The origins of fascism

Walter Laqueur, who died in 2018, fled Nazi Germany when he was a teenager.  He became a respected scholar of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and other political topics.  He warned in 1996 that fascism could have a second coming in a book entitled, appropriately, Fascism:  Past, Present, Future.  

Laqueur noted that before World War I, no one had heard of fascism.  After World War II it seemed to disappear.  He wrote that fascism seemed to appear out of nowhere.  He said that liberalism and conservatism can trace their roots to the French Revolution.  Western democracy and Marxism had common origins in the European Enlightenment.  Fascism, on the other hand, simply emerged sui generis.

It is composed primarily of negatives.  It is anti-individual, against rational thought, anti-feminist, anti-democratic, anti-scientific.  As an ideology, it pushes grievances, identifies enemies. and in most cases is led by a charismatic leader.

He thought it might re-emerge.  He likened it to staphylococci.  It can come back at any time, and there is no immunity.