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Fascism: A Warning
By Madeleine Albright
Madeleine Albright, U.S. secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, was the first woman
to hold that post. Czech by birth, she was nine when her family escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to London, where her father, Josef Korbel, worked for the Czech government-in-exile after Hitler's invasion of her homeland. Raised as a Roman Catholic from the age of four, she would not learn that her parents had converted from Judaism until much later in life. After enduring the Blitz, they returned to Prague, then moved to Yugoslavia when her father was appointed press attache′ at the Czechoslovakian embassy in Belgrade. Young Madeleine was sent to school in Switzerland to avoid communist indoctrination.
Korbel opposed communism, so the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia prompted him to move his family yet again, this time to the United States. They settled in Denver. Albright was eleven years old and had "no goal more ambitious than to become the typical American teenager." That teenager started an international affairs club in high school, where she prompted discussions of ideas from Titoism to Gandhi's satyagraha. She earned her citizenship in 1957 and went on to a multifaceted career as journalist, mother, academician, political advisor, and diplomat at the highest levels.
Albright died on February 23—one day before Russia's most recent invasion of Ukraine. Published in 2018, Fascism: A Warning also preceded much of the previous U.S. presidential administration. But although the book appeared four years ago, Albright's deeply informed, incisive, and empathic analysis of the events leading up to our current situation were prescient and are even more compelling in 2022.
Fascism starts with an inquiry into what the term means. We think of it as a political philosophy—an outgrowth of extreme right, ultraconservative, nationalistic, and racist views. The word has been appropriated to brand a broad range of persons and policies deemed undesirable. Albright reframes fascism as a process, a means of seizing and holding power, independent of ideology or left/right political orientation. Fascists exploit resentment and confusion by offering simple solutions. What they actually deliver is far less. Instead, they play on people's fears, foment division (typically by dehumanizing a scapegoat group blamed for their followers' grievances), and incite hatred and anger. This establishes a foundation for increasing political control that ultimately progresses to repression.
Albright uses the ensuing chapters to anatomize fascism in several nations, demonstrating how strongmen—from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin, the Kim family, Orbán, Erdogan, Duterte, Chávez, and Putin—have employed the tactics of fascism to sow disinformation, seize power, silence opposing views, circumvent representative government, and suppress their citizens. She does not hesitate to examine what she has witnessed in the United States. Most telling, however, is the way Albright exposes the process not only through the actions of power-hungry autocrats but also through the reactions of the people who enable their power. "There are two types of Fascists," Albright notes, "those who give orders, and those who take them": Within each of us there is an inexhaustible desire for liberty. . . . However, that desire often seems in competition with our desire to be told what to do. . . . When we are afraid, confused, or angry, we may be tempted to give away bits of our freedom . . . in the quest for direction and order.
In 1936, Hitler described his popularity as a product of that quest: "Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them. . . . I, on the other hand, reduced them to their simplest terms. The masses realized this and followed me." One ordinary German citizen described the transition to fascist rule: "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice —please try to believe me. . . . Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion,‘regretted,’ that . . . one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing."
Hitler's rise to power reflects the prediction of political philosopher Oswald Spengler, writing in 1918 at the end of the Great War:
The last century was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and skepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism and money. But in this century, blood and instinct will regain their rights. . . . The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.
Will autocracy triumph in the twenty-first century, if not the twentieth? As an "optimist who worries a lot," Albright acknowledges the possibility, if we abandon the"difficult art" of defending our democratic institutions. Those who feel embittered and alienated, who believe themselves to be entitled to more from their government without asking more of themselves, are vulnerable to fascist deception, control, and abuse. Autocrats promise solutions but their goal is power, and their methods boil down to this: any means necessary.
Albright offers an eye-opening narrative of where our world has been, where it is, and where it may be headed. Her perspective helps us identify the characteristics, of both leaders and citizens, that undermine democratic institutions. We are not immune:
Good guys don't always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price.
—Chris Moose, editor, the Voter
