Nick Fuentes made a revealing aside after his box office appearance on Piers Morgan’s “Uncensored” YouTube channel in December. The 27-year-old white supremacist spent two hours sparring with Morgan, his youthful disrespect clashing repeatedly with Morgan’s middle-aged bombast. Much of the subsequent outrage focused on Fuentes’s brash insistence that Hitler was “cool”, which he explained, in part, as a love for Nazi aesthetics.
The next day, when reviewing the exchange on his own Rumble channel, Fuentes gave a more revealing explanation. “Why do we say Hitler is cool?”, he asked. It’s “because we are destroying the secular religion of liberalism and the Holocaust, which go hand in glove.”
Fuentes is an on-off Holocaust denier. In the past he has queried the number of Jews killed by comparing the capacity of the crematoria of Auschwitz with the time it takes to bake cookies in an oven. When Morgan challenged him on this, Fuentes surprised his interrogator by fully accepting that the Nazis may have killed six million Jews, if not more. Denial of the extent and goals of the Holocaust used to be an essential part of the far-right political lexicon, but Fuentes’s response signalled that it is no longer. Now it seems enough simply to argue that the extermination of European Jewry should not matter.
Standing up such a claim requires some degree of historical re-engineering. Enter Daryl Cooper, a self-made pseudo-historian who provides the intellectual underpinnings, such as they are, for this new revisionism on the right. He used an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in March to argue that we have got the Holocaust and the Second World War all wrong. Hitler was motivated by love for the German people, Cooper told Rogan, claiming that the author of Mein Kampf somehow kept his antisemitism mostly hidden from public view. As for the Holocaust, that was largely an accident caused by deficient planning. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Cooper said in an interview with Tucker Carlson, they “went in with no plan… and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.” This is a monstrous distortion: the millions who lost their lives in Nazi camps did not “end up” dying but were intentionally killed. Far from being the result of poor organisation, we know that the scale and speed of the Nazis’ industrialised murder was the direct result of hyper-efficient planning, resourcing and logistics.
Cooper’s understanding of the origins of the Second World War is no better. He told Joe Rogan that prior to the outbreak of war “if there was a sliver of an opportunity” to de-escalate the stand-off with Hitler it should have been tried, and only if Hitler turned it down should war have been the choice of last resort. It’s as if Cooper has never heard of the Munich Agreement, but it allows him to argue that Churchill—who he has called “the chief villain of World War Two”—pushed for an avoidable war with Hitler, when it would have been much better to leave the Nazis in power. His aim is not just to exonerate Hitler, but to condemn Churchill, and through him western democracy as a whole.
Cooper’s claim that Churchill dragged the UK into an unnecessary war with Germany has been taken up by others on the American right, notably Tucker Carlson, though in truth, it has been around for a while. Pat Buchanan, perhaps the best known paleoconservative on the American right, has long argued for this alternative view of the 20th century. But it has acquired a particular political role, more timely and relevant than ever, as a lever to dismantle the postwar order and its liberal assumptions. Cooper opposes mass immigration into the United States and Europe and believes that this immigration only happens because “some of the lessons we drew from that war were… maybe not the right ones to take”. Revulsion at Nazism and the Holocaust has led to a situation, he believes, where a country like Ireland “feels like they don’t have the moral right to say, this is a country for the Irish” and instead is compelled to let everyone else in. This is the shift in political thinking that he and others seek to bring about. The way the Holocaust is remembered has become a prime target of that effort.
The postwar world was built, in part, as a response to the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazism. The United Nations Charter was adopted in 1945, the year that crimes against humanity were prosecuted for the first time at Nuremberg. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide followed soon after. Sixty years later, when the UN adopted 27th January as a global day of Holocaust commemoration, it cited these three international instruments as justification. In so doing, the UN confirmed the indelible link between the Nazi genocide and the norms that have shaped our world ever since.
Western politicians rarely mention the Holocaust without referring to this postwar legal and moral framework. Keir Starmer told last year’s national Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony that learning from survivors means “we can develop that empathy for others and that appreciation of our common humanity, which is the ultimate way to defeat the hatred of difference”. This isn’t teaching about the Holocaust for its own sake, or even simply to honour those who died. It is an effort to use its lessons—albeit carefully chosen and curated—to promote a certain understanding of how our world should be. “The Union we want to build is a place where everyone can be whoever they want to be,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, told an International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in 2022. “A place where everyone is entitled to the same rights and is treated with the same dignity. This is what ‘keeping the memory alive', truly means. A continent that is finally united in its beautiful diversity.”
Such faith in the unifying power of Europe’s “beautiful diversity” seems brutally naive today, with right-wing populism riding, and driving, a wave of anti-immigration sentiment. Von der Leyen herself now says that “the west as we knew it no longer exists”. An entire political era designed to enshrine the idea of “never again” in a liberal consensus is coming to an end. As alternative voices rise to replace it, there is a danger that Holocaust commemoration will be seen more widely as a tool of the old western order that ought to be brushed aside.
This is not just apparent on right-wing podcasts and YouTube shows. It is happening on the left, too, and in more intellectual tones. In his influential essay “The Shoah After Gaza”, published in the London Review of Books in March 2024, the novelist Pankaj Mishra situated the Holocaust as “the central event and universal reference” in the moral order on which the postwar world was built. He goes on to charge Israel, and “Netanyahu and his cohort”, with “dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945” through its conduct in Gaza. “It hardly seems believable,” Mishra writes, “but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of collapse in the free world.” Expanding his argument in a book titled The World After Gaza (2025), Mishra says the 80 years since 1945 were bookended by the Shoah and what he calls “Israel’s industrialised mass killing and cultural devastation across the Middle East”. And the conflict in Israel and Gaza is different to any other on Earth, he writes, not only because of the scale of death and destruction, the depth of western involvement, or its sheer longevity, but because Israel is a Jewish state. “The first Jewish state”, he writes, “holds up a mirror” to humanity by “simply by existing”.
Mishra does not question the facts of the Final Solution, rather, he points to a political purpose in the reframing of Holocaust memory in light of the war in Gaza. “Those describing Zionism as a genocidal ideology,” he writes, “aim to defuse the symbolism of the Shoah and represent the destruction of Gaza as the true evil of our times.”
The equation of Israel with Nazi Germany is nothing new. As a tactic it was developed decades ago as part of Soviet antisemitic anti-Zionism. Today it is ubiquitous whenever protesters march for Palestine. Even Hamas, during last year’s first ceasefire deal, staged its grotesque hostage-release ceremonies in front of banners decrying “Nazi Zionism”. Israel’s opponents are not alone in cheapening the memory of the Shoah; Israeli politicians also invoke this history in cynical and unjustified ways. But the comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany, and Gaza with the Shoah, carries a multi-layered sting. It entwines Jews with the worst of their persecutors while also implying that the Holocaust was not so special after all.
It is a cruel comparison to make, carrying a visceral punch to the Jewish gut. It is also baseless. Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza is clearly questionable, but the death toll and humanitarian deprivations are by no measure on the same scale or for the same purpose as the Holocaust. Rather, they are the result of a real, tragic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, a material struggle over territory and sovereignty. The atrocities of 7th October really did happen, Israeli hostages were held, tortured and abused for two years in appalling conditions, and Israel’s Islamist enemies around the region, from Iran to Yemen, Lebanon to Palestine, cling to their dream of seeing Israel eradicated. In contrast, Jews posed no threat at all to Germany in the 1930s. The Nazi project to murder every Jewish man, woman and child throughout Europe and beyond was born of a conspiracist fantasy of Jewish peril, a delusion shaped by centuries of European Judeophobia. But for Mishra, these fundamental distinctions seem irrelevant. Instead, in his book he describes what he sees as an Israeli paranoia, rooted in a Shoah-shaped psychosis that, he argues, has led the Jewish state to replicate the inhumanity and limitless violence of Nazism.
Of course, Mishra is not alone in implying that Israel’s actions in Gaza carry such echoes. The debate over whether Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza constituted a genocide is fiercely contested. While genocide is a criminal charge that ought to be determined solely on the evidential facts, it is also a label with broader political implications. Further, there is a long-standing academic division over whether genocide is an intentional crime knowingly committed by states or other actors, or a consequence of social forces produced by imperialism, or even by capitalism itself. The latter view often comes with the idea that the Holocaust was not unique but rather was just another colonial genocide, committed by a European power looking for lebensraum in Eastern Europe.
This is a deeply flawed argument that fails to explain Germany’s total, obsessive drive to destroy the entirety of European Jewry. The theory that the Holocaust’s purpose was to clear territory for German colonisation cannot tell us why Jews from Paris or Rome were transported eastwards, into precisely the lands earmarked for Aryan settlement. It cannot, for example, explain why the Nazis felt it necessary to capture, transport and kill Anne Frank, hiding in her attic in Amsterdam. Instead, it over-universalises the Shoah, redefining it not primarily as an act of antisemitism but of colonialism. This, in turn, leads some people to place it alongside not just colonial genocides like the destruction of Native Americans or Aboriginal peoples in Australasia, but acts of war such as the bombing of Hiroshima or the onslaught in Gaza.
This has two important consequences. First, if the Holocaust was no different to any other genocide, then the rug is pulled from under the Zionist argument that the Holocaust—perpetrated by the most scientifically advanced and culturally sophisticated European state at that time, abetted by accomplices across the continent, and enabled by the refusal of much of the world to take Jewish refugees—demonstrated the need for a sovereign Jewish state. And second, if antisemitism was not central to the Nazis’ motivations, then the prominence of the Jewish story in Holocaust commemoration is unmerited.
The idea is to leverage the undoubted suffering in Gaza to supplant the moral power of the Holocaust in today’s world. Going by his book, Mishra seems to see Holocaust commemoration as we know it as a sham used to prop up an unjust international system. He describes an imagined future in which the Shoah is supplanted by colonialism as the west’s great sin and anticolonialism is understood as “the fount of a global revolution”. Nor is it only Israel that Mishra brackets with Nazism: he pairs Auschwitz and Hiroshima together as twin atrocities, as if there was no meaningful difference between the 20th century’s dictatorships and its democracies. “Germany was no exception,” he writes: “all Western powers worked together to uphold a global racial order, in which it was entirely normal for Asians and Africans to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned and ostracised.” Viewed through a racialised, revolutionary lens, the 7th October attack, with its massacre of hundreds at the Nova music festival, its rape and sexual violence, was, according to Mishra, seen by many on the left as an act of resistance to “white power”.
It is striking just how much these arguments, on left and right, have in common, even though they are diametrically opposed in so many ways. Mishra, for instance, seems to suggest that Holocaust memory has been used to keep the doors of western power firmly closed to outsiders. Cooper, meanwhile, believes Holocaust commemoration has flung those doors wide open, enabling mass immigration and the dilution of white, western societies. Despite these profound differences, however, both appear to share the belief that, as the international order that has shaped our world since 1945 comes apart, the status of the Holocaust in our moral and cultural imagination is central to the question of what will follow.
While establishment politicians and institutions continue to treat the Holocaust as the pivotal moral event of the 20th century, out in the discursive undergrowth ever-larger audiences increasingly seek alternative explanations for the world, and radical visions of how to remake it. In these circles, the sanctity of Holocaust commemoration is what makes it such an enticing target. “Are we closer”, Mishra writes, “to finding a replacement for the Shoah as a universal symbol of human and moral evil?”
Why this all matters ought to be obvious. The late Yehuda Bauer, one of the great scholars of antisemitism and the Holocaust, warned many years ago that “a reversion back to ’normalcy’ regarding Jews requires the destruction of the Holocaust-caused attitude of sympathy”. It is not difficult to find evidence that this reversion to an antisemitic “normalcy” is occurring. Last year, the massacre of Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach, following the killing of two Jews at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and the shooting of two Israeli embassy employees outside the Jewish Museum in Washington DC in May, were just the latest lethal incidents in a global surge of hatred that itself feels like the end of an era. Jews have been shot, stabbed, kidnapped and burnt, and synagogues and schools torched on multiple continents since the 7th October attack. Less visible is the daily grind of racist comments, slurs and exclusions that never make the news but lead Jews to shrink inwards and rethink their futures. Almost a third of all British Jews were directly targeted with antisemitic violence, harassment or abuse in 2024, according to polling from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
The rise of antisemitism, conspiracy-driven populism and authoritarian demagoguery makes Holocaust commemoration more essential than ever. But there is an urgent need to rethink how it is done. The long-held fear that it would become harder to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive once the last of the survivors are no longer with us might soon be surpassed by a greater danger: that people stop thinking the Holocaust matters, not because they don’t know what happened, but because they no longer care.
Perhaps “Never Again” was always a forlorn hope. It implies an optimistic assumption of progress, as if we can leave unwanted human behaviours and attitudes in the past, when history—and the current Jewish reality—suggests the opposite is true. Still, whether the existing international order survives this crisis or not, the memory and dignity of the six million who were murdered, and the vital lessons for humanity that we take from that darkest of times, must not be sacrificed in the process.
