So much opprobrium has come to be attached to almost every aspect of the German past that it is impossible to say anything good about it without being condemned as a Nazi sympathizer. Nonetheless, it is hard not to conclude that the Germany of the past was vastly superior to the one about to dominate Europe for the next millennium. Germans today are whiny, parochial and unenterprising. They have 12 percent unemployment and the lowest birth rate in Europe. Their army is a joke. German ideas are copied from American liberals. Their courts have ruled it unconsti-tutional to display crosses in school. It is enough to make a Ludendorff, a Moltke, and a Bismarck cry.

Nazism, as far as I'm concerned, was in large part a response to Communism. That and the dishonorable treaty of Versailles, not to mention the disgrace of the German army ordered to lay down its arms on French soil. A decade ago, the learned Professor Ernst Nolte became the target of a campaign of defamation because he asked, "Didn't the Gulag Archipelago come before Auschwitz?" He also asked, "Wasn't the class-murder of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual presupposition of the race-murder of the Nazis?"

I say these are still rather good questions. Which brings me to the Jewish problem. It has been bother-ing me a lot lately. It has to do with people trafficking in the Holocaust - as vile an act as I can think and one that trivializes the suffering of millions. People like Alfonse D'Amato, Senator for New York, Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times, and the "leader of the Jewish community," Edgar Bronfman. Then there is the historian Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Will-ing Executioners.

The latter's central argument is that ordinary Ger-mans were not forced to commit crimes against the Jews, but relished doing so. His achievement in writing his best-seller was not to add anything to our knowl-edge of the Holocaust but to stir up hatred of the Ger-mans. In this he has been amazingly successful. The likes of fat Frank Rich, Abe Rosenthal, Tina Rosenberg - all of the New York Times - have been exulting.

Given the fact that Lenin's and Stalin's murder squads were more efficient than the Nazis' - as were Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge - the constant harping on about the Germans seems to be motivated by profit.

- From an essay by "Taki" in The Spectator (London), March 8, 1997, p. 48.