The Collective Trauma of Nazism & the Holocaust

Putting the Power of Self-Knowledge to Work

By David Bernstein, August 23, 2016 (LINK to article)

This article relates to how childhood trauma can be a major factor in an array of social ills. However, it is not just individuals who can suffer such trauma. Western civilisation itself, I believe, suffered collective psychological trauma in the form of Nazism and the Holocaust, which is widely overlooked but having a hugely negative affect on modern western society.

In an editorial response to the Islamist terror attacks in Paris last November (LINK), the NYT offered these wise words of warning:

“In the reaction and overreaction to terrorism [evil] comes the risk that society will lose its way.”

Western civilisation has indeed lost its way, but because our leaders - in politics the media and, especially, academia - would have to take responsibility for it (despite a previous generation bearing personal responsibility), they are loath to admit it, even to themselves.

There is also the problem of so many personal, professional and political self-interests now being bound up with it, which something I elaborate on in other BLOGS.

Because the Nazis made a huge and very ugly issue of race, there was an overreaction to the opposite extreme of denying its importance, even its very existence, altogether.

Race is not the "social construct" we are taught to believe it is (except when you try dividing closely related peoples from the same subcontinent into different races, as the Nazis insanely did), but real and important. Not in the way that racial supremacists believe it is, but because central to any deep and meaningful sense of both personal and group, i.e. genuine national, identity. This explains why the state, which deceitfully poses as a nation itself, is so keen to suppress its importance.

America, and increasingly Europe, will never solve their race problems by denying the importance of race, but quite the contrary.

Jews were especially traumatised by Nazism and the Holocaust, and thus find it especially hard to face up to. Perhaps this is why they seem to play such a prominent role in the west's extreme overreaction to it.