THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

ecame used to it and we could no longer differentiate sounds. This noise is the resultof the moral distortion in a victims’ state, the country that permits itself to sacrificethe other. Victimhood sets you free. I have to confess, especially having rejected theposition of victimhood, that my greatest surprise in writing this book was discoveringthat the political, social, and national structures that most resemble Israel’s are thoseof Germany’s Second Reich before the period of anarchy that facilitated the rise ofNational Socialism. I must emphasize, though: before, not during.This is both embarrassing and frightening.Otto Eduard Bismarck was the founding father of the second German empire,known also as the Second Reich. Early in the 1870s Bismarck fulfilled a twodecade-longdream. In a few months he crushed the French army of Napoleon IIIand founded the Second Empire in Versailles, France, of all places. With this act, heelevated Germany to the level of the other European powers. Most Germans, amongthem Jews, regarded the unification of the German lands as an act of historical, if notmessianic, redemption. Friedrich Nietzsche, the doubting philosopher, was notamused. He tried to shake them, stating “such a magnificent military victory maycause much greater destruction and annihilation than was defeated in battle, especiallyif it is interpreted by the Germans as proof of their human and cultural superiorityover the defeated French.” 1The few who shared his views understood that German national revival at gunpointwas a poor substitute for true national revival, such as was needed to repair adecadent regime and society. Leopold Sonnemann, the Jewish publisher of theFrankfurter Zeitung, predicted that the new German unification “will come at theexpense of freedom.” He and others correctly saw that the new union was based onthe strength of the German army. They understood that the new situation createdtension between a military state and a civilian state. In such a situation, the militarystate would sanctify flawed values, such as nationalism, belligerence, and theidolization of a national security doctrine, above all others. Militarists know no otherway of functioning but to manipulate people’s prejudices against those perceived“others” through social and political toughness