When people who live in democracies that have never witnessed the experience of an occupation, a violent revolution, or felt the social disruption of a war on their doorstep, hear the word fascism – most of the time, their mind leaps to the same images.

Hitler ranting amidst the columns of light in Berlin, goose-stepping soldiers in occupied Paris, the city of Berlin awashed in swastikas. Europe in flames in black and white.

But this remains the Hollywood version of fascism now as a generational memory; experienced only second-hand through old films and photographs – human monsters dressed in polished black boots, saluting in perfect unison like some fucked up hive-mind of evil. Conveniently, that imagery that we have so ingrained as the definition of fascism, makes it seem both distant and obvious. A relic of the past.

Fascism was something that our grandfathers – or great grandfathers – fought against and won nearly a century ago.

The truth is – the Nazis may have died, but fascism will never leave us. Instead – it stalks democracies like a vengeful wolf; seeking weak-points to take down the herd.

Democracies do not die in a sudden blaze of tanks rolling down streets. It dies in whispers, in legal loopholes, in carefully constructed propaganda. It dies when politicians frame authoritarian measures as “security”, when corporations can freely bankroll politicians to dismantle worker protections, when police become militarized to protect property over people.

It dies in the wake of the normalization of cruelty. Against the migrant, against the unhoused, against the Indigenous – until what once shocked us barely registers as a headline anymore.

The trick of modern fascism is simple – it relies on subtlety. It wears the cloak of respectability, drapes itself in flags and barks for “law and order”, it lies with promises of economic stability. Leaders who lean towards authoritarianism know they must distance themselves from the obvious caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini. Instead, they seek to weaponize the language of democracy – claiming to be the defender of the people as they erode civil liberties and demonize anyone outside of their narrow definition of “Us.”

This is why so many Westerners fail to recognize fascist tendencies in our midst. We’ve been conditioned to see fascism as the totalitarian extreme, something that can only come dressed in jackboots. But in reality, it can come dressed in a suit, smiling for the camera. It doesn’t need to abolish democracy in a night, it has no need to burn the Reichstag; it only needs to weaken it gradually until the shell remains but all substance has gone. This is how lies become truth in a dying democracy, when the institutions and organizations to combat the lies of fascism are defunded, privatized, or dissolved.

Do not fall into the trap of believing that Canada is immune. Far from it.

From the Northern Ontario to Ottawa, from Vancouver to St. John’s, you can see the same playbook being prodded once more. Public services slashed in the name of austerity, Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights dismissed, unions targeted and demonized, and entire communities being told to tighten their belts while corporations hoard record profits. Police budgets balloon while poverty soars as affordable housing, addiction treatment, and social safety nets are starved of consistent funding. A corporate media frames dissent and protest as chaos, and workers organizing as threats to the “economy”.

This is not democracy thriving – it is democracy being managed into submission until there is no one left who can remember the actual truth.

In Northern Ontario, these dynamics play out in stark ways. Foreign mining and forestry companies extract immense wealth from the land, while many Northern towns struggle with systematic poverty, unemployment and decaying infrastructure. Decisions on development are often made in Toronto boardrooms or Bay Street investment firms behind closed rooms, and not in the communities most affected.

For Indigenous communities, the parallel with authoritarianism are almost impossible to ignore. From boil-water advisories lasting decades to governmental overreach in resource extraction, democracy for our Indigenous communities has long been conditional – something that is only granted when convenient, withdrawn when inconvenient. Clearly, this is not a system built on equal voices; it is one where power flows upwards and accountability is an afterthought.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis deepens across the North. Families are priced out, students struggle to find rentals, and homelessness grows in towns once thought immune. Yet governments continue to tell us that budgets must be balanced, while corporate subsidies flow freely to industries that exploit and destabilize – sapping rightful gains in real wages out of the pockets of workers and into offshore accounts.

Fascism today doesn’t need to wear marching boots, it thrives in boardrooms, legislatures and police departments. It thrives when ordinary people are convinced to turn their frustrations not against billionaires and profiteers, but against their own struggling neighbours. It thrives in fear – fear of immigrants, fear of “radicals”, fear of those that demand greater justice. We see this in how immigrants are scapegoated on mass for housing shortages, even it is real estate speculation and corporate landlords driving up rent. We see it in how environmentalists are smear as “radical” for wanting clean air and water when forests burn yearly now in Canada. We see it in how people struggling with addiction are criminalized and dehumanized rather than supported in a well-funded personal welfare system.

This constant manufacturing of enemies serves one purpose; to keep the powerful unchallenged, and to keep communities divided.

Our democracy will die when we let fascism disguise itself as normal governance. And if we only look for Hitler, we’ll miss the politicians in suits, the oligarchic CEOs who hoard wealth, and those who look the other way and praise the militarization of society. All quietly dismantling democratic life in the present.

Resistance is built by supporting unions, by defending Indigenous rights and sovereignty, by building and supporting grassroots organizations that refuse to accept cruelty as “just the way things are.” In Northern Ontario, that means supporting local movements for housing, healthcare, and environmental justice. It means pushing back against corporate control over our resource wealth, and demanding governments put people before profits.

It means refusing to be silent when injustice becomes normalized.

Fascism does not need to march in perfect rhythm to advance. It only needs us to stay silent while it grows.