Hate and Self-Hate

In a later commentary on his book A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth, Norman Finkelstein distinguishes, in his critique of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (HWE), between two different types of Holocaust literature:

"holocaust scholarship, which tends to be historical and multicausal, and Holocaust literature, which tends to be ahistorical and monocausal." (ANOT: 88) I reckon the former as "solid scholarly research," the latter as "largely devoid of scholarly interest."  

Goldhagen's true distinction is to argue that German anti-Semitism was not only an integral but rather that it was the sufficient condition for perpetrating the extermination of the Jews: "With regard to the motivational cause of the Holocaust, for the vast majority of perpetrators, a monocausal explanation does suffice" (HWE: 416, emphasis in original; cf. 455, 582 n42).

The sensationalist literature that tries to frame Wagner into the Prophet, who is single handedly held responsible for causing his Disciple, Hitler, to start World War II and instigate the Holocaust, can obviously only be called "monocausal" and "largely devoid of scholarly interest". The situation demands a psychological post-mortem to determine what the motivations—beyond cashing in on some populist scandal mongering—underlying this type of crazed polemic might be.

Israeli scholar, Na'ama Sheffi is candid in telling us the real meaning of the endless stream of polemics directed against Wagner: "we hate the Germans". That is certainly true when it comes to non-German writers, who wish to frame Wagner into the supreme embodiment of everything that is supposed to be wrong with Germany. Hate the Nazis—and hate Wagner unless you are a Nazi—is how the propaganda goes. Next, Jews who wish to keep the memory of the Shoah alive start to consider it their sacred duty to hate Wagner with all their heart.

It seems that hatred is the emotion most closely associated with the memory of National Socialists. Accusations of Nazism are used as a generic catch-all to be liberally thrown at any target one wishes. Today, whenever you want to run a polemic against a target of hate, the brick that you throw at your enemy is the accusation of Nazism. You can easily find hate filled images on the internet depicting almost any major politician as another Hitler. For example:

You won't be seeing images like this coming from official Republican funded political advertising leading up to the US elections. Nor will you see anything official from the Democrats taking responsibility for this type of thing either:

Next up is Angela Merkel:

Here is Benjamin Netanyahu depicted in the same way:

The reason is that this sort of vomiting of raw, emotive hatred is considered extremely distasteful and disrespectful to the memory of the Shoah. It is an unwritten rule that politicians should avoid using comparisons of their political rivals with the National Socialists, because when they fling this kind of mud, they usually end up wearing most of it themselves as this German cartoon rather humorous points out:

"Astonishing...even though the mouse knows that it will receive an electric shock, it keeps pushing the button over and over again"

"We will therefore name this the Hitler Comparison Paradox"

Politicians are hardly the only object of this sort of eruption of hatred. For example, similar images can be found for the Pope:

Likewise, you gets these polemics about 'Islamo-Nazism':

Others compare the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to that of the Jews by the National Socialists and call the Jews the new Nazis:

The same brick is also thrown at the left of politics, as well as the right:

Every target is game, and nobody is immune to having this brick thrown at them—not even Mother Teresa. I found this on the internet:

Fortunately, this sort of inflammatory rhetoric is mostly frowned upon in sensible mainstream public discourse. Yet, somehow when it comes to Wagner, this sort of carry on has become the standard modus operandi that goes far beyond restriction to the virtual anonymity of the internet's darker side, for it has long ago become publicly respectable, and many consider it their deeply pious duty to vehemently hate Wagner as though this would make a shining tribute to the victims of the Shoah. Even the best academic publications from the most respected sources permit themselves to be instantly reduced to this sort of ranting at the very mention of Wagner's name. The meaning of this is naturally, once again, just "we hate the Germans".

Many of these pious Wagner haters simply refuse to admit to themselves that such petty hatred and thirst for blood vengeance underlies their thoughts. That is because this sort of bloodthirsty desire for vengeance is regarded as a taboo, as it tends to reduce the persecutor to the same level as those they persecute—the most extreme variant of this being a call to exterminate all Germans in gas chambers for the betterment of mankind, so as to eradicate the German racial bacillus that is the root of all Nazi evil. You feel a little guilty in saying "we hate the Germans", so instead you say "we hate Wagner". Wagner is turned into a cultural symbol of the whole of Germany. Hate begets hate, and once this issue snowballs out of control, and, worse still, gets politicised, you can reason all you wish, and it will be to no avail whatsoever.

Of course, readers will already be wanting to interject saying that because Joachim Köhler is German, his endless polemics against Wagner can not mean "we hate the Germans". However, the emotion that drives him is essentially the same, except that it is a self-hatred. It seems this disease of self-hatred is something that Shoah has transferred from the Jews to the Germans. Before the Shoah, Jews felt guilty about being different and many yearned for full assimilation by thoroughly eradicating their roots. Indeed, Wagner encouraged Jews to do just that in order that they and gentiles become "united and without difference". He meant well, and even Theodor Herzl thought like this for much of his life. Today, with the theory of the German Sonderweg, it is the Germans themselves who are left feeling like the odd ones out, while finding themselves caricatured by writers like Daniel Goldhagen as a nation of sadists who are "Hitler's Willing Executioners":

By the end of the nineteenth century, the view that Jews posed extreme danger to Germany, and that the source of their perniciousness was immutable, namely their race, and the consequential belief that the Jews had to be eliminated from were extremely widespread in German society. The tendency to consider and propose the most radical form of elimination—that is, extermination—was already strong and had been given much voice.

Hitler's Willing Executioners: P77 

[A] demonological antisemitism, of the virulent racial variety, was the common structure of the perpetrators' cognition and of German society in general. The German perpetrators ... were assenting mass executioners, men and women who, true to their own eliminationist antisemitic beliefs, faithful to their cultural antisemitic credo, considered the slaughter to be just. 

Hitler's Willing Executioners: P392-3

[The Germans were] pathologically ill ... struck with the illness of sadism ... diseased ... tyrannical, sadistic, psychopathic.

Hitler's Willing Executioners: P397, P450

The Germans are a bunch of sickos, says Goldberg—just look at the likes of Wagner, he would undoubtedly say: the name always thrown around as the ultimate cliché of the allegedly supreme cultural expression of universal German psychopathy. Every salacious lie concocted about Wagner to perpetuate this myth is secretly justified to one's innermost conscience as being a noble white lie to be dutifully repeated over and over—until it becomes the Truth.

Today, it is the Germans, rather than the Jews, who are torn by feelings of guilt, mixed with self-hatred. As you can see in Köhler, the combination of these two emotions turns out to be explosive as he eggs himself on to hating Wagner with as much vehemence as possible. Many Jews, and even some non-Germans, will be intensely pleased at this ostentatious outburst of pious German self-hatred, and laud it as an admirable desire for atonement and forgiveness.

Unfortunately, there is something frightfully disingenuous about this public spectacle of seemingly pious self-flagellation. By making Wagner the scapegoat, who must single-handedly shoulder the burden of guilt for the Shoah, Köhler ends up cleansing Hitler and other National Socialists of defilement in sin too. After all, in this view of events, Hitler, the Disciple was but a hapless little puppet, forced by the spellbinding power of his Prophet's art to commit genocide. Of course, this is exactly what Köhler wants: to cleanse the soiled reputation of the Nazis by shifting all blame to Wagner. It's not Hitler's fault—says Köhler—Wagner made him do it.

The scapegoat, Wagner, also helps to cleanse Köhler, and with it the whole of the German Volk of defilement in the sin and guilt of genocide. The more he explodes with hatred towards Wagner, cheered on by Jews who wish to keep alive the memory of the Shoah, the more Köhler feels cleansed of his deep seated feelings of sin and guilt. It all ends up a gratuitous orgy of frenzied hatred and self-hatred disguised as a hypocritical self-righteousness and phoney pure-hearted penitence.

The truly astonishing thing is that this sort of appalling nonsense is not only condoned, but universally encouraged. Köhler has already published five books that are just naked polemic against Wagner, and another is soon to come, with nearly all of his books having been translated into English. If a writer tried to write that many books calling President Obama, Chancellor Merkel or Pope Benedict XVI the mere puppet of Hitler, both author and publisher would come under such massive criticism from the public, or from politically influential organisations, that the enterprise would get shut down fairly quickly. You would get the same outcome if someone wrote book after book villainizing Martin Luther as the Prophet of the Shoah, or demonising the whole of Christianity as the root cause of the Shoah. If you tried to singlehandedly blame Marx for causing the Shoah, the whole of the political left, even those usually unsympathetic to Marx, would come to his defence. Not so with Wagner, who is left on his own.

Wagner is an easy target. Wagner associations are small, with scanty political influence or clout. Due to the immense difficulties in reading his theoretic writings, his clearly post-Bakunian anarchist-socialist thinking, so clearly articulated by George Bernard Shaw, has been unjustly neglected, and has been permitted to lapse into obscurity. Few people even associate Wagner with socialist thought or realise that the best and most radical aspects underlying Nietzsche's thought have been inherited, if not downright stolen, from Wagner. No philosopher would condescend to read the thoughts of a composer, let alone defend them, and no musicologist can read such philosophically complex writings. Wagner is left orphan.

That means that writers like Köhler can write their endless polemics, praising to the heavens, the virtues of Hitler as supreme Wagner interpreter—and with complete impunity, knowing nobody will seriously challenge him as he presents interpretations that secretly honour his Nazi masters with interpretations of Wagner more fantastically Nazified than anything even they could ever have dreamt of in their wildest dreams. Truly, Joachim Köhler is a masterful crypto-Nazi, who can gloat in contentment that he has virtually the whole of Israel in his thrall, hailing him, chanting with their blind mob anger, whipping him into ever more frenzied fits of gratuitous Wagner-hatred. Köhler is a silvery tongued Aron who is leading people into an insane Dance Around the Gold Calf.

It is high time that Köhler and his ilk be made to wear some of the mud he throws, and that more people stand up to his appalling intellectual bullying behaviour, if only to teach his sort that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. This is truly a case of "Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!"