[This is the final post of a four part series, orignally posted as Shame, Aggression and Demographic Suicide. The references and comments are to the original series from the Spring of 2006.]
In the first three posts in this series (Part I, Part II, Part III), I have attempted to show how Gudrun, a German woman who entered therapy many years ago, was able to understand some of the ways in which her parents' (especially her mother's) experiences in Germany during WWII led to her inability to enter into a healthy relationship with a man and ultimately led to her decision not to have children. I then suggested a similar dynamic may be involved in Europe's current demographic collapse.
AVI has put together some statistics about European demographics that are illustrative, though it is worth wondering if some of his numbers aren't skewed by the fecundity of the substantial Muslim communities in a number of the countries listed (especially France, where the Muslim birthrate is extremely high compared to the non Muslim French population.)
A number of commenters, and the comments have been uniformly thought provoking, made some excellent points. Maxed Out Mama, in particular (who is under the weather, perhaps as part of her exemplary and ongoing efforts to help us understand the Avian Flu; keep her in your thoughts), wrote about her own family's brush with the "evil at the core" (in the comments to Part II):
I was just brushed by this, and it left a huge mark. You've got no idea of what it is like to, as a child, be in a public park and watch visitors from Europe stiffen at the sight of a park guard in uniform. These, btw, were victims and not perpetrators. You've got no idea what it is like to be forbidden to ever correspond with a number of relatives.
My grandfather was born in Germany, was drafted into the German army as a teenager at the end of WWI, became a socialist, was almost killed by a band of vigilantes after the war, got out to France and eventually made his way to the US. He enlisted at the age of 42 in the US Army for WWII. My father was born here in 1929. After the war, my father's parents brought my great grandmother over from France.
Anyway, one day the police were making the rounds to tell people that the health department was giving free vaccinations. This old lady opened the door, saw the uniform, and ran in screaming hysterics into her bedroom.
David, most Americans can have NO idea.
For those who lived through those evil times, even as passive participants, the fear was ever-present and corrosive. She also offered this:
You cannot know what it was like for that generation of children. The silent footsteps of the millions gone are the loudest footsteps in the western world today. As a child Gudrun would have been surrounded by the silences, the flinches and a corrosive, all-encompassing insecurity. She grew up in a giant graveyard with no monuments and no public mourning rituals to assist in coming to terms with the grief or even the murders.
David Foster offered a challenge:
It seems clear that Gudrun was an exceptionally intelligent and morally serious person. Is it really valid to generalize from her case? Would people who are less morally intelligent, and less inclined to abstract thinking, usually be under the spell of their family (or national) past to the same degree?
And in a comment to Part III, expat wrote:
As a long-time resident of Germany, I agree that the Holocaust is one factor in this country's suicidal tendencies. I can't tell you how often I've heard the comment "We have learned THE lessons from the Nazi dictatorship." The left often uses the Holocaust as a reason to oppose even modest actions of national self interest. Some people reacted to the American flag displays after 9/11 as if they were Nuremburg rallies, failing to consider that the flag is the binding agent for our complex society. Debate and discussion here can be so ideologically framed, that ordinary people must feel afraid to open their mouths.
As to Alan's comment about Cold War armaments, there were massive protests here.
I have commented on the European's increasing difficulty in defending themselves. This has its roots in their revulsion and fear at open expressions of their own aggression, but its utility as a way to express their own shame and aggression is revealed in their open celebration of the aggression of chosen victims (which conspicuously does not include the Jewish people) against chosen aggressors (America and Israel, primarily.) Let me try to clarify. I suggested that the aggression that the grandchildren of the perpetrators and collaborators of the Holocaust have tried to repress (because it was so shameful and horrifying) would find ways to press for expression. In part because of their eschewal of religious belief they have no way to atone and receive forgiveness for their sins. (Perhaps they feel that a God who would allow them to perpetrate a Holocaust would be a God, like Lot's God, who would forsake them forever.) They were left stuck with the residue of guilt and shame their grandparents bequeathed them.
[The idea of the grandparents' pathology being expressed through the parents onto the children was first closely examined in one of the seminal papers in modern Psychoanalysis, "The Ghost in the Nursery" by Selma Fraiberg, which dealt explicitly with the impact of an infant's grandmother on the child's current mother's ability to nurture; it is not available on-line, unfortunately.]
My patient suffered from terrible guilt at her mother's and her mother's family's complicity in their small part of the Holocaust; for those who are less sophisticated (the people David Foster asked about) their struggle is more with shame than guilt.
As Dr. Sanity so eloquently has pointed out, Arab culture is the quintessential Shame culture. In Islam there is no shame in genocide or murder because there is no real Prohibition against slaughtering infidels, in fact, it is explicitly endorsed. Not only are they not ashamed by their complicity with the Nazis, but they celebrate it and strive to emulate Nazism. At the same time they deny the Holocaust took place and they vow to do it right the next time. It is easy to see the hatred and rage that their own shame produces. The Americans and the Israelis, the Great and Little Satan respectively, evoke shame by the contrast between successful, dynamic, "alive" societies, and the stagnation of so much of the Islamic world, which celebrates death rather than life, in the words of their sages.
It is less clear (better disguised) how the shame driven rage of the Europeans is expressed, but two excellent posts will serve to illustrate how an intellectual can express evil while hiding its provenance from himself. Pedro, at The Quietest has a superb post in which he documents and describes the ways in which Western intellectuals have managed to destroy and obfuscate the distinction between good and evil:
Something has been going on now for a while. Increasingly. About 200 years or so. There is a strange, self-destructive tendency in modern Western civilization to pretend there is no such thing as evil. That people aren't bad, they're misunderstood. That "right" and "wrong" are really merely functions of tradition (Denis Diderot), pain/pleasure (Jeremy Bentham), culture (Franz Boas), power (Michel Foucault), or even language -- that is, "good" and "evil" are not real, they're just made-up constructs embedded in all kinds of arbitrary aspects of human society that trick us into believing they exist.
It is a very powerful post and should be read in full. His conclusions should disturb:
This is why Holocaust denial frightens me. It is part of the postmodern project that apologizes for evil. And if you think Holocaust denial is solely a right-wing phenomenon, think again. I read the History News Network regularly; I've noticed a disturbing trend over the past few months. It has become a lurking-place for a whole bunch of leftist Holocaust deniers.
But left-wing Holocaust deniers (LWHD) are different; they're not defending "Aryan pride" or whatever the neo-Nazis care about. Their current strategy is to try to knock the Holocaust from its privileged place in our moral sensibilities, to de-emphasize it, to make it less scary, to show how it wasn't necessarily unique. This seems rather innocuous, but it is insidious because the Holocaust, for most modern people nowadays, is really the only connection we have to "evil." If the Holocaust wasn't "evil," then what is?
He conflates Holocaust denial with our "cultural elites trying to deny us the memory of what happened on 9/11"; if you think this is fanciful, just take note of the disparity in the number of pictures you have seen in the MSM of 9/11 versus abu Graib.
Holocaust denial is going mainstream in Europe and it is a short step from Holocaust denial to facilitating and "understanding" genocide. Sweden prides itself on being one of the most enlightened and sophisticated nations in the world. To their delicate sensibilities, to offend another person is criminal. The European Jewish Press wrote about this several days ago [HT: Islam in Europe]:
It is a crime in Sweden to express derogatory statements about ethnic, racial, national, religious and sexual minorities or to incite hatred and violence against them.
But notice the intellectual contortions, thinly disguised rationalizations, that allow for the open expression of Jew hatred even while the publishing of offensive cartoons is illegal:
At the beginning of this year, the Chancellor of Justice*, Goran Lambertz, discontinued his preliminary investigation against the great mosque in Stockholm. Cassette tapes had been sold in the bookshop of the mosque with a violently Anti-Semitic contents. After a couple of broadcasts on the 26 and 27th November last year, the Stockholm mosque was reported to the police.
In his decision to discontinue the preliminary investigation Lambertz wrote that “the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs.” Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and “Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers - celebrated as martyrs - are the most effective weapon”.
The Chancellor raises the question whether the statements “should be judged differently, and be considered allowed, because they are used by one side in a continuing profound conflict, where battle cries and invectives are part of everyday occurrences in the rhetoric that surround the conflict.” Lambertz thought that the “recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered “incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law”. His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this case of incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict. That is, in spite of the calls for ”killing the Jews”, these statements are not a crime in the legal sense in Sweden, because of the current conflict in the Middle East, according to the Chancellor of Justice. The logical conclusion is clear. If one mentions Palestine in hate speeches and calls for massmurder against Jews, one risks nothing in Sweden.
What are then the situation for the Jews of Sweden? The Jewish communities spend 25% of its budget on security measures. No Jewish events, social, religious and cultural, can take place without extensive security measures. ...
Official Sweden wants to cut down on the little aid there is, to Jewish institutions for security; schools among others, and refuse absolutely to take over any responsibility for the security measures that even security police reports deem necessary. Jewish cemeteries in Stockholm and Malmoe have been vandalized recently.
The Chief of police in Stockholm wants to remove the cement impediments in front of the great Synagogue of Stockholm.
Jews are being harassed and persecuted in certain suburbs of Stockholm only because of their Jewishness and many have been forced to move to get away from the harassment.
I am afraid that Jews are the originators of the 80/20 rule I wrote about before, yet I would hope that this time they leave before they no longer have the ability to do so. The humiliation and shame fueled fires of rage are escalating throughout Europe. The Europeans once again seem ready to throw the Jews under the bus to appease the haters, yet even they are beginning to realize that they will be next. What happens when the Jewish scapegoat is no longer adequate as a sacrifice to the ravenous Allah of the Islamists?
The Europeans, nowhere more so than among their elites, have disarmed themselves, literally and intellectually, out of fear and shame; they have ceased to reproduce because they contain nothing admirable worth passing on and much that is execrable. The "cause" of their shame, the hated and envied Jews, have left and made a new life for themselves far away; the few who are left are too few to offer as meaningful fodder for the crocodile within their house.
And their only option for obtaining absolution and regaining their confidence has been systematically assaulted and destroyed. Perhaps Europe could be saved if they could be "saved", but the prospects are grim.
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