We lived under Hitler's spell – time to wake up

Hitler's age was not the 1930s and 1940s: it has been our own life. It started in the 1940s, was in full swing by the sixties and only now, it seems, ends.

In the post -war era, Adolf Hitler has been our most powerful, uniting figure. It remains our touchstone and our backstop. In a world where we are increasingly unable to agree everywhere, we can still almost fully agree to condemn him. Everyone who defends Hitler therefore reveals a monster. When we want to condemn someone, we almost instinctively compare him with him. His indisputable evil makes him a unique fixed reference point in our moral landscape.

As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Memes van Vladimir Putin began to appear when Hitler appeared – even when Putin himself (and absurdly) claimed that his war goal was to “Denazify”. Hillary Clinton is one of the many people who called Donald Trump a new Hitler, and the Trump's 2024 meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New York, compared to the notorious Pro-Nazi rally that took place there in 1939. Boris Johnson compared the EU with Hitler; Conversely, during the peak of the Brexit Rancune, it was regularly depicted with a toothbrush -frame. Even now, it seems, we still define our values ​​with reference to the Nazis. We cannot shake our fascination.

I remember for the first time that I heard Hitler's name in the late 1970s. I think I was about six years old. I asked my mother something like: who is the worst person ever? Well, who could have chosen them more? Who would choose more? My next flash of memory – although it could actually be months later – is to ask her: did anyone ever write a book about Hitler? I remember that I felt at the time that my second question was somewhat embarrassing. My instinct was that it was wrong to write a book about a bad man; It was probably wrong to want to know more about him. But my mother surprised me by pointing out our bookshelves, and a big hardback with that feared name in the spine in Barefaced capitals: my fathers of Alan Bullock's Biography Hitler from 1952: a study in Tyranny. “Oh, yes,” she said, “there are a lot.”

There are indeed, and more every year: not only because Hitler was a hugely consistent figure, but because I am not the only person who has found his malignant fascinating. We cannot stop repeating and reinventing his story, and the endlessly rich story of the war against him. A life later the films, the books, the ever -duer documentaries come; To judge on the schedule of the History Channel and the lists of many publishers, the Second World War is almost the only event in human history. And historians are forced to share Hitler with storytellers and mythemakers-everyone who wants to stiffen what they drink with a photo of cheap moral spirits. Sauron, The Daleks, Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort: they are all, unmistakable and shameless, Nazi -Teergoon.

Hitler's era is the age in which the Western victors of the Second World War set the conditions of the worldwide conversation. Many of us have lived most of our lives in a era of broad and stable consensus about our simplest shared values. Human lives are fundamentally of equal value; All people have fundamental and inalienable rights; Our lives, bodies and conscience are ours and no one else. These truths naturally seem to be the point of banality. Nevertheless, most people have not believed such things in most periods of human history.

And consider what happens when someone refuses to conform to those supposedly universal anti-Nazi values. In Zimbabwe in the late nineties, for example, Chenjerai Hunzvi, a particularly brutal enforcer who traded, took over and glorified in the nickname “Hitler” on behalf of Robert Mugabe. It meant his ruthlessness to the opponents of the regime, to scare them and every criticism they could defy for him. It worked at that level. For the rest of the world, however, it only confirmed that the rulers of Zimbabwe had merely become predators and contributed to Mugabe's Ostracism on the international stage.

Intentionally adjust yourself to Hitler is rare. More often, people or movements occur in discredit with unintended or poorly hidden echoes of Nazism. The most obvious examples of this can be found in the persistent tendency of many anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist movements around the world to stray or fall, in open anti-Semitism. During most of my life, people in Western societies who broke that taboo have automatically banned. It is a characteristic of the end of Hitler's era that that taboo is clearly expired.

Writence can also activate our anti-Nazi antibodies. Vladimir Putin may be surprised that his invasion of Ukraine met such a surprisingly different Western reaction in 2022 than that of his war in Chechenia, or his annexation of Crimea. But those earlier acts did not have complete, unarmed armed invasion of an adjacent sovereign state. When Putin tried such an act, it caused Europe's collective memories of 1938-40.

I am not the first person to notice that the modern world is busy with Nazism, nor that the Nazis have a major role in our ethics. But the people who make this point often come from one end of the political spectrum. Take the French writer Renaud Camus, notorious as the founder of the extreme right-wing conspiracy theory The 'great replacement': he has complained what he calls 'the second career of Adolf Hitler', which means that the career of the Fuehrer as a moral symbol. Camus and other activists hate how the ghost of Nazism is invoked when they propose massive removal of immigrants, cleansing the judiciary or limitations on the religious freedoms of Muslims. It is time, these people believe that we are no longer afraid of bogeyms with swastikas.

This is not my opinion. I don't want us to unlearn the lessons from Nazism, lessons that were learned at such terrible costs. Recognizing Hitler as a really exceptional evil is the beginning of wisdom. But this recognition is not enough. Just knowing that Hitler was a monster is not an adequate guide to the world in which we live. In Great Britain, our instinct has long been to compare every crisis with the Second World War: we even tried it, ridiculous, with Covid-19. There are some evils that Hitler's age simply has not prepared us to face, and some misleading lessons that we taught us. Scream “Nazi!” On each other is a hopeless way to deal with our economic, environmental and demographic crises. And a knee shaking rejection of “appeasement”, in itself, is a bad guide to international relations in a nuclear era.

Our values ​​are more vulnerable than we think. Our feeling of what is right and wrong, our deep beliefs about justice and human rights, feel like timeless, natural truths, and we can't help look down on ancestors who didn't have the humor to see them. We also cannot help believe that we have now understood those truths, we never let them go. Certainly, people will always believe in democracy and human rights; Certainly, the bow of the moral universe is bending into justice? But this is demonstrable, actually incorrect. Our values, my values, your values, are the outcome of a certain historical process, a process in which the Second World War was decisive.

And now those values ​​are on the way again. On the right, throughout Europe and afterwards, it is taboo against parties that have a touch of fascism almost disappeared. Trump's acolies play with “Hitler Salutions” and the like because they like to let their opponents sputter out of indignation. In the meantime, the new identity politics of race and gender have meanwhile disputed ideas that used to be trees, such as simply egalitarianism, the aim to be color blind or the conviction that anti -Semitism is an exceptionally evil to be avoided free of charge. Both parties have indeed, until nobody's surprise, started spewing poison on Jews again.

We can strive to maintain the consensus after 1945, but the war falls from the edge of the living memory. Whether you like it or not, the era of Hitler, the age in which fascination for the Nazis dominated our moral imagination, comes to an end. The question is: what will come afterwards?

The age of Hitler and how we will survive it by Alec Ryrie (Reaction, £ 15.95) will be published on 1. July. Alec Ryrie will speak at Oxford Literary Festival, in collaboration with the Telegraph, on July 30. Tickets: Oxfordliteraryyfestival.org