Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. History can familiarise, and it can warn. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances.
These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth.
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. History does not repeat, but it does instruct. ‘These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten’ Observer ‘ A sort of survival book, a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close’ Rachel Maddow
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