Ken McGoogan is the globe-trotting Canadian author of seventeen books—mostly nonfiction narratives but also novels and memoirs. His bestselling titles include Searching for Franklin, Fatal Passage, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and Canada’s Undeclared War: Fighting Words from the Literary Trenches. He was born in Montreal, has lived in towns and cities across the country, and now resides in Guelph, ON.

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Shadows of Tyranny takes a granular look at authoritarianism in the twentieth century and raises the alarm about the erosion of democracy in our current moment. How hopeful are you that the world will learn from the past and forestall or avert a backward slide toward more authoritarian forms of power?

I was more hopeful before Donald J. Trump got re-elected. Like many others, I am still shaking my head: what just happened? In Shadows of Tyranny, I look to history. And I ask: how did Europeans respond in the 1930s when authoritarians gained power? In my book, I highlight the resistance movements that arose, notably in Spain and France.

My epilogue is entitled, “Where is Our Churchill?” Today, I begin to think that we need not an outstanding individual but an entire nation, and that, to avert the backward slide, Canada itself will have to step up to lead an international Resistance.

Picking up on this theme, it’s important to note that your book was published before the re-election of Donald Trump in the United States. How does Trump’s election in particular change the calculus of the situation?

The theme of the book comes from Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but often it rhymes.” I was more optimistic before Trump won the election, but now I think the present moment rhymes with 1934. That was the year a certain demented someone became the all-powerful Fuhrer. Yes, by then he had already built his first concentration camp, Dachau. But in 1934, he consolidated his power, surrounded himself with sycophants, and launched the Night of the Long Knives to remove any potential naysayers.

Remember what came next? In 1935, he passed the Nuremberg Laws, legalizing the persecution of Jews in Germany, and in 1938 he unleashed Kristallnacht, during which Nazis rampaged through thousands of Jewish shops and synagogues. Then things got worse . . . .

One of the most compelling parts of the book is the light you shine on how ordinary figures—journalists, doctors, volunteers, and others—found ways to resist and confront dictatorships in the twentieth century. What do we each need to be doing in the current moment?

That is very much what the book is about. Early on, I described it as A Resistance Narrative Ranging from Hitler and Stalin to Donald J. Trump. I think of The Great Generation, of those who struggled through the Great Depression and then fought in the Second World War. Here in North America, we have since had our ups and downs. But most of us have never been tested the way they were. I hate to say it, but I am afraid our time has come. Each of us will have to decide for ourselves. Do we become collaborators? Or do we join The Canadian Resistance? And proceed accordingly.

You also explore why and how historical figures (like Chamberlain and McKenzie King, as two examples) reacted to authoritarian threats by essentially burying their heads in the sand or remaining overly optimistic as a way to avoid dealing with threats. How prepared is Canada and how willing are Canadian political leaders to confront authoritarian governments in the current political moment?

The good news is that finally, our political leaders appear to be waking up. Leading Liberals and NDPers are of course repudiating calls for annexation but even politicians I have never regarded highly are speaking out. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been warning against massive job losses and sporting a baseball cap that says “Canada is Not for Sale.” And Stephen Harper – yes, our former pro-American Prime Minister! – has revealed that he was shocked by some of Trump’s comments, noting that they do not sound like the words of “a friend, a partner, and an ally.”

The bad news? Pierre Poilievre seeking advice from Elon Musk, Trump’s latest right-hand man. We can only imagine where that might lead.

It’s a huge question, but what aren’t Canadians seeing or understanding about the current threat of authoritarianism (either within our own country and elsewhere) and how it is likely to impact our lives?

If today we are rhyming with 1934, as I believe we are, then in the next few years, things are going to get worse. Trump’s opening move, the big tariff squeeze, will cost us jobs and exacerbate our housing crisis. But how will we respond when, for example, the man announces that he has rounded up 500,000 “illegal immigrants” and will soon be expelling them from detention camps, sending them north into Canada?

Oh, and he won’t take no for an answer -- not unless Canada becomes the 51st state. What? Surely that is far-fetched. Maybe so. Maybe I am ludicrously deluded. Wouldn’t that be great?

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Excerpt from Shadows of Tyranny

Chapter 1: What Rough Beast?

In the autumn of 2016, a wealthy American woman told me during a private conversation at a public event in Toronto that she was surprised to see Canadians taking such an interest in the US presidential election. We could not vote in it, after all. And presidents come and go every four years. Why would Canadians concern themselves? I had expressed a worry that Donald Trump might get elected and she was indicating that, as a Canadian, I should keep my opinions to myself. I observed mildly that whatever happened in the US affected the whole world and especially Canada. But then I let the matter drop. Canadian politesse, eh?

After Trump won that 2016 election, I, like many other Canadians, started watching more closely. Installed in the White House in January 2017, Trump moved immediately to ban immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. He fired acting attorney-general Sally Yates when she ordered the Justice Department not to defend that illegal ban. For those who had eyes to see, Trump made no secret of his racism. And his rhetoric found a sympathetic audience.

In August, seven months into his presidency, far-right groups mounted a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The two-day demonstration attracted self-identified members of the alt-right: neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and various right-wing militias. Some brought weapons. Many wore Nazi and Ku Klux Klan insignia. Others carried neo-Nazi artifacts, Confederate battle flags, and items featuring anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic symbols. They chanted slogans like “Blood and Soil,” a rallying cry born in Hitler’s Germany.

The Charlottesville event turned violent. Protesters clashed with counter-protesters and more than thirty people were injured. Early in the afternoon of August 12, a self-identified white supremacist deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a thirty-two-year-old woman and injuring nineteen other people. He would be arrested, tried, and convicted of first-degree murder. But that came later.

Reacting immediately, Donald Trump condemned “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence, on many sides. . . This has been going on for a long, long time.” He then observed that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” With those words, as Joe Biden remarked later, the president was assigning “a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”

Ten months after Charlottesville, in June 2018, Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the US border began making headlines. Children were transported to special holding facilities, including a shuttered Walmart. During one six-week period, nearly two thousand children were taken from their parents. Trump claimed falsely that a law enacted by Democrats was forcing family separations: “We have to break up families. The Democrats gave us that law, and they don’t want us to do anything about it.”

A year later, hundreds of children were still being held. Two days before Trump celebrated the Fourth of July with a martial “Salute to America” featuring tanks, military flyovers, and a fireworks display in Washington, the Department of Homeland Security made public an urgent report on conditions in migrant detention centres in the Rio Grande Valley. Published photos showed adults and children crowded into cages. Some held signs up in windows, pleading for help. The report spoke of “serious overcrowding” and detentions so prolonged that they violated federal guidelines.

Children, separated from their parents, were denied access to showers and received no hot meals. At one location, adults were confined in spaces that were standing-room-only. Many had gone without showers for as long as one month. A diet of bologna sandwiches made some of them sick. On MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez observed that Trump “has systematically engaged in the violation of international human rights on our border.” She noted that one child died while in custody. And she charged that Trump was trying to restrict every form of legal immigration: “This is systemic, it is wrong, and it is anti-American.”

Trump shrugged off this criticism. He never let up. Early in 2022, when Russian president Vladimir Putin announced, just before he invaded Ukraine, that he would recognize two regions of that country as independent, Trump hailed the move as a stroke of genius. Speaking on a syndicated conservative talk radio show on February 22, Trump said: “So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. . . . We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen.”

Next day, at a Florida fund-raiser, he reiterated that the Russian dictator was “pretty smart.” After all, “he’s taken over a country for two dollars worth of sanctions . . . taken over a country—really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people—and just walking right in.” Trump would continue to celebrate Putin though the rest of his presidency and beyond.

This brings me back to that naïve American woman who wondered at my unseemly interest in the US political process and thought I should mind my own Canadian business. I could have asked her what she thought the French should have done in the mid-1930s. Should they have remained silent while, next door in Germany, the Nazis took power and began furiously rearming? Oblivious, self-absorbed, the French did not start seriously mobilizing for war until September 1,1939, after Germany invaded Poland and launched the Second World War.

Early in May 1940, the Nazis bombed Dutch and Belgian airfields. They circumvented the vaunted Maginot Line and rolled over the French army. On June 14, motorcyclists led the invaders into Paris, roaring up the Champs-Élysées followed by German cameramen and broadcasters. Then came the Nazi troops, goose-stepping up that splendid boulevard while Parisians watched, sick with shock and disbelief. So began the occupation of France by its powerful next-door neighbor—a subjugation that lasted four years. Given this historical precedent, and Donald Trump’s tendency to praise dictators and admire invasions, I might have asked that friendly American how Canadians could not worry about what happens in the United States? . . .

Excerpt from  Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship by Ken McGoogan(Douglas & McIntyre, copyright 2024), reprinted with permission of the publisher.