Sack of Ashes

To: Der Spiegel

Re: The construction of two more genocide memorials in the center of Berlin]

Oh screw.... why the hell don’t you just give every German a 13 kilo sack of ashes at birth which he can use to distraught himself with at periodic intervals throughout his life.

This whole endless commemoration of guilt is a wretched exercise and will ultimately prove counterproductive.

Except perhaps for some Visigothic sperm somewhere along the line, I am not of Germanic extraction. I am from the other side of the Rhine and am proud of my own. That said, Germany is a great country. It is at least one chamber in the heart of Christian Civilization.

The accomplishments of the German People are things that enrich my life daily. You have produced among the world’s greatest scientists, poets, artists, and musicians. Why this endless, masochistic self abasement? Has someone convinced you into some sort collective anti-neurosis to supposedly balance a previous hysteria? That is not the way toward true balance. No good will come from compounding complexes.

Pope Pius XI condemned Nazism as ethnic pride that went too far becoming at once superstitious and idolatrous. He saw the true nature of the beast. But superstition and idolatry can also arise from morbid ethnic self-hate.

The Nazi regime can be regarded as an aberration or as historically inevitable but in the end and in all events as reprehensible for what it did to innocent and ordinary people. But to elaborate a cult of demonology is stupid and superstitious. Other nations have committed equally terrible crimes.

Neither should you forget that the literal holocaust (i.e. fire-storm) was the one Germany suffered at the hands of monsters like Portal and Lindemann and their expressly stated policy of “demoralizing” civilians with constant fear and death. That too was a murderous crime against innocent and ordinary people.

This is not to compare sufferings but to avoid doing so. To compare sufferings is pointless and odious. It rains on the just and the unjust alike and no one's suffering is more special than another's.

Nor is this is not to argue a tu quoque moral relativism. It is simply to recognize that we are, alas, a morally equivocal species. The human soul is 50% black. The proper way to guard against that perilous fact is to take the Lord’s Prayer to heart; to always remember that we are daily capable of trespasses and to never forget that we must always forgive.

But to forgive is to move on, letting the dead bury the dead. That is not achieved by scarring your cities with monumental black tombs and darkening your minds with morbid guilt.


Chip