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Well, I warned her.

September 1992. I was in Munich for the only reason I ever went to Europe, the sonofabitchin’ Holocaust. My traveling companion Tina and I had just concluded two weeks in Poland, and now we were in the heart of Bavaria, where I was scheduled to give a talk.

I was in our hotel room, writing my speech (the only speech I ever gave that wasn’t ad-libbed, and not coincidentally, the worst speech I ever gave), and Tina—a golden-haired lass from Nowhere, New York (seriously, look up DeKalb Junction. It makes the people in Bumfuck, Egypt, go, “Hey, we’re a metropolis!”)—tells me she wants to check out Oktoberfest.

Back then, I never drank. Not a drop. It wouldn’t be until summer 2003 that my broker encouraged me to get in on the ground floor of that exciting new cirrhotic liver thing, and I never looked back. But that night in ’92, I lisped to Tina, “I have an important thspeech to write. You go have fun; I’m thstaying in.”

She excitedly exclaimed, “I can’t wait to tell the locals about our work! How we’re challenging the inaccuracies of Holocaust history. They’ll be so pleased that we’re lessening the burden of their guilt!”

I don’t remember my response word-for-word, but it was something like “Dear God no, don’t tell them that! Do not mention our work! Not under any thircumthtances!”

“Thuffering thuccotash, Tina. Whatever you do, don’t do that.”

“Don’t worry,” Tina chirped. “I know Holocaust revisionism’s illegal here. I’ll be discreet.”

And that’s when we had “the talk.” The talk a Jewish Holocaust revisionist gives to his hick-town shiksa before she goes to Oktoberfest to discuss gas chambers (yes, I’m the only person in history to ever have that talk). I explained that the postwar German identity is centered around atonement. They’re the “good atoners.” That’s their shtick. Other nations, other peoples throughout history, from the highest Viking to the lowliest Choctaw, have waged wars and committed atrocities. But the Germans alone are repentant. It’s a point of pride.

You don’t try to take that away from them by saying, “Hey, maybe you don’t have quite as much to atone for.” They’ll react negatively. It’d be like going to France and saying, “You guys can’t make cheese.” It strikes at the core of their national soul.

Tina didn’t listen. Out she went, looking more Aryan than Eva Braun in a dirndl, and I set about writing a truly godawful speech. I don’t precisely recall when she returned…maybe two hours later. And the chipper smile she departed with was nowhere to be seen.

“They yelled at me,” she said, on the verge of tears. “They were like, ‘How dare you?’”

Poor Tina had been Greta Thunberged before it was cool.

German atonement provides useful lessons for American whites.

In the immediate post-WWII years, U.S. schemes to break the German psyche were heavy-handed. Those were the Morgenthau years, the “denazification” years. But then the West Germans got lucky; Cold War realities dictated that it was more important to have a happy and prosperous West Germany than Morgenthau’s proposed Stone Age wasteland. West German school textbooks and media ensured that the next generation grew up feeling eternally guilty for the Holocaust (the singer Nena—born in 1960—once recounted that while filming the “99 Luftballons” video, which featured pyrotechnic explosions, the entire band started crying because the kaboomies reminded them that they’re a race of evil warmongers). But at the same time, daily life in West Germany was fine. It was a good place to live. Safe, prosperous, culturally alive. Why, you might even see a Beatle or two warbling at a local kneipe.

The point? The people to whom Germans had pledged eternal atonement weren’t physical menaces. Even by 1992 there were only 40,000 Jews in a nation of 77.5 million (during my trips, I was often the first Jew some Germans had ever met). And what Jews there were didn’t rob liquor stores, mug grandmas, or riot.

For Germans, it was a comfortable atonement. In exchange for a good life, just abandon all national pride and saddle yourself and your children with lifelong guilt for the actions of a dude who proved that the most extreme response is not always the right one:

Wehrmacht Generals: “Perhaps we shouldn’t liquidate so many Jews and Soviet POWs…we may need them for labor. Also, maybe we should make use of our Ostland subjects as allies instead of crushing them as Slavs. And hey—have you considered not declaring war on America?”

Hitler: “Nein nein nein! You are cucks! Filthy cucks! We must be based! Chads not virgins! Have you not read Breitbart? Double-down double-down fuck you, WAR!”

Cut to Hitler’s charred remains being urinated on by Russians outside the bunker.

Hitler’s Charred Remains: “I blame the Deep State!”

So even though Germans were made to carry the burden of Based-dolf, the sting was dulled because you could go through an entire day without once seeing or thinking of a Jew.

1990 through 1995, the years I routinely visited Germany, were pivotal times. Cold War politics had kept West Germans safe from Morgenthau-style physical destruction. But now the Cold War was over, and the country was reunified. Time to import some physical pain. Time to use 45 years of guilting-from-birth to force Germany to house the dregs of the Third World. Time to take the laws against Holocaust denial (which had been around since the 1980s, and which were tolerated by Germans because they were unobtrusive, as most Germans never sought to deny the Holocaust) and expand them to make any opposition to the mass importation of “asylum-seeking” ooga-boogas and ali akbars illegal too. After all, Germans “owed” it to the world to be forever anti-racist. Sure, the debt was originally supposed to be held only by Jews, but hey, some mortgages are assumable.

The “asyl-schwindel” got rolling in the early 1990s and went into hyperdrive the following decade. Cold comfort though it may be, at least Germans had a good four decades of comfortable atonement before having to deal with rapists, robbers, and terrorists imported as part of the terms of their repentance.

I’ve written multiple times about how white America’s current predicament—blacks are sacred, they must be allowed all misbehavior, they can’t be chastised, arrested, or imprisoned, they’re to be hired in your stead regardless of merit and seen as geniuses regardless of skill, they get to steal from you at will, you owe them an eternal debt and no matter what you say or do you’ll always be the villain—is a bill come due. I’m not saying it’s good, just inevitable.

After the Civil War, when the South was militarily crushed much as Germany was in 1945, the North attempted a kind of Morgenthau-style atonement conditioning. But it was impractical. Germans in 1945 could pledge a forever debt to Jews because there were almost no Jews around to lord it over them. But almost half the South was black. The Radical Reconstruction scheme of making white Southerners bow and scrape to freedmen wasn’t gonna work (for a contemporaneous look at how and why it failed, read abolitionist James Shepherd Pike’s The Prostrate State). I’ve also written about the childish naivete of the Reconstructionists, who foolishly believed that the black question would just “take care of itself” over time because blacks would never leave Southern farms and mixed-race children were so sickly they’d die before they could reproduce.

Forty years before the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson, while acknowledging that eventually the black question would be “the knell of the Union” and “expatriation” was the only possible salvation, nevertheless engaged in his own brand of childish naivete by declaring that “diffusion [of blacks] over a greater surface [of the U.S.] would make them individually happier and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen on a greater number of co-adjutors.”

So the Radical Reconstructionists were like, “Keep ’em confined to the South! That’ll solve things,” and Jefferson was like, “Spread ’em across the nation! That’ll solve things!”

But no. Like politicians dealing with any national debt, they just put it off for future generations to deal with.

And now here we are: Atonement is rapidly becoming the thing that defines goodness and righteousness to large numbers of white Americans. White Americans are morphing into the Germans. And sure, you can chalk a lot of it up to today’s Morgenthaus. Ashkenazis in government, academia, Hollywood, and the press. Propaganda disguised as school textbooks; entertainment that presents a virtuous black America plagued by white villainy. Newspapers that hide the slaughter of whites while acting like the death of any black is Christ crucified anew.

Denazification, U.S.-style.

And it’s well and good to fight against that.

But I return to the issue of intractability, my buzzword for the past few months. There’s a problem that’s not going away: A disproportionately high percentage of U.S.-born blacks can be described as a failed people. What I’ve previously labeled “unsalvageables.” And these unsalvageables drag everyone down—whites, Asians, other American blacks—and you can spend a trillion dollars on them and at most maybe pull two or three out of the failure spiral.

There’s no solution. And any Ben Shapiro type who tells you there is (“bibles, flag pins, and Wheaties!”) or any white nationalist type who does the same (“white homeland! National divorce!”) is either lying or cretinous.

The Germans I met in my traveling years, as conditioned as they were by their schools and media, were, at heart, genuinely troubled by what the Nazis had done. That’s why, as Himmler famously stated in his Posen speech, removing the Jews from the Reich had been difficult, because everyday Germans were sentimental about Jews. So it’s not just postwar conditioning; average Germans didn’t hate Jews, and the knowledge that an elected German leader killed millions of them is something today’s Germans truly find distressing, “conditioning” aside.

The continued failure of black America distresses many whites. And again, it’s not just conditioning. These whites are good (if naive) people who deplore past racial injustices and genuinely want to help blacks “get better,” and they’re too good at heart (and too naive) to entertain the notion that the problem might be intractable.

If you convince these whites that atonement is the solution, they’ll try it. All other avenues have failed, so why not be a trouper and repent? Maybe that’ll finally do the trick! Because at the very least, even if it doesn’t help, it’ll make whites feel like they’re helping.

To be sure, not all whites will be penitent; in Germany, I did meet locals who wanted to hear about my work. But they lived in the shadows. You can’t totally exterminate reluctance to atone, but you can drive it underground.

Will this end up being America’s “knell”? I’ll examine that question in greater detail in an upcoming column.