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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 26 September 2026

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Does the moral vow of 'never again' still hold true, or is history now showing that its application is deeply compromised and selective on matters of atrocities, wars, genocides, and massacres? 

The world of politics and political leadership today, once again is: A world devoid of humanity, dignity, empathy, trust, kindness, spirituality, meaning, purpose, morals, and manners.

The pertinent question is: Are we witnessing the rise of fascism again?

In a recently published book, ‘The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It’ (2025), Alec Ryrie, writes, “the most potent moral figure in western society was Jesus Christ. Now it is Adolf Hitler.”  In this sense, as has been noted'What happens when we forget Hitler?' notes, 'the age of Hitler began not in 1933, when he was appointed chancellor of Germany, but in 1945, when the world united around the principle that the horrors he had unleashed must never be allowed to happen again.’

For many decades, the world leaders kept the promise of ‘Never Again’ alive. For example as Matthew d’Ancona writing in The New World: ‘From this first moral proposition flowed almost every feature of the modern western world. The United Nations, Nato, the Treaty of Rome, the international codification of human rights, the foundation of Israel, the exclusion of ethnonationalism from respectable politics: all were direct consequences of the war and the ethical guardrails agreed in its aftermath. Even in the chilliest depths of the cold war, the free west and the Soviet bloc still shared the common language of anti-Hitlerism.’ 

d’Ancona then continues to note the following: ‘the significance of the second world war is changing, and fundamentally so: an incremental process whereby the source code of the international rules-based order, a shared civic narrative about right and wrong and a secular religion in which Hitler and Holocaust represented the ultimate evil is losing its previously vice-like grip upon the moral imagination of the west.’ 

This, to my mind, speaks to our age, to what I am about to share with you in some detail below.

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