Last week I visited the Lee Miller exhibition at Tate Britain. Miller was one of the first journalists allowed into the Nazi concentration camps in April 1945.
Her photographs were published in Vogue in June that year under the stark heading “Believe It.” She understood that people would struggle to accept the scale of the horror — not only the crimes of the Nazi regime, but the mindset that made them possible.
Soon after, I learned of the death of Gerry Gable, the former editor of Searchlight magazine. For more than five decades, Searchlight played a central role in exposing, disrupting and ultimately weakening fascist and neo-Nazi organisations in the UK. In the early 2000s, it also helped give birth to Hope Not Hate, an organisation that continues that vital work today.
If Lee Miller offered an early warning about the dangers of Holocaust denial, Gerry Gable confronted what that denial looks like in practice. His life’s work was a reminder that fascism does not disappear on its own — it has to be challenged, persistently and courageously.
I worry that we are living through a period in which the conditions that allow fascism to take hold are once again gathering momentum.
Growing economic inequality polarises our politics and fuels social instability. It undermines confidence in democratic institutions and breeds anger at social systems that appear to be failing. The scapegoating of refugees and the obsession with flags are symptoms of these deeper failures. They are amplified by the easy-answer politics of the populist right and their so-called “personality” politicians, who trade in slogans that pander to the lowest common denominator and promise simple solutions that will never work.
We need to respond on two fronts. Like Lee Miller, we must help people understand the world as it really is, and be alive to the consequences of ignorance and denial. And like Gerry Gable, we must take action — not just to name the threat of fascism, but to actively resist it.
Remembering the past matters. Acting in the present matters even more.
