Martin A. Lee. The Beast Reawakens. Little, Brown and Company: Boston, New York, Toronto, London, 1997. 546 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 0-316-51959-6. $24.95.

I grew up during the Cold War. In my secure and circumscribed world, I thought that there were “good guys” and “bad guys,” democracy and communism, “black hats” and “white hats.” The War in Vietnam taught me that these distinctions were not always so clear cut. Now, with the reading of The Beast Reawakens by Martin Lee, I understand I have been surrounded by evil all my life. That evil is called Fascism.
Before reading The Beast Reawakens, I thought that white supremacy, racism, and neo-Nazism were just passing fads, like platform shoes. I hoped that my world would not be infected with this madness for very long. As it turns out, Nazism has never been far from my side. In fact, it never died. It is not neo-Nazism that we face today: it is the Nazism of old.

While reading this book, I turned often to the interesting endnotes at the back. I can usually get a sense of how valid the scholarship is in a book by reading the notes as they come up. So often in this book, the notes would start out with: “Author’s interview with ...”; or there would be quotes from magazine articles, FBI files, CIA files, or even records of US Army Intelligence. This author clearly did his research. If you have ever come across periodicals such as Spotlight, The Barnes Review or Mankind Quarterly; or if you have watched TV shows like “The 700 Club,” listened to Pat Buchanan or the Christian Coalition, read books like The Bell Curve, or wondered about militias, Waco, or Randy Weaver, then this is the book to read.

The author shows how the CIA and the US military kept Nazism alive by hiring Nazis as scientists for our space program or as spies against the former Soviet Union. Instead of taking measures to ensure that Nazi ideology would never again take hold in Germany or anywhere else, the U.S. gave these criminals a mere “slap on the wrist.” We even paid for some of them to obtain safe passage to countries in South America. As a result of the political atmosphere of the Cold War, aid programs such as the Marshall Plan were given a higher priority than bringing Nazi criminals to justice.

Martin Lee traces the history of Fascism, and particularly Nazism, from the end of World War II to the present day. In the course of his presentation, he offers a chilling look at reality and speculates about the links between world events and Nazism. How many of us, for example, think about interconnections between Yasser Arafat, the Christian Coalition, and Waco? What really happened in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism? Who really was behind Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar Sadat in Egypt? Where did the Croats get their military equipment and weapons? Who supported the war in the former Yugoslavia? Who backed the Serbs and offered aid to them? And in our own country: What is the relationship between the militia movement and the neo-Nazis? What does the right wing emphasize and how do they differ from the left?

Martin Lee has answers to these questions and many more. His answers are based on meticulous research. Yet his writing style is so lucid that this book of more than 500 pages is a veritable page-turner and reads like a thriller. If you have been like an ostrich with your head in the sand as far as current events are concerned, or if you belong to that majority which often is confused about current events, this book will definitely make sense to you. It will bring you up to speed. It debunks common misconceptions, clarifies vague notions and, in the process, frightens you more than Wes Craven or Quentin Tarantino could ever do.

Learning about the world-wide resurgence of Fascism, with its thousands of manifestations, I find I cannot pursue my college education with a “business as usual” attitude. Lee’s book showed me to what extent concerted propaganda, rather than ignorance, is the cause for various manifestations of hate. It has sharpened my perceptions and taught me to watch out for a possible resurgence of the ideological “beast”—even here, in my own community. The Beast Reawakens is propelling me into an active commitment to stand up for civil, political, and human rights.

Rivka Strom—HGPS 490 Student