The journalist who did The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

This Organization was born out of the ruins of the empire of the Third Reich.

And it should come as no surprise that my first novel at 16 was about Neo Nazis taking over Nigeria to institute the Fourth Reich.

The end of the war and the fall of the Third Reich did not bring to Poles the full sovereignty and the independence they were fighting for.

So when I bow my head today to those who vanquished the Nazi Third Reich, it is not an empty gesture, but an expression of awareness that the victory saved millions of human lives.

Renata Sonnenfeld, Succession and Continuation, A Study on Treaty Practice in Post War Germany, 7 Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 91, 108 16 (1976) (discussing the influence of war on the validity of international treaties concluded by the German Reich).

The Japanese, too, carry a burden of historical crimes, but their attitude to foreigners in distress is far less welcoming. Even though few Germans have any personal memories of the Third Reich, many still feel the need to prove that they have learned from their country s history.

Historically, rising powers tend to become too confident too soon, leading them to behave imprudently, which frightens their neighbors. For example, Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed Otto von Bismarck as chancellor in 1890, less than 20 years after the formation of the Second Reich, and began to destroy Bismarck s carefully crafted alliance network.

In Italy, the right wing daily newspaper Il Giornale had no scruples about devoting its headline for August 3, 2012, to the emergence of the Fourth Reich. Likewise, conspiracy websites in the countries of northern Europe claim that Germany s eagerness to support Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko against Russian President Vladimir Putin is a reenactment of Hitler s subjugation of Ukraine.

If we were less haunted by memories of appeasing the Nazi regime, and of the ensuing genocide, people might not be as concerned about human rights as they are. And by no means do all those who work to protect the rights of others invoke the horrors of the Third Reich to justify Anglo American armed intervention.

Yet analogies with the Third Reich, although highly effective as a way to denounce people with whose views one disagrees, are usually false. No Islamist armies are about to march into Europe indeed, most victims of Revolutionary Islamism live in the Middle East, not in Europe and Ahmadinejad, his nasty rhetoric notwithstanding, does not have a fraction of Hitler s power.