BOOK REVIEW. Every age has its own fascism

Maddeningly sanctimonious and irritatingly condescending in parts, Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning , is yet a book for our times. It must be read, as much for what it says, as for what it leaves out. Soft on a mass murderer like Franco of Spain, easy on Trump, and ignoring the genocide in what is now Bangladesh, Albright’s book has just enough residual value, to squeak through the gap to be an essential read.

Albright, a Jew, has the credentials to write on fascism, having experienced it at first hand. Several of her close relatives, including her grandparents perished in German concentration camps. She fled her native Czechoslovakia with her parents twice — first to England when the Nazis overran the country and next to the US when, after a fleeting tryst with freedom, Czechoslovakia went communist.

In her book, Albright dwells extensively on the kind of fascism that Mussolini and Hitler practiced, one in which, as Albright tells us, “a single party, speaking with one voice, controlling every state institution, claiming to represent all people, and labelling the entire sham a triumph of the popular will”.

As people once again repose their faith in strong men pursuing muscular nationalist agendas, Albright steps in with her book, warning us that there never can be a happy ending when people choose to go the fascist way. Fascists, Albright contends, can only flatter to deceive as Mussolini, and Hitler did, bringing death and destruction to millions across the world. Unsurprisingly Albright does not leave out the communists like Stalin and Tito when she talks of fascism, contending that they aped its techniques, “attacking the press, smearing political rivals, demanding total loyalty from party members and threatening anyone who stood in their way”. The last is important for violence, or the threat of it, is an integral part of fascism.

Primo Levi observed “Every age has its own Fascism”, and Albright agrees. Beware of the “magnetic leader, exploiting widespread disaffection, by promising all things”, she tells us. From Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin and Tito, the book shifts to more recent times and the rise of dictators with strong fascist characteristics like Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Museveni of Uganda, Maduro of Venezuela and the ‘communist monarchy’ which North Korea really is.

Albright devotes a full chapter of her book to the rise of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who, to her mind, is treading the fascist path but she stops just short of classifying him as a fascist. Not so Putin who, in her view, is a ‘natural’ fascist by upbringing and temperament.

‘Fascism A Warning,’ is persuasive and engaging without being excessively anecdotal. It is an essential read for us in India as we head to the 2019 general elections. Every page of Albright’s book should make us reflect on the people and the political parties in the fray. Each of these parties has its storm troopers and ideologues. If the BJP clearly displays some fascist tendencies that Albright talks about, so do all other parties, in varying degrees. Albright’s book is certainly not a definitive work on the subject. There are several others that explain the nature and character of fascism in greater depth than Fascism: A Warning , does. A few that immediately come to mind are, Hannah Arendt’s classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism , Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives , as well as Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power . These are powerful works but unlike Albright’s book, none of them is an easy read.

Trump’s shadow

Albright’s understated raison d’etre for writing this book is the rise of Trump to the presidency of the US, deploying some of the techniques that would have made a Mussolini or a Hitler proud. She fears for her adopted country. She needn’t, for fortunately the US has an evolved and mature democratic system, with enough resilience to outlast anyone seeking to destroy it. The determination with which the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian involvement in the US presidential election is proceeding, is a case in point.

Where ‘Fascism a Warning,’ falters is when it dwells on human rights and US’ role in promoting it across the world. Albright is being rank hypocritical in not talking about the long and unedifying US record in deposing democratically elected governments and replacing them with vile and murderous fascist regimes across the world.

The CIA was instrumental in getting rid of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1951, and replacing him with an upstart fascist, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi later overthrown by Ayatollah Khomenei in 1979. In Indonesia, the US was complicit in the 1965-66 mass-killings of over half a million Indonesians by General Suharto.

Not many know that the US supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge which went on to murder over two million Cambodians. In Chile, the CIA, by its own admission, was behind the overthrow of its popularly elected President Salvadore Allende in 1973.

Recently declassified US documents clearly indicate that the US supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran which lasted eight years, and killed over half a million people on both sides. It is also well-known that the US dropped three times more bombs — more than 7 million tonnes — over Vietnam, than it did in the entire Second World War, all the while propping up corrupt and violent men to head the South Vietnamese government.

Fascism A Warning , would have been a great work if Albright had highlighted the US role in creating and sustaining fascist regimes around the world. But how could she, a former Secretary of State under President Clinton, and therefore a member of the establishment, ever have done that?

The reviewer is a former civil servant and taught at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore