By Davis Carlton
Doug Wilson recently posted a video on his Blog & Mablog YouTube channel called Epistemological Impudence and The Post-War Consensus. He has a real knack for coming up with titles that just roll off the tongue. The thesis advanced by Wilson is that World War II set the stage for the zeitgeist of relativism. The secular elites adopted relativism because they came to believe that deeply held beliefs and dogmas were the cause of war with all of its accompanying atrocities. The solution was: mix in some relativistic “paint thinner” with our convictions to make sure that the evils that brought about the world wars could be avoided in the future. Wilson recalls a rancorous classroom discussion in the 1970s in which a young woman complained about how the deep seated convictions of Christians made them “just like the Nazis.”
Wilson states that the relativism of the post-war consensus was on full display after the conclusion of hostilities at the Nuremberg trials in which putative German war criminals were confronted with the vague and amorphous charge of “crimes against humanity.” Wilson cleverly states that the secular elites decided that “crimes against humanity” would come to mean “anything displeasing to the nation that developed the atomic weaponry first.” Wilson continues, “If Germany had won the war, a ‘crime against humanity’ would have been ‘whatever it was that the Jews were doing.’” Wilson calls out Allied hypocrisy in our selective outrage, noting that “Hitler has slain his six million; meanwhile democratically run America has slain its sixty million.” Wilson complains that the “shock value of the revelation of what the Nazis had been doing in the concentration camps” provided the Allies with the opportunity to “try the Nazis on a fundamentally Nazi principle. We tried the Nazis in our own name and on our own authority, which is exactly what they would have done had the positions been reversed.”
This is really where Wilson’s analysis runs off the rails in my opinion. That Hitler killed “a lot of Jews” is absolutely central to the post-war consensus. Wilson’s framing makes it seem as though the atrocities committed by the Germans during the Second World War, real or imagined, are merely an incidental fact accepted by all rational people. This framing is rhetorically effective, because it accomplishes two things. First, Wilson places German atrocities alongside other mundane facts accepted by everyone who knows the history of the war. This would indicate that it is just as foolish to deny the historicity of atrocities committed by the Germans presented by the mainstream narrative as it is to deny the accepted chronology of battles and other relevant political events. The second thing that Wilson accomplishes with his framing is to sell viewers on his idea that Germans committing atrocities isn’t central to the post-war consensus by mentioning it alongside mundane chronological facts. The unstated argument is that everyone agrees that these atrocities happened just as they agree on the order in which battles occurred, so obviously none of these things are central to the post-war consensus that Christians should oppose.
Wilson’s clever rhetoric makes him an effective communicator, but I think that both aspects of Wilson’s framing of German atrocities are false upon closer inspection. I’ve already addressed why I’m a revisionist when it comes to World War II history, so I want to address the second issue. Is the idea that Germany committed unspeakable atrocities during World War II really not central and foundational to the post-war consensus? Are Hitler’s “crimes against humanity” really just accepted facts like the sequence in which battles were fought? Obviously not, and this is where Wilson’s intellectual dishonesty really kicks in.
Wilson is aware of the fact that many young men on the right have been discussing the post-war consensus and its role in reshaping the world that we have grown up in. The post-war consensus has been used to justify the complete deconstruction of the institutions and moral values of our Christian forebears. The result has been that younger generations of men in the West have grown up in a hellscape among the ruins of the civilization their ancestors built, only to see what was taken from them in old photographs and movies. The dissident right is primarily comprised of young men who have identified the post-war consensus as a sacred cow, whose worship is responsible for the chaos and turmoil of modernity. Doug Wilson recognizes this, and so he is seeking to redefine what the post-war consensus is actually about, and for Wilson the answer is relativism.
It seems so obvious that the narrative of German atrocities is central to the post-war consensus that it’s difficult to imagine anyone taking Wilson’s contention seriously. What Wilson says about relativism in the video is good. Relativism has increasingly gained a stranglehold in academia and has acquired a privileged status among the intelligentsia. Wilson also isn’t wrong to point out the extent to which many expect our vague moral consensus to be enforced by society at large without giving much thought to pondering how morality itself is grounded. I think that moral relativism accurately describes the attitudes of many in the post-Christian West who simultaneously condemn those guilty of “wrongthink” while dismissing their own moral failings with the tired expression; “only God can judge me,” in which it is clear that “God” doesn’t refer to the one true God of Christianity.
Nevertheless, that being said, the West has replaced Christian morality with equally strong convictions about right and wrong. People are only advised, “You do you,” as long as this doesn’t entail going against the new moral norms. Self-expression is accepted as long as we’re talking about degeneracy that our Christian forebears would have detested, but self-expression does have its limits. That’s where Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist regime in Germany has become a convenient foil for what modern morality opposes. Some like Corey Mahler of Stone Choir have argued that Hitler was actually a Christian and has been unjustly maligned as a pagan occultist. I haven’t studied this issue and don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, but Hitler’s personal beliefs aren’t particularly relevant to the post-war consensus.
Hitler and the Nazis are hated and despised, not for anything they did against Christianity, but because they were nationalists who were pro-white and anti-Jewish. The supposed atrocities of the National Socialist regime are identified by the world as the natural behavior of white men, especially when they are in pursuit of their own national interests. The natural evil of white men and innate goodness of non-whites has replaced the Christian doctrine of original sin. The putative slaughter of Jews replaces the atoning death of Christ upon the Cross. Even the word “Holocaust,” which means burnt offering, is pregnant with religious meaning. Whites are collectively guilty for what the Germans are supposed to have done during the course of the Second World War. Atonement is sought by whites in the form of ethno-masochism and acknowledgment of collective “white guilt,” but unlike Christianity, there is no forgiveness of sins. Whites can never be forgiven and no amount of self-loathing will ever make things right.
This narrative is incoherent and self-contradictory, and so it can be challenged on several fronts. Germany was defeated by mostly white soldiers from America, Great Britain, France, and Russia. The Allies also committed unspeakable atrocities against the German population that entirely undermines the Allied claim to moral superiority. Indeed, many of the photographs and films currently used to document Holocaust atrocities actually date to the Allies’ forced resettlement of Germans to Soviet-controlled areas three or four years after the war’s end. And along those lines, to make matters worse, the war cleared the way for Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe, abandoning a generation behind the Iron Curtain. Wilson pontificates against relativism, but there are few things more absolutely rejected by the post-war consensus than white nationalism, “white supremacy,” or Nazism (conveniently defined in broadly Leftist terms). The King of Britain, George VI, managed to denounce the Germans as operating under the “primitive doctrine that might is right,” (famously portrayed by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech) around the same time that the Royal Air Force was intentionally targeting civilians for firebombing.
As those on the dissident right have questioned the post-war consensus, the role of the Jews inevitably comes into play. In this video Wilson complains, “If Germany had won the war, a ‘crime against humanity’ would have been ‘whatever it was that the Jews were doing.’” This succinctly summarizes the assumptions that are at the foundation of the post-war consensus. The Jews weren’t doing anything wrong. They were just a little bit different, and they became convenient scapegoats for the hardships that Germany was facing in the wake of defeat at the conclusion of World War I. Wilson assumes that this narrative is true, but this becomes hard to swallow in light of the fact that “Anti-Semitism” isn’t by any means confined to Germany during the early 20th century. Indeed, given the many societal restrictions against Jews lifted by the Kaiser, one could argue that Germany was well on the way to becoming the most philosemitic country in all Europe prior to the First World War. Are all expulsions of the Jews explicable on the grounds of unhinged hatred that was in no way based upon the actual behavior of Jews as a group?
Many on the dissident right have come to reject the view of Jewish innocence and victimhood expounded by Doug Wilson. This is especially true as the heinous teachings of Rabbinical Judaism found in the Talmud are coming to light. All one has to do is read what Judaism teaches about Gentiles and Christianity and suddenly the actions of Jews in the modern world and throughout history makes a good deal of sense. This means that things could get very interesting as the philosemitic generation of baby boomers gives way to younger generations of leaders who hold views less favorable to Israel on both the emerging left and right.
Doug Wilson had to make this video because he has enough of a presence online to see the World War II narrative he was taught unravel before his eyes. This video attempts to shift the discussion on the post-war consensus to the topic of relativism. While Wilson has many good things to say against relativism, he is clearly attempting to change the subject. It won’t work because it is far too obvious to those on the dissident right that the post-war consensus is what has made the world ripe for Jewish domination, and the results have been a complete devastation for the Western world. Those who want to fix the foundational problems that emerged after the Second World War will inevitably expand their query beyond the problems of relativism.