The end of the First World War left Germany shattered economically and spiritually. Unemployment soared to unprecedented heights. The industrial collapse that Karl Marx had long foretold appeared to have finally arrived.

The conditions for a proletarian revolution were all there–hunger, anger, joblessness, humiliation. But history took a darker turn.

Instead of a workers’ uprising, Germany saw the rise of the far right. The early strength of these nationalist movements came from the unemployed masses–men recently demobilized from the trenches.

They returned from war trained to fight but with no work to return to. Many found new purpose in paramilitary organizations: the Freikorps. These groups became the muscle of Germany’s nascent fascism.

And when the fragile Weimar government needed to suppress communist uprisings, it turned to the Freikorps, to the very forces that would later destroy it.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), nominally the guardian of the working class, was in power. Yet in choosing coalition over conviction, the Social Democrats compromised themselves.

To keep order, they aligned with conservative elites and militarists. In doing so, they lost sight of the very revolution they once claimed to lead.

Into that void stepped Rosa Luxemburg.

Luxemburg, the brilliant and uncompromising founder of the Spartacus League, saw what others refused to see. She understood that without a revolutionary transformation–without genuine leadership for the unemployed and the working class– the rage of the dispossessed would not vanish.

It would find a new master. Her call for revolution was a desperate act of foresight instead of merely a Marxist zeal.

But the SPD saw Luxemburg and her followers as enemies. They unleashed the Freikorps on them. Luxemburg was captured, beaten, and murdered–executed by the very men the Social Democrats had empowered.

It was the left’s suicide note.

Paving way for far-right

For the Freikorps did not stop with Luxemburg.

The same right-wing militias that had crushed the communists went on to undermine the republic itself. When Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Social Democrats tried to resist–but they stood alone.

The streets no longer belonged to them. They belonged to the fascists they had once hired as enforcers. Within months, the SPD was banned. Many of its members were sent to the same camps that would soon devour Europe’s conscience.

The tragedy of Weimar Germany is not simply that fascism triumphed. It is that those who could have stopped it–the Social Democrats, the reformist left–mistook revolution for chaos, and compromise for stability.

They feared their radicals more than their reactionaries. In the end, that fear proved fatal.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party–the Nazi Party–understood something essential about power. Even as it waged a war of annihilation against communists, it could not ignore the magnetic pull that socialism held over the working class.

The far right knew that the language of equality, struggle, and solidarity had deep emotional resonance among the poor and dispossessed. So it stole that language.

Nazism was never socialist. But it was shrewd. It adopted the vocabulary of socialism only to hollow it out–to weaponize class anger in service of nationalism and racial hatred.

“Socialism,” in Nazi rhetoric, became a mask for blood-and-soil chauvinism and a tool for disciplining the working poor into the service of capital and empire.

That tactic–the appropriation of leftist language by authoritarian politics–has not vanished. It has simply adapted.

In Bangladesh today, a coterie of far-right ideologues deploys an updated version of this strategy. They don’t call themselves socialists, but they mimic left-wing postures– invoking the “subaltern,” claiming to defend the downtrodden, performing outrage at “elitism.”

All the while, they spew venom at actual leftists and trade unionists, and cheer on the state’s criminalization of informal workers–rickshaw-pullers, street vendors, construction workers, day laborers–branding them as extortionists or thugs.

It is a politics of inversion: fascists playing at being revolutionaries.

Misguided revolution

The Nazis perfected this theater long ago. Their first paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), was drawn largely from the unemployed and the lower middle classes–men who had fought in the trenches and returned to nothing.

They believed they were fighting for a new order, for a “people’s revolution” purer than Marx’s. The SA saw itself as the army of the working man. In truth, they were the shock troops of their own destruction.

When Hitler consolidated power, he turned on them.

In June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, the SA’s leadership was massacred–erased in a single purge. The so-called “revolutionaries” were discarded the moment they outlived their usefulness.

From that point on, the Nazi regime openly served Germany’s industrialists and financiers. The false socialism of the right had completed its purpose.

History’s warning is clear. Whenever the far right borrows the rhetoric of the left–when it claims to fight for the people while targeting the poor–it is not a revolution in disguise. It is the old order renewing itself, dressed this time in the stolen clothes of its enemy.

To grasp the dangers posed by a generation of militarily trained men left idle after a war, one need not look only to Weimar Germany. Bangladesh has its own cautionary tale.

Between 1972 and 1975, in the fragile years after independence, the country struggled with the same volatile mix–disillusioned veterans, joblessness, and the unmet promises of revolution.

When soldiers return from the battlefield to find no place for themselves in peace, the line between patriot and insurgent begins to blur.

We know this pattern. History has shown it to us, again and again. Yet we rarely learn from it. And so it returns–first as tragedy, then as farce.

Even when we correctly diagnose the conditions of our time, even when we foresee the dangers ahead, we often fail to alter the outcome. But that does not absolve us of responsibility.

To understand is not enough; one must still act, even if the odds are overwhelming. The task of politics, at its most humane, is to make that final attempt– to reach for a mercy that history itself seems to deny.

Perhaps one day, beneath the weight of repetition, something will give way. A new calm–a sakinah, a true tranquility–might descend.

For now, history regards us with weary eyes. I have seen this before. The tragedy is not that it speaks–but that we have forgotten how to listen.

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Parvez Alam is the author of the critically acclaimed book “Madina”