Chad Crowley
@CCrowley100
Hitler is merely one facet, or more precisely one tenet, of the founding religion of the post-1945 Western world: the religion of the Good War.
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.
Under its influence, the doctrine of equality hardened into dogma. What had once been a legal principle became an article of faith, binding the West to the conviction that difference itself is evil. The war that destroyed Europe is said to have proved that hierarchy is tyranny, that identity rooted in anything higher than material or economic existence leads to violence, and that peace depends upon the abolition of distinction. Thus the religion of the Good War sustains the slavish cult of equality, and together they form the creed of a civilization that no longer remembers what it once was.
The consequences of this creed have been destructive. Nationalism, once understood as the natural expression of collective will, was recast as the seed of catastrophe. Loyalty to one’s own became suspect, and pride in ancestry a moral defect.
Moreover, anything that had been used or symbolized by the Axis powers, even when it had long preceded them in Western history, became condemned by association. The symbols of empire and the language of hierarchy were cast aside as relics of oppression, while the notion of spiritual order itself was treated as a threat. What earlier generations regarded as noble or sacred was redefined as the seed of tyranny. In this way, the West came to renounce not only its past but the principles that had once animated its greatness.
The religion of the Good War transformed the instinct for belonging into a source of shame and reduced the nation to a tolerated mechanism of administration, stripped of its older dignity as the living form of a people.
Borders persist chiefly for commerce, rarely for preservation. “Nations” of people have become “states” of populations, administrative shells devoid of conviction, while those within them drift without purpose. A civilization that once found destiny in creation now measures virtue through surrender.
This inversion has left the West incapable of defending its own existence. It cannot speak of heritage without apology or affirm continuity without guilt. Its moral vocabulary condemns the instincts that sustain life, such as loyalty, hierarchy, and rootedness, and in the pursuit of universal peace, it has disarmed its spirit.
That spiritual disarmament prepared the way for dissolution. Having denied the legitimacy of pride, the West lost the will to preserve itself. Mass immigration was welcomed not as policy but as penance. Demographic transformation was taken as proof of virtue. The replacement of native populations was celebrated as the consummation of moral progress. What began as a religion of redemption became an instrument of erasure.
The collapse that followed was not merely political but spiritual. The West ceased to see itself as a civilization and began to regard its own survival as a problem to be managed. Its rulers converted guilt into a governing principle, while its people were taught that self-sacrifice is the highest form of virtue. This belief hollowed the inner life of nations, replacing the will to endure with the wish to be absolved.
The effect upon mankind has been profound. A people cannot live without a vision of continuity or purpose. When memory is condemned, existence loses shape. What had once been a civilization of builders became a civilization of caretakers. It preserved fragments of greatness but forgot the source from which greatness sprang.
The religion of the Good War, once a moral shield, has become a burden too heavy to bear. It cannot sustain a living order because it denies the instincts upon which life depends. No civilization can flourish while despising its fathers, nor guide the future while treating the past as a curse. It must now be seen for what it is: not a foundation, but a chain.
Only by casting it off can the West once again stand among the nations of men, not as a penitent, but as a people who remember what they are.