Permission

I first noticed it at a family gathering.

Nothing dramatic. Roast potatoes drying out on a plate, someone fiddling with a phone charger that never quite worked. We were talking about the news in that vague way people do now, as background noise rather than something that might touch them. Someone said the world had gone mad. Someone else said it needed stronger hands.

Then my uncle, who used to read me stories when I was small, said, “Well, at least he says what everyone’s thinking.”

The room went quiet, not shocked quiet, more like relieved quiet. As though a door had been opened and everyone was grateful not to be the first through.

I remember thinking how strange it was that they kept calling him a saviour, when everything about him was rotten. Not rumours. Not exaggerations. Things that were known, documented, shrugged away. The sort of man who left damage behind him like fingerprints. Children, wives, followers, all used and discarded, then denied.

But they did not deny it angrily. They denied it tiredly.

“He’s flawed, sure,” someone said, slicing meat. “But they all are.”

That was the first lie we agreed to together.

After that, the others came easily.

He spoke about purity while being corrupt. About protecting children while having harmed them. About truth while lying as easily as breathing. And still people followed, because he sounded certain, and certainty is addictive when everything else feels unstable.

Around him gathered others, quieter, sharper. They did not shout. They did not salute. They talked about tradition, about restoring order, about taking things back from those who had no right to them anyway. They wore suits, not uniforms. Smiles, not symbols.

And behind them, always just out of focus, were the old things.

I saw one once, or thought I did. At a rally I attended out of morbid curiosity. A figure standing too still, listening rather than cheering. Its face seemed ordinary until you tried to remember it, and then it slipped away like a dream you cannot quite hold onto. When people passed near it, their voices softened. Their anger became calm. Directed.

That was when I understood. These things did not feed on rage. Rage burns out. They fed on permission.

They whispered that history had been misunderstood. That the monsters of the past were crude, unsophisticated. That what was happening now was different, necessary, inevitable. They whispered that some people mattered more than others, and that it was exhausting to pretend otherwise.

People listened because it felt like being let off a moral hook.

The leader at the centre of it all did not matter, not really. He was useful because he was shameless. Because nothing stuck to him. Because every lie exposed and forgiven lowered the bar a little further for everyone else.

He was proof that sin could be loud and still rewarded.

So when laws tightened, people nodded. When certain lives became less visible, they looked away. When cruelty returned, dressed up as policy, they called it realism.

And when someone finally said the word that should have stopped everything, the old word, the one everyone swore would never return, they were told they were hysterical. Living in the past. Unable to accept change.

At home that night, I found one of my grandmother’s notebooks. She used to write in them when sleep would not come. In the margins, she had scribbled something once, so lightly it almost did not count.

We thought it would come back wearing the same face.

That is the danger.

It does not need to wear that face again. It has learned how to borrow ours.

It knows we will excuse anything if the person offering it sounds strong, sounds familiar, sounds like they will take responsibility off our hands.

The old things are patient. They do not need to rule. They only need us to agree, quietly, that some people deserve less.

Once that is done, the rest is just administration.