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Hanna Arendt, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, was arrested by the Nazis in 1933, fled to the US, had her German citizenship withdrawn and was stateless until the US welcomed her 2 decades later. Her main concern was the “banalization of evil”, as she put it.

Jewish, she didn’t want to be called a philosopher, but a political theorist. In her life and work, she criticized representative democracy in its current form, advocating a more direct model. Her greatest value was human freedom as the antagonist of totalitarianism, which had to be fought.

About this, she wrote: “The fanatical members are intangible by experience and argument; identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity to feel, even if it is something as extreme as torture or the fear of death.”

Our country is going through a very critical moment in its history, which may have repercussions in world history. Our society is giving birth to a neo-fascism, inspired and influenced by Nazism and others from the past, but even more drastic, because it knows no limits.

Modernity, in its speed and liquidity, as Bauman, also a Jew, points out, has brought the limits down, and we are already seeing the consequence of this when robots govern trending topics more than humans. This neo-fascism could turn out to be much worse than its predecessors.

Iconography and dramatic art (theater, cinema) of the 20th century sometimes give the impression that Hitler and the Nazis were terrible and feared people, who spread chaos and destruction wherever they went, taking over Germany dictatorially. On the contrary, Hitler was idolized, crowds flocked to hear him, people wanted to touch him and shake his hands, mothers gave their children to him to hold as he passed. Young people lined up to enlist in the Nazi party or the SS, filled with patriotic fervor. Everyone carried Nazi symbols wherever they went and their iconic salute was repeated everywhere. The truth is that Germany fell in love with Hitler and Nazism. A similar phenomenon occurred to a greater or lesser degree in all countries that fell into the clutches of fascism, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc. Hannah Arendt spent her life investigating the causes of this type of mass behavior.

It is ironic that, in the homeland where Josef Mengele came to peacefully end his days, without ever having paid for his crimes, a neo-fascism mirrored that of his contemporaries arises. Using a biblical imagery, the serpent needs to be crushed right now, before it’s too late.