Fascism

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Madeleine Albright

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photographs © themacx/iStock/Getty Images

Madeleine Albright asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce from the following:

Tomorrow Belongs To Me

from the Musical CABARET

Words by Fred Ebb

Music by John Kander

Copyright © 1966 by Alley Music Corp. and Trio Music Company

Copyright Renewed

All Rights for Trio Music Company Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

Used by Permission

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME

Written by Fred Ebb, John Kander

Used by permission of Alley Music Corporation

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008282301

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008282288

Version: 2019-01-30

Dedication

To the victims of Fascism

Then and now

And to all who fight Fascism

In others

And in themselves

Epigraph

Every age has its own Fascism.

—PRIMO LEVI

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

PREFACE

ONE: A DOCTRINE OF ANGER AND FEAR

TWO: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

THREE: “WE WANT TO BE BARBARIANS”

FOUR: “CLOSE YOUR HEARTS TO PITY”

FIVE: VICTORY OF THE CAESARS

SIX: THE FALL

SEVEN: DICTATORSHIP OF DEMOCRACY

EIGHT: “THERE ARE A LOT OF BODIES UP THERE”

NINE: A DIFFICULT ART

TEN: PRESIDENT FOR LIFE

ELEVEN: ERDOĞAN THE MAGNIFICENT

TWELVE: MAN FROM THE KGB

THIRTEEN: “WE ARE WHO WE WERE”

FOURTEEN: “THE LEADER WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US”

FIFTEEN: PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

SIXTEEN: BAD DREAMS

SEVENTEEN: THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

FOOTNOTES

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE

I AM AT MY FARM NEAR THE BORDER THAT SEPARATES VIRGINIA from West Virginia. This morning, upon awakening, I poured a cup of coffee, put on a jacket, and walked outside to greet the cows who replied with a hearty chorus of moos. Having exhausted their vocabulary, I returned to the house, took a deep breath, switched on the television, and began writing this.

My desktop calendar is turned to December 2018. Last month, I was among the tens of millions of Americans who went to the polls, thus participating in democracy’s signature rite. The balloting in the midterm election was described by many—including the president—as a referendum on the leadership of Donald Trump. As such, the results were inconclusive, but to me, mildly encouraging. The Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives although the Republicans, as expected, increased their majority in the Senate. Maneuvering for the next big election has already commenced. I pray the campaign will be uplifting—but confess to harboring doubts.

This book, Fascism: A Warning, rose from the wreckage of 2016, for many of us a year of bewilderment. First the British were lured into Brexit by the false promise of a new relationship with the European Union, one they mistakenly thought would enable them to retain their rights while shedding their responsibilities. Then, in November, Donald Trump won a majority in the American electoral college despite violating every precept of conventional political wisdom (aside from remaining in the public eye) from the beginning of his campaign until the end. Few believed that could happen, but it did.

Even before the 2016 balloting, I had decided to write about the toils and snares confronting democracies around the world. My idea was to make support for free governments a foreign policy priority in Hillary Clinton’s first term. The political upheaval following the election added urgency to the task, and partially shifted the focus to include Trump’s take-no-prisoners approach to governing. Where in the past I could assume that the U.S. government would put its foot down on the side of democratic institutions and values, Trump’s foot has been fully engaged in kicking America’s allies, the independent press, federal prosecutors, immigrant families, and the notion—stressed to most children at an early age—that facts matter.

The resulting book was published originally in hardcover in April 2018. I dared hope then that the fears I express in its pages would quickly prove exaggerated. Alas, that has not been the case.

During the interval between then and now, heads of government with an autocratic bent have won reelection in Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Venezuela, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Cambodia. In each case, the field of competition was tilted heavily in favor of the incumbent. These were not fair elections. In Brazil, voters fed up with corruption, crime, and recession turned to an openly misogynistic right-wing candidate who promises quick solutions based, in part, on a full-scale retreat from environmental stewardship. In Europe and elsewhere, extreme nationalist movements continue to scale the ramparts—shifting the terms of debate, moving into legislatures, and grabbing for themselves a thicker slice of power. Italy’s new leaders boast of their refusal to knuckle under to regional norms. In Syria, the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad still flaunts his ability to dominate seven years after an American president urged his removal. In the Middle East, more fissures are opening due to such shocks as the cold-blooded murder and dismemberment of a reporter in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Worldwide, there are more refugees huddled in camps than there have been since the Nazi surrender almost three-quarters of a century ago, and the United States is less welcoming to the international homeless now than at any time in modern memory.

According to an old Czech saying, it’s no trick to make soup from a fish, but making a fish out of soup is a challenge. In the chapters to come, I argue that ambitious, often arrogant leaders are intentionally undermining the institutions and democratic principles that have held the world together through much of my life. Without offering anything real or better, they ask us to abandon the ideals of international cooperation, political pluralism, civil discourse, critical thinking, and truth. The longer these false prophets have their way, the more damage they will wreak and the more difficult it will be to heal the wounds they are opening. The trend is worldwide, and among those most directly affected are Americans.

In traveling around the United States to discuss this book, I have shared my thoughts with thousands of people from every region. The experience was bracing—and a little odd. In Las Vegas, my appearance coincided with a convention of the wine and spirits industry. Behind the table at which I signed books for both the sober and the tipsy, a banner read: MAKE WHISKEY GREAT AGAIN. Despite all the attention given to the “me too” movement, a gentleman in Miami rose to his feet and said, “I’m ninety years old, but I haven’t lost my eyesight, and you’re a good-looking gal.” An article in the Washington Post referred to me as “a lovable feminist granny.” By contrast, a man in Brooklyn who heard me speak told a reporter later that I was a “war mongering ghoul,” this according to a Russian newspaper. At every stop, when I opened the floor to questions, a hundred hands flew up.

Overall, I found the national mood to be cranky; and it’s no wonder we’re on edge. Our political parties are at war with one another and fracturing internally at the same time. We have a president who considers it good politics to drive our citizens apart and whose approach to world affairs prompts many among us to cringe while others stick out their chests. Common ground is hard to find; instead, we are at each other’s throats. Even now, with the volume on my television turned low, I can hear the yelling.

In this book, I offer both a historical perspective and a global one. Many of the trends we now see were also evident in much earlier decades. This leads to some important questions: What lessons can we derive for the future from the horrors perpetrated long ago by the followers of Mussolini and Hitler? Where do we draw the line between the simple abuse of authority and the gross misrule we call Fascism? How can we explain the alarming rise and contagious spread of anti-democratic trends? Is the hitherto unshakable bond between Europe and the United States unraveling and, if so, can it still be mended? What must we do to ensure the preservation of freedom for our children and those who will come after?

My farm provides a good vantage point from which to ponder such topics. Like a democracy at work, the property is vulnerable both to sudden storms and to the encroachment of termites, pests, viruses, and weeds. There are predators in the woods, reptiles on the ground, and—overhead—occasional bolts of lightning. Survival depends on adherence to a rigorous schedule of maintenance. Yet the farm is also resilient, having endured for generations, its evergreens still majestic and its foundation, though set in the rock of an earlier era, satisfyingly firm.

In recent years, we have all become familiar with the counterterrorism mantra: “See something, say something.” In the pages that follow, I propose an added exhortation—do something. What that something might be is for each of us to decide in accordance with our opportunities and talents, but it begins by pushing back harder against the debilitating cancer of cynicism.

Fascist attitudes take hold when there are no social anchors and when the perception grows that everybody lies, steals, and cares only about him- or herself. That is when the yearning is felt for a strong hand to protect against the evil “other”—whether Jew, Muslim, black, so-called redneck, or so-called elite. Flawed though our institutions may be, they are the best that four thousand years of civilization have produced and cannot be cast aside without opening the door to something far worse. The wise response to intolerance is not more intolerance or self-righteousness; it is a coming together across the ideological spectrum of people who want to make democracies more effective. We should remember that the heroes we cherish—Lincoln, King, Gandhi, Mandela—spoke to the best within us. The crops we’ll harvest depend on the seeds we sow.

I look once more through the window and can see that the winter sun is now high in the sky. The air outside is warming and it has occurred to me that there might be value in taking a long walk, gathering my thoughts, then initiating a discussion on the herd instinct with my four-legged friends.

Thank you in advance for your interest in this book.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

LOUDOUN COUNTY, VIRGINIA

DECEMBER 2018

ONE

A DOCTRINE OF ANGER AND FEAR

ON THE DAY FASCISTS FIRST ALTERED THE DIRECTION OF my life, I had barely mastered the art of walking. The date was March 15, 1939. Battalions of German storm troopers invaded my native Czechoslovakia, escorted Adolf Hitler to Prague Castle, and pushed Europe to the threshold of a second world war. After ten days in hiding, my parents and I escaped to London. There we joined exiles from all across Europe in aiding the Allied war effort while waiting anxiously for the ordeal to end.

When, after six grueling years, the Nazis surrendered, we returned home with high hopes, eager to build a new life in a free land. My father continued his career in the Czechoslovak Foreign Service and, for a brief time, all was well. Then, in 1948, our country fell under the control of Communists. Democracy was shut down and once more my family was driven into exile. That Armistice Day, we arrived in the United States, where, under the watchful eyes of the Statue of Liberty, we were welcomed as refugees. To protect us, and to make my life and those of my sister, Kathy, and brother, John, seem as normal as possible, my parents did not tell us what we would learn only decades later: that three of our grandparents and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins were among the millions of Jews who had died in the ultimate act of Fascism—the Holocaust.

I was eleven when I came to the United States with no goal more ambitious than to become a typical American teenager. I ditched my European accent, read stacks of comic books, glued my ear to a transistor radio, and became stuck on bubble gum. I did everything I could to fit in, but I could not escape knowing that, in our times, even decisions made far away could spell the difference between death and life. On entering high school, I started an international affairs club, named myself president, and provoked discussions about everything from Titoism to Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (“The Force which is born of Truth and Love”).

My parents cherished the freedoms we found in our adopted country. My father, who quickly established himself as a professor at the University of Denver, wrote books about the perils of tyranny and worried that Americans were so accustomed to liberty—so “very, very free,” he wrote—that they might take democracy for granted. After I began a family of my own, my mother called each Fourth of July to confirm that her grandchildren were singing patriotic songs and had been to the parade.

There is a tendency among many in the United States to romanticize the years just after World War II—to imagine a time of sky-blue innocence when everyone agreed that America was great and each family had a reliable breadwinner, the latest appliances, children who were above average, and a rosy outlook on life. In fact, the Cold War was a period of unceasing anxiety in which the lingering shadow of Fascism was darkened by another kind of cloud. In my teenage years, due to atomic tests, the radioactive element strontium 90 was found in babies’ teeth at fifty times the natural level. Virtually every town had a civil defense warden urging the construction of backyard fallout shelters stocked with canned vegetables, Monopoly boards, and cigarettes. Children in big cities were issued metal tags, embossed with their names, for identification should the worst happen.

Growing older, I followed in my father’s footsteps and became a professor. Among my specialties was Eastern Europe, where countries were dismissed as satellites orbiting a totalitarian sun, and where it was widely thought that nothing interesting ever happened and nothing of importance would ever change. Marx’s dream of a workers’ paradise had degenerated into an Orwellian nightmare; conformity was the highest good, informants kept watch on every block, whole countries lived behind barbed wire, and governments insisted that down was up and black was white.

Then, when change did come, it was with a velocity that amazed. In June 1989, the decade-old demands of dockworkers and the inspiration of a pope born in Wadowice brought democratic governance to Poland. That October, Hungary became a democratic republic, and in early November the Berlin Wall was breached. In those miraculous days, our televisions brought news each morning of what had long seemed impossible. I can still picture the decisive moments of my native Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, so called because it was secured without the widespread cracking of heads or gunfire. The time was a frosty afternoon in late November. In Prague’s historic Wenceslas Square, a crowd of 300,000 joyously rattled keys to emulate bells tolling the end of Communist rule. On a balcony overlooking the throng stood Václav Havel, the valiant playwright who six months earlier had been a prisoner of conscience and five weeks later would be sworn in as president of a free Czechoslovakia.

In that instant, I was among the many who felt that democracy had aced its severest test. The once mighty USSR, made fragile by economic weakness and ideological weariness, shattered like a dropped vase on a stone floor, liberating Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltics, and Central Asia. The nuclear arms race subsided without blowing any of us to bits. In the East, South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia cast off longtime dictators. In the West, Latin America’s military rulers made way for elected presidents. In Africa, the freeing of Nelson Mandela—another prisoner who became president—engendered hopes of a regional renaissance. Around the globe, countries meriting the label “democracy” expanded from thirty-five to more than one hundred.

In January 1991, George H. W. Bush told Congress that “the end of the Cold War has been a victory for all humanity … and America’s leadership was instrumental in making it possible.” Across the Atlantic, Havel added, “Europe is attempting to create a historically new kind of order through the process of unification … a Europe in which no one more powerful will be able to suppress anyone less powerful, in which it will no longer be possible to settle disputes with force.”

Today, more than a quarter century later, we must ask what has happened to that uplifting vision; why does it seem to be fading instead of becoming more clear? Why, per Freedom House, is democracy now “under assault and in retreat”? Why are many people in positions of power seeking to undermine public confidence in elections, the courts, the media, and—on the fundamental question of earth’s future—science? Why have such dangerous splits been allowed to develop between rich and poor, urban and rural, those with a higher education and those without? Why has the United States—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. IF WE THINK OF FASCISM as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting fTrump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.

To the political class of Washington, D.C.—Republican, Democrat, and independent alike—the election of Trump was so startling it would have caused an old-time silent film comedian to clench his hat with both hands, yank it over his ears, leap in the air, and land flat on his back. The United States has had flawed presidents before; in fact, we have never had any other kind, but we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.

From the early stages of his campaign and right into the Oval Office, Donald Trump has spoken harshly about the institutions and principles that make up the foundation of open government. In the process, he has systematically degraded political discourse in the United States, shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libeled his predecessors, threatened to “lock up” political rivals, referred to mainstream journalists as “the enemy of the American people,” spread falsehoods about the integrity of the U.S. electoral process, touted mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies, vilified immigrants and the countries from which they come, and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions.

To officials overseas who have autocratic tendencies, these outbursts are catnip. Instead of challenging anti-democratic forces, Trump is a comfort to them—a provider of excuses. In my travels, I hear the same questions all the time: If the president of the United States says the press always lies, how can Vladimir 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 the leader of the world’s most powerful country views life as a dog-eat-dog struggle in which 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?

National leaders have a duty to serve the best interests of their countries; that is a truism. When Donald Trump talks about “putting America first,” he is stating the obvious. No serious politician has proposed putting America second. The goal is not the issue. What separates Trump from every president since the dismal trio of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover is his conception of how America’s interests are best advanced. He conceives of the world as a battlefield in which every country is intent on dominating every other; where nations compete like real estate developers to ruin rivals and squeeze every penny of profit out of deals.

Given his life experience, one can see how Trump might think that way, and there are certainly cases in international diplomacy and commerce where a clear separation between winner and loser is evident. However, at least since the end of World War II, the United States has championed the view that victories are more readily won and easier to sustain through cooperative action than by nations acting alone.

The generation of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman argued that states would do best by promoting shared security, prosperity, and freedom. The 1947 Marshall Plan, for example, was grounded in a recognition that the American economy would stagnate without European markets able to buy what U.S. farmers and manufacturers had to sell. This meant that the way to put America first was to help our European (and Asian) partners rebuild and develop dynamic economies of their own. The same thinking led to Truman’s Point Four Program, which made U.S. technical assistance available in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. A comparable approach has served us well in the security realm. Presidents from Roosevelt to Obama have sought to help allies protect themselves and to engage in collective defense against common dangers. We did this not in a spirit of charity but because we had learned the hard way that problems abroad, if unaddressed, could, before long, imperil us.