Fascism: A Warning

Madeleine Albright, “Fascism: A Warning,” Harper Luxe, 2018 Large Print Paperback, 367 pp.  

 I began this book in a paperback large font, then finished reading the book in regular font size from Waupaca library. 

Fascism is back in fashion across the world and has some presence in the US, with or without Trump, is the message from former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.   In many places, we see strongmen on the rise, and this authoritarian resurgence is accompanied by a conspicuous surge of ideas from the far right. Albright perceived disturbing trends when she began writing this book before Trump was elected (she didn’t believe that could happen).

So are we experiencing a revival of the most virulent forms of extreme right-wing ideology, of the sort that the West thought it had vanquished back in 1945? Albright believes that answering this question is crucial to understanding the current political moment. The first chapters of her book follow the careers of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in the 1920s and ’30s. Her account gains additional force from her own biography: As a little girl, she had to leave her native Czechoslovakia with her family after the Nazis invaded in 1939. (Her 54-year-old maternal grandmother, who was Jewish, was murdered by the Nazis during World War II.)

Albright discusses her travels as secretary of state with reflections that include encounters with Hugo Chavez, Slobodan Milosevic, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin. Yet, she admits that none of these politicians really qualify as fascists. She does mention that the Kim family regime in North Korea probably qualifies as the only truly fascist regime in the world today.

Albright identifies President Trump as the “first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history.”   As I was reading this book I reflected that too many people are centering their attention on Trump and believe when he is out of office decent behavior will return.  Not so: something is loose in this country (and much of the world) that allowed such a leader to be elected and it will not go away with his exit.  However, I believe coming elections will dampen down some of it—people may surely have awakened to the need to vote and put more thought into voting for third party candidates.

My Notes:

Pg. 5:  Commensurate with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, around the globe, countries meriting the label ‘democracy’ expanded from thirty-five to more than one hundred.  Twenty-five years later, we must ask what has happened to the uplifting vision that so recently was present.  Why has the US—at least temporarily—abdicated its leadership in world affairs?  And why, this far into the twenty-first century, are we once again talking about Fascism?  One reason, frankly, is Donald Trump.  Madeline Albright in her travels hears the same questions all the time: If the president of the US says the press always lies, how can Putin be faulted for making the same claim?  If Trump insists that judges are biased and calls the American criminal system a ‘laughingstock,’ what is to stop an autocratic leader like Duterte of the Philippines from discrediting his own judiciary?  If Trump accuses opposition politicians of treason merely for failing to applaud his words, what standing will America have to protest the jailing of prisoners of conscience in other lands?  If no country can gain except at another’s cost, who will carry the banner for international teamwork when the most intractable problems cannot be solved in any other way?

Pg. 118f:  The Nazis sorted humans based on nationality and race; to Communists, the key determinant was class.  In Germany, Jews and Roma were persecuted; in the Soviet Union, the principal targets were landowners, the bourgeoisie, and only later the Jews.  The Nazis seized control of state institutions; the Communists dismantled and then rebuilt them, replacing a slothful czarist bureaucracy with a lumbering and inefficient Soviet one.  Both Stalin and Hitler shared a common language: violence.  Both despised the Jeffersonian ideals of popular governance, reasoned debate, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and fair electoral competition. 

Pg. 132:  Senator Joseph McCarthy had the instincts of a Mussolini, but without the intellectual foundation.  He was a showman who loved politics and craved power.  His temperament was that of a Fascist bully.  During his early years in the Senate, he tried to think up an angle that would make sensational news out of tariffs, public housing, sugar quotas, or Pentagon procurement.  It was hard going.  In 1950 with his reelection campaign on the horizon, he stepped up his quest for a headline-grabbing idea.  A Jesuit friend of his, Father Edmund Walsh, SJ, was dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, suggested that Communism and the threat to national security would make a good issue.

Pg. 144:  When in 1991, Yugoslavia broke into five pieces, the dissolution was most wrenching in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had a Muslim majority but also housed significant Serb and Croat communities.  As part of the breakup, Milosevic allowed Bosnian Serbs from the Yugoslav Army to return home with all their weapons, giving them the upper hand in what quickly became a grisly civil war.

Every party to the Bosnian bloodbath could be faulted for human rights violations, but the Serbs had the greater firepower and committed by far the most egregious crimes.  As early as the summer of 1992, there were ninety-four Serb-run concentration camps in which, all told, tens of thousands of prisoners were beaten, starved, or raped.  (The Dayton Accords in 1995 ended the Bosnian War).

Pg. 154:  The twentieth-century had three make-or-break opportunities for long lasting pieced.  The first was at the end of WWI, but the US refused to participate in the League of Nations leaving Germany in a quest for vengeance on one side of the Atlantic and America’s retreat into isolationism on the other: Fascism was ultimately ignited.  The second was the end of WWII in which the international community built institutions that fostered prosperity and helped avoid yet another global conflict—of course, we did have a ‘Cold War.’  The third was marked by the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall—a fresh chance to make the world more stable, civilized, and just.

Pg. 162:  In 2017, The Economist’s Democracy Index showed a decline in democratic health in seventy countries, using such criteria as respect for due process, religious liberty, and the space given to civil society.  Among the nations scoring less well was the US, which for the first time was rated a ‘flawed democracy,’ not a ‘full’ one.  The analysts didn’t blame Donald Trump for this fall from grace but rather attributed his election to Americans’ loss of confidence in their institutions.  Popular trust in government, elected representatives, and political parties have fallen to extremely low levels, the report concluded, adding, and “This has been a long-term trend.”  In 2016 a poll determined that the number of Americans who say that they have faith in their government ‘just about always’ or ‘most of the time’ dropped from about 70 percent in the early 1960s to below 20 percent in 2016.  (I attribute this to the loss of a common and reputable media and the rise of silo media outlets devoted to attracting clicks while not at all devoted to accuracy).

Pg. 170:  When we awaken each morning, we see around the globe what appear to be Fascism’s early stirrings: the discrediting of mainstream politicians, the emergence of leaders who seek to divide rather than to unite, the pursuit of political victory at all costs, and the invocation of national greatness by people who seem to possess only a warped concept of what greatness means. 

Pg. 214f:  On July 15, 2016, a faction within the Turkish military tried to kill Erdogan and take over the government.  The coup failed and with parliament’s support, he declared a state of emergency.  As the months passed, more than 140,000 government employees were suspended or fired, 16,000 military and police officers cashiered, 6,300 teachers purged, 2,500 journalists sacked, 1,000 businesses seized, 180 media outlets shut down, fifteen universities closed, and one out of every five judges forced to resign.

Notes below are from regular font (not large print) book from Waupaca Library:

Pg. 157:  During the Great Depression, America’s economic output declined by one-third.  In the 1990s, Russia’s shrank by more than half. 

Pg. 164:  Late in 2016, the American intelligence community reported that Moscow had used online tools to influence the American electoral process and to help Putin’s preferred candidate, Donald Trump, gain the Oval Office.  Comparable disruptive efforts have been directed toward balloting in France, Italy, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, the Baltics, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Georgia.  Methods include the theft and release of campaign e-mails, the generation of phony documents, the use of disguised identities on Facebook and the dissemination of fictitious and sometimes libelous ‘news’ stories that are then picked up and splashed around by social media. 

Russia’s motives are apparently to discredit democracy, divide Europe, weaken the transatlantic partnership, and punish governments that dare stand up to Moscow.  This agenda is about power, pure and simple 

Pg. 181:  Today, nearly two-thirds of the citizens in EU countries believe immigration has a harmful impact on their societies.  In the United Kingdom, wariness toward migrants almost certainly led to Brexit. 

Pg. 184:  In Hungary, the EU refugee crisis has given Prime Minister Orban another supposedly existential threat against which to rally his people.  Orban has chosen to foment paranoia.  Ignoring the fact that relatively few migrants are clamoring to enter Hungary he declared, “The masses arriving from other civilizations endanger our way of life, our culture, our customs and our Christian traditions.”  He said migrants would bring ‘crime and terror…mass disorder…riots…and gangs hunting down our women and daughters.’  Orban then went on to pin responsibility for this imaginary plot on George Soros.  Late in 2017, the government sent a questionnaire to every household asking whether it supported the ‘Soros Plan’ to force Hungary to accept migrants, pay them welfare, and assure them lenient sentences for any crimes they might commit.  Orban has added to his demagoguery with a crowd-pleasing project to build border walls and by incarcerating some migrants in shipping containers surrounded by high fences topped by razor wire. 

Pg. 190:  In WWII’s last week, Stalin’s Red Army penetrated far into the northern half of Korea.  American diplomats shifted their focus from should be done to what could be achieved most easily.  They met with their Soviet counterparts and, tracing lines on a map, consented to the peninsula’s ‘temporary’ division along the 38^th parallel.  The people who lived there were not consulted.  In 1948 the US supported Republic of Korea (ROK), while the USSR-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK); both officially declared their existence.  North Korea’s head of government was hand-selected by the Soviets (Kim Il-sung).  Kim then persuaded the Soviets to underwrite an invasion of the South, boasting to Stalin that he would win easily. 

Pg. 193:  Until 1990, North Korea was more prosperous than the South but with the end of the cold war their star began to set.  China embarked on a program of economic opening and reform.  The USSR started to demand full market price for its oil.  Eastern European trading partners turned their backs.  The North Koreans reacted by withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and prepared to extract weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods in the DPRK’s one operational nuclear reactor.  Kim planned to build nuclear bombs. 

Pg. 212: Trump’s view of the US is dark.  Among his favorite mantras are that US courts are biased, the FBI is corrupt, the press almost always lies, and elections are rigged.  Americans have never heard a president speak with such persistent scorn about US institutions.  Also, Trump’s audience is a global one.  Instead of encouraging others to respect and follow the example of the US, he invites the opposite, especially in his ridicule of journalist.

Pg. 218:  Trump’s cynical attitude explains the president’s peculiar view of NATO as a protection scheme in which the US is ‘owed’ billions of dollars for supposedly hiring out its armed forces to provide security for others.  Albright, on the other hand, views NATO as a unique political and military arrangement that for more than seven decades has allowed Europe and the US to prepare, train, share intelligence and fight against common dangers.  It’s the cornerstone of world peace and a living testament to our collective will.

Pg. 220:  Since early 2017, surveys show a marked decline in respect for the US.  In Germany, belief that the American president can be counted on to do the right thing shrank from 86 percent under his predecessor to 11 percent under Trump.  In France, the fall was from 84 percent to 14; in Japan, 74 to 24; in South Korea, 84 to 17.

Pg. 221:  Trump has attempted to fulfill campaign promises that he should never have made.  The list is a long one and includes: renunciation of the Paris Climate Agreement; putting at risk the benefits of the North America Free Trade Agreement; badmouthing the Iran nuclear pact (he actually pulled out of the agreement); squandering resources on the Mexico wall; trying to ban Muslim immigrants; and proposing to slash our budget for diplomacy, development, and environmental health. 

Pg. 245f:  Albright believes that Fascism and Fascist policies pose a more virulent threat to international freedom, prosperity, and peace than at any time since WWII.  She concludes that a Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.  Up until now, Albright felt that America could be counted on to put obstacles in the way of any such leader, party, or movement.  She now has her doubts.