Since 1945, World War II has been the basis of Clown World’s civic religion, but with the observable decline of the West, neither the native masses nor the foreign invaders believe in it anymore:
Every civilization rests upon a sacred order, something that transcends the merely mortal and provides the framework through which value is arranged and meaning conferred. It is not a fiction but a sacred order that defines good and evil, memory and destiny, and determines what may be preserved and what must be condemned.
For the modern West, that faith is the Second World War.
It is remembered not as a conflict among nations but as the moment in which a new moral order was born. The war is treated as revelation, the event from which the moral legitimacy of the Western Regime descends. From it emerged a political theology that shaped institutions and public life, binding the Western world to a moral interpretation of its own survival.
Within this framework, Hitler ceased to be a historical figure and became a moral archetype, a new antichrist whose memory must be condemned. He stands as the emblem through which modern virtue is defined and the warning through which conformity is maintained. His image serves as the foundation of the postwar faith, a reference point invoked to justify authority and to police the boundaries of thought.
Through this transformation, a human tragedy was elevated into doctrine. The victors fashioned from their triumph a permanent narrative of righteousness that turned history into morality and memory into commandment. The faith endures because it explains the modern West to itself, granting coherence to its institutions and meaning to its exhaustion. It teaches that virtue lies in suppressing national will, that peace depends upon the renunciation of power, and that remembering the past too fully risks exposing the myths on which the present order rests.
The cult of the war did not remain confined to remembrance. It grew into a civic religion, woven into the structures of power and instruction. Its language pervades public life, where law and policy alike are judged against its moral vision. The past is recalled less to understand than to admonish, and history itself has been moralized into a sermon.
From this grew an orthodoxy that defines the limits of permissible thought. Nations may exist only as administrative zones and marketplaces, peoples as abstractions, and tradition as surface decoration. The religion grants the ruling order its moral immunity, for to question it is to profane what has been declared sacred.
As I pointed out to Louise Mensch, no one cares about World War II, the Nazis, or the Holocaust anymore than people cared about the Boxer Rebellion in 1939. Events that took place more than 80 years ago are simply not relevant to their lives or to their experience in any way, shape, or form.
This wasn’t true 30 years ago. When Spacebunny and I bought our first house, the man from whom we bought it was nearly brought to tears when meeting my grandfather, a Marine who fought in WWII, because he’d lost his brother in Normandy on D-Day. And an elderly British man of our acquaintance could barely hear the word “Israel” without his lip curling in disdain; he’d lost a brother in the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946.
But nearly everyone with personal experience of WWII is now gone and the false moral order that was imposed in its aftermath is not only fading, but obviously bankrupt. We don’t know exactly what will take its place, but we do know that the post-post WII period is going to be very different than what preceded it. And we can be certain that the nations will rise again.