When to Stay, When to Go: The Hard Truth About Fighting Fascism

This isn’t about fear—it’s about discernment.

Across history, people have faced the impossible question of whether to stay and fight for their country or leave to escape the oppression. It’s a question layered with emotion, loyalty, and grief. The stories we’re told about heroism often glorify the ones who stayed—those who defied tyranny from within, who risked everything for the chance to reclaim their homeland. But those stories, as moving as they are, rarely tell the full truth. In reality, some who stayed became martyrs, silenced before their voices could ever create change. Others who fled became the historians, teachers, and architects of renewal when the storm finally passed. Knowing when to stay and when to go has never been about bravery—it has always been about discernment.

Stage One: When Resistance Still Works

In the early days of authoritarian drift, resistance still matters. Institutions, though strained, still function. Elections still exist. The courts still hold some weight. Teachers still speak openly in classrooms, and journalists still print the truth, even when it costs them. In this fragile space, civic resistance can genuinely alter a nation’s course. Unity, clarity, and moral courage can still slow the slide into authoritarianism. History has shown us that when people act early, before the machine fully takes root, their voices can make a real difference.

Weimar Germany offers a haunting lesson. During the early 1930s, the democratic system was fractured, exhausted by economic collapse and political infighting. Many believed Hitler could be contained within the system that appointed him, that reason or law would hold him in check. By the time the opposition recognized the danger, it was too late. The system had already been hollowed out from the inside. The same pattern unfolded in Italy a decade earlier, when unions and civic groups had the numbers to resist Mussolini’s rise. But divisions among socialists, Catholics, and liberals left them paralyzed, and fascism filled the void they left behind. Chile in the 1970s offers a more hopeful example: when Pinochet seized power, it was teachers, clergy, and artists who refused to surrender the truth. Their underground networks documented every abuse, and those records became the backbone of Chile’s eventual return to democracy.

At this stage, fighting fascism doesn’t mean violence. It means vigilance. It means teaching, documenting, organizing, and refusing to normalize cruelty. When institutions still breathe, staying can make a difference.

Stage Two: When the Machine Has Taken Over

There comes a darker stage when the system itself has been consumed, when propaganda replaces journalism, when law becomes punishment, when violence becomes ordinary. At that point, resistance from within becomes nearly impossible. The state feeds on fear, isolating and eliminating anyone who refuses obedience. Staying no longer means fighting for change; it means trying to survive without losing your soul.

In Nazi Germany after 1934, organized resistance from within was met with imprisonment, torture, and execution. Students from the White Rose movement distributed anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich, knowing exactly what would happen if they were caught. They were executed within days. Clergy who refused to align with the regime vanished into camps. The courage of these individuals was undeniable, but their impact was crushed beneath the machinery of totalitarian control. Stalin’s Soviet Union offers another example: millions of citizens disappeared into gulags for crimes as small as owning the wrong book or speaking out of turn. Any effort to reform the system from within was devoured by the system itself. And in modern North Korea, entire generations have grown up with no concept of dissent at all; truth survives only through those who escaped.

When the government itself becomes the oppressor, staying often means silence or death. Leaving is no longer abandonment. It’s preservation. To live is to bear witness. To survive is to remember what truth felt like. And to leave is sometimes the only way to carry that truth safely into the future.

Stage Three: The Work of the Diaspora

History’s exiles are often misunderstood. People assume those who flee have given up the fight, but in truth, exile has always been a critical form of resistance. When people leave, they carry stories, evidence, and memory that regimes cannot erase. They build networks of support, raise funds, and document atrocities for the world to see. They become the custodians of a nation’s conscience, preparing the groundwork for its rebirth long before it’s possible to return.

Spanish exiles who fled Franco’s dictatorship kept the dream of democracy alive for decades, returning home when the regime finally collapsed. Chilean exiles scattered across Europe organized campaigns that pressured Pinochet through international courts and human rights movements. Iranian and Syrian diasporas continue to archive the stories of those who can no longer speak. These are not people who turned their backs on their homeland; they are people who refused to let their homeland disappear. Leaving does not mean surrender. It means changing tactics. Sometimes, the most powerful fight happens from a place of safety, where truth can still be spoken aloud.

The Hearth Perspective

Home has never been just a location. It is a fire we tend - a place of values, integrity, and love for life itself. Sometimes, loving your homeland means staying to defend it. Other times, it means refusing to let it destroy you. The hardest act of love may be walking away, carrying that fire with you so it can one day burn again on freer soil. Home travels with those who keep its spirit alive, no matter how far they go. And sometimes, the greatest act of resistance is survival itself.

Sources & Further Reading

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, 1951.

BBC Archive. “Exile Resistance: Voices from Chile.” BBC World Service, 2021.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Rise of Fascism in Europe.”

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Fragility of Freedom.”

International Center for Transitional Justice. “The Role of Exile Communities in Democratic Transitions.”