Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead.

I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings.

Anything requested and approved will be read and a decent quality review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I have a lot of time for Paul Mason but How to Stop Fascism was a curate's egg for me. Part history of fascism, part overview of recent politics and part warning, there's much here to get you thinking but I'm not sure the structure holds together. The tone is also uneven, veering between passionate leftism (a strength as far as I'm concerned) and something closer to the commentary from an Adam Curtis film. This all leaves the book seeming like less than the sum of its parts. There are some striking, if questionable, observations e.g. 'the algorithms that derive social media traffic are the first major technology in history for which there is no history' and Mason continues from previous books his habit of blaming Nietzsche for more than seems reasonable. So on balance like everything Mason writes this is worthy of your time but a little disappointing.

Paul Mason’s latest book would make a nice compliment to Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning. Whereas Albright’s book speaks from her professional experience as former US Secretary of State and her personal experience of migrating from her native Czechoslovakia after Hitler’s advance to Prague, Paul Mason offers a richly detailed analysis on the nature of fascism which analyses the past- and the present-form of fascism. One thing that is particularly intriguing in Mason’s book and not in the main agenda of Albright’s book is the time limit that we currently have to stop fascism with climate change and the need to reach net-zero before 2050. In this regard, Mason’s project is also an extension of Bill Gates’ mission in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. And with the upcoming COP26 in Glasgow next month, this topic might be highly relevant. So what is the relation between climate change and modern fascism?

The perspective that Mason echoes throughout this book about fascism is “the fear of freedom, triggered by a glimpse of freedom. It is the violent mobilization of people who do not want to be free, around the project of destroying freedom.” In the word of the Italian antifascist Enzo Traverso, it is condensed into the view of fascism as ‘a revolution against the revolution’. What Madeleine Albright’s stated as a warning in 2018 in lieu of Trump’s presidency finally changed with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. The current situation triggers people to differentiate between ‘before’ and ‘now’, such was the case in the 1930s when people took the First World War and the Great Depression as ‘before’. Covid-19 pandemic with its myriad of implications and the ticking clock of climate change might push us to put fascism into the table as a problem to solve more than ever before.

Despite the fact of his leftist political opinion, Paul Mason in this book could break free from the Orthodox Marxism which views the historical inevitability of the collapse of capitalism as a given fact and suggests a temporary coalition between the liberals and the lefts to destroy a common enemy. Many scholars have provided some factual accounts and analyses of why fascism offers an alternative solution for most people who feel that the system they believed in slowly collapsed. The myths embraced by the fascist movements in Italy to recreate the great Roman Empire and in Germany to build a thousand years Third Reich provided alternatives for people with their doctrines, albeit with their irrationalities. Mason asserts the view that fascism comes from the total break from ideologies that we used to believe—democracy, market forces, globalism, science and the rule of law—to form a set of disconnected theories that make sense for people feeling hopeless with the crumbling of our systems.

The digital platform has become the new battleground for fascists of the twenty-first century. Mason outlines that disinformation has become the main tool to sabotage digital platforms with trolls, doxxing, threats, hate speech, etc. Internet used to be a platform based on writing where people exchanged thoughts and ideas. In the past decade, the move towards mobile devices has changed the way we interact on the internet into pictures- and short texts-basis which offer ease for people who want to manipulate the platforms with misinformation to create as much content as possible in just a short span of time.

No example is more striking than the one given by Carole Cadwalladr in her 2019 TED Talk about Facebook’s role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy in which she conducted small research based on the fact that sixty-two per cent of people in her hometown in South Wales Valleys voted to leave the European Union, despite the fact that there were several large construction projects in that county with the sign ‘Funded by the European Union’. She interviewed several people to get more insights. One of them noted the fear of immigrants and refugees (she didn’t meet any immigrants or refugees in the whole county, only a woman from Poland). The other commented on Turkey’s entrance into the EU, which was not true since the decision for Turkey to enter the EU was not even on the table in the EU parliament. The connecting dots corresponding to the source of information from the people she interviewed, Facebook. All traces of the disinformation could be traced back to ‘Vote Leave’ ads on Facebook which specifically targeted a sliver number of people that the ads identified as ‘persuadable’.

The failure to mitigate fascism in the past has been attributed to the failure of the left and the liberals to work together to suppress the common enemy. Instead of seeing fascism as a threat, Stalin and the Comintern had embedded the view that the social democrats are ‘social fascists’, while the liberals also saw the lefts as their nemeses and refused to cooperate or form a coalition in the government. Paul Mason seems to be fond of the idea of forming Popular Fronts, to contain fascists such was the case in 1936 France when the working class worked together to push back the Croix de Feu and subscribes to Karl Loewenstein’s idea of militant democracy to outlaw some basic features that give way for fascism to thrive (uniform, banner, hate speech, etc), something reasonable at this stage of development. Despite the fact that this book is hardly able to provide detailed historical accounts of fascism and is highly sporadic in quoting sources, I still find most of Paul Mason’s ideas insightful. For people who don’t subscribe to Marxist ideas, the book might give an eyebrow here and there, however, the point that there is the need to act now due to the pressing issue of climate change is relevant for all of us today.

A fascinating look at the history of fascist movements, the fight against them, and the lessons that might help us hit back against the growth of the far right. Mason argues that the rise of the right is a result of the failure of capitalism, and shows us the conditions in which fascism succeeds. At times chilling, but ultimately a hopeful book.