Global Village Burning: Humanitarian Totalitarianism, Totem & Taboo

Stories We Tell Ourselves, or Stories We Are Ourselves, Part 12

“The challenge today is to restore the Nazi holocaust as a rational subject of inquiry. Only then can we really learn from it. The abnormality of the Nazi holocaust springs not from the event itself but from the exploitive industry that has grown up around it.” —Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (p. 150)

Mimetic Scapegoats

“Anything is potentially acceptable once the tone of a film has been adequately established. . . . There are many ways to manage this, most of which depend on devices of dramatic structure that manipulate the audience into the position where  they will have some greater satisfaction in accepting the thing that is incredible, rather than the thing that is natural or logical. In effect, the audience is bribed. How? First, delay the introduction of whatever it is that might be regarded as incredible, irrational, absurd, wholly unlikely and contrived.  Begin by establishing the plausibility of circumstances within which the irrational element will make its appearance.” —Alexander Mackendrick, On Filmmaking

In Rene Girard’s theory of “the scapegoat mechanism,” the sacrificial victim is first seen as impure, either to be cast out or killed, as a means of binding the community together in shared condemnation.

After the sacrifice, however, since the scapegoat has served the function of consolidating the community, it becomes a sacred item, a “god.” Taboo becomes totem, just as the totem is by its nature also taboo.

Freud writes (in Totem and Taboo):

unclean animals were holy and . . . were sacrificed to the gods to whom they were holy. [They] were originally identified with the gods themselves and . . . at the sacrifice the worshippers in some way emphasized their blood relationship to the god and to the animal. . . . The holy mystery of the sacrificial death was justified in that only in this way could the holy bond be established which united the participants with each other and with their god (p. 177, 118, emphasis in original).

As is commonly cited, the word holocaust means burnt offering, or fiery sacrifice. The Jews, as descendants of the original Hebrew patriarchs and “the chosen people” of Yahweh, were (even the staunchest Holocaust denier might allow) publicly scapegoated by the National Socialists in the media. They were even compared to vermin to be cast out and/or exterminated.

After World War 2, however, these same people (whether or not they were actually the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Judah) were raised up as the chosen people once more—their ticket renewed—when they were given the “Promised Land” of Palestine (though by what authority is rarely asked, since the Palestinians were not consulted).

There are two complementary (because opposing) narratives playing alongside one another here. First, that of the Holocaust™, of innocent, “special” victims being scapegoated by evil Nazis.™ Second, from the perspective of Holocaust denial™, a shadowy force of Jewry™ (Zionism) was working behind the scenes to demonize (scapegoat) the Nazis, and to use their own status as the victims of persecution to found their own Nation.

Last up, to indicate just how the mechanism keeps on spinning, the Palestinians became a more literal sacrificial scapegoat to the maintenance of Zion-Israel, as Israel set about implementing its own Final Solution™ to the Palestinian problem.

History Turned On Its Head

“How does one persuade an audience to put aside its normally critical approach to subject matter and willingly collaborate with the storyteller in accepting as logical what is plainly incredible, nonsensical and/or absurd?” —Alexander Mackendrick, On Filmmaking

As I observed in my recent piece on Ron Unz, reacting against people’s reprehensible ignorance of true facts about history—as one discovers one’s own reprehensible ignorance—can cause a revisionist researcher to assume a position of defiance. This usually involves assembling a counter-narrative designed—both consciously and unconsciously—to shock and provoke a similar reaction (one of indignation or outrage) in others.

Look how we have been lied to!

The researcher proceeds with brash confidence, armed with “true facts” such as:

·         Britain (and the US), not Germany, was the real aggressor in both world wars.

·         Churchill, not Hitler, initiated the first-ever indiscriminate bombing of cities, determined to provoke a counter attack from Hitler.

·         Hitler strove for an alliance with Britain, and made repeated, rejected or ignored, efforts to avoid a war with her.¹

·         Jewish factions, including banking—in tandem with Anglo-American interests—had Germany in a kind of stranglehold leading up to the war (making anti-Semitic policies partially a form of self-defense).

·         Germany’s “invasion” of Poland, which we were told sparked the war, was, to some degree, also a form a self-defense, seeing as Poland was mistreating and even murdering Germans living in areas which had been Germany, before the Treaty of Versailles.²

And so on.

Facts such as these tend to be either rejected and embraced—depending who is hearing them for the first time—in a similar spirit, that of referring and adhering to a preferred narrative. They rarely, if ever, get taken independently, as a growing challenge to the many assumptions our preferred narrative might have instilled into us, regarding facts.

Perhaps the most important question (besides checking to see if any of these facts are true or not) is this: “Why should any facts (when referring to the distant past) be disturbing, destabilizing, or threatening to us, at all?”

Revisionist Rebellion & Controlled Oppositional Denials

“The sheer amount of lies perpetrated by the Anglo-American establishment against its public in order to preserve the myth that World War II was a ‘good’ war, won for a just cause, is incalculable. The proof lies in the myriad of classified files documenting the vital phases of this intrigue, which to this day remain unavailable to the public eye —for reasons of ‘national security,’ they say. . . . What makes Anglo-America so furiously bent on revving up the engines of the Holocaust Industry is the fear that, if that story—the story of the gas chambers, above all—were to wither for whatever reason (oblivion, neglect, indifference, countering evidence. . .), there would be no screening (and deflecting) mega-narrative behind which to hide the horror perpetrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” —Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler (p. 508-9)

Preparata is perhaps the first writer I know of who clearly singles out “the essential role of the Holocaust deniers as foils of choice in this system’s mechanics of censorship” (p. 508). Holo-Denial, he writes,

plays very efficaciously in the hands of the Holocaust industry as it enables the latter to discredit rather easily any dissenting position in the eyes of the non-expert audiences by associating it at once with this cesspit of Nazi nostalgics. That is why the so-called Holocaust deniers have become an integral component of the set-up, and why the mainstream press periodically showers them with heavy doses of publicity (p. 509-10).

Revisionist fact-lists (which often consist simply of strategically de-emphasized official facts), can all-too easily (especially when resisted) become a club and a bugle with which to assert a new narrative line, one in which:

• Germany, not the Jews, is the victim

• the Allies and organized Jewry, not the Nazis, are the force of prejudice, deception, oppression, and barbarism

• last but not least, Hitler and the National Socialists represent the thwarted, vilified forces of liberation

This kind of reversal is a bit like a child who, as part of a coming of age ritual, punishes its parents for having imposed an oppressive set of false values and expectations upon it, via wanton acts of defiance. The child pushes in the opposite direction and adopts anti-values (sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, and revolution) that are every bit as destructive to the child’s spirit as those being rejected.

The “good Nazi” inversion, similarly, is a childish attempt to counteract the lies of history by inventing (or buying into) a counter-version of the truth, one every bit as fantastical but even more simplistic: a comic book fable to replace the far more sophisticated myth that has been generationally spun around us.

It seems to me that the actual truth about Hitler and the National Socialists—in the almost incomprehensibly distorted context of decades of geopolitical strategizing and deceit—is either that they were the witting instruments of Germany’s hobbling, and the consolidation of Anglo-American-Zionist power; or, that they were the biggest dupes in history.

Either way, it is hardly a tale of heroic iconoclasm. It might quite possibly be a genuine modern tragedy however, at least if one is tempted, as I am, to lean towards the view of Hitler as a demagogic dupe who genuinely cared about the German people, and who got caught inside a web of malevolence and deceit, both that of his enemies and his own unconsciousness or insanity.

Instead we have all been sold a nuance-lacking, good vs evil narrative frame of pseudo-history, and it creates an insistently ideological black hole, into which every scrap of information sooner or later gets dragged and smashed to dust.

But compare either the official or the counter-official frame, again, to Guido Preparata’s Conjuring Hitler:

Britain’s—and later on America’s—drive to conquest was foreshadowed unmistakably by Mackinder’s cursory yet almost oracular mention of the several bridgeheads that the Sea Powers needed to graft unto the heartland to draw out its armies in a deliberate sequence of separate clashes. To isolate each conflict, the targeted territorial portion had to be severed from its adjacent district and bled white by prolonged strife waged in the name of political, religious, or ethnic diversity. Thus the Anglo-Americans have always acted: in Europe by spinning everybody against Germany (1904–45); in the Near East, by jamming Israel in the heart of the Arab world (1917– present); in the Far East, by planting thorns in the side of China: Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan (1950–present); in Central Asia by destabilizing the entire region into tribal warfare with the help of Pakistan to prevent the Caspian seaboard from gravitating into the Russian sphere of influence (1979–present). Most importantly, in such trying games of conquest, results might never be expected to take shape quickly, but might take a matter of weeks, months or even decades. Imperial stratagems are protracted affairs. The captains of world aggression measure their achievements, or failures, on a timescale whose unit is the generation. It is within such a frame that the incubation of Nazism should be gauged: it was a long and elaborate plan to eliminate the possibility of German hegemony over the continent. And the stewards of the empire took their time (p. 25-26).

(Over the Paywall: Transcendental (and Not-At-All-Banal) Evil, Judaism Vs Christianity, A Single Match that ignites western society. There will be two more articles in the current series (plus an appendix), and I will be making all three freely available to all subscribers as a gesutre of thanks to my paid subscribers. Thanks for reading, and please don’t forget to “like,” comment, and share, and subscribe.)