Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“[…] our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before.”

– Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

Things don’t happen randomly. The shocking news of Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela broke on the 101stanniversary of Benito Mussolini’s announcement to the Italian parliament accepting full responsibility for blackshirt violence and declaring himself dictator of Italy. That gesture—greeted by applause, complicit silence, and opportunistic support—ushered in fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. History isn’t a machine, automatically repeating itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain is said to have commented. And sometimes it rhymes in macabre ways.

Stefan Zweig was one of the first to see this. In his 1914 essay “The Sleepless World” published in the collection Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink and composed before and during the Second World War, he describes a civilisation that can’t sleep because it no longer trusts itself. This insomnia isn’t a malady of individuals but a symptom of systemic collapse. The world can’t sleep when violence ceases to be the exception to become method, and when lying ceases to be an aberration to become state policy.

In The World of Yesterday, written in exile and posthumously published in 1942, Zweig develops this insight into his testimony and bequest, with a book that is an ethical autopsy of the liberal, cosmopolitan, and humanist Europe which naively believed that technical progress would automatically lead to moral progress. He describes how aggrieved nationalism, the cult of power, and contempt for truth pave the way for fascism, not as an accident but as the logical product of an epoch.

Zweig knew that fascism doesn’t start with bombs. It........

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