The Hitler Divide - an outline

Holocaust victims piled up

Muslims showing their admiration for Hitler

• Western civilisation was profoundly shaken by the experience of WWII and has been engaged in a long process of recovery. Not only economically and structurally but also culturally. Hitler stands as a unique personification of evil and has come to represent all that should be avoided. He represents a moral black-hole that people in the West seek to distance themselves from and any proximity to him is regarded (generally rightly) as a slippery slope towards perdition.
• Much research such as Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies (1962) has been inspired by the events of WWII. A long process of soul-searching has taken place. To the extent that people feel distant from Nazism they feel good and virtuous. It is a benchmark of depravity.
• Images of the holocaust have a profound significance for Western civilisation. They represent the nadir, the lowest point that we reached and to which we never want to return. The European Union is partly the product of the desire to avoid any such outcome ever again. Nationalism in whatever form is seen as a source of disorder and warfare. De-fanging the nation state has become a commonly supported goal.
• Nazism and its greatest exponent, Adolf Hitler, have been so thoroughly discredited that no-one wants to be associated with it. Playing the Hitler card in a debate has become a common tactic to put an opponent on the defensive and to derail his/her argument. This is one of the many fallacies discussed at fallacyfiles.org.
• No such process has occurred in the Muslim world. In fact, quite the opposite. Islam has deeply ingrained anti-semitism, tyranny, and belligerence within it. Many prominent Muslims supported Hitler and Mein Kampf is still widely read.
• Hassan-al-Banna, Syed Qutb, Amin al-Husseini, and many others admired Hitler and many prominent Muslims today speak well of him. Hassan-al-Banna was the father of the Muslim Brotherhood, arguably the most influential Muslim organisation in the world today. Syed Qtub was the father of modern Islamism, a man with total contempt for democracy, Western freedoms, and the equality of the sexes. Amin al-Husseini was an ally of Hitler during WWII and helped to organise Muslim SS units in the Balkans. He was hopeful of continuing Hitler’s Final Solution in the Middle East once Hitler had finished the job in Europe.
• For sure, the existence of Israel has become a rallying point (and convenient disguise) for Muslim/Arab anti-semitism, but the roots of Jew hatred are far deeper and more extensive than the existence of Israel.
• Muslim culture is not well-suited to critical self-examination anyway but even if it were, the attitude towards WWII and Hitler is markedly different to our own.
• Thus, in respect of this crucial figure of recent history and his embodiment of tyrannical, anti-semitic attitudes, the West and the Muslim world have totally different perspectives.

18th Feb 2014

Integrity can be defined as loyalty to a principle. It can therefore be understood in terms of Moral Foundations Theory. Intellectual integrity can be defined as loyalty to the principles of Reason and evidence. Liberals tend to score lower on the Loyalty/Betrayal measure than conservatives. We do see evidence of lower intellectual integrity among liberals - they are often flagrant violators of Reason and Logic (see previous post on Laurie Penny). In The Uses of Pessimism, Roger Scruton in coined the phrase 'unscrupulous optimism' to describe the Utopian thinking of the Left. They are often guilty of making the most optimistic assumptions and deriving the most optimistic extrapolations from them. They want their dreams to come true and they'll stop at nothing to see that they do. Liberals frequently employ the most unscrupulous tactics to argue their case because they do not care much about intellectual integrity - they are intellectually unscrupulous. The loyalty that they feel is towards 'the vision'; you cannot sustain loyalty to Reason if you are committed to an imagined Utopia. In fact, very soon the ends come to justify the means.