We live in an age of liberation, in which we are told endlessly by some that freedom of speech, taken to its furthest boundaries, is the crowning achievement of democratic culture. And freedom of speech, alongside freedom of thought and conscience, freedom of (or from) religion, freedom of the press, of movement, of assembly and to legal equality, all safeguard human dignity, personal autonomy, and the ability to participate meaningfully in civic life. But what if one of the clearest signs of civilisational decay is precisely that the right to say anything is now used most energetically by people with nothing worthwhile to say?
‘Ye’, formerly known as Kanye West, a man I am told was once a cultural innovator of some sort, now presents himself as one such cautionary tale. This is a man who has mistaken notoriety for relevance and offence for originality; a man so intoxicated by grievance and notoriety that he has now released a track titled Heil Hitler, a crude, adolescent chant of racial slurs and fascist glorification masquerading as music. One listens – or rather, endures – the song, not out of interest but out of a kind of civic obligation, the same way one scans the damage after a vandal has defaced a war memorial. It isn’t the aesthetic quality of the work that demands attention. It’s the defilement.
There will, of course, be those who raise the now-tired defence of his much-reported mental illness. As if that excuses the gleeful desecration of the memory of six million Jews murdered. As if mental illness, however real or severe, automatically confers moral impunity. If Kanye West cares not whom he offends, why should I have sympathy for his paranoia and limited intelligence? He has made his calculations clear: pain sells, and taboo is currency. His artistic vision has now descended to the level of tantrum performance – a fusion of juvenile provocation and grotesque authoritarian fetishism.
His defenders, if any still exist outside the deepest corners of online nihilism, may argue that the song is a form of radical expression – an effort to ‘confront’ taboo or ‘reclaim’ pain. But there is no confrontation here, only the shallow defilement of something far beyond the show-off’s grasp. There is nothing radical about repetition either; the lyrics are a crude litany of racial epithets, Nazi slogans, and sexual bragging, repeated ad nauseam as if sheer audacity might substitute for lyrical invention. It is a display of arrested emotional development, not artistic depth. He is at once a petty attention-seeker and an unserious historical vandal.
Freud, writing on narcissism, observed that the narcissist is never interested in others for their own sake; he sees only his own wounded ego, reflected and refracted through every perceived slight. Ye has clearly become the textbook embodiment of this pathology: his songs obsessively circle his legal troubles, his grievances with ex-partners, his custody arrangements – all while indulging in the fantasy that he is a misunderstood revolutionary. Yet nowhere in this song does he mention the feelings or needs of his children, who are reduced to symbols in a petty war against imagined enemies. The pathological ego is not sustained by love for others, but by their usefulness as mirrors. The narcissist is never truly in dialogue, only in search of reflection.
It is not fatherhood Ye explores, but ownership and acquisition. Not reflection, but retaliation. Not self-improvement but revenge.
There is no profundity here. This is not a philosophical meditation on alienation, fame, or the African-American (or even Jewish) experience. It is simply a chronicle of a very rich, very vain man trying to turn personal bitterness into cultural capital at the emotional, historical and societal expense of Jewish people. The invocation of Nazism is not an artistic provocation – it is a marketing ploy, one calibrated for outrage in a world where the attention economy rewards the grotesque. It is obscene not just because of what it says, but because of how transparently it exploits one of the greatest crimes in human history to attempt sustained relevance.
And yet, the deeper concern is not Ye himself, but the cultural atmosphere that has incubated this kind of obscenity at all. There was a time, not long ago, when public Holocaust denial or glorification of Hitler would render a person permanently exiled from public life. Now it earns press, plays, tweets, and – ironically – think pieces like this one. But what else can I do? The boundaries of acceptable discourse have shifted, not just downward but inward, toward a moral void.
This is the true climate emergency: not global warming, but moral cooling. The temperature of public decency is dropping fast. Holocaust mockery results in viral buzz. Nazi references are no longer the desperate howls of internet fringe figures; they now come from Grammy award winners, still inexplicably respected by some.
We are witnessing not just the degradation of one man, but the corrosion of cultural norms that once seemed immovable. Deliberate, gleeful provocation of Jews and trivialisation of the Holocaust have been normalised – not in fringe chat rooms, but in mainstream platforms with millions of viewers, and also in school playgrounds or on our streets during protests. This is not free speech, it is civilisational erosion.
Ye is not interesting. He is not radical. He is not important. But what he represents is. He is the avatar of a deeper corrosion: a world where fame shields malice, and where the Holocaust can be reduced to a marketing gimmick for the lonely and foolish. We are watching the collapse of cultural seriousness, the triumph of provocation over principle, and the ascendance of a cult that trades in attention as currency, heedless of the cost to our collective dignity.
www.spectator.co.uk
