“Repeat: A Warning From History” is Dennis Glover’s new book that looks to the future as much as the past. He draws parallels between significant historical figures and the politics of today. Unfortunately, this focus on drawing lessons from history leaves much to be desired. 

Gore Vidal, in one of his many waspish offerings of wisdom, suggested that nothing could ever be certain about history. He offered one exception: had the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev been assassinated instead of US President John F. Kennedy, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis would hardly have married Mrs Khruschev.

History has no precise lessons, excepting one fact: that its lessons are difficult to learn, and often inapplicable to the present. It is dead matter tenanted to archives and records, literally past, unrepeatable and never to be seen or set upon again. They can be inspected and examined, but impossible to replicate. Ironically enough, cadres of policy makers, and even some historians insist that it reappears in warnings and signals, oracular in guidance for the next decision.

Those most studied in history chain often themselves to the past, unable to understand current challenges and assuming that previous errors offer contemporary solutions. Policy makers and leaders embrace, with delusionary comfort, an impossible, unrepeatable model in order to guide current decisions. Such thinking led the United States into the quagmires of Indochina, its planners obsessed about the next sign of appeasement akin to the policy adopted by Britain and France towards Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

It is precisely such a model that animates Dennis Glover’s Repeat, a work that seems linked to that same strain of writing that inspired pulpit promoting assessments such as Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man and any number of books of previous eras claiming to capture a spirit no one else seemed to be taking seriously (the comparison is relevant, given Glover’s shameless borrowing from Karl Marx’s proposition that history begins as tragedy then culminates in farce). In other words, it is less history than Zeitgeist tapping, a saunter into the corridors of power to convince readers that his warnings offer a cipher to combat modern authoritarianism. And its inspiration lay in one key event: “Repeat has been on my mind every day since Donald Trump’s attempted insurrection in January 2021.”

As if advising a politician–which is exactly the role he performed as speechwriter for a number of Australian Labor leaders, including Kim Beazley and Simon Crean–he takes the reader through such key stages as “sowing the wind” (economic instability), “populism” (when will that word ever be understood?), “savagery” (vague), “preliminary war,” (this is where the populists are given a free hand) and “consequences” (too late, we are told: death is upon us).

The book essentially reads like a lengthy speech echoing, if inadequately, the speech by Charlie Chaplin in The Dictator. This approach, one heartily pursued by Glover, leads to baroque curiosities. Before you know it, very living current figures seem to be sharing the buffet table with Stalin, Hitler, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin. 6 January becomes a historical template for resurrections the world over.

Credible historical analysis can never be catalogued or packaged neatly. Glover is unbothered, straightjacketing history in offering a factually inaccurate formula in screeching italics: “If something can happen once, it can happen again.” Strictly speaking, no. The same thing is never bound to happen again, the once being the only–though, as Mark Twain teasingly proposes, it may rhyme. But for the speechwriter, those nine italicised words “must become democracy’s rallying cry.”

Glover is performing a hack act, hoping that this cobbling of events will somehow yield a pattern. He calls the supporters marshalled by Trump strategist Steve Bannon “shock troops – thousands of bored alienated young men linked to each other via internet message boards.” A less than subtle allusion is implied, turning Trump’s assembly into reincarnated participants of the Beer Hall Putsch led by Adolf Hitler in Weimar Germany in November 1923.

Tragedy entails a broad stroke summation of events which the poet W. H. Auden, (whom Glover cites), once called the dishonest decade. The horror of the Spanish Civil War. The rise of the Nazis in Germany. Huge patches of detail are avoided. Ditto the second part, “Farce,” which gives Glover a chance to compare Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. Conveniently, he suggests that, just as Hitler refused to respect the Versailles Treaty, Putin does the same to the Treaty on Friendship, Co-operation and Partnership concluded between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

The inconvenient aspects of this are ignored: the assurances by the United States and NATO that there would be no eastward expansion towards the Russian border post-Cold War; and the continual meddling in Ukraine’s domestic affairs by the United States leading up to the 2014 Orange Revolution. None of this justifies the appalling conflict currently unfolding, but such omissions lead the reader to see this work as less a historical examination than a funding appeal for causes against authoritarianism. Hence the exhortation to arm Ukraine “to defend international law” while praising the country’s “charismatic” leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy as its faultless defender.

Glover’s work, short on matter (“because we need to digest its message quickly and respond immediately”), absent an index, lightly spread, is a jittery spray of warning for a certain class of politician untethered by deep examination and proves invaluable in one respect. It will certainly be an important addition to the catalogue of warnings that served to illustrate the importance of their errors. For that reason, it should be read with interest.

This is a review of Dennis Glover’s Repeat: A Warning From History (Collingwood: Black, Inc. 2024). ISBN: 9781760645311.

Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.