The present moment carries a chilling echo of a past we vowed never to repeat. As the poet W.H. Auden characterized the 1930s as a “low, dishonest decade,” we now find ourselves in a similarly bleak period of history. That earlier era was defined by economic despair following a global crash, rampant protectionism, a refugee crisis, and a widespread loss of faith in liberal democracy. This pervasive anxiety created a vacuum, one eagerly filled by fascist demagogues who promised order through authoritarian rule, the brutal suppression of dissent, and the ruthless scapegoating of outsiders. Today, the parallels are uncomfortable and undeniable: economic precarity, the weaponization of migration fears, and the rising clamor of strongmen who offer the same destructive, simplistic solutions. The wheel, it seems, has turned full circle.
This historical repetition is vividly illustrated in the realm of global spectacle. Just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics are forever remembered as Hitler’s Games—a propaganda tool used to glorify Aryan supremacy and mask the regime’s violent oppression—so too will the current World Cup be remembered as Trump’s. The comparison is stark and intentional. Both figures, at their respective times, openly supported far-right military ventures abroad, and both utilized state-sanctioned forces to persecute minorities at home, whether Hitler’s SS or Trump’s ICE squads. The hijacking of international sport to broadcast nationalist ideology and demonize so-called “inferior” peoples is a playbook borrowed directly from that darkest of decades, revealing how populist autocrats understand the potent fusion of pageantry and prejudice.
Tragically, Britain is not insulated from this regressive tide. In the 1930s, it was Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts bringing terror to the streets, attacking minorities and calling for the overthrow of democracy. Today, a new and wealthy elite orchestrates a similar hatred, cajoling young men to don masks, take to the streets, and target their fellow citizens based on the color of their skin. The recent, horrendous knife attack on Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast was not an isolated incident. It was, as MP Claire Hanna rightly identified, a “race-based pogrom,” a term that deliberately evokes the horrors of the past. The subsequent mob violence, with masked individuals seeking to burn ethnic minorities from their homes, was terror pure and simple—violence turned on anyone deemed different by the men wielding the weapons.
While this raw hatred played out on the streets, a grotesque political spectacle unfolded online and in the media, giving oxygen and credibility to the thugs. Multi-millionaire Rupert Lowe’s Restore party sank to despicable depths, promising to “put murderous third-world savages to death.” Meanwhile, figures like Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, and the leadership of the Reform party engaged in a race to the bottom, wrestling each other into the gutter to see who could appear most extreme. This salivating on the sidelines by influential voices does not merely comment on the violence; it incites and legitimizes it, blurring the line between political rhetoric and a call to arms. It signals to the violent that their bigotry has a place in the mainstream.
The central, terrifying lesson we must heed from history is that fascist leaders always offer simple answers to complex problems. They dupe the masses with promises of restored order and national purity, a seductive lie that masks their true aim: the accumulation of personal power and wealth. These answers never materialize. What arrives instead is the blood-drenched anarchy they deliberately whip up, a society fractured by fear and consumed by chaos. The solution they sell is the problem they create. As Auden warned in his poem “September 1, 1939,” written as the Nazis invaded Poland and plunged the world into carnage, we find ourselves “lost in a haunted wood.” His prescription was the antithesis of the fascist lie: “We must love one another or die.”
This is the only human lesson worth learning. It is a call for active solidarity, for the defense of our shared, multi-ethnic democracy against those who would shatter it. It demands that governments address legitimate concerns about immigration with competence and compassion, not with rhetoric that fuels xenophobia. It requires from all of us a moral courage to name hatred and violence for what they are, and to reject the simplistic narratives of the morally defective. The 1930s taught us the cost of failure. Our duty now is to ensure that this low, dishonest decade does not become a prelude to an even darker chapter. The choice remains, as Auden knew, starkly simple: we must choose each other, or we will perish together.
