A Guide to Understanding Fascism: A Warning from Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

edward d solomon: Excellent explanation of fascism and the danger to out democracy

United States on Sep 09, 2023

Jan: This book is interesting and very well written, dark but factual. I gained knowledge and insight.
Recommend.

United Kingdom on Sep 09, 2023

Clogdancer: A clear warning from the past that we ignore at our peril if we don't want history to repeat its terrible lessons.

United Kingdom on Jun 06, 2023

FR: Brilliant and catching analysis of the latest history of fasism through the eyes of someone, who experienced a lot of that first hand and dedicated her political life to advance the protection against it. If you are interested in how fascism grew successfull from Mussolini via Hitler, Erdogan and others to Trump and why democracies are (still) vulnerable, these lines from Madeleine Albright are a must read. On top she has the ability to write in a beautiful tone allthough delivering hard facts and unpleasent truths. This book realy helps to understand where the dangers are: for example she shows, that populism in itself is not a bad thing, it is used widely as a political instrument. It comes to be a critical tool for fascists all over the world, if missused to cater an agenda that has no other goal but to cater to the ego of individual men or single nations (with an isolated nationalist view...). This should be a book read in school (I would have liked it back then...).

Germany on Nov 18, 2022

Ki Ageng: As can be expected from any second hand books. There is a big fold on the first few pages of the book, but other than that the book is fine.
The jacket is intact, no damage, the spine is okay.
I would have given a 5 stars if it wasn't for the folded pages.

Canada on Dec 01, 2021

bettyparry: (my comments are in brackets)
If anyone is able to talk about Fascism then Madeleine Albright is the person to do that. In 1937 Prague she was born to Jewish parents. The family had to go into hiding when the Nazis invaded and managed to escape to England. Her parents converted from the Jewish faith to Roman Catholicism to protect the family in 1941. They moved to the USA in 1948 when she was 11 years old and only found about her jewish heritage when she was in her 50s. She discovered about a dozen of her relations had died in the Holocaust. She became the first female Secretary of State for the USA in 1997 to 2001 having to deal with leaders like Milosevic and Putin. She describes Putin as “he is small and pale, so cold as to be almost reptilian”.
The PROLOGUE. She states 2016 was a really bad year. “the British were lured into Brexit by the false promise of a new relationship with the EU mistakenly thinking they could retain their rights and shed their responsibilities, and also Trump won”. (I write this review August 2020 as Merkel has taken Brexit off the agenda of the next EU meeting as UK still insist on cherry-picking and no progress has been made over...

United Kingdom on Aug 28, 2020

Pseudo D: Madeleine Albright was the secretary of state in Bill Clinton's second administration and a major
architect of his approach to globalization. I remember her for being very hawkish toward Slobodan
Milosevic, and she's remembered for her view of America as the "indispensable nation". She has
written several books, and here again provides some biography of growing up under the Nazis
and Communists in Czechoslovakia.

She notes at the beginning that the term "Fascism" is directed to whatever people don't like. Paul
Gottfried notes that there is no such thing as "generic fascism" because the Italian and German
variants were so different from each other, despite their common cause and alliance. Often people
call you a "Fascist" when it would be going too far to say "Nazi", but because Mussolini is associated
with Hitler, the namecalling is done anyway and you are linked to both Mussolini and Hitler. Gottfried
shows how the name is often directed toward bourgeois traditionalists and the values of what R.R.
Reno has recently called the strong gods. But as Albright shows, there were important differences
between the personality cult of Il Duce and the...

United States on Apr 16, 2020

Gary Moreau, Author: This is a timely book by a brilliant person who had a front row seat to the tragedy that was Europe in the Mid-20th Century. There is little doubt that the world is starting to look fearfully like it did at the beginning of those dark hours, starting with the tyranny of Hitler and Mussolini and culminating in the Cold War and the gulags of the Soviet Union.

Figuratively speaking, this is really three books. The first will be the most divisive and may, in fact, quite unfortunately, relegate the book to practical irrelevance. The second book is extremely insightful and informative. And the third book, honestly, is pure gold and vintage Madeline Albright.

The first book begins with a contradiction. Albright openly acknowledges that Fascism has become a meaningless epithet, hurled, as it is, by opposing politicians of every stripe and at parents merely attempting to limit the cell phone usage of their children. She goes on to defend the titular use of the term, however, by clarifying her use of the term: “To my mind, a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is...

United States on Apr 10, 2018