If something can happen once, it can happen again – Dennis Glover’s reading of history sounds an alarm about the present
- Written by Olivera Simic, Associate Professor in Law, Griffith University
Are we living in a pre-war rather than a post-war world? This is a legitimate question, given that there are more than 120 armed conflicts worldwide. The International Crisis Group has noted that 2024 began with:
wars burning in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine and peacemaking in crisis. Worldwide, diplomatic efforts to end fighting are failing. More leaders are pursuing their ends militarily. More believe they can get away with it.
Review: Repeat: A Warning from History – Dennis Glover (Black Inc.)
In his latest book, Repeat: A Warning from History, Australian writer Dennis Glover uses the past to illuminate our dire present situation.
Repeat is a short book divided into two parts: Tragedy and Farce. Each part consists of five chapters with a repeated sequence of titles. These chapters address the five stages that triggered the second world war and could trigger a global war if repeated. The key stages are:
Sowing the wind (creating difficult economic conditions)
Populism (allowing those willing to exploit hatred to gain power)
Savagery (descending into an era of murder and violence)
Preliminary war (letting populists plan and win early conflicts)
Consequences (waking up to the reality of massacres and global war).
According to Glover, we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, which led to the most destructive war in history.
First as tragedy
Repeat does not focus on the battles and atrocities of the wars themselves, but on complex events and relationships that have led, and may again lead, well-meaning leaders into brutal conflicts.
Officer and soldiers from the German Condor Legion, which fought with General Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War (January 1939).
Cassowary Colorizations, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Then as farce
In the second half of Repeat, Glover compares events and characters from the second world war with today’s concerning state of affairs. He argues that “the age of savagery our grandparents and great-grandparents endured is back”.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is his prime example to prove his claim. Glover draws parallels between Vladimir Putin and Hitler, noting, for example, that Hitler refused to respect the Versailles Treaty, ratified at the conclusion of the first world war, regarding it as a source of German humiliation. Putin has similarly flouted the Treaty on Friendship, Co-operation and Partnership concluded between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Signed in 1997, the treaty established principles of strategic partnership, recognised the inviolability of existing borders and included a commitment not to use each other’s territory to harm the security of the other.
In his essay Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942), George Orwell wrote:
The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – at any rate not in Spain […] The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had the modern arms and the other hadn’t.
Glover argues that the Spanish Civil War has returned to Europe 85 years later with Russia’s vicious attack on Ukraine. Like the Spanish Civil War, the Russia-Ukraine war will not be decided in Kyiv, but in other places.
Estimates suggest there are already around 35,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in addition to 11,500 civilian deaths and as many as 20,000 amputees. There are no statistics on how many people are suffering from severe mental trauma from losing their loved ones.
Glover sees the solution to the war in arming Ukraine and sending its youth to fight the war. The Western democracies failed to provide arms to fight against fascist aggression prior to the second world war. Glover asks whether the world is prepared to learn from its mistakes, arguing that we must “arm Ukraine and defend international law”.
Dennis Glover has dedicated Repeat to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Sergey Dolzhenko/AAP
War fatigue
For Glover, this course of action seems decisive for defending the democratic values of Europe and beyond. He admires Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he describes as a “charismatic leader”. Glover has dedicated his book to him.
But does international law defend itself only with arms? Wasn’t the whole aim of developing international law to prevent conflicts among states and seek peaceful solutions if they arise?
Apart from arming and fighting back, are there any other avenues for peaceful solutions or negotiated settlements? Or have we given up on them entirely, resorting only to military means that will inevitably bring more war, more killing and an increased risk of spreading conflict to other states? There must be concrete efforts to end the war in Ukraine, given the growing insecurity within the region. But these efforts do not have to be only military ones.
Faced with the war fatigue that has come to dominate the Western media, the problem remains how to sustain people’s engagement beyond reading about wars. This may be one of the biggest challenges facing humanity: to imagine such horror happening to us and to act with full force to stop it. A recent global study at Oxford University revealed a growing number of people are intentionally limiting their news consumption, especially concerning wars or politics.
One reason for this is to protect themselves from feeling “angry and depressed”. As Margaret MacMillan writes in War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020):
We do not take war as seriously as it deserves. We may prefer to avert our eyes from what is often a grim and depressing subject, but we should not.
It is an illusion that war, violence and horrific events always happen to someone else, somewhere else, and could never happen to us. The reality is that war has happened and is happening to so many people and places around the globe. As Glover argues, “it seems to be part of our nature to think people can’t really be serious when they tell us they intend to stray from orthodox, managerial forms of political behaviour”.
A man wounded in a Russian bombing of a factory in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, April 19 2022.
Petros Giannakouris/AAP
Populism and ‘post-truth’
Turning his attention to the West, Glover considers the way populists, such as Donald Trump, exploit racism and discrimination. They evoke “a lawless abyss of open borders, rampant killings, super hyperinflation […] and festering corruption”. Just as Hitler once blamed Jews, Trump now blames immigrants and undocumented people for unemployment, crime, financial crises, and threats to race and class.
Orwell wrote 70 years ago that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world”. We are now living in just such a “post-truth” era, in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion and government policymaking than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Today’s populist leaders create their own “alternative facts” and effectively mobilise mass emotions of hatred and anger, arguing that ideals like human rights serve only the “elites”.
As Dr Penelope Mathew, president and human rights commissioner of the ACT Human Rights Commission, stated in her Michael Whincop Memorial Lecture 2024, combating populism will take more “commitment to the hard-won ideals of human rights – to the values of common humanity, equality and dignity […] and engagement with the evidence and viable alternatives to any problem we seek to address”.
Glover is upfront about his lack of intention to provide a concrete plan for avoiding a new global war; instead, he means to “sound an alarm”. He wants his readers to “remaster the past” and gain a deeper understanding of history. Only by doing so will they be able to recognise how perilous things have become and understand that we are muddling through events that could lead to new global destruction.
The writing in Repeat is simple and easy to read, but fragmented. The book consists of short anecdotes and summaries of events, often disjointed, which are packed into 140 pages. What is novel in its account is not the events or characters, but the historical parallels it draws between past and present. Glover urges his readers to stop and think where the world might be heading and ask “is it all going to happen again?” He warns that “maybe the endgame has already begun”.
Authors: Olivera Simic, Associate Professor in Law, Griffith University
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