Can It Happen Here? Madeleine Albright Examines Fascism Then and Now

nytimes

George H. W. Bush declared that “the end of the Cold War has been a victory for all humanity,” and Vaclav Havel predicted Europe would create “a new kind of order” where the powerful would no longer suppress the less powerful and disputes would no longer be settled by force.

How far away those days seem. What happened to this optimism? Why has the momentum toward democracy and international comity slowed? Why, as Madeleine Albright asks early in her new book, “are we once again talking about fascism?”

Who better to address these questions than Albright, whose life was shaped by fascism and whose contribution to the cultivation of democracy as a stateswoman and private citizen is unparalleled? In “Fascism: A Warning” Albright (with Bill Woodward) draws on her personal history, government experience and conversations with Georgetown students to assess current dangers and how to deal with them.