Culture | March of the times

Madeleine Albright’s guide to fascism, past and present

Dismissive of hyperbole, the former secretary of state is still nervy about Donald Trump

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Fascism: A Warning. By Madeleine Albright. Harper Collins; 254 pages; $27.99 and £16.99.

WITHIN each human heart lies an inexhaustible yearning for liberty, “or so we democrats like to believe”, writes Madeleine Albright near the end of “Fascism: A Warning”, a book on how nations descend into tyranny. In reality, that desire often competes with another: the urge to be told what to do. When people are fearful, angry or confused, observes Mrs Albright, a former secretary of state, they are tempted to give away freedoms, or the freedom of others, to leaders promising order. In uncertain times many no longer want to be asked what they think: “We want to be told where to march.”

Her book is dedicated to victims of fascism, but also to “all who fight fascism in others and in themselves”. Mrs Albright has earned the right to that ambitious mission-statement. At a moment when the question “Is this how it begins?” haunts Western democracies, she writes with rare authority. She is not just a distinguished elder stateswoman, a former ambassador to the United Nations before leading the State Department from 1997-2001. She was also a child refugee, twice, once from a fascism of the right, then from one of the left.

Mrs Albright was a toddler in 1939 when goose-stepping Nazis drove her family from Czechoslovakia to exile in London. At war’s end she returned home; her father resumed work with the Czechoslovak foreign service. In 1948 the crack of communist boots on cobblestones signalled a second, permanent exile, to America.

She sat through more sinister marching as Bill Clinton’s chief diplomat. In October 2000 Mrs Albright found herself in a stadium in Pyongyang next to Kim Jong-Il, watching 100,000 North Korean children and adults dance and thrust bayonets in perfect unison. The dictator turned out to be short (Mrs Albright and her host wore heels of the same height, she found), well-informed and cordial, if disingenuous. He confided that he had designed the show himself. She left her reaction unsaid: that it takes fascist levels of discipline to make so many strut as one.

Nowadays Washington fills every few months with marchers vowing resistance to President Donald Trump (who recently ordered his generals to stage a military parade for him to review). A longtime professor of international relations at Georgetown University, Mrs Albright hears, and deplores, cries of “fascist” by hotheads on all sides. She has met too many real-life despots to indulge such sloppy thinking, and seen too much of their handiwork, starting with the murder of many of her relatives in the Holocaust.

She describes a graduate seminar with Georgetown students in her sitting room, “lasagne-leaking paper plates on their laps” as she challenges them to define fascism. She reminds the class that fascism wears different ideological guises, sometimes calling for a dictatorship of the proletariat or higher pensions for the old, at others seizing power in the name of a race, a religion or national rebirth. In a useful passage, she defines a fascist as someone who claims to speak for a nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use all means, including violence: “A fascist will likely be a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a fascist.” One litmus test involves who is trusted with guns. Many kings or dictators fear the masses, and create corps of bodyguards to shield them, she notes. Fascists seek to have the mob on their side.

Mrs Albright sees only one true fascist regime today, in North Korea, with its ultra-nationalism and murderous contempt for human rights. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is not a full-blown fascist, she finds, because he has not yet felt the need.

Shame and submission

If Mrs Albright’s learning is to be expected, her way with words is a happy surprise, as is her wisdom about human nature. Free of geopolitical jargon, her deceptively simple prose is sprinkled with shrewd observations about the emotions that underpin bad or wicked political decisions. In her first meeting with Mr Putin, for example, he conceded that the Berlin Wall could never have lasted for ever, but deplored the chaotic haste of the Soviet exit from East Germany. He “is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness”, she jotted in a note. A proud man is, indeed, capable of almost anything to escape embarrassment.

Bookshops are full of expert guides to spotting a country’s slide into autocracy. Bearing names like “How Democracies Die” or “Trumpocracy”, they generally focus on the man in the White House. This book is broader; Mrs Albright says she first planned it as a primer for defending democracies worldwide, when she thought Hillary Clinton would win. Still, in historical chapters that a college might call Fascism 101, she has professorial fun describing despotic tactics with modern-day echoes, noting for instance that Benito Mussolini promised to “drain the swamp” by sacking Italian civil servants. Journalists were pointed out at his rallies so that his fans could yell at them. Only in periods of relative tranquillity are citizens “patient” enough for debate and deliberation, she writes, or to listen to experts.

As for Mr Trump, a tribune of the impatient, Mrs Albright’s wariness of hyperbole does not mean that she is sanguine. She calls him America’s first modern “anti-democratic president”. Transplanted to a country with fewer safeguards, he “would audition for dictator, because that is where his instincts lead”. In another era she would have been confident that such impulses would be contained by America’s institutions: “I never thought that, at age 80, I would begin to have doubts.”

If that sounds alarmist, it is supposed to. But her strictures are meant as much for diffident voters as for the president. She recalls her father’s anxiety on arriving in post-war America and finding locals so accustomed to liberty—so “very, very free”, he wrote—that they might take democracy for granted. Today she sees urgent work for citizens and responsible politicians, who may be tempted to close their eyes and wait for the worst to pass. She quotes Mussolini’s scornful idea of a crowd’s role: to “submit to being shaped”. Submission is the first step on an avoidable march.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "March of the times"

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