Tick Tock
Beneath the noise of daily news, deeper changes are unfolding. This essay gathers the clues, connects them and makes the case that they add up to something far more serious.
There’s a certain comfort in imagining that if someone had just pulled the trigger in 1931, history would have turned out differently. We like that version, a single bullet in a specific moment of time. It flatters our sense of agency and compresses the problem of evil into a single man. However, this is the wrong fantasy because Hitler wasn’t the cause, but the consequence. The real danger wasn’t the man, but the moral weather that made him plausible. If the storm had already formed, then it is just a matter of time before we are drenched. Dictators don't invent themselves. They condense out of silence, out of contempt, out of the slow collapse of civic restraint. If we accept this then we realise a single bullet could never have replaced the deluge of bombs, death and sacrifice that was to follow in a word war. It requires sustained collective effort to stop demagoguery.
Germany didn’t fall in a day, it was coaxed down, step by step, through the tolerated mistreatment of Jews and leftists. They were called “traitor”, “subversive”, “degenerate”. They were the ones who stopped being protected by law. The ones who, once labelled, became a test of what the state could get away with because they are not true “Citizens”. That’s how it happens: you pick someone and you say they don’t really count and so what happens to them doesn’t really count, even if their most fundamental rights are infringed. And then all our fundamental rights are infringed.
Really this essay isn’t an alternate history exercise, take this essay as a weather report, a tracking of the storm while it still sits out over the sea. Make no mistake a storm has formed and the men who will one day seize upon it may already be here. They won’t need to announce themselves they’ll arrive when the atmosphere dictates.
We think democracy dies loudly, with tanks or decrees or some grotesque final vote, like a drama in a big budget movie. More often, it dies when enough people stop insisting that some things are unacceptable. It dies in permissions, in exceptions, in the logic of necessity, of compromised oaths and forgotten taboos. Today look around, the US and the UK, what is the state of health of much of the democratic world?
We often return to Germany because of its transformation from the most liberal place in Europe to the most fascist. Pre-War Germany had a parliament, it had civil servants, judges, newspapers, elections. In 1932, the Nazi Party still struggled to win a majority. In 1933, Hitler was still described by many conservatives as a temporary containment measure. Things changed and one of the first, was the treatment of the Jews. It went from a dull antisemitism to a focussed demonisation. Persecution was no longer done against the grain of the state but it was done through the state. The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Jews were purged from the civil service by law that April and Jewish businesses were boycotted before the summer was out. Just like that, casual antisemitic comments turned into state coordinated mass murder in a matter of months. Democracy was dead, as suddenly as a heart attack.
The antisemitism that made this possible wasn’t just street violence or Nazi slogans. It was bureaucratised and normalised. Judges upheld these new laws, teachers taught them and Employers enforced them. Berliner Tageblatt, once a mouth piece for liberal views, quietly instructed its editors to adopt a more neutral tone, on the very day Hitler rose to power. None of these bodies thought they were doing anything so momentous. Yet in that first Summer when prosecutor Josef Hartinger tried to bring charges against SS guards for murdering political prisoners in Dachau, the judiciary protected the murderers. The case was buried and Hartinger was threatened and shipped out.
This is the part people don’t want to look at because it means that catastrophe didn’t begin with a seizure of power. Historians would tell you it began when the function of institutions changed, when the law stopped defending the vulnerable and started defending the regime. Really, however, it started with the accepted dehumanisation of Jews. It made cruelty not just thinkable, but reasonable against these unworthy, illegal, treacherous, alien traitors. Deep-seated racism gave permission to rewire the moral circuitry of the state so that there were no brakes left.
The true sickness didn’t start with Hitler, it started with the idea that the law could be bent for some, that decency could be paused, that silence was safer than protest. In 1933, the sickness of antisemitism killed German democracy.
If you don’t think we are living through a similar dehumanisation of Muslims, then this dehumanisation has worked completely. Like fish swimming in a sea who don’t notice the water or like a magic trick so convincing, you forget it’s just an illusion.
It’s impossible to know which acts will be memorialised by future historians as decisive, even though there are so many. The real inflection points are almost never recognised in the moment. They appear ordinary, procedural - just another memo, another executive order or just another bad law. Only later do they show themselves as irreversible but by then history has already changed the shape of the world.
The post-9/11 period was our first disfigurement of our democracy. Not just because of the brutal wars or the moral collapse that made us accept black sites, extraordinary rendition and torture. The real damage came through law. Quietly, deliberately, with bipartisan confidence, the legal architecture of the democratic state was rebuilt to accommodate permanent war and extrajudicial power in the service of persecuting a particular group.
Consider one doctrine: “imminent threat.” Previously, it meant what the words suggest. A threat you could name, with a clear timeline. But that wasn’t flexible enough for drone warfare. So “imminent” was redefined to mean: a person whose pattern of behaviour suggests they might pose a threat, at some undefined future point. No intelligence required. No direct link to a plot. The mere profile was enough. And once that shift was made, it became legally acceptable for the U.S. to assassinate its own citizens abroad, to target a group of men who had come together in a village to celebrate a wedding. Scores of innocent dead – oh well.
Do you know Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old born in Denver, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen? He had committed no crime. He was not “collateral damage” because he was a intended target. The Obama administration called it a mistake but offered no apology because this was all legal. If the state believes you are “affiliated” with someone it deems dangerous, it can kill you without warning, without trial, and without accountability. That was over a decade ago. The legal frameworks that made it possible are still intact. No party has committed to repealing them. No major court has disavowed them. The climate they created is now the water we swim in.
We tell ourselves these powers will only be used against terrorists. But the system doesn’t remember intentions, it only notes the capacity of what it can or cannot do. The violence we authorised for someone else can always be redirected and reclassified. And it often is.
A decade later, the Trojan Horse Affair in the UK showed how little support for decency towards Muslims remained. A forged letter, unsigned and riddled with inconsistencies, claimed that Muslim governors and teachers were conspiring to “Islamicise” Birmingham schools. It was almost certainly a nefarious hoax. The provenance was laughable, the claims were incoherent but the reaction was instant and uncritical. Ofsted launched aggressive inspections where teachers and governors were removed and their careers were destroyed. The Prime Minister promised sweeping new powers to root out “non-violent extremism.” The press used it to vilify Muslim civic life for years. Labour went along with it while Liberal commentators stayed quiet. Even after it became clear the letter was fake, none of the measures were walked back..
The event was less significant than the response: the ease with which a state, a media class, and a political establishment could be turned against a whole community on the basis of nothing. All it took was a piece of paper, which gives permission, however flimsy, to act on a pre-existing narrative. That’s how moral exceptions become policy and how democracy begins to die.
Consider January 6th. A fascist attempt to halt the democratic process through physical force. The footage is public for all to see, the chants, the gallows, the weapons. It was not spontaneous, it was incited by the sitting President who summoned the mob, sent them to the Capitol, and watched. He was not arrested or exiled, he was impeached but acquitted and now he is President again. The lesson was clear, large parts of society will be passive if you overthrow democracy. When the storm strikes, the majority, caught off guard and paralysed by indecision, will find themselves swept away by the chaos, unable to muster the resolve or secure their future. We are not a society trained to uphold the ideals of democracy.
There are other moments, Prevent, Windrush, the hostile environment, protest bans, surveillance creep, but the pattern is already visible. Not a string of isolated missteps but a political climate, systematised. What the UK government once called a “hostile environment” has become the governing mood: not impartial, not dispassionate, but openly prejudicial. Civil servants are no longer expected to act with neutrality they are expected to act with suspicion. Suspicion against Muslims is turning into suspicion against all citizenry.
Bureaucracy is not neutral, it is not simply a matter of administration, forms, or inefficiency. Bureaucracy is a structure of coercive power, organised, layered, institutionalised power. In liberal societies, it is the most enduring form of power and it is the form that state violence takes.
When democracy is healthy, bureaucracy conceals its force, its coercive capacity is legal, not spectacular. However, when the taboos fall, when law begins to make exceptions, when policy begins to reflect prejudice rather than principle, bureaucracy does not evaporate, it begins to act more vigorously.
This is what fascist regimes understand better than most. The Nazis did not build a new state. They seized the one they had. On April 7, 1933, they passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. That single piece of legislation removed Jews and political “unreliables” from the state apparatus and replaced them with loyalists. The court system, the education system, the registries and permits and prisons, all remained but the logic of their operation changed. Every mechanism that once served the citizen was now free to serve the Reich. The violence that followed did not begin in the camps, it began in the files: who was listed; who was flagged; who was entitled to what. Bureaucracy made the Holocaust possible.
Government systems today have infinitely more sophisticated tools for monitoring and control. It flags immigrants for removal based on risk scores; ranks asylum seekers using opaque algorithmic “suitability” models; links biometric identity to housing, benefits, and access to services; tracks protests, monitors associations with automated watchlists.
This is the context in which departments like DOGE were made possible. The name, “Department of Government Efficiency”, is already a lie, they might as well have called it The Ministry of Love. DOGE was created as part of a public-sector “rationalisation” campaign. It was pitched as reform: fewer silos, faster decision-making, less duplication. In practice, it became a node of capture. DOGE consolidated back-end control over the IT systems of key federal agencies: Social Security, DHS, HHS. It quietly revoked access to longstanding administrators and replaced oversight bodies with loyalty appointments. Then it began integrating data: biometric records, immigration history, voting status. All connected. All centralised. All out of reach.
A whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, attempted to stop it. He was told, implicitly and then explicitly, to drop the matter. He received a threatening note accompanied by drone surveillance photos. When he leaked documentation to the press, DOGE denied the claims and threatened legal action. His security clearance was suspended. Will the name Daniel Berulis sit alongside that of Josef Hartinger? Time will tell.
But let’s be clear this is not a period drama from the past or dystopian sci-fi film about a possible future, this is the here and now. This is the present tense of bureaucratic authoritarianism. The systems have already been built. DOGE has not done anything revolutionary except act, and act with intent. It is what happens when prejudice is formalised inside the machinery of the state, it is ideological intent. What it shows us, plainly, is that fascism in the 21st century will not march in with uniforms, it will come in with access credentials.
If the conditions are aligned, then certain outcomes don’t remain speculative, they become structural. Once dehumanisation, legal exception, and institutional complicity reach critical mass, dictatorship isn’t an anomaly, it’s a reflex of the system. At some point it is not swimming against the tide to call for the removal of rights for citizens, particularly if you don’t use that word and use “Muslim” or “Foreigner” or “terrorist sympathizers”. At some point to do so is to swim with the tide and that’s when dictatorship becomes the most efficient expression of the system. Donald Trump rode that wave to unprecedented popularity and countless political movements across Europe are doing the same thing.
Fascism rarely flourishes on popular fury alone; it needs patrons with capital to turn anger into an apparatus. In Germany those patrons were ready. The old agrarian aristocracy, the Junkers, feared land reform and organised labour; Ruhr industrialists like Fritz Thyssen, Gustav Krupp and Carl Friedrich von Siemens feared socialist taxation even more than street violence. They financed the Nazi press, underwrote party deficits and, crucially, vouched for Hitler in conservative drawing rooms where uniforms were still unfashionable. On 20 February 1933, three weeks after taking power, Hitler met two dozen magnates in the Reichstag President’s palace; by dinner’s end he had 3 million Reichsmarks in new donations and a promise from I.G. Farben to supply “technical assistance” for whatever the regime required. That money paid for the final election that destroyed the republic.
The bargain was simple: the state would smash unions, freeze wages and funnel re‑armament contracts, while industry would supply cash, prestige, and later, forced labour. The regime looked revolutionary, but the ownership structure of German capital barely budged; profits skyrocketed. This is why Goebbels could boast, “We have joined forces with the possessors of property,” and why Krupp’s directors toasted his birthday with crystal looted from annexed Austria. Dictatorships are expensive; tyranny is a joint‑venture.
The pattern endures. Fossil‑fuel billionaires fund climate‑denial candidates who promise deregulation; media barons launder demagoguery into breakfast‑TV chatter; private‑equity titans bankroll culture‑war campaigns that distract from tax reforms written in their boardrooms. Authoritarian politics is not anti‑elitist, it is a merger of resentful mass politics with anxious private power. Demagogues deliver scapegoats; oligarchs deliver cheques; both receive impunity. Every time we hear that a populist movement is “anti‑establishment,” follow the money. The new patrons sit in venture‑capital offices, not Prussian hunting lodges, but the transaction is unchanged: policy for patronage, loyalty for lucre.
In the United States, hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer (with daughter Rebekah) has funnelled millions into Breitbart and a web of outfits such as the Gatestone Institute that trade in anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, making the Mercer foundation a pillar of the Islamophobia industry. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson likewise steered at least $10 million through the Adelson Family Foundation to groups that produced the film Obsession and other campaigns portraying Muslims as inherent threats, while mainstream donor-advised funds quietly routed a further $125 million to 39 anti-Muslim organisations between 2014-16. Across the Atlantic, French media tycoon Vincent Bolloré uses his Canal+ empire to give CNews a Fox-style makeover, providing daily airtime to pundits like Éric Zemmour, a man twice convicted of inciting hatred against Muslims, and amplifying Marine Le Pen’s far-right message. From Wall Street to the Île-de-France, these billionaire patrons show how concentrated private wealth continues to bankroll and broadcast anti-Muslim sentiment across the West.
Remember: the Reichstag fire decree did not just silence opposition; it unlocked 2 billion marks in emergency war credits that enriched every company who had paid the Nazi party’s bills. Likewise, today’s emergency powers, pandemic procurement shortcuts, border‑tech contracts, national‑security data‑grabs, tend to land in the balance sheets of the very donors who demanded them. Where money leads, policy follows, and cruelty becomes a cost centre.
Donald Trump in his first administration didn’t just “ban” Muslims from entering the country he facilitated a bespoke tax loophole that allowed Robert Mercer to avoid $6.8bn in taxes. Trump also lobbied Japan’s Prime Minister to ensure Adelson received a $25bn casino licence while of course ensuring Adelson’s US businesses benefitted by over a billion dollars due to Trump’s tax law changes. These hatemongers continue to receive spectacular returns on their political investments.
Political actors don’t invent brutality, they inherit it. They read the weather, like Boris Johnson who saw Brexit and Donald Trump who saw Tea-Party Republicanism. Successful politicians are chameleons and adjust to what will serve them. And if the easiest route to power is through cruelty, they’ll take it. They always do.
The murdering brutal Fuhrer of the Third Reich was Adolf Hitler but it could easily have been Joesph Goebbels or Henrich Himmler or Ernst Rohm or many others. This the danger of our current atmosphere, it doesn’t just enable repression, it selects for it. The politics that thrives in such a climate is not the one that protects rights, it’s the one that weaponises fear.
Yes, there are moments of resistance. Yes, the future is never fixed. But moments of intervention only matter if they’re used. And we’ve passed too many already to think we will behave any differently at the next moment.
For Muslims, that question is no longer abstract.
We are already seeing the state kidnap legal residents for their political views. ICE operatives acting under expanded authority have detained multiple individuals not for crimes, but for speech. Abrego Garcia is making headlines, but what about Mahmoud Kahalil? Mohsen Mahdawi? Rumeysa Ozturk? All detained. No charges. Just “national security concern” - a phrase now emptied of meaning and filled with terror. And those are just the names we know. There are hundreds of others, quietly disappeared into systems of administrative detention, immigration holds, no-fly lists, revoked visas, rescinded statuses.
The widely accepted atmosphere of Islamophobia in the western world is so very dangerous for Muslims. Yet it is also fatal for western democracies, if anything it is this poison that will kill democracy in these lands, not some Shariah law fantasy.
But perhaps you’re not Muslim. Perhaps you still feel immune. Perhaps the idea of an authoritarian turn feels abstract. Perhaps even the quiet kidnapping of citizens doesn't move you. Then consider this: What happened after the Nazis came to power? Not just dictatorship but war. It did not stop with the crushing of dissent. It did not stop with the closing of borders. It did not stop with the Jews. It spilled outward. It swallowed the world. In the end tens of millions were dead, cities flattened, nations broken, nothing remained untouched.
We think we’ll recognise the moment. That we’ll know when to resist. But the conditions are already here and it’s only a matter of time before the storm makes landfall.
Tick. Tock.