A Warning from History

Image: Hope Not Hate

Today in Sweden, the centre-left Prime Minister Stefan Lofven was forced to call elections after the far-right Sweden Democrat party killed a crucial budget vote. The Sweden Democrats (such an innocuous name) are against immigration, Swedish membership of the EU, and are critical of rights that have been given to the indigenous Sami people. In the United States of America yesterday, Republican politicians discussed their plans to try and thwart President Obama's executive order, which offers millions of illegal immigrants protection from deportation. Last week Binyamin Netanyahu proposed that citizenship in Israel should be restricted to Jews. In the UK, we've seen a race to the bottom over recent months as David Cameron and Ed Miliband have struggled to match the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party. Just a few months ago Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, claiming that it was only looking after ethnic Russians. All this only a few years after a massive financial catastrophe.

As a kid I was frogmarched through 20th century history. I like to think we all were. We studied the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (another innocuous name!), of Mussolini, of Mosley and his desire for British isolationism. We explored in detail the causal relationships between economic crises and political extremism and intolerance. We saw how people turned inwards and blamed others for their troubles, how populism and electoral compromises combined to destroy democracy. We saw how some nations responded by increasing their military spending and flexing their muscles in an attempt to restore lost pride or secure resources. We read about it all, we watched the documentaries and the interviews.

"Thank God," we said to ourselves, "that we are learning this lesson. We are listening to the voices of the dead: the victims, whose corpses we watched being bulldozed into pits; the soldiers forced to kill each other; the children burnt to ashes. We must hear their testimony, because it will tell us how to prevent this from happening again. We will know the signs. The missteps and the mistakes that lead to disaster. We will ignore the men who tell us our problems are the fault of others, that we should turn on those who have less than us. We will ignore the men who win our trust by making us more afraid. In hindsight, it is all so clear. How sad it is that the people of those times fell for their lies so easily. We will not make the same mistakes. Thank God."