A looming threat: Historical accounts of 20th-century fascism ring frighteningly true today

Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston / Winnipeg Free Press / Aug. 24, 2024

The substratum alert of this nifty collection of historical accounts of the rise of fascism is: “It can happen here” — the “it” personified in one Donald J. Trump.

Guelph, Ont.-resident Ken McGoogan is the prolific author of 16 books, mainly Canadian historical non-fiction, most recently 2023’s Searching for Franklin.

These 40-plus pieces and portraits chronicle the genesis of fascism in the 20th century. It includes those who warned against it early, as well as those who bravely fought against and defeated it.

It includes literary luminaries — George Orwell, André Malraux, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Martha Gellhorn, Hugh Garner, Hannah Arendt — as well as politico-historical figures such as Winston Churchill and Norman Bethune. It also includes ordinary average-Joe folks, heroes whose stories are largely unknown and unheralded.

And while this isn’t a tightly argued polemic against totalitarianism, the introductory and closing chapters nicely encapsulate the lessons of the profiled historical moments and personalities.

Those chapters also address the looming prospect of a second Trump presidency.

McGoogan warns that if you thought the first Trump presidency a disaster-cum-gong-show, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet if he wins a second term of office.

“The dark forces that raised him up — the ignorance, the racism, the rage — are alive and thriving,” he writes. “They bear an uncanny resemblance to the anti-democratic forces that led to Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and the Second World War.”

Once upon a time, McGoogan’s warnings would have been a reach. No longer: the mob politics that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Congress and attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden was aided and abetted by Trump.

The book comes with disturbing revelations. In evidence of just how lunatic elements of the Republican alt-right have become, McGoogan cites former Fox News broadcaster and MAGA proponent Tucker Carlson’s documentary film promoting a U.S. military invasion of Canada.

“Late in April 2023,” writes McGoogan, “Fox News fired Tucker Carlson — prime-time broadcaster and cheerleading Trumpist — after deciding not to air a TV documentary he had prepared advocating that the United States invade Canada to free the country from the tyranny of Justin Trudeau.”

Canada adroitly weathered the first Trump storm. But this time round the Donald is hell-bent on revenge — rule of law and civilized norms be damned. Trump has already promised to be “dictator for a day” and gut both the U.S. justice department and American intelligence services. Based on the evidence to date, there’s real reason to fear a second Trump presidency will devolve into a vulgar and despotic regime.

McGoogan disdains the kowtowing of some Canadian officials to Trump.

He singles out former Canadian ambassador to the United States David McNaughton and even more so our ex-ambassador to the United Nations, Louise Blais, who recently maintained in an article in the Globe and Mail that Canadians shouldn’t comment on the pending U.S. election and it is “for the Americans to support who they wish.”

Canada will have to walk a fine line — not poke the Trump bear, but not retreat from it either. Acquiescing to Trump’s reckless foreign-policy demands and protectionist trade policies might make us more secure in the short run. But, to borrow the prescient words of late Canadian journalist Peter C. Newman, it could also render us “stripped of our soul.”

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.