If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be?
If I could erase one trend from history, it would be fascism.
More than anything, I wish I could sit down for one more Sunday lunch with my late father-in-law, Dr Zbigniew Pelczyński. He grew up in Warsaw during the 1930s, lived through the destruction of his country under fascism, and went on to teach politics at Oxford University, becoming one of Britain’s foremost scholars of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Family Sunday lunches had a habit of turning into impromptu tutorials. Almost any subject—history, democracy, nationalism, liberty or Europe—would lead him effortlessly into a discussion informed not only by scholarship but by lived experience. He had witnessed the consequences of political ideas that most of us know only from books.
Looking back, I realise how privileged I was. At the time, I simply enjoyed the conversation. Today, I find myself wishing I had asked twice as many questions. What did fascism look like before people recognised it for what it was? How did ordinary families adapt as freedom disappeared? At what point did neighbours stop trusting one another? How does a society persuade itself that surrendering liberty is the price of security?
Those conversations are probably why my answer came so quickly. I expected to choose something less obviously destructive—consumerism, environmental degradation or perhaps slavery—but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that fascism is not simply another political ideology. It is one of history’s recurring temptations, capable of exploiting some of the darkest instincts in human nature while presenting itself as national salvation.
To me, fascism begins long before a dictator steps onto a balcony or a crowd raises its arms in salute. It starts in miniature. It starts with the playground bully. The boy who discovers that fear works. The teenager who enjoys humiliating others because he can. The adult who mistakes obedience for respect and domination for leadership.
Most bullies grow out of it. Some are stopped. Some are simply denied the opportunity. But history shows what happens when a society rewards rather than restrains that instinct. Authoritarian personalities rise through families, schools, armies, businesses, and political parties until, one day, they acquire enough followers that ordinary people feel they have little choice but to submit.
That, perhaps, is the most frightening aspect of fascism. It rarely arrives announcing itself. It usually comes wrapped in promises of order, security, patriotism or national renewal. By the time people realise what has happened, dissent has become dangerous, and institutions designed to prevent tyranny have already been hollowed out.
Growing up, I was fascinated by history’s great leaders. As a boy, I admired conquerors and generals. Later, I became more interested in the societies that produced them. Why do populations sometimes embrace authoritarian rule? Is it simply fear? Economic hardship? National humiliation? Or is there something in human nature that occasionally longs for certainty more than freedom?
That raises uncomfortable questions. We readily identify Mussolini and Hitler as fascists, but what about earlier rulers? Was William the Conqueror, imposing his will through military conquest and absolute authority, in any meaningful sense fascist? Napoleon created a powerful centralised state, cultivated a personality cult and crushed opposition. Yet historians generally stop short of calling either man fascist because fascism belongs to a particular twentieth-century ideology rooted in mass politics, nationalism and totalitarian control. They may have shared authoritarian traits, but they were products of very different ages.
It is worth making an important distinction. Fascism is not simply another word for authoritarianism, dictatorship, tyranny or despotism. Those describe ways in which power is exercised and have existed for thousands of years. Fascism is something more specific: a twentieth-century political ideology that fuses extreme nationalism with the cult of a supreme leader, glorifies violence and militarism, mobilises the masses through propaganda, identifies internal and external enemies to unite the nation, and seeks to subordinate every institution to the interests of the state. Every fascist regime is authoritarian, but not every authoritarian regime is fascist. That is why William the Conqueror, Napoleon or an autocratic Pope may exhibit authoritarian characteristics without belonging in the same historical category as Mussolini or Hitler.
The same distinction prompts other questions. Have some Popes governed in ways we would now recognise as authoritarian? Certainly. But does that make them fascists? Probably not. The label loses its usefulness when stretched across every powerful ruler in history.
More interesting are the places where fascistic tendencies can emerge unnoticed. Can a business become fascistic when loyalty matters more than truth and questioning the boss becomes career suicide? Can government departments acquire authoritarian cultures without anyone intending them to? Can schools, sports clubs or online communities drift into the same habits of conformity, scapegoating and blind obedience? These organisations are not fascist states, but they may reveal some of the same psychological dynamics that fascism exploits.
And what of women? We instinctively associate fascism with powerful men, yet history has produced women who exercised authoritarian rule or enthusiastically supported fascist movements. Psychology is not exclusively male, even if history has more often handed absolute power to men.
Perhaps that is the most important lesson. Fascism is not itself a timeless human instinct. It is a modern political ideology that exploits timeless human instincts: tribalism, fear, hero worship, resentment, obedience and the desire for simple answers to complicated problems. The bully who discovers that intimidation works, the manager who silences dissent, the politician who claims only he can save the nation—they all draw upon impulses that have always existed. Fascism gives those impulses an organised political form.
That is why I would erase it.
Not because doing so would magically produce a peaceful world. Human beings would still be greedy, tribal and capable of violence. But remove the ideology that perfected the mobilisation of those instincts through mass propaganda, myth-making and totalitarian control, and perhaps millions would have been spared the wars, persecutions and genocides that followed whenever societies surrendered their freedom to those who promised greatness in return.
If there is one lesson I took from those Sunday lunches with Dr Pelczyński, it is that democracies are rarely destroyed overnight. They are eroded gradually, as fear replaces trust, certainty replaces debate, and loyalty replaces truth. Fascism is not history’s inevitable destination. It is a choice. Which is precisely why every generation has a responsibility to recognise it before it acquires another face and another name.
Perhaps I’ve been answering the wrong question. I could roll it back to pre-fascism. I’d want to play it safe with history and erase the conditions that allow fascism—and every other form of authoritarianism—to flourish. I would replace them with something stronger than constitutions and elections. I would inject into history a passion for democracy: the belief that no individual is above the law, that disagreement is not disloyalty, that compromise is not weakness, and that political opponents are fellow citizens rather than enemies. Democracies are untidy, frustrating and slow. They are meant to be. Their genius lies not in producing perfect governments, but in making it possible to remove bad ones without bloodshed. It feels like muddling through and very ‘middle of the road’, but isn’t that the best kind of politics? We don’t want celebrity politicians; we want public servants who do their best for the people they serve – the electorate.
Leave a Reply