Repeat: a warning from history by Dennis Glover

A Review

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Dennis Glover’s name is well known in Orwellian circles not least for his novel The Last Man in Europe (2017) which explores Orwell’s final days as he writes Nineteen Eight-Four on Jura (https://orwellsociety.com/the-last-man-in-europe-review) but also for the articles he has written that often utilise an Orwellian prism to examine current events and politics. He is well aware that everybody appears to want to co-opt Orwell to their cause however distant, indeed diametrically opposed, it might be to the concept of democratic Socialism as (Orwell) understood it and so consequentially he wants to ensure that the left, both in his native Australia and internationally, reclaim Orwell for our society’s good.

Repeat is a short polemical book that is aimed at a popular audience and designed to be read quickly and to alarm and disquiet the reader, jolt them into taking the threat of current day populists and would-be fascists very seriously and above all heed the lessons and warnings of history. The idea of writing Repeat was on Glover’s mind following Trump’s attempted insurrection in January 2021 and I fear that events since the book’s publication have only served to reinforce its central message that the interwar years provide the keys to what is happening now, not in some crude mechanical deterministic fashion but in laying bare the processes of path dependency, examining the past decisions, events and processes that have influenced how we have arrived at where we are now.

The book has two heroes; George Orwell of course, whose insights into how history is weaponised and distorted by the totalitarians must and should continue to inform how we view history, and John Maynard Keynes who saw only too clearly the course history could, and did, take given the victor’s frenzy for war reparations and assigning guilt to the defeated. In two hundred pages the reader is taken through a brief history of the rise and brutal crimes of the totalitarians through to the present day parallels from Putin’s revanchist and warmongering Russia, the rise of the so-called populists across Europe with their illiberal and nativist ideologies and the MAGA movement in the US who are intent on tearing up the established rules based era in favour of a return to the rule of strongmen unconstrained by morality or decency.

Dennis Glover was asked in a recent interview – If readers will only take one message away from Repeat, what do you hope that message is?

“The populists and fascists are coming back. Don’t let them. Don’t give them an inch. Crush them now while we are still stronger than them. And arm Ukraine!”

In his 1919 poem ‘Aftermath’ Siegfried Sassoon wrote…..

    But the past is just the same—and War’s a bloody game…
    Have you forgotten yet?…
    Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

    …….
    Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

This question is the epigram Dennis Glover has selected for this book. His answer is Yes we must stop and ask, Yes we must remember our history and Yes we must not let it happen again. “History can save us”

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Repeat: a warning from history by Dennis Glover (London. Allison and Busby Ltd., 2025 204pp ISBN13: 9780749033217)