Fascism is on the rise in the world again.

Many totalitarian regimes and dictators in the world, Brexit, the anti-immigrant views in Europe and the rise of Christian right, the election of Donald Trump in the US, etc. They all show signs of another fascist wave in the world, similar to the one observed about a hundred years ago.

People don’t learn from history, and I think humanity is repeating the first half of the 20th century.

The fascism was rising in the world about a 100 years ago, in the 20th century, and now we are living the 21st century equivalent of the same thing.

The first one caused 2 major world wars, and resulted in the bloodiest wars humanity has ever seen.

Now, we have even more dangerous weapons. And another world war may be the end of civilization as we know it. But humanity is unfortunately going in that direction.

The only way to prevent this would have been preventing the election of the wrong leaders in the most powerful, and the most advanced countries. And the only way to do that would have been abandoning democracy as we know it, and allow only highly educated and intelligent people to vote in elections. Not the general public. Or, maybe a weighted voting strategy could have been devised. All votes wouldn’t be equal in this case. The most ignorant and uneducated people would have 1 vote, but the more knowledgeable or educated you are, the more your vote would count. Scientists’ and university professors’ votes should count at least 10 times or 100 times of a regular vote.

But devising a voting structure based on this would be too complicated, and not possible to implement fairly. So, the more practical way to handle this would be determining voter eligibility based on a test (similar to driver’s license test). Some basic civics questions, and economy and policy questions be on this test, and the purpose of the test would be to determine if the candidate voter even understands the basic concepts required to make an educated decision about who to elect as a political leader.

There are only 2 ways for the democracy to work as intended. You either educate people successfully, so that the majority of the people already know what they need to know to be able to make educated decisions in elections, or if you cannot do it (which is the case in the world currently), then implement a filtering mechanism in the voting process, to allow only the eligible people to vote.

Humanity failed to take these precautions. And we will pay the price severly. Many people will probably die again, in the upcoming decades, due to a new world war that I think is coming.

I wish I could be more optimistic, but this is what I see when I look at the state of the world today.