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.