2025 is the year, we lose the Second World War to the Nazis and fascism.

It took me longer to write this piece because breathing down my neck is a fast approaching rent day. The task of making ends meet, sometimes, leaves me more winded than usual. A cost of living crisis is, however, intended to create anxiety in large swaths of a nation's population. It diverts voters from the systemic causes of their economic inequality.

This week Trump becoming a permanent earworm in my head didn’t help, my feelings of impending catastrophe. His tariffs against Canada and Mexico, slated for the first of February, will destroy the livelihoods of millions of Canadians and Mexicans.

Even if the tarrifs are rescinded. Corporations will put out the lie that Canada, regardless, must be more competitive, which is a neoliberal code for lowering the taxes of the rich and gutting workers' wages.

The glass for many of us, will never be half full again. We are like passengers on the Titanic, after it was hit by an iceberg. The poor and those without influence, are already drowning in this sinking neoliberal ship.

I can't get Trump out of my head. But I also can't get history- mine and Europe's from scratching me awake. Lines from the Russian poet Puskin echoed in my ear this morning, after another sleepless night.

"What is past shall be no more, shall be no more! But lo! They have started to stir again."

When Hitler became Chancellor in the Spring of 1933, my grandmother was a thirty-eight-year-old resident of Hamburg. She was a single mother and, since the Crash of 1929, the mistress of an importer of tobacco products.

Politically, my grandmother leaned toward socialism. It agreed with her feminist, working class and bohemian lifestyle. However, being a young mother without means, my grandmother’s true ideology was the politics of personal survival. She lived by a mantra of "needs must."

She never voted for Hitler or the Nazis. But her lover did. She didn't object because my grandmother had few options to survive through the tumult of the 1930s. My grandmother then was a manager for a hotel in Hamburg's Reeperbahn. It was a district known for being a haven to socialists, drunken sailors on leave, trade unionists, communists, prostitutes and gays. It was a place for people, the nazis considered degenerates, and promised to rid Germany of- once they formed a government.

So my grandmother's days as a hotelier were numbered. To remain as manager of that hotel in 1933 would have meant becoming an informer for the Gestapo. If she refused, it would have placed a target on her back as a political agitator.

In 1933, it was safer for my grandmother to become a full-time "kept" woman of an opportunist.

The Nazis moved fast to disrupt society and dismantle all democratic institutions. Trade unions were banned, newspapers shut down, and political parties outlawed. The writing was on the wall, Hitler meant business. Yes, people protested and editorials of outrage were written just like they are now against Trump's government. However, for the most part, citizens knuckled down to the new order because most people weren't political. It's the same now. Whether it's our digital world or our ancestor's analogue one. People want to get by, raise their kids, and save for some new consumer gadget or dream of a summer holiday. They don’t want to invite problems to their door step.

Today we can’t deny that our society like Germany’s in the 1930s has an enormous amount of people who are racists. We have an abundance of citizens who want revenge on those, they see as different to themselves.

In 1933, some Germans fought back against Hitler. But there were consequences for opposing fascism. Resisters were impoverished, derided, beaten or imprisoned. Many were also murdered. The lucky dissenters with cash or connections fled into exile. Trump this week wrote an executive order that non citizens caught in protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians will face immediate deportation.

For a while, my grandfather, a gadfly when it came to being a family man, fought back against the Nazis because he was a trade unionist. But after one too many shit kickings by the police, he retreated into silent non conformity. Not that it did him much good. By the war's end in 1945, my grandfather resided in Berlin. There, he either died in the fighting or disappeared into a Russian labour camp. Being 50 years old at the time, it's doubtful he wouldn't have survived a gulag, if that was his fate.

My Mum- during those first years after the Nazis seized power, lived with a foster family. My grandmother's lover didn't want my Mum living with them. It posed too many questions for nosy neighbours and the secret police. Instead, Mum was placed privately with a foster family.

On weekdays, Mum lived with a working-class family. But on weekends returned to her "kept" mother's apartment because her lover had decamped to his real family in an upper-class district of Lubeck.

My mother's foster family had left-wing sensibilities. Her foster father, when a soldier during the First World War, was taken prisoner on the Eastern Front. At its conclusion, he fought on the side of the Reds in the Russian Civil War. But by the 1930s, after Hitler became Chancellor, he left politics well enough alone. After all, he was middle-aged and had a family to provide for. People learned to ignore the cruel insanity before them because sticking your neck out for someone else got it chopped off.

My mother, at the time, was still a child. She didn't understand that empathy for others whilst living under a totalitarian regime is signing your own death warrant. Near her foster family's apartment was an allotment. It's where my mother played and several Roma families had set up a migrant camp. One day, the police came and disappeared the Roma living there into Germany's growing concentration camp system.

My mother asked about their whereabouts. Her foster mother said.

"Little girls should never ask questions about things that don't concern them as they can vanish, forever from Hamburg too."

Today, there are fewer means to resist fascism than in the 1930s because neoliberalism castrated working-class solidarity. It convinced citizens there was no class system, only consumers with different degrees of purchasing power.

80 years ago, the Western World and the Soviet Union defeated fascism and Nazism in May 1945. Come spring in 2025, the Western world, instead of killing fascism and nazism, will embrace it as if they were old friends much missed. There will be blood, and it will be ours for the moment. But not forever because tides always turn.

Thanks for reading my Substack. You have been great to me. My subscription numbers have grown to 3100 with 223 as paid subscribers.

If you are able. I am rent short by a few hundred Canadian. I want to remain housed and continue to sustain and grow the legacy of my dad and his Last Stand Project. I think it is worthwhile and necessary. I am looking for 7 new, yearly subscribers to keep the lights on.

It’s 30 quid a year or $50 and I think it has value. Substack and the payment platform take around 20% of that because capitalism is the gift that keeps giving to the wealthy. If you can thanks. If you can’t, it’s all good because we share the same boat.

Take care, John