In this talk, I address the problem posed by the diffusion of fascism far beyond the confines of Mussolini’s movement and regimes in the first half of the 20th century and assess the significance of its afterlife since 1945 as an international threat to democracy and humanistic values a century later. The term “fascism” has undergone an extraordinary proliferation of the concept among scholars, political ideologues, and antifascist activists who have over the last hundred years endowed the term with a multitude of different definitions, interpretations and meanings. I argue that a radical distinction should be drawn between fascism and the many other forms of political extremism that now manifest themselves in movements and regimes, particularly Radical Right-Wing Populism, the scourge of modern liberal democracies. One impact of the deep human trauma of the fascist era in the collective memory and historical imagination is to blind many contemporary socialists, liberals, religious humanists and human idealists to the fact that the main political threat to modern democracy lies not in its fascistization but its illiberalization (sometimes called Orbanization), which is now having such catastrophic human consequences inflicted by the deliberalization of US and Israeli politics under Trump and Netanyahu. This involution of democracy and retreat from global humanistic ideals is one symptom of a deeper blight of humanity, which I describe as incurvation, a global turning away from other-directed humanistic compassion and idealism in both secular and religious states which can only deepen humankind’s impotence to tackle the global threats to the survival of our species.