Book Review: Madeleine Albright's "Fascism"

History is remarkably grounding, if one pays attention to it and studies it, especially amid considerably turbulent and uncertain times. This holds true for Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state from 1997-2001 and ambassador to the United Nations, who was both an avid consumer of history and a close participant. A child of WWII and the early Cold War, Albright fled with her family from her native Czechoslovakia in 1939 to London ahead of Hitler's invasion. Returning six years later, Albright subsequently witnessed the early stages of the Cold War, with her homeland falling under the sway of Communist regimes. From America, her family then watched as the Berlin Wall fell, signalling the death knell of the USSR and the Cold War. Having witnessed two governmental extremes in her early life and armed with her historical knowledge (especially about her native Central & Eastern Europe) gleaned in her professorial days, Albright brought an invaluable understanding to her conduct as secretary of state. Reflecting on her life and public service, Albright (along with co-author Bill Woodward) attempts to provide context for our present era of strife-anxiety over globalization, the rise of populism, increased protectionist/isolationist sentiments, concerns over sociocultural change and various immigrant crises, rising racism/misogyny-in her 2018 historical treatise Fascism: A Warning.

Throughout the book, I got the impression that the main message was that, yes, fascism has happened many times before in history, but that for all the carnage and evil, people snapped out of it eventually when they realized that one person or party cannot provide the simple answers they wish for complex problems. And that no amount of catastrophic division can serve as a justifiable means to an end. That doesn't make what happened in the past, or what is happening presently since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 any less concerning or scary. It's just that looking to the past for lessons on how to deal with the present can be grounding, taking away the core of our uncertainty that comes with the perception that things have never been this bad.

Like her readers were students in her graduate foreign policy class at Georgetown University, Albright profiles Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Slobodan Milosevic, Hugo Chavez, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Jaroslaw Kacynski, Kim Jong-Un and even Donald Trump (as much as it is possible so early into his presidency). From Europe to the Middle East, East Asia, and America, each profile is helpfully situated within the eras they took power in: post-WWI, WWII, the Cold War, post 9/11. Joseph McCarthy even makes a cameo appearance in the second-most recent national turmoil fresh in our collective cultural memories in the Cold War, Red Scare era. These eras were defined by periods of significant social, cultural, economic and political turmoil, from the ravages of war to rising unemployment and corruption that often gave rise to a toxic mix of nationalism and militarism against scapegoated Others believed to be the cause of their problems (and thus stoked by dictatorial figures like Hitler, Mussolini, and present-day leaders like Putin and Orban into incredibly destructive geopolitical flames). Both left-wing and right-wing revolutions were hijacked for this purpose, even in America, where the interwar period saw the rise of sympathetic groups like the America First Committee (AFC) that sought to prevent American involvement in WWII. A harrowing picture of a dog-eat-dog world was often painted, with a zero-sum game of constant international competition defining international relations.

Sound familiar?

Strains of these eras are with us today in our era of despair over the state of democracy, a seeming resurgence of authoritarianism, refugee crises and histrionics over immigrants irrevocably changing a nation's essence. Albright is definitely concerned about how Trump's antidemocratic sentiments erode our own relatively strong democratic institutions and serves to embolden dictators and their wannabes, but doesn't feel as if our circumstances are as dire as they were in the interwar or Cold War years. The foundation for this cautiously optimistic assessment is that socioeconomic and political conditions have markedly improved over the years and average lifespans have lengthened for the average person. Yet, globalization and the inequalities it has generated, combined with refugee-producing intrastate conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa and climate change are no trifling matters.

In her conclusion, Albright acknowledges the latter issues of the present day, but counters pessimistic readers (admittedly, like myself) with the fact that, in the past, leaders like Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln rose not by dividing, but by uniting people to confront their collective problems in more democratic ways. However, like the dictators and fascists Albright profiles in Fascism: A Warning, no one leader can be our savior; we must also stand up for ourselves and our democracy by being more outspoken participants in our democratic process. Undoubtedly, it will be a difficult fight and the good guys do not always win. But how can we live with ourselves if we don't try to stand up for what's right?

"The temptation is powerful to close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass, but history tells us that for freedom to survive, it must be defended, and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed." (Albright, 2018, p. 252)

Works Cited:

Albright, Madeleine, & Woodward, Bill. (2018). Fascism: A Warning. New York: HarperCollins.

Book Review: James W. Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me"

In our age of fake news, populist leaders like President Trump have been known to make false statements on a wide range of issues, from history to policy. Especially dangerous are distortions or revisionist interpretations of the former (like declaring human trafficking to be the worst problem in the history of the world, ignoring the obvious injustices of slavery and the barbarity of Columbus towards indigenous peoples), which can dangerously narrow one's worldview and the available solutions to the present world's problems. Trump is not alone in misunderstanding or omitting key parts of American history. Many Americans (myself included) struggle to recall various historical factoids from our high school civics/history courses and what we do recall might be wrong (or the fact that the history textbooks used were back-breaking behemoths!). What has gone wrong with the teaching of American history? Author, historian and sociologist James Loewen sets out to answer this question in the newest (2007) edition of his popular book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

Originally published in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me is out with a second edition, to cover more ground with recent events like 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Most of the book is dedicated at the outset to dispelling myths around events like Columbus's landing in "America" to the post Civil War period of Reconstruction to 9/11 and the role of government in domestic/international affairs as they are portrayed in the major high-school level textbooks (Loewen surveys 18 textbooks for his latest edition). The last few chapters are devoted especially to textbook critique and suggests ways that teachers could improve student engagement in American history courses.

Because Loewen covers a great deal of historical ground, I will focus on the main issues Loewen raises with textbooks. First and foremost is how history is often shaped by the victors (i.e. the dominant culture) to both paint them and their ancestors in a more flattering light and whitewash (some pun intended here) much of the bad done (i.e. African and American Indian slavery, the Spanish conquistadors' brutal exploitation of indigenous peoples in the name of greed). In other words, history is often self-serving to dominant groups and this is reflected in textbooks by the near-deification of figures like Christopher Columbus and Helen Keller, turning them from imperfect human beings into bland and "pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest" (Loewen, 2018, p. 31). Historical figures become archetypes, often used for the purposes of instilling blind patriotism by identifying in them our values: tolerance, forward-thinking, hard-working, industrious, etc. (Perhaps this identification is more the result of the projection of our societal values, specifically Western ones, onto historical figures, rather than the other way around.)

One of the more prominent examples to me was that of Columbus, whose atrocities towards native populations (something I hadn't discovered until my college courses in American government/history and multicultural studies) cannot be overstated (for example, enslavement of indigenous peoples), is more well known for apparently being a progressive, forward-thinking explorer carrying the hopes of Europe with him to the New World. Then there is Woodrow Wilson, who, despite his famous championing of women's suffrage and the League of Nations, was notoriously racist, segregating the federal government while he was in office.

The second issue is that the textbooks teachers teach from (often because it is easier than devoting more time they don't have outside of their many other duties to radically restructuring the curriculum and lesson plans) encourage the teaching of history in a way that does not invite controversies. Rather, history is presented as a black-and-white string of loosely-connected events, with each event a problem that is neatly resolved with some sort of action, usually on behalf of centralized authorities (like racism being solved by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act). And with each successive correction of injustice, we get ever closer to perfection as a society (i.e. the ideal of progress as inevitable). This means that it is very difficult to persuade anyone that history has relevance to their daily lives if the past itself was a mess of seemingly unrelated events. Moreover, it prevents students and citizens from seeing how issues like racism and inequality persist in various (yet often different or more subtle) forms today. And it leads to a dangerous trap of apathy: if nothing can be done to understand today's issues in historical context, why bother trying to change anything?

Finally, there's the issue that textbooks aren't written by historians and often stray far from primary sources (letters, photographs, videos, etc.). That really surprised me. Shouldn't the knowledge being imparted to students (students we want to be better, engaged citizens) require the strictest vetting and fact-checking (especially by people trained in that specific subject area)? No wonder there are so many false narratives and misconceptions out there.

What solutions are there, if any, to this complex problem of history teaching? Loewen suggests that to ameliorate the pressures coming from parents, publishing companies, textbook approval boards and more is to teach history in a way that teaches critical thinking and independent learning (rather than rote learning of a pre-approved narrative) with an eye towards teaching backwards (from the present to the past). Because there's so much history out there, this necessitates limitations on what material can be covered, but it might be a vast improvement if people merely learn that today's issues (and solutions) are often in the past. In summation, teaching history by showing its intimate connections with our lives could promote student (and adult) engagement and renewed interest in an important subject. Who knew?!

While I felt that there was a heavy-handed and often repetitive focus on textbook critique in certain parts of the book rather than little-known historical happenings, Loewen overall got across a valuable point to readers: something needs to change in regards to teaching history. Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book that everyone should read, providing an eye-opening narrative that not only expands on the good and bad left out in textbooks but also conveys the expansive, complex, captivating, and relevant nature of history.


Works Cited:

Summers, Juana. (2017, August 24). Trump's Muddled View of American History. Retrieved July 27, 2018, from https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/19/politics/trump-history-facts-historians/index.html.

Loewen, James W. (2007). Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press.