Ideology, the famous linguist Noam Chomsky once said, is what is taken to be truth irrespective of the facts. Furthering ideology is exactly why Hitler is kept alive. The ideology of ultimate evil and ultimate good. Hitler plays ultimate evil, and because the U.S. defeated him, we play ultimate good. If a State Department officials tells us, via the New York Times, that the leader of Uzbekistan is evil, we want proof.
Evil is a pretty serious charge, and sounds sort of biblical and fuzzy.
The strangest example I have seen of this was during the bombing of Kosovo, when Albanians were fleeing on trains to the safety of Macedonia. Images of people packed into trains were repeatedly shown in the news media, and references to the holocaust were both explicit and implied. Quickly cemented into the American mind was the idea of Serbs being Nazis. This then justified the bombing that prompted the exodus in the first place, and completely overlooked the difference between riding on a train to a safe country, and riding on a train to a death camp. I question why we hear about massacres in Yugoslavia but not in Indonesia.