At a time when global civilization has lost its moral compass, Manfred Henningsen’s Regimes of Terror provides a north star for our dark night of the soul. He embraces his personal formative experience in the spirit of a moral and philosophical anamnesis. His move from Germany to the United States and his marriage to Kareda, an African American woman, woke him up to the legacy of slavery and the collective refusal of modern America to come to terms with its past. He draws from his own story, beginning with a childhood in WWII Germany to illuminate his country’s success in coming to terms with the horrors of Nazi rule. This was a process so unusual in politics that Germans created a special term for it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, meaning a society coming to terms with its traumatic past. Henningsen contrasts Germany’s remarkable success in emerging as a relatively wise and moral society with the conspicuous failure of the United States in confronting a foundation built on chattel slavery and the genocide of its indigenous population. He casts a comparative gaze on Japan, Cambodia, Russia, Indonesia, Australia and China. In conclusion he challenges the reader to consider the urgency of a collective moral, intellectual and political awakening in a post-truth age of appalling destructiveness. Regimes of Terror is a clearly written cornerstone work for those who are waking up to ‘love of truth-seeking’ as the ultimate answer to moral, political and existential catastrophe.