The Comfort of Hindsight, the Cost of Silence

We are far too comfortable throwing the word fascist about, usually as a lazy insult. The trouble is that when we do need it, when the shoe actually fits, we’re left fumbling, hedging with euphemisms like “populist” or “firebrand.” 

We forget that Hitler himself didn’t arrive with a black swastika stamped on his forehead. In the early 1930s he was “just” a radical nationalist, “just” a man railing against elites, “just” someone with a taste for uniformed rallies. By the time people admitted he was a fascist, it was too late. The Reichstag was torched, opposition outlawed, and the boot was firmly on the neck.

That is the danger of hindsight. We call Hitler a fascist from the comfort of knowing how it ended, but contemporaries in 1930 might have shrugged and said much what some say about Trump today − strident, authoritarian, dangerous perhaps, but not really fascist. They mistook trajectory for destination. They judged him on his present rhetoric, not the logic of where that rhetoric would lead once coupled with power.

And yet, there were voices warning. Otto Wels of the Social Democrats stood alone in the Reichstag, telling the Nazis that they could take freedom but not honour. The satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote that Germany was sleepwalking into barbarism. Carl von Ossietzky exposed the secret rearmament that would fuel Hitler’s war machine. They were mocked, dismissed, or silenced, but time proved them right. Cassandra cries that only hindsight chose to hear.

So here we are, nearly a century on, watching Trump rename the Department of Defense the Department of War, deploy federal troops in the capital against its own citizens, and strip recognition from entire communities. Yet people tie themselves in knots, insisting he's not “really” a fascist. This is the same indulgence that was once extended to Hitler, as if the word only applies once the concentration camps are up and running. By then, of course, the word is meaningless because the system has already closed its jaws.

The lesson is brutally simple. If you wait for history to provide you with hindsight, you guarantee history repeats itself. Fascism does not announce itself fully formed. It sidles up in stages, each step deniable, each outrage normalised. The difference today is the speed. What took Hitler three years is now accelerated by social media, billionaire backers, and a global echo chamber. To say Trump is not a fascist but a proto-fascist is to play with matches in a room full of petrol, nodding wisely at the semantics while the fumes build.

We know what Hitler became. We also know that in 1930 respectable voices swore blind he was merely a dangerous clown. That is how hindsight betrays us.

And now look closer to home. Nigel Farage and his Reform chorusboys aren’t goose-stepping down Whitehall, but they’re busy softening the ground. Mass deportations that can’t be delivered, tax cuts that can’t be paid for, scapegoating migrants while services crumble − all the theatre of grievance without a single workable solution. They sneer at warnings of fascism because, like their friends across the Atlantic, they rely on the luxury of hindsight. Britain, they say, is too sensible, too moderate, too well-mannered for that sort of thing. But that’s exactly what Germans said in 1930.