Hitler’s Third-World Appeal

Admiring Adolf Hitler isn’t just a signal that you reject “the post-war Western moral order.” It’s a signal that you reject the Western moral order as such.

A clothing store in Pakistan (photo: Google Maps)

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This is a guest essay by Ben Koan, who writes the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In 1943, French philosopher Simone Weil wrote that, “We speak of punishing Hitler. But he cannot be punished. He wanted only one thing, and he got it; he wanted to go down in history.”

She prophesied that, “Whatever is inflicted upon Hitler will not prevent, in twenty, fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years, a dreamy and lonely little boy, whether German or not, from thinking that Hitler was an awe-inspiring person and had an utterly awe-inspiring destiny, nor will it prevent him from hoping with all his soul for a similar destiny.”

And so, in 2025, a dreamy and lonely little boy named Nick Fuentes (an American Far-Right political commentator) achieved fame while claiming that “Hitler was cool.” Unlike Fuentes, Weil couldn’t then know how Hitler’s story ultimately ended: in suicide, after vainly commanding his subordinates to destroy Germany because “the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East.”

Hitler and the Nazis were failures by their own barbaric standard: that of Vernichtungskrieg, or a war of annihilation. Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich” lasted a mere 12 years, leaving only corpses and ruins in its wake. His accomplishments, if we can call them that, were the opposite of his intentions.

A German militarist and expansionist, he left his country smaller and pacifistic. An avowed anti-communist, his war resulted in the Soviets vastly expanding their empire. A believer in Nordic world domination, he hastened the decline of Europe and the loss of its colonies. As a genocidal antisemite, he’d probably consider murdering a third of the world’s Jews to be his foremost accomplishment. But even then, the people of Israel still live.

So why, then, does this world-historical loser appeal to certain Gen-Zers?

Part of the answer is surely distance, in the sense of history, geography, and ethnicity. Historically, the people who battled or suffered under Nazism are mostly dead. Fuentes doesn’t have a living relative who fought in World War II to deservedly beat him with a belt.

Geographically, though the U.S. helped defeat the Axis powers, it was never an occupied country. The Nazis murdered around 5.4 million Polish citizens during the war, including 3 million Jews and 2.4 million ethnic Poles. Hundreds of thousands more survived concentration and forced labor camps. Following the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis razed the entire city, with special groups of German combat engineers dispatched to burn down libraries per Hitler’s doctrine that “no nation outlives the material testimonies of its culture.”

Unsurprisingly, Nazi nostalgia is less than appealing in the countries that bore the brunt of Nazism. Ethnically, memories of Nazi crimes are most strongly upheld by their victims: Jews, of course, but also Poles, Russians, and other designated Untermenschen (German for “sub-humans”) — plus the largely repentant Germans themselves.

Outsiders may be sympathetic, but sympathy is fleeting. A week before invading Poland, Hitler reportedly said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The Armenians obviously did.

But perhaps it’s naive to think that the Holocaust could forever retain universal significance; that in the future, another genocide won’t begin with the question, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Jews?”

If we’re being honest, the Holocaust never had universal significance anyway. The Arabs sought to destroy the modern State of Israel during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, even though perhaps a third of its citizens were Holocaust survivors. Johann von Leers, a Nazi ideologue under chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels, later converted to Islam and led Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anti-Israel propaganda unit.

In 2025, only 16 percent of survey respondents in the Middle East and North Africa agreed that the Holocaust happened and its death toll isn’t exaggerated. Hitler’s autobiographical and political manifesto Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) remains a bestseller in the Arab world, though it’s seldom actually read.

Instead, according to author Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, the turgid tome functions as “a totemic object, within the Arab Hitler folklore prevalent across significant swaths of Arab societies — itself embedded within a broader antisemitic symbolic complex that recasts Hitler as a kind of alter-Muslim, an alter-Muhammad victimized by Jewish villainy before he finishes his salvific Final Solution.”

Of course, Arab attitudes toward Hitler are predetermined by hatred of Israel and Jews more broadly, but that’s the point. Mansour describes the Arabic Mein Kampf “as a symbolic spear-tip thrust against an opposing system of signs — the post-war Western moral order in which Hitler signifies absolute evil and the Jew embodies paradigmatic victimhood … against the Western system of morality and identity constructed upon Holocaust memory as its sacred center, and most importantly, against any claim of legitimacy for Israel.”

Though Fuentes lacks ethnic or religious solidarity with the Palestinians, his statement that “Hitler was cool” is a functionally similar signifier. For nihilists intent on burning the system down, the Führer is their alter-Christ.

Then there are the vibes. For worshippers of power, it’ll always be cool to become a dictator, remake society, kill your enemies, and build an empire. That’s why Fuentes admires Hitler and Stalin alike. The ideological content is less important than the totalitarian aesthetic. In Fuentes’ own words: “It’s just cool. The uniforms. The parades. It’s cool.” Or, as podcaster Myron Gaines (notably, a Sudanese Muslim born Amrou Fudl), put it: “Hitler was a real nigga.”

When we combine vibes with the aforementioned distance factor, we can understand why there’s been an Indian state minister named Adolf Lu Hitler Marak, a Namibian councillor named Adolf Uunona (he eventually dropped the middle name Hitler), and a Peruvian mayor named Hitler Alba Sánche (who ran against Lenin Vladimir Rodríguez Valverde). I’ve personally had a Latino Uber driver named Stalin. I doubt the man’s parents were committed Stalinists, or that the Namibians who named their son Adolf knew much about Nazism. They probably just liked strongmen.

Undoubtedly, many Groypers are functionally Namibian. In a Manhattan Institute focus group with Gen-Z Republicans, a Fuentes fan defends Hitler with the following stirring words: “I’m very pro-strong executive, strong leader, strong man. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, we have to take Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population. So, I’m not an expert on Hitler by any means, but as far as nationalism is concerned, I’m all that.” Many such cases, I’m sure.

But the West also has powerful antibodies against Hitler fandom. Contra admiration for tyranny, there is the classical opposition between Greek democracy and oriental despotism, the free polis and the repressive empire. Contra distance from the murdered, there is the biblical principle that all people are created in the image of God. These antibodies didn’t prevent the rise of Hitler in the first place. But they did contribute to his ultimate defeat, and have quite rightly made him into an emblem of evil.

Admiring Hitler isn’t just a signal that you reject “the post-war Western moral order.” It’s a signal that you reject the Western moral order as such. That’s why his appeal in the free world is ultimately limited. You can’t reconcile the Führerprinzip (“The Führer is always right”) with reason, totalitarianism with freedom, or death camps with the sanctity of life. Nazism isn’t just opposed to liberalism, but to the West’s foundational philosophical and religious traditions.

Thus, in 1940, Winston Churchill warned that upon the Battle of Britain “depends the survival of Christian civilization,” and that failure risked plunging the world “into the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

The West without a Hitler taboo wouldn’t be quite so apocalyptic. But it would be more like the Arab world, where that taboo never existed: susceptible to dictators, dominated by conspiracy theories, and obsessed with scapegoats as a cope for civilizational decline.

Revulsion toward Hitler is the sign of a healthy body politic.

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