Yesterday I visited the Cheltenham Literature Festival where I was fortunate enough to sit in on a talk 'Inside Auschwitz', featuring the respected historians Anne Sebba and Laurence Rees.
As the talk was coming to an end, inevitably perhaps, Mr Rees was asked about the rise of the Nazis and parallels with the popularity of the populist right, some may say far right, in Britain today, his response reply was illuminating.
To start out with Rees said that we must never call today's populist right 'Nazis', or compare them with Hitler. The rise of the Nazis was particular to a time and place that was receptive to that phenomenon. We are no longer in that time and place and have the benefit of the lessons of history, it is not unreasonable to assume that if a similar party were to emerge the opposition to it would be far stronger this time around.
In essence, Rees was rightly saying we must not jump to easy and wrong comparisons because they are both easy and wrong but also jeopardise our understanding of their impact in the modern world.
But, if history is about understanding, that does not mean we should not draw parallels. One hundred years later there may well be similar levels of dissatisfaction with the elite, similar concerns about immigrants, similar disaffection about supranational bodies and the actions of neighbouring states, similar worries about being left behind by large demographic groups, similar symbolism and similar targetting of 'the other'. Rees suggested in the talk (and when I was getting my book signed by him at the end) that those parallels are real, and we should be very worried indeed.
Perhaps the most worrying statement however was something Rees said on the stage. We must not take democracy as a given just because have it now. We all know that in federal elections the Nazi party never secured a majority of the popular vote, but what I had never given huge consideration to was that in the 1932 federal election, when you take the communist vote into account, there was a clear majority of Germans voting for the removal of democratic structures.
That is a majority of people in a major western nation explicitly voting for some form of authoritarian government.
History is about learning the lessons of the past and one clear lesson is that our democracy isn't set in stone, it is under threat and if we believe in it we must be prepared to fight (rhetorically at least) for its principles.