In our age of moral relativity, leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair have been cast as modern Adolph Hitlers—a practice which trivializes the “moral collapse” perpetuated by the Third Reich. Weekly Standard contributor David Gelernter, in contrast, is intent on magnifying these moral differences.
Claiming inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s characterization of WWII as a choice between “Christianity” or “paganism,” the Yale professor said at the American Enterprise Institute that “The thesis I want to investigate, one that involves such a daunting tangle of complex issues and demands so many qualifications…this thesis is that we need to study not only the holocaust and the gulag and Japanese atrocities, but this phenomenon of moral collapse as it was connected with a doctrine of state paganism.”
Professor Gelernter views World War II as a faceoff between pagan state cults (Germany, Russia, and Japan) and two “Christian” nations (Britain and America). Besides Italy, Gelernter’s lecture dismissed the effects of Christianity within Spain, France, and other European nations. He describes this paganism as replacing “the idea of individuals in a nation with the idea of parts or cells in a body directed by a mind that was divine or divinely ordained or otherwise superhuman and yet present on earth.” He continued,
“Group assemblies with ranting, singing, or shouting in unison are invaluable to the creation of the nation of the pagan beast, because they act not as mythical but as real, tangible, amplifiers—feed in your own voice and get back a roar.”
This dehumanizing trend was true in Japan as well. “The idea of all Japanese merged into the sacred being of the Emperor is reflected in the anonymity of the individual and the irrelevance or non-existence of the individual’s moral judgement,” he said. “And presumably this deliberate repression of their own personalities made it easier for these men to see in their victims things and not persons,” he added.
Gelernter links Italy’s relative restraint towards mass killings to the nation’s religious heritage, because Italy “nonetheless continued to consider itself a Christian nation throughout the fascist era.” And this is true for Britain and America as well. “The violent contrast between the conduct between the two Christian, or quasi-Christian, powers on the one hand and the three pagan regimes on the other grew only more striking as the war continued,” he asserted.
When asked if his theory can be generalized the modern terrorist conflict, Gelernter replied “I think it is too easy to associate Islam or Fascist Islam with Fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia.” He continued, “It seems to me in many cases today Islam is more a topic than a strategy and when we see the continuity of terrorist movements that began with no religious goals at all…there’s no reason they shouldn’t move back again.” There are “similarities,” he said, but other decades parallel the World War II era than the present.
However, figures such as Rick Santorum and Pepperdine University Professor Joseph Loconte continue to classify the modern jihadist movement as “Islamofascism.” Indeed, Islamic radicalism seems to exhibit many of the traits contained within Gelernter’s “state paganism,” albeit within a post-national structure:
1. Islamic radicals are taught to perceive themselves as members of a beleaguered Umma (Muslim community) that is in conflict with—and superior to—the infidel.
2. Palestinian children, like the WWII-era Japanese, are taught from an early age that martyrdom is honorable and a sign of loyalty to their God.
3. Radical clerics and leaders like Osama bin Laden are treated as Messianic figures or, at least, speaking for God himself. “Himmler believed Hitler’s words to be pronouncements from a world transcending this one,” noted Gelernter.
4. Nations such as Iran hold rallies in which masses of citizens chant “Death to America” and punch their fists in unison, reminiscent of Hitler’s “Zieg Heil.”
Christianity or Rationalism?
In The Crooked Timber of Humanity, reknowned philosopher Isaiah Berlin traces Romanticism—and its subsequent glorification of violent irrationality—back as far as the French Revolution and regarded it as the philosophical precursor to Hitler’s Nazism. It is not surprising, then, that one audience member questioned whether the difference between Britain, America, and totalitarian societies resulted from a Ciceronian respect for reason culminating in the Enlightenment.
“Um, no,” Gelernter responded. “Of course the moral significance of the individual is a biblical idea, is a Jewish invention and [a] Christian invention,” he argued. Gelernter urged the audience not to underestimate the “enormous significance of Christian Puritan ideas in the creation of the liberal modern American state.”
Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.
