Sitting here in Berlin, waiting for my suitcase to be delivered two plus days after having arrived and thinking, Isn’t this the AI future we’re not supposed to be living in? No sloppy human errors and lost luggage. Inconvenient rescheduling a thing of the past. Zero percent fuck ups.

Still.

A minor snafu, in the scheme of things, in the Berlin scheme of things which, of course, doesn’t make the clothes I’m wearing any less stiff and stale. But you still have those clothes on your back (a generic nana’s voice in my head). Consider yourself lucky. Look around you. Having just scratched the dark modern history of the city, not yet even fully face on with the Nazi era, your current problems really not amounting to anything more than a hill of beans.

Yeah?

Even if you wanted to, it’s awfully difficult to avoid the history of Berlin even, especially, the unpleasant, an understatement to be sure, branch of it, say, the nearly sixty years from 1933 to 1989. Which has been the point, to not forget, to not sweep the ugly and vile under the rug. Again, an understatement. Every descriptor feels inadequate in writing about it.

And yet, here we are, 2026, and what’s going on around us, even here in Germany itself, is not a forgetting but, stunningly, an embracing of the history, a revising of it, a softening of the atrocities and butchery. A glorifying of authoritarianism and xenophobia. Making fascism great again.

In America. In South America. In Reform UK. The AfD in Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt. Marie Le Pen in France. Vox in Spain.

And on and on, etc. & etc.

It no longer suffices to content yourself with a How is this possible? as if it’s all some aberration, a peculiar historical blip that came out of nowhere, blindsiding us all. Our hope became a belief, metastasized into ineffectual disbelief. It couldn’t possibly happen here. It couldn’t possibly happen again. History will save us from ourselves.

The impotent fretting and hand-wringing during this inexorable resurrection of global fascism has lead to some equally futile finger-pointing. Where’s the Left’s messaging in countering this rise of right-wing, antidemocratic populism? Implacable neoliberalism, hand-in-hand with its resulting wealth inequality proving itself to be the handmaiden of fascism. Social media and the new technology made the dissemination of odious ideology and atavistic politics easier, a mere click away.

All of which, or some of it, or a potent combination of all of it, may well be true, is very likely true.

It’s never been easier in the last 80 years to be a Nazi than it is now.

As disconcerting as that idea is, there’s another aspect here that should be equally disturbing.

Given this tilt away from democracy is occurring in the form of (initially) free and open elections, from India to Trump II and everywhere in between, it’s probably best if we accept the fact that fascism has never gone away. It’s been beaten back throughout history. Been bombed into submission for periods of time. Forced to put on a pretty face and call itself by other names, alternative labels, but it has not, cannot be, extinguished. Ever.

It simply seems to be a part of human nature, a part of human nature that simply has to be dealt with and corralled into manageable portions of our society, of all our societies. Constantly and regularly inoculated against. Like the measles and small pox. Forever lurking, opportunistically, waiting for us to let our guard down, thinking we’re past it, that it’s all in the past, and that past can’t hurt us anymore. A thing for the history books and that history never repeats itself.

There’s fascism in our bones. Denying that is to deny that we’re human. We don’t have to like it. But we do have to accept it. Accept it, accept that we are highly susceptible to it, and to constantly fight against it.

Fascism may well be part of the baggage we carry around with us, our unholy mix. We never lose or misplace it. We just need to be able to identify it, and then store it in a place so we always know exactly where it is.