Floods and World Wars

Thomas Mann was a famous novelist and essayist. He was born in 1875 into a bourgeois German family and won the 1929 Nobel prize for literature.

He was a fierce opponent of Hitler and had to flee to Switzerland and then to the United States. He was one of the few intellectuals, the so-called “Exilliteratur,” who continued to oppose Hitler from exile, broadcasting to Germany via the BBC.

If you read about his early life and work, you will be amazed that he became an opponent of the Nazis rather than one of their most ardent supporters.

At the outbreak of the First World War, he embraced a fanatical German patriotism that attracted many intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers.

Mann joined those who welcomed the coming war. They believed it would create a moral reset and remedy for his country’s corruption and stagnation. To be blunt, he and many others thought the world was morally rotten. A great war was a last chance to escape from a sick pre-war 1914 world.

When the war began, he wrote an essay entitled, "Gedanken im Kriege" ("Thoughts on War"). Mann hailed World War as “a cleansing, liberating, and a hopeful event.”

It did not of course, produce the purification of the German people that the younger Mann anticipated.

As a Jew, I feel rather the same about our world now.

I was thinking about Mann as we revisited the parsha of Noach last week. There, a different catastrophic event did cause a reset among humanity.

It made me wonder, what is going through Hashem’s mind as he looks at our world today?

That is a particularly pertinent question if we consider the words of Rabbeinu Bachye ben Asher, the great 13^th-century Spanish Rav in his commentary on the Torah, Parsha Matot 31:2, “Moshe said to Hashem, ‘If we were uncircumcised like the rest of the world, and if we shared their values and beliefs, the world wouldn’t hate us at all. We would just be another people like all the others.

“Why then is it that they hate us so much? It is because of the Torah and the mitzvos that you gave us. It follows, that hatred and attacks on us are in reality, hatred and attacks on You!”

I suspect that Hashem might well feel that given the explosion of Israel and Jew-hatred today, some “resetting” and cleansing is appropriate.

Imagine the Almighty looking at Ireland for example. Seeing the Jew hatred of that particular people, it’s easy to imagine Heaven having thoughts about the necessity of them having a reset.

In fact, the recent disgrace of the Irish national soccer squad’s reaction to playing against Israel shows that a Heavenly assessment of that particular people’s behavior is definitely overdue.

In the two recent matches of the Union of European Football Associations played between Ireland and Israel, the Irish players wore black armbands in solidarity with those (non-Jews) killed in Gaza. They also bowed their heads while the Israeli national anthem was played before the start of both games.

The Irish didn’t care how appalling this would look when set beside pictures of another Irish national football team actually performing the Nazi salute (they really did!) before a match against Germany in May 1939.

The Prime Minister of Ireland, Eamon De Valera made an official visit to the Nazi Consul’s Dublin home after Hitler’s suicide to express the condolences of the Irish people for the death of the Fuehrer.

By then, most of Europe knew about the horrors of the Holocaust. Just two weeks previously, the BBC broadcast a report from Belsen Concentration Camp. The footage shocked Britain but apparently not Ireland. De Valera knew about the Holocaust.

Subsequent Irish leaders have been asked if they would apologize for this repulsive piece of antisemitism. None have agreed to do so.

Shortly after the Hamas pogrom, on November 2023, the Israeli Ambassador Dana Erlich asked to screen a 43-minute compilation video of the October 7 attacks for Irish politicians. The request was refused on the grounds that the graphic images might upset the politicians.

Then there is Spain. You might have been surprised that the nasty Leftist government of Pedro Sanchez in 2025 called Israel a “Genocidal State.”

Spain is after all, an expert in genocide. Ask the Aztecs or the Incas and of course, ask the Jewish people that their forbears tortured, burned at the stake, or expelled.

The Nazis' word for purging Jews from a city or place is “Judenrein.”

In my many visits to Spain, I have never seen any place where Jewish history is so completely “Judenrein” as Spain.

Yet Sanchez offers citizenship to over a million illegal Muslim immigrants, knowing that they will add to his voter base and keep the Left in power. If that means that Spain’s Jews are threatened as a consequence, then their history shows Spain is completely comfortable with that.

In fact, that is precisely the devil’s bargain that the Left has made across Europe. You can see it particularly in the place I come from, the UK.

Projections predict that by the year 2040, indigenous British people will become a minority in their own country. If the thought of a nuclear power's foreign policy being controlled by Islam in fourteen years’ time terrifies you, you are not seeing the wood for the trees. It has already happened.

The removal of the historically unpopular Keir Starmer has produced a successor who is much worse, Andy Burnham. His new Foreign Secretary (the equivalent of the U.S. Secretary of State) is Ed Milliband.

He is a Jew who comes from a family of Communists and is about as far to the left as you will find in the UK today.

With elections on the horizon and with the Muslim vote being the most important element of Labour’s support, he wasted no time in imposing sanctions on Israel.

The UK, along with the rest of Europe, has refused to assist the U.S. in its war with Iran. That too would be unpopular amongst Labour's Muslim base.

Domestically, as I wrote here recently, the last 25 years of mass Muslim immigration has seen a shocking outbreak of Pakistani Muslim Rape gangs targeting indigenous white girls. The estimated figure of victims is a quarter of a million!

It is only an “estimate” because the Labour party has been fighting to suppress the facts of this horror for decades. They continue to do so. So, UK domestic policy is also dictated by two-tier justice.

I could write much more about all these countries and so many others, but I think I am just going to leave it to Heaven.

The message of Noach is that sometimes humanity is so rotten that nothing other than the most dramatic therapy will work. I have felt that way for a long time now along with a premonition that therapy is coming.

These three countries and many like them continue to attack the Jewish people. In so doing, they attack Hashem. If their Jew-hatred is called out by heaven, they will not be able to claim they haven’t earned it.

I will watch with interest to find out exactly what therapy Hashem thinks they deserve.