Twisting history to dishonour history’s victims and democracy’s principles

Across the Western world, a troubling pattern has emerged: Historical memory is being weaponised against democratic preferences. Institutions claiming to safeguard the lessons of the past increasingly deploy historical trauma to delegitimise populations whose only transgression is disagreeing with elite consensus.

The pattern is unmistakable: Expand the definition of extremism until ordinary citizens find themselves categorised as threats. Heteronormative families become “resonance spaces” for right-wing radicalism. Scepticism about gender ideology transforms into proto-fascism. Concerns about migration challenges? Evidence of extremist sympathies. This isn’t analysis—it’s alchemy, transmuting normal democratic disagreement into existential danger through definitional inflation.

This instrumentalises the memory of six million Jews industrially murdered by the Nazis, reducing their suffering to a rhetorical cudgel in contemporary partisan debates. When every policy disagreement invokes 1930s Germany, when border enforcement becomes Kristallnacht, the actual lessons of history are obliterated beneath bad-faith analogies.

The Minnesota obscenity: When Anne Frank becomes a political prop

The weaponisation of history reaches its nadir when American politicians appropriate Holocaust victims for contemporary partisan advantage. Minnesota’s governor declaring that children of illegal immigrants are “like Anne Frank” doesn’t just trivialise genocide—it reveals the fundamental dishonesty of this entire enterprise. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen because totalitarian state machinery systematically hunted Jews for extermination. Children of illegal immigrants face potential deportation—a legal enforcement action in every sovereign nation—because their parents violated immigration law.

The comparison isn’t just historically illiterate; it’s morally obscene. Yet it exemplifies the transatlantic coordination in deploying history as a bludgeon. Der Spiegel debates whether ICE resembles the SS or SA. The pattern transcends borders: Invoke the most extreme historical evils to delegitimise any enforcement of immigration law, any restriction on migration, any assertion of national sovereignty.

This is moral blackmail masquerading as historical consciousness. It transforms the Holocaust from a unique historical atrocity demanding serious engagement into a rhetorical weapon for silencing immigration enforcement. When every policy disagreement becomes Munich 1938, when every border control measure evokes Kristallnacht, the actual lessons of history are obliterated beneath a tsunami of bad-faith analogies.

What makes this particularly insidious is the selectivity of historical invocation. While Western commentators obsessively compare every conservative policy to 1930s fascism, actual authoritarian trends receive far less scrutiny. Erdoğan’s Turkey operates as a right-wing dictatorship, yet receives minimal attention from institutions supposedly vigilant against right-wing extremism. Surveys consistently document that anti-Semitic views among certain immigrant communities run three to four times higher than general populations—over 40 per cent agreeing that “Holocaust victims are exaggerated”—yet this receives no substantive treatment in reports supposedly concerned with combating anti-Semitism.

The methodological absurdity

The internal contradictions reveal the game. Western progressive institutions simultaneously champion strict gender ideology while celebrating mass immigration from cultures that overwhelmingly reject these very theories. If heteronormative family structures are “fascist resonance chambers,” what does that make communities where such structures are nearly universal?

This cognitive dissonance exposes the actual objective: Not serious analysis of extremism, but the moral delegitimisation of political opposition. When substantial majorities believe immigrants should adapt to local norms, declaring this position racist renders vast swaths of the population beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. When patriotism itself becomes classified as proto-fascist, you’ve constructed a framework where democratic will is inherently suspect.

The definitional crisis: What fascism actually means

Here lies the fundamental intellectual fraud: Fascism has become whatever progressives currently dislike. This definitional collapse serves political purposes but obliterates historical understanding. Fascism, properly understood, represents a specific historical phenomenon with identifiable characteristics. Mussolini’s formulation remains instructive: ” All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Fascism is totalising state control over civil society, the subordination of individual liberty to collective purpose, the fusion of corporate and state power.

By this standard—the only historically serious standard—contemporary accusations collapse into incoherence. Argentina’s Javier Milei dismantles state bureaucracy and champions radical economic freedom. Fascist? Donald Trump, whatever his rhetorical excesses, advocates reducing federal power and regulatory burden. Fascist? The cognitive dissonance becomes deafening.

Meanwhile, genuinely authoritarian tendencies receive minimal scrutiny. Which political tendency demands expanded state surveillance? Increased control over digital communication? Messenger app monitoring? Administrative exclusion of democratically elected parties from governance? The prosecution of political opponents through creative legal theories? The answer implicates precisely those institutions most vocally warning about fascism.

Too many Western institutions exemplify this inversion. Organisations supposedly dedicated to historical precision instead participate in definitional debasement. Rather than insisting on careful, rigorous application of terms like “fascist” and “Nazi”—recognising their gravity and historical specificity—they expand these categories until they encompass heteronormative families and gender-critical feminists. This isn’t scholarship; it’s the instrumentalisation of trauma for contemporary political advantage.

When everything becomes fascism, nothing is. When Anne Frank’s murder gets compared to immigration enforcement, the Holocaust loses its historical specificity. When traditional families are “resonance chambers” for extremism, the term extremism loses all meaning. This conceptual inflation doesn’t protect against authoritarianism—it enables it by rendering populations unable to identify actual threats beneath the noise of false alarms.

The authoritarian inversion

The cruelest irony: Institutions warning most shrilly about fascism employ the most recognisably authoritarian methods. In France, Marine Le Pen’s candidates face systematic legal harassment designed to exclude them from ballots. In Britain, jury trials are curtailed when the state fears popular verdicts might contradict official narratives. In the European Parliament, the EPP threatens members with committee expulsions for voting against von der Leyen. In Germany, discussions proceed about preventing the AfD from participating in constitutional court appointments even if they enter government.

These represent actual restrictions on democratic processes, actual expansions of state power to override popular will, actual subordination of legal principles to political expediency. Yet they’re justified as necessary measures against the “fascist threat”—the very threat manufactured through definitional expansion to encompass half the electorate.

History is being weaponised not to prevent authoritarianism, but to enable it. The past becomes a cudgel wielded against populations whose only crime is preferring policies their elites oppose. When democratic will is systematically reframed as incipient fascism, democracy itself becomes the target. When institutions abandon historical rigour for political activism, they betray both their mission and the memory of those they claim to honour.

Serious engagement with fascism demands definitional clarity. It requires distinguishing between authoritarianism (which can emerge from any ideological direction) and fascism specifically. It necessitates acknowledging that the greatest contemporary threats to liberal democracy come not from powerless opposition parties but from entrenched institutions wielding state power to suppress dissent.

Until Western institutions recover this clarity—until they recognize that six million murdered Jews deserve better than instrumentalisation in partisan debates, that Anne Frank’s memory should not be cheapened through absurd contemporary analogies, that fascism means something specific rather than “policies progressives dislike”—they will continue dishonouring both history’s victims and democracy’s principles.