Growing up in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, I was mesmerized by a nationalistic TV series called Otpisani in which partizani (guerilla partisan fighters) Tihi and Prle fought to end fascist tyranny in their country. World War II had ended some 30 years earlier, and Europe was still stifling the remnants of the old Third Reich amid a Cold War that seemed—at least then—likely to drag on. “Smrt Fascizma, Sloboda Narod” was the TV serial’s mantra: “Death to fascism, liberty for the people.” 

But fascism, and the politics of the far-right, never truly went out of fashion. Fifty years later, a wave of anti-immigration zeal is sweeping through Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Fascism doesn’t announce itself as it may have done thirty years ago—with fanfare, street protests, or by burning down housing units allocated to immigrants in Europe. It has adapted, embracing democratic institutions and the right to assembly and free speech. It has moved out of the shadows, replacing whispers and beer hall vitriol with composed, media-savvy speeches in public spaces. It has replaced the regalia of order and concentration camps with Armani suits, polished shoes, and warm smiles as it asks for your vote.

A century after the then-nascent Nazis made full use of free elections, fascism is once again trying to woo the voting public through smart advertising, innocuous Instagram pages promoting nationalism and masculinity, and free trade slogans.

In 2020, the right-wing populist Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) used an aggressive anti-immigrant campaign to win votes. “No way. You will not make Austria Home”, was used to promote tighter border measures to ensure that refugees don’t stream into Austria from neighboring countries. The party, established by a former Nazi SS officer in 1956, boasts itself as a defender of Austrian national identity. In September 2024, the FPO won a general election but was shut out of a ruling coalition formed by the Conservatives (OVP) and the Center-Left (SPO). Since then, its popularity has surged to unprecedented levels. 

Across the border, in Hungary, former liberal politician Viktor Orban rose to power by campaigning on an anti-immigrant, Hungarians-first platform. Part of his campaign focused on the fears that Hungarians would eventually be ‘replaced’ by other races—chiefly, immigrant Muslims. One popular campaign slogan that gained traction during his 16-year-rule was “We want Hungarian Children”, aiming to encourage white Hungarian families to have more children.

European and global populist movements look to Orban’s ultra-conservative anti-LGBTQ policies for inspiration. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly lauded Orban as a fierce defender of European identity and vanguard against immigration. Orban, whom the European press have labeled as Trump’s best friend in Europe, has championed the American President’s criticism of EU liberal policies. On February 5, 2026 Trump yet again endorsed Orban in Hungary’s upcoming April election.

The alarming power these populist politicians hold over the general public has been growing steadily. In its Resolution 2128, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly warned of a rising number of incidents involving “physical violence, labour exploitation, trafficking, sexual harassment and abuse, discrimination and hate speech”.

In addition to decrying the lack of momentum to combat this violence, the resolution also shed light on the abuse and human rights violations of women and children migrants in detention centers and holding facilities. It warned that “anti-migrant rhetoric has been widely used by populist parties and mass media, provoking stigmatisation, intolerance and xenophobia”.

It’s a simple formula: during times of economic hardship, parties with anti-immigrant foundations become more popular. An Associated Press study of European anti-immigrant rhetoric found that parties who call for extremist measures—such as mass deportations of immigrants—are the ones likely to top opinion polls. It names Reform UK and Germany’s AfD as examples of populist political movements that have recently surged in the polls.

That is why we dedicated this issue to highlight the dangers in the rise of the right; a rise (or reich) which has the potential to bring about severe consequences, both in terms of human rights and international policy. 

In her article on fascist imagery, distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York Dagmar Herzog links anti-Jewish pornography from the Third Reich with contemporary political imagery used to sexually fearmonger Germans into xenophobic voting at the ballot box.

“The fundamental themes of AfD messaging follow from this Nazi paradigm: vehement contempt for the ideals of human equality and solidarity and viciousness toward any and all groups identified as vulnerable; a profusion of racialized scapegoats for complicated economic and social dynamics; and a persistent concern with appealing to narcissistic longings for national and personal greatness,” Herzog writes. “Everything is about the promise of feeling superior. Even the loopily ludicrous guidance for boosting young white males’ self-esteem fits this overall picture.”

Narrative building is key to proponents of fascism and defenders of democracy, as writer and researcher Mariam Mohsen explores in her review of Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel American War. As state violence against civilians increases in the United States, Mohsen draws our attention to the dire warning El Akkad expresses in his dystopian prediction of a future America ravaged by civil war and climate change. 

“Reading American War today feels like peering into a funhouse mirror of our present. The book was meant as speculation, but in 2026 it reads more worryingly like prophecy and political parable. El Akkad himself has described the novel as ‘an account of a future US ravaged by war and climate disaster’, born of his years covering America’s wars abroad as a journalist. Now those wars’ echoes are at all Americans’ doorstep. The scenes on American streets—armed troops in Los Angeles, protesters clashing with federal forces in Minneapolis—uncannily resemble the novel’s descriptions of a nation at war with itself,” she writes.

But how did the pillars of equality, human rights, and rights of man (and woman) crumble so quickly under the brown boot of fascism? 

Distinguished Canadian scholar Henry Giroux points to an education system infiltrated by fascist government forces who have systematically dismantled its liberal and inclusive components from within.

Giroux writes: “To reclaim education as a public good is, therefore, to reclaim the means through which consciousness becomes political, and politics becomes collective. The question before us is not merely whether education matters, but whether it can still awaken a public imagination capable of turning thought into resistance, and resistance into mass action. This politics of disinformation does not circulate in a vacuum. It is amplified, legitimized, and normalized by a powerful media ecosystem that routinely privileges propaganda over truth.”

As education falters in the face of fascist government, right-wing sentiments have also rediscovered support in sports, especially within European football clubs. Some Ultras, hyper-dedicated football fans, are using the group mentality of their shared love of football to build bases of fascist supporters. Stadiums are increasingly witnessing racist chants and far-right symbols from their most impassioned fans.The beautiful game, it seems, is turning ugly, as former AUC journalism professor Gabriele Cosentino warns. 

Cosentino sounds the alarm about Europe’s football stadiums “becoming grounds—in Italy and elsewhere in Europe—where young people are groomed and recruited to join far right organizations and militias”. Taking advantage of the excitement and passion that the youth has for their favourite teams, extremists with neo-fascist and neo-nazi agendas can exploit vulnerable people and entice them to join their ranks, he writes.

The essays in this issue aim to explain why fascism has reemerged with such force and lay a path for how to resist it. As Tihi and Prle fought to end tyranny, so too must we. Smrt Fascizma.

Cairo Review Managing Editor,

Firas Al-Atraqchi

December 26, 2018 was supposed to be an exciting day for Italian football fans: it was the first time matches of the top national league, Serie A, were scheduled during the Christmas holidays, to add some sports fun to the festive season. The big match of the day was Inter Milan vs Napoli, a classic face-off between two of the most prominent teams in Italy. The post-match TV coverage, however, did not dwell on scored goals or athletic feats, but rather on the violent riots among Inter and Napoli fans that left one man dead. 

During the riots, Daniele Belardinelli, a supporter of the Italian team Varese, was mowed down by an SUV driven by a Napoli fan. Belardinelli was an ultrà, a slang term used to identify hardcore football fans, in Italy and across Europe. Ultras are a fixture of Italian football, well known for expressing their diehard fandom through colorful, sometimes scurrilous chants and highly choreographic banners. Unfortunately, they are also notorious for their racist and violent behavior and, increasingly, engagement in political extremism and illegal activities. 

While some ultras groups subscribe to progressive or leftist ideology, the great majority lean to the far-right. Often, groups supporting different teams form bonds along ideological lines. Ultras of Varese and Inter are both far-right oriented and have a long history of political alignment and mutual support. Belardinelli had joined fans of Inter Milan in an ambush against a busload of Napoli fans. Despite the attack’s careful planning—which managed to defy the police intervention—he was caught off guard by the car that rammed into the crowd of Inter fans and took his life.

The Growing Presence of Fascism in Football Fans

This was not the first time that an ultra had died in clashes among rival supporters, a history of violence dating back to the late 1970s that has left a trail of victims (23 deaths over the last four decades). But the death of Belardinelli—who was a key member of a neo-nazi group of Varese supporters called Blood and Honor—put a spotlight on the recent infiltration of neo-fascist and neo-nazi groups among Italian football fans, as well as on their networks of affiliates across Italy and Europe. 

The fans of Inter and Varese—with further support of another group of extremists hailing from Nice, France—had launched the attack against the Napolitaneans not simply because of a football rivalry, but to advance their racist and far-right political agenda. Napoli are a team from Southern Italy, traditionally a target of racist attacks by northern Italian ultras, and one of their star players at the time was  Kalidou Koulibaly, a Senegalese defender who had often been at the receiving end of racist taunts and insults for his skin color by ultras groups across Italy. 

Blood and Honor are part of a galaxy of neo-nazi groups active in northern Italy, originally emanating from the UK and with a strong presence in Germany. While small in number, they have cast an outsized shadow among Varese fans for years. Blood and Honor—a name that is an explicit reference to a motto used by the infamous paramilitary group SS in Nazi Germany—had waged a campaign against the team signing players of color, vandalized the team stadium, engaged in criminal activities, and clashed with the police on various occasions. 

As extreme as they might appear, the far-right ultras from Varese are not an exception. Veneto Fronte Skinheads, the largest and best organized xenophobic and anti-semitic group in Italy, has been part of the ultras group of Verona Football Club since the late 1980s. When Verona acquired its first player of African descent in the mid 1990s , far-right ultras staged a protest donning Ku Klux Klan style attire while holding a dark-skinned puppet hanging from a noose. Members of the Veneto Fronte Skinheads have also staged attacks and protests against charity or progressive organizations in Verona assisting migrants and refugees.

Fans of the Lazio team—the second most popular team in Rome—are also notorious for their fascist sympathies and have strong ties with the far-right organization Forza Nuova. In 2013 and 2017, Lazio fans distributed stickers and posters throughout Rome carrying a doctored image of the well-known known Holocaust victim and writer Anne Frank, pictured wearing a jersey of AS Roma, Lazio’s main rival. The image was meant to taunt Roma fans through an obvious anti-semitic message. Anti-semitic tropes are part and parcel of Lazio ultras’ lore, many of whom never renounced their allegiance to the legacy of Italian fascism and its involvement with the Holocaust during World War II. On a recent occasion in 2024, Lazio supporters in Germany sang fascist songs at the Hofbrauhaus am Platzl, the pub where Adolf Hitler announced the founding of the Nazi Party.

While other teams—including major ones such as Inter, Juventus and AC Milan—have more moderate right-wing supporters than Verona or Lazio, far-right politics have made significant inroads into their fan groups in the past decades. Inter fans have increasingly drifted towards more radical positions, while also interacting with powerful organized crime cartels, such as Ndrangheta from the Calabria region. As a result, most ultras in Italy have displayed openly racist or bigoted behavior during football matches since the early 2000s: booing or mocking players of African descent, displaying anti-semitic and Islamophobic messages, expressing transphobic or anti-LGBTQ messages, or even parading symbols reminiscent of the Nazi or Fascist era, such as the Swastika or the Celtic Cross.  

How Far-Right Politics Found a Foothold in Italy (Again)

Until a decade ago, the impact and influence of far right ultras on the broader Italian culture and politics was limited. Openly racist comments or displaying controversial symbols such as the fascist salute were generally frowned upon and in some cases even sanctioned or prosecuted. Paolo Di Canio—a Lazio player unapologetic about his fascist sympathies—received strong backlash for his frequent use of the fascist salute and his endorsement of far right politics during his professional career in the early 2000s, both in Italy and in England. 

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the Italian political establishment and public opinion firmly rejected the radical messaging and agenda of far-right movements, parties, and personalities, who were de-facto ostracized. The trauma brought on by two decades of totalitarian fascist rule and by War World II left deep scars in the collective psyche of the country, and laws were enacted to prevent the reestablishment of fascist parties and the display of fascist symbols. 

However, after the 1992 Tangentopoli corruption scandal and the following collapse of the party system that ruled post-war Italy, far-right and neo-fascist parties exploited the political vacuum to reenter the political sphere. Furthermore, in Italy as in other countries in Europe, unexpected cultural shifts triggered by globalization at the turn of the millennium brought on a return of political and cultural conservatism and nationalism, creating a hospitable climate for the resurfacing of far-right politics. Nostalgic or positive views on the fascist era—once considered taboo—gradually crept back into the public sphere and were met with less backlash, or even openly espoused.  

As a result, since the beginning of the 21st century, far-right politicians and movements have made significant gains in local and national elections. This trend has become especially visible since the late 2010s, culminating with the appointment of Giorgia Meloni as Prime Minister in 2022, member of the far right party Fratelli d’Italia (a national-conservative and right-wing populist party). Meloni, who in her youth belonged to neo-fascist and far-right organizations, has never completely condemned fascism.

Ultras groups have also become involved in far-right politics. Activists belonging to Inter Milan ultras have campaigned for Fratelli d’Italia politician Carlo Fidanza—recently involved in a corruption scandal—in the 2019 European elections. Following the mainstreaming of previously fringe political ideas in Italian society, far-right ultras have seen their influence increase, expanding their power in the organization of club fan bases and engaging in a plurality of business activities adjacent to football matches, such as the illegal or unregulated sale of tickets, fast food, or merchandise outside of the stadium.

The Politicization of Sport in Italy

Italy is not completely unprepared for an overlap between politics and football. Such an interpenetration of the two spheres has already happened, and has taken many forms. For instance, the use of football to advance a far-right political agenda in the country can actually be traced back to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who turned the 1934 World Cup into a propaganda tool to promote his National Fascist Party. In this sense, far-right politics and football in Italy go a long way back.  The final match of the 1934 World Cup—won by Italy—was played in a stadium in Rome dedicated to the National Fascist Party.

More recently, the late Silvio Berlusconi was for many years both the Italian prime minister and the president of AC Milan, one of Italy’s most successful football clubs. Berlusconi was a football and media tycoon-cum-politician that brought many significant innovations to Italian politics. He was able to create an unprecedented synergy among his media, football, and political enterprises, turning his successful persona into a broader ‘brand’ that allowed his football fans to merge with his voters, and vice versa. The very name of his political party, Forza Italia, was inspired by chants by fans of the Italian national football team. 

While a center-right conservative, Berlusconi was a shrewd politician who was responsible for the re-legitimization of far-right parties. On multiple occasions, he created political coalitions with far-right parties such as Alleanza Nazionale, Lega Nord and Fratelli d’Italia, gradually allowing them to gain more national exposure and legitimacy. Meanwhile, Berlusconi actively contributed to the politicization of football by frequently using expressions and metaphors from the sport (famously, his political debut in 1994 was framed as an ‘entrance into the football arena’), and boasting about his AC Milan’s victories during political debates.

While the Berlusconi era of ‘football politics’ effectively ended in 2013 with the electoral defeat of his party and the later sale of AC Milan club, his broader legacy can still be felt in Italy. His anti-socialist views, patriarchal attitude, and nationalist outlook have left an imprint on Italian society and culture, which over the past decade has drifted to the right. 

The growing clout of far-right fans in the broader community of football lovers in Italy has also begun to creep into the supporters of the Italian national team. Aside from its use as a tool for propaganda in the fascist era, the national team has traditionally been associated with a very mainstream and moderate type of football fandom. Matches of the national team—Azzurri, meaning ‘the blue ones’, from the color of the jersey—were occasions for the whole country to join together and overcome social or political fissures. The World Cup victory in 1982 is still remembered as a joyous moment of celebration that helped the country heal from the political troubles and ideological divisions of the 1970s. 

Recently, however, a group of supporters of the national team calling itself Ultras Italia has made headlines for displaying the fascist salute, donning coordinated black shirts—reminiscent of the black shirts worn by armed militias during the fascist era—and criticizing players of mixed African-Italian heritage. Hailing primarily from the South of Italy and well-connected with groups of supporters residing abroad, the rising profile of Ultras Italia shows that a far-right leaning is not just a feature of ultras of individual clubs, but has also reached the fan base of the national team.

Fascism Grows in Football Across Europe

While far-right politics have been a trait of the football fandom in Italy for several decades, it is only recently that the radical agenda and discourse of ultras has found a more receptive public opinion and political leaders who represent and amplify their views and rhetoric to a wider audience. A similar alignment between far-right football fans and politicians can be also seen in the UK, another country with a long and troubled history of football hooliganism. 

A case in point is Reform UK, the far-right party expected to be the main challenger to the incumbent Labour Party at the next general election. Led by controversial politician Nigel Farage—a fervent supporter of Donald Trump and a key figure behind the Brexit referendum—Reform UK has gained traction because of its strong anti-immigration rhetoric. As Reform UK has risen in the polls, British flags carrying the phrase ‘Stop the Boats’ (referencing a UK government policy to decrease boat crossings by asylum seekers) have started to appear at matches of the England national team, while fans distributed stickers bearing the motto “On the charge with Nigel Farage”. 

The last and most troublesome aspect of the overlap between football fans and far right extremists is that football stands are becoming grounds—in Italy and elsewhere in Europe—where young people are groomed and recruited to join far right organizations and militias. Taking advantage of the excitement and passion that the youth has for their favourite teams, extremists with neo-fascist and neo-nazi agendas can exploit vulnerable people and entice them to join their ranks. 

By dangerously embracing far-right politics, football fans are allowing into the arena racism, bigotry, and even violence, turning the beautiful game into an ugly spectacle. If this trend continues, it will be a loss for everyone who loves football and a threat for society at large.

A frigid morning on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. Sirens wail as a crowd scatters through plumes of tear gas. Minutes earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and father, lay dying—shot by a federal agent during what should have been a peaceful protest. His killing, the second of a civilian by agents in January 2026, ignites fury. Protesters hurl chants and snowballs; riot police answer with rubber bullets.

Watching the shaky livestream on my phone, I feel a chilling déjà vu. I’ve seen this before, I think, only last time it was fiction. Last time, it was in the pages of Egyptian-Canadian Omar El Akkad’s American War.     

The Thin Line Between Novel and News

This haunting novel, published in 2017 and nominated for several awards, envisioned a future United States shattered by its own second civil war, a war that feels less unthinkable with each night like this. American War opens late in the 21st century, after rising seas have swallowed Florida and droughts have ravaged the heartland. In 2074, the Southern states defy a federal ban on fossil fuels and secede, igniting a brutal conflict between North and South.

El Akkad introduces us to Sarat Chestnut, a young girl from Louisiana, whose family is displaced by the war’s climate disasters and sent to Camp Patience, a sprawling refugee camp on the banks of the Mississippi. In one striking scene, Sarat’s family arrives at Camp Patience by boat, joining thousands of fellow Americans living under tents and tarps, a fate eerily reminiscent of real Red Cross shelters after the real world’s own recent hurricanes and wildfires.

The novel’s war burns for over 20 years, breeding atrocities on American soil that evoke the worst of Iraq, Syria, or Gaza. By the end, Sarat, once an innocent child, has been scarred by loss and radicalized into delivering a final act of vengeance: unleashing a deadly plague that forever poisons the North.

Reading American War today feels like peering into a funhouse mirror of our present. The book was meant as speculation, but in 2026 it reads more worryingly like prophecy and political parable. El Akkad himself has described the novel as “an account of a future US ravaged by war and climate disaster”, born of his years covering America’s wars abroad as a journalist.

Now those wars’ echoes are at all Americans’ doorstep. The scenes on American streets—armed troops in Los Angeles, protesters clashing with federal forces in Minneapolis—uncannily resemble the novel’s descriptions of a nation at war with itself.

In June 2025, Los Angeles was rocked by unrest after militarized ICE raids led President Trump to deploy 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines into the city’s streets. Reuters reported it as the fiercest domestic crackdown of Trump’s term, “a focal point in a national debate over…the use of federal force in domestic affairs”.

Americans witnessed soldiers in full combat gear patrolling Sunset Boulevard and Blackhawk helicopters thundering over city blocks, images that could be outtakes from American War’s battle of Birmingham.

And just this month, Minneapolis’s grief and anger over two fatal shootings by immigration agents has prompted what former President Bill Clinton described as “horrible scenes” of conflict and a crisis of legitimacy. Clinton warned that “at every turn, the people in charge have lied to us…pushed increasingly aggressive and antagonistic tactics”—eroding 250 years of democratic norms. The American experiment, Clinton cautioned, is at a crossroads: “If we give our freedoms away after 250 years, we might never get them back”.

It’s not just politicians sounding the alarm. Scholars see the cracks in democracy turning into chasms. Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego who has studied civil wars worldwide, notes that by every measurable risk factor “the U.S. has them all”. 

According to Walter, we have become what experts call an “anocracy”, a weakened democracy teetering in the unstable zone where internal conflict erupts. Walter points to a deadly convergence of conditions: partisan hatred along identity lines, a flood of guns, and leaders who encourage violence.

Indeed, rather than tamping down violence, many American elites are fanning it. When a public official was assassinated in Minnesota last year, extremist media hailed her as a martyr of a “coming war”, and far-right commentators openly use “war” framing to mobilize supporters.

Walter’s conclusion is bleak: the United States is likely entering “a 10-20 year period of sustained instability and violence”, absent a dramatic change of course.

In American War, Sarat’s radicalization begins with her losing faith in the nation, watching her father die in a suicide bombing and her camp get massacred by Northern drones. How many real Americans are likewise losing faith now, seduced by extremist ideologies after seeing government violence or dysfunction?

The novel’s great warning is that when the social contract shatters, ordinary people can be driven to unthinkable revenge. Sarat was not born a killer; America’s war made her one. The current trajectory, many fear, could breed real Sarat Chestsnuts in the years ahead.

The Climate Siege

While political violence pulls America apart, American War also shines a light on another slow-burning catalyst of conflict: climate change and mass displacement. The novel’s civil war is triggered by a climate policy (fossil fuel prohibition) and intensified by ecological catastrophe.

Its refugees in Camp Patience recall today’s climate migrants, except today’s are no longer confined to distant islands or what they call the Global South. They are present in Great America, ominous in the real world.

In 2025, the U.S. was battered by record disasters: wildfires raged even in winter, and by July nearly half a million people worldwide had already been forced from their homes by wildfires, the highest mid-year total in decades. Astonishingly, Los Angeles County saw 260,000 wildfire displacements in January alone, almost as many internal evacuees as the entire country saw in all of 2024.

Over the summer, a historic flash flood in Central Texas killed at least 135 people when the Guadalupe River rose 31 feet in just 90 minutes. Thousands of Texans fled to emergency shelters on higher ground, a scene not unlike the drowned Gulf Coast that Sarat’s family escapes.

Koko Warner, a United Nations climate migration expert, has warned that such “climate shocks” are no longer sporadic anomalies but a trend now “influencing…security and stability” worldwide.      

These are essentially the prequels to American War’s nightmare: resource depletion and displaced populations setting the stage for conflict. The novel’s haunting tableau of the Mississippi burning and camps overflowing feels like a foretaste of what a hotter, harsher world could bring if we don’t act.

Already, phrases like ‘America’s climate refugees’ have entered our lexicon as coastal towns relocate inland and wildfire survivors wonder if they can ever return home.

Perhaps the most jarring inversion in American War is its portrayal of the United States not as a global policeman, but as a ravaged land on the receiving end of foreign intervention. In the book, the rest of the world has moved on, a new superpower called the Bouazizi Empire (born from the Arab Spring’s embers) and a rising China broker peace and send aid to the shattered United States.

The novel pointedly imagines foreign drones bombing Georgia and international peacekeepers herding Americans in camps, a role reversal aimed at Western readers who are used to seeing such tragedies play out in other countries. It forces the question: What if we became the next Gaza, the next Syria?

The Imperial Boomerang

As Omar El Akkad said in a recent interview, he grew up in the Arab world watching Western wars and always thought “I’m sitting on the side that’s launching the bombs”, never imagining that side could be us. His faith in the “free world” was deeply shaken by the 2023–25 war in Gaza, when the United States unflinchingly backed Israel’s devastating bombardment.

American War flips that script: an America reduced to ruins, reliant on others’ mercy. It’s a provocation, and a reminder of how quickly empires fall.

Consider the United States’ current foreign policy choices. In Gaza, the United States is still underwriting Israel’s siege in the name of security, even as children freeze to death in winter rubble for lack of aid. In Davos in January, President Trump unveiled a glitzy “New Gaza” redevelopment plan, calling the war-torn enclave “great real estate”, all while Gaza’s actual residents shiver in tents waiting for food and medicine.

The disconnect is staggering. Amr Adly, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, blasted Trump’s approach to Gaza as “shocking and extremely dangerous”. When Trump floated the idea last year of relocating Gaza’s entire population to Egypt or Jordan, Dr. Adly warned it would “destabilize the region as a whole”, effectively compromising Egypt’s security and echoing the Nakba, the mass displacement Palestinians suffered in 1948.

To many in the Middle East, America greenlighting what they see as ethnic cleansing in Gaza confirms the worst hypocrisies of an empire that preaches human rights but picks and chooses when they apply. El Akkad captures this global revulsion. Reflecting on Gaza, he wrote that the West’s moral authority has crumbled, and “the bombardment of Gaza…will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the west, the rules-based order, …and said: I want nothing to do with this.”

And then there’s Venezuela—another theater where American power is on display, for better or worse.Amid the 2025 holiday rush, the respectable U.S government carried out a stunning operation: the capture and removal of Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro, who is now sitting in a U.S. jail awaiting trial.

After years of economic sanctions strangling Venezuela, the Trump administration suddenly shifted tactics. By early 2026 it began “rolling back” oil sanctions on Venezuela, not out of mercy, but to exploit Venezuela’s oil as we squeeze Russia. Leaked plans show U.S. officials courting oil companies to invest in Venezuela’s oilfields now that Maduro is gone.

It is a classic oil-fueled regime change play, straight from the 20th-century imperial playbook. In fact, Washington insiders are openly discussing Venezuela in terms of “post-regime transition.” Yet even on U.S bases, the blowback is brewing: Congress, including members of Trump’s own party, is so uneasy with his adventurism that they’ve moved to limit his military authority in Venezuela. Five Republican senators joined Democrats to demand a future vote to limit the President’s powers regarding the conflict with Venezuela, wary of sliding into another open-ended conflict.

The irony is rich: as the United States projects force abroad, its own Union is fraying. The more the administration flexes the empire’s muscle in places like Gaza and Caracas, the more it resembles the hubris of ancient Rome, arrogant, overextended, and blind to the rot from within, an allegory well-illustrated in American War.

One of El Akkad’s most poignant subplots is the global aid shift: in the late stages of the Second American Civil War, a Chinese ship named Běijīng anchors in Chesapeake Bay, delivering relief supplies to destitute Americans while Washington lies in ruins.

“In the real world, one wonders: if our political violence and climate disasters continue on current trend, how long before we are appealing to the U.N. for humanitarian aid or peacekeepers on our soil?”, an American from Minneapolis told the Cairo Review.          

The Next Chapter

When one reads Sarat’s journey, from a child who only wanted to live by a quiet river, to an extremist molded by pain, one can’t help but think of all the young lives today being shaped by violence and division: the child in Gaza who has lost her entire family, the teenager in Ohio falling down an online hate rabbit-hole, the migrant kid in Texas staring through barbed wire in a detention camp.

Our current trajectory is not destiny; it’s a call to action. Maya Wiley, a U.S. civil rights leader, said it best during last year’s turmoil: “Our democracy is under siege from coordinated attacks…We must act with urgency, clarity, and unity to resist these threats and uphold the Constitution.”

American War reminds us that radicalization is born from trauma and despair. It is a warning that only America can help itself. The alternative is concerning: if injustice, climate chaos, and democratic decay are allowed to fester, the great American ideal could decay creating a generation of Sarat Chestnuts, with nothing left to lose.

The war in Gaza speaks volumes about the future of warfare—privatized by mercenaries, automated by the large-scale deployment of AI-enabled weaponry, mediated by the live transmission of atrocities, and totally urbanized as they erase life in city centres. Although the human losses in Gaza are staggering—killing 70 thousand people, amounting to outright ‘genocide’—the war has also resulted in large-scale ‘urbicide’ through the annihilation of Gaza’s city spaces. Yet, this aspect of war will not end as the dust of destruction settles; it may resume with a new peace plan that opens Gaza to global capital to reshape its future, as envisioned by Trump.    

Urbanized Warfare and Urbicide 

Modern military operations are no longer conducted in “the middle of nowhere” but in “the middle of everywhere”, as strategist and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says about the terrain densely populated by civilian buildings, infrastructure, roads, streets, historical buildings, and networks of wires and concrete. By 2050, it is predicted that about 68% of the world’s population will live in highly urbanized, littoral, connected, and globalized cities; so too will be their warfare.

MOUTs (Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain)—whether insurgency, counterinsurgency, combatting organized crime, or inter-state conflicts—will likely take place in streets and sub-terrains. This type of fighting results in the massive destruction of physical space, producing “feral cities” where minimum conditions of safety and security are absent. Most of this destruction in MOUTs occurs due to the extensive use of the concrete environment for tactical and operational purposes. Consider the grisly scenes of the battles in Mogadishu (1993), Grozny (199-2000), Fallujah (2004), Aleppo (2012-2016), Mosul (2016-2017), Raqqa (2017),  Marawi (2017), Mariupol (2022), Khartoum (2023-present), and others to come.

While it is often controversial to determine if the destruction of these urban centres was intentional or merely collateral damage on a large scale, in Gaza, the destruction of urban space has been deliberate and for the strategic purpose of liquidating the Strip as a living space. For Israeli military planners and decision-makers, it is a component of strategy not only to annihilate Hamas and the Palestinian resistance but to drain the ‘demographic swamp’ that produces it. It is a “final solution” akin to genocide.

This specific form of destruction is referred to as urbicide. Resurfacing in strategic discourse during the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian War, the term refers to the deliberate, planned ‘killing’ of a city. Like genocide, urbicide entails destroying the national character of the oppressed group to impose that of the oppressor. It targets buildings not merely as physical structures, but as the constitutive elements of urbanity itself. The logic here is the destruction of urbanity for its own sake—erasing the very possibilities of the place. Consequently, urbicide is a fundamentally political act—it forecloses the potential for self-governance and development in targeted cities, which constitutes the core logic of Israel’s destruction of Palestine.

Palestine as an Urbicidal Lab 

The most recent destruction of Gaza is merely a harsh culmination of the consistent urbicide Israel has practiced across the Occupied Territories for the last few decades. This is evident in the erasure of the thriving indigenous Palestinian urbanity in the historical coastal centres of Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre, and in Jerusalem during the Nakba (1948) and in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It is intrinsic to Zionism as a settler-colonial project.

In response, Forensic architecture is a practical approach developed in Palestine to examine whether Israel’s destruction in the Occupied Territories is intentional. Led by scholars like British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, it uses spatial data and the study of buildings to investigate acts of state violence and human rights abuses. In the 2023 edition of his book Hollow Land, Weizman discusses how architecture and city planning shape political control and dominance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He examines how settlements and roads are strategically placed to restrict movement and divide Palestinian land. He also claims that the repeated destruction and reconstruction of Gaza’s infrastructure—such as water, power, and hospitals—is a deliberate form of urbicide, aimed at keeping the area unstable and hindering long-term development and self-rule.

Stephen Graham, professor of cities and society at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, and other scholars suggest that Israel’s military and political leaders view Palestinian urban development as a security risk, which leads them to intentionally dismantle these environments. Graham’s analysis of Israeli practices during the Second Intifada (2000-2005), especially the destruction of homes in Jenin in 2002, concludes that such actions are part of a systematic “de-territorialization” strategy. This approach targets both the land and civilians, aiming to erase Palestinian spaces and reinforce Israeli control. This paradigm of urbicide and de-territorialization in Palestine makes it a laboratory to develop oppressive policies for use around the world that become more violent and chaotic as elites seek greater control over unruly urban centres ridden by violence, crime, and poverty.

The Unique Urbanism of Gaza 

Prior to the war, Gaza stood out as one of the most highly urbanized areas in the region. The densely populated strip formed a continuous urban environment, with official figures indicating that about 87% of its land was classified as urban. Yet, ongoing issues like limited arable land and the Israeli blockade meant that clear boundaries between ‘rural,’ ‘urban’, and ‘camp’ areas did not really exist.

Gaza also exhibits a distinctive and highly urbanized socio-spatial composition. The urban density in Gaza surpasses that of many major global centres, yet the region has access to only limited infrastructure. Resource and infrastructure stress has intensified due to a 3% annual population growth rate per annum. Prior to the conflict, density—not simply the proportion of urban residents—was the most significant characteristic of Gaza, with an average population density of approximately 6,000 persons per square kilometre. In certain areas, particularly within refugee camps, this density increased substantially, ranging from 26,000 to 50,000 persons per square kilometre.   

Gaza’s urban landscape is defined not just by its density, but by a kind of ‘enforced urbanization’ with no way in or out. This pattern developed after the Nakba of 1948, when the Strip was shaped along ceasefire lines to shelter families displaced from regions like the Negev and cities such as Isdud, Acre, and Haifa. Within Gaza, areas labeled as “refugee camps”—including Jabalia, Al-Shati, and Nuseirat—have, over the past 75 years, transformed from tent encampments into concrete shantytowns and then into crowded, multi-story urban neighbourhoods. While these places are legally recognized by the UN as camps, their physical structure has evolved, blending with the surrounding city and turning into extremely dense slums. This compelled, concentrated growth has effectively made the entire territory resemble a vast ‘mega-city’ of confinement, leaving almost no open land for organic expansion.

Unmaking Urbanity of Gaza 

Whereas it is problematic to prove the crucial component of ‘intent’ in genocide under the UN convention, establishing a case for urbicide offers more accessible paths under international humanitarian law. In Gaza, it is straightforward to prove the deliberate erasure of living space through piles of satellite imagery, videos captured and proudly streamed by IDF troopers, surveillance cameras, and other verified sources. The piling evidence for urbicide can be found in ‘domicide’, a derivative of urbicide referring to the deliberate destruction of the domestic sphere and the removal of private houses as secure spaces. Legally, these acts align with war crimes defined under Article 8 of the Rome Statute, particularly the deliberate targeting of civilian objects and cultural monuments, where the scale of physical scale destruction provides primary evidence of a policy to render the territory uninhabitable.    

By the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, assessments conducted by the United Nations and satellite imagery showed that more than 80% of Gaza’s buildings sustained damage or were destroyed. This figure encompasses approximately 320,000 housing units; this translates into over one million individuals being displaced from their permanent residences. Furthermore, the IDF was determined to flatten entire neighbourhoods along with their social networks and commercial significance. In the south, most of Rafah turned into rubble, and in the north, the Al-Rimal district—once a commercial and cultural hub of Gaza City—was flattened.

Gaza’s cultural fabric has also been decimated. More than 972 schoolteachers and administrators, as well as 95 university deans and professors, have been killed. The educational infrastructure, including schools and universities, suffered extensive damage, with entire institutions such as the Islamic University of Gaza and Al-Azhar University being leveled. This systematic targeting of academics and destruction of educational facilities has raised concerns among UN experts and human rights organizations, who refer to these actions as “scholasticide“.

Killing the city requires erasing its historical memory as well. The campaign of urbicide in Gaza has included the targeting of cultural and historical sites that once anchored the population’s identity. More than 200 buildings of cultural and historical significance have been reduced to rubble, including mosques, cemeteries, and museums. Gaza’s Omari Mosque, built in the 7th century—though its history as a house of worship traces back to the Bronze Age and the establishment of Gaza by the Sea Peoples—was severely damaged by Israeli bombardment. Once a focal point of Palestinian history and culture, its walls collapsed and its minaret was significantly damaged. Additionally, the Church of Saint Porphyrius (the third oldest church in the world) and the Central Archives of Gaza City were severely damaged or destroyed.

To ensure the uninhabitability of Gaza, targeting the health sector was a major focus during the Israeli operation. A United Nations report covering events from October 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024, notes that at least 136 attacks were carried out on 27 hospitals—of Gaza’s 36 total—as well as 12 other medical facilities. Many suffered severe damage or destruction. In addition, essential water infrastructure such as desalination plants and sewage treatment facilities was deliberately targeted. As a result, the coastal aquifer became contaminated, leading to outbreaks of waterborne diseases like Hepatitis A and Polio. This transformed the city’s water supply from a source of life into a carrier of death. Even as the ceasefire has halted the official fighting, the threat of urbicide continues in post-war plans. 

Urbicide by Other Means 

The ceasefire agreement, signed by U.S. President Donald Trump and mediators in Sharm El Sheikh (October 9) and adopted by the UN Security Council on November 17, 2025, ended hostilities—or rather, the Israeli atrocities and genocide—but it did not end the urbicide of Gaza; it gave it other means. In a broader sense, urbicide can occur through urban planning that prioritizes profit and global capital, leading to displacement, gentrification, and the destruction of affordable, diverse public spaces for the sake of real estate development and luxury consumption.

The physical, violent destruction of the living space paved the way for an economic phase of urbicide under the cloak of reconstruction sanctioned by Trump’s peace plan. It creates a tabula rasa (clean slate) for these schemes, stained only by rubble and resilient people. Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza aims to end the historical struggle over Palestine through the same neoliberal approach that seeks to bypass the historical, political, and religious complications of the conflict in favor of ‘economic peace’. 

Even during the heydays of bloodshed and destruction, Trump did not shy away from explicitly sharing “his dreams for Gaza” as a “Riviera of the Middle East” via his own social media platforms, utilizing its Mediterranean location for luxury real estate and tourism rather than conflict. Furthermore, the plan proposes the development of “high-tech megacities” along the coast, modeled after the rapid modernization seen in Gulf states like Dubai or the NEOM megaproject in Saudi Arabia.

Obviously, the plan addresses some immediate needs of the population, specifically regarding the flow of aid, the restoration of water desalination, electricity grids, and sewage plants, in addition to clearing the estimated 50 million tons of debris to enable reconstruction. Nevertheless, it shares the logic of violent urbicide by replacing the resistance-based, self-sufficient economy led by Hamas with a globally managed, high-investment model.

 Characteristically, Trump’s model for peace bets on private investments from “thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East” (alluding to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar) to fund the estimated $50–$70 billion reconstruction bill. It prioritizes private equity and real estate investment over traditional humanitarian grants. This type of planned urbicide, managed by a colonial-mandate-style “Council for Peace”, aims to erase all legacy of the conflict in Gaza by burying the densely crowded space created by decades of occupation and blockade under a space dominated by global elites, exclusivity, and the exclusion of the indigenous people of Gaza.

While the implementation of Trump’s plan remains precarious, tethered to the fragility of the ceasefire, the irreversible reality of the destruction is already established. The unprecedented scale of devastation in Gaza demonstrates that cities are no longer incidental backdrops or collateral victims of warfare; they are now intentional, strategic targets. As an architecture of violence, urbicide does not merely scar the city; it kills it as a macro-organism, erasing the history, culture, and life it sustains. Consequently, true post-conflict reconstruction cannot simply be an exercise in physical rehabilitation. It must be a resurrection of urbanity itself—restoring not just the walls, but the extinguished spirit of the place.

Ever since 2017, when the far-right Alternative für Deutschland populist party in Germany revived its own political fortunes by splashing a provocative new campaign of titillating and entertaining images across dozens of cityscapes and millions of personal computer screens, commentators have sought to explain the contradictory relationship between the party’s programmatic demands to return to ‘old-fashioned’ values and the imagery it uses to capture the popular imagination. 

An extraordinary amount of ink continues to be spilled on the presumed puzzle: officially, the party wants to restore the ‘traditional’ heteronormative family model (a salary-earning father and a childrearing-prioritizing mother with multiple children), yet its leading figure, Alice Weidel, is an out lesbian, formerly worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, has a PhD in economics, and lives in a civil partnership with a Swiss woman of Sri Lankan heritage, with whom she is raising two sons. 

Is Weidel simply “the perfect fig leaf” for a party that is otherwise given to vicious homophobia in addition to its relentless völkisch racism against migrants and refugees, especially those hailing from predominantly Muslim countries? What all the speculations about this supposed great paradox miss is that strategic contradictoriness is not an aberration for the AfD; it’s a deliberate method. 

Indeed, the contradictoriness is highly functional: it expands potential audiences, keeps opponents guessing, entertains with shrewd humor, and provides plausible deniability in case of critical rebuke. It is especially visible in the party’s sexual politics—whose main purpose is not so much to police the populace’s intimate choices, but rather to use sex to sell racism. Moreover, the sexy racism messaging, which does not shy away from borrowing Nazi iconography, has gone through a revealing evolution over time—from cute to cruel. 

Sexy Racism

And yet another showed the sensual pregnant belly of a young white woman with the tagline “New Germans? We make them ourselves”.

Two years later, the imagery shifted to something more overtly pornographic—even as it simultaneously centered the purported threat posed by migrant men to white womanhood. One poster from the 2019 state election campaign in Saxony showed a naked blonde handcuffed to a radiator while a dark silhouette of a man with a knife hovered ominously in the corner. The tagline read: “Pepper spray doesn’t always help. Good politics does. Therefore now vote AfD”. Similarly, for the European elections of 2019, the Berlin branch of the AfD filled public spaces with a repurposed copy of the nineteenth-century artwork, The Slave Market, by French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Here, a lovely and light-skinned naked woman is being aggressively manhandled by brown men in turbans and the headline read: “So that Europe does not become ‘Eurabia”.

The visual echoes of these anti-Muslim representations with anti-Jewish pornography from the Third Reich are noteworthy. From the late 1920s into the early years of the regime, the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer recurrently featured a naked blonde being violated by Jewish men or by snakes with Jewish names. The point, of course, was that these images conveyed a double effect: even as they stirred moral indignation at the menace supposedly emanating from men of color, they also invited all to gaze on nude female flesh. 

More recently, in 2024, the images have become creepier and more brutal—as was the case in the music video and AfD party song “Remigration Hit”. Here, gyrating attractive female flight attendants dressed in AfD blue and “Aryan” pilots celebrate while herding droves of dejected and humiliated brown and black men into hundreds of airplanes and flying them off into the distance. The video then concludes with a huge rally signaling AfD rule and general revelry. The video contains boastful references to the infamous May 2024 dance party on the island of Sylt (during which elite young Germans were captured on film singing “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out”) as it includes unmistakably Nazi iconography. 

Here we find a novel form of arousal. Rather than brown and black men being portrayed as menacing threats (as in the Saxony ad), this video portrays the men of color as abject and the white men as virile and superior. The video also mocks the purportedly “woke” white allies seeking to rescue the men of color. Instead of selling fear, sex is used to sell the elation of triumph. 

While sexualized fear-mongering has by no means gone away in German political discourse—in fact the other parties, from the Christian Democrats to the Greens, have jumped on that bandwagon, too—what is manifest in the video is instead a mode of full-on braggadocio, where Schadenfreude reigns and—as the American journalist Adam Serwer put it about Trumpism—“the cruelty is the point”. This is dominance posturing and triumphalism. It is also sexy racism. When a liberal politician filed a criminal complaint noting that the song, when publicly performed, was an “incitement to hatred”, AfD politicians fired back that it was just a joke—young people testing limits and having innocent fun. Plausible deniability is found again in the blurred space between humor and sincerity. 

Strategic Contradictoriness

The AfD, then, needs to be understood as a self-consciously postmodern political phenomenon: postmodern in the sense that the party’s messaging is not just self-reflexively clever but also unapologetically inconsistent. Indeed, the party plays, gleefully, with the inevitable contestedness and instability of truth, and is unabashed about advancing manifestly outrageous assertions. No claim is too absurd so long as it serves the purpose of either acquiring/maintaining power or muddling the audience’s grasp of facts. The classic example might be Weidel giggling with Elon Musk and declaring that Adolf Hitler was “this communist, socialist guy”. 

This comfort with (and delight in) incoherence is also why, depending on context and target audience, the party can style itself as both anti-gay and pro-gay. On the one hand, AfD politicians have embraced a nationalistic “pride month” (Stolzmonat)—replete with the slogan “against rainbow shit and gender madness”—in their overt antagonism to what they consider left-wing queer pride advocacy. On the other hand, gay voters are appealed to via blunt racism with slogans such as: “My partner and I don’t value the acquaintance of Muslim immigrants, for whom our love is a deadly sin”.

In its published platforms, the party is officially opposed to further expansion of LGBT rights, sometimes calls for undoing the equality of marriage law passed in 2017, and expressly upholds reproductive, white, gender-polar heteronormativity. A Bavarian branch of the party has circulated a poster—self-consciously echoing Nazi anti-Bolshevism imagery, but also just campily silly—portraying a Conchita Wurst-resembling drag queen ‘threatening’ a child to represent the danger of tolerance-teaching sex education. 

Sometimes the party rails against Christopher Street Day (Europe’s annual LGBTQ+ pride parades); other times, party advertisements imply the AfD is the only party that will protect the parade against homophobic migrants through posters emblazoned with photos of Weidel. The party also has an official organization of gay members (Alternative Homosexuelle), who cheerfully aver that the party is the furthest thing from homophobic.

The heterosexual messaging is similarly mixed. Yes, over and over, the party celebrates “traditional” families. Yet, it also jokingly recommends teen sex. And single parenting is by no means off-limits among its leadership. One clear priority for the party is to present the party’s official anti-abortion platform as an effort to create a “welcome culture” for all (white) children (a deliberate reappropriation of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “welcome culture” for Syrian refugees). This anti-abortion platform is intended to offset what AfD leaders allude to as the fearful prospect of a “Great Replacement” of white European populations by immigrants. This racism is no longer just implicit, it is made patently clear by a female AfD politician excitedly reporting the results of far-right Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s latest success in incentivizing a rise in the birthrate expressly of “‘light-skinned’” (hellhäutige) children with baby bonus payments.     

But the goal is not merely reproduction, nor is it traditional familialism per se. The goal is popularity and, again and above all, power. Most recently, the prominent—and avidly taboo-breaking—AfD politician Maximilian Krah (infamous for various remarks including that the Nazi SS were not all criminal, that “Europe should stay European and not become African”, and that “collective sexual abuse of European girls is the typical corollary effect of Oriental invasions”) turned to the right-wing manosphere for messages he could borrow and rework to reach young white men and boost their lagging self-esteem. 

This meant providing ideological, nutritional, and dating advice. Krah warned that “every third young man has never had a girlfriend”, that “the testosterone level of young men is sinking and sinking”, that the vegan or vegetarian preference for soy-based foods kept muscles feeble and boys should instead eat meat, that young men should “not vote Green” and should “not let yourself be talked into the idea that you should be nice, soft, weak and leftist”. Krah went on TikTok to inform viewers that “Real men are right-wing”. According to Krah, if only these messages were taken to heart, then things would work out (sexually) with their girlfriends as well (dann klappt’s auch mit der Freundin). It was Krah’s most successful video ever.

Anti-Disability Hostility

There is one more distinctive feature in the AfD’s cacophonous political messaging which has been long underplayed by the party’s political opponents and not analyzed closely until recently: The AfD has an obsessive concern with amplifying and legitimating hostility to people with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities. No other far-right party in the world compares to the AfD in its hostility toward people with impairments and its obsession with saying sly, nasty, and cruel things. As with its racism against refugees and immigrants, the party revels in a posture of taboo-breaking against what it perceives as goody-two-shoes kindness, borrowing time-honored strategies of stirring emotions (above all repugnance) and economic anxieties from the anti-disability playbook. 

Already in its 2016 party platform, the AfD had railed against “ideologically motivated inclusion” of children with learning difficulties into mainstream classrooms (claiming not just that it cost “‘significant expenses’” but also would “hamper other children in their ‘learning successes’”). Once the AfD entered the Bundestag (Germany’s federal parliament), it got more crass: In March 2018, the party sought provocatively to stir revulsion against the disabled by presenting a formal “inquiry” to the government with regard to the (utterly fabricated) issue of migrant families producing disproportionately more children with cognitive impairments because of the (again, fantasized) prevalence of “incestuous” marriage between blood relatives among refugees. 

As it turns out, and just as ugly stereotypes of Muslims have replaced the Nazis’ ugly stereotypes of Jews in the AfD’s political pornography, this anti-Muslim claim was actually grafted onto a century-old antisemitic trope, in which it was contended that Jews produced more cognitively disabled offspring than gentiles due to their—supposed—prevalence of marriages between blood relatives. This stunt was met with outraged response from social welfare organizations and churches. The federal government neutrally answered the inquiry with the information that 94 percent of significantly impaired individuals were in fact German citizens. But this had been no slip-up by the AfD; it was intentional, as the aim had been to arouse both disgust and voyeuristic curiosity. 

The AfD continued unperturbed, claiming that posing such questions was merely ‘research’, going on in a further inquiry to rail against allegedly excessive social spending on people with mental illnesses, and lamenting the recently granted voting rights for people under guardianship—as if the latter did not deserve political representation. Notably, Krah joined in the anti-disability pile-on when he made a point of mocking the German television news program Tagesschau for offering “easy language” news for individuals with learning disabilities, calling it “news for idiots”. Although he insinuated that the program’s purpose was to spread “leftwing nonsense”, disability rights organizations understood immediately that his primary aim was to insult the disabled.  

The AfD’s most vigorously consistent animus is directed against inclusion of children with disabilities into mainstream schools. Apparently, this has turned into the single most objectionable aspect of the recently won rights for people with disabilities, secured when Germany ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2009. Nearly every regional AfD party program contains a clear rejection of inclusion. 

AfD politicians like Markus Frohnmaier and Karin Wilke in their campaign materials demand an end to a “cuddle-curriculum” (Kuschelunterricht) and call for the reinstatement of “the achievement-principle”—the implication being that the nondisabled children are slowed down by the mere presence of the disabled. AfD representative Josef Dörr went so far as to suggest that if children with Down syndrome spent time together in class with “normal, healthy” pupils, it was akin to placing people with “severe contagious diseases” on a hospital ward together with noninfected persons—as if Down Syndrome could be infectious. 

Most notoriously, in a televised interview in summer 2023, extreme-right AfD front-runner Björn Höcke—who led the campaign in the German state Thuringia that won 32 percent of the popular vote—again attacked the mainstreaming of disabled children in schools on grounds that it harms the ability of the nondisabled to become the “skilled workers of the future”. “Healthy societies have healthy schools,” he declared, but presently German children were falling behind in the “most basic” German and math skills. The cause of this dismaying deterioration? The schools, he said, needed urgently to be “liberated” from “ideological projects such as inclusion”. These attacks on inclusion are all the more concerning as they need to be understood more as a ‘frontlash’ than a backlash—a kind of preemptive or anticipatory counterrevolution against the prospect of shared schooling, which has in Germany hardly yet been comprehensively established.

Racial Hatred vs. Racial Fear

The utterly peculiar conjunction in AfD campaigns of soft-core porn carrying racist anti-Muslim messaging with a tenacious concern to re-invisibilize children with learning challenges and keep them hidden away in a segregated special education system can seem simply bizarre to non-Germans. What could possibly be the relationship between the titillating celebration of “Aryan” dominance in the “Remigration Hit” video and the blatant, compulsively repetitive malice toward children with learning challenges? It is only intelligible against the background of the Nazi past.

As astute interpreters of the intricate relationships between the coercive sterilizations and the “euthanasia” murders of people with disabilities and the Holocaust of European Jewry have noted, Nazi racism had two complementary components: racial hatred (against those deemed to be outsiders to the Volk) and racial fear (the deep insecurity about imperfections within the would-be dominant group). After all, becoming the ‘master race’ was just a fantasy, not an already accomplished reality. The would-be dominant group was never naturally dominant, and the dream of disability-free perfection was meant to be implemented through brutality. People with disabilities were perceived as a shame and a burden on the Volk, both biologically and economically. 

The fundamental themes of AfD messaging follow from this Nazi paradigm: vehement contempt for the ideals of human equality and solidarity and viciousness toward any and all groups identified as vulnerable; a profusion of racialized scapegoats for complicated economic and social dynamics; and a persistent concern with appealing to narcissistic longings for national and personal greatness. Everything is about the promise of feeling superior. Even the loopily ludicrous guidance for boosting young white males’ self-esteem fits this overall picture. 

And it’s working. The AfD’s popularity is at an all-time high at 25 percent nationwide in recent opinion polls—neck and neck with the Christian Democrats—and ranging between 35 and 40 percent in states of the formerly Communist East of Germany. The party has its sights set not just on regional rule in the 2026 elections, but also on the nation’s chancellorship in 2029, as its “Project 2029” makes explicit.

A major debate currently roiling the media, legal experts, and political classes in Germany involves the question of whether the party could or should be formally banned. The discussion is based on the fact that the domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, has designated the AfD as “confirmed right-wing extremist” and has found hundreds of its leaders’ pronouncements and expressed goals to be in express violation of foundational points in Germany’s constitution. Some commentators fear that a ban would create a “martyr effect” and raise popular support for the party; they urge instead that new ways be found to engage the party’s adherents.      Other commentators focus on whether and how a “firewall” can be maintained sufficiently so that the centrist and left-leaning parties remain steadfast in refusing collaboration and thereby keep the AfD out of power. 

The most vigorous critics diligently promote the pertinent analysis that the AfD’s economic proposals will actually serve the rich and in no way be helpful to the disenfranchised and disgruntled working class it pretends to represent. Others, however, call attention to how frighteningly successful the AfD has already been: not only in shifting the entire national conversation about migration and asylum rightward as well as trivializing the Nazi past and the Holocaust, but literally in eroding from within multiple pillars of Germany’s once-strong democratic infrastructure. 

Alarmingly, moreover, the Christian Democrats, in power again since May 2025, have recently doubled down once more on the racist sexual fear-mongering. And no less worrisome, in the newest taboo-rupture, a prominent Christian Democrat has also joined in stigmatizing people with disabilities and claiming that the German economy simply cannot sustain the cost of support for people with disabilities mandated by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This novel turn of events makes it all the more essential that activists, self-advocates, service providers, disability moms, journalists, and politicians from the other parties challenge the false math behind such claims and consistently provide robust and eloquent counterarguments. Thankfully, they are doing so.

We live in a dangerous historical moment when fascist politics no longer lurk on the margins but occupy the centers of power. Across the globe—from the United States to Hungary, Chile, India, and Argentina, and elsewhere—authoritarian regimes are hollowing out democracy, merging violence with spectacle, and transforming education into a battlefield over truth itself. Journalists increasingly describe this shift as a “campaign of annihilation”.      

What is under assault is not simply the university or the classroom, but the capacity to think, remember, and act collectively. The struggle over education is therefore the struggle over democracy’s very promise. To reclaim education as a public good is, therefore, to reclaim the means through which consciousness becomes political, and politics becomes collective. The question before us is not merely whether education matters, but whether it can still awaken a public imagination capable of turning thought into resistance, and resistance into mass action. In such times, the issue is also whether education can survive as a democratic force in an age of emerging fascism across the globe. 

Disinformation: The Impetus for Authoritarianism

Under the Trump regime, ignorance has been manufactured and weaponized, twisted into a force that shrouds lies as truth and redefines education as an act of violence. In the United States, and across other authoritarian regimes, a culture of lies, along with the deliberate erasure of reality, serves as a mask for tyranny. Trump, with his grotesque parade of over 30,000 lies during his first term, continues to poison the public mind, even now refusing to concede his loss in 2020. 

There are alarming examples of this disinformation, which now functions as a central weapon of authoritarian politics rather than a marginal pathology. Republican Senator Mike Lee, in a grotesque inversion of reality, blamed “Marxists” for the murder of a top Democratic state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, despite the fact that the perpetrator was a Trump supporter. In a similarly revealing display of fascist logic, the Trump administration claimed that the political left was responsible for the assassination of right-wing youth leader Charlie Kirk, converting right-wing violence into a pretext for further repression. These fabrications are not random acts of distortion; they are part of a broader strategy that casts dissent as treason and prepares the public for state violence. Accordingly, the administration has openly declared a war against so-called “enemies within”, a category that increasingly includes communists, leftists, journalists, educators, and anyone who challenges Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

This politics of disinformation does not circulate in a vacuum. It is amplified, legitimized, and normalized by a powerful media ecosystem that routinely privileges propaganda over truth. Right-wing media, spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, provides the most flagrant example. Murdoch’s Fox News lost a major legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems after knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion had helped steal the 2020 election, a lie that fueled the January 6 insurrection and further eroded democratic norms. Yet even after the settlement, conspiratorial rhetoric continues to spread largely unchecked, saturating public discourse and drowning reason in its wake. 

The failure is not confined to the right. The mainstream press has shown a troubling reluctance to confront authoritarian violence directly, often sanitizing or minimizing it through euphemistic language. Coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal assault on Gaza, for instance, remained muted until the scale of devastation became impossible to deny. 

Similarly, corporate media outlets routinely describe the Trump administration’s illegal abduction and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as him being “captured”, adopting the language of state power rather than naming the crime itself. Such linguistic laundering does more than obscure reality; it normalizes lawlessness, erases accountability, and conditions the public to accept authoritarian violence as ordinary politics.

The mainstream media was also mostly silent in discussing Trump’s bombing of Iran in July 2025 as a violation of international law and a reckless act of militarized violence. It refuses to draw connections between Trump’s illegal military strikes against alleged cartel boats (resulting in over 100 deaths) to his deployment of U.S. troops to a number of American cities—both of which share a common contempt for due process and constitutional limits. It is difficult to imagine that Trump’s brutal, gangster-style assault on Venezuelan soil, including the kidnapping of the country’s elected leader and his wife, will be examined by the mainstream press as a violation of both international and domestic law. Nor is it likely to be named for what Trump himself has admitted it to be, a ruthless imperial intervention aimed at seizing control of Venezuela’s oil resources. 

In the hands of the far right and MAGA mobs, truth has become a dangerous force to be neutralized or destroyed, and the mainstream media has increasingly enabled this assault through omission, normalization, and linguistic laundering. Critical thinking, once a defining feature of an informed society, is now being steadily exiled from libraries, schools, and much of the corporate press.

This has fast-tracked the American public’s sinking into a pit of civic illiteracy, a condition in which people lack knowledge of history, are unable to think critically, remain trapped in a culture of immediacy, and are incapable of connecting their private troubles to larger systemic forces. At danger here is what American cultural critic David Levi Strauss, citing philosopher Jerome Kohn, calls “the public spirit”—the essence of democracy, where citizens engage in dialogue, debate, and struggle, working together to promote the common good. 

As civic consciousness wanes, culture decays simultaneously. This decay is evident in the “Disneyfication” of society, where sanitized illusions mask brutal truths, and in the rise of a zombie politics ruled by the living dead—soulless figures with blood on their lips. In this politics of the undead, power is held by the corrupt, the incompetent, the unethical, and the extremist, leaders who drain public life of meaning while advancing authoritarian agendas. As journalist Chris Hedges astutely observes, America is a decaying regime, its vitality drained, clinging to spectacles—like Trump’s grotesque military parade—that serve only to feed the pathologies of a diseased society. 

Hedges speaks with precision when he writes: “The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality.” 

In this world, the population is conditioned by a mass culture dominated by sexual commodification, mindless entertainment, and graphic depictions of violence. Thoughtlessness has not only been normalized as entertainment, it has become the precondition for authoritarianism, amplified by toxic social media ecosystems, endless scrolling that numbs critical judgment, and a culture of spectacle that prizes outrage over understanding. 

The Collapse of Critical Education

Thus, the first casualty of authoritarianism is the critical mind. This is not only a political issue but an educational one. As Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire understood, education is never neutral. It either functions as an instrument to reproduce the existing order or becomes a tool for liberation. In the face of escalating fascism, education demands reclamation as a moral and political project whose task is to cultivate the knowledge, skills, values, and civic courage necessary to challenge injustice and imagine alternative futures. It must be rooted in critical pedagogy, a moral and political practice that enables students to speak, write, and act from positions of agency and empowerment.

In the age of the neoliberal university, many educational institutions have abandoned these responsibilities. Under the weight of privatization, standardization, and corporate influence, many institutions have hollowed out their democratic purpose. Universities have become sites of credentialing, training, and conformity rather than inquiry and critique. 

Driven by the ideological and instrumental dictates of gangster capitalism, the logic of the market has reduced students to consumers, faculty to managed labor serfs, and knowledge to a commodity. Ranking systems, performance metrics, and austerity budgets have supplemented public investment, intellectual freedom, and pedagogical citizenship. 

As universities submit to far-right ideological pressure, chase corporate funding, and no longer define themselves by a claim to democracy, they abandon the mission of cultivating critical, engaged citizens capable of imagining a radically different future. Aligned with the forces of predatory capitalism, they erode public conscience by celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, and privatization. Academic life is increasingly organized around high-stakes testing, narrow measures of individual achievement, and cut-throat competition for grants, producing a pedagogy of compliance rather than critique and a culture that prizes metrics over meaning, entrepreneurial self-interest over democratic imagination.

Yet, an even more insidious force is at work. In addition to market-driven logic, higher education is being re-engineered to serve authoritarian control. In both subtle and overt forms, universities are increasingly being transformed into an apparatus of white Christian nationalist indoctrination and citadels of fear. Curricula are being purged of so-called “divisive concepts”, anti-racist scholarship is demonized, and educators who teach about settler colonialism, gender, or Palestinian liberation are being censored, surveilled, or fired.  What we witness across the United States is not merely the erosion of democratic education, but its replacement by a theocratic and ethnonationalist vision rooted in exclusion, historical erasure, and moral authoritarianism.  

Under Trump, the assault on higher education has taken on the character of political extortion. Universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern are threatened with funding cuts, targeted investigations, and public humiliation unless they align with the regime’s ideological demands. Faced with this mafia-like pressure, many institutions such as Texas A&M capitulate: syllabi are monitored or pre-approved, faculty self-censor, and entire fields—from gender studies to critical race scholarship—are quietly dismantled. Academic freedom becomes a permission granted by administrators rather than a right grounded in democratic life, and universities shrink into obedient service providers rather than spaces for critique and possibility

Journalist Indigo Olivier argues that Trump’s war on education extends beyond the suppression of campus dissent. It is a concerted effort to seize the very essence of higher learning, reshaping it in the image of authoritarian ideology, built on power, control, and the erasure of critical thought. She writes:

In recent months, Trump has: signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, suspended student loan repayment programs and $400 million in funding to Columbia University, and threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after freezing over $2 billion in federal funds. Dozens of universities now face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion campaign. Perhaps most disturbingly, he has encouraged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target international students involved in Gaza solidarity protests for deportation; several are currently being held in a processing facility in Louisiana…Taken together, these actions have been widely seen as a chilling assault on academic freedom and institutional self-governance that threatens to undermine the character of American higher education itself.

This project mirrors, with chilling precision, the ideological reengineering of higher education under past fascist regimes. In Nazi Germany, universities were purged of Jewish professors and political dissidents, while academic disciplines were reshaped to propagate racial pseudoscience and Aryan supremacy. Professor of global engagement Iveta Silova notes how swiftly and systematically German universities were transformed under Hitler: “Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge, they served power.”  

In Mussolini’s Italy, intellectuals were coerced into swearing loyalty to the fascist state, and scholarship became a tool of nationalist propaganda, intertwining classical myths with imperial ambition. As American history professor and political commentator Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, “Leftists, liberals, and anyone who spoke out against the Fascists were sent to prison or forced into exile”. 

In Franco’s Spain, the university was subjected to Catholic authoritarianism, with philosophy, history, and literature marshaled to serve an ultra-conservative, patriarchal order. In Chile, as Ben-Ghiat writes, under the brutal regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, universities were condemned as “hotbeds of Marxism and targeted…for ‘cleansing’”. She notes that by 1975, 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed, thousands imprisoned and tortured, and entire philosophy and social science departments disbanded. 

The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle DEI programs, censor dissenting faculty, and freeze funding to elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard echo this dangerous legacy. These are not random acts; they are part of a calculated attempt to remake higher education into an instrument of ideological control. The pattern is clear: authoritarian leaders understand that universities must either serve the state or be silenced.

Rebuilding Critical Consciousness     

Yet, even amidst this reactionary onslaught, resistance is burgeoning. Across campuses in the United States, Canada, and around the world, students and educators are refusing to be conscripted into authoritarian narratives. From the pro-Palestinian encampments protesting genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, to the nationwide student walkouts opposing book bans and censorship, young people are transforming educational spaces into laboratories of dissent and collective imagination. These acts of defiance recall earlier waves of resistance, from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley to the student uprisings in 1968 Paris, to the Black campus revolts of the 1970s, to the anti-apartheid university occupations of the 1980s, as well as the feminist struggles that reshaped the twentieth century, when women broke through the walls of misogyny by organizing for reproductive freedom, demanding equal pay and educational access, confronting gender-based violence, and insisting on the right to define their own lives.

Resonating with past movements, today’s students are reclaiming education as an act of resistance, not a preparation for conformity and ideological indoctrination. They are forming assemblies, teach-ins, and counter-courses, horizontal spaces of power where knowledge is co-created, solidarity is forged, and the university is reimagined as a site of justice rather than domination. Faculty, too, are pushing back, filing lawsuits, penning public letters, creating sanctuary classrooms, and insisting that pedagogy must serve not power but freedom. 

In this context, critical pedagogy transcends mere academic method; it becomes a political act. It is a refusal to surrender the university to fascism and a commitment to making it a space where new forms of collective life can be imagined and fought for. In cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, students are joining with immigrants, workers, artists, activists, and politicians to resist Trump’s ruthless immigration policies, the criminalization of dissent, and seeks to consolidate power by placing the military under his personal control, turning the armed forces into an instrument of his rule. 

This convergence of struggles signals a growing recognition that education cannot be separated from the broader fight for human rights, sanctuary, and democratic life—struggles that are now under threat from the unfolding authoritarianism of Trump’s regime. It is through these alliances that a new critical pedagogy of resistance is emerging, one rooted in memory, insurgent hope, and an unshakable belief in the possibility of a different future.

Drawing upon the lessons of history and the radical value of critical education, the Foro de Sevilla collective writes, “Auschwitz was much more than a concentration camp, it was a laboratory of dehumanization”. Gaza, too, has become such a site, where children, schools, and entire futures are being systematically annihilated. Education, in this context, is not just about knowledge transmission but about moral reckoning. It must preserve memory as a living force, capable of shaping civic courage and alerting us to the dangers of silence, complicity, and ideological manipulation. From Auschwitz to Gaza, from Nazi Germany to Trump’s America, we see the same dangerous arc: a politics of exclusion that depends on erasure, that turns classrooms into sites of fear rather than freedom.

Pedagogy that Matters

To meet this moment, educators must embrace a form of pedagogy that is inseparable from politics. Critical pedagogy begins not with answers, but with probing questions about history, justice, identity, power, and possibility. It refuses the notion that teaching is a technical act, a homage to empty instrumentalism, divorced from context. Instead, it insists that education is always implicated in the struggle over meaning and memory.      

As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu warned, some of the most powerful forms of domination are symbolic and pedagogical. If authoritarian regimes aim to control not only public institutions but the public imagination, then our task as educators is to illuminate, disrupt, protest, and reimagine. In this struggle, education and culture are not peripheral but central to politics, for the battle over shaping mass consciousness is the very bedrock of any genuine resistance.

Education exists not in a vacuum, but in the throes of a battleground for identities, values, and power. As such, it carries the potential to either suppress or empower—or often, to be a complex mix of both. Author Paulo Freire warns us that pedagogy can become a tool of oppression when it reinforces entrenched power structures. Yet, he powerfully extends this argument by emphasizing that education is a site of struggle, where its potential for both oppression and liberation is constantly negotiated. It can awaken consciousness, empower individuals, and resist the forces of injustice. In this sense, education becomes a critical site where the struggle for freedom, dignity, and transformation is waged.

Let us be clear: the relentless attacks on higher education by authoritarians like Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the Trump regime expose a deeper truth—universities have always been incubators of resistance to authoritarianism and its ever-shifting forms of fascist politics. This is precisely why they are viewed as such a threat. As institutions dedicated to the public good, their core mission is to defend and nurture democracy—however fragile or imperfect—making them a formidable challenge to those who seek to dismantle it.

This means embracing education as a public good and a site of collective responsibility. It requires curricula that foster a culture of inquiry, equip students with the knowledge and skills to hold power accountable, challenge dominant narratives, and cultivate a historical literacy that can dismantle the myths sustaining fascist ideologies. It calls for defending the university not as a corporate entity but as a democratic commons—a space where a culture of critique and academic freedom can thrive, and where students are empowered to define themselves and break free from the continuum of manufactured ignorance. It demands a language that links freedom with social responsibility, agency with solidarity, and critical thought with civic engagement.

As postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha once said, civic education must disrupt the consensus of common sense. It must fracture the settled order of things to make space for the not-yet-imagined. In an age where language is stripped of meaning and culture is weaponized by the far-right, education must reclaim its capacity to name injustice and summon hope. We need a language of critique and a language of possibility. One that refuses both fatalism and false neutrality.

Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis argues that there is no democracy without an educated public, no justice without a language to critique injustice. In dark times, education must do more than transmit knowledge; it must cultivate the political and moral imagination necessary to resist tyranny and build a future rooted in equality, dignity, and shared responsibility. To make education central to politics is to insist that the fight for democracy begins not only in the streets or at the ballot box, but in the classroom, in the slow, transformative work of teaching people to think otherwise, so they might act otherwise. 

Castoriadis reminds us that democracy is not merely the absence of censorship or the formal guarantee of rights, it is the collective power of the people to shape the conditions of their own existence. The classroom is one of the last spaces where the future can still be imagined differently. That is why it is under siege—and why we must defend it with everything we have. To defend education is to defend the very capacity for politics itself: the slow, difficult work of shaping public consciousness against the tides of ignorance and authoritarianism. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, culture, and by extension education, “is a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled”.

It is within classrooms, libraries, community centers, and public forums that citizens learn not only to read the word but to read the world—to connect private suffering to public issues, and to translate moral outrage into collective action. Every lesson that nurtures empathy, every discussion that rekindles historical memory, every act of critical questioning pushes back against the machinery of fascism and reclaims the political as an educational project, and education as a political act.

To confront fascism today is to reclaim education as a practice of becoming fully human, one rooted in the ability to listen deeply, remember truthfully, and imagine boldly. Critical pedagogy invites educators and cultural workers to create spaces where freedom can be practiced, tested, and lived, where the world rehearses the possibility of renewing itself. A radical democracy will emerge and endure only if we summon the courage to build a mass movement grounded in historical memory, collective imagination, and the willingness to act together in the name of justice.

In this struggle, schools and universities cannot stand aside. They must become laboratories of freedom—sites where democratic renewal is nurtured daily, and where the power to name injustice is inseparable from the collective will to confront and dismantle it. Only when educational institutions embrace this mandate can the work of resistance take root and help remake the world.