FASCISM
A WARNING
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT William Collins, 304pp, £16.99, Oldie price £13.76 inc p&p
Retired politicians, such as the US Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, should not write history books unless they know what they are talking about. This was the gist of a scathing review by the Cambridge historian Richard J Evans in the Guardian. ‘Lumping together post-stalinist dictators such as Kim Jong-un and Nicolás Maduro with rightwing nationalists such as Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin is not much help in understanding either the forces that brought them to power or the policies they are implementing,’ he wrote. ‘Albright seems to identify fascism simply with a hostility to democracy and a propensity to lie. There’s a vast literature on its history and politics, but this might as well not exist as far as she is concerned. For the Nazis, for example, she relies mainly on Alan Bullock’s biography of Hitler, published in 1952. Her account of fascism’s history is shot through with errors, great and small. Why does any of this matter? If we fail to identify how the threat to democracy operates or why it succeeds in some places and not in others, we won’t be able to offer any effective opposition to it.’
Other reviewers were more generous. ‘If Mrs Albright’s learning is to be expected,’ wrote the Economist’s anonymous reviewer, ‘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.’ While he found that ‘much of the early chapters are standard history lessons’, JP O’malley, in his review for the Irish Independent, pronounced the book an ‘addictive and widely informative read… at its most compelling when Albright casually recollects personal details of diplomatic missions…’