The Shoah and Western Civilization

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz of the Institute of World Politics analyzes the role of Holocaust revisionism in the Islamic assault on the West:

“The terrible, if unstated, implications of the anti-Jewish logic of the Islamists are clear. For them, the Holocaust is the secular religion of the West. The United States is the dominant Western power. It is controlled by ‘the Jews’ who purvey the ‘myth’ of the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad and his cronies destroy the ‘myth,’ they will destroy the West . . . .

“After all, they see that the Holocaust is virtually the only topic apparently treated with reverence. The Shoah is the only historical phenomenon in the West that is, at least to a large extent, outside of the post-modernist, deconstructionist “school” of thought. Everything that used to be sacred for the West has been challenged and discredited by the dominant liberal elite. That includes all religions (in particular Christianity), America’s Founding, and Western Civilization.

“The Holocaust is perhaps the last vestige of the Truth that Westerners generally agree on among themselves. It is the only general exception in the sea of the West’s nihilism and moral relativism. If the ‘myth’ of the Holocaust ‘falls,’ the West is gone. As [Victor] Hansen put it ‘there are millions of highly educated but cynical Westerners who see nothing exceptional about their own culture.’ And our culture is based upon the millennia old premise that the truth exists and is demonstrable. Deny that and Western civilization crumbles. Thus, the true objective of the Holocaust revisionist policies of the Islamic radicals is to destroy the last vestige of truth as encapsulated in the historical fact of the Jewish extermination by the Third Reich. Once that is gone, the center will no longer hold.”