They have to escape the reality of their failures by returning to blame Jews and expend Jewish lives and safety because otherwise they have to finally face their own centuries of complicity in murder, marginalization, and dispossession. They don't want to. They want to hang onto all the good golden artsy philosophical bits of their histories and never look at the broken bones and stolen gravestones and Judensau underneath it all.
And when we point out they haven't changed, simply pretended and offloaded it? They get very angry:
"Western civilization never waged war on the holocaust. If Hitler hadn’t also been bent on world domination, he could have industrially mass murdered all the Jews of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia with nary a peep. Escaping Jews would have been turned away from safer shores, and the train tracks certainly wouldn’t have been bombed. And the world that still appeased Hitler after Munich and didn’t care to save Jews during the war, except as part of other objectives, would have called any Jew who complained too loudly a troublemaker and a warmonger.
The world wishes to say it gave a damn about the Jews at the time and that WW2 was waged against the deepest moral horrors of the Nazis. It needs to expiate its unique, civilization-level indifference to the extermination of its Jews. It is clear from the way that Europe has always spoken to Israel that it considers its sins well-compensated, and from the way the US does that it never had any doubts—cultural, military, spiritual—in the first place. Many brave soldiers may, at a personal level, have fought to save the Jews. Their governments did not. Western Civilization went to war not to save the Jews, but to save itself from the world-conquering monster it had midwifed, the man who invaded Poland, whose allies bombed Pearl Harbor. The camps were liberated and documented in the best spirit of, “See what the war enemy is like.” Thus anti-Nazi sentiment became a civilizational self-absolution. The Nazis were declared the enemy without having to pay a dime. And the Jews were admitted, magnanimously, as evidence.
The often-genuine empathy of the individual toward the holocaust is natural, spontaneous, and totally uneducated. As soon as they ask, “But how did this happen?” a thousand “educators” step in and start talking about things they invariably would have opposed anyway had Jews never existed. They say it was nationalism, or populism, or right-wingism, or anti-communism, or dehumanization, or a bad Treaty of Versailles unleashing powerful economic forces, or the alienation of modernity and the death of G-d. Whatever it was, you see, we, the right-thinking, we whose minds are shaped by the same ideas and swim in the same waters, we, the creators of the One True Rational Hermetically-Sealed Dichotomy, are not to blame. It was not the culmination of our civilization. The holocaust was aberrant, and so obviously aberrant that everything other than the one side of the True Dichotomy can be forgiven as a bad turn down a wrong road. The project is good. Heidegger, and the churches, and art, and liberalism, and enlightenment humanism, and communism, and family values are not to blame for this. What’s that, Jew? Oct. 7 is a Nazi crime? Because it’s obviously mass Jew murder? Why would a Jew have any say about what a Nazi is? In fact, muddying the waters and crossing the dichotomies and saying this type of person could be a Nazi makes you the disgraceful one, Jew. You’re misusing the holocaust, whose lessons about universal human brotherhood and giving peace a chance are well known. You obviously don’t care about the memory of the six million. The Jews have sunk so far since the holocaust…"
