As I write, thousands of soldiers, supported by heavy artillery, tanks and aircraft, are locked in a major battle near Kursk, some 500km south of Moscow. Many of those fighting and dying will be the great-grandchildren of men and women who fought for the Soviet Red Army against Hitler’s forces close to the same spot in 1943. Some say that history never repeats. They are wrong.
This second battle of Kursk is just one example of many déjà vu-inducing incidents going on in our world today. In fact, the entire Russo-Ukrainian war can in one very important way be viewed as a repeat of another historical event – the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, when the Spanish Republic was left to defend itself against General Franco’s reactionary forces, which were strongly supported by Hitler and Mussolini. On that occasion, western nations failed to arm the forces of democracy sufficiently to defeat the aggressor – a failure which many historians believe emboldened Hitler to turn his attentions towards Czechoslovakia and Poland. Will we make the same mistake a second time?
Here’s another question: Will we ignore other warning signs of another possible impending global conflict? The second world war was caused in major part by aggressive rightwing populist politicians bearing nationalist grievances who rose to power by widening and exploiting racial hatred and economic discontent. Their crude rhetoric spread hatred, mass violence and widespread murder of the sort that led to November 1938’s Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in which Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed and Jewish men rounded up and sent to concentration camps and which was the precursor to the Holocaust. How is today looking against that measure?
In the last weeks in the UK, angry racist mobs rioted in several cities across England, acting on rumours that a Muslim refugee was responsible for the killing of three young girls at a school holiday dance party. Change “Muslim” to “Jewish” and you have the basic ingredient of every antisemitic pogrom of the last 150 years. At one of the riots, encouraged by extremist misinformation, a mob attempted to set fire to a hotel sheltering refugees. Thankfully they failed, but there seems to me small difference between the white supremacist rioters’ intent and that of the Nazi brownshirts on that night of breaking glass.
How extraordinary that here we are in 2024 with an entire nation being placed on alert against the threat of racist street violence. Think about that for just a moment and it will seem extraordinary. This has been headed off for now, but what happens after the next invented provocation?
Events like this highlight something that should worry us all: we are entering a new age of savagery and organised lying that would have been almost unthinkable in western democracies just a generation ago. As in the 1930s, our society is becoming increasingly irrational, frightening and violent. And this is mirrored in the coarsening of our political language and the daily workings of our political system, where populists routinely lie, peddle conspiracy theories, and stoke racial, cultural, gender and class divisions as they attempt (with increasing success) to create a voting base for themselves. Cultural elites were declared enemies of the people in fascist and communist countries in the 1930s and are regularly denounced as such today. Our culture wars are nothing new.
It is important to recall that only a decade ago, it was almost inconceivable that people who addressed rallies in a similar ranting style as Hitler or Mussolini, who praised neo-Nazis, called political opponents vermin and accused immigrants of poisoning the blood of their citizens could have attracted more than a few per cent of the national vote in established democratic nations. And yet in France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and elsewhere, parties of the hard right, including some with very real historical links to the Nazi and Fascist parties of the 1930s, are challenging mainstream democratic parties for the share of the popular vote.
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In the US, this includes a presidential candidate who less than three years ago attempted to overturn the result of the election by sending an armed mob into the Capitol building. Insurrection, coup, putsch, violent demonstration – call it what you will – but this smacks of the sort of thing Mussolini and Hitler also tried out during their rise to power. And in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny are regularly being publicly tried and murdered in similar fashion to Joseph Stalin’s opponents in the old USSR.
The conclusion is clear: in many easily recognisable ways, the history of the 1920s and 30s is already repeating. It’s all happening before our very eyes and yet few see it because we have stopped thinking of our situation in historical terms. Will the global conflict that the savagery of those times led to also repeat? It’s time to look in the mirror. With the mass bombing of civilians in cities like Gaza and Kiev, the fate of Taiwan now being openly discussed, and a major land battle right now being fought in Kursk, maybe the early stages of widening global conflict are already under way. Do our leaders have the historical insights necessary to prevent it all happening again?