Book Review – Repeat: A Warning from History

[Extract] 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.