Daniel Miller recently posted a piece on IM-1776 that’s deserving of high praise. It’s a provocative assessment of how the decades-long aftermath of World War II resulted in the gradual transformation of the West into something increasingly sinister. This transformation annihilates any posturing about the West (and perhaps America specifically) being an “anti-fascist” prototype. The latter narrative, of course, was always a flattering delusion (Miller notes that Stalin invented the term anti-fascism, after all).
Realistically this metamorphosis may’ve been inevitable, and sealed by fate in our fallen world. Miller compares the outcome to Aztec paganism and dubs it “Hitlerian Satanism” — observable in the vicious psychopolitics of modern-day democracy.
Writes Miller:
According to the precepts of Hitlerian Satanism, never explicitly formalized but everywhere visible through the distortion effects they exert, World War II was not a political conflict, but a crusade against evil. It could not have been averted, and none of its destructive consequences, including the holocaust, could have been prevented except maybe by earlier action.
Because they were fighting the devil, all of the measures adopted by the US-led forces were justified, including the military alliance with a Soviet terror state which, over the previous decade, had murdered perhaps twenty million of its own citizens in concentration camps and politically engineered mass starvations, which are today widely defended as logistical errors. This criminally sadistic regime, which started the war in alliance with Germany and ended it as the ally of the Western democracies and the master of an Eastern European police empire, following a campaign of mass rape, and indiscriminate murder of European civilians, was our noble Antifascist ally, now and forever: nobody today will face consequences for being a Stalin-apologist.
In this strange metaphysics, the extermination of the Jews is a facsimile of Christ’s crucifixion, minus redemption. “Because one can never pay the infinite debt of a sacrifice of millions of lives, made for nothing,” Miller says, “the Jews acquire the position of a kind of parody of Christ: eternal tortured victims in a cosmos without God”:
G.K. Chesterton’s warning that when men cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything, applies here in extremis. As it sinks into increasingly oppressive and corrupt dysfunction, the West clings onto the moral certainty supplied by Hitler, as a kind of negative reverse God, and false God.
The void left by no affinity for the divine, and no healthy religious structure, has been disastrous:
Religion is not simply a matter of individual conscience: it composes the symbols which underwrite the power of judgment upon which political decisions are based. An ideological religion anchored in the contingent historical circumstances of the Second World War – circumstances that never previously existed, and will never be repeated — is neither subtle, nor precise enough to generate truly critical concepts: what it amounts to is a dysfunctional matrix of fragmentary images producing systematic distortions of judgment, and endemic corruption, in the absence of judgment.
All Thoughts are Prey
The result is a learning disability at scale, with the West completely unable to collate signal from noise, and doused with powerful faux-religious incentives to never learn. Most people do not have immunity to this and anyone can be collaterally damaged, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum. 2020 demonstrated this, as paranoia about COVID and our contrived racial discord led to mass social dysfunction. Victims landed in the camps of epistemic failure or fear (and sometimes both), which exacerbated already questionable levels of social trust. For me personally, the fallout was a nightmare and a violation for which I’m loath to offer forgiveness, so my own bitter resentment helps fuel the cycle that devours us. Rinse and repeat.
Rene Girard‘s work applies here in increasingly obvious ways. Mimetic theory dictates that groups imitate their rivals. And while it might be incorrect to say that denizens of the West have mimetically become who they defeated (Nazis), Miller points to Girard’s scapegoat mechanism as key to understanding the current moment. The scapegoat mechanism never provides satisfactory resolution because the scapegoat isn’t guilty enough to resolve the crisis that generated it (see Donald Trump, whose “crime” is advocating for civic nationalism and views that a centrist liberal might’ve held in 1993).
The Eternal Recurrence of WWII: A Never-Ending Loop, in a Distortion Chamber
Miller’s grim prognosis is that World War II can’t end until the West acknowledges that the apocalyptic destruction of the war wasn’t due to Hitler’s evil intentions alone, “and the crimes and mistakes of the other combatants cannot be absolved ex cathedra, as if a remission of sins, based on the fact that they fought him.”
In the meantime, we are left with the West as panoptic hologram, a censorial generator of false realities fueled by deception and Luciferian desires. Its adherents have become 100% programmable NPCs, eager to attack scapegoats to distract from their own enslavement. This beast, or machine, is a self-perpetuating murmuration. No memo needs to be sent out; all coordination is mass-intuited and reflexive, which enables plausible deniability and grants forward momentum — an obvious occult phenomenon and shades of the Devil’s “Second Trick”:
Already in his 1945 essay ‘The Devil’s Share’ Denis de Rougemont recognized the emerging identification of Hitler with the devil as the devil’s second trick, following Satan’s original success in convincing the world that he didn’t exist. “When we imagine that Hitler is the Devil we obviously do too great honor to the Austrian ex-corporal,” Rougemont wrote, “but above all we delude ourselves as to Satan’s real stature. Let us not forget that Satan is Legion! Suppressing a dictator would not suffice, alas! to rid our epoch of the profound evils that beset it.”
“The central proposition of [Hitlerian Satanism] is that we are nothing like this,” Miller writes, “when the lesson of totalitarianism is precisely yes, we are.”