The Monopoly on Guilt: Why Only Germany Must Repent

Germany is the only nation in modern history forced to apologize forever. It was crushed, occupied, disarmed, and morally sterilized. Its children are taught not pride but penitence; its artists and thinkers must forever bow before the altar of “Never Again.” The Nazi crimes were monstrous, and no rational mind can deny the industrialized horror of Auschwitz. Yet a strange hypocrisy haunts this moral theater: nations that committed equal or greater atrocities have been forgiven, forgotten, or mythologized as “civilized.” Germany alone bears the eternal stigma of evil, while its prosecutors sit on mountains of unacknowledged bones.

Consider the United States. It enslaved millions, lynched them for centuries, and then burned two Japanese cities alive with nuclear fire. It dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia — three times more than were dropped in all of World War II. Villages like My Lai were erased; children were set on fire by napalm; jungles poisoned with Agent Orange. Then came Chile, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, and the Philippines — democracies subverted, dictators propped up, rebels slaughtered. The moral logic was simple: genocide is evil when others do it, “foreign policy” when America does. Yet no global tribunals, no permanent museums of shame, no textbooks of repentance teach American schoolchildren that their country incinerated peasants in the name of freedom.

Or take Britain — the empire that starved three million Bengalis to death in 1943 while Churchill sneered that Indians “breed like rabbits.” The empire that whipped and castrated Kenyan rebels, crushed Irish independence with famine, and looted so much wealth from Asia and Africa that its museums are still full of other people’s gods. The British ruled India by famine, ruled Africa by rifle, and ruled the world by hypocrisy — yet today they host tea parties for “Commonwealth friendship.” Their war crimes were rebranded as “civilization.” No Nuremberg for empire; no judgment for genocide.

Russia exterminated entire populations — Ukrainians under Stalin, Chechens under Putin — and still poses as a liberator. China wiped out Tibet’s monasteries, sterilized Uighurs in Xinjiang, and calls it “national rejuvenation.” The Japanese empire slaughtered millions across Asia — Nanjing, Manila, Burma, Korea — yet Japan was forgiven as America’s obedient ally. Israel can bomb Gaza to rubble, occupy land indefinitely, and still demand the world’s sympathy as a “victim of terror.” Islam’s empires, too, drowned continents in blood — Zoroastrians annihilated, Buddhists in Afghanistan wiped out, Hindu temples leveled in waves of conquest. But none of these civilizations are told that repentance must define their identity forever.

Only Germany — precisely because it lost — must carry the cross for all eternity. Its guilt is infinite, its rehabilitation conditional, its nationalism permanently suspect. A German who waves a flag is a potential fascist. An American who waves a flag is a patriot. This moral asymmetry is not justice; it is propaganda. Postwar power wrote morality as victor’s memory. The Allies needed an absolute evil to sanctify their own violence — to make Dresden, Hiroshima, and colonialism disappear under the glare of Auschwitz. The Holocaust became the metaphysical center of Western guilt, and Germany its ritual scapegoat.

The irony is cruel. Germany’s very contrition, its willingness to face history, became the weapon used to keep it subdued. No Japanese, British, or American child is raised in collective shame. German children are taught their grandparents were monsters. The West’s “memory culture” became a political industry — museums, reparations, films, endless commemorations — ensuring that the moral hierarchy of nations remains frozen. The Shoah was unspeakable, yes; but the firebombing of Tokyo, the Bengal famine, the Congo rubber massacre, or the American slaughter in Vietnam are equally unspeakable. They are simply unspoken.

To question this monopoly on guilt is to risk heresy. But the numbers don’t lie. King Leopold’s Congo killed ten million Africans — the same scale as the Holocaust. The Atlantic slave trade destroyed twenty million African lives. Stalin’s purges, Mao’s famine, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Rwandan genocide together make the human twentieth century an abattoir of ideologies. And yet, world conscience fixates on the Holocaust as though it were metaphysically unique. That uniqueness is not historical but theological — a function of the Western self-image, of the Judeo-Christian narrative that frames history as sin and redemption. The Holocaust became Western civilization’s crucifixion — Germany as the sinner, Israel as the resurrected victim, America as the redeemer.

The political consequences of this theology are immense. Israel can weaponize memory to deflect all criticism, invoking 1945 every time it bombards Gaza in 2025. The United States, the self-appointed guardian of “freedom,” uses the Nazi analogy to justify its wars — every adversary is Hitler reborn. Thus Iraq, Serbia, Libya, even Russia: every enemy becomes a new fascist, every war a new Normandy. The irony is historical amnesia masquerading as moral vigilance. The civilization that once burned witches now burns villages by drone and calls it democracy. The media that weeps for the Holocaust rarely weeps for Hiroshima.

None of this excuses Nazi barbarism. The Holocaust remains one of humanity’s lowest points. But moral consistency demands that we measure all nations by the same scale. If collective guilt is legitimate, let America apologize for Hiroshima, Britain for Bengal, Belgium for Congo, Turkey for Armenia, China for Tibet, and Islam for India. If it is illegitimate, then Germany too must be allowed to breathe — to remember, repent, and move forward without being eternally flogged by those whose hands are no cleaner. The very idea that one people’s suffering counts more than another’s is itself the seed of fascism.

The world needs not selective memory but universal conscience. Every people has its Holocaust — its wound buried under propaganda and denial. The Hindus of Bengal, the Armenians of Anatolia, the Congolese under Leopold, the Cambodians under Pol Pot, the Native Americans exterminated in silence. Suffering is not a competition; but justice cannot be monopolized. If “Never Again” means anything, it must apply to all — not just to one chosen trauma enshrined in Western theology. The moral tragedy of our age is that we have learned to sanctify guilt instead of abolishing cruelty.

Germany rebuilt itself as a democracy, a scientific and artistic power, a culture of discipline and humility. It has done more to confront its past than any empire in history. Meanwhile, the architects of Hiroshima and Bengal are honored with statues, the colonizers of Africa hold UN vetoes, and the financiers of modern wars sit on Nobel committees. This is not morality; it is the triumph of narrative over truth. The world forgives only the victors.

To turn the chapter on Germany is not to whitewash history. It is to apply history’s own logic fairly. A crime confessed and redeemed should not be punished forever. The purpose of remembrance is reconciliation, not perpetual humiliation. The moral lesson of the twentieth century is not that Germany must atone forever, but that humanity must never again outsource its conscience to power. When guilt becomes a geopolitical weapon, morality dies and hypocrisy rules.

The true moral revolution will begin the day museums of empire stand beside Holocaust memorials, when American students read about Hiroshima with the same solemnity as Auschwitz, when British children learn that their ancestors built the Bengal famine, and when Israeli and Palestinian schoolbooks teach each other’s dead as equal. Until then, the world remains a courtroom where the guilty sit as judges, and one defeated nation remains forever on trial.

Citations

1. Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New Press, 1996).
2. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2001).
3. John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1986).
4. Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, 2001).
5. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Vintage, 2000).
6. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
7. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981).
8. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order (Basic Books, 2004).
9. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Harper Perennial, 2002).
10. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2005).