The road to deradicalization

It is a common myth that total victory is often achieved once an enemy’s army is defeated. Yet an army is often only the visible expression of a deeper political and ideological system. If the beliefs that sustained the conflict persist within society, military success may prove temporary. In earlier eras, states sought to secure lasting dominance through the destruction or displacement of populations.

In the modern period, a different logic has emerged. Rather than eliminating people, governments attempt to weaken the appeal of the ideas that mobilized them. This effort to reshape political attitudes and societal norms is what we now describe as deradicalization.

The post-1945 experiences of Germany and Japan demonstrate how similar defeats can produce markedly different outcomes, depending on institutional structures, security conditions, and the broader strategic environment in which reconstruction takes place.

In both cases, the Allies first sought to stabilize economic conditions through reconstruction, as well as humanitarian and monetary aid. They would then initiate a top-down intervention, mostly focused on dismantling the ruling regime and imposing changes through institutions, laws, and authority. Among the main recipients of those changes would be the media, the educational sector, as well as the legal sector. Over the years, the intervention would foster a new generation fully aware of the crimes of their forefathers, which in turn would generate a national sentiment of shame and a desire to atone for those crimes. This desire would then be nurtured by the transformed state apparatus to eliminate any remnants of the old regime.

In the case of denazification, the war managed to remove the first obstacle: the regime itself. The Führer was dead, the political leadership was under trial, and virtually all German land was under direct Allied occupation. This allowed the Allies to spring into action. By 1946, they had already re-established the federal Länder, a decentralized system designed to prevent the re-emergence of centralized authoritarian rule, and held municipal elections designed to replace all civil servants who failed a mass screening. Moreover, thousands of teachers were fired from schools and universities, and a new curriculum that emphasized the atrocities committed by the Nazis was put in place. All of this occurred in conjunction with the banning of more than 30,000 books containing Nazi propaganda, as well as racist and anti-Semitic material.

More importantly, the German population was forced to confront the crimes committed in its name. Allied military authorities organized mass visits for civilians to concentration camps. There, some were compelled to bury the bodies, while others were shown footage documenting the conditions in which prisoners had been held. The objective was to produce a moral shock, and at least in the immediate sense, the Allies succeeded.

That moral shock, alongside the previous actions, was sufficient to secure a lasting transformation. What began as an externally imposed confrontation would gradually evolve into a broader and more enduring societal process, one later described in German as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the struggle to come to terms with the past.

World War II (1939-1945). Concentration camp. Source: AFP

By the 1960s, this struggle became a dominant aspect of German society. Both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church in Germany embedded themes of repentance and moral responsibility into the spiritual and civic life of postwar Germany. Literary movements centered on exposing the moral ambiguities and everyday complicity of life under Nazism continued to shape German public discourse. In towns where atrocities had been committed, memorials were erected and became sites of voluntary public remembrance.

Yet remembrance did not remain confined to ritual or reflection. This new generation demanded greater accountability from their elders, a demand that culminated in the protests of 1968. In doing so, they completed the shift from imposed denazification to lived reckoning, and what had begun as Allied-imposed reform was, by then, absorbed into Germany’s political culture.

The Japanese case differed significantly from that of Germany. Although Japan was defeated and occupied following its surrender, the occupation authorities quickly concluded that removing the emperor would risk destabilizing the country and provoke civil unrest. As a result, the Allies adopted a more limited judicial strategy in Japan, trying a relatively small number of defendants at the Tokyo Trials (28), rather than pursuing the broader prosecutorial approach seen at Nuremberg (199). This narrower process led many Japanese citizens to perceive the trials as an instance of “victor’s justice” rather than a comprehensive moral reckoning.

Denazification-style purges were also less extensive: fewer teachers and civil servants were removed, and educational reforms emphasized pacifism and democratic values rather than collective repentance. Moreover, much of Japan’s wartime brutality had been committed abroad, in territories far removed from the Japanese home islands, which reduced direct societal confrontation with the crimes. This dynamic was further complicated by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which facilitated the emergence of a powerful victimhood narrative that, in many cases, overshadowed questions of responsibility and remorse.

The geopolitical environment further shaped the trajectory of Japan’s postwar transformation. After China’s communist victory and the Korean War, the United States prioritized stability and economic recovery over deep reckoning. Purges were softened, with officials of the old regime reinstated, and deradicalization yielded to strategic containment. As a result, Japan’s postwar reckoning with its wartime past remained more limited and contested. Debates over historical responsibility persist, as evidenced by repeated visits by Japanese prime ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine, the latest in 2013, where senior wartime leaders convicted as war criminals are enshrined.

The experiences of Germany and Japan suggest that deradicalization is neither automatic nor uniform. Instead, it is conditioned by economic reconstruction, institutional reform, external pressure, and the broader strategic context in which rebuilding occurs.

When applied to Lebanon, this comparison reveals a set of structural realities that cannot be ignored. Ideological transformation does not occur in a vacuum. It depends on the broader political and security environment in which it is embedded.

The Lebanese state has not experienced the kind of decisive rupture that forces collective self-reassessment, nor has it achieved the level of stability that renders parallel systems of power obsolete. Authority remains fragmented, external pressures continue to influence domestic calculations, and competing narratives of resistance and victimhood persist within the political sphere. Under such conditions, ideological commitments are sustained by perceived necessity. The historical record suggests that deradicalization becomes durable only when the structures that sustain older frameworks are fundamentally altered. Until those conditions shift, transformation remains constrained by the realities that define the living experience of the Lebanese people.