How Self-Loathing Became the West's Nazi Inheritance

Though moral relativism in the name of self-critiquing multiculturalism is often defended as a bulwark against Nazi-inspired atrocities, its elements are actually inherited from that which originally spawned Nazism.

“Since Hitler was defeated in 1945,” the historian Sean McMeekin writes, “there has been a tendency to say ‘goodbye to all that’, as if the exposure of the Nazi death camps truly taught the world ‘a lesson it will never forget’. And yet the toxic self-pitying disease which gave rise to Nazism is still abroad in the world, if no longer so prevalent in Germany itself.”

Those words appear in McMeekin’s new World War I history The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid For World Power. Based around the story of Germany’s attempt to build a rail line through the Islamic world as part of a plan to foment a global jihad to defeat the Allies, the book contains important lessons for, and eerie parallels with, today’s current events, in which Western self-hatred threatens the cultural identity of the world’s free people in service to appeasing radical Islam.

“In 1914, if not when they were writing post-war memoirs, Germany’s leaders saw in Islam the secret weapon which would decide the world war,” McMeekin writes. Not only was Kaiser Wilhelm II enthusiastic about the idea of bringing the “waves of Muslim rage” on the British Empire, but Baron Hans von Wangenheim, the German ambassador to the Porte, played a key role in bringing the Ottoman Empire “fully on board” even before Turkey entered the war.

Ottoman War Minister Enver Pasha sent envoys to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Cairo, and even the Caucasus to alert them to the plan. German “jihad-preparation teams” had also been sent before the war began.

The plot, as we now know, failed and Germany lost the war. Pan-Islamic solidarity proved difficult to control, once empowered. But much of the damage was done.

“As we have seen, the Kaiser’s promotion of pan-Islam, while a strategic failure in the world war, threw up flames of revolutionary jihadism as far afield as Libya, Sudan, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, Iran and Afghanistan, which never entirely died down after the war, not least because of ever-more brutal British (and Bolshevik) measures to douse them,” McMeekin writes.

Of course, Germany intended to manipulate the Jews of Russia and the Middle East as well. The Kaiser even got behind Zionism as an attempt, first to undermine the British and Russians, then to rid themselves of their own Jews, especially after Germany found itself administering five million Russian Jews in the eastern occupation zone.

But most Jews were wary to join a German war leadership that was unleashing Islamic jihad at the same time–a jihad that naturally targeted Jews (as well as Christians). Despite the fact that the Jews didn’t make any attempt to undermine the German war effort either, they became the scapegoat of German bitterness.

Kaiser Wilhelm wrote in December 1919 that his beloved nation had simply been “Egged on and misled by the tribe of Juda whom they hate, who were guests among them! That was the thanks they got! Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been wiped out from German soil and been exterminated! This poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree!”

The wheels of genocide were in motion.

McMeekin notes, however, that something else was put in place as well, and uses the case of Max von Oppenheim to illustrate his point. The Baron was a son of the wealthy banker Albert von Oppenheim (who was Jewish, though Max’s mother was not), and became an avid explorer and then diplomat during the war. Von Oppenheim supported the ethnic cleansing of Jews, first in the Middle East. It was Oppenheim who suggested Hitler appoint Jerusalem Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini to rule the soon-to-be Judenrein Palestine.

“It was not only in his invention of global jihad that Oppenheim was a pioneer. In the Baron’s self-pitying rejection of his Judaic heritage, we can see at work that virulent syndrome of bourgeois self-loathing so common in the modern West,” McMeekin writes.

Von Oppenheim’s self-hatred was dangerous because it was attractive and common in post-war Germany, McMeekin argues. This self-hatred led to giving jihadist Muslims a free pass as long as they targeted the politically correct adversary of the day–Jews, especially in the Middle East (sound familiar?).

McMeekin says the blame-Israel-first mentality is only the most obvious current manifestation of this syndrome.

“But there is a subtler version of the virus coursing through the veins of the West, such as in the fashionable Third Worldist autocritique which decries every sin of European imperialism while absolving the world’s most wicked post-colonial regimes of responsibility for their crimes,” McMeekin writes.

The post-war German leadership placed their faith in supporting Islamic powers dedicated to their own destruction.

“It was a breathtaking error in judgment,” McMeekin writes, “and we are all living with the consequences today.”