Nazis, Holocaust Deniers, and the Slippery Slope of Relativism and Multiculturalism

For the last few weeks in my World War II class, we have been reading up on one of the War's most prominent aspects: the Holocaust. The book I am currently in the middle of is Deborah Lipstadt's Denying The Holocaust, and it was preceded by selections from The Good Old Days, which gave perpetrator's and bystander's accounts of the Holocaust. While reading both, I was provided with interesting insight into the world of Multiculturalism and Moral Relativism, and offered further proof as to why these two ideas are unrealistic and wrong.

Allow me to start with one of the most startling quotes from The Good Old Days. In the early stages of the Holocaust, extermination consisted entirely of mass shootings, as the gas chambers had not yet been implemented. One of the soldiers who participated in these shootings justified his actions by saying that he "only" shot men and women, but refused to shoot children because that would have been "immoral." Then there is the German officer who thought the world would end if his mistress left him, never mind his wife and children or the thousands of Jews he killed a day. As you can probably tell, both of these Germans have re-drawn their moral lines. To the one, killing "Jews and Jewesses" is perfectly acceptable, but killing children, well, that's wrong. But, hey, who are we to say he's wrong - it's all relative to his Nazi culture. Or how about the, highly distressed, officer? It's not his wife leaving him, or the continuation of the mass murder, that would spell the end of the world, but his mistress leaving him that would - but hey, once again, that's just part of the Nazi culture. And how can we deem Nazi culture 'wrong'? We're supposed to show more compassion and refrain from making harmful judgements.

My most recent reading, Denying The Holocaust, has been interesting for the overt manner in which Lipstadt directly calls out relativism, postmodernism and multiculturalism as being responsible for the acceptance of Holocaust Denial as "the other side" of an argument. While noting that they do have right to say what they like, she points out that they are not 'one side' of the argument or in any way on equal footing with other intellectuals; they are simply lunatics who ignore all facts to promote an agenda. And the reason Holocaust Denial is often seen in this improper way is because of Multiculturalism. Multiculturalism teaches students to treat all ideas 'fairly', equally and to give everyone an opportunity to speak. Naturally, this sort of openness and acceptance leads to the slow acceptance of ideas like Holocaust Denial as something other than complete idiocy.

Additionally, Lipstadt correctly points out that relativism also leads to acceptance of these wacky ideas. In the aftermath of World War II we began hearing about how the bombing of Dresden and the crimes of the Allies were 'equal if not worse' than those of the Nazis. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking persists today amongst Neo-Nazis and Relativist leftists. Of course, Holocaust Deniers have a symbiotic relationship with the aforementioned notion. Denying the Holocaust certainly diminishes Nazi War Crimes and claiming: 'the Allies were evil too,' trivializes the meaning and horror of the Holocaust.

After reading all these things it becomes even clearer that Moral Relativism and Multiculturalism are utterly ridiculous. Multiculturalism, unfortunately, must be applied to all cultures, even that of the Nazis - and Nazism hardly deserves fair or equal standing amongst world cultures. Further it provides an intellectual atmosphere in which anything and everything is accepted; even intellectual fraud and sheer stupidity. Relativism, too, helps foster the 'anything goes' mindset; and it furthers the problem by making it impossible to implicate people for obviously evil and immoral deeds. If all Moral codes are equivalent, how can you convict the man who feels killing Jews and Jewesses is ok, provided he doesn't slaughter children? How can you implicate a people who treat women as property, stamp out all semblance of freedom, and cheer on civilian-targeting suicide bombers? The answer, if you are a relativist, is that you can't; because, once again, that's just their 'culture' and their particular 'worldview'.

Right and Wrong exist and aren't variable from person to person or culture to culture. Cultures and ideas don't all deserve the same treatment and respect. And sure, different peoples, such as Nazis and Americans, may have disagreements about what's right; but disagreements don't mean there's no right answer: they just mean somebody's wrong.