IF you’ve been smitten with the dreadful sense that history now acts as some reverse time-machine, relentlessly dragging us back into the past, 100 years to the 1920s and 1930s, then your jitters aren’t misplaced, indeed they’re confirmed by the tastes of millions.
Across social media - Elon Musk’s X, to YouTube and those GenZ favourites TikTok and Instagram - fellow human beings, in numbers which would populate an average-sized nation, are consuming "content" glorifying Adolf Hitler.
I struggle to comprehend that I’ve just written that sentence. The Holocaust happened only a lifetime ago, yet tens of millions idolise its architect.
As a writer, I’ve always struggled with the word "evil"; it strips humanity from the target. But Hitler, both through his crimes and his assault on the very notion of what it means to be human, personifies evil. How then can other human beings idolise this man?
Read more by Neil Mackay
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The far-right must be smashed, its enablers shamed and social media broken
Recently, Dani Dayan, chair of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, condemned a podcast by the right-wing American media personality Tucker Carlson, once a star of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The podcast featured Darryl Cooper, billed by Carlson as America’s “best and most honest popular historian”.
Cooper said the Holocaust was an accident, not an intentional act of genocide. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) - an international think-tank investigating polarisation, extremism and disinformation - reported that Cooper suggested “the millions who died in concentration camps ‘ended up dead’ because the Nazis were unprepared to manage large numbers of prisoners, framing the mass extermination as a response to food shortages”.
Cooper portrayed Winston Churchill as the primary antagonist of the Second World War. Musk called the discussion “very interesting. Worth watching”. Yad Vashem’s Dayan said: “Tucker Carlson and his guest Darryl Cooper engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years.”
Today, more than 34 million people have watched that video on Musk’s X alone. ISD says there’s now a “burgeoning trend of pro-Hitler content emerging online”. I urge you to read its report: "Content glorifying Hitler surges online amid growing historical revisionism".
Pro-Hitler content “had significantly higher reach on X than TikTok, Instagram or YouTube”, ISD analysts found. In the period August 13-September 27 “posts that appeared to glorify or support Hitler, or included Nazi iconography, received over 24.8 million views across X, TikTok and Instagram”.
ISD analysts found that by engaging with pro-Hitler posts as part of their research, the “X algorithm quickly adjusted to proactively serve this type of content. In one test, 10 of the first 19 posts served in an account’s ‘For You’ feed featured content including Hitler, praise of Nazis or overt antisemitism”. ISD says pro-Hitler content is “particularly aimed at or consumed by younger audiences”.
One post by Nick Fuentes, a far-right media personality who once dined with Donald Trump, said “people are still afraid to question the big narrative regarding Hitler because they know they will be punished”. The post was seen 1.4 million times.
ISD noted “many of the narratives spread online about Hitler also aligned with another Carlson podcast guest, Russian President Vladimir Putin”. During an interview with Carlson, Putin said “the Poles … forced Hitler to start the Second World War”. Poland, Putin said, was “uncooperative” and “Hitler had no choice but to implement his plans”.
If you can stomach searching X, you’ll find posts referring to Nazi Germany as a “magical place”, images of Hitler saying “the answer to 2024 is 1934”, or Hitler looking happy and the words “Hitler seeing more and more people see he was right”.
It’s like gazing into a mirror called "‘Despair". It debases humanity. Evidently not everyone consuming this material is a Hitler-worshipper, but plenty will be.
Today, 21% of Americans under 29 believe Hitler had some “good ideas”; it’s 11% across all generations.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Permission has increasingly been given by politicians across the West for their followers to drift further to the extremes. Trump calls his opponents “vermin”, and says immigrants “poison the blood” of America.
Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s most respected historians, recently wrote in The Atlantic magazine that “Trump is speaking like Hitler”. In Britain, politicians like Suella Braverman refer to refugees as an “invasion”. Half of Britons, according to polls, believe Nigel Farage is “personally responsible” for the summer’s far-right rioting.
Farage posted a video after three young girls were stabbed to death in Southport, suggesting that police withheld the truth from the public, and repeating misinformation questioning if the suspect was under security service surveillance. Fellow Reform MP Lee Anderson said rioters “are not far-right thugs, they’re just young idiots who got carried away”.
The boundaries of what’s acceptable have become exceptionally porous. Language matters. If, as a parent, I shrug off racism, then I shouldn’t be surprised if my children one day espouse hate. There’s a trickle-down effect from politicians who flirt with extremes, to those on the ground fully embracing extremism.
While, clearly, we can look to solutions such as clamping down on Big Tech, better education for children around history and extremism, and holding politicians more accountable when they veer too far from what’s acceptable, we need to look at ourselves here too.
My grandparents - on both sides of my family - fought the Nazis. My last surviving grandparent died at the end of the 20th century. How is that today, when so little time has truly passed since the end of the Second World War, that millions of Europeans and Americans worship the very man who would have once destroyed us and all we stand for?
Is there some worse truth to be had here - that this isn’t all the fault of careless and dangerous politicians, or out of control tech moguls, or dumb kids who know nothing about history thanks to their dumb parents and useless teachers?
Are some of us just evil - that word I fear to use because it’s so blunt and so impossible to take back?
For only evil or profound stupidity could lead someone towards the glorification of Hitler. And something tells me that not all those Hitler worshippers are stupid. Some of them, I fear, are very smart indeed. And that’s truly terrifying.
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics
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