Naming Good and Evil
Both pseudoscience and pseudo-ethics appear to embrace legitimate means and ends, while actually subverting them. Analogously, Nazism did not simply deny or contradict Judaism; it borrowed from Judaism and twisted it to its own purposes. Here I analyze eight interwoven dynamics of Hitlerite deceit: (1) the appeal to schadenfreude rather than to a sense of justice; (2) the masking of schadenfreude itself as a sense of justice; (3) the appeal to “Nature” rather than to God; (4) the masking of “Nature” itself as God; (5) the rejection of many Jewish and Christian teachings as anti-Aryan; (6) the masking of Jesus himself as an anti-Semitic Aryan; (7) the rejection of Jewish “legalism” as decadent and racially motivated; and (8) the masking of Nazi racism and genocide as itself legal. So many leaps of illogic are involved that some commentators doubt that the Nazi leadership believed what they were saying, but I do not underestimate the aptitude for self-deception at every level of the Third Reich.