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“Fascism did not die with Mussolini,” he warned. “Hitler is finished, but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains. It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than to kill the ideas that gave them birth.”
The aggression shown by Tojo’s militaristic Japan, Mussolini’s New Rome, and Hitler’s supposed thousand-year Reich could all be traced, at least in part, to the unbridled nationalism of those countries’ leaders and followers.
There is, however, a tipping point where loyalty to one’s own tribe curdles into resentment and hatred, then aggression toward others.
Because of that history, postwar statesmen established organizations to make it harder for deluded nationalists to trample on the rights of neighbors. These bodies include the United Nations—hence Truman’s speech—and regional institutions in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Among those indicted by the tribunal was Milošević, who was charged with genocide in Bosnia and the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from Kosovo.*
In a true democracy, leaders respect the will of the majority but also the rights of the minority—one without the other is not enough.
What does this mean? It means that we no longer judge established democracies by comparing them with the Soviet alternative; and that we don’t evaluate emerging democracies by looking at their totalitarian predecessors.
if they try fairly to find the truth.
stirrings: the discrediting of mainstream politicians, the emergence of leaders who seek to divide rather than to unite, the pursuit of political victory at all costs, and the invocation of national greatness by people who seem to possess only a warped concept of what greatness means.
the attacks on a free press justified by security,
joke quickly made the rounds that Chávez deserved thirty years in prison—one for plotting the coup and twenty-nine for not succeeding. Like Hitler, he had essentially committed treason and yet was released within two years. Like Hitler, Mussolini, and Perón, he graduated from prison to politics.
Immediately, on taking office, he began to pluck the chicken—using power to remove obstacles to yet more power. In April 1999, he held a referendum calling for a special assembly to draft a new constitution. That document lengthened from five to twelve years the maximum tenure of a president, abolished the senate, and gave Chávez control over promotions within the armed forces.
Instead, he indulged his ire by vilifying one half of the country in search of applause from the other. Interviewing
the government banned Islamist political parties, but within a few years, comparable organizations with new names took their place. The most dynamic and best run, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), was founded in August 2001. Its leader was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In 1453, the Ottoman Turks swept into Constantinople, gave a good-bye shove to the tottering Byzantine Empire, and founded a Muslim dynasty that ruled a quarter of the world for four hundred years—a
For the first time, the eclectic elements of the anti-Erdoğan world assembled in one place: liberals, environmentalists, feminists, secular nationalists, academics, and dissident Kurds. What took place in Taksim Square might have signaled the beginning of a unified movement in opposition to the AKP—had
In the spring of 2017, he sought and won approval of a referendum to abolish the office of prime minister and transfer its authorities to him.
Gülenists, nor the terrorists, nor rival political parties—it is the voice inside telling him that he and only he knows what’s best for Turkey. That’s the siren’s song that transforms power into an end in itself—and leads toward tyranny.
His father, a member of Stalin’s secret police, was assigned to carry out sabotage operations behind German lines in Estonia.
education.” A restless, energetic youth, he channeled his physicality into the martial arts, grappling, throwing, parrying, and pinning his way to the judo championship of Moscow. At
Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.
Putin isn’t a full-blown Fascist because he hasn’t felt the need. Instead, as prime minister and president, he has flipped through Stalin’s copy of the totalitarian playbook and underlined passages of interest to call on when convenient. Throughout his time in office, he has stockpiled power at the expense of provincial governors, the legislature, the courts, the private sector, and the press.
good guess would be to discredit democracy, divide Europe, weaken the transatlantic partnership, and punish governments that dare stand up to Moscow.
All of this reminds me of the opening quotation from an episode of The Wire: “A lie ain’t a side of the story; it’s just a lie.” In recent years, the Russian bear has also been on
Oswald Spengler’s chilling century-old prophecy that “the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.”
learning from one another. If this were a college for despots, we could imagine the course names: How to Rig a Constitutional Referendum; How to Intimidate the Media; How to Destroy Political Rivals Through Phony Investigations and Fake News; How to Create a Human Rights Commission That Will Cover Up Violations of Human Rights; How to Co-Opt a Legislature; and How to Divide, Repress, and Demoralize Opponents So That No One Believes You Will Ever Be Defeated. In 1933, shortly
America or to the big tent that Europe has become. His ideal is what he calls “illiberal democracy,” and the models of governance he acclaims are those of Putin in Russia and Erdoğan in Turkey.
Party chair Jarosław Kaczyński, whose rigid conservatism prompts the fears, has a deft political touch, but his attempts to expand power at the expense of constitutional checks have met with only partial success.
THE WAR OF WILLS BETWEEN HUNGARY AND POLAND ON ONE SIDE and the EU on the other is an important test of where extreme nationalism will lead.
There will be no peace in Europe if the States rebuild themselves on the basis of national sovereignty, with its implications of prestige politics and economic protection.
fears of decadence and decline; assertion of national and cultural identity; a threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order; and the need for greater authority to deal with these problems.”
Orbán has chosen to foment paranoia. Ignoring the fact that relatively few migrants are clamoring to enter Hungary, the prime minister declared, “The masses arriving from other civilizations endanger our way of life, our culture, our customs and our Christian traditions.”
democratic tool—the plebiscite—and
Like other vile tactics, the misuse of plebiscites was perfected by the Third Reich, which employed it often to attach a small thread of legality to Hitler’s rule. “The most effective form of persuasion,” said Goebbels, “is when you are not aware of being persuaded.”
The complexity of immigration as an issue begins with a basic human trait: we are reluctant to share.
More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up.
TELL MY STUDENTS THAT THE FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE OF FOREIGN policy is elementary: to convince other countries to do what we would like them to
Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was “bully,” and on the day of the Normandy invasion, Franklin Roosevelt prayed to the Almighty for a “peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.” By contrast, President Trump’s eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.
Early in his presidency, Donald Trump phoned Duterte to congratulate him for doing an “unbelievable job.”
The president’s admiration for autocrats is so ingrained that it extends to men even less worthy of respect than these. To Trump, Saddam Hussein “was a bad guy, a really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the
Cambodia’s was the first of many governments—others include those of Hungary, Libya, Poland, Russia, Somalia, and Thailand—to insist that negative stories about them are false for no reason except that the press cannot be trusted.
He wants his countrymen to see themselves as the victims of negotiators who have given handouts to foreigners in return for nothing and who gullibly sign on to blatantly unfair trade and climate deals.
“Principled Realism” and “Putting America First.” Principled Realism is merely a slogan; America First is a slogan with a past. Founded in 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) brought together pacifists, isolationists, and Nazi sympathizers to fight against the country’s prospective entry into World War II.
Trump’s top advisers have praised him for his “clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” This formulation puzzles because, although it’s fair to say the world isn’t exactly Sesame Street, it is a place where people from all countries must live. To reduce the sum of our existence to a competitive struggle for advantage among more than two hundred nations is not clear-eyed but myopic.
Designating “(Fill in the blank) First” as the golden rule of international relations provides an all-purpose justification for tyrants to do as they like.
Personally, I have never conceived of NATO as a business proposition; it is something far more valuable. The Alliance is a unique political and military arrangement that for more than seven decades has allowed Europe and the United States to prepare, train, share intelligence, and fight against common dangers. It’s the cornerstone of world peace and a living testament to our collective will; you can’t put a price on that. The course I teach
From what I’ve seen, the president would have a hard time passing it.
It is important to remember that actions taken today depend largely on expectations about the future. If a country feels abandoned by the United States, or uncertain about its leadership, that nation may see a need to act more forcefully—and perhaps unwisely—on its own.
At a minimum, the country may see no choice but to invest in what amounts to foreign policy insurance by strengthening ties to others, leaving America on the outside looking in.
Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and ’30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice,
