What is the point of books? What do they do? Why do writers write them? In his essay “Why I Write” George Orwell declared that his “starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
Orwell uses the generic term “book” here; for though Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made his name, he aimed in non-fiction works like The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia to uncover lies and reveal necessary facts. Implicit in the heightened awareness gained is that readers might act. Asked, for example, whether the world of Big Brother was inevitable, Orwell replied that “the moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It all depends on you.” More than simply getting a hearing, Orwell wanted his readers to do something.
Dennis Glover’s new book, Repeat: A Warning From History, has a similar motivation. Not surprisingly, Orwell appears several times in the text, as he has done in Glover’s earlier writing. Orwell’s Australia: From Cold War to Culture War (2003) saw Glover arguing forcefully for the ongoing validity of Orwell’s thinking to contemporary Australia. The Last Man in Europe (2017) was Glover’s fictional account of the writing of Orwell’s most famous work, its title taken from one that Orwell toyed with before settling on Nineteen Eighty-Four. And Glover made the case in his introduction to an edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four that Orwell changed his mind about the famous equation “2+2=5” Winston Smith scrawls in dust at the Chestnut Tree Café and wanted the 5 left out, a typographically small but conceptually massive change. For various reasons, I disagree with Glover’s argument, but no doubt he would try to convince me that I am wrong.
Glover certainly wants to convince readers of Repeat. But a change in thinking is not sufficient; he wants them to act in response to what he sees as the repetition in our time of certain personality types, events and underlying forces from the 1920s and 1930s that led to the catastrophe of the second world war. To avoid a rerun, he implores readers to become citizen-historians. “Armed with the lessons of history,” Glover insists, “we must demand our governments and political parties act strongly and with courage” to forestall a repeat “Tragedy,” the title of the book’s first part. As we brace for the 2024 US elections (and the likely contestation of those results) it is possible to perceive unnerving parallels with earlier times.
The extreme urgency of our current political situation determines that this book’s tone, structure, length and aesthetics grab our attention. The main title, stamped at 45 degrees across a crimson cover, gives Repeat the feel of an extended pamphlet. Under 150 pages long, and written in vigorous, demotic prose, it can be read quickly, its analysis easily absorbed. Which again is part of its strategy, its one-page preface ending: “Learn, good people. Fast.” It wears its considerable learning lightly, for though it has a “Further Reading” list that the average punter might find daunting (though informative), it has too much rhetorical work to do to be burdened by footnotes. Repeat is the better for travelling swiftly.
In Part I, Glover reconstructs historical moments from the first half of the twentieth century that in the second part he sees replaying today to catastrophic import. Each part is split into five chapters with identical titles, underscoring connections between what happened before, what is happening now, and what might happen soon if we do not apply a cautionary historical awareness.
The first chapter, “Sowing the Wind,” considers the creation of “economic conditions that made it difficult to maintain social harmony and political stability” in the 1920s and 1930s, with particular attention on the ruinous conditions imposed on the defeated Germans after the first world war. John Maynard Keynes is Glover’s Cassandra, warning unsuccessfully about the likely economic and social effects of those policies.
In the longest chapter, “Populism,” Glover recounts how populist leaders used “hatred to take power and claim legitimacy,” especially in Nazi Germany. Hitler takes lessons from Mussolini while the wealthy and the media barons naively think they can control him. In “Savagery” the focus turns to Stalin and the Soviet Union, with Glover showing how culture wars and intolerance have been deployed to violently wipe out opponents. While these abominations occur within national boundaries, the chapter “Preliminary War” plots how the Spanish civil war showed fascist leaders that “the democracies were weak and would let them get away with anything.” The final chapter of Part I, “Consequences,” deals with the ghastly repercussions of these actions and inactions: world war, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and death and destruction of unprecedented scale. “Such were the consequences of letting the populists get the upper hand… the first time,” Glover declares, adding “Will we let there be a second?”
Part II uses the same structural template to chart the modern developments that lead to our current situation. Glover insists that we need to understand the parallels to avoid a similar tragedy. The ominous rhetorical question that ends the first part, as well as the book’s main title, seem drawn from the philosopher George Santayana’s famous admonition that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The point is not that there is some one-to-one correlation between then and now, but that the historical patterns are instructive and extremely alarming in their implications.
So, the focus on the aftermath of the first world war in “Sowing the Wind” is replaced in the chapter of the same name by a consideration of the initial rebuilding of the global economy after the second world war, followed more recently by decline, fragmentation and disruption. Glover pays particular attention to shock therapy visited on the morbid Russian economy post the collapse of the Soviet Union, treatment that benefited oligarchs at the expense of ordinary, long-suffering Russians. Worse, this economic trauma paved the way for the rise of the “virtual nobody” who nevertheless “had an innate grasp of how to appeal to the masses. His name was Vladimir Putin.” Where the economic deprivations after 1918 undercut German democracy and allowed Hitler to gain ascendancy, the so-called “wild capitalism” of late-twentieth-century Russia profited no one more than Putin, this century’s apex authoritarian.
As with the first part of Repeat, the chapter on “Populism” takes up most space, moving swiftly from the rise of populist ideology in France, Germany, Hungary and Britain, the latter two nations promoting the populist leaders Victor Orbán, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. The chapter’s main interest, though, lies in the United States, and Donald Trump. In Glover’s telling, a key motivating figure is Steve Bannon, “a committed revolutionary willing to tear down the political system and replace it with someone completely new.” Glover cites a report that Bannon’s response when he saw Trump descend on a golden escalator to announce his candidacy was: “That’s Hitler.” Bannon’s extreme reaction might give us pause. Surely, for all his glaring personality flaws and dictator-adjacent aspirations, Trump is not exactly Hitler. A racist, sure, but more a narcissistic isolationist than a genocidal expansionist.
But Glover is not arguing that Trump is an identikit fit for Hitler. Rather, Trump exemplifies the type dealt with in American political historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s powerful 2020 study Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fail (not included in Repeat’s booklist but worth chasing up). She argues that leaders like Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, Orbán and Putin destroy democracy, utilising “propaganda, virility, corruption and violence” as “a set of interlinked tools and tools that have evolved over a century.” As with the secondary reading that Glover does supply, Ben-Ghiat’s study (more than 350 pages, with copious footnotes) provides the weighty backup to the more fleet-footed assault Repeat undertakes.
As Glover recognises, history or History can be interpreted in a range of ways and to different ends. Hitler’s regime, after all, claimed some form of legitimacy in calling itself the third reich, linked both to Charlamagne and the Prussian Empire of the late nineteenth century. Putin, too, deploys history as an instructor and a defence, reportedly viewing the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century. His brutal use of power and the elimination of opposition within and beyond Russia are part of his attempt to install himself as a latter-day czar, although the chapter “Savagery” connects him to his more recent predecessor — Stalin.
Putin’s 2021 essay (let’s be generous and say he wrote it) “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” offered a flimsy historical covering for the “military operation” in Ukraine. Glover treats this as the modern “Preliminary War” equivalent to the Spanish civil war of the 1930s. As with that conflict, he fears regimes that should support Ukraine might provide insufficient aid, failing to call Putin’s bluff or to curb his drive to rule for life.
Which brings us almost to the present. The most recent date mentioned in Repeat is 27 May 2024, in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. It says something for the turbulence of our times that on that day, less than four moths ago, Rishi Sunak was British prime minister, Marie Le Pen’s party seemed on the verge of taking power in France, and Joe Biden was still a month away from the debate he hoped would ruin Donald Trump’s presidential hopes. One is reminded of British prime minister Harold Macmillan’s perhaps apocryphal reply when asked by a reporter what could potentially derail his prime ministership: “Events, dear boy, events.” Macmillan’s response suggests that politicians are sometimes at the whim of forces beyond their control. But Repeat is not a primer on prime ministers. Rather, it is aimed specifically at those who are, or might become, citizen-historians.
Here, though Glover doesn’t make the specific connection, we might return to the advice Orwell gave about Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Don’t let it happen. It all depends on you.” The current situation is all too real, so that we need history rather than fiction as our muse. And here, in the final chapter, “Consequences,” one difference between the parts of Repeat becomes clear. We know the consequences of the 1920s and 1930s (although, of course, there are different interpretations). But the consequences of what we are now facing necessarily are unknowable in their entirety.
Again, for Glover, history does not entail one-to-one repetition. But it does provide the best means not only of discerning patterns, but of guiding us to actively work so that earlier tragedies do not recur. In the chapter “Conclusion” he presents five lessons the past provides that will help avoid a disastrous repeat: populists and dictators must be removed; economies be crafted to work for all citizens; we must be alert for pronouncements from populists and strongmen that are warning signs of their intentions; never backdown to populism, using arms if necessary; and, perhaps most immediately, “rid yourself of the idea that it can’t happen all over again.”
Is Repeat’s argument convincing? Like any polemic, there are contentious elements, interpretations or connections that readers might push back on, or even dismiss. At times, as when Glover asks bluntly, “Can you see the parallels now?” or “Do you ever stop to ask, “Is it all going to happen again?,” the tone borders on the hectoring. But, as with any good polemic, total persuasion is less important than engagement. Glover, like Orwell, wants to expose lies and draw attention to facts; Repeat is his attempt to get a hearing. More than this, he wants readers to become historically informed, motivated political actors. Like Orwell, and like Michelle Obama in her speech at the recent Democratic National Convention, he implores us not just to think, but to “do something.” •
Repeat: A Warning From History
By Dennis Glover | Black Inc. | $26.99 | 160 pages
