BRIAN READE: 'Lineker is right, we owe it to our war heroes to stay alert to fascism'

How weird that we’re still talking about a two-year-old social media post from an ex-footballer. How bizarre that is still making headlines for calling the anti-refugee rhetoric of then Home Secretary Suella Braverman “immeasurably cruel” and “using language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. Especially when Suella Braverman revels in accusations that she’s a populist rabble-rouser.

Lineker has spent years working for and back in 2023, many people, including Holocaust survivors, agreed with his words. Apart from the BBC who, quivering at the right-wing media backlash which saw the Daily Mail splash for three days on their need to sack Lineker, caved in and suspended him.

It’s back in the news due to Lineker doing an interview with the BBC in which he says he doesn’t regret the tweet because “what I said was accurate”. And even if you find it bad taste to draw comparisons between Tories and Nazis, surely, as someone not on BBC staff, he had the right to express his views.

After all, , who is now being rightly hailed as courageous and compassionate for championing asylum seekers, once likened Europe’s holding centres for refugees to “concentration camps”.

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Bringing up such comparisons does not mean you believe the regime or person you are criticising is capable of exterminating six million people. It means you see the same red flags that should have been spotted by Germans in the 1930s as Adolf Hitler seized control, but weren’t.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of defeating the Nazis, and celebrate the few brave souls still alive who fought that noble fight, it has never been more important to speak out when parallels with that heinous regime appear visible. Because, as Primo Levi famously observed: “It happened, so it can happen again.”

Look what is happening in two of the countries pivotal to defeating the Nazis. Like Hitler, Vladimir Putin is an expansionist and murderous dictator who has wiped out his opponents and brainwashed his citizens into believing his destiny is to bring all his peoples into a great empire. Hence the atrocities in Ukraine. In the US, red flags are everywhere.

Like Hitler, some of Donald Trump’s first acts in power were to attempt to muzzle the “enemies within” – the courts, media, universities and civil service. He is a bully and a narcissist who has openly bragged about annexing other lands, has demonised minorities, and deported undesirables.

He helped facilitate an unsuccessful coup, created a personal cult (MAGA) that only he can lead, and has not ruled out changing the electoral system to stay in power indefinitely. He promotes conspiracy theories, holds human rights in contempt, whips up hatred against liberals and intellectuals, and distorts reality. Rarely, since Joseph Goebbels claimed that “if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, have we seen the truth so blatantly traduced.

This week in San Francisco, former vice president Al Gore compared the Trump administration’s attempts to “create their own preferred version of reality” to the Third Reich’s. And warned all Americans of the dangers that brings to their cherished democracy.

Gore’s warning is necessary and timely because the main lesson we learn from history is that we should never ignore lessons from history. We owe it to the generation that defeated the Nazis to be alert to the signs of fascism wherever we see them. So we never have to fight such evil again.

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