Chronicle
news &
opinion
By
James A.
Carter
(NATIONAL)
– Madeleine Albright, a
former UN Ambassador from
the US who
later served as
America's sixty-fourth Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, has
written a powerful, timely and troubling book called
Fascism:
A Warning.
It
ranks up there in the required
reading
slot for every
US. citizen and indeed
every citizen of every other democracy who labors under the false
assumption that fascism as a world power and threat is dead and that
it cannot take
hold of their own fragile democracies today,
tomorrow or next year.
In
so
many
ways Albright’s
book is far more important than the media-explosive tome
that is on everyone’s
mind at
the moment: former FBI Director James Comey’s memoir “A
Higher Loyalty,” that
came out last
week.
Albright,
now a distinguished
professor of diplomacy
at Georgetown University
knows something
first hand about fascism.
Her
family fled from fascism
not
once but twice; first
from Hitler in Czechoslovakia
(occupied
by Nazi Germany from
1938
to
1945)
and then following World War Two after returning to Czechoslovakia
from
England, her family fled again when the communists were taking over
that country (it
fell
under Soviet
domination from 1948 to 1989)
and
came to America.
And
so when Albright
writes, “Some may view this book and its title as alarmist.
Good. We should be awake to the assault on democratic values that has
gathered strength in many countries abroad and is dividing America at
home,” we all better damn well listen.
The
drip method: how fascists come to power
Albright
says one of the reasons she wrote the book is to point out to people
that fascists don't usually take over a country in one dramatic
revolutionary surge –
it’s
more like small drips from a faucet that
seem unimportant
at the
time.
As
Albright said during an interview last
week
on the national radio show Fresh
Air
that originates in Philadelphia at WHYY
radio,
“So
many of the things that have happened, and happened in
Czechoslovakia
were
steps that came as the result of ethnic issues with the German
minority but mostly steps that seemed not so terrible that there
couldn't be a deal made...that’s what’s so worrisome is
that fascism came one step at a time and then in many ways goes
unnoticed until it’s too late.”
Danni
Miller, an
Amazon
reviewer of
the book takes that thought a bit further by mentioning this quote
from Italy's most famous fascist leader Benito Mussolini: "If
you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, people don't notice.”
“That
is,” says
Miller “if
you slowly attack and eventually erode the
pillars that define a democracy
(e.g., rule of law, free press) people won't notice; until it's too
late.”
That
bears repeating: they
won’t notice until it’s too late.
That is the slick, effective play that fascists make. Communists do
big dramatic
revolutions, says Albright. Fascists do drip-drip-drip until all of a
sudden one day your town is under water and you’re
swimming for dear life.
Does
anything sound familiar there?
Sound
like anything you might have noticed in say, oh...America of late?
Hungary?
Turkey? Poland? Venezuela? The Philippines perhaps,
where the leader of that country, “Thinks
it’s terrific to kill drug dealers and talks about all the
things he has accomplished in that particular way,” notes
Albright.
How
about sections of Europe perhaps where some far-right wing
politicians are fanning “the fear factor” of those damned
immigrants who are to blame for everything? Have you noticed that in
Germany there’s all of a sudden a very far right political
party “that is now in the parliament,” notes Albright?
As
Albright noted on Fresh
Air,
the drip-drip method is a very good way of, “Undermining
democracy and the democratic institutions that are the basis of
democracy or
criticizing
the press or thinking that there are those that are “enemies of
the people” and are the cause of distress or bad economic
situations and...it
kind of works on the fear factor rather than the hope factor.”
Have
you noticed anyone in America of late making a concerted effort to
undermine democratic institutions in this country? To flaunt the rule
of law? To name and blame scapegoats for all of America’s
problems?
These
are the tools, says Albright that
fascists employ in going about
their work.
And
what of Donald Trump? There is a chapter in the book dedicated to
Trump. But
she does not refer to Trump as a fascist. Here is what she does say
about President Donald Trump:
“I
definitely don't call him a fascist. I say that he’s the most
anti-democratic leader that I have studied in American history and
that what he’s doing is in some ways systematically undermining
some of the institutions that have made this country great.”
Drip,
drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.