If a fascist announces himself, you’d better believe him

THERE’S a certain sort of commentator who likes to sound mature and urbane and wise in the ways of the world, by brushing off suggestions that fascism might be making a bit of a comeback.

I wouldn’t be one of those commentators — I wrote an article in LIFE magazine about Trump which had the word “fascism” in the headline, and that was before he was elected.

But those mature and urbane commentators will baulk at the use of the word in almost any context except that of Nazi Germany, supposedly because the word has such weight, you have to be terribly careful about using it in any other context — but really it’s because they just want to sound mature and urbane. It is, if you like, an affectation.

After all, I too am profoundly aware of the weight of that word, indeed of the weight of all words, so I tend to look at it this way: If a man such as Trump is openly contemptuous of the norms of democracy, indeed of the constraints of the US constitution itself, and if he frequently expresses his admiration for totalitarian forms of government and the dictators who preside over them, I am prepared to take him at his word on that.

And if he is pushing a far right nationalist kind of politics, I feel it would be remiss of me not to point out certain similarities with certain movements of the 1930s. Indeed to fail to find such echoes is revealing of a failure of the imagination at least, on the part of the mature, urbane commentator — a bit like the failure of the imagination in the higher echelons of German society in 1930, when Germany was still a liberal democracy, and they just couldn’t envisage that within four years that democracy of theirs would all be so over.

The Rise of the Nazis starts in 1930, and I guess we know where it will eventually finish. But first we must praise the BBC for showing this series last year, and RTE2 for starting to repeat it last Sunday.

They didn’t just make this by accident, it is framed clearly as “a story of how democracy died”. And we are left in no doubt that with the rise of far right nationalism in America and Britain and a lot of other places too, any takeaways from the way things panned out in Germany in the 1930s are entirely appropriate.

There too the “conservative” establishment thought they could use the delinquent energies of Hitler for their own malevolent ends, as the Republicans have been doing with their “strongman”. But they are also discovering that these guys just can’t be controlled, that they have this feral understanding of what a fragile thing this democracy can be, if you really want to push it.

And these guys really want to push it.

It is a failure of imagination too, if you’re expecting a force such as fascism to repeat itself in exactly the same form as it did in the 1930s, jackboots and all.

The next time it comes, it won’t necessarily be advertising itself with SS uniforms, though of course some of its modern adherents are perfectly comfortable with that look. Nor is it a coherent ideology, as such, it is more about the amoral opportunism of ruthless men, the kind who have no limits.

Again there are one or two characters of that ilk knocking around the top tables of Washington and London, as we speak.

So we should all be watching The Rise of the Nazis, and noting how the opening episode had the progressive lawyer Hans Litten destroying Hitler in court during a cross examination in 1931 — by the end of the episode we would learn that Litten died in Dachau in 1938.

We kept recognising certain patterns in the way that the Nazis were enabled by “big business” and aristocrats and “sections of the media”, united in their hatred of leftists and liberals and “progressive” types.

Really, there’s only one word for it.