We are living through an utterly lamentable era of history

On the day that World War II began, September 1, 1939, the poet W.H. Auden described the preceding 10 years as a “low dishonest decade”. Might we borrow from him and recognise the 12 months to December 31 as a “low dishonest year”? Has there ever been one when so many lies were told and so many democratic hopes left unfulfilled? Has there ever been a New Year’s Day of such foreboding? And yet, so many carry on as if everything is normal. It’s not. This year, 2026, must be the year we wake up and avert potential disaster.

Think of the events of last year. So inured have we become to extraordinary developments that we struggle to recognise them as extraordinary any more. At least not until December 14, when the year had only two weeks to run.

In Europe in 2025, a major land war entered its fourth year. The familiar background to our news feeds, it seems prosaic, a given. But is it?

Watch the news tonight. You will probably see drones diving into apartment blocks in Kyiv, bitter street fighting in snow-bound Donetsk, or an oil tanker exploding in the Mediterranean. This is how the V1 rocket attacks on London of 1944, the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 and the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943 looked to the people who experienced them. The past is catching up with us.

The BBC now estimates Russian deaths in Ukraine at between 243,000 and 352,000, and Ukrainian deaths at about 140,000. Adding injuries and prisoners of war takes the total casualties to somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million. The war has so far lasted a month longer than Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union – which traversed many of the same battlefields. There is nothing ordinary about any of this. Why don’t we have a greater sense of foreboding?

Across the democracies of Europe, far-right parties are surging. Their common idea? Probably “remigration” – the idea that non-white people are conspiring to destroy European civilisation and should be forcefully deported. Not long ago, this familiar-sounding conspiracy theory was reserved for neo-Nazi sects; now it is sometimes openly touted by far-right parties contesting for power, like Germany’s Alternative For Deutschland (AfD). In Hungary and elsewhere, antisemitism is also being officially encouraged, often couched in attacks on Jewish businessmen such as George Soros.

It has even infected the official policy of the United States government. “All America wants for Christmas,” the US Department of Homeland Security tweeted recently, “is remigration.” That’s not a misquote. President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy, published a fortnight earlier, said Europe is facing “civilisational erasure” caused by non-European immigration and stated US support for the anti-immigration parties of the far right. American tanks rolled Nazism out of Europe in 1944 and 1945 – but in 2025 and 2026, American diplomacy wants to help it return. It’s almost hard to believe.

In the face of all this, it’s not difficult to see why the parties of the centre are struggling to hold on. In Britain, the anti-immigration Reform Party led by Nigel Farage has been leading in the polls since Easter, while the Starmer Labour government, elected just 18 months ago with 411 of 650 seats in the House of Commons, seems terminally unpopular. You know the world has swung to the right when a far-left party wills on the centre-right German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, also struggling to maintain popularity. And in France, President Emmanuel Macron is having trouble keeping the far-right parties from government. Across most of Europe, populist far-right parties are gaining or consolidating their vote share, some even governing.

And all this is being aided by the rapid undermining of the concept of the truth, as extremist governments and parties simply manufacture the truths they need – about drug-smuggling boats, rocket attacks on Vladimir Putin’s official residences, or a thousand other things.

So we have to confront the question: could such things happen here? Walled behind our gold-standard electoral system, we feel immune from the disease of right-wing extremism. Can our independent AEC and preferential voting rules really inoculate us?

Sometimes it’s the small things that alert us to danger. Something quite alarming started happening this year: the reappearance on our streets of Nazis. Not wild, idiotic neo-Nazi skinheads, but actual Nazis who worship Adolf Hitler, call themselves National Socialists and march through the streets in disciplined ranks, wearing black uniforms. Like the sick rats emerging from the drains at the start of Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, their sudden and unexpected arrival is a sign.

In May, voters re-elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party with a record majority (though a weak primary vote), rejecting a Liberal-National Coalition that had drifted well away from the political centre. World commentators hailed Australia along with Canada for having found the formula to defeat populism. And yet, since then, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party has climbed in the polls, hitting 16 per cent in the latest Resolve Political Monitor. And now, following the Bondi tragedy, Coalition members have begun making dark allusions to the cultural blindness of our immigration system and the failure of multiculturalism. Can they resist the temptation to forget the recent election result and contest the far-right vote with One Nation?

The fear is that “illiberal-democracy” has now gained an Australian bridgehead that can be consolidated and expanded in 2026. Will someone like future Liberal leadership contender Andrew Hastie make good on his implied threat of turning the Liberal Party into a MAGA-style populist movement, or maybe form a party of his own? It is possible the thing most preventing the hard right from breaking through until now has been Pauline Hanson. Perhaps a more articulate and canny leader could find a way to draw more people in.

In Australia, thankfully, things haven’t progressed to extremes, but we now live in a more divided, extreme, violent and savage world than a decade ago. Liberal democracy is being confronted with something quite evil. Wider global conflict is far from impossible.

If history is any guide, then carrying on as usual isn’t an option. We need, in effect, a mental reset. We must start paying greater attention to what’s going on at home and abroad, what dangerous ideas are gaining ground, and how utterly, utterly extraordinary the world is becoming. The crucial psychological step is to accept that our times are not normal.

As Macron, the NATO chairman, the leaders of the Baltic countries and others have put it: we need to understand we are now living in a pre-war, not a postwar world, where major conflict is possible within five years. Our leaders need to spell out what that may mean for domestic and foreign policy.

At home, it means explaining the absolute necessity for national unity, especially in the wake of the Bondi massacre. Those attempting to selfishly exploit that tragedy through dark, contrived, calculated messaging need to be confronted by strong leadership armed with a convincing story that puts this moment in its full perspective: the threat to liberal democracy posed by the global return of anti-democratic and antisemitic politics we defeated 80 years ago and now need to defeat again. Proscribing the National Socialist Network and cracking down on the most straightforward hate speech will be a good start.

Overseas, ending the Ukraine War is crucial. If still under way in May, it will have lasted longer than World War I, whose duration caused the collapse of the global order, weakened democracy and created the grievances that produced World War II. Big long wars have consequences that can’t be guessed at or contained – this is one of history’s biggest lessons.

Europe and the United States must now pressure Russia to accept terms that allow Ukraine to survive – not just to end the killing but to head off a potentially wider disaster. Victory might embolden Putin to attack other neighbouring countries he considers “Russian” and maybe even encourage China to turn its current military exercises near Taiwan into actual invasion. Under such pressure, the postwar international legal and diplomatic architecture might totally unravel. With Donald Trump seemingly unwilling to confront Putin, the rest of NATO must, with Australian support, as we have done to date by arming Ukraine with tanks and armoured personnel vehicles and supporting NATO-led diplomacy. If the war ends soon, might 2026 see Australian peacekeepers in Ukraine? If so, believers in democracy should support it.

This year we will also see midterm congressional elections that may clip Trump’s wings. Perhaps more importantly, the major contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination will emerge and the world will begin holding its breath, hoping the primaries that follow produce a leader electable enough to win and maybe put this lamentable era of history to bed.

Let’s ensure 2026 is the year we finally grasp the extraordinary peril facing our world and begin confronting it with the necessary decisiveness and clarity. The sound of gunfire at Bondi was surely enough to wake us up.

Dennis Glover is a speechwriter, novelist and author of Repeat: A Warning from History.

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