Shadows of Power

“The lesson of the past is not that fascism was defeated, but that it always waits in the wings.”

Symbols are treacherous things. A flag, a vote, a speech about “freedom”—all can be hollow, their colors soaked in illusion. If coherence means living in alignment with truth and compassion, then we must ask: whose truth, and whose compassion, are these symbols serving?

We were taught that America stood against fascism, that it liberated camps and became the arsenal of democracy. Yet after the war, Nazi scientists were folded into U.S. programs. Corporations that armed Hitler were never truly punished. Financial empires played both sides. Even the supposed triumph over fascism left its spores intact, drifting into institutions where they could quietly grow again.

Racism was not undone by victory in 1945—it only put on different uniforms. We saw it in the gangs of our youth, in the cruel jokes told without shame, in neighborhoods divided by color, in prisons that became modern plantations. We see it still when a leader praises his “great genes,” when crowds rally behind exclusion, when brown-skinned citizens are mistaken for foreigners and thrown into detention camps. These are not accidents. They are continuities.

Coherenceism teaches that systems decay when they fall out of alignment with their declared values. Democracy without truth becomes spectacle. Freedom without compassion becomes cruelty. When wealth concentrates while the majority grows powerless, we are no longer witnessing progress, but the tightening grip of hierarchy. The sickness is not German, American, Russian, or Chinese—it is authoritarianism itself, reborn whenever fear and power collude.

It is easy to feel powerless before this. Easy to believe the infection runs too deep, that the spores have spread too far. But coherence does not ask us to topple empires with one hand. It asks us to refuse lies. To refuse cruelty. To remember that every act of alignment—every moment where truth is spoken and compassion is practiced—is resistance to the machinery of deception.

Fascism never disappeared. It waits in the wings, rehearsing its lines. Coherence reminds us: we need not let it take the stage.