Never Again—Except When We Do It.

The Hitler Exception: The Politics of Selective Evil.

The world never lets us forget that Hitler was evil. Every generation is educated, televised, and sermonized into the same ritual of remembrance: the camps, the boots, the gas chambers, the oratory, the nightmare. It is a moral reflex embedded into Western civilization — Hitler as the eternal symbol of what humanity must never become. Yet somehow, the same civilization that ritualizes his crimes turns amnesiac when it comes to its own. The same textbooks that name Auschwitz do not name the Congo. The same news channels that mourn the Holocaust skip the Bengal Famine. Evil, it turns out, is not a universal moral category but a geopolitical convenience.

The elevation of Hitler into a metaphysical monster performs a crucial political function: it protects the victors. After 1945, the United States and Britain needed a mirror in which to appear righteous. They had firebombed Dresden, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still ruled over colonies drenched in blood. To moralize these powers, they needed a Satan — and Hitler served perfectly. The victors of World War II did not merely defeat Nazism; they canonized its destruction as their baptism. They could build a new world order in the name of “Never Again,” without ever saying “Never Before.” America became the self-anointed redeemer of mankind — the nation that had defeated absolute evil and therefore inherited the right to define all lesser evils.

By making Hitler the standard of depravity, Western civilization monopolized virtue. The crimes of empire became “history,” the crimes of enemies became “atrocities.” The incineration of Japanese civilians became “the end of the war.” The slaughter of Native Americans was “the closing of the frontier.” Slavery was “a moral failing overcome.” The genocide of Bengalis by Pakistan in 1971 was “a civil conflict.” The industrial genocide of Africans during European colonialism is politely filed under “economic exploitation.” Hitler’s uniqueness is not in what he did, but in what he represents: a moral firewall shielding the West from its own reflection.

Psychologically, Hitler became the exorcism of Europe’s conscience. For centuries, Christian Europe externalized evil — into Jews, witches, Muslims, pagans, heretics. After the Enlightenment, when God faded and theology retreated, the West needed a secular devil. Hitler filled the vacancy. His face became the screen onto which the Western world could project its repressed savagery — its crusades, its slavery, its colonialism — and then condemn that face with righteous fury. The ritual of anti-Nazism thus functions as a collective purification: we are good because we hate Hitler. It is moral theatre performed by the descendants of empire.

There is another, quieter reason the world remembers Hitler but forgets others: documentation. The Nazis were German — obsessive record-keepers, photographers, bureaucrats. Their atrocities were filmed, photographed, catalogued, and confessed. The world saw them in newsreels. By contrast, the Belgian genocide in the Congo, which killed over ten million Africans, left no cameras and no trials. The British empire’s famines that killed tens of millions in India left only bureaucratic memos. The American extermination of Native peoples left bones, not footage. Visual evidence became moral evidence — and what was not filmed was not remembered.

But the moral arithmetic runs deeper than images. Hitler’s victims were European. The Holocaust was the slaughter of Europeans by Europeans — white by white — in the heart of Europe. It threatened the self-image of the “civilized world.” When the victims are brown, the world does not remember; when they are white, the world never forgets. The memory of Auschwitz is thus both moral and racial: Europe grieving for itself. That grief, elevated to universal morality, became the moral foundation of postwar liberal democracy. The rest of the planet’s corpses — African, Asian, indigenous — are morally outsourced to the footnotes of “global history.”

This selectivity of evil also serves capitalism. Hitler’s defeat made possible the rehabilitation of Western empire as the guardian of “freedom.” America’s wars became “defense of democracy.” European colonialism was recast as modernization. Even Stalin’s horrors — the Gulag, the famine, the purges — could be condemned safely, because they too affirmed Western moral superiority. The system that atomized the world into the Cold War required a shared mythology: freedom versus tyranny, democracy versus fascism. Hitler provided the mythic enemy that allowed the liberal capitalist order to appear morally inevitable. The Holocaust became the West’s passport to permanent innocence.

The “Hitler Exception” is thus not about Hitler at all. It is about memory management — the industrial control of historical guilt. The same countries that never stop teaching the Holocaust never teach the firebombing of Tokyo. The same media that mourn Nazi racism rarely mention the apartheid foundations of America or Australia. The same moralists who lecture the world about fascism fund dictatorships, coups, and invasions in the name of freedom. Hitler’s ghost is summoned to bless the bombers. The moral capital of 1945 still finances the hypocrisy of 2025.

None of this relativizes the Holocaust. It remains one of the most horrific, dehumanizing events in human history. But its singularity has been inflated into a moral monopoly. The world’s curriculum is not designed to prevent future genocides; it is designed to protect past empires. When Saudi Arabia bombs Yemen, when Israel starves Gaza, when America invades Iraq, the comparison to Hitler is forbidden — because Hitler must remain incomparable. The Holocaust is weaponized not to expand moral responsibility, but to restrict it.

The result is a civilization that can recite “Never Again” while repeating “Again and Again.” Hitler is remembered not because he was the worst, but because he was the most useful. His memory sustains the illusion that the world learned something. But look around: the industrial killing continues, the genocides are livestreamed, and the moral vocabulary remains unchanged. Evil, it seems, has a nationality. Only one nation — Germany — must apologize forever. The others get to lecture, invade, and forget.

If moral memory were truly universal, the names of King Leopold, Andrew Jackson, Churchill, Truman, Yahya Khan, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be invoked with the same moral horror. But they are not. Some evils are historic; others are strategic. The Western world did not build its morality on the ashes of Auschwitz; it built its propaganda on them. The rest of humanity, from Hiroshima to Dhaka to Gaza, lives in the shadow of that selective light — condemned to die invisibly so that Europe may weep visibly.

The memory of Hitler became the conscience of the West. But like all institutionalized consciences, it functions to protect power, not challenge it. Nations remember only those crimes that do not threaten their current hierarchies. That is why America can fill cinemas with films about Nazi Germany but none about its own slave ships. It is why Britain can mourn Anne Frank but not the millions it starved in Bengal. The moral memory of the modern world is curated by victors and dramatized by Hollywood. The result is a theater of selective virtue — compassion that flatters the powerful and forgets the powerless.

Hollywood turned the Holocaust into a genre. Its moral message is clear: evil comes with swastikas, goose-steps, and German accents. Audiences cry safely because the villain is foreign, European, defeated, and unmistakably “other.” By contrast, a film about Native American extermination or African slavery indicts the present; it does not offer moral comfort. To show black bodies in chains or Indian bodies in pits is to accuse the entire Western project. And that would mean dismantling the very myth of modernity that underwrites NATO, Wall Street, and the idea of “the free world.” Hitler therefore remains the preferred evil because he is safely dead and politically useful.

The moral asymmetry is not accidental. It is structural. The global media, publishing, and academic apparatus that define the moral vocabulary of the planet are headquartered in the very nations that committed the colonial crimes now forgotten. They decide what counts as “genocide,” what counts as “war crime,” and what is mere “tragedy.” The British famine policies that killed more Indians than all Nazi gas chambers combined are described in textbooks as “policy failures.” The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is remembered not as moral horror but as necessary pragmatism. When the authors of language control morality, evil becomes a matter of syntax.

That is why the world speaks of “the Holocaust” as if it were singular. It was singular in horror, but not in nature. The American Holocaust against the Native peoples, the Atlantic Holocaust of slavery, the Congo Holocaust under Leopold II — these terms exist, but they are cultural orphans, denied institutional memory. The word “Holocaust” has been copyrighted by Western guilt. When brown or black nations invoke it, they are accused of appropriation. Thus even memory is segregated. There is a first-class suffering, with museums and memorial days, and there is steerage-class suffering, buried under development statistics.

Education systems reproduce the imbalance. Every European child learns to associate fascism with racism, and racism with Germany. Few learn that the pseudoscience of race was a British and American invention long before Hitler adopted it. Few are taught that American segregation laws inspired the Nuremberg racial codes. In moral pedagogy, cause and effect are reversed: the West learns to blame its student, not its teachers. This is the secret architecture of the “Hitler exception.” Evil begins in 1933 and ends in 1945 — nowhere else, never again.

The Western conscience depends on that closure. If the Holocaust were seen as one chapter in a longer book of racial capitalism and imperial domination, then modernity itself would stand accused. Every luxury of the postwar world — the consumer paradise, the dollar economy, the technological miracle — rests on the same material logic of exploitation that once powered colonial plantations and concentration camps alike: extract maximum value from dehumanized labor. To remember that continuity would be to expose civilization’s bloodline. Easier to isolate Hitler as a moral mutant, a historical accident.

The “Hitler exception” also preserves the illusion of Western moral evolution. It tells a comforting story: once we were barbaric, now we are enlightened. The narrative allows Europe to believe in moral progress without reparations. Germany’s repentance becomes Europe’s redemption. America’s defeat of Nazism becomes proof of its innocence. Meanwhile, black Americans are shot in the streets, indigenous lands are drilled for oil, and refugees drown at Europe’s borders — but the moral ledger is already closed. The world learned its lesson in 1945, we are told; therefore, today’s crimes are merely policy errors, not moral catastrophes.

The global South sees through this hypocrisy. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Hitler narrative is often viewed as moral imperialism — a Western obsession used to discipline others. When Washington or Brussels accuses a foreign leader of being “the next Hitler,” it is never moral language; it is diplomatic code for regime change. The invocation of Nazi analogies justifies sanctions, bombings, and coups. The memory of one genocide thus becomes the license for many. In this way, “Never Again” turns into “Again for our interests.”

Meanwhile, the true lesson of the twentieth century — that industrial modernity combined with nationalism and dehumanization leads to annihilation — is ignored. The same ingredients that produced Auschwitz built Hiroshima, Vietnam, and the endless wars of the Middle East. The same bureaucratic rationality that counted corpses in Poland counts them in Gaza. The same euphemisms — “collateral damage,” “security threat,” “strategic necessity” — sanitize murder today as “final solution” did yesterday. The grammar of evil has evolved, but its authors remain fluent.

The theology of selective evil even extends into academia. Western universities have entire departments devoted to Holocaust Studies, but almost none to Colonial Genocide Studies. Memorials to Jewish suffering exist in cities that have none for enslaved Africans. Western guilt is privatized, not universalized. It is pious self-reflection, not moral transformation. The Holocaust, instead of being a warning against all tyranny, becomes a ritual confirming the West’s claim to moral leadership. The very act of remembrance becomes an act of domination.

And yet, every civilization that builds its innocence on selective memory eventually faces its reckoning. The ghosts of empire do not vanish; they migrate. Europe’s refugee crisis is the colonial past knocking on its front door. America’s racial unrest is the unpaid bill of slavery. Israel’s moral confusion mirrors the theology of chosenness it inherited from its persecutors. The West cannot exorcise Hitler because Hitler was its mirror — the distilled essence of its own arrogance, racism, and industrial rationality. The day it admits that is the day its exceptionalism dies.

The moral of history is not “Hitler was evil.” It is that the structure that produced him survives — in flags, corporations, armies, and algorithms. To chant “Never Again” while funding new wars is to replace ethics with public relations. True remembrance would mean dismantling the global hierarchies of power that made the Holocaust possible — capitalism without conscience, science without compassion, nationalism without humanity. But that would require the West to confront itself. Easier, instead, to keep flogging the ghost of Hitler — the convenient evil that keeps all others invisible.

The “Hitler exception” governs the modern moral economy. It is the lens through which global politics measures virtue and vice. Every enemy of the United States is, sooner or later, compared to Hitler — Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam, Putin. Every bombing is justified as another “anti-fascist” intervention. The moral currency of 1945 never devalues; it keeps financing new wars. When Washington drops bombs on Yugoslavia or Baghdad, it is not committing violence; it is “preventing another Holocaust.” The invocation of Hitler thus becomes an exorcism before every invasion.

In this way, memory turns into military doctrine. The West’s moral self-image depends on perpetual villains — new Hitlers to keep the good guys good. But none of these villains are white Christians from Europe. They are Arabs, Asians, or Africans. That pattern is no accident. By externalizing evil into the Global South, the West sustains its own innocence. Its wars become humanitarian; its sanctions, moral hygiene. The very memory of Hitler thus becomes a colonial instrument — an emotional technology that manufactures moral superiority.

Israel’s political theology is built on the same foundation. The Holocaust became the metaphysical charter of the Jewish state, the unanswerable justification for its existence and its militarization. The world that watched the genocide of Europe’s Jews now watches the suffering of Palestinians — but the same moral firewall remains. Criticizing Israeli policy is equated with blasphemy against the sacred memory of six million dead. The historical tragedy of one people becomes the political immunity of another. The lesson “never again to anyone” quietly transforms into “never again to us.” And thus, Hitler’s ghost continues to authorize oppression — inverted but intact.

American liberalism also thrives on this moral asymmetry. The United States treats its own crimes — slavery, segregation, Vietnam, Iraq — as aberrations, while treating Hitler’s crimes as essence. Evil, to the American mind, is always foreign. Domestic evil is rebranded as error. A Confederate general is reinterpreted as “a man of his time.” A Nazi officer is “inhuman.” The distinction is rhetorical but decisive: the first can be forgiven, the second cannot. Forgiveness, like evil, is racially allocated.

Education cements this hierarchy. The average Western student learns more about Anne Frank than about Patrice Lumumba or Wounded Knee. The pedagogical purpose is not moral expansion but moral containment. By keeping Hitler’s evil quarantined in Germany, the West protects its own myth of civilization. The Holocaust becomes a story of progress: barbarism defeated, democracy triumphant. It reassures the student that the world has improved, that the teacher’s nation stands on the right side of history. The classroom thus reproduces the geopolitics of amnesia.

Media maintains the illusion. Every anniversary of Auschwitz is broadcast worldwide, but no prime minister lays wreaths for the millions who perished in the Congo, Bengal, or Hiroshima. The news cycle sanctifies European tragedy and commodifies everyone else’s. When a Middle Eastern city is bombed, anchors call it “a complex situation.” When Tel Aviv is attacked, it becomes “terror.” The moral vocabulary itself is colonial: white suffering is sacred, brown suffering is statistics. Hitler’s memory serves to preserve that linguistic apartheid.

There is also a theological dimension. Western civilization never fully abandoned the idea of the chosen and the damned. It simply secularized it. The moral world remains divided between those who can sin and be redeemed and those who can only be evil. The West can repent — Germany, after all, became a democracy. But the colonized, the communist, the Muslim, the rebel — they can only be evil. Their deaths never teach lessons; they merely confirm prejudices. In this scheme, Hitler is not the exception; he is the anchor. He keeps the West’s moral order stable by absorbing infinite blame.

Even the culture of apology reveals this asymmetry. Germany performs annual rituals of contrition. Its leaders bow, cry, and educate. America apologizes only in footnotes. Britain apologizes to no one. Belgium expresses “regret.” Spain builds cathedrals on the bones of the conquered. Pakistan denies its genocide in Bangladesh. Stalin and Mao are defended by those who count industrialization as moral compensation. Pol Pot is forgotten. The measure of evil is not body count but narrative control. Whoever controls the narrative decides who must remember, who may forget, and who gets to teach morality to others.

The world’s conscience, therefore, is not a moral organ but a propaganda device. It selects its memories the way corporations select their markets. There is demand for Nazi documentaries because there is supply of guiltless empathy. But who will finance a documentary on the bombing of Hiroshima that ends with an American flag? Who will fund a film about King Leopold that indicts the Vatican, the crown, and European civilization? Memory, too, obeys capital. That is why evil, to be remembered, must be profitable.

Philosophically, the “Hitler exception” distorts our understanding of human nature. It suggests that evil is a mutation, a moral aberration that appeared once in Germany and was eradicated by democracy. That story flatters the liberal imagination but insults human intelligence. The truth is simpler and darker: evil is not the violation of civilization but its instrument. Every empire, from Rome to Washington, has depended on organized cruelty. Hitler industrialized what others moralized. He did openly what others outsourced. His crime was not invention but exposure.

Until the world accepts that, moral progress will remain theatre. We will continue to build museums for the evils that no longer threaten power while ignoring those that sustain it. The child who learns that Hitler was evil but not that slavery was capitalism learns to admire evil in uniform but ignore it in a suit. The world has mastered the art of selective outrage. It cries for the dead of Auschwitz while voting for the policies that create new Dachaus in deserts and refugee camps.

The true challenge, then, is to break the monopoly of memory. Evil must be democratized. The same moral clarity reserved for Hitler must apply to every nation that dehumanizes, every ideology that kills for power, every system that turns human beings into waste. The memory of the Holocaust must not be the West’s property but humanity’s warning. That means remembering not just the victims who look like us but the ones who never will.

Until then, the moral map of the world will remain distorted. The compass points always toward Berlin, never toward Washington, London, Brussels, or Islamabad. Hitler will remain the safe evil, the one everyone can condemn without consequence. The rest of evil will remain invisible — too profitable, too familiar, too Western to name.

The tragedy is not that Hitler is remembered. The tragedy is that he is remembered alone.

Citations

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking Press, 1963).
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 1950).
Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes” (New Press, 1996).
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2001).
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Metropolitan Books, 2003).
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993).
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006).
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899).
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 1989).
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935).
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980).
Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World (Vintage, 2003).
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1986).