Fascism: A Warning
by Madeleine Albright (William Collins, £14.99)
Peter Hegarty
Albright’s striking title emphasises her concern about the rise of strongmen around the world: ‘Some may view this book and its title as alarmist. Good. We should be awake to the assault on democratic values that has gathered strength in many countries abroad and that is dividing America at home.’
Fascism of the Right and Left has shaped her life. Her Czech family fled Nazi repression, finding refuge in Britain. They left behind her maternal grandmother, who died in a camp. After the war the family returned home, for good, or so they thought, but had to flee again, this time to the United States, when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia, in 1948.
The former US Secretary of State uses the term ‘Fascist’ to refer to charismatic, populist leaders who espouse authoritarian, nationalist policies. They offer direction and purpose in difficult times, exploiting our natural desire to be part of a ‘meaningful quest.’
Albright has much to say about Donald Trump, noting his charisma, his ability to reach out to people with grievances. She makes the interesting point that he may assist the rise of strongmen in other countries, encourage others to take the populist path. He is “a gift to repressive regimes”.
Discussion
As they must in any discussion of Fascism, German and Italian Fascism were comparable in some respects, very different in others. Mussolini didn’t share Hitler’s anti-Semitism, for instance, and only began persecuting Italy’s Jews when his ally put him under pressure to do so. There was some space for dissent, and labour activism in Italy, but none in Germany, where Hitler imposed an extreme form of Fascism, brooking no opposition.
Theses dictators helped Franco defeat democracy in Spain. He emerges from these pages as perhaps the most successful Fascist in history, a man who died peacefully, decades after seizing power, having overseen the economic transformation of his country.
Albright’s exploration of a baleful ideology takes her to Latin America, the one region she doesn’t handle well. Her claim that Ronald Reagan was committed to democracy will raise eyebrows in places like Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Many will take issue with her description of former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, as an inhabitant of “the outskirts” of Fascism: “The Venezuelan experience shows that when economic and social conditions deteriorate and democratic politicians fail in their obligation to lead, the lure of a gifted pied piper can be hard to resist.”
“A gifted pied piper” Chávez might have been, but he was a democratically-elected “gifted pied piper”.
He was a failure rather than a Fascist, one of a succession of Venezuelan politicians who have failed to wean the country off its dependence on the export of oil.
It’s strange that a book about Fascism should overlook a country’s recent experience of the real thing. Right-wing nationalist generals took power in Argentina in 1976, and slunk off in disgrace in 1982, having lost a war, and killed up to 30,000 people. One of the thousands tortured under the generals was a Jewish publisher, Jacobo Timerman, who would later recall the portrait of Hitler that adorned the wall of the dungeon where they set about him.
‘Every age has its own Fascism’, the writer and survivor of Auschwitz Primo Levi once remarked. Argentina’s ordeal confirms the truth of that aphorism, the introduction to a perceptive, informed book.