by Ken McGoogan
DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE
2024/$36.95/320 pp.
Former Calgary Herald books editor Ken McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny is a collection of vignettes about reporters, writers, soldiers and resistance fighters who fought fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s not just a book about the past, though. From the silhouette of Trump on the cover to the final chapter raising the spectre of a possible US invasion of Canada(!), McGoogan’s angle is that he’s telling the story of a past age of dictatorship just in time for a new one.
Time, as W.H. Auden wrote in 1940, tells us nothing but “I told you so,” and the implication that interwar statesmen should have known what was coming runs throughout Shadows of Tyranny. Here’s McGoogan on prime minister Mackenzie King, who was before the war a committed believer in appeasement: “King wrote a note thanking Hitler for… a silver-framed photo of the Führer…. By this time, Hitler had already dispatched four thousand innocents to concentration camps and created laws turning German Jews into second-class citizens.” Whether King should have known what would happen in the future is debatable, but what’s not debatable is that many people throughout the 1930s, including many Canadians, were committed anti-fascists. King simply chose not to listen to them, as Chamberlain chose not to listen to Churchill until war had become inevitable.
McGoogan has a lot to say about those who enabled Hitler, but the heart of the book is the tale of how people of foresight and goodwill tried to prevent the expansion of fascism in Europe. McGoogan combines his flair for engaging narrative with meticulous research (of secondary sources, mostly, not archival ones) to tell stories many readers will be unfamiliar with. These include the story of Alberta born and raised Matthew Halton, one of the first to report from Nazi Germany in 1933, and later a renowned war correspondent. Halton’s level-headed view of the danger Hitler posed is contrasted with the chorus of politicians who were happy to see Hitler as someone they could work with. (That the Western Allies were later happy to see Stalin as somebody they could work with, and that some of the most committed anti-fascists were Stalinists, is a still-open wound of history that McGoogan touches on, but only briefly.)
McGoogan includes many Canadians in his book, but he also includes George Orwell and French Resistance fighters and collaborators. These people’s stories have been told many times before, as have the stories of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, so it might have been better if the book were more focused. On the other hand, the stories themselves are well worth reading, especially if they inspire readers to find ways to defend democracy here and abroad.
Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.
_______________________________________
