There is a new king
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpEGBgHxNTQ&feature=player_embedded
Sunday 6 December 2009
Sunday 11 October 2009
The man speaks!
Bored of my tedious prattling on about transcendental voulteeerism, my gushing pseudism over programmatic modernism and my ivory tower snotty 'oh, look at me and SHUT THE FUCK UP, IDIOTS' reading of fascism.
Well, now, you can have it done much better and far far less dickishly and with proper peer review pdfs.
See the great Roger Griffin blog here:-
http://roger-griffin.blogspot.com/
Well, now, you can have it done much better and far far less dickishly and with proper peer review pdfs.
See the great Roger Griffin blog here:-
http://roger-griffin.blogspot.com/
Friday 9 October 2009
Really Lazy Now - Old essays pt 5
Assess the viability of the statement by Michael Foucault that public punishment was ‘Pure Theatre’
‘When urged to repent by the clergymen who visited her in prison, "she would laugh at them, and reply in some such language as she had learned in the devil's school, with which she was well stored". Her defiance continued to the gallows, where, we are told, "she ended her wicked life by a shameful death, without the least signs of repentance for her abominable whoredomes and wickedness”’[1], account of Hannah Blay’s execution in 1668
‘Hats Off’[2], traditional cry at hangings on the emergence of the Condemned, recorded by Dickens
Rather than a display of power onto a passive victim and audience, public punishment in early modern England was a far more contested arena of rituals and rites than Foucault allows. The crowd, the condemned and ideas about death, courage, pain and the body were locked in an ongoing tension with the official script of such ‘theatre’. Whilst in the vast majority of cases, the deviant was pilloried, the criminal hung, the traitor tortured and dispatched and the reticent crushed, the meaning of these events did not go unopposed. The administration of public punishment was at the centre of ‘a constellation of enshrined ideas’[3], many of which were not controlled by the killing and maiming state.
Other factors beyond the power of the state must be considered. The crowd and the wider community had expectations of both the performance and their own place within it, as well as independent agency in perceiving it. The condemned proved willing to subvert or challenge the punishment, seeking to both seek a good death and gain solace to bolster them for the coming pain and worst. A considerable knot of discourse and rites surrounded the body under punishment, ideas independent of princely power, disrupted the claims of same power on the pillory, the gallows and the giblet. Foucault’s theory thus downplays ‘role of agency, meaning and interpretation’[4]. Pain and suffering and even what might be termed the ‘narrative ritual’ of the state sanctioned punishment were not the pliable tools of supreme secular authority. Instead, the place of punishment was more of a physical space, an arena for a host of meta-physical customs and rituals, all in contest and conflict.
Foucault bases his interpretation along a singular axis. Public punishment was a spectacle of power, that of the monarch acting against the body of the convicted. Through the public infliction of pain, the prince addressed the perceived ‘injury’ to his person that the crime represented. Thus the pillory and the gallows were the setting of a theatrical performance, demonstrating the reiteration of the Prince’s law and a display of power onto the condemned’s flesh. Within this ‘pure theatre’, the very extremity of the violence and the subsequent pain marked out a sanguinary moral. This performance was the primary purpose of early modern public punishment. The prince enforced a narrative tale of deviancy rewarded, of wrong made right and of effrontery answered by pain. The crowds came to be told this tale; the punished was an extra, symbolically made humble. Their sole roles were to ‘consecrate his own punishment by proclaiming the blackness of his crimes’[5] and to die and suffer. The only active agent was the prince and his power. Foucault then theorises that it was the growing un-passiveness of the crowd that turned this tableau of majesty restored into an ugly and uncontrollable contest. Rather than a reaffirmation of hierarchy, it became an arena where such structures were challenged. This led to the prison system of the high modern period, marking out deviants as ‘cases’, separate from the healthy social body.
Using a quite static binary model of punishment then discipline, Foucault over-emphasises structures and homogenised entities like ‘society’ and ‘power’. Barely touching on the English experience, ironic given the contemporary reputation as the ‘Bloody Country’[6], he seeks a general truth in the extremities of punishment, those dealing with the highest crimes, ones where injury to the prince is actual i.e. regicides and traitors. With regards to the English case, he thus misses out on a far more substantial social phenomenon. The thousands of men, women and children condemned under the ‘bloody code’[7] and to the pillory did suffer their punishment in performance and ritual. Yet this was no space of pure power transmitted down the social hierarchy from monarch to criminal. Rather a wide and competing host of rituals, customs, practices and indeed theatre surrounded the ‘narrative ritual’ of serving ‘justice’. These conflicts were not the demise of the public display of punishment; rather they were its mechanism, its social reality.
While Foucault’s approach has certainly generated new debate and lines of research, it had increasingly come under criticism. Some historians like J.A. Sharpe[8] and R. McGowen have supported his interpretation, seeing repentance and humbling the deviant before the princely power at the centre of public punishment. However, Gatrell, Lake and Questier[9] as well as sociologists like Smith have sought to inject further actors and agencies into the punishment ‘performance’. Thomas Laqueur[10] goes further, inverting the whole of Foucault’s model, placing the crowd in charge of proceedings. In this carnival, the whole hierarchy was mocked and the pretensions of power subverted. As is often the case, both extremities of interpretation, that of a display of unchecked monarchical power versus a mass led subversion of the order of things fail to account for the complexities within a huge social phenomenon. At the hanging tree, there was no monopoly of discourse.
Looking at the official act of taking life and inflicting pain, there is no simple transmission of will. The ‘play’ has many rewrites. In punishing the people, the state and the law had to act through a wide selection of the self-same populace. To quote C.B Herrup, ‘A hanging did not result from any single decision….but rather was the end product of a series of discrete decisions assessing degrees of culpability’[11] based on ‘the common ground between the values of the legal elite, the gentry and the local men of middling status’[12]. These men were at times to be as swayed as much by popular notions of what constituted ‘justice’ and what was proper than regal power. Similarly the Law was considered more than the bare will of the Monarch. ‘The metaphor of the body politic’[13], of crime as a disease to be cut out, was a consensus one, and thus open to negotiation over its contours and limits. Foucault and McGowen assume a Weberian ideal type of state, one with a clear executive centre and a monopoly of violence. As Amussen points out; in early modern England, violence was ‘understood as part of a strategy’[14] to claim power. Yet it was one which was linked to the socially conceived legitimacy of its use and not a monopoly. Punishment in a Foucaultian sense was a societal wide activity, from husbands to monarchs, yet it was merely one discourse amongst many.
The various caveats attached to punishment, such as the pre-strangulation of female petty traitors before burning and the dispersed disposal of the Gordon’s rioters near their locations of their crimes also complicated the power of this ‘theatre’. The garrotting of Catherine Hayes in 1726 was meant to amend the horror of immolation, ‘this part of the sentence, a type of barbarism’ due to public sentiment, it failed and thus the crowd had to witness as ‘she rent the air with her cries and lamentations’[15]. Gatrell lists eleven executions over three days at seven different locations for various rioters in 1780. Whilst this might all be a case of maximising ‘Visibility and example’[16], exercising the crimes in particular geographical space suggests a need to widen the space of punishment, confronting other subversive discourses. Thus even at the heart of the exercise of power, there was contest and contingency.
The practice of peine forte et dure or pressing with weights[17] represented a escalation of violence upon the condemned, yet this was activated by the agency of the would-be victim. It was their intransigence to the court and the system condemning them, that ’…opened up a space in which they could for a time both seize the initiative…and demonstrate their resolution and courage’[18]. In making their case ‘a contested space’[19] these ‘passive bodies’ might not escape their sentence but they made it a fight; demonstrating their own courage and questioning the forum of their conviction. The body most controlling of punishment in the early modern period was not the state, but rather a corporation. The Bank of England was the major driving force behind many an execution for forgery in the early 19th century. In comparison with the fractured and contradictory procedures of the state, ‘The Corporation managed death with a single-minded purposefulness’[20]. Instead of the pure exercise and demonstration of power, we see ‘…The infliction of death was managed to secure more modest goals than the crude intimidation of the lower orders’[21]. Thus even in the ‘master ritual’, there was tension and a dynamism ill placed in Foucault’s static interpretation.
Possibly the most important element to rival the state in its performance was that of the watching crowd and the wider community. As has been mentioned, violence and ritual outside of state control had a popular legitimacy. Rough Music[22] and brawls had a set of norms and customs that mimicked (or more accurately coexisted with) the pretensions of the avenging and ‘just’ state. Indeed the pillory was dependant on the crowd’s participation. During the humiliation of William Hales and his accomplice, it was the state who discouraged them being pelted, as ‘nothing was offered to be thrown at them’[23]. The formation of a mass crowd in an age where ‘…the coming together of several hundreds or several thousands of the lower orders was not regularly encouraged’[24] was important, but not merely in the narrow way Sharpe views it.
The crowd were there in tacit consent, but part of that consent was the ‘remonstration’ of their own ritual expectations and prejudices. In the case of Eliza Fenning, executed in 1815, the crow voiced its concern of the sketchy evidence and her great composure in front of the noose by congregating in at the house of Mr Turner, the prosecutor, ‘conversing on the subject, with whom, pity for her sufferings, and a firm belief of her innocence, seemed to be the prevailing sentiment’[25]. The crowd became so large and threatening that they had to be dispersed. They had not saved the poor victim but they had shown their displeasure and outrage. The crowd as such was a vital actor, whom both the state and the condemned wished to convince, as ‘Public sentiment, siding with the victim, may deny the hegemonic interpretation of the ritual and convert the execution from a liminal to a profane event’[26]. The crowd was a partner in the production, and as such could not be assumed to an undiscerning sponge, awaiting the morality of the state to be reiterated.
As Gatrell notes, the scaffold crowd was also a perceptive critic of the proceedings. How the condemned faced their fate was one of the paramount issues within the on looking mass, ‘in the business of dying it was all important to make a good end’[27]. In the case of those dispatched at Tyburn, the most public of rituals, the ‘Calvary’ from Newgate to the bottom of Edgware Road was a public examination. Those found to be brave, courageous and charming, even the darkest of criminals, were ‘admired by our sprightly people’[28]. In procession and on the scaffold, they were being re-judged, to use Andrea McKenzie’s term, in ‘God’s Tribunal’[29]. It was not merely the almighty, but the huge crowd at the foot of the tree that were to consider the wretches on display.
The crowd expected certain forms of behaviour. On the one hand; determined but controlled defiance was the case of ‘the five Jesuits’ hanged in 1679 might reverse much wider public opinion. Their ‘solemn protestations of innocence and above all…bravery’[30] changed the temper of the crowd and the wider audience reached by pamphlets and broadsides, challenging the hegemonic anti-papist bigotry. Overly fiery rhetoric could inversely over step the boundaries as George Gervase in 1608 was to find when he declared he did not want the ‘prayers of heretics’[31], thus confirming the crowd’s prejudices of Catholics as fanatics. On the other hand, signs of piety and grace attracted the crowd’s sympathy. In cases such as Francis Newland, killed in 1695, whom after declaring his innocence and thus confounding his Foucaultian ‘role’, said ‘I am at peace with all the world . . . I suffer (I heartily believe) a most just reward, for my past sinful life and conversation’[32]. In doing so, he (and others) charmed the crowd and produced ‘…the most effective critique of justice’ by ‘simply dying well’[33].
Just as effective, especially during the 18th century was roguish charm and ‘cheek’. Lord Balmerino, a Jacobite executed after the ’45, chatted and quipped to his friends over wine, gave a speech ‘in which he praised the King for magnanimity and mercy, but faulted him on erroneous political principle’, tipped his executioner three guineas, adjusted the block and felt the blade of the axe. He even demonstrated where his killer should strike his neck. Such bravado inspired the crowd to behave ‘…with uncommon decency and evenness of temper’[34]. Consider that this was punishment for treason in the aftermath of an armed insurrection against the royal dynasty, one laden with intense sectarian division. Yet the crowd did not passively accept a triumphant message of victory and regal excess, nor did the state see the need to enforce it. The rituals of the crowd, their expectations of ‘the good death’ and their place in such a ceremony defy Foucault’s ‘simple unidirectional account of the flow of power between state, felon and religious ideology’[35].
The abuse poured onto incompetent hangmen who botched a ‘good death’ demonstrates the crowd’s independent agency and expectations. When Robert Johnston was hung in 1818, he was left ‘half-standing, half-suspended’ by the botched efforts of the authorities. As frantic efforts where made to finish him off, he was cut down and born off by the crowd whom then attacked the executioner. After a struggle between the crowd and the constabulary over control of the nearly expired victim, he was hung again to ‘dreadful cries…from every quarter’[36]. The infamous Calcraft was publicly reviled less for his function but because he was careless about performing it, ‘He hanged them like dogs’[37]. If the primary agent in the punishment process was slack in doing its part and thus failed to honour the public’s ritual expectations, the crowd would openly and forcefully disrupt the proceedings and their legitimacy.
Rather than an extra to suffer justice upon their flesh, the condemned had considerable independence in their now deeply limited options. Sharpe’s deeply foucaultian description of the punished as ‘…the willing central participants in a theatre of punishment’, aiding by their contrition, ‘a reinforcement of certain values’[38] is lopsided. The gallows was a space where the soon to be dispatched had a series of sacred rights. The aforementioned good death, of having shown dignity and grace was paramount. Considering the self-interest of the punished in the ‘proper’ manner of their dispatch, this is unsurprising. Folkloric notions of where best to pace the noose made the last moments on the gallows a place of negotiation. As the Cato Street conspirator Ings insisted to his soon-murderer, ‘Now, old gentlemen, finish me tidily: pull the rope tighter; it may slip’[39]. The nature of their demise was conceived to be fluid and within their control. This was no passive recipient for the pain honed morality of some Leviathan.
Similarly, the last speech was seen as ‘one of the alienable rights of the “free-born Englishman”’[40]. It was sacrosanct. The ‘penitent end’ expected of the condemned in Sharpe’s review of 17th century gallows speeches was less about their specific crimes. Instead the condemned sought to seek forgiveness for general sinfulness. They were making their, not the state’s, peace. John Noyse in 1686 did not choose to seek forgiveness for committing murder, he urged the audience to avoid ‘the profanation of the Sabbath day’[41]. The disruption by the convicted of the ‘master ritual’, by cheek and parody, by defiance and charming grace, by high spirits and actual drink was an entitlement of those condemned. These strategies allowed them to ‘die well’ and just as importantly ‘anaesthetize mortal fear’[42]. They, the crowd and indeed wider society expected these customs to be respected, that the space so created be respected.
Death and its ‘primordial’ nature challenged the ‘pure theatre’ of punishment. The transition of mortality came with ‘a forest of symbols’[43], independent of the state. It is a liminal event par excellence. The post-mortem body of the executed could become a battleground between the state and societal notions, it became ‘totemic’. While a custom which was decline during the 18th century, the condemned in both life and death became a mediator between the two state, a magical property. Contact with the body had almost shamanic properties, able to ‘cure cancers and warts’. Three women in 1814 seeking such ‘power’ had the deceased’s hands placed on their breasts, for instance[44]. The body, of the killed or soon to be killed as well as that of the killers had a power in spite of the state. In the face of their martyrdom, ‘Ralph Sherwin kissed the executioner, Mark Barkworth embraced the hanging body of Anne Line, and Edward Waterson took to kissing the remains of a disembowelled and quartered priest which had been sent to scare him into submission’[45]. Further, Squabbles over dissection and being placed in the Giblet reveal that ownership of the body and its meaning were rigorously disputed[46]. There was no monopoly of the state in meaning or narrative, rather this too was contested.
When the last public execution was performed in 1868, the move ‘indoors’ of capital punishment transformed its character. It ceased to be a social ritual and one of ongoing negotiation and tension and was turned into a private method of dispatch. The reasons for this change are disputed, but one of the foremost is the increasing abhorrence of elite observers to public punishment. To Dickens, Wakefield, Ewart and Bright, the panoply of rituals that surrounded the gruesome act of killing were just as if not more horrific. To Holyoake, an execution crowd was ‘an avalanche of ordure’[47]. The whole act was unseemly and a de-civilising event. There was even doubt that it was in any way a deterrent. In Weberian terms, it must be rationalised away, made respectable, predictable. It was the very nature of this public tug of war between rituals, actors and customs that made it such a shambolic theatrical performance. It was completely un-professional.
When Foucault uses this theatrical metaphor, he does his work a disservice. If the metaphor were to hold up, the director would mangle the script, the actors refuse to say their lines and the audience would have a tendency to invade the stage. This, of course, resembles ‘low theatre’ of the early modern age, before lines of behaviour were so rigidly enforced[48]. Rather public punishment was a place where an active battle took place, where state, crowd and condemned sought to struggle in a contest of ‘narrativization’[49]. The ‘master ritual’ of execution had to coexist with and indeed respect a whole host of other narratives, one which could not be easily excised for the gallows or the pillory. The result was thus a conversation, albeit one which was regularly antagonistic and confrontational. At death, a whole tangle of discourse and customs, rituals and beliefs came together in a tightly bound knot, the state being unable and unwilling to cut it with a single blow. While it is true that the execution and the punishment contained ‘the ceremony in which the sovereign triumphed’[50], these small victories had never been total, nor accepted passively.
[1] J. A. Sharpe, ‘"Last Dying Speeches": Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, May 1985, 107, pg. 154
[2] as quoted in V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pg. 60
[3] Clifford Geertz as quoted in R. McGowen, ‘The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England’, The Journal of Modern History, 1987, 59/4, pg. 653
[4] P. Smith, ‘Executing Executions: Aesthetics, Identity, and the Problematic Narratives of Capital’, Theory and Society, 1996, 25/ 2, pg. 238
[5] M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London, Penguin, 1977), pg. 66
[6] Edmund Burke as quoted in V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 20
[7] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 21
[8] See J.A Sharpe, 1985, ibid.
[9] P. Lake & M. Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’ Past and Present, Nov 1996, 153,
[10] T.W Laqueur, ‘Crowds, carnivals and the English state in English executions 1604-1868’ in A.L. Beier eds. The First Modern Society: Essays in honour of Lawrence Stone, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989)
[11] C.B Herrup, ‘Law and Morality in Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present, 1984, 106, pg. 107
[12] C.B Herrup, 1984, ibid, pg. 108
[13] R. McGowen, 1987, ibid, pg 654
[14] S.D. Amussen, ‘Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England’, The Journal of British Studies, 1995, 34/1, pg. 31
[15] Newgate Calender, see http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/newgate3/hayes.htm , 7/12/08 14pm
[16] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 31
[17] ‘However the said woman standing obstinately mute to her first Indictment, notwithstanding all the perswasions of Master Sheriff, and the Ordinary representing to her that she drew her blood upon her own head, the Court was forced to that terrible Judgment, that she should be pressed to death; and accordingly she was carried forthwith to Newgate in order to such Execution’, ref # t16760823-6, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?path=sessionsPapers%2F16760823.xml, 9/12/08 13pm
[18] A. McKenzie, “This Death Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose”: The Practice of Peine Forte et Dure in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England”, Law and History Review, 2005, 23/2, pg. 312
[19] A. McKenzie, 2005, ibid, pg. 283
[20] R. McGowen, ‘Managing the Gallows: The Bank of England and the Death Penalty, 1797–1821’, Law and History Review, 2007, 25/2, pg. 243
[21] R. McGowen, 2007, ibid, pg. 280
[22] See M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the "Reform of Popular Culture" in early modern England’, Past and Present, 1984, 105, pg. 79-113
[23] R. McGowen, ‘From Pillory to Gallows: the punishment of forgery in the age of the financial revolution’, Past and Present, 1998, 165, pg. 124
[24] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 161
[25] as quoted in P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 243
[26] P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 242
[27] T. S. R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance, (London, Thames and Hudson, 1972), pg. 119
[28] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg 33
[29] A. McKenzie, ‘God’s Tribunal: Guilt, Innocence and Execution in England, 1675-1775’, Cultural and Social History, 2006, 3
[30] A. McKenzie, 2006, ibid, pg. 122
[31] P. Lake & M. Questier, 1996, ibid, pg. 81
[32] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 155
[33] A. McKenzie, 2006, ibid, pg. 128
[34] P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 245
[35] P. Lake & M. Questier, 1996, ibid, pg. 66
[36] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 50
[37] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 51
[38] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 152
[39] as quoted in V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 47
[40] A. McKenzie, 2006, ibid, pg. 126
[41] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 151
[42] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 40
[43] Victor Turner as quoted in P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 239
[44] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 82
[45] P. Lake & M. Questier, 1996, ibid, pg. 78
[46] See the case of William Jobling in 1832 in D. Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914, (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pg. 136
[47] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 60
[48] See P. Bailey, ‘Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture’, Past & Present, 1994 144/1, pg. 138-170
[49] P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 240
[50] M. Foucault, 1977, ibid, pg. 56
‘When urged to repent by the clergymen who visited her in prison, "she would laugh at them, and reply in some such language as she had learned in the devil's school, with which she was well stored". Her defiance continued to the gallows, where, we are told, "she ended her wicked life by a shameful death, without the least signs of repentance for her abominable whoredomes and wickedness”’[1], account of Hannah Blay’s execution in 1668
‘Hats Off’[2], traditional cry at hangings on the emergence of the Condemned, recorded by Dickens
Rather than a display of power onto a passive victim and audience, public punishment in early modern England was a far more contested arena of rituals and rites than Foucault allows. The crowd, the condemned and ideas about death, courage, pain and the body were locked in an ongoing tension with the official script of such ‘theatre’. Whilst in the vast majority of cases, the deviant was pilloried, the criminal hung, the traitor tortured and dispatched and the reticent crushed, the meaning of these events did not go unopposed. The administration of public punishment was at the centre of ‘a constellation of enshrined ideas’[3], many of which were not controlled by the killing and maiming state.
Other factors beyond the power of the state must be considered. The crowd and the wider community had expectations of both the performance and their own place within it, as well as independent agency in perceiving it. The condemned proved willing to subvert or challenge the punishment, seeking to both seek a good death and gain solace to bolster them for the coming pain and worst. A considerable knot of discourse and rites surrounded the body under punishment, ideas independent of princely power, disrupted the claims of same power on the pillory, the gallows and the giblet. Foucault’s theory thus downplays ‘role of agency, meaning and interpretation’[4]. Pain and suffering and even what might be termed the ‘narrative ritual’ of the state sanctioned punishment were not the pliable tools of supreme secular authority. Instead, the place of punishment was more of a physical space, an arena for a host of meta-physical customs and rituals, all in contest and conflict.
Foucault bases his interpretation along a singular axis. Public punishment was a spectacle of power, that of the monarch acting against the body of the convicted. Through the public infliction of pain, the prince addressed the perceived ‘injury’ to his person that the crime represented. Thus the pillory and the gallows were the setting of a theatrical performance, demonstrating the reiteration of the Prince’s law and a display of power onto the condemned’s flesh. Within this ‘pure theatre’, the very extremity of the violence and the subsequent pain marked out a sanguinary moral. This performance was the primary purpose of early modern public punishment. The prince enforced a narrative tale of deviancy rewarded, of wrong made right and of effrontery answered by pain. The crowds came to be told this tale; the punished was an extra, symbolically made humble. Their sole roles were to ‘consecrate his own punishment by proclaiming the blackness of his crimes’[5] and to die and suffer. The only active agent was the prince and his power. Foucault then theorises that it was the growing un-passiveness of the crowd that turned this tableau of majesty restored into an ugly and uncontrollable contest. Rather than a reaffirmation of hierarchy, it became an arena where such structures were challenged. This led to the prison system of the high modern period, marking out deviants as ‘cases’, separate from the healthy social body.
Using a quite static binary model of punishment then discipline, Foucault over-emphasises structures and homogenised entities like ‘society’ and ‘power’. Barely touching on the English experience, ironic given the contemporary reputation as the ‘Bloody Country’[6], he seeks a general truth in the extremities of punishment, those dealing with the highest crimes, ones where injury to the prince is actual i.e. regicides and traitors. With regards to the English case, he thus misses out on a far more substantial social phenomenon. The thousands of men, women and children condemned under the ‘bloody code’[7] and to the pillory did suffer their punishment in performance and ritual. Yet this was no space of pure power transmitted down the social hierarchy from monarch to criminal. Rather a wide and competing host of rituals, customs, practices and indeed theatre surrounded the ‘narrative ritual’ of serving ‘justice’. These conflicts were not the demise of the public display of punishment; rather they were its mechanism, its social reality.
While Foucault’s approach has certainly generated new debate and lines of research, it had increasingly come under criticism. Some historians like J.A. Sharpe[8] and R. McGowen have supported his interpretation, seeing repentance and humbling the deviant before the princely power at the centre of public punishment. However, Gatrell, Lake and Questier[9] as well as sociologists like Smith have sought to inject further actors and agencies into the punishment ‘performance’. Thomas Laqueur[10] goes further, inverting the whole of Foucault’s model, placing the crowd in charge of proceedings. In this carnival, the whole hierarchy was mocked and the pretensions of power subverted. As is often the case, both extremities of interpretation, that of a display of unchecked monarchical power versus a mass led subversion of the order of things fail to account for the complexities within a huge social phenomenon. At the hanging tree, there was no monopoly of discourse.
Looking at the official act of taking life and inflicting pain, there is no simple transmission of will. The ‘play’ has many rewrites. In punishing the people, the state and the law had to act through a wide selection of the self-same populace. To quote C.B Herrup, ‘A hanging did not result from any single decision….but rather was the end product of a series of discrete decisions assessing degrees of culpability’[11] based on ‘the common ground between the values of the legal elite, the gentry and the local men of middling status’[12]. These men were at times to be as swayed as much by popular notions of what constituted ‘justice’ and what was proper than regal power. Similarly the Law was considered more than the bare will of the Monarch. ‘The metaphor of the body politic’[13], of crime as a disease to be cut out, was a consensus one, and thus open to negotiation over its contours and limits. Foucault and McGowen assume a Weberian ideal type of state, one with a clear executive centre and a monopoly of violence. As Amussen points out; in early modern England, violence was ‘understood as part of a strategy’[14] to claim power. Yet it was one which was linked to the socially conceived legitimacy of its use and not a monopoly. Punishment in a Foucaultian sense was a societal wide activity, from husbands to monarchs, yet it was merely one discourse amongst many.
The various caveats attached to punishment, such as the pre-strangulation of female petty traitors before burning and the dispersed disposal of the Gordon’s rioters near their locations of their crimes also complicated the power of this ‘theatre’. The garrotting of Catherine Hayes in 1726 was meant to amend the horror of immolation, ‘this part of the sentence, a type of barbarism’ due to public sentiment, it failed and thus the crowd had to witness as ‘she rent the air with her cries and lamentations’[15]. Gatrell lists eleven executions over three days at seven different locations for various rioters in 1780. Whilst this might all be a case of maximising ‘Visibility and example’[16], exercising the crimes in particular geographical space suggests a need to widen the space of punishment, confronting other subversive discourses. Thus even at the heart of the exercise of power, there was contest and contingency.
The practice of peine forte et dure or pressing with weights[17] represented a escalation of violence upon the condemned, yet this was activated by the agency of the would-be victim. It was their intransigence to the court and the system condemning them, that ’…opened up a space in which they could for a time both seize the initiative…and demonstrate their resolution and courage’[18]. In making their case ‘a contested space’[19] these ‘passive bodies’ might not escape their sentence but they made it a fight; demonstrating their own courage and questioning the forum of their conviction. The body most controlling of punishment in the early modern period was not the state, but rather a corporation. The Bank of England was the major driving force behind many an execution for forgery in the early 19th century. In comparison with the fractured and contradictory procedures of the state, ‘The Corporation managed death with a single-minded purposefulness’[20]. Instead of the pure exercise and demonstration of power, we see ‘…The infliction of death was managed to secure more modest goals than the crude intimidation of the lower orders’[21]. Thus even in the ‘master ritual’, there was tension and a dynamism ill placed in Foucault’s static interpretation.
Possibly the most important element to rival the state in its performance was that of the watching crowd and the wider community. As has been mentioned, violence and ritual outside of state control had a popular legitimacy. Rough Music[22] and brawls had a set of norms and customs that mimicked (or more accurately coexisted with) the pretensions of the avenging and ‘just’ state. Indeed the pillory was dependant on the crowd’s participation. During the humiliation of William Hales and his accomplice, it was the state who discouraged them being pelted, as ‘nothing was offered to be thrown at them’[23]. The formation of a mass crowd in an age where ‘…the coming together of several hundreds or several thousands of the lower orders was not regularly encouraged’[24] was important, but not merely in the narrow way Sharpe views it.
The crowd were there in tacit consent, but part of that consent was the ‘remonstration’ of their own ritual expectations and prejudices. In the case of Eliza Fenning, executed in 1815, the crow voiced its concern of the sketchy evidence and her great composure in front of the noose by congregating in at the house of Mr Turner, the prosecutor, ‘conversing on the subject, with whom, pity for her sufferings, and a firm belief of her innocence, seemed to be the prevailing sentiment’[25]. The crowd became so large and threatening that they had to be dispersed. They had not saved the poor victim but they had shown their displeasure and outrage. The crowd as such was a vital actor, whom both the state and the condemned wished to convince, as ‘Public sentiment, siding with the victim, may deny the hegemonic interpretation of the ritual and convert the execution from a liminal to a profane event’[26]. The crowd was a partner in the production, and as such could not be assumed to an undiscerning sponge, awaiting the morality of the state to be reiterated.
As Gatrell notes, the scaffold crowd was also a perceptive critic of the proceedings. How the condemned faced their fate was one of the paramount issues within the on looking mass, ‘in the business of dying it was all important to make a good end’[27]. In the case of those dispatched at Tyburn, the most public of rituals, the ‘Calvary’ from Newgate to the bottom of Edgware Road was a public examination. Those found to be brave, courageous and charming, even the darkest of criminals, were ‘admired by our sprightly people’[28]. In procession and on the scaffold, they were being re-judged, to use Andrea McKenzie’s term, in ‘God’s Tribunal’[29]. It was not merely the almighty, but the huge crowd at the foot of the tree that were to consider the wretches on display.
The crowd expected certain forms of behaviour. On the one hand; determined but controlled defiance was the case of ‘the five Jesuits’ hanged in 1679 might reverse much wider public opinion. Their ‘solemn protestations of innocence and above all…bravery’[30] changed the temper of the crowd and the wider audience reached by pamphlets and broadsides, challenging the hegemonic anti-papist bigotry. Overly fiery rhetoric could inversely over step the boundaries as George Gervase in 1608 was to find when he declared he did not want the ‘prayers of heretics’[31], thus confirming the crowd’s prejudices of Catholics as fanatics. On the other hand, signs of piety and grace attracted the crowd’s sympathy. In cases such as Francis Newland, killed in 1695, whom after declaring his innocence and thus confounding his Foucaultian ‘role’, said ‘I am at peace with all the world . . . I suffer (I heartily believe) a most just reward, for my past sinful life and conversation’[32]. In doing so, he (and others) charmed the crowd and produced ‘…the most effective critique of justice’ by ‘simply dying well’[33].
Just as effective, especially during the 18th century was roguish charm and ‘cheek’. Lord Balmerino, a Jacobite executed after the ’45, chatted and quipped to his friends over wine, gave a speech ‘in which he praised the King for magnanimity and mercy, but faulted him on erroneous political principle’, tipped his executioner three guineas, adjusted the block and felt the blade of the axe. He even demonstrated where his killer should strike his neck. Such bravado inspired the crowd to behave ‘…with uncommon decency and evenness of temper’[34]. Consider that this was punishment for treason in the aftermath of an armed insurrection against the royal dynasty, one laden with intense sectarian division. Yet the crowd did not passively accept a triumphant message of victory and regal excess, nor did the state see the need to enforce it. The rituals of the crowd, their expectations of ‘the good death’ and their place in such a ceremony defy Foucault’s ‘simple unidirectional account of the flow of power between state, felon and religious ideology’[35].
The abuse poured onto incompetent hangmen who botched a ‘good death’ demonstrates the crowd’s independent agency and expectations. When Robert Johnston was hung in 1818, he was left ‘half-standing, half-suspended’ by the botched efforts of the authorities. As frantic efforts where made to finish him off, he was cut down and born off by the crowd whom then attacked the executioner. After a struggle between the crowd and the constabulary over control of the nearly expired victim, he was hung again to ‘dreadful cries…from every quarter’[36]. The infamous Calcraft was publicly reviled less for his function but because he was careless about performing it, ‘He hanged them like dogs’[37]. If the primary agent in the punishment process was slack in doing its part and thus failed to honour the public’s ritual expectations, the crowd would openly and forcefully disrupt the proceedings and their legitimacy.
Rather than an extra to suffer justice upon their flesh, the condemned had considerable independence in their now deeply limited options. Sharpe’s deeply foucaultian description of the punished as ‘…the willing central participants in a theatre of punishment’, aiding by their contrition, ‘a reinforcement of certain values’[38] is lopsided. The gallows was a space where the soon to be dispatched had a series of sacred rights. The aforementioned good death, of having shown dignity and grace was paramount. Considering the self-interest of the punished in the ‘proper’ manner of their dispatch, this is unsurprising. Folkloric notions of where best to pace the noose made the last moments on the gallows a place of negotiation. As the Cato Street conspirator Ings insisted to his soon-murderer, ‘Now, old gentlemen, finish me tidily: pull the rope tighter; it may slip’[39]. The nature of their demise was conceived to be fluid and within their control. This was no passive recipient for the pain honed morality of some Leviathan.
Similarly, the last speech was seen as ‘one of the alienable rights of the “free-born Englishman”’[40]. It was sacrosanct. The ‘penitent end’ expected of the condemned in Sharpe’s review of 17th century gallows speeches was less about their specific crimes. Instead the condemned sought to seek forgiveness for general sinfulness. They were making their, not the state’s, peace. John Noyse in 1686 did not choose to seek forgiveness for committing murder, he urged the audience to avoid ‘the profanation of the Sabbath day’[41]. The disruption by the convicted of the ‘master ritual’, by cheek and parody, by defiance and charming grace, by high spirits and actual drink was an entitlement of those condemned. These strategies allowed them to ‘die well’ and just as importantly ‘anaesthetize mortal fear’[42]. They, the crowd and indeed wider society expected these customs to be respected, that the space so created be respected.
Death and its ‘primordial’ nature challenged the ‘pure theatre’ of punishment. The transition of mortality came with ‘a forest of symbols’[43], independent of the state. It is a liminal event par excellence. The post-mortem body of the executed could become a battleground between the state and societal notions, it became ‘totemic’. While a custom which was decline during the 18th century, the condemned in both life and death became a mediator between the two state, a magical property. Contact with the body had almost shamanic properties, able to ‘cure cancers and warts’. Three women in 1814 seeking such ‘power’ had the deceased’s hands placed on their breasts, for instance[44]. The body, of the killed or soon to be killed as well as that of the killers had a power in spite of the state. In the face of their martyrdom, ‘Ralph Sherwin kissed the executioner, Mark Barkworth embraced the hanging body of Anne Line, and Edward Waterson took to kissing the remains of a disembowelled and quartered priest which had been sent to scare him into submission’[45]. Further, Squabbles over dissection and being placed in the Giblet reveal that ownership of the body and its meaning were rigorously disputed[46]. There was no monopoly of the state in meaning or narrative, rather this too was contested.
When the last public execution was performed in 1868, the move ‘indoors’ of capital punishment transformed its character. It ceased to be a social ritual and one of ongoing negotiation and tension and was turned into a private method of dispatch. The reasons for this change are disputed, but one of the foremost is the increasing abhorrence of elite observers to public punishment. To Dickens, Wakefield, Ewart and Bright, the panoply of rituals that surrounded the gruesome act of killing were just as if not more horrific. To Holyoake, an execution crowd was ‘an avalanche of ordure’[47]. The whole act was unseemly and a de-civilising event. There was even doubt that it was in any way a deterrent. In Weberian terms, it must be rationalised away, made respectable, predictable. It was the very nature of this public tug of war between rituals, actors and customs that made it such a shambolic theatrical performance. It was completely un-professional.
When Foucault uses this theatrical metaphor, he does his work a disservice. If the metaphor were to hold up, the director would mangle the script, the actors refuse to say their lines and the audience would have a tendency to invade the stage. This, of course, resembles ‘low theatre’ of the early modern age, before lines of behaviour were so rigidly enforced[48]. Rather public punishment was a place where an active battle took place, where state, crowd and condemned sought to struggle in a contest of ‘narrativization’[49]. The ‘master ritual’ of execution had to coexist with and indeed respect a whole host of other narratives, one which could not be easily excised for the gallows or the pillory. The result was thus a conversation, albeit one which was regularly antagonistic and confrontational. At death, a whole tangle of discourse and customs, rituals and beliefs came together in a tightly bound knot, the state being unable and unwilling to cut it with a single blow. While it is true that the execution and the punishment contained ‘the ceremony in which the sovereign triumphed’[50], these small victories had never been total, nor accepted passively.
[1] J. A. Sharpe, ‘"Last Dying Speeches": Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, May 1985, 107, pg. 154
[2] as quoted in V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pg. 60
[3] Clifford Geertz as quoted in R. McGowen, ‘The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England’, The Journal of Modern History, 1987, 59/4, pg. 653
[4] P. Smith, ‘Executing Executions: Aesthetics, Identity, and the Problematic Narratives of Capital’, Theory and Society, 1996, 25/ 2, pg. 238
[5] M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London, Penguin, 1977), pg. 66
[6] Edmund Burke as quoted in V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 20
[7] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 21
[8] See J.A Sharpe, 1985, ibid.
[9] P. Lake & M. Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’ Past and Present, Nov 1996, 153,
[10] T.W Laqueur, ‘Crowds, carnivals and the English state in English executions 1604-1868’ in A.L. Beier eds. The First Modern Society: Essays in honour of Lawrence Stone, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989)
[11] C.B Herrup, ‘Law and Morality in Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present, 1984, 106, pg. 107
[12] C.B Herrup, 1984, ibid, pg. 108
[13] R. McGowen, 1987, ibid, pg 654
[14] S.D. Amussen, ‘Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England’, The Journal of British Studies, 1995, 34/1, pg. 31
[15] Newgate Calender, see http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/newgate3/hayes.htm , 7/12/08 14pm
[16] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 31
[17] ‘However the said woman standing obstinately mute to her first Indictment, notwithstanding all the perswasions of Master Sheriff, and the Ordinary representing to her that she drew her blood upon her own head, the Court was forced to that terrible Judgment, that she should be pressed to death; and accordingly she was carried forthwith to Newgate in order to such Execution’, ref # t16760823-6, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?path=sessionsPapers%2F16760823.xml, 9/12/08 13pm
[18] A. McKenzie, “This Death Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose”: The Practice of Peine Forte et Dure in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England”, Law and History Review, 2005, 23/2, pg. 312
[19] A. McKenzie, 2005, ibid, pg. 283
[20] R. McGowen, ‘Managing the Gallows: The Bank of England and the Death Penalty, 1797–1821’, Law and History Review, 2007, 25/2, pg. 243
[21] R. McGowen, 2007, ibid, pg. 280
[22] See M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the "Reform of Popular Culture" in early modern England’, Past and Present, 1984, 105, pg. 79-113
[23] R. McGowen, ‘From Pillory to Gallows: the punishment of forgery in the age of the financial revolution’, Past and Present, 1998, 165, pg. 124
[24] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 161
[25] as quoted in P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 243
[26] P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 242
[27] T. S. R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance, (London, Thames and Hudson, 1972), pg. 119
[28] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg 33
[29] A. McKenzie, ‘God’s Tribunal: Guilt, Innocence and Execution in England, 1675-1775’, Cultural and Social History, 2006, 3
[30] A. McKenzie, 2006, ibid, pg. 122
[31] P. Lake & M. Questier, 1996, ibid, pg. 81
[32] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 155
[33] A. McKenzie, 2006, ibid, pg. 128
[34] P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 245
[35] P. Lake & M. Questier, 1996, ibid, pg. 66
[36] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 50
[37] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 51
[38] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 152
[39] as quoted in V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 47
[40] A. McKenzie, 2006, ibid, pg. 126
[41] J.A. Sharpe, 1985, ibid, pg. 151
[42] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 40
[43] Victor Turner as quoted in P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 239
[44] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 82
[45] P. Lake & M. Questier, 1996, ibid, pg. 78
[46] See the case of William Jobling in 1832 in D. Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914, (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pg. 136
[47] V.A.C Gatrell, 1994, ibid, pg. 60
[48] See P. Bailey, ‘Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture’, Past & Present, 1994 144/1, pg. 138-170
[49] P. Smith, 1996, ibid, pg. 240
[50] M. Foucault, 1977, ibid, pg. 56
Friday 2 October 2009
Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 4
The Crucible of the New Man – Anthropological rebirth within Violence
‘He must be severe and merciless, without mercy and pardon, for his duty is to lesson the pain of the Croatian people with fire, iron and blood, to crush with force the neck of the foreign parasite and so liberate his homeland’[1], Pavelić, Ustaša, May 1932
‘I swear before God, before your holy sacrifice, for Christ and the Legion, to tear from me the earthly happiness, to render myself from humanly love and, for the resurrection of my People, to be ready for death at any time’[2], Oath of the Legionnaires Moţa and Marin, 11 February 1937
One of the most prominent aspects of generic fascism is the mythology of the anthropological rebirth. It is of little surprise given the fascists’ perspective on their revolution. Rather than being based on political or materialistic change, the fascist revolution was primarily concerned with an idealistic and psychological rebirth on the anthropological level. By the infusion of a new ‘habitus’ and grand narrative as well as totalitarian social experimentation, a ‘heroic pedagogy’[3] was unleashed, transforming the imperfect and fallible human stock of the nation into a higher form of human collective life. The New man was to be infused with the characteristics and higher morality of the epitome of the national ideal type as well as a possibly conflicting willingness to ruthlessly carry out the bidding of the movement. Violence had a part to pay in the creation of this new form, not just in destroying physically human life ‘incapable’ of joining or aiding in this project. Violence also provided a scaffolding for constructing the new man, a crucible where the reborn was forged and the impurities of character melted away.
If we consider the elements deemed vital in the make up of this new form of life, we see that violence served as a midwife, removing the individual from the decay of the old equipping them with the skills need for the new. Violence was a baptism of fire for the new man, where the decrepit humanitarianism of the old was burned away, like Junger’s ‘myth of the new gestalt fashioned in war’[4]. In this furious heat, the new skills and virtues for ‘mastering’ modernity, ruthlessness, submission to the movement, selflessness would be indoctrinated. Emilio Gentile’s work on the anthropological outcome of Modernist Nationalism and Italian Fascism’s proposed palingenesis on the micro scale place the role of war as the most central dynamic in the transformation[5]. This is taken up in particular detail with regards to the Ustaša and the Legion by Yeomans[6] and V Sandulescu[7]. All point to the fact that violence was a form of socialisation for the new race of ‘barbarians’.
Violence broke the individual out of the malaise of the decadence, ‘dis-embedding’ them from the fallacies of the bourgeois humanitarianism that so imprisoned them. By breaking all the taboos of the decaying world, the individual proved themselves as part of the new elite, they demonstrated they were reborn. By violent acts, the foot soldiers of the fascist revolution demonstrated that they were at heart, beyond conventional morality and in the embrace of the functional moral coda of the movement. There were no returning ‘rites of reaggregation’[8]. This was the key to creating a new type of social actor. Only through this forcible detachment could the new man be allowed to come forth.
As has been mentioned the nature of the violence was ideologically informed too. Fascists conceived that to kill others for the cause was similar to being killed or martyred for the cause. Between Selbstopfer and Fremdopfer was a link of gift giving and reward. In both instances, a gift was offered up to the altar of the nation. The gift was two fold in the case of Fremdopfer. On the one hand the destruction of your enemies was a vital part of the National Revolution[9].On the other, by committing such actions, the individual conquered the moral qualms[10]and obstructions of their personal moral coda.
To Codreanu, the mission to create a new man was the centrepiece of his political practice. No longer in thrall to selfish materialism and individualism, the new man or was a willing and complete servant to the cause. In the borrowed terms of ‘Village Orthodoxy’, Codreanu saw the salvation of the fallen Romanians only via the movement and in the service there of. As such unthinkingly doing the bidding of the movement became a central part of its pedagogy. This had a tripartite logic, education via Social acts of piety, altruistic work and in violence, creating a ‘hero in the warlike sense; so through struggle he may impose his ideas’[11]. Bear in mind that both Moţa and Codreanu had killed before they formed the Legion and became such parables, They had stepped out of convention. In pray and the building of public buildings, such obedience was easy, only in violence was the choice sufficiently existential.
Moţa was more than a martyr, he was lionised for both his willingness to die and fight for the cause, he was in essence ‘one of the ‘finest products’ of Legionary education, coming close to Codreanu’s ideal ‘new man’’[12]. In the shape of these martyrs and those of the death team, voluntarily suffering imprisonment and the ‘damnation’ for their worldly sins, the Legion had ‘dying proof’[13] of this new breed. After the Moţa/Marin funeral, ‘The Moţa and Marin Order’ was formed, a vast expansion of the Death teams with ‘10,000 members willing to die at any time’[14], following Moţa’s transformative example. The Death Teams might thus be considered finishing schools for the new man, a parable of the extent of what was required. Violence articulated this ascendancy in its ritualistic forms, in its place within the mythology of the movements. The key aspect of this new moral constitution was its ability to overcome the crisis of modernity, being ‘the man of today’s historical moment, the men requested by the present Romanian society’s needs’[15]. This new skill was to be found in violence as the commandment of the movement, in the uprooting of the old.
For Pavelić, no less than Codreanu, his revolution required new men. In the Croat case, such men were to be the inheritors of a mythical warrior tradition, from the first medieval Croatia, via the Uskoks, ‘Gun and sword are their father and mother’[16], the Grenzer of the Habsburgs, The Illyians and Dalmatians of the Grande Armee to the present day. They were the vanguard of a new Croat, again embodying a new morality brought out of violence and death. The Black Legion was ‘...seen as a transforming experience for Sarajevan youth itself’[17]. Francetić was more than an eternal hero of the young nation; he was the one of the ’modern barbarians’, one of a nation of ‘wolves and lions’[18] . In his campaigns of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, he had conquered the crisis of modernity, finding mission and meaning.
The ruthlessness and brutality of Glina, the ‘Doves' Nest’ at Jadovno [19] and Jasenovac[20], even the small scale intra-community fratricides of Medjugorje[21] were all explosive and moral fracturing instances were violence placed both the victims outside the aforementioned ‘universe of obligation’ and the killers outside the old ‘universe of Christian morality’. For the Ustaša, ‘the half Slovene and pacifist Maček was the antithesis of the new Croatian ‘barbarian’, unlike the Poglavnik...who, like Starčević, hailed from Lika, ‘the Croatian Sparta’’[22]. Pavelić, Budak and Kvaternik were in short replacing a culture and morality that they perceived to have failed to surmount the identity and nomic crisis. In its stead, they saw a culture of righteous and transformative violence in the service of a totalising ideology as the correct route out of the malaise of decadence and the Golgotha of Croatian identity. This culture and ideology internalised, amounted to a new form of humanity.
In their efforts, the Legion and the Ustaša was following a long tradition of anthropological rebirth. Junger’s belief in ‘Das Arbeiter’ is in essence, how to make a human being capable of thriving in modern society without suffering from the atomisation and the anomie that society entailed. Codreanu and Pavelić were engaged in an identical project. They, like Corradini or Papini or Hilter or Mussolini saw violence as a central part of this crisis defying re-education, allowing the new man to ‘live fully within the realm of modernity, leading “an adventurous, energetic and quotidianly heroic life’[23] .Only violence could remove the ignoble raw materials out of the old morality and teach them the value of the new absolutes. Thus a new man came forward.
Violence placed man outside of the old and equipped them spiritually and physically for the new. To the fascists, this ‘heroic pedagogy’ of ruthlessness, of submitting any moral qualm to the good of the nation was possibly the most vital part of their revolution. Equipped for the struggle of life, bound to the will of the nation via the commands of the leader, fascists would gain from murder and death the status of the prototype new man, the sum and product of the fascistic totalitarian experiment. This mythical baptism, within the programs of violence, was vital to the fascist Weltanschauung and as such assured the individual of their own elevation towards the elite of the new. Within the murderous heat of the crucible, came forth a modern barbarian.
[1] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 161
[2] V Săndulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 264
[3] E. Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism and Fascism, (Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003), pg 58
[4]R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 164
[5] E Gentile, 2003, ibid
[6] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid
[7] V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid
[8] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 164
[9] The main administrative organisation for the Ustasha racial policy was the State Directorate for Renewal, charged with the ‘removal of foreign life from the NDH’, N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 379
[10] ‘We swear, at the price of our blood, to defend our honour and to punish traitors and rascals. If we take a step backwards let the curse of the whole nation fall upon us’, Oath of the Legionnaires Moţa and Marin, Z Ornea, The Romanian extreme right: the nineteen thirties, (New York: Eastern European Monographs, 1999), pg 284
[11] V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid, pg 358
[12] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 261
[13] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 262
[14] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 265
[15] Dumitru Cristian Anzăr as quoted in V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid, pg 356
[16] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid pg 125
[17] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid, pg 702
[18] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 336
[19] ‘Nearly all of them were murdered by beatings, stabbings with knives or swords, or shooting by early August. While many were still alive, they were thrown into a deep pit known as "Golubnjači," or "Doves' Nest," since only birds could get out’, Z Loker, ‘The Testimony of Dr. Edo Neufeld: The Italians and the Jews of Croatia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7/1, 1993, pg 69
[20]The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid
[21] M Bax, 1995, ibid, pg 92
[22] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 338
[23] E. Gentile, 2003, ibid, pg 56
‘He must be severe and merciless, without mercy and pardon, for his duty is to lesson the pain of the Croatian people with fire, iron and blood, to crush with force the neck of the foreign parasite and so liberate his homeland’[1], Pavelić, Ustaša, May 1932
‘I swear before God, before your holy sacrifice, for Christ and the Legion, to tear from me the earthly happiness, to render myself from humanly love and, for the resurrection of my People, to be ready for death at any time’[2], Oath of the Legionnaires Moţa and Marin, 11 February 1937
One of the most prominent aspects of generic fascism is the mythology of the anthropological rebirth. It is of little surprise given the fascists’ perspective on their revolution. Rather than being based on political or materialistic change, the fascist revolution was primarily concerned with an idealistic and psychological rebirth on the anthropological level. By the infusion of a new ‘habitus’ and grand narrative as well as totalitarian social experimentation, a ‘heroic pedagogy’[3] was unleashed, transforming the imperfect and fallible human stock of the nation into a higher form of human collective life. The New man was to be infused with the characteristics and higher morality of the epitome of the national ideal type as well as a possibly conflicting willingness to ruthlessly carry out the bidding of the movement. Violence had a part to pay in the creation of this new form, not just in destroying physically human life ‘incapable’ of joining or aiding in this project. Violence also provided a scaffolding for constructing the new man, a crucible where the reborn was forged and the impurities of character melted away.
If we consider the elements deemed vital in the make up of this new form of life, we see that violence served as a midwife, removing the individual from the decay of the old equipping them with the skills need for the new. Violence was a baptism of fire for the new man, where the decrepit humanitarianism of the old was burned away, like Junger’s ‘myth of the new gestalt fashioned in war’[4]. In this furious heat, the new skills and virtues for ‘mastering’ modernity, ruthlessness, submission to the movement, selflessness would be indoctrinated. Emilio Gentile’s work on the anthropological outcome of Modernist Nationalism and Italian Fascism’s proposed palingenesis on the micro scale place the role of war as the most central dynamic in the transformation[5]. This is taken up in particular detail with regards to the Ustaša and the Legion by Yeomans[6] and V Sandulescu[7]. All point to the fact that violence was a form of socialisation for the new race of ‘barbarians’.
Violence broke the individual out of the malaise of the decadence, ‘dis-embedding’ them from the fallacies of the bourgeois humanitarianism that so imprisoned them. By breaking all the taboos of the decaying world, the individual proved themselves as part of the new elite, they demonstrated they were reborn. By violent acts, the foot soldiers of the fascist revolution demonstrated that they were at heart, beyond conventional morality and in the embrace of the functional moral coda of the movement. There were no returning ‘rites of reaggregation’[8]. This was the key to creating a new type of social actor. Only through this forcible detachment could the new man be allowed to come forth.
As has been mentioned the nature of the violence was ideologically informed too. Fascists conceived that to kill others for the cause was similar to being killed or martyred for the cause. Between Selbstopfer and Fremdopfer was a link of gift giving and reward. In both instances, a gift was offered up to the altar of the nation. The gift was two fold in the case of Fremdopfer. On the one hand the destruction of your enemies was a vital part of the National Revolution[9].On the other, by committing such actions, the individual conquered the moral qualms[10]and obstructions of their personal moral coda.
To Codreanu, the mission to create a new man was the centrepiece of his political practice. No longer in thrall to selfish materialism and individualism, the new man or was a willing and complete servant to the cause. In the borrowed terms of ‘Village Orthodoxy’, Codreanu saw the salvation of the fallen Romanians only via the movement and in the service there of. As such unthinkingly doing the bidding of the movement became a central part of its pedagogy. This had a tripartite logic, education via Social acts of piety, altruistic work and in violence, creating a ‘hero in the warlike sense; so through struggle he may impose his ideas’[11]. Bear in mind that both Moţa and Codreanu had killed before they formed the Legion and became such parables, They had stepped out of convention. In pray and the building of public buildings, such obedience was easy, only in violence was the choice sufficiently existential.
Moţa was more than a martyr, he was lionised for both his willingness to die and fight for the cause, he was in essence ‘one of the ‘finest products’ of Legionary education, coming close to Codreanu’s ideal ‘new man’’[12]. In the shape of these martyrs and those of the death team, voluntarily suffering imprisonment and the ‘damnation’ for their worldly sins, the Legion had ‘dying proof’[13] of this new breed. After the Moţa/Marin funeral, ‘The Moţa and Marin Order’ was formed, a vast expansion of the Death teams with ‘10,000 members willing to die at any time’[14], following Moţa’s transformative example. The Death Teams might thus be considered finishing schools for the new man, a parable of the extent of what was required. Violence articulated this ascendancy in its ritualistic forms, in its place within the mythology of the movements. The key aspect of this new moral constitution was its ability to overcome the crisis of modernity, being ‘the man of today’s historical moment, the men requested by the present Romanian society’s needs’[15]. This new skill was to be found in violence as the commandment of the movement, in the uprooting of the old.
For Pavelić, no less than Codreanu, his revolution required new men. In the Croat case, such men were to be the inheritors of a mythical warrior tradition, from the first medieval Croatia, via the Uskoks, ‘Gun and sword are their father and mother’[16], the Grenzer of the Habsburgs, The Illyians and Dalmatians of the Grande Armee to the present day. They were the vanguard of a new Croat, again embodying a new morality brought out of violence and death. The Black Legion was ‘...seen as a transforming experience for Sarajevan youth itself’[17]. Francetić was more than an eternal hero of the young nation; he was the one of the ’modern barbarians’, one of a nation of ‘wolves and lions’[18] . In his campaigns of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, he had conquered the crisis of modernity, finding mission and meaning.
The ruthlessness and brutality of Glina, the ‘Doves' Nest’ at Jadovno [19] and Jasenovac[20], even the small scale intra-community fratricides of Medjugorje[21] were all explosive and moral fracturing instances were violence placed both the victims outside the aforementioned ‘universe of obligation’ and the killers outside the old ‘universe of Christian morality’. For the Ustaša, ‘the half Slovene and pacifist Maček was the antithesis of the new Croatian ‘barbarian’, unlike the Poglavnik...who, like Starčević, hailed from Lika, ‘the Croatian Sparta’’[22]. Pavelić, Budak and Kvaternik were in short replacing a culture and morality that they perceived to have failed to surmount the identity and nomic crisis. In its stead, they saw a culture of righteous and transformative violence in the service of a totalising ideology as the correct route out of the malaise of decadence and the Golgotha of Croatian identity. This culture and ideology internalised, amounted to a new form of humanity.
In their efforts, the Legion and the Ustaša was following a long tradition of anthropological rebirth. Junger’s belief in ‘Das Arbeiter’ is in essence, how to make a human being capable of thriving in modern society without suffering from the atomisation and the anomie that society entailed. Codreanu and Pavelić were engaged in an identical project. They, like Corradini or Papini or Hilter or Mussolini saw violence as a central part of this crisis defying re-education, allowing the new man to ‘live fully within the realm of modernity, leading “an adventurous, energetic and quotidianly heroic life’[23] .Only violence could remove the ignoble raw materials out of the old morality and teach them the value of the new absolutes. Thus a new man came forward.
Violence placed man outside of the old and equipped them spiritually and physically for the new. To the fascists, this ‘heroic pedagogy’ of ruthlessness, of submitting any moral qualm to the good of the nation was possibly the most vital part of their revolution. Equipped for the struggle of life, bound to the will of the nation via the commands of the leader, fascists would gain from murder and death the status of the prototype new man, the sum and product of the fascistic totalitarian experiment. This mythical baptism, within the programs of violence, was vital to the fascist Weltanschauung and as such assured the individual of their own elevation towards the elite of the new. Within the murderous heat of the crucible, came forth a modern barbarian.
[1] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 161
[2] V Săndulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 264
[3] E. Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism and Fascism, (Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003), pg 58
[4]R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 164
[5] E Gentile, 2003, ibid
[6] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid
[7] V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid
[8] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 164
[9] The main administrative organisation for the Ustasha racial policy was the State Directorate for Renewal, charged with the ‘removal of foreign life from the NDH’, N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 379
[10] ‘We swear, at the price of our blood, to defend our honour and to punish traitors and rascals. If we take a step backwards let the curse of the whole nation fall upon us’, Oath of the Legionnaires Moţa and Marin, Z Ornea, The Romanian extreme right: the nineteen thirties, (New York: Eastern European Monographs, 1999), pg 284
[11] V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid, pg 358
[12] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 261
[13] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 262
[14] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 265
[15] Dumitru Cristian Anzăr as quoted in V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid, pg 356
[16] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid pg 125
[17] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid, pg 702
[18] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 336
[19] ‘Nearly all of them were murdered by beatings, stabbings with knives or swords, or shooting by early August. While many were still alive, they were thrown into a deep pit known as "Golubnjači," or "Doves' Nest," since only birds could get out’, Z Loker, ‘The Testimony of Dr. Edo Neufeld: The Italians and the Jews of Croatia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7/1, 1993, pg 69
[20]The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid
[21] M Bax, 1995, ibid, pg 92
[22] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 338
[23] E. Gentile, 2003, ibid, pg 56
The Republic reviews...Der Baader-Meinhof Complex
Now I have a RAF T-shirt.....brought in those heady days when Camden wasn’t a holding pen for about 7 million Neu-ravers and I was all ‘Lenin said’ and Manics slogans and combats and insufferable. The scraps an 18 year old wannabe ideologue could conceptually grasp about RAF were pure glamour; the sex, the guns, the giving it to ‘the Man’ and all the rest. It was vicariously living out a cowboy dream in flairs and sans hats. I lost the illusion, the conceit, the inhumanity of their higher humanity, but not the T-shirt.
I hate to be glib, but they were cool. Even as they went murdering tens of people and threatening hundreds, all for some violent declaration of a sordid dream, they looked cool. I guess it is a fetish, like my and hats, and akin to those who get a hard on from SS insignia. There’s no defence, but they did look cool. Evil can look cool. This merely demonstrates the imbecilic nature of cool. (Oddly the T-shirt is labelled ‘Brigade Rossi’, when you’ve seen one nihilistic youth death cult, you’ve seen them all)
Watching Der Baader-Meinhof complex, you get the cool. The whole thing is shot like Frankenheimer directing High Noon in flappy coats. There is a (German?) crispness to the shots, the sets, the costume that makes it feels like a classic 70s political thriller. This is cleverly counter-posed. The action is unsparingly brutal, not as with Michael Bay’s explosion addiction, but with a raw exclamation. The chaos, the debris, the blood are imposed on the clean cut sets, the blank hopper like scenes. Given the nature of the RAF’s ‘propaganda of the act’, it is a powerful insight.
The cool is not allowed to stand, indeed the plot, the script, the acting and the direction, consciously crush the cool. Cool is made to look flimsy, meaningless and empty. The motive of the bloodshed, whilst placed within its time with Vietnam, a constant culture of protest and an at times violent counter movement, is stripped down during the film to the bare psychology of angry nihilism, of charisma, of cults, of personal bitching and self-abasement. By the time the core group is in prison at Stammheim, they are a bickering group, desperately demanding the 2nd generation of RAF free them by some coup de main, picking gaping holes in each others ‘commitment’.
Beyond the periodic brutality of the Guards, they unknowingly find themselves in the torturous cul-de-sac their actions lead them. Baader comes across as a shamanistic bully, a blow hard who knew how to burn things down, losing any semblance of control or thought. Meinhof ceases to be a forthright radical journalist and loving mother and devolves into a will-less vessel of the group think, engaged in endless self-flagellation. Ensslin similarly descends from a cock sure beauty and righteous ideologue into a paranoid and exhausted carrion bird, pecking at the others. The genius of the film is that there is no sympathy or heavy handed condemnation. Rather the stripping away of the cool, matched by a series of cameos by Bruno Ganz as the leading anti-Terrorism chief in almost a narrating role, is merely demonstrated. Horst Mahler, now a leading member of the fascist NDP and an imprisoned Holocaust denier, is shown as an opportunist Lawyer on the make, playing with terrorism.
If the film has a motive to understand, it does so, not for the terrorists, but for the wider ‘soft’ infrastructure of the RAF. What of the thousands of helpers and helpers of helpers and, at points, the millions of Germans who did have sympathy with the group? It ask what did they see; in those famous faces, in the pictures of bodies on the ground, the television footage of embassies under siege, that made them feel anything other than revulsion. It lays out that mythology, of the romantic rebel, the man (or woman) of drama action, and then demonstrates its fallacy, its dilettante morality.
That T-shirt lies in the back of my drawer, unworn for years, unaired except for pottering about the house when the wash is on. A reminder that what cool is.
The Revolutionary Cells or RZ would similarly make a suitable subject for such a well made treatment. Their ultra ‘Anti-Zionism’ and Entebbe needs a little light shed
A wee BBC documentary on the RAF for youse. Misses out on a few recent facts, such as Stasi involvement, but still good for the squirming Mahler and others
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd3LQXOLrOw
I hate to be glib, but they were cool. Even as they went murdering tens of people and threatening hundreds, all for some violent declaration of a sordid dream, they looked cool. I guess it is a fetish, like my and hats, and akin to those who get a hard on from SS insignia. There’s no defence, but they did look cool. Evil can look cool. This merely demonstrates the imbecilic nature of cool. (Oddly the T-shirt is labelled ‘Brigade Rossi’, when you’ve seen one nihilistic youth death cult, you’ve seen them all)
Watching Der Baader-Meinhof complex, you get the cool. The whole thing is shot like Frankenheimer directing High Noon in flappy coats. There is a (German?) crispness to the shots, the sets, the costume that makes it feels like a classic 70s political thriller. This is cleverly counter-posed. The action is unsparingly brutal, not as with Michael Bay’s explosion addiction, but with a raw exclamation. The chaos, the debris, the blood are imposed on the clean cut sets, the blank hopper like scenes. Given the nature of the RAF’s ‘propaganda of the act’, it is a powerful insight.
The cool is not allowed to stand, indeed the plot, the script, the acting and the direction, consciously crush the cool. Cool is made to look flimsy, meaningless and empty. The motive of the bloodshed, whilst placed within its time with Vietnam, a constant culture of protest and an at times violent counter movement, is stripped down during the film to the bare psychology of angry nihilism, of charisma, of cults, of personal bitching and self-abasement. By the time the core group is in prison at Stammheim, they are a bickering group, desperately demanding the 2nd generation of RAF free them by some coup de main, picking gaping holes in each others ‘commitment’.
Beyond the periodic brutality of the Guards, they unknowingly find themselves in the torturous cul-de-sac their actions lead them. Baader comes across as a shamanistic bully, a blow hard who knew how to burn things down, losing any semblance of control or thought. Meinhof ceases to be a forthright radical journalist and loving mother and devolves into a will-less vessel of the group think, engaged in endless self-flagellation. Ensslin similarly descends from a cock sure beauty and righteous ideologue into a paranoid and exhausted carrion bird, pecking at the others. The genius of the film is that there is no sympathy or heavy handed condemnation. Rather the stripping away of the cool, matched by a series of cameos by Bruno Ganz as the leading anti-Terrorism chief in almost a narrating role, is merely demonstrated. Horst Mahler, now a leading member of the fascist NDP and an imprisoned Holocaust denier, is shown as an opportunist Lawyer on the make, playing with terrorism.
If the film has a motive to understand, it does so, not for the terrorists, but for the wider ‘soft’ infrastructure of the RAF. What of the thousands of helpers and helpers of helpers and, at points, the millions of Germans who did have sympathy with the group? It ask what did they see; in those famous faces, in the pictures of bodies on the ground, the television footage of embassies under siege, that made them feel anything other than revulsion. It lays out that mythology, of the romantic rebel, the man (or woman) of drama action, and then demonstrates its fallacy, its dilettante morality.
That T-shirt lies in the back of my drawer, unworn for years, unaired except for pottering about the house when the wash is on. A reminder that what cool is.
The Revolutionary Cells or RZ would similarly make a suitable subject for such a well made treatment. Their ultra ‘Anti-Zionism’ and Entebbe needs a little light shed
A wee BBC documentary on the RAF for youse. Misses out on a few recent facts, such as Stasi involvement, but still good for the squirming Mahler and others
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd3LQXOLrOw
Tuesday 22 September 2009
Democracy and the Fallarovous
Memes.....Don't you love 'em. There they stand, giving you the entire meaning and narrative to a series of disparate events and happenings, always with the right answers, always gnostically satisfying. Like prejudice reinforcing, moral certain pringles. Once you pop etc etc.And what about the clash of the memes? The sheer joy of the loudest emitting. My, the treats of political theatre.
Looking at the boo-sucks around the Tea-baggers, them being perceptive civic angels who see the Nazi-Marxist-Jonestown nature of the 44th president, and a mass movement of dedicated racists oft to storm the White house, you see just such a crash of theoretical circle jerking. And how new is all is, how fresh.....
Hofstadter's famous essay (its first line adorns this missive) is probably now the most over flogged piece of writing on these here lefty interwebs. This kind over-flogger will at least link to a copy:-
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html
Written with reference to Goldwater's electorially doomed but historically significant campaign, 'The Paranoid Style' makes the case that American political discourse had become tinged with a pseudo-apocalyptical manchianism, a divided world made up of devilish plotters and voiceless helpless victims, wolves and sheep.
For 8 years, we have witnessed BDS in its finest robes, a thought-less hyper-active sub-culture. Now, I have my reasons for thinking Bush is a bit of a patronising Lady garden and was a fairly terrible president. But BDS goes further; it plucks him out of the mundane of normal politics and made him Wagnerian. The heart of Bush derangement was a conceived lack of legitimacy that then made each action of the administration something more. His promise of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and being conscious whilst governing of his plural defeat in 2000 proved to be hogwash.
That led on, with the deep nation wide shock of 911 and the nature of the debate on the invasion of Iraq, to a virtual suspension of political moderation within discourse. Thus 8 years of ‘fascism is just around the corner’, ‘the 2002/2004/2006/2008 election will be cancelled’, Bushitler and that most obscene ‘Troof’ made 43 a monster of unparalleled evil. This was matched in part with a deafening but slowly fading level of counter vitriol; ‘Traitors’, ‘Appeasers’, ‘Hell bound agenda pushers of acid gayness’.
The theft/mere electoral peculiarity in Florida in 2000 made a space for this carnival of the grotesque projected. But I suspect it was just the trigger rather than the cause. Bush, as a vocal culture warrior and a trickle downer nightwatchmen, ticked all the boxes to get under the wider American left’s skin. He, like any good fan of the eighties, loved the classic figures of the age. Returned were many of Reagan’s middle rung of appointments, now in place to dazzle. The deepest fears of one half of the political spectrum were intrinsic in the wee fella’s frame.
Obama has that same quality. He is everything that the wider right has learnt to hate. And from that point, everything is up for grabs. Now Race, I believe, is only a conscious part of this hatred for a small portion of the waves of ordure dumped on Pennsylvania avenue, as snobbery and ‘east-coast’ distain was for BDS. OBS is not about race. It is about a disparate collection of absolute fears, potently mixed in with a whole host of material concerns.
At the moment, the American (economic) Dream is going through its periodical night terror phases and the grounds of how government should act have shifted. Tea Baggers are reinforced in their delusions by the titanic numbers of losses, bailouts, share falls and index crashes. It is the mood music of their movement. Yet the elite’s bipartisan response, massive government intervention, seems so alien to the doctrines of rugged realtor mum and plumbers everywhere, popularly sold again and again since the mid seventies, created a shocking disconnect. OBS thrives in this void, a void of legitimacy, of sacred rhetoric versus evicted reality.
As such, Obama can be an out and out Radical, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Fascist, a Nazi[1], a Gay agenda throat pusher, a supa-dupa militant Black Panther, a Salafist Muslim infidel burner, a knitting needle wielding baby popper, he can be an absolute evil.
There are the questions, how ‘American’ is this paranoid style and how ‘new’ is it. With reference to the UK, it does seem to be an element in our discourse. Brown, an incompetent and clumsy third way acolyte is not just wrong or ill-suited for the job, he is a Stalinist wannabe, leading a party of anti-Semites, totalitarian Rad-Fems and bin-snooping fascists (see footnote). Thatcher wasn’t just a driven ideologue, she was a fascistic child snatching bitch and earlier there was Wilson the KGB agent.
There might be a case that this rise in vitriol and its stark dualities might be an after effect, a social mechanism, of dealing with a long term crisis in society and in self perception of said society. The Seventies trauma for Britain remains a central component on policy and discourse. Turning it over to America, a series of existential or nearly so crisis have had decades and even centuries old after effects. The Civil War and reconstruction, the agrarian crisis of the late 19th century, the great depression; these are milestones, events that required a society to deal with their consequences; they are too vast to ignore. The paranoid style might well be such a mechanism, channelling resentment, into periodical ‘elections of a generation’. On the whole, these manias do manifest themselves within the current political system and in conventional political action; they are not, like the rise of Nazism or military coups in South America, an implicit denial of existing political arrangements.
One element that the Tea baggers do have that much of BDS lacked was the whole hearted financial and ideological support of the leading news outlet in the States. Where the line can be drawn from spontaneous outburst and strategically managed corporate branding would make a fine academic career, but this would probably make a fine abstract.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-october-1-2009/tea-partiers-advise-g20-protesters
Some rather charming and affectionate reporting on proto-tea-baggers here by Alexandria Pelosi
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-7294526473944146040&ei=U_TFSrbNFpSt-Abss6nrBg&q=Right+America%3A+Feeling+Wronged#
[1] Lest we forget – NAZIS AND COMMUNISTS AND FDR AND CLINTON ONE AND TWO ARE EXACTLY THE SAME THING!!!!!!!!!
Wednesday 16 September 2009
David Lindsey News!!!!!!
http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2009/09/great-historical-questions-to-which-the-answer-is-no-2.html
There is always one man who never disappoints......A hero......A Propheta.......A Seer
Monday 14 September 2009
Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 3
A portal to eternity – Sacrifice and Killing as a route beyond mortality
‘The finest aspect of legionary life is death. Legionary death has nothing in common with ordinary death. By legionary death the legionary becomes engaged to eternity … is translated into legend’[1]
‘They are with us in freedom! They are with us in Ustasha Croatia! Our martyrs are with us! They are with us!’[2]Ustaša, 1941
As movements obsessed with temporal matters and supra-individual transcendence, the fascists saw sacrifice and the act of killing as essential to defeating the anomie of the ‘old shit’[3]. Within fascist ideology, abandonment of ego and selflessness regarding morality and mortality was to be rewarded. For those who sacrificed themselves and others to the cause, a mechanism of defining history was apparent. Obsessed with the nature of temporality and the direction of history as the fascists were, immortality was seen as the fruit of total sublimation and immersion within the ideology. Fascists actively sought the martyrs for the cause and the ‘martyrs’ to the moral fall of murdering that mass violence produced. In the act of being killed or killing for the movement, the individual would join an eternal elite, a timeless and a-historic band of heroes. These men ceased to be puny mortals, locked in the embrace of a corrupting and decadent gesellschaft and became immortal totems of the National narrative.
Griffin’s work on the acute temporal anxiety of fascism deposits this change from mortal to immortal as a reaction against the metronomic mediocrity of the old ‘liminiod’ world. This he characterises as ‘Chronos’, or dead time; that is a temporal experience devoid of meaning and ritual, one where time is merely the brief passage from birth to death[4]. It is a deeply psychological and chronological variant on anomie, where the individual is made anonymous and insignificant by the dearth of ‘magic’ in society. Individualism was not just another vice, either. It was, in essence, the opposite of the collective nomos that fascist ideology wished to recreate and a form of social ‘heat death’, it ‘denies any escape route from transcendence’[5]. To fascists, this conundrum might be overcome by the total abandonment of the self, by ending any autonomy of the individual for the fascist vehicle of collective meaning. Within the movement, which viewed itself as the logical and organic outcome of a timeless national narrative, the individual might join this narrative via annihilation of the self. Drowning yourself in the waters of the ideology might be the baptism into a supra-temporal existence, eternal, heroic and ‘Chronos’ defying.
Griffin has linked temporality to violence before[6]. The idea of dreamtime, which is a magical supra-individual chronology, is borne out by several examples, i.e. David Copeland and Millian Astray y Terreros’s Legionnaires (‘Long live death!’[7]). Individuals, performing a mission that involves violence cease to be troubled by the mundane humanism or anomic terrors that plague them. Rather, they feel like responsive agents of a supra-individual scheme, driven by a wider sense of meaning beyond their own will. Such violence is based on ‘projective narratives that tell a story of the past and map out future actions that can imbue the time with transcendent collective values’[8]. Thus we see a clear reprocicity between the ‘sacrifice’ of the individual and the ideologies’ award of a-temporal existence beyond mortality.
The Legion has been called ‘a genuine cult of death’ [9], given the central premise of the death/rebirth analogy so evident in their writings and actions. Death as a gateway to a collectively held immortality in the service of the movement was a key feature of the conceived ideal of all Legionnaires. Yet Dreamtime was clearly an element in the aforementioned Stelescu killing, the Decemviri (the name given to the killers) dancing round his dismembered corpse were lost in a time defying and meaningful ritual, in a trance, in dreamtime. Further, the memories of their actions and sacrifice (they gave themselves up to the police immediately and would be eventually killed after the Carlist coup) were to be kept evergreen by the movement and their actions and lives made into parable. For these ten men, they joined the heroes of the Nicadori[10], ‘the first legionary legend‘[11] as men who had become more via their actions; the legion rewarded them with immortality.
Codreanu specifically addressed the nature of sacrifice within the act of killing. The murderers were, according to Codreanu, placing their mission ahead of their own personal salvation. This was a selfless act par excellence to the pious Legionnaires, one they were to be compensated with. The Decemviri ‘surrendered to expiate their deed’[12], the Nicodori ‘gave themselves up in a state of trance’[13] .Whilst they might be damned for all eternity for their un-Christian acts, the nation would provide a separate place for their immortal remembrance.
The names and biographies of such martyrs, not least Codreanu, Mota and Marin were entered into such national pantheon of immortals. The rituals of death and burial became infused with fervent temporal and transitory meaning. Indeed the high point in the Legion’s strength in the sphere of public space was the Moţa/Marin funeral of 1937. Rather than being a ritual of remembrance, the vast proceedings were an intensely stylised transformation of feeble and flawed mortality into perfect and irreproachable immortality. This was a mass communal experience. The nationalistic religiosity of the funeral reached the frenzied levels of classic millennial movements[14]. For instance, a legionnaire stood on the Hearst yelling ‘Romanians, baptise yourselves in the Legionary faith’[15].
The last letters from Moţa whilst in Spain describe a feeling of impeding death intertwined with a strong element of robotically joining a select band of immortals via the struggle, yet another incident of dreamtime, ‘This is why I too have taken leave of my nearest and dearest, why I will no longer be with you physically, beloved comrades’[16]. When Codreanu spoke of the Romanians being those dead, those alive and those yet to be born, he spoke of a relationship forged via transformative action, away from the petty and corrupt selfishness he saw as poisoning Romanian life[17]. That transformative action was in large part the result of the struggle, of violence itself. Legionnaires were in hock to a vision of death for and by the movement as a route beyond the tawdry dead time of the current, a way beyond history.
In the case of the Ustaša, the cult of death is less pronounced but still a major part of the rhetoric of the movement. As Rory Yeomans has pointed out, the Ustaša produced a veritable stream of literature and writing eulogising the dead, both those killed by the Yugoslavian dictatorship and during the struggles with the Partisans and the Cetniks[18]. They were ‘a liberating army of avenging angels’[19]. This is most clear in the endless proclamations of blood shed as a powerful catalyst nee fertiliser for the nation. The dead demanded it,’ ...The graves scream, roar!’[20] Blood spilt would fortify the actuality of an independent Croatia, nourishing the mythology of the Ustaša state as the modern receptacle of Croat national aspirations. Jure Prpić was not alone in ‘...Demanding blood and victims’, for him, blood was ‘the ‘eternal guarantee of our happy future’[21]. Thus, Blood, the ‘by-product’ of inevitable violence and struggle, acted to make the utopia of Pavelić more real whilst intertwining the givers of this life fluid to the future of the nation. Again we see the interaction between gift and reward. The dead and the killers became as one with Croatia, they were inseparable.
The Black Legion, a unit within the Ustaša Militia epitomises this symbiosis of killing, death and immortality via Croatia’s continued existence. Again we see dreamtime and a willingness to be submerged within the movement[22], again we see death being a portal out of the chains of meaningless time and anonymous mortality, and again we see the willingness of young men to take up these ideas and put them in horrific and brutal practice. In the words of a student paper, ‘We have begun a life-and-death struggle against them’, ‘We never feared blood when it was necessary to give it, so we won’t be afraid when we have to take it from them, Blood for blood!’[23] Indeed the crescendo of this fetish for the dead reached its logical conclusion on the 10th April 1945 as the regime crumbled, when the feted and ‘martyred’ hero of the Black Legion, Jure Francetić was made the head of the Ustaša army, having already been made the eternal commander of his beloved legionnaires post mortem[24].
In short, there is a clear connection between the fascist conception of revolution, the crisis of temporality and the cults of death and violence. Death and killing as a portal beyond the mundane ‘tick tock’ of modern societies in crisis is in many ways the signature of fascist violence. In death and in becoming ruthless ‘Weltanschauungskrieger’, be it in the Death teams of the Legionnaires or the Ustaša militia, the individual became more then their petty limitations. They, through violent acts, became the very core of a vast supra-temporal narrative of the nation. In a nest leader’s words, ‘Rise now, Rumanian, And march with us in the Legion, And you will feel the sacred thrill of determination, And the blessing of those in the grave’[25]. Whilst many other political and spiritual movements had such pantheons of martyrs and ‘necessary’ butchers, the fascist conception of temporality and revolution directly legitimised such a logic. Violence was not the only ‘cure’ to ammonic mortality, but it remained the most potent.
To the individual fascist, the process of sacrifice and killing, linked as they were, gave an opportunity for immortality. This is important because fascism’s major appeals and internal dynamics were to seek out an eternal place, outside of anomic, chronic time. Here the fascist could escape mortality and become eternal himself. Between Selbstopfer and Fremdopfer, than is between self sacrifice and the sacrifice of others was but a small matter for the fascist, both promised a route beyond history and into a spiritual plane of existence: ‘I am burning for Croatia and the Poglavnik’[26]. Through violence, there lay a portal towards an immortal being, to be celebrated and admired, to become part of history rather than its victim. To the fascist, this offered a seductive path towards beating Chronos, becoming the herald of the new age.
[1] As quoted in Stephen Fischer-Galati, 2006, ibid, pg 246
[2] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 133
[3] G. Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, (1996, Berghahn, Oxford), pg 70
[4] The term is borrow from Frank Kermode, R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 81
[5] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 81
[6] R Griffin, ‘Shattering crystals: the role of “dream time” in extreme right-wing political violence’, Terrorism and Political Violence 15/1, 2003
[7] R Griffin, 2003, ibid, pg 80
[8] David Rapaport as quoted in R Griffin, 2003, ibid, pg 7
[9] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 80
[10] The Nicadori were the three men responsible for the murder of I Duca, the Prime minister in 1933
[11] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 285
[12] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 292
[13] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 285
[14] N Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, (1957), (London: Granada, 1970)
[15] V Săndulescu, 'Sacralised Politics in Action: the February 1937 Burial of the Romanian Legionary Leaders Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8/2, 2007
[16] Letter to Libertate, 1937 in R Griffin, Fascism: A Reader (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pg 220
[17] R Griffin, 1995, ibid, pg 222
[18] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid
[19] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 131
[20] Hrvatski narod, 1941, as quoted in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 134
[21] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 129
[22]‘In the Ustasha state, created by the Poglavnik and his Ustashas, people must think like Ustashas, speak like Ustashas, and, most importantly, they must act like Ustashas.’ The Ustaša programme of 1941 as quoted in I Goldstein, 2006, ibid, pg 227
[23] Hrvatski branik, 1941 in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 132
[24] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 142
[25] Poem by Petre C. Stefan, 5th March 1933, CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 92
[26] Reported last words of Ivan Kukoranović whilst being boiled alive by Cetniki. R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 130
‘The finest aspect of legionary life is death. Legionary death has nothing in common with ordinary death. By legionary death the legionary becomes engaged to eternity … is translated into legend’[1]
‘They are with us in freedom! They are with us in Ustasha Croatia! Our martyrs are with us! They are with us!’[2]Ustaša, 1941
As movements obsessed with temporal matters and supra-individual transcendence, the fascists saw sacrifice and the act of killing as essential to defeating the anomie of the ‘old shit’[3]. Within fascist ideology, abandonment of ego and selflessness regarding morality and mortality was to be rewarded. For those who sacrificed themselves and others to the cause, a mechanism of defining history was apparent. Obsessed with the nature of temporality and the direction of history as the fascists were, immortality was seen as the fruit of total sublimation and immersion within the ideology. Fascists actively sought the martyrs for the cause and the ‘martyrs’ to the moral fall of murdering that mass violence produced. In the act of being killed or killing for the movement, the individual would join an eternal elite, a timeless and a-historic band of heroes. These men ceased to be puny mortals, locked in the embrace of a corrupting and decadent gesellschaft and became immortal totems of the National narrative.
Griffin’s work on the acute temporal anxiety of fascism deposits this change from mortal to immortal as a reaction against the metronomic mediocrity of the old ‘liminiod’ world. This he characterises as ‘Chronos’, or dead time; that is a temporal experience devoid of meaning and ritual, one where time is merely the brief passage from birth to death[4]. It is a deeply psychological and chronological variant on anomie, where the individual is made anonymous and insignificant by the dearth of ‘magic’ in society. Individualism was not just another vice, either. It was, in essence, the opposite of the collective nomos that fascist ideology wished to recreate and a form of social ‘heat death’, it ‘denies any escape route from transcendence’[5]. To fascists, this conundrum might be overcome by the total abandonment of the self, by ending any autonomy of the individual for the fascist vehicle of collective meaning. Within the movement, which viewed itself as the logical and organic outcome of a timeless national narrative, the individual might join this narrative via annihilation of the self. Drowning yourself in the waters of the ideology might be the baptism into a supra-temporal existence, eternal, heroic and ‘Chronos’ defying.
Griffin has linked temporality to violence before[6]. The idea of dreamtime, which is a magical supra-individual chronology, is borne out by several examples, i.e. David Copeland and Millian Astray y Terreros’s Legionnaires (‘Long live death!’[7]). Individuals, performing a mission that involves violence cease to be troubled by the mundane humanism or anomic terrors that plague them. Rather, they feel like responsive agents of a supra-individual scheme, driven by a wider sense of meaning beyond their own will. Such violence is based on ‘projective narratives that tell a story of the past and map out future actions that can imbue the time with transcendent collective values’[8]. Thus we see a clear reprocicity between the ‘sacrifice’ of the individual and the ideologies’ award of a-temporal existence beyond mortality.
The Legion has been called ‘a genuine cult of death’ [9], given the central premise of the death/rebirth analogy so evident in their writings and actions. Death as a gateway to a collectively held immortality in the service of the movement was a key feature of the conceived ideal of all Legionnaires. Yet Dreamtime was clearly an element in the aforementioned Stelescu killing, the Decemviri (the name given to the killers) dancing round his dismembered corpse were lost in a time defying and meaningful ritual, in a trance, in dreamtime. Further, the memories of their actions and sacrifice (they gave themselves up to the police immediately and would be eventually killed after the Carlist coup) were to be kept evergreen by the movement and their actions and lives made into parable. For these ten men, they joined the heroes of the Nicadori[10], ‘the first legionary legend‘[11] as men who had become more via their actions; the legion rewarded them with immortality.
Codreanu specifically addressed the nature of sacrifice within the act of killing. The murderers were, according to Codreanu, placing their mission ahead of their own personal salvation. This was a selfless act par excellence to the pious Legionnaires, one they were to be compensated with. The Decemviri ‘surrendered to expiate their deed’[12], the Nicodori ‘gave themselves up in a state of trance’[13] .Whilst they might be damned for all eternity for their un-Christian acts, the nation would provide a separate place for their immortal remembrance.
The names and biographies of such martyrs, not least Codreanu, Mota and Marin were entered into such national pantheon of immortals. The rituals of death and burial became infused with fervent temporal and transitory meaning. Indeed the high point in the Legion’s strength in the sphere of public space was the Moţa/Marin funeral of 1937. Rather than being a ritual of remembrance, the vast proceedings were an intensely stylised transformation of feeble and flawed mortality into perfect and irreproachable immortality. This was a mass communal experience. The nationalistic religiosity of the funeral reached the frenzied levels of classic millennial movements[14]. For instance, a legionnaire stood on the Hearst yelling ‘Romanians, baptise yourselves in the Legionary faith’[15].
The last letters from Moţa whilst in Spain describe a feeling of impeding death intertwined with a strong element of robotically joining a select band of immortals via the struggle, yet another incident of dreamtime, ‘This is why I too have taken leave of my nearest and dearest, why I will no longer be with you physically, beloved comrades’[16]. When Codreanu spoke of the Romanians being those dead, those alive and those yet to be born, he spoke of a relationship forged via transformative action, away from the petty and corrupt selfishness he saw as poisoning Romanian life[17]. That transformative action was in large part the result of the struggle, of violence itself. Legionnaires were in hock to a vision of death for and by the movement as a route beyond the tawdry dead time of the current, a way beyond history.
In the case of the Ustaša, the cult of death is less pronounced but still a major part of the rhetoric of the movement. As Rory Yeomans has pointed out, the Ustaša produced a veritable stream of literature and writing eulogising the dead, both those killed by the Yugoslavian dictatorship and during the struggles with the Partisans and the Cetniks[18]. They were ‘a liberating army of avenging angels’[19]. This is most clear in the endless proclamations of blood shed as a powerful catalyst nee fertiliser for the nation. The dead demanded it,’ ...The graves scream, roar!’[20] Blood spilt would fortify the actuality of an independent Croatia, nourishing the mythology of the Ustaša state as the modern receptacle of Croat national aspirations. Jure Prpić was not alone in ‘...Demanding blood and victims’, for him, blood was ‘the ‘eternal guarantee of our happy future’[21]. Thus, Blood, the ‘by-product’ of inevitable violence and struggle, acted to make the utopia of Pavelić more real whilst intertwining the givers of this life fluid to the future of the nation. Again we see the interaction between gift and reward. The dead and the killers became as one with Croatia, they were inseparable.
The Black Legion, a unit within the Ustaša Militia epitomises this symbiosis of killing, death and immortality via Croatia’s continued existence. Again we see dreamtime and a willingness to be submerged within the movement[22], again we see death being a portal out of the chains of meaningless time and anonymous mortality, and again we see the willingness of young men to take up these ideas and put them in horrific and brutal practice. In the words of a student paper, ‘We have begun a life-and-death struggle against them’, ‘We never feared blood when it was necessary to give it, so we won’t be afraid when we have to take it from them, Blood for blood!’[23] Indeed the crescendo of this fetish for the dead reached its logical conclusion on the 10th April 1945 as the regime crumbled, when the feted and ‘martyred’ hero of the Black Legion, Jure Francetić was made the head of the Ustaša army, having already been made the eternal commander of his beloved legionnaires post mortem[24].
In short, there is a clear connection between the fascist conception of revolution, the crisis of temporality and the cults of death and violence. Death and killing as a portal beyond the mundane ‘tick tock’ of modern societies in crisis is in many ways the signature of fascist violence. In death and in becoming ruthless ‘Weltanschauungskrieger’, be it in the Death teams of the Legionnaires or the Ustaša militia, the individual became more then their petty limitations. They, through violent acts, became the very core of a vast supra-temporal narrative of the nation. In a nest leader’s words, ‘Rise now, Rumanian, And march with us in the Legion, And you will feel the sacred thrill of determination, And the blessing of those in the grave’[25]. Whilst many other political and spiritual movements had such pantheons of martyrs and ‘necessary’ butchers, the fascist conception of temporality and revolution directly legitimised such a logic. Violence was not the only ‘cure’ to ammonic mortality, but it remained the most potent.
To the individual fascist, the process of sacrifice and killing, linked as they were, gave an opportunity for immortality. This is important because fascism’s major appeals and internal dynamics were to seek out an eternal place, outside of anomic, chronic time. Here the fascist could escape mortality and become eternal himself. Between Selbstopfer and Fremdopfer, than is between self sacrifice and the sacrifice of others was but a small matter for the fascist, both promised a route beyond history and into a spiritual plane of existence: ‘I am burning for Croatia and the Poglavnik’[26]. Through violence, there lay a portal towards an immortal being, to be celebrated and admired, to become part of history rather than its victim. To the fascist, this offered a seductive path towards beating Chronos, becoming the herald of the new age.
[1] As quoted in Stephen Fischer-Galati, 2006, ibid, pg 246
[2] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 133
[3] G. Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, (1996, Berghahn, Oxford), pg 70
[4] The term is borrow from Frank Kermode, R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 81
[5] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 81
[6] R Griffin, ‘Shattering crystals: the role of “dream time” in extreme right-wing political violence’, Terrorism and Political Violence 15/1, 2003
[7] R Griffin, 2003, ibid, pg 80
[8] David Rapaport as quoted in R Griffin, 2003, ibid, pg 7
[9] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 80
[10] The Nicadori were the three men responsible for the murder of I Duca, the Prime minister in 1933
[11] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 285
[12] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 292
[13] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 285
[14] N Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, (1957), (London: Granada, 1970)
[15] V Săndulescu, 'Sacralised Politics in Action: the February 1937 Burial of the Romanian Legionary Leaders Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8/2, 2007
[16] Letter to Libertate, 1937 in R Griffin, Fascism: A Reader (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pg 220
[17] R Griffin, 1995, ibid, pg 222
[18] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid
[19] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 131
[20] Hrvatski narod, 1941, as quoted in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 134
[21] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 129
[22]‘In the Ustasha state, created by the Poglavnik and his Ustashas, people must think like Ustashas, speak like Ustashas, and, most importantly, they must act like Ustashas.’ The Ustaša programme of 1941 as quoted in I Goldstein, 2006, ibid, pg 227
[23] Hrvatski branik, 1941 in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 132
[24] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 142
[25] Poem by Petre C. Stefan, 5th March 1933, CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 92
[26] Reported last words of Ivan Kukoranović whilst being boiled alive by Cetniki. R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 130
Wednesday 9 September 2009
Dramatically interrupted Hiatus!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/conservative/6157955/How-cool-are-David-Camerons-Conservatives.html
There....are.....no.....words
(h/t Mike Fredman)
There....are.....no.....words
(h/t Mike Fredman)
Tuesday 18 August 2009
Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 2
Ritualised Violence and the Cosmology of Terror – ‘Kosher Meat’ and the Satyr
‘For minorities such as Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have three million bullets’[1], Mile Budak, July 22, 1941
‘....the most important thing was to act’[2], Codreanu
Having made their diagnosis of society’s endemic ills, the fascists were left with the problem of how to bring about national revolution. In this, fascists were united in their rejection of ‘bourgeois’ socio-political norms and routines of power and governance. Such systems were part of the problems contributing to, and indeed a cause of, the societal decadence and decay they discerned. Due to democracy and meek Christian virtues, ‘the Romanian cause everywhere suffered and bowed to the foreigner’[3] and as such ‘...We cannot fight against those forest bandits with a prayer book in our hands’[4]. Their impulse to change, they boasted was not based fallacious notions of programs and party policy and consensus. Rather the idea, the act of will was the central dynamic, one that would be communicated by their choice of ‘social strategy’. The act of will could overcome the perceived crisis of modernity, via ‘active nihilism’[5] one that had defeated the previous social structures and epistemological constructs. The act of will made politics unhinged from certain conflicting realities, it made the impossible possible. This new form of social strategy was the cultural setting for revolutionary change, a palette for would-be rebels, to pick and choose meaningful and socially emotive indicators of power, status and deviancy.
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus depicts man as an animal that uses a tapestry of various strategies to navigate life situations[6]. The particular habitus ‘...is a set of dispositions which incline agents to and react in certain ways’[7] Faced with problems and periods of crisis, humanity resorts to traditional or more accurately hegemonic cultural formats of action, performing an act of ‘ludic recombination’ to reconfigure the cultural abstract to the situation in reality. Chris Taylor’s anthropological work on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has particular resonance with regards to the Legion and the Ustasha[8]. He saw within the very ritualised and metaphoric violence perpetrated by the Hutu militias on their Tutsi victims, a logic derived from radicalized forms of cultural myths and perceptions.
Naming this toolbox of norms and strategies a ‘Cosmology of Terror’, Taylor saw such elements of folklore, traditional religious or cultural practices as well as the particulars of Hutu supremacist ideology ‘enacted’ within the individual acts of violence. Liisa Malka asked of the killings in Rwanda, ‘...the extent to which the techniques of cruelty actually used were already meaningful, already mythico-historical’[9]. I propose that this analysis also holds true with other forms of political violence and the particulars originating in the cultural foundations of each of the perpetrating movements. Further I suggest in the cases of the Ustasha and the Legion, two particular elements are in play. First is the ‘generic’ act of will found within fascism as a political genus, whilst the second relates to peasant or rural habitus with regards to otherness, deviancy and crisis of identity. These elements allow the researcher to see both the similarities and the differences of rituals of political violence. In addition such a schema allows us to discern the essence of fascist violence.
In their dynamic of social scission, the fascist movements were contorting forms of habitus. In their rejection of compromise they sought victory through a test of wills. When Cuza was attacked on the street by a Jew, Codreanu, Moţa and a group of students went from cafe to cafe in Iaşa, beating up Jews. One student even shot at Cuza’s assailant[10]. Only demonstrative will, manifested in violence would do. In extended periods of such high stress such as the Legionnaire revolt or the civil war in Croatia, the parts of habitus dealing with deviancy and ‘other-ness’ became super-charged. Faced with the macro-tasks of the ‘gardening state’, the perpetrators used rituals taken from their (mostly) peasant habitus to embody within the act of violence, higher meaning. Against increasingly isolated ‘deviant’ communities, the Legion and the Ustaša sought to demonstrate the new order of things.
Dealing with the act of will initially, both the Ustaša and the Legion exalted their decisive action with regards to their enemies. They sought nothing from them in way of compromise or recognition; rather they wished to take everything. Codreanu’s lament of Romania’s surplus of programs[11] and deficit of men willing to act demonstrated to both the Legionnaire at the time and the Historical observer a structural ideological impatience. ‘You accomplish, let others talk’[12]. The will to act became a major cultural construct to mass murder and political violence. Pavelić dismissed the norms of ‘Bourgeois’ society as being the very chains on the Croat nation that had caused its ‘Golgotha’[13] under Yugoslavia. Once Yugoslavia had fallen, there would be no accommodation, ‘Blood will be shed and heads will roll’[14]. The occasion of each murder was a demonstration of the fascist’s power and control, of the power of the ideology, of the victory of will over reason. . At that point, the culture of violence and action as a dialectic of history, became as powerful as any idea.
For the Legion, the new spirit of social organisation and action that they proposed as a resolution to Romania’s problems was inherently cultural and indeed meta-political. By being subsumed by the movement’s Weltanschauung, Legionnaires entered a world of clear pathways and delineated morality, Moţa declared ‘As God resurrected Christ in order to help the good to victory, so will the legion triumph, too – even if only by miracle’[15]. The Ustaša went even further, constructing an elaborate system of laws and institutions that worked from the cultural supremacy of the act. Their camps and tribunals were not organs of guilt or innocence, freedom or punishment. Rather they were the mechanics of a vast enactment of an ethno-cratic mythology of value propelled by a fetish of will and action. Jasenovac was not a place where debate and mediation had a home, it was the workshop of the Ustashas’ ‘Nationalising war’, where acting had a position inestimably higher that reflection. In sum, ‘...There are only two paths: that of the Croatian Ustasha state or that of the šuma’[16]. The traditional forms of intra-ethnic compromise in Bosnia, the slavas were destroyed as Ustaša violence and vendettas tore at the communities[17]. Between ‘light and darkness’[18], there was no centre ground
The Counter-type outline in the pervious chapter points towards a powerful analogy. The Counter type opposed to the peasant resembles the Satyr, the Wildman, the nomad[19]. They were a both a dark ‘primordial’ threat over the stability of the peasant community and the unity so prized by the fascist. The Counter type held the role of the Wildman, ‘a degenerate, the model of a lost soul’[20], They were the thieving and parasitic bandit or grazer, the backwards and pagan forest dweller, the barbaric and cruel un-rooted enemy of the village. In dealing with them, habitus suggested their humiliation by the power of the village, the peasant collective; it suggested an area of metaphoric forms of symbolic justice and power. In the words of the NPD, a German Ultra-nationalist group ’ We have to manage free areas, in which we de facto exert power, in which we are able to sanction, that is to say, to punish deviants and enemies’[21]. The Satyr would be made humble for its effrontery and then made invisible for its inherent threat. Unwillingly, the rootless would play its part in a performance of expiation, where the supremacy of the peasant was affirmed and reinforced and the deviant ‘exiled’.
In the following cases, it should be noted that the choice of ‘un-ritualised’ murder was there and indeed practiced simultaneously. Each of the groups of killers had access to guns and each group chose to go beyond ‘simple’ shooting. These were conscious decisions to make these acts of murder ‘mean’ more. It is this investment of meaning that provides powerful evidence of cultural forces at play in these heinous crimes.
The Ustaša were particularly clear in their use of peasant mythology in describing and dealing with the conglomerate counter type. The Serbs, the Gypsies, the Jews were the šuma or ‘Forest’. They represented chaos, an end of stability and certainties. As traditionally cattle farmers and state sponsored settlers, the treatment of Serbs was an example of reversed and inverted logic. ‘They were a race of destructive pastoral nomads and bandits’[22] in the words of Pilar, they were fattening their cattle on the hard work of arable and thus civilised Croats. The knife gloves, designed for the slaughter of cattle[23], the mallet, used for stunning the animal before draining[24], the uses of the counter type as doomed pack animals, dumb automatons[25], all were linked to a cultural depiction of a conflict between the civilising mission of the clearing and planting farmer and the locust like behaviour of a cattle farming nomadic tribe. The Ustaša super-charged an existing culture of conflict and compromise, making it unbalanced towards violence whilst using its mythology as an overarching logic to their crimes. Whilst the Croat peasant dreaded nightmares of this forest Satyr as his eternal enemy, the Ustaša made them die according to the logical, even ‘ironic’ humiliations of these mythic constructs.
The murders at Jasonovac were ‘”performances” for public punishment’[26]. At the final Glina massacres, the clubbing to death of several hundred would-be converts in the town church was akin to putting down a pack of rabid dogs, tempted in by the pretence of safety and despatched en masse. In using the Orthodox building, they were mocking the pretence of a separate place of sanctuary, of safety for Serbs[27]. The twin Nomads, the Jews and the Gypsy were pitted against each other at the Gradina and the Granik killing ground, making victims implicit in the whole act of mass murder[28], in the ‘ritual slaughter of Jews’[29]. When bodies were dumped in tributaries of the Drina, the messages of ‘meat for Jovanova market’[30] carved in them revealed two truths. The act of murder was expulsion from the realm of the ‘volk’ and the act of mutilation was the finishing touch to culturally defined humiliation, of symbolic process[31]. The demon of the forest had been processed and reduced into a carcass, made ridiculous, impotent and demonstratively powerless.
In the Romanian case, two particular ritualised acts stand out; the murder of Stelescu and the Bucharest pogrom. The particulars of the Romania crisis are revealed again. The main dichotomy in the Legionary critique was between rural and urban, between Eden and Babylon. The Satyr was at home in the chaos and barbarism of the city. In the case of Stelescu, his ‘betrayal’ of Codreanu placed him deep within the alliance of the counter type. He was a Satyr who had turned his back on the Peasant and sought to divide the movement from the comfort of the City. His subsequent demise was deeply ritualised[32]. Each of the ten assassins emptied a six shot revolver into him as he lay in his hospital bed, then he was hacked into pieces with axes, (again the meat metaphor) before his remains were danced around by the Killers in a trance like state. He was made into nothing, a will-less and powerless bundle of limbs and torso in someone else’s ritual. His pretensions of being the equal of Codreanu and his lack of faith had resulted in his metaphoric annihilation.[33] The act of will and the culture of deviant humiliation were apparent.
Amongst the chaotic bloodletting of the Bucharest pogrom, the 15 lives destroyed in the central Abattoir again suggest a peasant habitus hyper-ventilating in a modern crisis. The Jewish victims after torture and humiliation were fed into the machinery of the slaughter house, their bodies hung on hooks and a mock ritual of Kosher butchery performed on them. This was then presented to a public audience[34]. Here we see a logic of meat and humiliation in action, of destroying the myth and the strength of the urban Satyr and publicising this new ‘order of things’ as proclamation at a time of high stress. The Legionnaires who delved into sadistic action were drawing on a cultural dialogue, one that the ideology of the Legion sought to use.
The results of a peasant habitus being hyper-accelerated are not new or a result of the modern age. The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-49 (known as the deluge amongst Jews) bare a remarkable similarity to the Ustaša’s Nationalising war, ’In the synagogue, before the Holy Ark, they slaughtered with butchers' knives[35]’, but in both instances, such bestialities were reinforced by a wider ideology or sense of mission whilst being acted out via peasant habitus. They ended up surrounding their killers with a cultural tapestry of action, violence and ways of making meaning out of death. Within this, the killers could enact simple but resonant morality plays via their brutality, the humiliation and flesh of their victims and the manner of their sadism. The ideology lifted their simple inhumanity into a historic and dialectical act. It made the very nature of the solution to their social critique an important and self-justifying act.
With the act of will, demolishing the ‘false’ moral constrictions on social and political action, the fascists sought to bring inherent meaning to their actions. Each act of murder, of rape, violence and destruction was ritualised and raised above mere brutality by incorporation within the movements’ grand narrative. On the ground, death became the result of a contorted mode of social relationship, between the saviours and the doomed. Those charged with the task of the act, of saving the future of the National community drew on older forms of social catharsis through violence and re-invigorated them with grand meaning, of the battle against decay and for rebirth. The doomed became symbolic canvases for the manifestation of this new form of habitus, to be transformed from people to metaphoric representatives of the other to meat (or finished industrial product), via a ritualised process. Such was the extent of the ritual process amongst these ‘Angels[36]’ and ‘Avengers’[37]
[1] C.K. Savich, Islam under the Swastika: The Grand Mufti and the Nazi Protectorate of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1941-1945, http://rastko.org.yu/rastko-bl/istorija/kcsavic/csavich-islam_e.html, 12/1/08 19.00
[2] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 252
[3] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 89
[4] Pavelic in 1929 as quoted in M Glenny, The Balkans: 1804-1999 – Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (Granta, London, 1999)
[5] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 60
[6] P Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (London, Polity, 1991) and G Lakomski, ‘On Agency and Structure: Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Theory of Symbolic Violence’, Curriculum Inquiry, 14/ 2, 1984
[7] P Bourdieu, 1991, ibid, pg 12
[8] C Taylor, 1999, ibid,
[9] as quoted in C Taylor, 1999, ibid, pg 104
[10] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 264
[11] ‘This country goes to pieces not because of a lack of programs but because of the lack of men’, N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 267
[12] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 11
[13] Božidar Kavran, 1944 as quoted in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 128
[14] Pavelić as quoted in E Paris, 1962, ibid, pg 55
[15] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 266
[16] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 372
[17] M Bax, Medjugorje: Religion, Politics and Violence in Rural Bosnia, (Amsterdam, VU Uitgeverij, 1995), pg 92
[18] Moţa as quoted in N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 266
[19] B Widenor Maggs, ‘Reljković, Satyrs, and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Croatia’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 20/ 4, 1976
[20] G Forth, ‘Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe’, Folklore 118 (December 2007), Ante Starčević described Serbs as ‘devious vagabonds and beggars’, R Yeomans, How to make a silk purse out of a Sow’s Ear: The Ustasha Movement and the Cultural Contradictions of the Independent State of Croatia in its Formative Period 1941-4 (London, Meze/SSEES, 2001), pg 18
[21] As quoted in J Casquete, ‘Protest Rituals and Uncivil Communities’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7/ 3, 2006, pg 291
[22] N Bartulin, 2007, ibid, pg 177
[23] ‘...The Ustaše slit the throats of Serbs over a large vat until the vessel was overflowing with blood’ M Glenny, 1999, ibid, pg 494
[24] ‘According to von Wedel (A German Army Officer), the Ustaša killed the women and children `like cattle' in a series of `bestial executions " The references to the violence of animals or violence used against animals made Ustaša violence into something primal and base. Butchers, after all, participated in crude nontechnical killings of animals bereft of any form of defence’ J Gumz, 2001, ibid, pg 1033
[25]Milko Riffer on arrival at Jasenovac; ‘Through a cloud of thick dust, they then saw an Ustaša guard riding towards them in a cart. Standing with a whip in his right hand, the guard was lashing the backs of the four Jewish men in rags who were harnessed to the front of the cart and pulling it’, M Glenny, 1999, ibid, pg 496
[26] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, trans S Djuric, Crimes in the Jasenovac Camp, (Zagreb, 1946/2003), pg 23
[27] ‘250 people turned up for the event [mass conversion ceremony]. They were greeted by six members of the Ustaša. When all were inside, the church doors were locked shut. The peasants were forced to lie on the ground and the six Ustaše began hitting them with spiked clubs. More Ustaše appeared and one after another every single person was murdered in this fashion’ M Glenny,1999, ibid, pg 500
[28] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid, pg 25
[29] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid, pg 31
[30] Testimony of Prvoslav Grizogono in R. Petrović, The extermination of the Serbs on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, (The Ministry of Information of The Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, 1991), pg 31, Jovanova was the main cattle market in Belgrade
[31] V Nahoum-Grappe, ‘The Anthropology of Extreme Violence: The act of Desecration’, International Social Science Journal, 54 (174), 2002, pg 549-557
[32] Stelescu’s breakaway group , the Romanian Crusade was suspected of taking funds from Lupescu
[33] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 292 and
[34] ‘‘Millo Beiler and the Rauch brothers, who 'were found with their stomachs deeply slashed and with their intestines tied around their necks', The rest of the bodies from the slaughterhouse were suspended on meat hooks, as if to say 'kosher meat.'’ R. Ioanid, ‘The Pogrom of Bucharest 21-23 January 1941’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 6/ 4, 1991, pg 373-382, Jean Ancel differs, saying there was an actual sign. See J Ancel, ‘The “Christian” Regimes of Romania and the Jews, 1940-1942’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies,.7/ 1, 1993
[35] As quoted in http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/ukraine.html#c (31/4/08, 19:00)
[36] L Barbu, 1980, ibid, pg 388, the full quote is ‘...they were angels of light’
[37] M Biondich, ‘”We were defending the State”: Nationalism, Myth and Memory in Twentieth-Century Croatia’ in JR Lampe and M Mazower eds., Ideologies and national identities : the case of twentieth-century south eastern Europe, (Budapest, Central European University Press, 2003), pg 62, again the full quote is ‘...the avenger of a martyred past’
‘For minorities such as Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have three million bullets’[1], Mile Budak, July 22, 1941
‘....the most important thing was to act’[2], Codreanu
Having made their diagnosis of society’s endemic ills, the fascists were left with the problem of how to bring about national revolution. In this, fascists were united in their rejection of ‘bourgeois’ socio-political norms and routines of power and governance. Such systems were part of the problems contributing to, and indeed a cause of, the societal decadence and decay they discerned. Due to democracy and meek Christian virtues, ‘the Romanian cause everywhere suffered and bowed to the foreigner’[3] and as such ‘...We cannot fight against those forest bandits with a prayer book in our hands’[4]. Their impulse to change, they boasted was not based fallacious notions of programs and party policy and consensus. Rather the idea, the act of will was the central dynamic, one that would be communicated by their choice of ‘social strategy’. The act of will could overcome the perceived crisis of modernity, via ‘active nihilism’[5] one that had defeated the previous social structures and epistemological constructs. The act of will made politics unhinged from certain conflicting realities, it made the impossible possible. This new form of social strategy was the cultural setting for revolutionary change, a palette for would-be rebels, to pick and choose meaningful and socially emotive indicators of power, status and deviancy.
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus depicts man as an animal that uses a tapestry of various strategies to navigate life situations[6]. The particular habitus ‘...is a set of dispositions which incline agents to and react in certain ways’[7] Faced with problems and periods of crisis, humanity resorts to traditional or more accurately hegemonic cultural formats of action, performing an act of ‘ludic recombination’ to reconfigure the cultural abstract to the situation in reality. Chris Taylor’s anthropological work on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has particular resonance with regards to the Legion and the Ustasha[8]. He saw within the very ritualised and metaphoric violence perpetrated by the Hutu militias on their Tutsi victims, a logic derived from radicalized forms of cultural myths and perceptions.
Naming this toolbox of norms and strategies a ‘Cosmology of Terror’, Taylor saw such elements of folklore, traditional religious or cultural practices as well as the particulars of Hutu supremacist ideology ‘enacted’ within the individual acts of violence. Liisa Malka asked of the killings in Rwanda, ‘...the extent to which the techniques of cruelty actually used were already meaningful, already mythico-historical’[9]. I propose that this analysis also holds true with other forms of political violence and the particulars originating in the cultural foundations of each of the perpetrating movements. Further I suggest in the cases of the Ustasha and the Legion, two particular elements are in play. First is the ‘generic’ act of will found within fascism as a political genus, whilst the second relates to peasant or rural habitus with regards to otherness, deviancy and crisis of identity. These elements allow the researcher to see both the similarities and the differences of rituals of political violence. In addition such a schema allows us to discern the essence of fascist violence.
In their dynamic of social scission, the fascist movements were contorting forms of habitus. In their rejection of compromise they sought victory through a test of wills. When Cuza was attacked on the street by a Jew, Codreanu, Moţa and a group of students went from cafe to cafe in Iaşa, beating up Jews. One student even shot at Cuza’s assailant[10]. Only demonstrative will, manifested in violence would do. In extended periods of such high stress such as the Legionnaire revolt or the civil war in Croatia, the parts of habitus dealing with deviancy and ‘other-ness’ became super-charged. Faced with the macro-tasks of the ‘gardening state’, the perpetrators used rituals taken from their (mostly) peasant habitus to embody within the act of violence, higher meaning. Against increasingly isolated ‘deviant’ communities, the Legion and the Ustaša sought to demonstrate the new order of things.
Dealing with the act of will initially, both the Ustaša and the Legion exalted their decisive action with regards to their enemies. They sought nothing from them in way of compromise or recognition; rather they wished to take everything. Codreanu’s lament of Romania’s surplus of programs[11] and deficit of men willing to act demonstrated to both the Legionnaire at the time and the Historical observer a structural ideological impatience. ‘You accomplish, let others talk’[12]. The will to act became a major cultural construct to mass murder and political violence. Pavelić dismissed the norms of ‘Bourgeois’ society as being the very chains on the Croat nation that had caused its ‘Golgotha’[13] under Yugoslavia. Once Yugoslavia had fallen, there would be no accommodation, ‘Blood will be shed and heads will roll’[14]. The occasion of each murder was a demonstration of the fascist’s power and control, of the power of the ideology, of the victory of will over reason. . At that point, the culture of violence and action as a dialectic of history, became as powerful as any idea.
For the Legion, the new spirit of social organisation and action that they proposed as a resolution to Romania’s problems was inherently cultural and indeed meta-political. By being subsumed by the movement’s Weltanschauung, Legionnaires entered a world of clear pathways and delineated morality, Moţa declared ‘As God resurrected Christ in order to help the good to victory, so will the legion triumph, too – even if only by miracle’[15]. The Ustaša went even further, constructing an elaborate system of laws and institutions that worked from the cultural supremacy of the act. Their camps and tribunals were not organs of guilt or innocence, freedom or punishment. Rather they were the mechanics of a vast enactment of an ethno-cratic mythology of value propelled by a fetish of will and action. Jasenovac was not a place where debate and mediation had a home, it was the workshop of the Ustashas’ ‘Nationalising war’, where acting had a position inestimably higher that reflection. In sum, ‘...There are only two paths: that of the Croatian Ustasha state or that of the šuma’[16]. The traditional forms of intra-ethnic compromise in Bosnia, the slavas were destroyed as Ustaša violence and vendettas tore at the communities[17]. Between ‘light and darkness’[18], there was no centre ground
The Counter-type outline in the pervious chapter points towards a powerful analogy. The Counter type opposed to the peasant resembles the Satyr, the Wildman, the nomad[19]. They were a both a dark ‘primordial’ threat over the stability of the peasant community and the unity so prized by the fascist. The Counter type held the role of the Wildman, ‘a degenerate, the model of a lost soul’[20], They were the thieving and parasitic bandit or grazer, the backwards and pagan forest dweller, the barbaric and cruel un-rooted enemy of the village. In dealing with them, habitus suggested their humiliation by the power of the village, the peasant collective; it suggested an area of metaphoric forms of symbolic justice and power. In the words of the NPD, a German Ultra-nationalist group ’ We have to manage free areas, in which we de facto exert power, in which we are able to sanction, that is to say, to punish deviants and enemies’[21]. The Satyr would be made humble for its effrontery and then made invisible for its inherent threat. Unwillingly, the rootless would play its part in a performance of expiation, where the supremacy of the peasant was affirmed and reinforced and the deviant ‘exiled’.
In the following cases, it should be noted that the choice of ‘un-ritualised’ murder was there and indeed practiced simultaneously. Each of the groups of killers had access to guns and each group chose to go beyond ‘simple’ shooting. These were conscious decisions to make these acts of murder ‘mean’ more. It is this investment of meaning that provides powerful evidence of cultural forces at play in these heinous crimes.
The Ustaša were particularly clear in their use of peasant mythology in describing and dealing with the conglomerate counter type. The Serbs, the Gypsies, the Jews were the šuma or ‘Forest’. They represented chaos, an end of stability and certainties. As traditionally cattle farmers and state sponsored settlers, the treatment of Serbs was an example of reversed and inverted logic. ‘They were a race of destructive pastoral nomads and bandits’[22] in the words of Pilar, they were fattening their cattle on the hard work of arable and thus civilised Croats. The knife gloves, designed for the slaughter of cattle[23], the mallet, used for stunning the animal before draining[24], the uses of the counter type as doomed pack animals, dumb automatons[25], all were linked to a cultural depiction of a conflict between the civilising mission of the clearing and planting farmer and the locust like behaviour of a cattle farming nomadic tribe. The Ustaša super-charged an existing culture of conflict and compromise, making it unbalanced towards violence whilst using its mythology as an overarching logic to their crimes. Whilst the Croat peasant dreaded nightmares of this forest Satyr as his eternal enemy, the Ustaša made them die according to the logical, even ‘ironic’ humiliations of these mythic constructs.
The murders at Jasonovac were ‘”performances” for public punishment’[26]. At the final Glina massacres, the clubbing to death of several hundred would-be converts in the town church was akin to putting down a pack of rabid dogs, tempted in by the pretence of safety and despatched en masse. In using the Orthodox building, they were mocking the pretence of a separate place of sanctuary, of safety for Serbs[27]. The twin Nomads, the Jews and the Gypsy were pitted against each other at the Gradina and the Granik killing ground, making victims implicit in the whole act of mass murder[28], in the ‘ritual slaughter of Jews’[29]. When bodies were dumped in tributaries of the Drina, the messages of ‘meat for Jovanova market’[30] carved in them revealed two truths. The act of murder was expulsion from the realm of the ‘volk’ and the act of mutilation was the finishing touch to culturally defined humiliation, of symbolic process[31]. The demon of the forest had been processed and reduced into a carcass, made ridiculous, impotent and demonstratively powerless.
In the Romanian case, two particular ritualised acts stand out; the murder of Stelescu and the Bucharest pogrom. The particulars of the Romania crisis are revealed again. The main dichotomy in the Legionary critique was between rural and urban, between Eden and Babylon. The Satyr was at home in the chaos and barbarism of the city. In the case of Stelescu, his ‘betrayal’ of Codreanu placed him deep within the alliance of the counter type. He was a Satyr who had turned his back on the Peasant and sought to divide the movement from the comfort of the City. His subsequent demise was deeply ritualised[32]. Each of the ten assassins emptied a six shot revolver into him as he lay in his hospital bed, then he was hacked into pieces with axes, (again the meat metaphor) before his remains were danced around by the Killers in a trance like state. He was made into nothing, a will-less and powerless bundle of limbs and torso in someone else’s ritual. His pretensions of being the equal of Codreanu and his lack of faith had resulted in his metaphoric annihilation.[33] The act of will and the culture of deviant humiliation were apparent.
Amongst the chaotic bloodletting of the Bucharest pogrom, the 15 lives destroyed in the central Abattoir again suggest a peasant habitus hyper-ventilating in a modern crisis. The Jewish victims after torture and humiliation were fed into the machinery of the slaughter house, their bodies hung on hooks and a mock ritual of Kosher butchery performed on them. This was then presented to a public audience[34]. Here we see a logic of meat and humiliation in action, of destroying the myth and the strength of the urban Satyr and publicising this new ‘order of things’ as proclamation at a time of high stress. The Legionnaires who delved into sadistic action were drawing on a cultural dialogue, one that the ideology of the Legion sought to use.
The results of a peasant habitus being hyper-accelerated are not new or a result of the modern age. The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-49 (known as the deluge amongst Jews) bare a remarkable similarity to the Ustaša’s Nationalising war, ’In the synagogue, before the Holy Ark, they slaughtered with butchers' knives[35]’, but in both instances, such bestialities were reinforced by a wider ideology or sense of mission whilst being acted out via peasant habitus. They ended up surrounding their killers with a cultural tapestry of action, violence and ways of making meaning out of death. Within this, the killers could enact simple but resonant morality plays via their brutality, the humiliation and flesh of their victims and the manner of their sadism. The ideology lifted their simple inhumanity into a historic and dialectical act. It made the very nature of the solution to their social critique an important and self-justifying act.
With the act of will, demolishing the ‘false’ moral constrictions on social and political action, the fascists sought to bring inherent meaning to their actions. Each act of murder, of rape, violence and destruction was ritualised and raised above mere brutality by incorporation within the movements’ grand narrative. On the ground, death became the result of a contorted mode of social relationship, between the saviours and the doomed. Those charged with the task of the act, of saving the future of the National community drew on older forms of social catharsis through violence and re-invigorated them with grand meaning, of the battle against decay and for rebirth. The doomed became symbolic canvases for the manifestation of this new form of habitus, to be transformed from people to metaphoric representatives of the other to meat (or finished industrial product), via a ritualised process. Such was the extent of the ritual process amongst these ‘Angels[36]’ and ‘Avengers’[37]
[1] C.K. Savich, Islam under the Swastika: The Grand Mufti and the Nazi Protectorate of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1941-1945, http://rastko.org.yu/rastko-bl/istorija/kcsavic/csavich-islam_e.html, 12/1/08 19.00
[2] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 252
[3] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 89
[4] Pavelic in 1929 as quoted in M Glenny, The Balkans: 1804-1999 – Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (Granta, London, 1999)
[5] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 60
[6] P Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (London, Polity, 1991) and G Lakomski, ‘On Agency and Structure: Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Theory of Symbolic Violence’, Curriculum Inquiry, 14/ 2, 1984
[7] P Bourdieu, 1991, ibid, pg 12
[8] C Taylor, 1999, ibid,
[9] as quoted in C Taylor, 1999, ibid, pg 104
[10] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 264
[11] ‘This country goes to pieces not because of a lack of programs but because of the lack of men’, N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 267
[12] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 11
[13] Božidar Kavran, 1944 as quoted in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 128
[14] Pavelić as quoted in E Paris, 1962, ibid, pg 55
[15] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 266
[16] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 372
[17] M Bax, Medjugorje: Religion, Politics and Violence in Rural Bosnia, (Amsterdam, VU Uitgeverij, 1995), pg 92
[18] Moţa as quoted in N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 266
[19] B Widenor Maggs, ‘Reljković, Satyrs, and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Croatia’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 20/ 4, 1976
[20] G Forth, ‘Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe’, Folklore 118 (December 2007), Ante Starčević described Serbs as ‘devious vagabonds and beggars’, R Yeomans, How to make a silk purse out of a Sow’s Ear: The Ustasha Movement and the Cultural Contradictions of the Independent State of Croatia in its Formative Period 1941-4 (London, Meze/SSEES, 2001), pg 18
[21] As quoted in J Casquete, ‘Protest Rituals and Uncivil Communities’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7/ 3, 2006, pg 291
[22] N Bartulin, 2007, ibid, pg 177
[23] ‘...The Ustaše slit the throats of Serbs over a large vat until the vessel was overflowing with blood’ M Glenny, 1999, ibid, pg 494
[24] ‘According to von Wedel (A German Army Officer), the Ustaša killed the women and children `like cattle' in a series of `bestial executions " The references to the violence of animals or violence used against animals made Ustaša violence into something primal and base. Butchers, after all, participated in crude nontechnical killings of animals bereft of any form of defence’ J Gumz, 2001, ibid, pg 1033
[25]Milko Riffer on arrival at Jasenovac; ‘Through a cloud of thick dust, they then saw an Ustaša guard riding towards them in a cart. Standing with a whip in his right hand, the guard was lashing the backs of the four Jewish men in rags who were harnessed to the front of the cart and pulling it’, M Glenny, 1999, ibid, pg 496
[26] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, trans S Djuric, Crimes in the Jasenovac Camp, (Zagreb, 1946/2003), pg 23
[27] ‘250 people turned up for the event [mass conversion ceremony]. They were greeted by six members of the Ustaša. When all were inside, the church doors were locked shut. The peasants were forced to lie on the ground and the six Ustaše began hitting them with spiked clubs. More Ustaše appeared and one after another every single person was murdered in this fashion’ M Glenny,1999, ibid, pg 500
[28] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid, pg 25
[29] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid, pg 31
[30] Testimony of Prvoslav Grizogono in R. Petrović, The extermination of the Serbs on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, (The Ministry of Information of The Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, 1991), pg 31, Jovanova was the main cattle market in Belgrade
[31] V Nahoum-Grappe, ‘The Anthropology of Extreme Violence: The act of Desecration’, International Social Science Journal, 54 (174), 2002, pg 549-557
[32] Stelescu’s breakaway group , the Romanian Crusade was suspected of taking funds from Lupescu
[33] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 292 and
[34] ‘‘Millo Beiler and the Rauch brothers, who 'were found with their stomachs deeply slashed and with their intestines tied around their necks', The rest of the bodies from the slaughterhouse were suspended on meat hooks, as if to say 'kosher meat.'’ R. Ioanid, ‘The Pogrom of Bucharest 21-23 January 1941’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 6/ 4, 1991, pg 373-382, Jean Ancel differs, saying there was an actual sign. See J Ancel, ‘The “Christian” Regimes of Romania and the Jews, 1940-1942’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies,.7/ 1, 1993
[35] As quoted in http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/ukraine.html#c (31/4/08, 19:00)
[36] L Barbu, 1980, ibid, pg 388, the full quote is ‘...they were angels of light’
[37] M Biondich, ‘”We were defending the State”: Nationalism, Myth and Memory in Twentieth-Century Croatia’ in JR Lampe and M Mazower eds., Ideologies and national identities : the case of twentieth-century south eastern Europe, (Budapest, Central European University Press, 2003), pg 62, again the full quote is ‘...the avenger of a martyred past’
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