Answer:
There are many indications that the Holocaust is becoming a new religion of sorts of Western civilization - a pervasive historical experience that grows wider and deeper. Alongside the rising tide of historical research and political preoccupation, ritual aspects are spreading. Ritual settings for the Holocaust have been established not only in Israel, the state of the Jewish people and the place where most Holocaust survivors live, but in other countries as well, foremost among them Germany, the United States and Sweden. The rituals are secular, religious, and mixed secular-religious. Next to the killing sites - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Babi Yar, Chelmno, Belzec, Buchenwald and other vales of agony; the collection and deportation points: the Umschlagplatz, Theresienstadt and Plaszów; ruins of ghettos; railroad stations; killing sites such as Ponar, Klooga and almost all the forests of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia and Belarus; and the concentration camps of the Germans and their collaborators across Europe, which during World War II became ponds of frozen Jewish blood - monuments, museums and memorials are being erected, and plazas and streets are being named for Holocaust victims and resistance fighters. Adorno said that poetry is no longer possible after Auschwitz, the muses ascended to the heavens with the smoke of the crematoria, as it were. The Holocaust shattered the basic values of Christianity and the rationalism that the French Revolution had brought to the world - two fundamentals of Western culture and civilization. Therefore, it has had a vast impact on history and on politics, which is history as it occurs in the present time.
A stable liberal-democratic republic has been established on the ruins of Nazi Germany. Under the leadership of France, Italy, and West Germany, formerly fractious Western Europe has become a cradle of democracy and a focal point of economic revitalization and prosperity. Under the influence of the United States and of Western Europe, Communist totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and its Eastern and Central European colonies has crumbled, in a process that peaked and matured with the victory of Solidarity under Lech Walesa in Poland and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal collapsed. The fascist tyrannies in Greece and Latin America collapsed. A process of de-colonialization swept the world, peaking with the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. Totalitarianism and Fascism became illegitimate and worthy of eradication, either through internal uprisings on the part of nations that had been the victims of benighted Fascism or through outside intervention - political, economic, moral and sometimes military - that was usually belated and lacked resolve and total mobilization of the democratic community.