The Monopoly on Guilt: Why Only Germany Must Repent

Germany is the only nation forced to apologize forever. It was defeated, occupied, re-educated, and told that guilt—not greatness—was its national identity. The Nazi crimes were beyond horror, but history has quietly absolved other empires whose record of slaughter rivals or exceeds Germany’s. Only Berlin must atone eternally, while Washington, London, Moscow, and Beijing wash their hands clean in the blood of their own victims.

America, the moral preacher of the modern world, is an empire built on graves. It enslaved millions, exterminated Native nations, and burned Japan alive with atomic fire. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not battles; they were experiments in annihilation. Later came Vietnam—where napalm turned children into torches and Agent Orange poisoned a generation. America dropped three times more bombs on Southeast Asia than all sides dropped in World War II. And after the fire came the hypocrisy: lectures on human rights delivered by the arsonist himself.

Then came the great forgotten holocaust of South Asia—the genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. Three million Bengalis, most of them Hindus, were slaughtered by the Pakistani army under General Yahya Khan. Women were raped, villages torched, entire communities erased. The Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger knew exactly what was happening. Declassified transcripts show them mocking the victims and praising the killer as “a decent man.” America armed the Pakistani junta while calling the massacre an “internal matter.” When U.S. diplomats in Dhaka pleaded for intervention, Washington silenced them. The so-called champions of democracy watched one of Asia’s largest genocides unfold and did nothing—because the victims were not useful to their Cold War. The world forgave Nixon; Bangladesh still bleeds in silence.

Britain’s record is no less monstrous. The empire starved three million Bengalis to death in 1943 while Churchill sneered that Indians “breed like rabbits.” It executed rebels in Kenya, herded Africans into camps, crushed Ireland, and looted Asia for centuries. The British Museum remains the largest crime scene in human history—its treasures stolen from civilizations Britain destroyed. Yet Britain is celebrated as the cradle of parliamentary virtue. Its crimes were “the price of progress,” not moral collapse. There was no Nuremberg for empire, only afternoon tea and amnesia.

Russia’s empire killed with equal efficiency. Stalin’s forced famine murdered millions of Ukrainians; his gulags devoured an entire generation. Later, Chechnya and now Ukraine again became laboratories of terror. China did the same under Mao—tens of millions dead in the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and today’s camps for Uighurs in Xinjiang. Japan’s wartime empire raped Nanjing, enslaved Koreans, and slaughtered across Asia. All were forgiven because they became useful to someone’s geopolitical balance.

Israel stands as the most protected exception of all—a state born from the ashes of one genocide that now inflicts another. Gaza’s ruins testify daily to a moral inversion: the oppressed become oppressor while invoking perpetual victimhood. Each bombardment is wrapped in the vocabulary of self-defense, each civilian death excused as “collateral damage.” The world that insists Germany must never forget insists simultaneously that Palestinians must never remember. Western politicians kneel at Holocaust memorials while funding the bombs that fall on refugee camps.

Islamic empires, too, have their ledger of blood. The caliphs who conquered Persia and Central Asia annihilated Zoroastrians and Buddhists, erased libraries, and built their faith on ashes. India bore centuries of invasions that leveled temples, enslaved millions, and forced entire populations into conversion or death. The Ottoman Turks wiped out Armenians; modern Pakistan wiped out Bengalis. Every faith that claimed divine monopoly left a trail of corpses in its wake.

Yet the world’s conscience fixates on Germany as if it were metaphysically unique. The Holocaust, while unmatched in industrial precision, was not unique in cruelty. King Leopold’s Congo killed ten million Africans. The Atlantic slave trade consumed twenty million more. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot each achieved death tolls that make Hitler look provincial. But Western moral theology turned the Holocaust into a sacred event—a crucifixion of civilization itself. Germany became the eternal sinner; Israel, the resurrected victim; America, the self-appointed redeemer. “Never Again” was universal in slogan, selective in enforcement.

Germany’s tragedy is that it took morality seriously. It confessed, rebuilt, educated its youth in contrition. But contrition became a leash. German pride was pathologized, its nationalism sterilized, its art and philosophy bound to guilt. No Japanese, British, or American child grows up ashamed of their flag; German children are told their grandparents were monsters. The more sincerely Germany repented, the more it was reminded of its unworthiness. Memory became an occupation policy disguised as virtue.

The moral asymmetry is staggering. The Allied firebombing of Dresden killed 25,000 civilians in one night. Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed over 200,000. These were deliberate mass civilian targets. Yet the victors’ narrative baptized their crimes as necessity, not evil. The same America that vaporized cities now sells itself as humanity’s conscience. The same Britain that engineered famines now lectures India about democracy. The same Israel that razes Gaza now defines antisemitism as any criticism of itself. This is not justice—it is moral monopoly.

To demand fairness is not to deny German guilt. The Holocaust must never be forgotten. But neither should it be fetishized into a religion of perpetual penance. If collective guilt is legitimate, then every nation that murdered millions should confess in kind. Let America apologize for Hiroshima, Britain for Bengal, Belgium for Congo, Russia for Ukraine, China for Tibet, Turkey for Armenia, and Pakistan for Bangladesh. If, on the other hand, history should move forward, then Germany too must be free to stand upright among nations, not on its knees before them.

Selective memory is itself a crime. When suffering is ranked by race or religion, morality dies. Every civilization that killed in the name of God, profit, or ideology deserves the same moral microscope. The Bengal famine, the Bangladesh genocide, the Congo holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the annihilation of Native Americans—these are not footnotes to Auschwitz. They are parallel horrors in the same moral universe. The world cannot heal by canonizing one set of victims and erasing the rest.

Germany today is democratic, rational, and humane—a cultural power built on discipline and intellect. Its postwar conduct is a model of repentance transformed into civilization. Meanwhile, the victors of 1945 still live behind the illusion of innocence. The U.S. builds new empires under old slogans; Britain rewrites textbooks; Israel bombards its neighbors; China expands its surveillance state; Russia wages holy wars of paranoia. The guilty now sit as judges.

To turn the page on Germany is not to whitewash history. It is to reclaim moral balance. A crime confessed and atoned for cannot be punished forever. The purpose of remembrance is reconciliation, not humiliation. The moral lesson of the twentieth century is not that Germany must atone eternally, but that humanity must stop weaponizing guilt as a political instrument. Until every nation confronts its own genocide with the same honesty Germany showed toward its own, history will remain a courtroom where the verdict depends on who writes the record.

Citations

1. Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, 2013).
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. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
6. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981).
7. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2005).
8. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Harper Perennial, 2002).
9. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order (Basic Books, 2004).
10. Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (Penguin, 2012).