It is difficult to deny that the far right is on the rise. Explanations abound—cultural anxiety, social media, populism—everything, in fact, except the cause. That cause is history. We have been here before, and the last time it took a world war to rid ourselves of the beast. Its head has regrown not because of a lack of legislation or progressive speech, but because the conditions that give it life are once again being ignored.
Germany was punished most severely after losing a war it did not start. The monuments, the minutes of silence, the dawn services serve a secondary purpose: they obscure Allied responsibility for how the First World War began and how its aftermath was handled. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles was designed to cripple Germany economically, making recovery and stability almost impossible. The Kaiser was removed, creating a political vacuum into which both the far right and the far left rushed. Meanwhile, ordinary Germans watched their savings evaporate. A wheelbarrow of banknotes might buy a loaf of bread.
Into this desperation stepped the National Socialists. They promised to tear up Versailles, restore dignity, and—crucially—assured the population there would be no more war. They would make Germany great again. How this would be achieved was a question people were too hungry, too humiliated, and too exhausted to ask.
Extremes rise when real problems go unaddressed. This is why social security exists—not primarily to protect the recipient, but to protect society from desperation. In interwar Germany, desperation was allowed to fester, and responsibility for that lies squarely with the victorious powers.
Much the same pattern is visible today across Western democracies. Successive governments have failed to confront the social consequences of runaway house prices, stagnant wages, and migration policies that may be well-intentioned but poorly managed. Communities destabilise not from diversity itself, but from rapid change without material support. At the same time, governments appear more attentive to the demands of loud, militant constituencies than to the quiet anxieties of the worker, the unemployed parent, the household with five dependents staring at an empty table at day’s end.
That person does not see the contemporary left as a solution, but as part of the problem. What remains is the far right, which is always ready to offer an explanation—simple, emotional, and wrong—by pointing to those it claims are responsible.
I am reminded of The Tin Drum, set in the years leading up to the Second World War. Its protagonist, three-year-old Oskar, refuses to grow up after witnessing the moral collapse of the adult world. In one scene he reflects that there was once a naïve people who believed in Santa, and then one day discovered that Santa was the gas man. The line lands because it captures the moment illusion gives way to horror—when denial becomes complicity.
History does not repeat itself mechanically, but it rhymes. When desperation is ignored, when dignity is treated as expendable, the far right does not need to be invited in. It arrives on its own.