I WILL be in Stockholm next week. Reporters Without Borders (RWB), the international organisation that promotes and defends freedom of information and the press, has invited me to join Swedish colleagues to discuss the challenges facing today’s war correspondents.

No doubt there will be talk, too, of that other threat to press freedom, the rise of the far right. Only last weekend the streets of Stockholm became the rallying point for the largest demonstration yet by the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), Sweden’s very own white supremacists and fascists. At the rally Per Oberg, an NMR leader, told followers that Donald Trump’s election was a sign that the world revolution was beginning. He’s not alone in this belief.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front in France, thought Mr Trump’s election a “great movement across the world”. In the Netherlands meanwhile, Geert Wilders, who heads the Party for Freedom, called Mr Trump’s win historic while, in Germany, Frauke Petry, the head of Alternative for Germany (AfD), said the result changed America, Europe, and the world.

Closer to home, the pithy and poisonous Nigel Farage simply said he couldn’t be happier. Across continental Europe next year a series of elections will tell whether Mr Trump’s win will have a bolstering effect on the far right. The Netherlands will go to the polls in March. France will have its presidential election in April and May and Germany in the autumn.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the rise of the Right is that it’s happening on two levels. On the mainstream party-political level its growth is obvious but, on an equally sinister plane, its neo-Nazi and fascist boot boys are increasingly taking their politics onto the streets. This all makes for the perfect hard-right political storm. Just this week Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany’s Verfassungsschutz domestic intelligence agency, warned that right-wing extremists were networking on a European level, in some cases with connections in the United States.

The agency’s annual report said that the incidence of far-right violent acts jumped by 42 per cent to 1,408 in 2015 and the number of arson attacks against refugee centres surged to 75 from just five a year earlier. “This is not just purely a German phenomenon,” Mr Maassen warned.

If all this seems eerily familiar then, yes, it is. Already I can hear the chorus of sceptics who think drawing parallels between the 1930s and today is overblown and alarmist. But look again and there are some disquieting similarities. Now, just as then, we have growing nationalist factions in many European countries that want to reassert national sovereignty and to hell with any “foreigners” or “outsiders” who get in the way.

Now, just as then, underpinning the rise of fascism is a profound crisis within liberal democracy and the structures on which it rests. Now, just as then, the Left and progressive movements, parties and institutions that should act as the bulwark against the rise of the extreme right and fascism are too busy blaming each other to do anything effective about it. Unpalatable as it might be, the extreme right has an undeniable sense of momentum. In recent years its cruder manifestations in the form of neo-Nazi groups, racists and white supremacists were by and large fringe organisations.

Today, however, not only have the ranks of such groups swollen, they have also found a conducive mainstream political climate under which their bigoted views are not only tolerated but also allowed to gain traction. Those who insist that our worst fears of fascism’s resurgence are unfounded and will never be realised need to wake up. Open a newspaper in the wake of Brexit and Mr Trump’s election and the stories speak volumes of this insidious and growing threat to democracies almost everywhere.

Over the past few weeks I’ve read about neo-Nazis on the streets of Stockholm, Ku Klux Klansmen planning to hold public “victory marches” to celebrate Mr Trump’s win, the hoisting of Swastika flags over US homes, and a report yesterday of members of the Greek neo-fascist Golden Dawn Party stoning refugees in camps on the island of Chios.

These are signs of the times in much the same way as the serried ranks of Blackshirts and Brownshirts were on the streets of Britain, Italy and Germany in the 1930s. Denial and complacency in the face of such threats leave us even more vulnerable to the predations of such vile beliefs and politics. The sudden revisionist take in some quarters on Mr Trump in the wake of his election win was both nauseating and terrifying. It showed how all too easy it is to begin normalising views that were utterly unacceptable during the election campaign and should remain so now.

What he said cannot be unsaid and the same goes for those who espouse and promulgate similar racist, misogynistic and xenophobic politics. As history has taught us, the price of ignoring these signs leads us to a dark place and is written in the blood of millions across the world.

“Never again”, we told ourselves after Nazism was defeated and that clarion call must go out now as a matter of urgency. Many years ago I interviewed a Scottish veteran of the International Brigade who had fought against the fascism of General Franco in Spain in the 1930s after democracy there came under threat.

“There are two ways to fight fascism,” the man then in his 80s told me. “The first is to be better organised than them and to challenge and counter them ideologically at every turn.” And the other way, I asked?

“Well one hopes it never comes down to it but, if necessary, we have to be prepared to take off the gloves and get stuck in about them,” was the old man’s conclusive reply.

Last weekend at Remembrance events across Scotland, the UK and Commonwealth states, we paid homage to those of a generation who made the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against fascism.

Our grandfathers and grandmothers fought and died for a better world and to rid us of the persecution, intolerance, dictatorship and evil that accompany the perversity that is fascism.

We owe it to our forebears to do our part in ensuring that the hopes they had for future generations are not squandered.

Mr Trump in America, the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, the Golden Dawn in Greece and Ukip in Britain: the list goes on.

We need to use every means at our political disposal to organise and argue the case against the extreme right and, where necessary, confront the evil lurking malignantly around us. It’s time to step up to the political plate and do this in an uncompromising and unflinching way. Let’s not write off the threat as being overblown. This is not the moment to deny the reality of fascism in our midst.