Unpleasant, but Smart

"[…] marked the culmination of twenty years of democracy's unfulfilled promises to control unemployment, inflation, deflation, labour unrest, party egoism, and more. […] which was weary of itself and doubtful of the principles it lived by, almost breathed a sigh of relief when everything was sorted out… It believed that […] was a very smart man—unpleasant, but smart. He made his country strong. Why not try it that way?"

If you insert “the fall of Paris” in the first blank, “Europe” in the second, and “Adolf Hitler” in the third, you get the original text of a report filed by Newsweek correspondent Rosie Waldeck in June 1940, from Bucharest, after the Nazi army marched into Paris.

But if you don’t, you have a handy template for understanding many political events and disruptions we are witnessing today.

Let’s not get our panties in a twist—as the Americans say—this is not about playing the Nazi card or calling every sprouting authoritarian "Hitler." But Rosie Waldeck’s article remains surgically precise in describing the social, economic, and political circumstances behind the meteoric rise of “unpleasant, but smart” politicians—then and now.

“His ideas don’t scare me. People have a right to choose whoever they want. We’re tired of politics because they always lie to us,” said 26-year-old salesman Orlando Sanchez, explaining why he voted for Javier Milei.

Mark Twain supposedly never actually said the famous quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” as historian Niall Ferguson once corrected me in conversation. But Twain did say that history is like a kaleidoscope—the same, coloured glass pieces turning and mixing over time into different patterns. Occasionally, they settle into various shades of brown.

People turn to “unpleasant, but smart” leaders when they feel democracy has let them down—when they feel they have nothing left to lose. When frustration, despair, and rage over “the unfulfilled promises of democracy—unemployment, inflation, deflation, labour unrest, party egoism, and more”—overwhelm reason, they become willing to support ideas and people who offer no real solutions—only the promise of radically changing a reality they can no longer endure.

All it takes is for the “unpleasant, but smart” ones to point the finger at those allegedly responsible for all the pain.

One reason we learn so little from history is that it's usually painful and unpleasant—we’d rather forget it. We’ve convinced ourselves that nothing bad can happen as long as we ignore the past thoroughly enough. Often, we do this by relying on the illusion of temporal distance. The events Rosie Waldeck described seem infinitely far away—another era, another world, one that’s gone and won’t return.

This is dangerously misleading.

Rosie sent her dispatch from Bucharest to editors in the U.S. less than a year after a 15-year-old Jewish refugee named Heinz Alfred Kissinger fled Bavaria with his parents. It’s entirely possible that while learning English, Kissinger read Waldeck’s articles describing the situation that had forced his family to flee Europe.

Let’s not forget—Kissinger died just a few days ago. The Europe of the 1930s is separated from us by the span of a single human lifetime.

Historical time is a funny thing—it doesn’t always flow in the direction we want. A few months ago, I sat on a panel with Francis Fukuyama, who admitted he had to revise his theory of the “end of history,” saying history in the U.S. is now unfolding—in the wrong direction.

“Democracy in the U.S. is under threat,” Fukuyama warned,

“but in Europe—with a few exceptions—you’re still doing fine.”

In reply, I shared a joke about a Bosnian refugee during the war who had found safety in Sweden. He spoke with his brother back home by phone:

“How’s life in Sweden?”

“Eh, they’re twenty years behind us. Still living in peace and harmony.”

We tend to believe that bad things only happen to other people, in other places. We’re the good guys. We’re safe.

This, too, is why Rosie Waldeck’s article remains so instructive: it doesn’t just describe Germany—it describes Europe. When it was published, Hitler had already been in power for over seven years. What he had done during that time is chronicled by historian Saul Friedländer in The Years of Persecution: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1939.

Today we like to think those events only happened "over there." But that’s not true. Historian Mark Mazower, in Dark Continent, shows that antisemitism, nationalism, obsession with demographics, survival, and national rebirth—through fetishizing childbirth, “family values,” and eugenics—as well as paranoia and hatred of others, were present in most European countries.

After WWI, Europe saw a wave of new constitutional democracies. Two decades later, almost none remained. The trend across Europe was toward authoritarianism and nationalism. The tipping point came when Germany took things too far—not only inwardly, but outwardly, into global war and genocide, chronicled in Friedländer’s second volume The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.

We also shouldn’t forget how many local collaborators, “good people,” joined that horrific endeavor.

Of course, one can take the obsession with history too far. There’s a difference between learning from the past and being paralyzed by it—or convinced we can’t escape it. Fatalism and the belief in the inevitability of history repeating itself are even more dangerous than blind faith in an inevitably brighter future.

The first leads to what Timothy Snyder calls the “politics of eternity”—the favorite tool of authoritarians like Putin, who promise no better future, just endless suffering and revenge for the pain supposedly caused by others. Historian Timothy Garton Ash calls it hyper amnesia—obsession with a warped, ideological version of history used to manipulate frustration and rage, without offering real solutions.

As Oleksandra Romantsova, executive director of Kyiv’s Center for Civil Liberties and 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, recently said in Strasbourg:

“The problem with Russian history is that it’s unpredictable.”

The politics of inevitability heads in the opposite direction. In this view, history isn’t unpredictable—it’s irrelevant and inconvenient. Dark periods are just temporary anomalies in a grand narrative that guarantees peace and progress by default, no matter what we do in the present.

To reinforce this belief, we assign retrospective logic and inevitability to historical outcomes that could easily have gone differently: WWII had to end with Nazi defeat, the Soviet empire was always destined to collapse, the fall of the Berlin Wall could only mean the lasting unification of Europe under shared democratic values.

We act as if things always sort themselves out—and for the better. And so we indulge in tantrums and destruction without considering the consequences. In the end, both the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability send the same message: we have no real influence or responsibility over the future we’ll live in.

But the truth likely lies somewhere in between.

Garton Ash recommends “moderate memory”—knowing the facts and cultivating critical historical understanding, so we can learn from the past, but without pretending it locks in our future. The future is not set by the past—it depends on us. On how we address the same economic, social, and political issues Rosie Waldeck wrote about nearly a century ago, and which still confront us today.

Fate will not bring us inevitable war, nor automatic peace and prosperity. The responsibility for the future lies with us—depends on what we do here and now.

The fight for peace, freedom, and democracy is never over. And if we keep handing the kaleidoscope of history to the “unpleasant, but smart,” we may find ourselves once again staring at a familiar shade of brown. Dark brown.

Today