Wayne Bradshaw reviews Dennis Glover’s Repeat: A Warning from History (Black Inc, 2024)
Dennis Glover’s new book, Repeat: A Warning from History, is the latest work to take its place in the committed tradition of polemical writing against the resurgence of a worldview that Umberto Eco called ‘Ur-Fascism’ in his 1997 essay of the same name. In this work, Eco described ‘a series of cultural habits, a nebula of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives’ within democracies which lead them towards tyranny (7). Eco went on to list fourteen Ur-Fascist habits of mind, including ‘the cult of tradition’ (16), ‘the cult of action for action’s sake’ (19), and an ‘obsession with conspiracies’ (21). Presciently, he warned of an ‘Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the ‘voice of the people,’’ making it necessary for Ur-Fascism ‘to oppose ‘rotten’ parliamentary governments’ (25). A desire to drain the political swamp, Eco suggested, is an inevitable obsession for any would-be Mussolini. Eco concluded his essay by proposing that ‘Ur-Fascism can still return in the most innocent of guises,’ and that ‘[o]ur duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new forms—every day, in every part of the world’ (28). Reading ‘Ur-Fascism’ today is an uncomfortable exercise.
Timothy Snyder, in his 2017 book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, took up Eco’s charge to confront authoritarianism wherever it is found, at a time when ‘hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people’ (Snyder 11). Where Eco had warned of the potential for fascism to return, Snyder warned that the resurgence of fascism was already upon us. He outlined a list of instructions for opposing the nascent forms of tyranny he saw in twenty-first-century society. Eco’s warning had failed. In the light of this failure, Snyder’s book is structured like a manual, with chapters advising that we ‘Do not obey in advance’ (17), that we ‘Remember professional ethics’ (38) and ultimately that we ‘Be calm when the unthinkable arrives’ (103). He tells us that ‘History does not repeat, but it does instruct’ (9), and ‘[h]istory can familiarize, and it can warn’ (11). History can also be ignored.
Seven years after Snyder’s On Tyranny, and twenty-seven years after Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism,’ Glover has added his own slim, urgent work to the tradition of writing on resurgent authoritarianism. The passage of time and the colour of contemporary politics have given Glover the confidence to go further than Eco and Snyder in declaring that history does, in fact, repeat. Glover warns us that ‘[w]e are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century’ (13), and he openly declares that ‘[t]he populists are back. The 1920s and ’30s have returned. The first time around, it was all so new. We were taken by surprise, disoriented, knocked off our feet, terrified, cowed. This time we have no excuse’ (xi). Repeat does not provide a list of values to be wary of or a set of guidelines to follow to survive and oppose the rising tide of populist tyranny. Instead, Glover argues that the 2020s are analogous with the 1920s; that war is coming; and that we must not flinch when it arrives. The price of failure, he argues, will be the next greatest catastrophe in modern history.
As in the case of ‘Ur-Fascism’ and On Tyranny, the structure of Repeat complements the polemical nature of the book. Glover argues for the existence of ‘five stages from the 1920s and ’30s that we must not allow to repeat’ (3), and these stages, ‘sowing the wind,’ ‘populism,’ ‘savagery,’ ‘preliminary war,’ and ‘consequences,’ form the chapters of the book. The twentieth-century forms of these stages are depicted as ‘tragedy,’ while our current repetition of past mistakes is somewhat appropriately characterised as ‘farce.’ Throughout both cycles, we are reminded that ‘the price for allowing populism to spread throughout Europe was war—as Keynes had warned. The leaders of the Western democracies didn’t care enough to do the only thing that at this point could have halted the slide to a wider war: arm the forces of democracy or intervene directly’ (61). War, Glover argues, is inevitable but the question remains whether the forces of democracy possess the will to act while they stand a chance of decisive victory. It must be conceded that the failure of society to take heed of Eco’s or Snyder’s earlier warnings does not bode well for this latest call to arms.
As a literary critic, I am tempted to suggest that the greatest enemies of fascists have not generally been historians but, rather, writers and artists like Glover himself. He seems to acknowledge this fact in Repeat, primarily through the historical figures who serve as his points of reference. Most notably, Glover returns to George Orwell, an author he has already dedicated an entire book to with his 2017 historical novel, The Last Man in Europe.
It is hard not to see shades of contemporary oligarchs like Putin and Trump in Orwell’s account of ‘crowds of working men chant, “Mosley! Mosley! Mosley!” as the obviously insincere multimillionaire businessman, who shared nothing of the lives of his followers, addressed them’ (28). Glover similarly incorporates Christopher Isherwood’s experiences in Berlin, where ‘[t]he books of Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig and many more ‘anti-German’ authors went up in flames’ (41). As Glover admits, ‘[p]opulists and revolutionaries can never abide artists for long, at least not while they are alive and capable of writing against the regime’ (50). The capacity to imagine and create alternative realities is a dangerous weapon against the dogma of tyrants.
There are two aspects which risk keeping Glover’s book from the timeless status of essays like ‘Ur-Fascism’ and On Tyranny. The first is that his reading of events sometimes feels a little too neat in its effort to demonstrate that history does, indeed, repeat. Many of the complex melodies of twentieth-century political ideology are muted to amplify Glover’s five-beat historical rhythm. The second issue is that this exercise in polemic never takes the opportunity to subvert readerly expectations. This is a book destined to be read by a self-professed progressive and educated, middle-class readership, of just the kind most likely to stand bemusedly on the sidelines as a Caesar—or a Mussolini—marches on Rome. My suspicion is that there is at least one key difference between the politico-historical conditions of the 1920s and the 2020s which Glover fails to account for. The difference is that twenty-first century society lacks the political will and moral fortitude to stand up to the will of tyrants, even at the eleventh hour. More than a decade of smartphones and social media algorithms; the systematic hollowing out of museums, libraries and universities; the demise of grass-root political participation; and now the rise of technologies which promise to do the hard work of thinking for us, have robbed society of the capacity for revolt, even against the most odious of tyrants.
Works Cited
Eco, Umberto. ‘Ur-Fascism.’ How to Spot a Fascist, translated by Richard Dixon and Alastair McEwen, Harvill Secker, 2020, pp 1–29.
Glover, Dennis. Repeat: A Warning from History. Black Inc., 2024.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The Bodley Head, 2017.
