A very timely read. As I followed the history of Fascism through the last century, I found myself frequently stopping, thinking of the current state of the world and asking myself hard questions about where we are now. This should be required reading in every high school.

I wasn’t necessarily a fan of Albright when she was Secretary or State, but I found this to be one of the most important books to read and explain the rise of authoritarian leaders across the world. So many parallels from history are packed in this well written book.

Tyranny: A Warning? Anti-Democracy: A Warning? I didn’t really know what to expect from this book, but it is not (only) about fascism. In fact, Nationalism: A Warning, would have been an accurate description as well, but either the author or the publisher was too timid to call it that. Granted, there are bits of popular history about fascism in here, but soon the gallery descends into ‘Whoever has opposed the US in the past’: A Warning. Albright completely lost me at ‘Soviet-style fascism’—something that she herself notes is an idea peddled mainly by the fascist right. It is not the only schizophrenic aspect of the book. Albright pays lip service to bad Americans and failed American policy, but in the end the US remains the beacon of light in the world—never mind support of anti-democratic coups, drones killing thousands of civilians, etc. The same with capitalism: on the one hand she seems to admit that ‘structural reform’ (a euphemism if there ever was one) programmes have been a source of economic hardship that is the breeding ground for actual fascism, but at the same time, she really subscribes to the idea that there is no alternative. Unfettered global capitalism run by corporations beyond democratic control is a ‘fact of life’, not an ideology, apparently. The real danger in calling everything in this book ‘fascism’ is that it is not much different from Trump’s ‘all sides’ comment. When you sit comfortably in the well-off liberal centre, everyone else is an enemy if they threaten the order that is with increasing pace making the world a worse place for the majority of its inhabitants (the stats about the world being a better place for everyone are an embarrassment). Hence, the ‘fascism’ of Hugo Chavez, for example. The interesting bits were about Albright’s personal experiences in diplomacy, but for that I would have preferred a memoir, not a book allegedly about fascism. Fascism is a real problem in the 21st century, but for its causes and symptoms this book looks the wrong way.