The Lie That Destroys
I recently watched Nuremberg, the stunning new film about the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trial. Chief among the tranche of top Nazi leaders indicted for crimes against humanity was Hermann Goering, Hitler’s number two man. The film centers on the interplay between Goering and the American military psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, who had been assigned to monitor the prisoners and help avoid the embarrassment of suicides.
That is why we have embraced freedom of religion and association — it makes our nation great.
In a real jail-cell interview with another mental health professional, Gustave Gilbert (not portrayed in the film), Goering made clear his mind about what leaders are able to do:
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
This was meant as an empirical observation. To be sure, the Nazi police state and the entire apparatus of totalitarian coercion had a great deal to with what Germans did. Even before the Nazis gained power, they used brute force against their political opponents. Less than two months after coming to power, they opened the first of the concentration camps, Dachau, in which brutality was institutionalized and augmented. Things only got worse as time went on.
But, as Daniel Goldhagen pointed out in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, we have extensive records of extreme cruelty and mass killings undertaken willingly, under no threat, by ordinary Germans. To use the full irony of the terrible truth, they were going “above and beyond the call of duty,” as if what they were doing was an act of supreme gallantry facing a ferocious enemy, instead of the improvising the torture and murder of starved, nearly naked, unarmed civilians.
Thus, the haunting nature of Goering’s remarks and their insidious effects, witnessed by Dr. Kelley in his own mind. He was shattered by Goering’s truth: every person can become a willing participant in hideous deeds and believe they are doing right. Kelley eventually mimicked Goering in death, killing himself by cyanide as Goering had done only minutes before he was to have been hanged.
The key to Goering’s Nuremberg defense was to make himself be understood as a human, recognizable as such to his accusers. His tried to implicate the Allies who were trying him as being just like him, willing to do whatever it took to stop an existential threat. His argument for moral equivalence was powerful, but to carry the day in court, he had to disguise that the chief existential threat his party and his leader had singled out for degradation and annihilation were not the armies of Britain or Russia, but unarmed Jews, men, women, and children.
Bernard Lewis traced the history of the Nazis’ focus on the Jews back to Roman Europe. Among the ideas that grew up in the rich loam of an evolving religious community was an idea that would haunt Europe for centuries: the idea of the Jew as demonic and cursed, uniquely capable of thwarting God’s plan of salvation — and irredeemable. In Lewis’ words from his classic work Semites and Antisemites:
In its extreme form, the anti-Semitic view of history portrays the Jew as a Satanic force, as the root of virtually all evil in the world, from the earliest time to the present day. In this view, he is engaged in an eternal and universal conspiracy, to infiltrate, corrupt, and ultimately rule the gentile world. For this he uses a variety of methods, all of them sinister. In medieval times, Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading the plague, and practicing ritual murder; in more modern times with inventing both capitalism and communism, and using the one or the other or both together to dominate the world. More recently, they have been blamed for the enslavement of black Africa and even accused — by some feminists — of introducing patriarchy and male domination…. Since it is manifestly impossible to maintain these and similar propositions on any rational basis of evidence, the anti-Semite resorts to another characteristic device — the invention of facts and the fabrication of evidence to support them.
Modernity in the West introduced skepticism over the hatred that had entwined itself so often in Christian culture. More than 500 years ago, humanists like Pico and Reuchlin fought it as antithetical to their religion.
But it didn’t die. The Inquisition in Spain and Portugal pushed back. Similar struggles took place in the emerging Protestant movements: Luther incited violence while in Holland and England, political thinkers, basing themselves on the Bible and now citing rabbinic texts, began making a powerful, faith-based case for religious freedom.
By the 19th century, though, European religion was on the defensive, and among many thought leaders, eclipsed. The great tides of events were now being pushed by allegiances to the rising nation states and their emerging power. Nietzsche told the people what they did not want to hear — they were killing God.
Ideologies arose to take religion’s place. Mayakovsky wrote the doxology of the undying Soviet god: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live,” and Jewish converts to the new religion were empowered by the government to destroy Judaism and the Jews who still practiced it. Hitler saw in Communism the ultimate Jewish plot to subdue the world and set about to kill not just Judaism but the Jewish people.
At the same time, Europe’s budding empires expanded into the Middle East, where religion still was strong. Lewis traced how they brought the germ of demonic Jew-hatred with them. The Damascus blood libel of 1840 was a case in point. Spurred by a Jew-hating French diplomat in that city, the local Muslim authorities imprisoned and tortured Damascus Jews on the phantasmagoric charge, till then only found in Christian Europe, that the Jews had killed a priest and an Arab in order to use their blood to bake matza for Passover. As the Jewish immigration to the Middle East began to increase, this strain of hatred began to grow as well.
In Europe, the old antisemitism morphed and took on nationalist rationalizations to fit the spirit of the times. Now the Jew was seen as the irredeemable enemy of the nation, and their existence was now deemed the Jewish Problem, requiring a solution.
The 1820 Hep Hep riots in the German universities were a foretaste of what we saw in 2023 and 2024 at Columbia, Stanford, and Cooper Union, among other places. The humiliating French defeat by Germany in 1871 required explanation.
In the Dreyfus Case, Captain Alfred Dreyfus became a focus of public hate for over a decade. A Jewish career soldier in the French army, Dreyfus was convicted through perjury, fabricated evidence, mob pressure, and obstruction and sent to the appropriately named Devil’s Island.
German defeat by France in World War I was explained as being due to the Jews stabbing Germany in the back, and Hitler rode that lie to absolute power, conquest, and the annihilation of most of Europe’s Jews before delivering his own country into death and ruin.
Through events like the Nuremberg trials and an effective control over the public culture, Germany was largely cleansed of Nazism — but not before it had transplanted itself into the Middle East. Reading the Hamas Charter is like reading a Nazi manifesto thinly disguised by Islamic proof texts. Every evil in the world, the Charter claims, has been set in motion by the Jew:
The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion. It does not refrain from resorting to all methods, using all evil and contemptible ways to achieve its end. It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, the Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups. All these organizations, whether secret or open, work in the interest of Zionism and according to its instructions. They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion.
We should not forget to remind every Moslem that when the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that “Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women.”
Israel, Judaism, and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. “May the cowards never sleep.”
Goering spoke from experience. He saw that people do organize themselves from within against an existential threat. It is a good thing we do. Had we not organized against the existential threats of Nazism and Communism, this would be a much darker world than it is. Had we recognized and dealt with the Nazi virus in the Middle East earlier, much agony could have been averted for all its inhabitants.
Because self-preservation is such a strong motivator, propagandists try to persuade their marks that they are under such threat. The rabble rousers of the First Crusade, the medieval fables of the blood libel and desecration of the Host, the modern libel of the Jew as behind every evil in a massive conspiracy for world domination — all depend on people who cannot discern truth from lies.
Victor Davis Hanson has focused this year on the propagandists peddling this odious ideology in the West. In his calm and through way, he exposed the lies of a faux historian touted by an immensely talented political commentator as being top notch; he has confronted the lies that commentators and others now embrace: about Israel, whether said directly or in the form of wink-and-nod innuendo; and about Jews, including the assertions of masterminding everything from 9/11 to a planned invasion of Venezuela. It is precisely these mind-bendingly false lies that let you know, if you didn’t already, that what VDH was attacking was not just political difference — which must be welcomed even if difficult — but something with a history more malign than anything in all the annals of humankind.
Nothing is new. As in the 1930s and at other times, talented and respected people, stumble like any others. Truth remains true and shows no favoritism. In the words of the great medieval philosopher-physician, quoted often on this page as of late, Moses Maimonides: “Accept the truth, wherever it is to be found.”
Dr. Kelley was so unnerved by Goering that his life fell apart and he killed himself. Goering led his nation into immolation and then killed himself.
Our great Western tradition offers a better option. Accept the truth. Rearrange life to conform it, not the other way around. Living a lie destroys the liar and spreads destruction all around.
Believing the lies, two members of the Goering cult that has infected Islam let loose murder in Bondi Beach on the first day of Chanuka. Like the Starmer government in the UK and Macron’s in France, the Australian government has deferred to the Goering-style lies of those cultists, who tried to destroy the holiday of Chanuka as well as the people celebrating it.
But showing the resiliency at the core of the West, some courageous people rose up to resist. Among the heroes of that day was Ahmed al-Ahmed, who was shot trying to save the weaponless Jews.
Ahmed’s heroism flowed naturally from his particular religious commitment. The religious freedom that marks the West knows that such an internalized commitment to the good of the community is the sine qua non of any successful self-governing nation. On that foundation stands the possibility of a moral commitment that transcends ethnicity and religious community. He testified to the truth of the God of Abraham, and brought honor to himself, his people, his adopted country, and his God.
The truth is both personal and universal, along with all the stops in between. That is why we have embraced freedom of religion and association — it makes our nation great.
Return to the truth. No better time than now.
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