Tony needs to wake up and smell the Lashon Hora (evil speech) that now permiates our public discourse. What is really banal today is the vulgarity, profanity and baseless hatred, that flows in torrents from the icons of pop culture. It is visceral. It is irrational. And it is everywhere...banal. It floods the cinemas (and the minds of our children) with millions of graphic displays of carnage, because it’s producers know that the ‘thrill of revulsion’ creates an addiction that demands more...and makes more money. It produces oceans of pornography that
cover the globe and drown the humanity and holiness of sexuality. It sanctions every rude and perverse vice and insults and castigates anyone who dares to impede it’s progress. It calls them ‘Nazis’. It makes war on those who try to prevent the utter destruction of the western, Judeo-Christian Canon and Ethic.
It loudly screeches that the reason for the Shoah was the very idea of an Absolute, and so hates and ridicules the Bible, Torah, Jesus, Commandments etc.. Immediately, it produces it’s own, arbitrary absolutes, that are tools for it’s ascent to power. This spirit is seductive, sublime and almost invisible. Like ‘crank’ it is a sweet rush but the cost, as we will soon see, is too high. The Holocaust was seen as horrible because years ago, people were relatively pure, innocent of such darkness. Our twelve year olds have DONE those things in their video games. They are not impressed. And every word of profanity coarsens their spirits.
The reason there was a Shoah was NOT because Hitler had an ‘absolute’. It was because he (and Stalin and Mao etc.)
had the WRONG absolute. It was an arbitrary absolute fabricated to take the place of the historical (though flawed) faith of Europe. It was just another form of Humanism. Like Heidegger, it’s back!
From time to time, observers have said that Hitler and Stalin were men possessed, in the manner described by Doystroevski. Anyone meeting them for the first time would find them quite ordinary. But behind their eyes glowed the fires of hell, so to speak. There is in fact no evil that ordinary men will not, have not committed.