FASCISM:

Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning should not be misunderstood as an academic text. It is not presented as one, and Albright’s primary aims in writing it were political; she identified a growing global fascist sentiment roughly halfway through the last decade and thought to, as the text says, warn people about the resurgent ideology. However, it does matter to historians what this book is and, specifically, how she presented fascist history within it. She was an influential figure in American politics across multiple decades, the height of which being her tenure as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001. Scholars of fascism will have to contend with students, lawmakers, and university administrators who have read this book. Furthermore, what Albright has left us with contains little value for scholars of fascism.

Albright remarks that her interest is not in the definitions of fascism: “I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels.”1 This stated goal leads her to analyze what is ultimately a strange cast of characters, from the classical fascists like Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, to more modern adherents to the ideology like Donald Trump and Recep Erdoğan. Along the way, she analyzes multiple politicians who performed what she identifies as fascist actions, ranging from socialists like Nicolás Maduro to right-wing figures like Joseph McCarthy. The blatant attempt at reviving the tired rhetoric of red fascism aside, her list contains some notable and confounding absences. It is understandable why a woman who was once the Secretary of State of this country would not dwell on a figure like Augusto Pinochet, considering our government’s role in the coup that put him in power. However, it is concerning that she failed to discuss the Chinese Kuomintang even once in her whole book. Her section on Mustafa Atatürk stops short of mentioning the Armenian Genocide, and ideological fathers of fascism like Julius Evola, are completely absent. All of this betrays a lack of interest in the subject. To hear Albright tell it, fascism just bubbled up out of nowhere in Italy after the First World War. The omission of the intellectual basis of fascism is particularly concerning. In addition to these omissions, it should be noted that many of her interpretations of political history skew in favor of the United States. The Marshall Plan, for example, is painted as a purely humanitarian effort with no ulterior anticommunist motives of containment. The book contains, as far as I can tell, only one section that is fully fabricated; her retelling of the division of the Korean peninsula in the wake of the Second World War, which has the Soviets and the United States meeting officially to discuss the division in the wake of Japan’s surrender. In actuality, the Soviets advanced into the peninsula, and two U.S. intelligence officers scrambled to ensure American presence in Seoul.

Her focus when discussing and analyzing self-identified fascists is somewhat pedestrian as a result of her limited scope. Her early chapters about figures like Mussolini and Hitler are fine analyses of the men and what they did upon achieving autocratic positions of power, but she had limited interest in the movements and systems that put and kept them there. Her chapters on many of these figures, fascist or not, are, therefore, decent introductions to these people and their positions and work in politics; however, they have very little intellectual value beyond that. Much of the book, especially her sections discussing socialist governments and capitalism, is fully dedicated to relitigating the Cold War. She more or less fully equates capitalism with democracy, regularly describing capitalist aspects of the United States as democratic. Much of the book seems dedicated to the reconstruction of horseshoe theory—the political notion that both extreme leftism and extreme rightism are prone to authoritarianism—positioning the United States as the furthest thing possible from fascism until quite recently. Her analysis of nationalism is also extremely odd. She spends a whole chapter defending the concept and claims that communist governments were fully opposed to nationalistic thinking, which is a bizarre understanding of socialist history. Unfamiliar as she was with considerable scholarship on fascism, she seems to have been actively uninterested in scholarship on nationalism.

This book was written, it seems, to warn people that fascism persisted and spread beyond the Second World War. Her analyses of history and politics are tired revivals of Cold War rhetoric, and ultimately this book confuses the issue of understanding modern fascist movements.

Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning, (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2019), 11.