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British were lured into Brexit by the false promise of a new relationship with the European Union,
retain their rights while shedding their responsibilities.
According to an old Czech saying, it’s no trick to make soup from a fish, but making a fish out of soup is a challenge.
Survival depends on adherence to a rigorous schedule of maintenance.
Fascist attitudes take hold when there are no social anchors and when the perception grows that everybody lies, steals, and cares only about him- or herself.
The wise response to intolerance is not more intolerance or self-righteousness; it is a coming together across the ideological spectrum of people who want to make democracies more effective.
March 15, 1939. Battalions of German storm troopers invaded my native Czechoslovakia, escorted Adolf Hitler to Prague Castle, and pushed Europe to the threshold of a second world war.
1948, our country fell under the control of Communists.
Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, so called because it was secured without the widespread cracking of heads or gunfire.
The once mighty USSR, made fragile by economic weakness and ideological weariness, shattered like a dropped vase on a stone floor, liberating Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltics, and Central Asia.
If Trump insists that judges are biased and calls the American criminal system a “laughingstock,” what is to stop an autocratic leader like Duterte of the Philippines from discrediting his own judiciary?
The answer matters because, although nature abhors a vacuum, Fascism welcomes one.
This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power.
established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface.
Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gain followers by dangling the prospect of renewal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.
To build fervor, Fascists tend to be aggressive, militaristic, and—when circumstances allow—expansionist.
Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy that others do not.”
This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible.
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 willing to use whatever means are necessary—including violence—to achieve his or her goals.
A Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down, Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and the firepower to strike first.
labor politics tilted sharply to the left and Socialist firebrands preached anger toward the government,
contempt for the Church, and militancy on behalf of workers’ rights.
Justice, he said, could be obtained only through violent struggle. Revolution was essential.
Il Popolo d’Italia, and urged Italy to enter the war.
In the countryside, Socialist peasants claimed the land they had long been tilling, sometimes murdering estate owners to spread terror and settle personal scores.
the fasces, a bundle of elm rods coupled with an ax that in ancient times had represented the power wielded by a Roman consul.
The Fascists grew because millions of Italians hated what they were seeing in their country and were afraid of what the world was witnessing in Bolshevik Russia.
reject the capitalists who wanted to exploit them,
This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.
Fasci di Combattimento (Combat Leagues), to shoot labor leaders, trash newspaper offices, and beat up workers and peasants.
choose between the Socialists who wanted to destroy the monarchy and the roughneck Fascists who might, he hoped, still prove malleable;
Mussolini’s swift rise had left him vulnerable to an equally rapid fall.
But Mussolini, soon to be known as Il Duce,
pegged the lira to the dollar, causing an abrupt increase in public debt, a problem made worse by his failure to understand how interest rates worked.
The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II led to the installation of multiparty democracy at an inauspicious time.
Both resented their more educated and socially correct contemporaries and both were Fascists,
The decisive break came in 1935 when the League of Nations slapped economic sanctions on Italy for invading Ethiopia.
nationalism, anti-Communism, and war.
Many of the tactics Hitler employed to seize and consolidate power, Mussolini had adopted previously: the reliance on violent gangs, the intimidation of parliament, the strengthening and subsequent abuse of authority, the subjugation of the civil service, the affinity for spectacle, and the insistence that the leader, whether Der Führer or Il Duce, could do no wrong.
The two leaders and the countries they represented were an imperfect fit.
man had such faith in his instincts, and believed so fully in what he heard himself say, that he failed to either seek or to take sound advice.
His most telling failure was in preparing Italy for what was to come.
Mussolini had promised his people economic self-sufficiency, but his country remained dependent on imported coal and fertilizer and lacked the seaborne military clout to safeguard its ships and ports.
Führer double-crossed him by securing German access to Romania’s oil fields, which Italy also coveted.
Mussolini’s bright idea: to invade Greece.
Russia deployed its most lethal weapon—winter.
Spain, divided by ideology and class, was split by religion as well.
Roman Catholic hierarchy was clearly identified with Franco.
The Spanish left was a political battleground that encompassed Communists loyal to the party, laborers partial to the exiled Bolshevik theorist Leon Trotsky (a bitter rival of Stalin), internationalists who meant well but lacked military skills, anarchists who detested everyone including each other, and a Socialist government trying to present an attractive face to the world.
Arrow Cross, a group that preached what it called “Hungarism.”
