Maasoch in High Places

Heiko Maas is truly a dogmatic idiot. During an interview with Der Spiegel, Germany's former Justice Minister and now its Foreign Minister, says he got into politics because of Auschwitz. It was “so horrific that I simply couldn't understand it. From that grew a deep need to make a contribution myself so that something like that never happens again.”

Okay, fair enough. He goes on to say, that the events in Syria can't be compared to Auschwitz. I hadn't thought anyone had made the comparison but, again, fair enough. However, Maas then followed up with, “The barbarity of the Nazis' crimes makes it impossible to compare them with others. Auschwitz cannot be compared with anything.”

It is here that Maas' negative Anti-Religion is made clear in all its bottomless darkness.

To say that it Auschwitz “can't be compared to anything” is to put it beyond the reach of all reason because the foundation of rationalism is to compare things. In Heiko's pathetic little mind, Auschwitz is that than which nothing more greatly evil can be conceived. It thus takes the place of St.Anselm's god [1], except that Heiko's god is not incomprehensibly good, but rather inconceivably evil.

One has to understand what it means to talk about that which is beyond all measure. When we look up at the stars and attempt to grasp the vastness of the cosmos, there is nothing left for us to do but to stand mutely in awe. What else can one do with the concept of infinity? We can't grasp it, we can't measure it, we can't compare it. After a moment of all too baffling and disquieting awe, we turn our sights down and go about our business. It is the same with God, that which is beyond infinity itself. When we talk about “god” -- even when we talk to Him -- we are actually talking to a carved chess piece on the board of our mind. When we intuit God, we simply stand in awe and adore.

What Heiko is demanding is that we stand in awe, dumb, mute and trembling before “Auschwitz” -- that than which nothing more infinitely evil can be conceived. Of course, Maas used “Auschwitz” as a short hand reference to a series and cluster of specific historical events. But by moving those facts beyond all comparison the word “Auschwitz” ceases to be a reference and becomes an object totem. What Maas ends up demanding is that we stand dumb and mute before a New Incarnation of Satan, who is exalted to an equal but opposite status of God. This is heresy.

It is a heresy that flows from Nationalism Socialism itself, although Stupid Heiko can't possibly conceive how. It is left to us to recall the critique of Nazism by Pope Pius XI, in his 1937 encyclical Mit Brennende Sorge. No one, he writes, could fault Germans for “establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country.” But,

Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, .... Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.

Whatever one's conception of God might be, what was clear to Pius (and what was a fact) was that the Nazis had exalted the Racial Volk as a divinized antipode to the Christian notion of God and, indeed, to any notion of God except the divinity attributed to “Racial Destiny.” Nazism was, in short, idolatry.

Idolatry is not simply a question of images. The essence of idolatry is exaltation. Christianity, and in fact Islam and Judaism as well, reject the concept of eternal and equally balanced forces of good and evil. For, if good and evil are co-equal they are co-valid. One can choose sides as one wills but neither can achieve preeminence over the other. Evil is idolatrized when it is exalted to a co-equal status with Good. In such a case, it is not possible to behold Creation and say “it is good.” (Genesis 1:31.) Thus, the Koran states, “there is no deity but Allah. He is the Knower of the Seen and the Unseen. He is the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful. He is the Almighty, the All-Wise. (Surat al-Hashr, 22-24.) Everything in the heavens and Earth belongs to Him. (Surat al-Baqara, 255.) In short, Satan is a fallen angel not an evil twin. He may be devious and strong but he is all too comprehensible. One can say that Auschwitz was Satanic or that it was an exercise in Banality but to say that it cannot be compared to anything is to mint a Counter-God.

All Maas has done is to internalize this idolatry, in a spirit of masochism, so as to supplant the idolatry of the Volk Gemeinschaft with an idolizing of its evil works. It does not make any difference that Maas condemns the works. Whether the German Volk is exalted beyond measure or whether the crimes of the German Volk are removed beyond all analysis and reason, an idolatry has still occurred. One is the idolatry of the Golden Calf, the other the idolatry of the Charred Calf.

This is of course the dynamic of masochism -- that it exalts the thing feared and fetishizes the brutality under which it yearns to suffer. That is all Heiko Maas has done. That is his personal choice, but he has used his position as minister of Justice and now Foreign minister to impose his masochism on a nation and a world. It is a perversion.

Don't be fooled. “Bottoms are always in control.” Maas may be the High Priest of Masochism, but he uses that self-exalted position to control others. The high priests of Moloch no doubt sincerely believed their self-conceived necessities; but that did not mean they didn't terrorize believers and persecute those who questioned their mandated sacrifices.

It is here that Maas' life work betrays itself. At the outset we said “fair enough” to his auto-devotion to make sure “Auschwitz” never happens again. But one can no more build a negative than prove one. So how does one insure something does not happen? The way Grand Inquisitors always have: rooting out dissent, dangerous thought or anything that Maas and his minions decide is a blasphemy against the Incomparable.

It is a pity that Christians have become so befuddled by their need to do useful good works that they are deaf and dumb to the threat of a rival god alien to that concept of life which their faith ought to uphold.

Notes

[1] i.e. “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived”


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