CARIBBEAN | Sally Carson's 1934 Novel of the Nazi Threat Warns the Caribbean About Democratic Collapse

KINGSTON,  Jamaica, October 20, 2025 - A few days ago, Charlotte Higgins recounts in The Guardian, an American acquaintance told her something chilling: "In my opinion, the US is in a very similar position to Germany in 1933-4. And we have to ask, could 1936, 1937, 1938 have been avoided? That's the point we are at." 

He was speaking about a country with centuries-old democratic institutions, constitutional safeguards, and the world's most powerful economy. 

If Americans are asking these existential questions about their own democracy, what should Caribbean nations—with far younger institutions, more fragile economies, and a history punctuated by colonial authoritarianism—be asking about theirs?

Higgins was contemplating Sally Carson's remarkable 1934 novel Crooked Cross, a book written in real-time as Nazi Germany was emerging from the Weimar Republic's ruins. 

Forgotten for decades and republished only this year, Carson's work offers something rare and valuable: a contemporary witness account of how democracy dies, written before anyone knew where the story would end. 

For the Caribbean in 2025, Carson's insights aren't historical curiosities. They're a diagnostic manual for the democratic erosion happening in our own backyard.

The Ordinary Face of Extremism

What makes Carson's novel so unsettling—and so relevant—is its radical ordinariness. There are no monsters in Crooked Cross, no obviously evil characters plotting Germany's destruction. 

Instead, Carson shows us the Kluger family: "kindly, loving parents and three grown-up children," celebrating Christmas in their picture-postcard Bavarian town. Within six months, that loving circle has "fallen apart." 

The young men of the family, unemployed and purposeless, have found meaning in extremism. The greeting changes from "Grüss Gott" to "Heil Hitler." The church bells are retuned to chime Nazi anthems.

Carson's genius, as Higgins notes, is showing us "how extremism, when it takes hold, provides these young men with purpose, work, a narrative, hope and clearly defined roles." 

But it also provides something darker: "a set of people—leftwingers, Jews, Blacks, and Gypsies—to hate, to blame, to punish and, quite quickly, to beat and to kill."

What often goes unmentioned in discussions of Nazi Germany's rise is that Jews weren't the only targets. Black Germans, though small in number, faced systematic persecution under Nazi racial laws. 

They were sterilized, banned from certain professions, forbidden to marry white Germans. The regime's anti-Black sentiment was explicit in its propaganda and embedded in its racial science. 

This matters because it reveals a crucial truth: authoritarian movements don't limit themselves to one scapegoat. They create hierarchies of humanity, and once the machinery of dehumanization is built, it grinds through whatever populations are deemed threatening or expendable.

This is the critical insight: democratic collapse is a process, not an event. It doesn't announce itself with tanks in the streets. 

It arrives through the slow normalization of the unacceptable, through economic desperation channeled into scapegoating, through the gradual erosion of the line between political opposition and criminality. 

Carson understood in 1933 what many still refuse to see in 2025: "There is nothing inherently terrible about these young men who turn on other young men and turn violently on those who, months ago, were their friends. But they choose what they choose."

The American Warning Bell

The parallels Higgins' acquaintance draws to contemporary America are impossible to ignore. The normalization of political violence. The erosion of institutional independence. The transformation of political opponents into enemies of the state. The economic anxiety of young men without meaningful work or clear futures.

But we must name what often remains unspoken: the racial resentment coursing through American politics in 2025. The attacks on diversity initiatives. 

The rhetoric about "real Americans" versus others. The coded language about urban crime, about immigration, about who belongs and who threatens. 

The targeting of Black history education, the dismantling of protections won through civil rights struggles, the resurrection of narratives about racial hierarchies dressed up in the language of "heritage" and "tradition."

This is where the Nazi parallel becomes most uncomfortable and most necessary. Like 1930s Germany, contemporary America offers economic frustration, nationalist fervor, and the identification of internal enemies—but it layers this over a foundation of anti-Black racism that predates the republic itself. 

The plantation didn't disappear; it evolved. The rhetoric has become more sophisticated, the discrimination more systemic and deniable, but the underlying message remains: certain people are threats to be controlled, criminals to be punished, problems to be solved.

For predominantly Black Caribbean nations watching this unfold, the implications are terrifying. If these patterns are visible in the world's oldest continuous democracy, with all its institutional resilience and civil society strength, how much more vulnerable are we?

Our Own Kranach

Consider the case of Dr. Keith Rowley, former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, detained at V.C. Bird International Airport in Antigua because his name appeared on an Interpol watch list. 

Not arrested. Not charged. Simply flagged as "allegedly involved in criminal activity." Rowley, who had stepped down mere months earlier and was traveling in his capacity as a volcanologist, found himself confronted by police with no explanation, no due process, no transparency from the administration that succeeded him.

"If this can be done to a former prime minister," Rowley warned, "imagine what can be done to the average citizen."

Or imagine a well known regional journalist being detained for in excess of an hour at the same V.C. Bird International Airport in Antigua, while immigration tries frantically to ascertain why he, a CARICOM national is travelling there. Their reason for his detention? None !

This is Carson's Germany playing out in Caribbean time. The weaponization of law enforcement. The silence from those in power when challenged to explain extraordinary measures. 

The use of international mechanisms—in this case, Interpol databases—to achieve what might be too politically costly to accomplish through domestic channels alone. 

The chilling effect on democratic competition when former leaders can be effectively rendered persona non grata without transparent legal proceedings.

And Trinidad isn't alone. Across the Caribbean, we've witnessed the troubling pattern: criminal justice systems perceived as tools of political retribution, selective prosecutions that coincidentally target opposition figures, and what Rowley himself called "state-sponsored slander" masquerading as law enforcement.

But we must also turn the mirror on ourselves. The Caribbean is not immune to the racial hierarchies and prejudices that fuel authoritarianism elsewhere. 

Our own societies carry the weight of colorism, the subtle and not-so-subtle hierarchies that privilege lighter skin and European features. 

We've witnessed the scapegoating of Haitian migrants across the region, treated as threats rather than neighbors. 

We perpetuate class divisions that often map disturbingly onto color lines. We harbor our own "hidden and unspoken" prejudices that, under the right conditions of economic stress and political opportunism, could be weaponized just as they were in 1930s Germany and as they are in America today.

The CARICOM irony is particularly bitter. The organization recently welcomed Interpol's Secretary General to discuss "international cooperation" and "strengthening safety and security across the Caribbean." 

Yet those very mechanisms of cooperation now facilitate what appears to be political persecution, allowing administrations to bypass domestic scrutiny by operating through international channels.

Meanwhile, our economic fundamentals mirror those that made 1930s Germany fertile ground for extremism. Youth unemployment across the Caribbean remains stubbornly high. 

Meaningful work is scarce. Brain drain depletes our most educated citizens. Young people without purpose, without hope, without economic security—this is the combustible material Carson identified. 

All it needs is the spark of a charismatic figure offering simple explanations and convenient scapegoats.

The 2025 Danger: Authoritarianism on Steroids

Here's where our situation becomes truly terrifying: Carson wrote about a world with newspapers, radio broadcasts, and face-to-face organizing. 

The tools of authoritarian control in 1934 were primitive by today's standards.

In 2025, we face something far more sinister. Social media echo chambers accelerate radicalization at speeds Carson couldn't imagine. 

Surveillance technology enables modern authoritarianism to track, predict, and neutralize opposition with surgical precision. 

Disinformation campaigns undermine shared reality itself, making it impossible to agree even on basic facts. 

Digital databases like Interpol's can be weaponized across borders with a few keystrokes. AI-enabled propaganda and deepfakes allow the manufacture of reality itself.

The tools for our destruction are now so readily available, so much more sophisticated than in Hitler's time. 

A would-be authoritarian in 2025 doesn't need brownshirts and street violence when algorithms can microtarget vulnerable populations with customized radicalization content. 

They don't need to burn books when they can flood the information space with so much noise that truth becomes indistinguishable from fiction. 

And they don't need explicit racial laws when systemic discrimination can be coded into algorithms, hidden in data sets, embedded in technologies that claim neutrality while perpetuating hierarchy.

The Choice Before Us

Sally Carson wrote Crooked Cross with what Higgins calls "an unshakeable moral core." Despite not knowing where Hitler's Germany would end, "there is no equivocation. 

What is being done in Germany to Jews, to communists, is plainly horrific." She saw the persecution of Black Germans, the targeting of Roma people, the brutalization of political dissidents—and she recognized it all as horrific, not as the unfortunate price of national renewal.

We in the Caribbean have the advantage Carson lacked: we know how this story ends when left unchecked. We've seen the photographs from Dachau, studied the Nuremberg trials, built museums to remember the Holocaust. 

We know what happens when racist hierarchies are given state power, when scapegoating becomes policy, when democratic norms erode in service of strongman promises.

Yet knowledge without action is merely spectacle. The question isn't whether we recognize the warning signs—it's whether we have the courage to act on them. 

That means demanding transparency when former leaders are placed on watch lists. It means protecting due process even for political opponents. It means refusing to normalize the weaponization of law enforcement. 

It means confronting our own prejudices—the colorism, the class hierarchies, the scapegoating of vulnerable populations—before they can be weaponized by those seeking power. 

It means resisting the economic desperation that makes our young people vulnerable to extremist narratives offering purpose and scapegoats.

So it was then in Carson's fictional Kranach. So it is equally now in Trinidad, in Antigua, across the Caribbean, and in the United States itself. 

The Kluger family didn't see their Christmas celebration as the last moment before everything changed. They had no idea that within six months, their world would be unrecognizable.

We have no such excuse. The question is whether we, unlike Carson's characters, have the advantage of hindsight—and the courage to act on it before our own democratic bells are retuned to authoritarian anthems. 

For Black and brown nations in a world where white supremacy still lurks beneath the surface of politics—sometimes hidden, sometimes brazen—the stakes couldn't be higher. 

Carson warned her generation. History warns ours. The tools of destruction are ready. The only question is whether we'll have the moral clarity to refuse them.

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