From the Mad Mullahs at the National Review

Via DeLong, we find Daniel P. Moloney (rumored to be hiding somewhere on border between Afghanistan and 5th Avenue) raging against the moral Nazism of The Decadent West:

What Pius XII diagnosed as the sin of the 20th century — the loss of a sense of personal guilt and sin — Benedict XVI thinks helped make great evil seem so ordinary. This is the theological solution to Hannah Arendt’s puzzle about how such boring bureaucrats as Himmler and Eichmann could bring about the Holocaust. The Nazis taught, repeatedly and in numerous different ways, that there is no God, no sin, and no personal guilt. Relentless propaganda made it easy for people to avoid feeling guilty, and, since everyone was complicit, nobody was made to answer for his sins.

In this regard, the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally. There’s a difference, to be sure, but hardly anyone would contest the observation that in elite Western society, as in totalitarian Germany, the moral vocabulary has been purged of the idea of sin. And if there’s no sense of sin, then there’s no need for a Redeemer, or for the Church.

So, really, aside from a few admitted differences, like the Holocaust and World War II, “elite Western society” is really just like Nazi Germany, because it doesn’t ache to be Christianized by the Mad Mullahs of NRO. Fascinating. Come to think of it, I don’t suppose the (elite, cosmopolitian, liberal, intellectual) Jews who died at Auchwitz felt much need for the Church, either. But that’s a column for another day.