Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy, customizable themes that let you build your brand,

marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time.

From startups to scaleups, online, in-person and on the go.

Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello, my name's David Ransom and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today it is part two of our new series that I'm calling Orwell's War.

And I'm going to be talking about Orwell's response to the events of 1940 and 1941, how George Orwell, more or less in real time, tried to understand what was happening now that the war was on and he was keen to fight it. He couldn't fight it in person. So he fought it in print as a prolific journalist, trying to take the fight to the

enemy and trying to work out who the real enemy was. It wasn't necessarily the Nazis.

On this podcast, we don't often talk about new books. We mainly talk about old books, but occasionally

when a really interesting new book comes out, we do episodes on it. Recently, for instance,

Luke Kemp's great book, Goliath's Curse. But I'd say over the past year, the book that we

have talked about on this podcast that has stayed with me most is a recent one, written by the historian of religion, Alec Rari.

And we did an episode on it called The Age of Hitler.

That's the name of the book.

And in it, Alec Rari talks about his view that we are coming to the end of what he calls the age of Hitler.

That is the time when in the West we orient ourselves morally around a particular idea of evil

embodied in Adolf Hitler and Nazism, not even fascism in general, but the Nazi movement,

in particular, and of course, the Holocaust. And

Alec Rari thinks, and I think rightly, that that is starting to come undone in the third

decade of the 21st century. The hold of that image of evil is wavering. Historical memories are becoming thinner. Generations

are passing. It's not as immediate, but also doesn't have the same force. And you see it around

...