An article in the Washington Post once observed that all internet conversation, given time, tends to boil down to three themes: irony, pornography and Nazis. Pundits across the political spectrum act as if constant references to fascism will eventually equate to greater understanding of its deadly legacy. I tend to disagree. Persistently screaming danger doesn’t always make people more vigilant, otherwise hoax 999 callers would be treated like public safety heroes.

Having drowned our brains in Hitler memes on twitter, we are less prepared than ever for the reality of (forgive the term) a literal Nazi. Two weeks ago, Canada’s parliamentarians rose to applaud the “heroism” of Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian veteran of the Waffen SS, on the grounds that he fought “the Russians”. In some quarters, it understandably caused a diplomatic scandal: the Polish government, already caught in a diplomatic wrangle with the Ukrainians, talked of extraditing Hunka for war crimes.

Canadian leaders, having initially blamed the scandal on Russian disinformation, were forced to issue an apology. They denied knowledge of Hunka’s Nazi leanings. In which case, there are only two possibilities: either the Canadian leadership are telling big fat fibs; or their collective knowledge of the Second World War falls below the expectations of a secondary school history pupil.

The response from the self-styled liberals of Western Europe was even more ambivalent. One influential blog wrote that the Ukrainian history of the Waffen SS was “complicated” because “fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi”.

At this point, debate has become entirely unmoored from historical reality. We now inhabit a simplistic, Marvel-movie-franchise style politics, of the elemental goodness or badness of the Ukrainian and Russian soul. The messy, inconvenient fact, for both sides of this debate, is that 4.5 million Ukrainians fought with the Red Army against Hitler and fascism, while around 250,000 joined Hunka in aligning with Nazism. But does anyone really have any incentive to tell that story?

However, there is a serious philosophical and political question here that should demand our attention: how do we deal with ordinary people who have committed violence in the name of political conviction?

Tony Kaye’s 1998 film American History X, where Ed Norton portrays the tragedy of a neo-Nazi’s tragic reckoning with his ideological past, was considered one of the great educational films of the nineties. At the time, some considered the film’s moralism overly simplistic. Yet it’s a world of serious, multi-layered emotional complexity relative to today’s slanging matches.

I imagine it won’t win me many friends, but I do believe that lapsed fascists – specifically, I mean ordinary people caught up in delusions and rhetoric – should be given opportunities to repent.

But forgiveness implies a degree of contrition, and the sight of Hunka receiving Canadian applause looks quite like the opposite. He has been boosted in his view that “fighting the Russians” in the Waffen SS makes him history’s good guy. And let’s be clear: in a spirit of pious war fervour, we – the collective we, of Western liberals – seem to have boosted Hunka’s self regard, making repentance all the harder and further away.

And so, the unthinking righteousness that causes people to point fingers and scream “Nazi” at all sorts of people for all sorts of political views has made us immune to unrepentant, former Waffen SS soldiers.

And the problem doesn’t end there. Even leaving aside the Ukrainian paramilitaries honouring the traditions of Stepan Bandera, or the far-right elements of Putin’s reign, recent events have accelerated the mainstreaming of far-right politics and discourse in European politics.

But Britain’s self-consciously vigilant liberal press scarcely notice Italy’s Georgia Meloni or Poland’s Justice and Law Party anymore. Insofar as these leaders play the game on NATO and arms shipments to Ukraine, they have been exempted from criticism.

As David Broder has observed, these Polish and Italian forces are “newly legitimised by their support for Ukraine” and “seek a place in the main Euro-Atlantic institutions, transforming them from within”. Having spent years ringing false alarms, liberal Europe seems suspiciously unmoved. Meloni is in fact a reliable Western partner.

Vladimir Putin is culpable for many crimes. Perhaps one day, he will follow Tony Blair and George W. Bush to the dock in the Hague to answer for his action. However, just as the dangers of Nazism highlight the risks of false alarmism, so the crimes of Putin are not unlimited. Otherwise, we are only deluding ourselves with our wartime propaganda.

Vladimir Putin didn’t force Justin Trudeau to applaud a Nazi veteran: that’s Trudeau’s error alone, and if Putin’s minions exploit it, that’s partly on Canada. Putin isn’t responsible for the populist explosion elsewhere in Europe and America. That’s on us. It’s a reflection of the ideological, political and economic limitations of our failing social orders.

Above all, we could be more conscious of the costs of cheapening language, and be wary of righteous fervour.

At the start of this war, many liberals openly wished for the extinction of all things Russian, from the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to the ordinary people inhabiting a vast subcontinent. Because, intent on preventing “another Hitler”, historical judgement has been cheapened to the point that the world’s most liberal parliament cheered a Nazi veteran to the rafters.

At some stage, this horrific stalemate of a war must end in negotiations and some type of reconciliation, and I wonder what then will be left of Western liberal identity.