthy of ridicule, but as something morally reprehensible and requiring punishment. It is only the rejection of dogma that is considered to be evil, not dissent from history. (5)

Indeed, the very name given to the historical occurrence suggests its elevation to the status of dogma – holocaust is the Greek term for a sacrifice completely consumed by fire, a burnt offering. People like Rassinier, Zündel and Faurisson are called “Holocaust Deniers” by those that would deny them the protection of the rights and liberties enjoyed by others. This term indicates the nature of the offence – the denial of established dogma – for which they are to be stripped of this protection. It is not very informative about the content of what these men claim, nor is it intended to be. (6) Having committed the grievous sin of “denying” the chief dogma of the age, their words contain a moral contagion from which the general public is to be protected, and if a member of the populace wishes to know what these men said that warrants this kind of treatment, they are to be directed not to the contaminated words of the “deniers” themselves, but to the experts who have appointed themselves to the role of protecting both the dogma and the public from the deniers.

My purpose here is not to argue that the holocaust revisionists are right, or that their version of the events of the Second World War is closer to what actually happened than the conventional history. (7) Nor am I trying to make the point that religious dogma is bad. Religion is a basic element of social life. It is the community of worship, and it is the community at worship, and as such performs the function suggested by its Latin root, of binding the community together. Dogma, a core set of beliefs that is collectively held, authoritatively established, dissent from which estranges one to one degree or another from the community, is essential to that function. My point is not even that dogma should not be enforced by the means used against the revisionists, disgusting and distasteful though I find those means to be.

No, the point I wish to make out of all of this is that the Holocaust should never have been made into a religious dogma because as a religious dogma it is being used to teach all the wrong lessons. The Holocaust, like the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union, Red China, and other Communist states, is a product of the Modern Age. The goal of the Modern Age, when it is thought of as a long-term project, was two-sided. It was about the bending of nature and all of creation to the will of man through science. It was also about the emancipation of the will of man from traditional constraints. The scale on which the Holocaust was conducted, and the means by which it was carried out, were made possible by the science and technology of the age of progress. The decision to commit murder on that scale is a decision made possible by the emancipation of the will. The manner in which it was carried out, with all the cold, technical, efficiency of a machine, demonstrates just how much modern technolatry can turn man into an imitation of his own soulless creation, the machine. The lesson to learn from all of this is that we need much of what modern man was willing to give up to obtain the wonders of science and technology to keep us from becoming cold, soulless, machines. Instead, the new secular religion that has elevated the Holocaust into dogma, teaches the exact opposite lesson, that man needs to further throw off the “shackles” of the past, and embrace completely a future of reason, progress, and technology.

Like Judaism and Christianity, the new, unofficial, state religion of what used to be Western civilization, is built upon a special kind of history, or a special view of history, that is usually called by the German word Heilsgeschichte.

Heilsgeschichte, which literally means “salvation history”, is history in which God is the primary figure, working in and through the events of history to accomplish His purpose, the salvation of His people. In the foundational Heilsgeschichte of Judaism, God called Abraham out of the land of the Chaldeans and into the land of Canaan and promised to make a great nation out of his descendants. When those descendants, whom God had brought down to Egypt to escape a famine, had grown to become a people, they were enslaved and oppressed by Egypt’s Pharaoh. God delivered them from that slavery, raising up Moses to lead them out of Egypt into the wilderness of Sinai, where God entered into a covenant with them, in which they agreed to be His people, and He agreed to be their God. If they were faithful and obeyed Him, they would dwell in the land He had promised them in peace, if they were faithless and disobeyed, they would be driven from the land. The central redemptive act in this Heilsgeschichte was the exodus and especially what transpired on their final night in Egypt, when the destroying angel struck down the firstborn in every house in Egypt, passing over the Hebrew homes which had been marked with sacrificial blood. This event is remembered and celebrated every year in the Jewish Passover. It was, not coincidentally, on the Jewish Passover, that the central redemptive act in the Christian Heilsgeschichte took place.

The Hebrew Scriptures, which Christians call the Old Testament, contain promises and prophesies that God will again rescue His people in a way that will overshadow the exodus, that He will send them a deliverer greater than Moses, to establish His kingdom on earth, and that He would then make a newer and better covenant with them, in which He would write His laws upon their hearts rather than tablets of stone. The Christian Scriptures teach that these promises and prophesies have been fulfilled in the Christian Heilsgeschichte, that Jesus Christ was and is the promised Messiah, that the salvation greater than the exodus was accomplished by Christ’s death and resurrection, and that the New Covenant has been established by His blood. Christ’s death and resurrection, together comprise the central event of the Christian Heilsgeschichte, the crucifixion having been understood from the time of the Apostles to be the ultimate act of atonement that the Day of Atonement prefigured, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices that effectively takes away the sins of the world, the true Passover of which the original was a shadow.

Throughout Christian history various “theories of the atonement” have been put forward by theologians. These are explanations of how Christ’s death accomplishes man’s redemption. Although there was no consensus on the matter in the Patristic period, a popular theory that arose during that time was the ransom theory, that Christ’s death was a ransom paid to someone, usually thought to be the devil, who was holding man captive. Anselm, the eleventh century Archbishop of Canterbury was not satisfied with this theory, and so he offered the, well, satisfaction theory of the atonement as an alternative explanation. This theory considers man’s sinful rebellion against God to be an insult to the honour of the Sovereign of the universe, requiring that honour to be satisfied. Christ’s death offers to God that satisfaction. A modification of this theory was the penal substitution theory, taught by the Protestant Reformers, which is closely related to their concept of forensic justification. According to this explanation, the sins of man were transferred to Christ, Who paid the legal penalty for those sins, so that God could in turn transfer His righteousness to the sinner who believes in Jesus, declaring him to be just.

Another theory of the atonement is the moral influence theory of the atonement that was taught by Peter Abelard in the twelfth century. According to this theory, the atonement works through the positive example of the humility and love displayed by Christ, which inspires others to follow that example and change their lives. Outside of liberal circles this is generally considered to be the weakest explanation of the atonement but it is of particular significance to our discussion because the Holocaust is to the Heilsgeschichte of the new religion what the atonement is to the Christian and the way it is supposed to operate is best explained as a backwards version of the moral influence theory. Whereas in the moral influence theory of the Christian atonement it is the good example of the Victim that brings salvation by inspiration emulation, in the inverted version of the theory that is the Holocaust it is the bad example of the perpetrators that brings salvation by inspiring shock and horror and turning people away from the evils that brought it about.

As Judaism was built upon the foundation of God’s historical deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt, and as Christianity was built upon the foundation of God’s redemption of the world from sin in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so the new state religion of what used to be Christendom is built upon the foundation of the idea that in the Holocaust the depravity and perversity of prejudice and hatred was manifested in such a way as to make mankind collectively declare “never again.” (8) While many Western governments have banned the teaching of Christian doctrine in state sponsored schools, all children in Western countries are now catechized in the lessons of the Holocaust from an early age. The new faith has erected sacred monuments all over the Western world. One is currently being constructed at the Forks in the heart of Winnipeg, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, a horrendous and hideous eyesore of postmodern architecture scheduled to open sometime next fall. The European Parliament and most European national governments have passed laws protecting the tenets of the new religion. Inquisitions have been created to root out and punish heretics. Some of these, like the Canadian Human Rights Commission are official institutions, formally established by the state with government powers. Others, like the Anti-Defamation League, are private institutions.

The regime that historically perpetrated the Holocaust exemplified several different kinds of evils. It was, for example, noted for suppressing dissent and silencing critics of the regime. Clearly, however, these are not among the evils to which “never again” applies. People have been given heavy fines and even sentenced to prison for expressing disagreement with the conventional history of the Holocaust while books putting forth arguments for why that history should be revised have been taken off library shelves, stopped at the border, and presumably burned. So some of the evils of the Third Reich are now actually committed in the name of the Holocaust and its lessons, against those who dare to dissent from the new faith!

If the new state religion of the West teaches that the Holocaust is an act of redemption that has superseded both the Jewish exodus and the Christian atonement and that it has done so by horrifying the world with the consequences of evil, the evil from which the world is thereby supposed to be delivered would appear not to include every kind of evil or even every kind of evil associated with the Third Reich. This means that it must be a specific evil or a specific set of evils. We do not have to look far to discover what that specific evil is, for it is emphasized every time a moral lesson is drawn from the Holocaust. The evil in question is prejudice.

There is a reason the teachers of the new religion have focused on prejudice over such other evils of the Third Reich as the evil of the police state or the evil of suppressing dissent. Prejudice is the faculty of the human mind that forms conclusions when the grounds for making a purely rational judgement are lacking. In the absence of such grounds, the mind forms its conclusions from information accumulated in the home and in the community from the opinions and actions of those we love and trust and who are closest to us. Since nobody can live their entire life based entirely upon purely rational judgments, prejudice is a necessary human faculty and is not intrinsically evil. It can err and be corrupted – but then so can reason. In its worst form prejudice is a dislike for other people over differences such as race and religion that hinders one from treating such people with justice. While this latter kind of prejudice is what the teachers of the new religion focus on when they condemn prejudice, their prejudice against prejudice arises out of the basic modern desire to see human life and the world in general organized according to patterns drawn up by pure reason. Thus they make the Holocaust into a warning, not just against corrupted and perverted prejudices, but against prejudice in general, and of all forms of thought that are neither modern nor strictly rational. They view ideas, sentiments, opinions, and feelings, formed in the home and drawn from tradition and culture with suspicion as the kind of thing that led to the Holocaust, and look to educational institutions administered by the state to root these ideas out and implant correct, rational, modern thought into young people.

This is exactly the wrong way of looking at it. Mankind was not made to live in a world built upon pure reason and he would find such a world, could it be built, which of course it cannot, to be utterly unlivable. It is natural for a man to be prejudiced in favour of the people he is closest to – his family, friends, neighbours, relatives, countryman over people who are strangers to him and there is nothing wrong with this prejudice so long as we remember that we have a basic duty to treat all men with justice and common decency. Nazi racial doctrine, far from being an exaggerated form of this prejudice, was instead the product of the modern era, of modern science, and of the modern unleashing of the will to power. The Nazi concept of race was the modern scientific concept. Traditionally, when a man spoke of his race he meant his immediate line of ancestors, not a large category of mankind, transcending national boundaries, and differentiated from other men by a shared set of physical characteristics. The latter concept was generated by the modern scientific compulsion to classify and to categorize everything. The Nazi idea of life as a struggle between the races for survival and domination is Darwinian.

Even Nazi anti-Semitism was a product of modernity and not merely a survival into the modern era of negative thoughts and feelings pre-modern Christians may have had towards the Jews based upon the longstanding mutual mistrust of Christians and Jews towards one another. As Dr. Jacob Neusner explained, anti-Semitism was a new phenomenon, and not the same thing as “casual bigotry, mere dislike of the unlike, let alone theological animus or a spiteful form of politics”, none of which could have caused the Holocaust. He wrote:

A political philosophy formulated in the world of late 19th-century Germany and Austria, anti-Semitism formed the ideological foundation of political parties and served as the basis for public policy. It provided an account of life and how the Jews corrupt it. It offered a history of Western civilization and how the Jews pervert it. It formulated a theory of the world's future and how the Jews propose to conquer it. (9)

There is a certain irony in the fact that by insisting that the Holocaust demonstrates the need for us to adapt a more rationally ordered, modern way of thinking, the new religion of the West is actually demanding that we embrace even further the kind of thinking that made the Third Reich and the Holocaust possible.

There is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, for those willing to learn it. The lesson is not that that we need to abandon prejudice for pure reason and embrace a modern way of thinking. If anything it is the exact opposite of that. The lesson contained in the Holocaust is a warning about the dangers of modernity, the dangers inherent in combining the pursuit of power through technical efficiency with emancipation from traditional constraints upon the exercise of the will. This is a lesson that can only be learned by placing the Holocaust in its proper historical context and not by elevating it out of that context and into the realm of Heilsgeschichte.

The Third Reich was an extremely modern regime that strove to re-organize German society, industry, government, and military the top down in order to maximize technical efficiency. It is this aspect of the Reich that her remaining apologists like to emphasize – “Hitler made the trains run on time”. It was notably on display early in the Second World War when the Germans used the Blitzkrieg tactic to quickly overrun their enemies.

Germany had been striving for technical efficiency long before the National Socialists came to power. In the early seventeenth century, Sir Francis Bacon wrote a treatise outlining a new methodology for learning about nature and the world. (10) He believed that the knowledge thus obtained would be the means for obtaining control over nature and the world. (11) Putting his ideas into practice, Great Britain obtained tremendous wealth and power over the next couple of centuries. The desire to emulate these achievements lay behind the nineteenth century unification of Germany, her industrialization, and her early twentieth century imperial ambitions. That this desire for scientific knowledge, technical efficiency, and the wealth and power that came with these things had entered into the German soul and become a national dream, was symbolically represented in literature as early as Goethe’s Faust.

Goethe himself was a representative of an earlier type of German civilization, one with roots in classical antiquity and medieval Christianity, that made the transcendental universals of goodness, truth, and beauty its ends, rather than science, technology, wealth, and power, and which found its highest expression in literature, music, and art. Today, looking back upon this civilization, it is often asked how the people of Bach, Haydn, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven could, less than two full centuries later, have chosen a gang of murderous, power worshipping, thugs as their government. Part of the answer must be Original Sin, that human depravity that is always there, just beneath the surface of even the highest of human civilizations, waiting to break forth in barbarism. The rest of the answer, however, is to be found in the Mephistophelean temptation of technical efficiency and the power it brings.

In Adolf Hitler and his cronies, the Germans found someone who promised both the final fulfilment of their century old dream of industrial wealth and empire and revenge for the humiliation that had been unjustly inflicted upon them by the victorious Allies after the First World War In power, the National Socialists set out to deliver on those promises. If technical efficiency is the use of scientific knowledge of nature and the world to make these most completely serve the will of man, the Nazis, who recognized no moral or other constraints upon that will and saw the efficient exercise of that will as essential to winning the struggle against other races, were more prepared than any other government to make full use of that efficiency. It is appropriate that the most memorable piece of Nazi propaganda, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film about the Nuremberg Rallies of the previous year, was entitled The Triumph of the Will.

In the Holocaust, you see the ultimate example of technical efficiency in service to a will that itself recognizes no limitations and no Master. The decision to terminate the existence of millions of people is made, an effective plan for doing so is drawn up, the means to carry out the plan is devised, and the system, from the railways that carried the prisoners to the concentration camps, to the gas chambers that killed them, and the ovens that disposed of the bodies, is put into place and set in motion, as one giant factory of death. Apart from the modern way of thinking and doing things, the subordination of nature to the will of man, and the emancipation of the will of man from the transcendental order of things, no amount of prejudice or even bigotry could have brought about the Holocaust. Furthermore, as the history of the Soviet Union and other Communist nations, whose ideology, whatever their practice, was officially egalitarian, shows, the combination of technical efficiency with an unfettered will, will produce large scale human atrocities apart from any official racial doctrines or hatreds.

It may have occurred to you that this modern way of thinking is exactly what our own liberal, democracies, have in common with Nazi Germany and the Communist powers and that if anything, it has grown even stronger in the decades since the Second World War. But don’t worry about that. Our governments would never allow themselves to become cold, soulless, machines and always treat people with justice and humanity.

Just ask Ernst Zündel.



(1) Crossing the Line.
(2) The Lies of Ulysses
(3) He died in 1968. His friend, libertarian economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard, wrote a detailed obituary that appeared in the final issue of Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought and can be read here: http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard165.html

(4) John Keegan, The Second World War, (New York: Penguin Books, 1989) p. 596.
(5) Sometimes this point is disputed by the claim that the revisionists are motivated by a desire to rehabilitate National Socialism. The Nizkor Project, for example, on its main website asks “Given the evidence why do people deny the Holocaust?” They then answer the question with a quote from the National Socialist White People’s Party “The real purpose of holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again.” While clearly this is true in the case of the NSWPP themselves, it is absolute nonsense to suggest that such was the motivation of Paul Rassinier and Harry Elmer Barnes. Rassinier had been a leader of the Libération-Nord, the French resistance movement against the Nazis, and among his anti-Nazi activities prior to his capture by the Gestapo, he smuggled Jews to safety in Switzerland. Harry Elmer Barnes was a classical liberal, i.e., what would today be called a libertarian. Neither man possessed the slightest sympathy with National Socialist ideology and it is libelous to suggest otherwise. Barnes was a noted Teutonophile and if anything clouded his reason it was this. It is dishonest to equate a love of German culture and the German people with sympathy for the policies, practices, and ideology of the Third Reich, however. Teutonophilia is common, if not universal, among holocaust revisionists. John Sack, an American author, journalist and war correspondent of Jewish ethnicity and moderate, centrist political views was invited to address the conference of the Institute for Historical Review in 2000. He went, and in February 2001 his account of his experiences there was published in Esquire under the title “Daniel in the Deniers Den”. As he told the story, he went there prepared to encounter a conference full of hateful anti-Semites but found no trace of hatred or anti-Semitism. In his words “All in all, the deniers that day and that weekend seemed the most middling of Middle Americans. Or better: despite their take on the Holocaust, they were affable, open-minded, intelligent, intellectual. Their eyes weren’t fires of unapproachable certitude and their lips weren’t lemon twists of astringent hate. Nazis and neo-Nazis they were certainly not.” What did he think was their motivation? “Most deniers, most attendees in their slacks and shorts at the palm-filled hotel, were like Zündel: were decent people who, as Germans, had chosen to comfort themselves with the wishful thinking that none of their countrymen in the 1940s were genocidal maniacs” You can read Sack’s essay, which was selected by Stephen Jay Gould for republication in Best American Essays 2002, here: http://www.johnsack.com/daniel_in_the_deniers_den_1.htm My own impression of every holocaust revisionist that I have ever met has been in accord with Sack’s assessment.
(6) The phrase “Holocaust Denier” suggests that the person to whom it is applied claims that the entire history of the Holocaust was faked just as some people claim that the moon landing was faked. In fact, what they actually claim is that the total number of Jews killed was significantly less than six million and that wartime concentration camp conditions were the primary cause of death, rather than a systematic plan of racial extermination.
(7) Nor is my purpose to explain where and why they are wrong. My thesis concerns the moral lessons that have been drawn from the Holocaust and how they differ from the moral lessons that ought to have been drawn from the Holocaust.
(8) I have used terminology drawn from the history of Christian theological reflection upon the atonement to describe the role of the Holocaust in the new religion that has replaced Christianity in what used to be Christendom. Today, in former Christendom, questioning the sacred number of six million, for the victims of the Holocaust, will usually produce a stronger emotional response, even among those who purport to be faithful, believing, and practicing Christians, than, a denial of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There has been much discussion of the theological significance of the Holocaust among the theologians of Judaism who, obviously, conduct their discussion using Jewish theological terminology. Dr. Emil Fackenheim, who escaped from the Third Reich to Britain, moved to Canada after the war and became a rabbi, and eventually made aliyah to Israel towards the end of his life, said that a 614th Mitzvah (commandment) had arisen out of the Holocaust, i.e., to remain faithful to Judaism and God, and so deny Hitler any posthumous victories. Other rabbis believe that the Holocaust requires a radical, reworking of Judaism’s picture of God, perhaps along the lines of the “God is dead” and “process theology” movements among liberal Christian churches. Most relevant to our discussion here, are the observations that distinguished academic rabbi Jacob Neusner has made regarding the role of the Holocaust in American Judaism. In the preface to his American Judaism – Adventure in Modernity: An Anthological Essay, (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1978) he said that the “story of Holocaust-and-redemption, destruction and rebuilding, or death and resurrection (to use the appropriate religious terms)” had become “the central myth of American Jewish consciousness over the past ten years”. It had not figured much into American Jewish consciousness in the 1950’s and 1960’s, he said, but the 1967 War had changed that when a large number of American Jews perceived the nations of the world as having reneged on their promises to Israel, believed the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people to be imminent, then, when Israel triumphed, regarded it as divine redemption. Dr. Neusner was less than impressed with the changes that the new Holocaust-and-Redemption theology brought to American Judaism. He believed that it had led Jews to embrace things that they had traditionally been sceptical of such as messianism and political salvationism. “Judaism, in its theologians’ eyes’”, he wrote “is a religion of the present and the future, affirms life and looks not to Auschwitz but to Sinai. But the Judaism of Sinai was not much heard from. Hitler was represented as a negative symbol, rather than Moses as a positive one. So Jews were told to be Jewish not because God has called them into being, but in order ‘to spite Hitler’”.
(9) Jacob Neusner, “Sorting Out Jew Haters”, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, March 1995, p. 40.
(10) Sir Francis Bacon, Novum Organum Scientiarum, 1620.
(11) Sir Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, 1627. The purpose of Salomon’s House, the institution of research and learning depicted in this utopian novel, is “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”



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