 First edition | |
| Author | Madeleine Albright |
|---|---|
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | 9780062802187 |
| OCLC | 1038579147 |
Fascism: A Warning is a 2018 book about fascism by Madeleine Albright, published by HarperCollins.
| First edition | |
| Author | Madeleine Albright |
|---|---|
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | 9780062802187 |
| OCLC | 1038579147 |
Fascism: A Warning is a 2018 book about fascism by Madeleine Albright, published by HarperCollins.
Albright raises concerns about a decline of liberal democracy, in reflections based on her early life in Czechoslovakia and career as a diplomat and academic. [1] Speaking with Vox in 2019, Albright explained: "...fascism is not an ideology; it's a process for taking and holding power." [2] The root causes Albright identifies as creating the condition for fascist leaders to rise include economic decline, social disorder, and disjointed opposition. [1]
Leaders analyzed by Albright include in the book cover the years from the 1920s to the 2010s, including Hugo Chávez, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benito Mussolini, and Donald Trump. [3] [2]
For The New York Times , Columbia University political science professor Sheri Berman praised Fascism: A Warning: "Democracy's problems can, Albright assures us, be overcome—but only if we recognize history's lessons and never take democracy for granted." [1]
JP O'Malley of the Irish Independent commented: "Much of the early chapters are standard history lessons, but the book is at its most compelling when Albright casually recollects personal details of diplomatic missions." [4] However, The Washington Post opinion editor Christian Caryl was more critical. Regarding later chapters where Albright recounted encounters with Hugo Chávez and Vladimir Putin, Caryl responds: "Rather oddly, given the title of her book, she admits that none of these contemporary politicians really qualify as fascists. She's merely using them—and a long chapter at the end, about the worrisome behavior of the current U.S. president—to show what can happen to power-hungry leaders who run roughshod over checks and balances." [3]
Richard J. Evans, history professor at the University of Cambridge, questioned the book's premise. Writing for The Guardian , Evans noted: "...Albright doesn't really know what fascism is. Lumping together post-Stalinist dictators such as Kim Jong-un and Nicolás Maduro with rightwing nationalists such as Orbán and Vladimir Putin is not much help in understanding either the forces that brought them to power or the policies they are implementing. Albright seems to identify fascism simply with a hostility to democracy and a propensity to lie." [5]
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, fascism is placed on the far-right wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who is the president of Russia. Putin has held continuous positions as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2012, and as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012. He is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin.
A useful idiot or useful fool is a pejorative description of a person, suggesting that the person thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who does not realize they are being cynically manipulated by the cause's leaders or by other political players. The term was often used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and psychological manipulation. A number of authors attribute this phrase to Vladimir Lenin, but this attribution is not supported by any evidence. Similar terms exist in other languages.
The term "illiberal democracy" describes a governing system that hides its "nondemocratic practices behind formally democratic institutions and procedures". There is a lack of consensus among experts about the exact definition of illiberal democracy or whether it even exists.
The colour revolutions were a series of often non-violent protests and accompanying changes of government and society that took place in post-Soviet states and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the early 21st century. The aim of the colour revolutions was to establish Western-style liberal democracies. They were primarily triggered by election results widely viewed as falsified. The colour revolutions were marked by the usage of the internet as a method of communication, as well as a strong role of non-governmental organizations in the protests.
Fascist has been used as a pejorative epithet against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the Left and the Right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II. In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the anti-fascist and socialist writer George Orwell commented on Tribune that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym for bully.
Social fascism was a theory developed by the Communist International (Comintern) in the early 1930s which saw social democracy as a moderate variant of fascism.
In politics, a strongman is a type of authoritarian political leader — civilian or military — who exerts control through military enforcement and has, or has claimed to have, strong popular support. Strongmen typically claim to have widespread popular support, portray themselves as the only one capable of solving the country's problems, and espouse a disdain for liberalism and democracy.
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin was a Russian jurist, religious and political philosopher, publicist, orator, and conservative monarchist. While he saw Russia's 1917 February Revolution as a "temporary disorder", the October Revolution, in his view, marked a "national catastrophe". This conviction led him to oppose the Bolshevik regime. He became a white émigré journalist, aligning himself with Slavophile beliefs and emerging as a key ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union. This organization firmly believed that force stood as the sole means through which the Soviet regime could be toppled.
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military. States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have some times been characterized as "hybrid democracies", "hybrid regimes" or "competitive authoritarian" states.
Fascism has a long history in North America, with the earliest movements appearing shortly after the rise of fascism in Europe.
National Bolshevism, whose supporters are known as National Bolsheviks and colloquially as Nazbols, is a syncretic political movement committed to combining ultranationalism and Bolshevik communism.
The Fourth Political Theory is a book by the Russian philosopher and political analyst Aleksandr Dugin, first published in 2009. In the book, Dugin states that he is claiming the foundations for an entirely new political ideology, the fourth political theory, which integrates and supersedes liberal democracy, Marxism, and fascism. In this theory, the main subject of politics is not individualism, class struggle, or nation, but rather Dasein.
Fascism is a political ideology, advocating an authoritarian, hierarchical government.
Putinism is the social, political, and economic system of Russia formed during the political leadership of Vladimir Putin. It is characterized by the concentration of political and financial powers in the hands of "siloviks", current and former "people with shoulder marks", coming from a total of 22 governmental enforcement agencies, the majority of them being the Federal Security Service (FSB), Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Armed Forces of Russia, and National Guard of Russia. According to Arnold Beichman, "Putinism in the 21st century has become as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th."
How Democracies Die is a 2018 comparative politics book by the Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt about democratic backsliding and how elected leaders can gradually subvert the democratic process to increase their power. The book also offers stark warnings about the impact of the Republican Party and Donald Trump's presidency on U.S. democracy.
Sheri E. Berman is a Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of scholarly books and articles on European social democracy, fascism, populism and the development of democracies and dictatorships.
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them is a 2018 nonfiction book by Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Stanley, whose parents were refugees of Nazi Germany, describes strategies employed by fascist regimes, which includes normalizing the "intolerable". His book is part of a "wave of articles, books and op-eds" that warn of the "return of fascism", features of which are already evident, according to Stanley, in the politics of the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and Hungary. The book was reissued in 2020 with a new preface in which Stanley describes how global events have substantiated his concern that fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world.
Ruscism, also known as Rashism or Russism, is a neologism and derogatory term used by a number of scholars, politicians and publicists to describe the political ideology and the social practices of the Russian state in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially during the rule of Vladimir Putin. It is also used in reference to the ideology of Russian military expansionism, and has been used as a label to describe an undemocratic system and nationality cult mixed with ultranationalism and a cult of personality. That transformation was described as based on the ideas of the "special civilizational mission" of the Russians, such as Moscow as the third Rome and expansionism, which manifests itself in anti-Westernism and supports regaining former lands by conquest. Ukrainian officials and media often use 'Rashist' to broadly refer to members and backers of the Russian Armed Forces.