Hitler Never Really Left

We like to believe history ends.

It doesn’t.

We defeat a dictator, bury a generation, sign treaties, build institutions, raise monuments, and teach our children that the nightmare is over. Then we congratulate ourselves for having learned the lesson.

But history does not care about our lessons.

Taking your medicine last year never stopped anyone from catching a cold the next.

The Myth of “Never Again”

Since 1945, the world has been at war again and again. Revolutions. Military coups. Civil wars. Dictatorships. Invasions. Ethnic cleansing.

We simply learned how to look away.

For decades, Western Europe enjoyed the luxury of watching much of this from behind a political and geographical glass wall. The wars were somewhere else: Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East. They were “regional conflicts.” They belonged to other people.

Then Yugoslavia exploded.

War returned to the European continent. Nationalism became a weapon. Cities were besieged. Populations were displaced. Ethnic cleansing became a reality not in some distant history book, but in Europe itself.

The glass wall cracked.

And suddenly, the comforting idea that certain horrors belonged to another age became much harder to defend.

History had not disappeared.

We had simply moved it out of the frame.

Hitler Never Really Left

No, Hitler did not survive 1945 as a man.

But the political conditions he exploited did not disappear from human nature.

Fear did not disappear. Economic insecurity did not disappear. National humiliation did not disappear. The desire for simple answers to complicated problems did not disappear. Neither did the temptation to blame someone else.

That is what “Hitler never really left” means.

Not that history repeats itself word for word. It doesn’t.

History changes its clothes.

The uniforms change. The slogans change. The technology changes. The enemies change.

But the machinery of fear can still be rebuilt.

The Democratic Shell

There is another uncomfortable reality: a democracy can survive institutionally while becoming increasingly hollow socially.

You can still have elections, parliaments, courts, constitutions, and political parties. You can preserve the machinery while losing the trust that makes the machinery legitimate.

And when people begin to believe that the system no longer represents them, protects them, or gives their children a credible future, something happens.

They start looking elsewhere.

Sometimes they look toward nationalism. Sometimes toward populism. Sometimes toward authoritarian leaders promising to cut through the institutional noise and restore order.

The response is often to condemn the symptom.

The harder question is to understand the conditions that made the symptom politically possible.

When the Market Becomes a Religion

For decades, Western societies were told that the market knew best.

Deregulation. Privatization. Flexibility. Competitiveness. Efficiency. Less government. More market.

These were not merely economic policies. They became a worldview.

The individual was increasingly expected to absorb risks once shared by society. The worker became “flexible.” The welfare state became “expensive.” Public services became “inefficient.” Inequality could be explained away as the unavoidable price of modernization.

For those who prospered, the system could look like freedom.

For those who lost security, bargaining power, community, or a sense of control over their future, it could look very different.

And here lies one of the great political contradictions of our time.

The same societies that embraced decades of neoliberal economics can now find themselves frightened by the political backlash produced by the social consequences of that economic order.

Enter Atlas

This is where Atlas comes in.

In the ancient myth, Atlas carries the heavens on his shoulders. He does not get to put the burden down. He simply carries it.

Forever.

That image has become strangely relevant to the modern West.

For decades, ordinary people were asked to carry the weight of globalization, technological disruption, labor-market transformation, fiscal restraint, international competition, and shrinking economic security.

They were told that this was the price of progress.

Keep carrying.

Keep adapting.

Keep competing.

Keep consuming.

Keep believing.

And now something has changed.

Atlas is tired.

Worse, Atlas has started asking a dangerous question:

Why am I still carrying the sky?

When Atlas Moves

That question is politically explosive.

Because if the people carrying the system stop believing in the system, the system itself begins to shake.

The backlash can take many forms: nationalism, protectionism, anti-establishment politics, isolationism, immigration restrictions, distrust of elites, nostalgia for a stronger state, and anger at international institutions.

Some of these responses may be contradictory. Some may be destructive. Some may be based on false assumptions.

But dismissing them as irrational does not make them disappear.

People do not become politically discontented in a vacuum. They respond to the world they believe they are living in.

And when enough people conclude that the existing order is no longer working for them, someone will eventually promise to tear that order apart.

The Dangerous Mistake

The dangerous mistake is to believe that defending democracy means defending every economic arrangement that currently exists within it.

It doesn’t.

Democracy is not a stock market index. It is not a balance sheet. It is not a permanent guarantee that tomorrow will resemble yesterday.

Democracy survives when people believe they have a meaningful stake in the society they inhabit.

Take that belief away for long enough, and formal institutions may remain standing while something much more important begins to collapse underneath them.

Trust.

Belonging.

Hope.

History Does Not Repeat. It Rhymes.

The twenty-first century will not reproduce the twentieth century.

There will be no perfect replay of 1933.

There doesn’t need to be.

History rarely repeats itself exactly.

It rhymes.

The danger is not that another Hitler will suddenly appear wearing Hitler’s clothes. The danger is that a society can once again create the conditions in which someone offering fear, certainty, enemies, and absolute solutions becomes politically attractive.

That is why “never again” cannot simply mean remembering the past.

It has to mean recognizing the mechanisms that made the past possible.

Otherwise, remembrance becomes ritual.

And ritual without understanding is little more than decoration.

The Sky Is Already Moving

Perhaps the most important question is not whether authoritarianism is returning.

Perhaps it is this:

What happens when the people holding up the existing order decide they no longer want to hold it?

That is the question behind the revolt of Atlas.

For decades, he carried the sky because he was told there was no alternative.

Now he is looking upward.

He sees the weight. He sees who benefits from the structure above him. And he is beginning to wonder whether the sky really has to remain where it is.

We can condemn Atlas for moving. We can fear what might happen if he lets go. We can insist that the old order is the only protection against chaos.

But there is one question we cannot avoid forever:

Why did Atlas become willing to drop the sky in the first place?

Because taking the medicine yesterday never made anyone immune to tomorrow’s fever.

Life Is a Game of Cards: Those Who Remember the Cards Already Played See Further

Life is a little like a game of cards. Some people play relying mostly on luck. Others look only at the cards in their own hand. And then there are those who pay close attention to the cards that have already been played.

More often than not, those are the players with an advantage.

Not because they know some secret trick, or because they are necessarily smarter than everyone else. They simply remember. They remember which cards have already appeared, which ones have been played, and which ones can no longer be in the opponents' hands. Little by little, they begin to form a picture of what the others might be holding.

The difference may seem small, but it isn't.

Someone who forgets every previous hand has to start from scratch every time. Someone who remembers what has already happened no longer looks only at the present. They look at the present in the light of everything that came before it.

That is how life works, too.

History is full of people who succeeded not necessarily because they had greater resources, but because they were better at understanding how those resources had already been used. In war, for instance, knowing an opponent's previous movements allows you to narrow down the range of moves they are likely to make next. Napoleon built much of his military strength on his ability to read the battlefield quickly, gather information, and adapt to what he saw.

During the Second World War, the battle for information became almost as important as the fighting itself. Intercepting communications, tracking movements and recognizing recurring patterns could make it possible to anticipate an enemy's next move before it became obvious.

The principle is always the same: you don't necessarily need to know which card your opponent is holding. Sometimes it is enough to know which cards have already been played.

The same thing happens in business.

An entrepreneur who looks only at today's market risks constantly being one step behind. An entrepreneur who remembers past failures, crises, consumer reactions, competitors' moves and mistakes made over the years has something far more valuable: strategic memory.

A product that failed teaches you something. A price that caused sales to collapse teaches you something. A failed advertising campaign teaches you something. A competitor abandoning a particular market leaves an important card on the table.

The biggest companies have turned this principle into a science. Amazon, Netflix and many others collect enormous amounts of information about past consumer behavior and use it to make predictions about what might happen next.

Every purchase, every search, every abandoned basket, every preference becomes, metaphorically speaking, another card that has left the deck.

The more cards you remember, the more readable the deck becomes.

But there is something even more important: remembering is not enough. You have to know how to connect what you remember.

A person can have an extraordinary memory and still understand nothing about the game. They may remember exactly what happened without understanding what it means.

True strategic ability begins when memory becomes interpretation.

We see this in human relationships, too. If someone has made the same promise three times and broken it three times, we can still choose to believe them a fourth time. But we can no longer behave as though we have no information.

The cards have already been played.

If a politician has repeatedly changed positions according to circumstances, that history is part of the game. If a company has always responded to a crisis in the same way, that behavior becomes a clue. If a person has repeatedly chosen the same path whenever faced with difficulties, it is reasonable to consider that possibility when trying to anticipate what they may do next.

That does not mean the future is already written.

It means that the past narrows the range of possibilities.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the metaphor.

We often think luck is everything. Some people seem to be born with the right cards, while others are dealt a terrible hand. To some extent, that is true. None of us gets to choose our entire deck. We do not choose the family we are born into, the historical period, the country, the opportunities that come our way or the unexpected events that will shape our lives.

But once the game begins, we can decide how to play.

We can forget the cards that have already been played and approach every day as if it were the first. Or we can observe, remember and learn.

We can ask ourselves why someone made a particular decision, why a company failed, why a government changed course, why a relationship ended, why a project did not work.

And, above all, we can try not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Because true experience is not simply having lived through many things. It is remembering what we have lived through and using it to understand what is happening now.

In the end, remembering the cards that have already been played does not guarantee victory.

You can still lose.

But you enter the game with something almost as valuable as luck: a clearer understanding of the possibilities that remain.

Luck determines some of the cards we are dealt.

Memory, experience and the ability to observe determine how we choose to play them.

And perhaps that is one of the few things we can truly learn from the long game of life: we cannot always choose the cards we are dealt, but we can make sure we never forget the ones that have already been played.

Defeat Is Not the Final Word

I have always had a strange sympathy for the defeated.

I noticed it very early on, as a child watching the war films that were constantly shown on television in the 1980s. I would sometimes feel sorry when German soldiers were killed. Not because I shared their cause, and certainly not because I had any particular sympathy for Nazism. It was simply that, in that moment, that soldier was the man who was losing—the one who was falling while the others were advancing.

The same thing happened with Bluto and Popeye. To my great surprise, I found myself rooting for Bluto.

Perhaps there was something in me even then that I could not explain. I was not necessarily on the side of the “good guy.” I was on the side of the one who was about to lose.

As I grew older, I found the same instinct in history.

I have always felt a certain sympathy for the Marian faction defeated by Sulla—a political world that seemed to have been definitively erased by Sulla's victory, only to return, through different people and different circumstances, and reclaim its place in Roman history. I am fascinated by Caesar, murdered by his enemies precisely when they thought they had finally solved the problem. I am fascinated by Napoleon, who fell from the heights of an empire, returned from Elba, and managed to reclaim power, even if only for a hundred days.

But not every defeated person rises again.

That, perhaps, is the most important part.

History is full of men, peoples, states, and ideas that fell and never got back up. Some defeats are never redeemed. Some doors really do close forever.

And that is precisely why I am fascinated by the possibility of a comeback.

Because it is never guaranteed.

Believing in redemption does not mean believing that every defeated person will eventually return to victory. It means refusing to regard defeat as final before time itself has spoken the last word.

Perhaps that is why I have always distrusted victors who are too certain of themselves.

History has a curious habit: sooner or later, it presents the bill to those who believe they have reached the end of history.

Empires that seemed eternal have disappeared. Regimes that appeared indestructible have collapsed. Ideologies that seemed destined to dominate forever have ended up in history books. And men who believed they had definitively defeated their enemies have discovered that history never completely belongs to anyone.

But there is one image that takes all of this to an entirely different level.

The Crucifix.

Before the Cross, according to Christian faith, we see absolute defeat.

A man abandoned. Humiliated. Tortured. Nailed to a cross. Dead.

There appears to be nothing left to recover.

His disciples themselves may have thought that it was over. Their teacher was dead. Their hope had been shattered. Everything they had believed in seemed to have collapsed.

And yet it was not over.

The Resurrection changes everything.

Perhaps this is the deepest reason why the Crucifix has always fascinated me: because it represents a defeat that appeared definitive, yet was not.

Christ does not simply return to reclaim what He had lost.

According to Christianity, through death He passes into an entirely different kind of victory: victory over death itself.

And so perhaps I understand that child a little better now—the child who rooted for Bluto, who felt sorry when German soldiers died in war films, and who instinctively looked toward the side that was losing.

Perhaps I never loved defeat.

I loved the possibility of redemption.

I loved the idea that history might still have another page to turn when it seemed the book had already been closed.

Of course, that hope can also be misplaced.

We can fall and never get back up. We can lose and never return. We can witness the end of something we believed would last forever.

That is the painful part of existence.

But precisely because redemption is not certain, it is worth believing in.

And perhaps this is one of the most beautiful lessons history can teach us: we should never confuse victory with eternity, or defeat with the end of everything.

Those who are on top today may fall tomorrow.

Those who are on the ground today may rise again.

And those who believe they have conquered the world may one day discover that the world never belonged to anyone.

I still sympathize with the defeated.

Not with every defeated person, of course. Not because every loser deserves to win, nor because every victor is wrong.

But because in the defeated I see a possibility that victors often forget:

the possibility that it is not over yet.

And perhaps that is what the Cross has been whispering to us for two thousand years.

When everything seems lost, when death appears to have spoken the final word, when there seems to be nothing left to hope for, perhaps we have not yet reached the end.

For the Christian, that certainty has a name:

Resurrection.

And perhaps, deep down, my love for the defeated has always been this: an unconscious form of faith in the possibility that defeat does not have the final word.

Remigration: When a Word Should Alarm Europe

History's greatest tragedies do not begin with massacres.

They begin with words.

Words change the way a society sees part of itself. They redefine who belongs and who is viewed as an outsider. That is why the growing use of the term "remigration" in European political discourse should concern everyone, regardless of political affiliation.

Before asking whether such a policy is feasible, we should first ask what it actually means.

Remigration—for whom?

Listening to much of Europe's emerging right-wing rhetoric, the answer appears increasingly clear. The issue is not immigration as such. Immigrants from China, India, or Latin America are rarely presented as the central problem. Instead, the focus overwhelmingly falls on people from Muslim-majority countries. The debate, therefore, is no longer simply about immigration; it is about an alleged incompatibility between Islam and Western civilization.

Europe undeniably faces serious integration challenges. Pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. Across the continent there are neighborhoods marked by social exclusion, crime, religious radicalization, unemployment, and the failure of integration policies. Ignoring these realities only strengthens political extremism.

But acknowledging these problems is fundamentally different from treating millions of people as a single, inherently suspect group.

This is where history deserves our attention.

In 1940, Nazi Germany developed the so-called Madagascar Plan, a proposal to deport Europe's Jewish population to the island of Madagascar, effectively treating an entire people as a geographical problem to be removed. The plan proved unworkable for military and logistical reasons. It was later abandoned, and the regime ultimately implemented the "Final Solution," leading to the systematic murder of six million Jews.

Mentioning this episode is not to suggest that contemporary advocates of remigration pursue the same objectives as the Nazi regime. Such a comparison would be historically inaccurate. Rather, it serves as a reminder of a broader lesson: whenever societies begin discussing entire groups of people primarily in terms of removal rather than as individuals with rights, responsibilities, and human dignity, they enter dangerous territory.

History offers other warnings.

In 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish population. More than a century later, it expelled the Moriscos—Muslims who had converted to Christianity. The goal was to create a religiously homogeneous kingdom. The result was immense human suffering and the loss of valuable economic, scientific, and cultural contributions.

In 1923, Greece and Turkey carried out a compulsory population exchange based almost entirely on religion. More than one and a half million people were forced from their homes. It was presented as a permanent solution to ethnic conflict, yet it left deep scars that endured for generations.

In 1947, the Partition of India triggered one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed newly drawn borders in opposite directions. The promise was peace through separation. The outcome was mass violence, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees.

More recently, during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Europe witnessed how rapidly multiethnic societies could collapse into brutality. Nationalist rhetoric transformed neighbors into enemies. Ethnic and religious identities became markers of exclusion, persecution, and murder. The Srebrenica genocide remains one of the darkest reminders of how quickly coexistence can unravel.

None of these historical episodes proves that today's Europe is destined to repeat the past. History never repeats itself in exactly the same way.

But it does teach one enduring lesson: societies rarely descend into violence overnight. They get there gradually—through polarization, fear, simplistic narratives, and the progressive dehumanization of those perceived as "the other."

That is what should concern us.

The real danger lies not in a single word but in the simultaneous failure of two opposing approaches.

On one side, immigration that is too often poorly managed, with inadequate border control and unsuccessful integration policies.

On the other, the temptation to answer these failures with slogans that promise the removal of entire communities as though complex social problems could be solved through mass exclusion.

Both approaches feed extremism.

Both deepen fear.

Both weaken the foundations of democratic coexistence.

Europe deserves better.

It needs effective border management, orderly migration policies, clear distinctions between those who have the legal right to remain and those who do not, meaningful integration for those willing to embrace democratic values, and lawful, case-by-case deportation of individuals who have no legal right to stay or who commit serious crimes.

That is the essence of the rule of law: judging people by what they do, not by who they are.

The real question, then, is not whether "remigration" is an effective political slogan.

The real question is whether Europe intends to confront migration with serious, rational, and lawful policies—or whether it will allow the debate to degenerate into a clash of collective identities.

European history does not tell us that the worst is inevitable.

It does remind us, however, that the worst becomes possible when politics stops solving problems and starts dividing humanity into categories deemed incapable of living together.

And that is why a single word can sometimes become the beginning of something far more dangerous.

Israel After Zionism? A Reflection on the Future of the Jewish State

Israel has the right to exist. This principle should not depend on the political orientation of the governments that happen to rule in Jerusalem, nor on one's approval or rejection of Zionism. Like every internationally recognized state, Israel's legitimacy rests on the principle of national self-determination and on the historical and legal reality that emerged after 1948. At the same time, the Palestinian people also have the right to live in security, dignity, and with their own political institutions. The failure to reconcile these two legitimate aspirations lies at the heart of one of the most enduring conflicts of the modern era.

Zionism has never been a monolithic movement. Its origins date back to nineteenth-century Europe, when nationalism was widely regarded as a force for the political emancipation of many peoples. Liberal Zionism coexisted with socialist, religious, and Revisionist currents. During the first decades of the State of Israel, the Labor movement dominated public life, promoting the kibbutzim and a socioeconomic model inspired by democratic socialism.

It is often forgotten that, in 1947 and 1948, the Soviet Union also supported the establishment of Israel at the United Nations, believing that the new state could weaken British influence in the Middle East. For several years, many on the European left viewed Israel sympathetically, largely because of the collective experience of the kibbutzim and the country's strong socialist tradition.

Over the following decades, however, the political landscape changed profoundly. The Arab-Israeli wars, terrorism, the occupation of territories captured in 1967, and broader social transformations contributed to the rise of nationalist conservatism. With Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and later Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel entered a political phase markedly different from that of its founding generation. The growing influence of religious nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties reshaped domestic politics, reinforcing a concept of national security centered primarily on military strength and deterrence.

In his book The End of Israel, Furio Colombo describes this transformation as a gradual departure from the democratic and pluralistic ideals that characterized Israel's early years. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, his analysis raises important questions about the relationship between security, democracy, and national identity.

The militarization of Israeli society did not emerge in a vacuum. It developed in response to repeated wars, terrorist attacks, intifadas, and persistent regional security threats. At the same time, Palestinians have lived for decades under conditions of occupation, territorial fragmentation, political instability, and recurring violence. The result has been a vicious cycle in which each side tends to view its own use of force as a response to that of the other.

Against this backdrop, the internationally endorsed "two peoples, two states" solution appears increasingly difficult to implement. The territorial continuity required for a viable Palestinian state has been severely undermined by the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Jerusalem remains an unresolved issue, as do the future of Palestinian refugees and Israel's legitimate security concerns.

Is there an alternative?

Some scholars have proposed a single federal or confederal state in which Israelis and Palestinians would share common institutions while preserving broad territorial autonomy. Comparisons have been drawn—despite their obvious differences—with countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Lebanon. None of these political systems is free from tensions, yet they demonstrate that communities with profoundly different identities can coexist within the same constitutional framework.

The greatest obstacle, however, is neither constitutional nor institutional. It is the legacy of more than a century of wars, terrorism, occupation, displacement, fear, and mutual distrust. No constitutional model can succeed without at least a minimum degree of reciprocal confidence, and today that confidence appears painfully absent.

There is also a broader geopolitical question. Israel's security has long relied on its strategic partnership with the United States and the wider Western world. If, in the distant future, the international balance of power were to change significantly and that support were to diminish, Israel would face the challenge of ensuring its long-term security through more stable relations with its regional neighbors. Comparisons with the medieval Crusader states occasionally appear in political commentary, but they should be understood as geopolitical metaphors rather than historical predictions.

How, then, can Israel secure its future?

Military superiority may guarantee survival in the short term, but it cannot by itself create lasting peace. Likewise, ignoring Israel's legitimate security needs would be no more realistic than denying the Palestinians their right to freedom, dignity, and political self-determination.

The fundamental challenge is to move beyond the illusion of total victory. As long as Israelis and Palestinians continue to view one another as enemies to be defeated or eliminated, no peace agreement will prove durable. A stable future will not emerge from the disappearance of either people, but from the recognition that both are now an irreversible part of the history of the same land.

Perhaps this is the hardest lesson of all. Yet it may also be the only one capable of preserving hope for the future.