The Genesis of Genocide: Breaking Through to the Heart of the Holocaust

Most Holocaust books have a pro-Western, anti-German slant. Published nearly two decades ago, this one still stands as the first to embrace a holistic, pro-human stance. It refrains from demonizing Nazis and lays the burden of responsibility for their crimes squarely on a Judeo-Christian legacy and the misparenting tradition it deifies. It is like a damning report by Child Protective Services, documenting how Judaism and Christianity sanctify child abuse in the family of man. And it makes the case guided by the principle that no God is worth the suffering of a single child.

Those who point to Nazis as bad guys forget the three fingers pointing back at them. Their moral indignation no longer serves as a smokescreen for the fact that the crematoria fires were kindled in the altar-flame of Judeo-Christian civilization. On the one hand, Abraham is hailed as the patron saint of the Nuremberg defendants, for had he been caught raising his knife to murder his flesh and blood, his defense would have been identical to theirs: 'I was just following orders.' On the other, the logic of saving the human race by sacrificing one innocent Jew arguably lays the foundation for the holocaust of six million.

Hitler and the run-up to WWII is a model to tease out the DNA of evil. Babies are born to live and let live, but in the teeth of predatory violence, they bargain for survival by giving up vital chunks of integrity. No matter what the cost, they despair not of peaceful solutions, as long as they can placate aggressors with self-denial or buy them off with self-sacrifice. It is when the path of appeasement proves a dead-end that children go on the warpath. Appeasement and aggression are the twin strands in the double helix of child abuse. A civilization that ignores it is doomed to retrace that trajectory. As Hitler came across as abusive father writ large, heads of state bent over backwards to keep the peace. Only when they ran out of patience and hope did they get their backs up to join forces with the aggressor. So, too, the fate of child abuse victims runs a gamut from self-destructive forms of appeasement to a backlash of world-destructive violence. The world is goaded into making war on Hitler because it refuses to redress the conditions under which children grow up to make war on the world - not for lack of will to live at peace, but for failure to see any other way of surviving deadly aggression.