Will ISIL be remembered as a new Third Reich?

The rise of ISIL in Syria and Iraq has chilling parallels to Nazi Germany, writes Nathan W Toronto.

Is ISIL the modern version of the evils of the Nazi regime in Germany? AP

In Europe this summer, I was struck by how much the effects of the Second World War still influence the continent. Public transportation is well developed, partly because the aftermath of the war required it. Berlin is a new city because it was destroyed in the war’s final throes. Most important, Europeans consistently remind themselves of the reasons the war occurred.

They fought, and many others around the world fought, to defeat the hate and tyranny represented by the Axis powers. Germany’s Third Reich created a system of hate that systematically exterminated six million Jews, one million Russian prisoners-of-war, and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, Gypsies, the disabled, and others the Third Reich deemed undesirable.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, is a stark reminder of the lengths to which the Third Reich went to destroy life. The Third Reich set up thousands of collection points, concentration camps and extermination camps, and then painstakingly built a bureaucracy to sanitise the work of death for those who conducted it. Plaques and monuments dot western Europe, to condemn the work of evil and remember its victims.

European politics is set up today to prevent a return to that dark era of hate, with little tolerance for speech and actions that justify the death of individuals based on religion, ethnicity or class. The reason is that during the Second World War, Europeans recognised a chilling truth: the threat of the Third Reich was not only its occupation of most of Europe but also in creating a system that fomented genocide.

ISIL is creating a similar system of hate now. The military power and resource base of ISIL pale in comparison to the power of the Third Reich, but the insidious attitude towards murder is the same.

ISIL seeks out members of what it deems unacceptable groups – Yazidis, Christians, Shia, combatant prisoners and westerners – and seeks to exterminate them. It has published a manual to manage its savagery, and its propaganda machine has a voracious appetite for more killing. ISIL has a deceptively simple method for engendering goodwill in the areas it controls, and then inducting initiates with murder.

As Europe found during the Second World War, such a system of hate is contemptible, and it laid waste a continent.

Thankfully, countries like the UAE and my own country, the USA, are actively combating ISIL. The question that should be on every policymaker’s mind, though, is this: “Under what conditions should my nation do more?”

The world could have – and perhaps should have – done more to blunt the rise of Nazi Germany. Once ISIL has been defeated and Iraq and Syria and the rest of the region have been liberated from their tyranny, will we find evidence of gruesome atrocities, as did the allied forces in 1945 at places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald? Are ISIL’s videos of beheadings and other atrocities only the beginning? If this is the case, then I hope and pray that we will have done enough.

Dr Nathan Toronto is an associate professor at the UAE’s National Defense College