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.

The Great Beacon of Academia: Postmodernism

As you can perhaps tell by the title, I have once again had the great pleasure of running into one of the great fallacies of modern liberalism: the philosophy of postmodernism. This idea flourishes on college campuses due mainly to the fact that a college campus is one of the few places were a group of people can be far enough removed from reality, for an extended period of time, to not see the absurdity inherent with it.

Many people buy into this idea believing that it represents honest questioning and research; i.e that we are trying to truly evaluate and understand both sides and be as reasonable as possible. Unfortunately, the true problem with this philosophy lies in the fact that, in an attempt to refrain from 'bias' or 'prejudice,' it omits judging and opinion-forming altogether. Furthermore, it also comes with the inevitable invoking of multiculturalism, and the standard lines that 'we don't really know right and wrong,' or that there are 'several' truths.

Today, I encountered it in history class where the discussion concerned various philosophies of and teaching methods of history. The postmodern idea of history contends that we can never 'know' historical truth because our viewpoint from the present is so diluted. Many in the class, indeed, gave responses that sounded like they were taken directly from Michael Moore or someone of the like. I even heard the contention that there probably were multiple historical truths.

So apparently, when I say that "on July 4th, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed" I'm not stating a historical truth. What? Was it signed again on the 8th? I mean come on, of course there's only one historical truth, a day or a moment only happens once, so two different things aren't happening at once. The founders didn't sign and not sign the Declaration on July 4th. They couldn't. Not unless they had a secret, evil time machine to go back and live through the day twice.

Look, I'm not saying it's not a good thing to look at evidence, and study an issue from all sides, walk a mile in someone else's shoes, if you will, but that doesn’t mean when you've walked that mile that you can't say their road just sucks. Making judgments is a good and necessary thing to do. That is where postmodernism falls apart in the real world. You can't just walk around saying I think that's wrong but that's just my opinion. What if, for instance, in my culture it's 'right' to pull out a shotgun and shoot postmodernists? Under those circumstances a postmodernist has no moral argument to prevent me from killing them. In fact, if they allowed themselves to live, based on their rules, they would be demonstrating 'intolerance' of my culture. The bottom line, however, is that if my culture pulls shotguns on postmodernists for no reason; my culture is just plain wrong.

Of course, as far as a history class is concerned, postmodernism is directly aimed at the old 'Eurocentric' model of teaching history. You know, the one where we teach kids American History and focus on the Western World. Postmodernists dislike this because it makes a judgment, a judgment that western culture is, by and large, better and superior to everyone else's. And that is, by and large, a true assessment. It was the Greeks, Romans and then Americans who first adopted this idea of a 'Republic'. It was out of the Enlightenment that we got this concept of 'unalienable' human rights. Heck, it was America that really began the total elimination of slavery. These, and many more, are the reasons why we teach from this perspective; because in the real world, it makes more sense for Americans to know a bit more about the history of Republicanism (in case they ever decide to vote) than of African tribal cultures.

Certainly, we should include lessons about the rest of the world, perhaps a mandatory 'World History' class would be a good idea, but let's not forget to emphasize Eurocentricity. We should not be afraid to draw the conclusion that Eurocentric values, traditions, etc are not just better, but right. After all, that's why we've stuck with them for so long and, interestingly enough, why the postmodernists, or the postmodernist's ancestors, came here in the first place.