The Social Republic

Yes, Mr Gove, please can we have this fucker mess about with our History syllabi

2011-02-28T14:40:00.003Z

What makes a good historian? A good memory? A nice style of prose? Ruthless self-promotion and a pathological need to be seen as upsetting applecarts? A very very large book and tv deal? Schilling on American News networks, pushing cathartic bullshit mythology for a partisan section of the audience? Speaking fluffy banality unto the powerful who pay your cheques? A choice and somewhat undemanding tenure at an Ivy League university or one of the Russell group? An nice Scottish (but not too Scottish) brogue? Pushing amusing High table games of Counter-factual history as some how revolutionary heuristic tools? No longer being arsed to do original research but claiming some standing above, and greater wisdom over actual working Historians?

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/un-american-revolutions.html

If Gove is looking for these "qualities" within a preposterous History "Tsar", then Niall Fergusson is your urbane fellow. What you also get is a bad historian.

When put forwards your prespective, on the evidence you present and, as importantly, how that evidence came to be selected, engagement with other interpretations is the essential mounting. A honest historian engages with the strongest prespectives of competators, looking to synthesise and answer more fully the discoveries and new evidence these cases have brought up. To return to older more amendable narratives, ignoring the new riches brought forth by rival alternatives, is sheer propaganda. It is a matter of respect, not only for others, but your own craft. Let mock cursory platitudes begin

Fergusson over narrative is thus:- He depicts a classic whig perspective but with an added cynicism engendered by the turmoil of the 20th century. A goldern era of Euro-generative progress and power is suddenly ended by a series of "incidents", unattached to the social and political condition out of which they arose. Thus Britain inflames a neccesary conflict between a European Germany and a backwards Slav fringe creating World War I by a few bad apples in government. This ushered in a era where actual existing Liberalism relaxed its power over subject peoples and in various metropoles allowing barbarities to gain power. By the end of the short 20th century, this multi-polar world is ended and a workable and essential just compromise of cheap subject labour and capital is combined with high living amongst the Liberal core. Military Power is to be transmitted via the United states and the "stability" of economic progress continued.

You can see why he is so upset by the revolutions in today's middle east. Why he must libel the people who made them and the diaspora of Arab democratic dissendents and lie outright about American revolutionary history. How can these poor stupid latter-day san-cullottes aspire to anything worthy of Fergusson's praise? To the wisdom of slave owning gentry, to Bismarckean real politick, to the Solomans of the Bush Pentagon. His apologies for empire reveal his Whig dialectical process. The rich make better decisions, so make the oppressed or their children or grand grandchildern richer and they might, if their culture passes muster, get a seal of approval. Only by decades long "tutelage" can cure the masses from their improper expectations of not being kicked in the face

Chin up though, Niall. If you can seek progress in laying down with the Congo Free State, José Napoleón Duarte or Savimba or Mubarak, then the Muslim Brotherhood should be no problem

Poetry Fruit Corner

2011-02-10T08:58:00.001Z

Manchesterismus

Once

once and for a while

we lay unearthed
a humanity awaiting
in turmoil and slumber

in the earth of vibrant stasis
under the weight of our old liberties,
exceptions and guilds

we awaited

for Hobbes and Locke
Ricardo, Bentham, Smith
and machines, Coke and Coal
Iron, more Iron, Cotton and Sugar
Iron Ships, Iron roads, More and More
Faster. Great lanes across mountains and seas
wealth from Sultans and Rajas, Gold under Sioux and Zulu
Millions march, to the beat of coins rubbing, notes and bonds counting
Cotton, Coal, Iron, Coffee, Corn, release the Grain, end the famine pact!

Let us breath free
shake the world, kings and the masses
cut down, put up, burrow and burn, slice and sell on
Steam, Power, Light and Reason, Steam, Power, Light
Turn cities to shells, desert into Jerusalem, onwards, busyness soldiers
Steam, Machine, under foot, eclipse Rameses and Hadrian, Marvel, display

Mills and Comte
Fire and Rifles and Krupps
From Preston to Liege to Essen
From Vyborg to Milan to Concord to Osaka
Cut, Cut, Now, onwards, Faster, Quicker, Pace, Power
Let Nations arise, let them fall, nothing in our way, under foot
God is with us, God cannot stop us, God worships us, marvels at our works
Steam, Power, Iron, More Iron, Cotton and Machine, resist us and starve

And now we should bow
before the creators, the demons of construction
breaking eggs
and making miracles
bloody acts of divinity
out of shell, bone, flesh and the sacraments
kiss the plinths on which they stand
as we catch our breath
and wonder where we are

Lazy, Moi? Part some number or other

2011-02-10T08:55:00.002Z

“The Blood flowed and covered the land – and daylight filled the world” - Spatial discourses within Hamas’ terrorist violence

“It occurred when the Palestinian, from the isolation of his world, asked another world that stood with its back to him: who am I and what am I in the scheme of things that seemed to govern other people's lives but not mine?” Fawaz Turki

“The world is a Paradise for the infidel, but a prison for the believer” Hadera Bus bomber, Ammar Armaneh’s will, 1994

There is no country for the Muslim except where the shariah of God is established, where human relations are bonded by their relationship to God” Sayyid Qutb

Spatial conceptions are a mainstay of Hamas’, and other groups’, terrorist ideology and the violence it manifests. Each act of violence constructs an alternative “…terrain of social utopia” . When added to the temporal and psychological aspects of forcing history via seemingly aimless acts of violence, this spatial dimension might well produce a more nuanced cartography of the terrorist and extremist worldviews. Whilst each “atlas” must be particular to each imagined geography, the primordial commonalities of a human-wide phenomena such as terrorism count as much as the specifics. Indeed, what is unique to Hamas and its attacks serve to highlight the supra-species universals, their limits and their extent, of the Muqawama’s geography of messages and discourse. As such, it is possible to highlight a tentative taxonomy of certain spatial processes, messages, contradictions and ideas within ideologically loaded violence

Using a single attack and its symbolic “topia” as a structural guide, this essay seeks to use several sociological and geographic constructs to examine the act, it’s importance in spatial terms and how it connect to wider spatial discourses in Palestinian Islamist thought. The first conception is that of Heterotopias, taken from Foucault’s essay Of Other Spaces . Here a space is created where ideological discourse shapes the space, its rules, norms, rituals and meaning, marking it out from other more homogenetic spaces, a space “…of deviation” . Secondly, Soja’s idea of thirdspace , i.e. a place both real and imagined, both solid and air, will be applied in its most extreme reading to recombine and consider the internal world of struggle and the actual existing conditions of the conflict. Here, there is “[a] site where one’s radical [identity] and subjectivity can be activated” . Finally, by using a form of Bhabha's concept of mimicry , this essay will examine the messages and symbolism within the spatial conceptions underlying Hamas’ resistance. Hamas power, in relation to Israel’s “…is at once resemblance and menace” . In addition, a conception of differential frames of temporality in violence, Griffin’s “Dreamtime” , provides another dimension to this tentative analysis .

Hamas and its progenitor, the Muslim Brotherhood, are deeply attached to discourses of space. Hamas goal of resisting Israel and leaving “not one Jew in Palestine” combines with the goal of remaking Palestine as “Islamicized space” . It is a campaign of rejecting the Jewish “….cancer expanding in the land of Isra and Mi’raj” combined with regenerating “Islamic observance in the public sphere inside Palestine” and the nature of the Pure Muslim. Cathartic expulsion with regeneration is Hamas’ re-formulation of its varied intellectual ancestry. This mixture of Palestinian Nationalism and the Supra-nationalism of Qutbish ideas of Caliphate and Ummah gave Hamas a symbolic mental geography. This stretches from the micro-scale of the refugee camps of Gaza or Jenin, the “Palestinian Street” to the macro-scale of cosmic struggle and history being “corrected”.

On the evening of March 27 2002, Abdel Baset Odeh, a 25-year-old Palestinian from nearby Tulkarem, blew himself up in the Park Hotel function room in Netanya. In the explosion, 30 others were killed, mostly elderly Jews celebrating Passover . Such was the force of the blast, a butter knife was found stuck two inches into the concrete ceiling. The overt intention of the Al-Qassam brigades who had sent Odeh to die and kill had been to overshadow the recently announced Saudi peace plan. In the words of the Hamas communiqué after the attack, it was “a message to the summit convening in Lebanon that our Palestinian people’s option is resistance and resistance only” . Yet an attack on a Seder consisting of family-less Holocaust survivors clearly had a symbolic significance. This knot of messages and meaning is intrinsically geographic, intrinsically spatial.

Odeh grew up in a classic anomic space. Tulkarem exists just within the boundaries of the Palestinian authority and is ringed with Israeli checkpoints, “a demonstration of power” . The ritual and daily humiliation of passing these combined with a lack of any other mundane opportunities provided an environment where firstspace, the physical material world, was constricted. Though the eyes of Hamas, this world offered only “...the dispossession, deportations, prisons, tortures, travel restrictions, the dissemination of filth and pornography, the corruption and bribery… a life of suffering and degradation” . As waves of violence and insecurity mounted for the Palestinians,”… the more they have supported martyrdom operations and even demanded more” . There were no grand meanings outside of Jihad, no heroic arena beyond that of the resistance.

In the words of Odeh’s father, people were “…frustrated and they don’t want to live any more”. Odeh, in particular, had only “…. a bitter life” . This arena was severely contracted when Odeh was denied a visa to visit his potential in-laws in Jordan 9 months before the bombing. After this he retreated into more and more ostentatious displays of piety before going underground as the Israeli military began to take an interest. Odeh’s firstspace had been not only become painfully anomic but had become impossible.

To this push towards his act of violence, the pull of the promise of a meaningful thirdspace was present. By marking the “unjust” world with a murderous example of Islamic resistance, Odeh was transported and transformed in both space and time. He brought a cosmic struggle, one of a manichean and eternal nature, a truly heroic mythos, into a comfortable, complacent Jewish reality. Qutb explicitly takes up this reforming and transporting notion of violent struggle, of violent Jihad. The Jihadi “….remains busy to strive against others, really strives against his own self also” , released from “…the bonds of earth and soil, the bonds of flesh and blood” . Ridden from corruption within, the Jihadi creates and enters a sacred space, combating “…existing power relations at the source” , one in which their actions had cosmic and dialectical significance.

This space is one of war, truly a Dar es Harb, house of war. In every action of violence, Hamas re-declares war and creates a topography of a cosmic battlefield. The function room at the Park Hotel was the site where Hamas proclaimed it’s power, it’s force and it’s struggle, “….a war of religion and faith” . In an asymmetric conflict, the smaller party increases its challenge by extending the reach of the struggle. The possibility of causing great harm to Israel by the launching of the Al-Qassam rockets from the Gaza strip is small. Yet the extension of uncertainty over a wide area of the realm of the “other” extends the war, its importance, it’s central meaning to all history, “The hour of Khaybar has arrived” . This reaffirmation of struggle into the space of the “other“ declares “We are at war”.

The acting out of this thirdspace of cosmic struggle; of war, a heterotopia ruled by the ideology of Hamas, occurred in the setting of an intensely sacred space for Jews; a Seder. This collision of spatial conceptions, of meaning was central to the symbolism of the act. The reception of the Israeli public of the attack as an invasion and attack on their own seder was it’s aim. This was not chance. To the manager of the Park hotel, Pauline Cohen, (who lost a son-in-law), the desecration was acute, “…they come on this holy holiday, they have crossed a line” . Suicide operations are not opportunistic events, they require planning, reconnaissance, strategic thinking. The Seder is the ultimate space of sanctuary and safety within Jewish culture, a place of refuge with family. Into this retreat, the bombing shattered all these assumptions. And it did so without warning or explanation. It was an arbitrary act par excellence.

This can be understood as an act of mimicry and of communicating control. In Palestinian nationalist discourse, Israel violence and influence is arbitrary, indeterminate and invasive. This invasion of Palestinian society, into the family home, demonstrates a stark disparity of power and reach. Hamas has yearned to “share” this insecure and fraught existence with Israel society, punctuated by state and non-state violence like the Hebron Massacre by Baruch Goldstein. In another communiqué after the Afula bus bombing on 6 April 1994, “Hamas vowed to make the Israelis pay for the pain and harassment”. Al Husseini warned even of Jewish culture that might “enter our houses and courtyards like adders, where they kill morality and demolish the foundation of society” . Onto the conceived complacency of Israeli society, Hamas’ violence mimics the seemingly arbitrary nature of the Israeli occupation, “…Treating like for like is a universal principle” to quote one Hamas communiqué. Regarding the Hebron massacre, Hamas was clear about the symbolism of violence, space and sacred days, “…You turned Eid’ al-fitr into a black day so we swore to turn your independence holiday into hell” .

This turning of the tables involves the creation of spaces of Palestinian power deep within Israeli social life. Out of this affirmation, two concentric zones are discernable, that of the explosion itself, full of chaos, suffering and the siren lights and that of a wider near existential space imbued with threat and insecurity. This “sharing” of experience, “sharing” of warning-less violence and all-pervading cultural insecurity communicates power, “…. proclaim to them: Allah is great, Allah is greater than their army, Allah is greater than their airplanes and their weapons” . This aping of the power of an occupying or colonial force thus produces spatial mimicry.

Such heterotopia can be described by Bhabha’s conception of mimicry. Here the powerful “other”, it’s rules, it’s forms and it’s behaviours are taken as exemplars for those contesting the existing situation. Hamas takes on the mantle of the colonial arbitrary power, it “…appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power” . Indeed, within Palestinian Islamist discourse, this is considered a re-establishment of the proper order of things. As people of the book, Jews should be under the power of Islamic grace. Without Islam in command, “…fighting and oppression will break out and corruption flourish. Obstinacy and war will break out” . The elusive nature of peace seems to confirm this prejudice. In the words of Qutb, “Whenever the Children of Israel reverted to evil-doing in the Land, punishment awaited them” . Thus the spatial mimicry of violence is given restorative power, recreating a “just” order geographically. Mimicking Israeli power and “sharing” insecurity, it declares “We are in control”

Netanya and Tulkamen each represent, for Hamas, spaces where spatial ideas clashed with the reality. Netanya, founded in the late 1920 from purchased land, is a successful sea side town, bustling with tourists and wealth. This is not how it should be in the minds of Hamas. In the dichotomy of “truthfulness” and ”falsehood” , Israeli material plenty is explained by a divine trick, lulling them into defeat. The crowded poverty and boredom of Tulkamen, haunted by the “…the plague of collaboration” and “…the existential antagonism of occupation” seemed paradoxical. How could the followers of the last Prophet fall so low; indeed, it seemed the entire glory of Islam“….totally unravelled in modern Palestine” . This set of contradiction is over-come by a total belief in prophetic and historic inevitability, “…history must confirm faith” and a reliance on Qur’anic examples.

The Nakba of 1948, which cleared the Arab villages around Netanya and swelled the slums of Tulkamen was re-imagined in the geography of the early Islamic community. To Hamas, the Nakba might well be a disaster and a personal one at that, it’s deputy leader, Rantissi, lamented “Our home still exists and is occupied by Jews from Yemen” . Yet it could also be represented as a modern hijra, where Muhammed fled Mecca in 622. The retreat leading to eventual victory, this “Mohammedan Paradigm” is clearly an attractive analogy for a people in exile, but it is further rewarding to Islamists. Before exile, “Islam had not yet fully existed in Mecca” , only the trauma of the hijra had created the world conquering faith. Exile could purify Palestinian Islam too, eventually leading to the day where “…the Jews shall drink what they have given our unarmed people to drink” . Here, despite the fitna and struggle of exile, victory was inevitable.

This inevitability provides more sacred sources of strength, making this worldly conflict “…a living lesson of the eternal sacred exemplars” . As well as the aforementioned battle of Khaybar, the battle of Badr in 624 gave an example of miraculous victory of a minority over a seemingly invincible majority and is a favourite of Hamas literature . What was needed was enough faith and enough piety. In this exile, true Muslims could be built, those “…who are willing to sacrifice the precious and the dear in the Cause of Allah” . Violence recall this heroic age, it positioned itself as a repetition of the victory of the Prophet, “States built upon oppression last only one hour”…” . It claims “We will win”

To this end, Hamas encouraged, in both Intifadas and beyond, local campaigns that contributed to these dual ends. Attacks on public impiety and secular influences violently re-asserted the narrow Islamic nature of the space Hamas wished to create. Collaboration with Israel, the ultimate sin, lead Palestinians in the first Intifada to kill “…at least 800 of their own” . After defeating the Fatah in the Gaza strip in the brief 2007 civil war, creating “Hamastan” , the new authorities declared the “…end of secularism and heresy” . There was to be an end to the PLO “..debauching themselves, drinking, singing, carrying on” . Hamas had taken on from the beginning of the first intifada the nationalist tradition of using wall murals commemorating the dead and ambushes on lost Jews, cathartically clearing and marking their new space. One such piece of graffiti mused, “Ah, O time of prostitution, O time of betrayal, You will be conquered by the heroes of the stones, No matter how slow is history” .

Further away, the focus of Hamas spatial discourses rests in Jerusalem, the “…central point of the struggle between faith and unbelief”” . The al-Aqsa Mosque and the site where the Hadiths claim Muhammad ascended heaven is intrinsically contested space. The Dome of the Rock lies on top of the remains of the Temple of Solomon and was the background to Odeh’s martyrdom video as part of Hamas’ insignia. Anxieties and fears over the al-Aqsa and narratives strengthening Islamic prior claims to the area are of vital importance to Hamas. It is the lynchpin to their religious claim to the land.

The threat is not wholly imagined, as Jewish extremist groups such as Gush Emunim have sought to carry out plans to destroy the mosque. Yet even the presence of Jewish power around the al-Aqsa is taken as a desecration. The Hamas charter of 1988 remembers when Israeli troops captured East Jerusalem in 1967 “…they shouted with joy ‘Muhammed is dead, he left daughters behind” . Violent tussles over control of the Dome were to provide both sets of Nationalists pre 1948 with a rallying point of support and identity, creating ”… two well defined camps opposing each other, Jews and Arabs (or Muslims)” . Contested ownership and a sense of control over this cosmic pivot provided the occasion for the 2nd Intifada (2000-ongoing). The primacy of this locale to Hamas’ and the wider Palestinian National movement’s symbolic topos is manifest

To compromise on the status of Jerusalem or indeed a single inch of “the land between the River and Sea” is an impossibility for Hamas. Palestine is taken to be a Waqf, a divinely sanctioned endowment to the Muslim nation till the day of retribution , the cosmic “Day of Anger” . To compromise over this would mean “…renouncing part of the religion” in the words of Hamas’ charter. To the eyes of Palestinian Islamists, their heterotopian project of an Islamic space is the mirror and opposite of that of the Zionists who they consider to have realised “...their religious thought on Muslim soil” . They seek to ape this effort.

This combination of cosmic struggle with the particular firstspace geography of Palestine relies of narratives of despoliation and desecration understood via historical topography. By the Zionist nationalist project, the Jew had over-turned a righteous order of things and “…indeed done evil in the Holy Land” . This evil is clad in the darkest historical connotations, “…this despicable Nazi-Tartar invasion” From these larger spatial narratives, the choices within violence attacks “…aimed at controlling and redefining public space” .are clearly drawn, they give a manual of symbolic tactics and targets. These “…cartographies of fear…” remake the world, “…enter directly into its construction”.

In sum, we have three concepts, three overlapping heterotopias caused by violence, “…how destruction creates spaces for new rounds of landscape reproduction” . Firstly, there is a space of war. Here dichotomies, be it jahiliyya and Qur’anic revelation, Truth and Falsehood, believer and Kufr, are reasserted and their inevitable confrontation renewed. In the second concept, a space of control is discernable, underpinned with by a notion of “shared” insecurity. In “…a form of the tragic” , pain is returned to the presumed source and a mimicking control, aping the arbitrary nature of the dominant power played out. These “sharing” spaces have to feel “…like existential crisis, like hopelessness, like loss of the future” . Finally we have a space of inevitability, the victorious space. In this zone, the end of history is predicted. Historical precedent, prophetic prescience and the self-will of the perpetrators rush into the space created by the violence; giving a dialectical importance, shaping its meaning.

Combining spatial and temporal understandings of violence pushes deeper into the lived and imagined experience of violence. Just as space can be remade, so time can attain a different quality to the tick-tock Chronos of mundane time. As the Jihadi enters a thirdspace where the dimensions are now governed by a historic cosmos of ideas, so they also carry “…the experience of ‘dying’ to ‘this’ world in order to be ‘reborn’ in a higher, more substantial reality” . As “….projective narratives…”, mythologies, religious exegesis, ideologies combine and wax in front of circumstance, so they “…can imbue the time with transcendent collective values” . I suggest this is just as true for space.

1848

2011-02-10T08:53:00.001Z

“We are sleeping on a volcano....Don you not see the earth trembles anew? A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon” Alexis de Tocqueville to the French Chamber of Deputies, 1848

Yer’right

Another year, another revolt. A year ago last summer, Iranians in their millions protested against a fraudulent election and resisted bitterly against the state’s repression and brutality. The “Green revolution“, has so far, failed. The Revolutionary Guard – Ulema fix up remains unchanged and unmoved. Its vindictive punishment and public humiliation of protesters continues.

This year, the “secular” dictatorships of Tunisia and Egypt are the target of mass protest and demands of reform. Active disquiet in Algeria and Yemen, rumblings in Syria, “Hamastan” and Jordan provide a wider background for the fall of long term dictatorships in Tunisia and potentially, Egypt. “The Springtime of Peoples” or just another dank February day? I’m not the first to suggest the analogy to 1848 and I do so not out of any teleological expectation but rather to examine the possibilities, the dangers and the consequences of this particular set of circumstances. A brief look at 1848 highlights all of these current concerns.

Preceded by an unsuccessful revolt in Austrian Poland and a victory of the democrats in a civil war in Switzerland, one might well consider whereabouts de Tocqueville was coming from. The first uprising of note came in Sicily, against the systemically corrupt House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies on 12 January 1848. These were, in part, encouraged by the election of a “liberal” pontiff, Pius IX and a series of moderate reforms in Rome and the Papal states. The demands were grouped around a return of the liberal constitution of 1812, drawn up as a preventative of French revolutionary ideological contagion and quickly withdrawn after the peace of Vienna. Whilst the conspirators behind the revolt were mostly liberally inclined notables, the revolt relied on the urban masses of Palermo.

By the 24th of February, a French republic had been declared, ousting the good bourgeois king of Louis Philippe after a long term campaign of republican agitation via (in good French gourmand taste) a series of mass banquets. By March 2nd, i.e. 7 days later (1848 was a leap year), the governments of Baden and Württemberg has fallen, by the 11th, Bavaria, by the 13th, Vienna and Buda were at the barricades, by the 18th Milan had fallen, on the 22nd, Daniele Marin had broken in to the Venice Arsenal, on the 23rd, the newly “constitutional” monarch of Piedmont-Savoy, Charles Albert declared war on the Austrian Empire to liberate Venetia. By the summer, every government, with the exception of the Belgium and Dutch, between the Pyrenees to the Oder and the Black Sea had fallen; even Brazil would feel the breath of popular revolt. Even in areas unaffected per se, either increased agitation, Blanquist coup d’état or invasion by newly “freed” forces would spread its memory, in Ireland, in Belgium, in Britain, in Prussian Poland. This whirlwind spread of revolt would become archetype pattern of the Socialist dream and the Conservative nightmare for the next 150 years. Ironically the only continent wide revolution to come close would be 1989 where governments proudly socialist would collapse en masse.

In 1917, the revolution in Russia would over the next few years inspired other attempts at the “subjective mastering the objective”. Yet 1848 stands out. Firstly it was near universal, affecting constitutional monarchy, enlightened depots, the backwards of Kingdoms, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox flocks, industrializing nations, peasant nations, comic operetta princelings and continental superpowers. Secondly was its breakneck speed. While there was a “counter culture” against Metternich-ian Europe, cosmopolitan, Franch-phile, united to a certain degree behind revolutionary heritage past, these revolutionaries in the main were taken by surprise by the revolts and, certainly, their immediate (albeit temporary) and total success. This was no Europe wide conspiracy but rather a conjoining of disaffection and anger about each nation’s particular circumstance. Yet in a matter of weeks, a Europe drawn up after the defeat of Bonaparte was smashed and its future was thrown into the air.

Just as important is the revolutions’ almost universal failure. In France, various flavors of Bourbon monarchy were rejected for good and a constitutional order put in place. Yet the first President of this new republic would be its grave digger, a somewhat vain but forward thinking ex-Carbonari called Louis Napoleon. Thousands of those who had risked life and limb in February to found a republic were shot down by a new “Party of Order” in charge of same Republic in July. In Berlin, Vienna, Rome and Prague, new governments of public confidence were thrown out by troops and absolutism restored. Savoy was defeated and its King exiled. In Hungary, independence would last till vast Russian reinforcements crossed the Carpathians in 1849 and crushed a spirited, and at times, brilliantly led campaign. Marin and the Republic of San Marco were amongst the last hold outs, having lasted 17 months.

Eagle or sparrow eyed readers might well detect a variety of analogous points with the current revolts. Egypt as France, Tunisia as Sicily, Iran as Poland, the US as the Russian bear. It has enough correlations to suit many a taste. The ones that seem the most important to me are as follows

• The price of Bacon (or Lamb) – The triggers have been a steady rise in food prices, not just regionally, but globally. Food price rises not only means hunger, it means lack of income for other goods thus knock on under-employment in societies already cursed with high levels of joblessness or partial employment in grey areas of the economy. It means a reliance on state or party largesse and thus further and political loaded scrutiny of corruption and high living amongst the “Peoples’ servants”. It also means queues, that dangerous and yet unavoidable social gathering where the faults of the current regime are not only publically demonstrated but where too there is an arena to share this insight. In 1848, like in March 1917 and throughout the French revolution, food prices rises and scarcity provided a ready made example of government wrong and a forum for collective discussion and action. It provided an uncontrolled civic space away from the normative watch of the state. It is no surprise that Algeria has increased grain supplies and subsidies after the Tunisian food riots that prefaced the toppling of Ben Ali. Eric Hobsbawm noted that 1848 coincided an economic downturn of the traditional type i.e. an agricultural dearth with that of the new type, industrial downturn. Are we seeing a return of the ancient famine cycle to combine with the paucity of international credit or, more likely, a new(ish) form of food instability linked to an increasingly unbalanced global economy?

• So far, the protests have mainly drawn on a tradition of thought labelled by the western media Liberal but probably more precisely anti-authoritarian. This is grounded in indigenous criticisms of the establishment of nationalist dictatorships after independence. The motif of Nasser or Sadat or Mubarak as Pharaoh is a trope not of Qutb or the Islamists (though they were to adopt it with relish) rather it was a label born of secular and democratic opponents around the ailing Wafd Party and anti-fascist socialists of the Free Officer regime. Such critics do not fit easily into western boxes, yet they are part of a nationalist tradition in Egypt than has spurned both the supra-nationalism and theocracy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the authoritarianism of Nasserism. Similarly, the “outs” in Algeria, Tunisia, Syria and Jordan, Nationalists critical of the existing regimes and their arbitrariness and corruption but of a shared heritage of the dominant nation parties have keep a continuity of democratic or at least anti-authoritarian opposition alive. These may not be at the stage of mass movements or even beyond drawing room conspiracy, they have, until recently, had little room to organise publically. However, their common root with that of the “Ins” means they do have a ready made legitimacy, a betrayal to renounce and rectify. This counter-point to the otherness of the revolutionaries (outside of France) in 1848 may well provide a way around the end point of 1849. In 1848, the new regimes were either unable or unwilling to mobilise the required mass effort to fend off counter-revolution. Their legitimacy was too shallow. A new nationalist and democratic revolt for the people of North Africa and the Middle East has a ready made tradition of loyalty, parable and action. It even has a (oddly not oxymoronic) nationalist internationalism to call on, of the UAF and other schemes, one seen in the Green movements embrace of the Jasmine revolution and the intifada in Egypt being celebrated by the self-styled Youth of Gaza,

• Having said that, with governments falling, international relations in the area become (to put it politely) fluid. In 1848, this spilt into war, Piedmont against Savoy, Croatia, Serbia and Romania against a centralising Hungary, German radicals against Danish liberals. At best it engendered boorish chauvinism, for instance, that between Germans and Czechs and Engels comments on the reactionary nature of Croats. At the moment, with only Tunisia and Egypt affected, the Camp David accords are the main focus of international contention. Is a democratic Egypt good/bad for Israel? What of Gaza? What can America do? Beyond this is the wider picture of a period of international relations founded on Authoritarian governments agreeing things between each national elite, backed up and funded by various outside powers. This may well be at an end and the Peoples’, those experiencing spring, will want their opinions and their nationalism heard. The intertwined nature of the ethnic geography of 1848 Europe and the bombastic pretentions and assertions of old medieval borders made strife virtually inevitable. These are far less in evidence currently within the Middle East and North Africa, neither is the model of French style unitary power so dominant. Democratic co-association may well provide a solution to the Coptic Christian community and the Berbers. Re-centralisation, even with a democratic mandate, may well usher a troubled autumn of Peoples

Howdy

2011-02-10T08:50:00.001Z

How goes the day?

Hope you are all well. I've been busy, lazy, joyous, depressed, blissful, suicidal. Still here or here abouts.

Let us begin

Fragment #3 or how Bill Haley stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb

2010-02-07T17:40:00.004Z

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/filmmore/reference/interview/tylermay5.html

Between 1949 and 1991, the world had to consider its complete destruction. The possibility of auto-genocide by proxy marked out a porous barrier between a known universe and one where any rules and any knowledge broke down. This Event Horizon presented even the most inhuman of ideologue with a great void, a post human and post pretention world.

Good for Bill for imagining some up side

More Goldberg.......Lucky lucky youse

2010-02-02T08:53:00.002Z

Hello, comrades

I've been pretty ill for the last 6 months or so and have been not up to much blogging wise. I have a few things in my draft folder that I might put up for completeness sake. But apart from a few random bursts of energy, it seems the Republic might be beyond my feeble will :) I'll see how it goes and will surely lurk around comrades blogs, with an occasional ramble

Anyhoo found this, care of Peter Ryley aka Fat Man

http://www.hnn.us/articles/122469.html

Four historians take on 'Liberal Fascism'.

I will add they do seem to miss a trick. Goldberg's thesis depends on three definitions; his highly idiosyncratic take on fascism i.e purely statist with leader cult, his depiction of the right in America as being essentially small government/low taxes, his belief that applies to post war Italy and post depression Germany.

All three are wrong.

I've mentioned at length the problems with his definition here

http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/06/republic-eventually-reviewsliberal.html

and briefly mentioned the other two.

I shall expand (Told you were lucky). To proclaim the right or conservatism (Goldberg is not consistent when he talks about them) as small government/low taxes or 'Classical Liberalism as he puts it in his reply to the historians above is quite a leap. Conservatism, if we take its current configuration is a synthesis of four elements;
A - Religious politics,
B - rejection of the New Deal,
C - security Keynesianism,
D - rejection of the Great Society.

Only part of two (B & D) of these are really small statist issues. To begin with A, using the state to promote or, very charitably, 'protect' religion is very far from small state. It fies in the face of the sacred respect for the constitution conservatism proclaims. Bear in mind, Mike Huckerbee, the last competitor to John McCain in the Republican presidentual primaries in 2008, is a long term advocate of making Christian supremacy (no doubt of the soft and cuddly type) part of the founding document. Merely monitoring Christian and non-Christian numbers in a purely benign way, an essential part of maintaining a Christian nation, is a vast expansion of state power, far beyond any census.What is small government in the illegalisation of Abortion, in the insistence on school prayer, on controlling debate?

B is more complicated than the 'Rugged Individualist' Conservatives or the Libertarian wing of the GOP or the various Randian/Paulian grouplets make out. The New deal certainly increased the state, but it also shifted its focus. By coming to some type of social compact with the unions and ending many of the lopholes in the tax codes, FDR took away the protective arm of the state away from much of American industry and commerce. Whilst saving the banks, no longer would the state act as a free militia to private enterprise against its citizens. The state, as part of the National Liberal program of industrialisation that had reigned supreme from 1863-1912, was a vital big brother to American 'individualism', protecting it from British and German competition, breaking organised labour and direct infrastructure investment. The increase in the state was one of degree, not kind.

When US Conservatives say ‘lets get back to small government’, what do they mean? When? The mid eighties with taxes higher that today? The 1920s when much of the bread basket neared starvation and the economy reached over saturation and collapse? The late 1860s when much of the country was under military rule? The 1790s when the nation was less than a tenth of the size and had a population under 4 million? When? C is the counter point to FDR's social Keynesianism. The vast military apparatus that was created during WWII and maintained into the cold war was and remains a vast component of economic prosperity in the US. Via a regulated use of vast sums of tax payer money, pork was brought and deals made. While it is difficult to quantify the amount gained by private industry via subsidised research and development, a huge workforce of highly trained engineers, workers and white collar staff exist at the end of the military complex’s teat.

The sanctity of this is hardwired into the conservative program. The plethora of programs started under the Eisenhower administration, few of which saw the light of day but consumed multiple billions, were a clear exercise in security Keynesianism, remarkably surpassed by the Reagan administration without regard to budgetary limitations. The modest program of re-entrenchment pursued by the Kennedy and Clinton administrations created a maelstrom of conservative protests.

It is worth noting that the rise in military spending tends to somewhat spotty. Having restarted Star wars, the Bush administration could not afford to up-armour its Humvees in Iraq

I would also add to security Keynesianism the notion of the war on crime/drugs. This has been a huge business, with a thriving market for jails to reinvigorate depressed areas. Oddly these wars, plainly counter-productive, disruptive of due process and liberties, harmful and very expensive must be fought. Beyond a few suddenly quiet Libertarians, this is a conservative given.

D again is more complicated. For all of the moaning about welfare programs, much of the bile, the rhetoric and the policy is aimed at reversing the gain in rights and the presumptions within those advances. What seems to drive much of the US conservative movement is a wish for the state to continue to discriminate and to push the excepted norms of liberty into a pre-civil rights world. The state must protect a form of social solidarity from the manifestations of these reforms. The state must protect the sacred banner, English as a first language, the nature of marriage, the rates of teen pregnancy. It suddenly must do all to return the nation to the pre-60s pristine environment.

No. Even in the land of the free, to claim conservatism as solely or even mostly a movement of small government/low taxes is asinine.

How does this definition of the right/conservatives travel to 1920s Italy and 1930s Germany?

Badly.

The major party of Italian Industrialists, the ANI , was a clear supporter of state planning, cartels and regulation, albeit controlled by them. They were to form the bridge between the Fascists and the elite within the Royal court and provide the foundation of the Fascist bureaucracy.

Italian Conservatism looked to the state to provide both a support to the hierarchies of rural society and promote forcefully industrialisation to maintain Italian pretensions of being a major power. For some reason, they had yet to realise the genius of Atlas Shrugged and school vouchers.

The bete noire of both Fascist and Conservative, along with much of the revolutionary left was Giollitti. He was considered the motif of Italian decadence and decay. Yet, he was one of the first social Liberals, much before Wilson. He created agreements with Unions, created rudimentary welfare schemes and sought to use the state to bring about a liberal social peace. To the syndicalists he was the ‘Great Domesticator’, taming the working class with material benefits and corrupting their leadership within the government. Yet according to Goldberg, he should have been Mussolini’s and the Movement’s hero, their patriach.

In Germany, there is even less of a case. The Vaterland Partei, the General Staff backed wartime front, was intrinsically linked to increasing state power for Conservative Militarist ends. Out of it were to come most of the early DAP/NSDAP leadership. Since Bismarck, the German right had been committed to some form of staatsocialismus to counteract the rise of the SDP. In the run up to the war and after, the German right looked to state mechanisms to revive traditional society via targeted welfare, reinforcing social structures, and thus mobilising the masses around Germany. As hard as you wish to look, no large component of the German right fits Goldberg’s description

Utter udder fail

The Republic does Weber - An ideal type for....Liberalism

2010-02-02T08:52:00.000Z

Parts 1

http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2008/07/conservatism-mit-added-weber.html

2

http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/05/republic-does-weber-ideal-type.html

3

http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/05/republic-does-weber-ideal-type_08.html‘We Socialists consider Liberals to be dangerous compromisers’ – a very svelte Christopher Hitchens 1988
Liberalism in its many forms is probably the most important political ideology ever conceived. Whilst under its own banner, much of the world was transformed materially and conceptually; its offspring, Socialism and Nationalism continued to reassess and remodel human society. Liberalism, in many ways, charted and defined the rules and parameters of modern secular politics. Even as a dialectical antithesis or an inveterate and insidious creed o'corruption, Liberalism laid down the means and the expected norms of political thought and political activity. What meanings do the language of Rights, those of Laws or the nature of property or nationhood have without a basis within the Liberal canon. Liberalism makes up the political DNA of modern political discourse. It is a Leviathan, at times soft hearted, at other ruthlessly pitiless.
As for my ideal type, here goes:-

'Liberalism seeks a form of governance that strikes a balance between social stability and solidarity and defending against arbitrary rule via maximising individual liberty in a multitude of forms. The nature of both sides of this equation are informed by legalistic means almost to the point of fetish. It is essentially a materialistic creed that links self-worth and self-esteem directly to property but seeks to counter the alienating consequences of this reductionism by a collective nomos'

Unpacking blah blah

‘Liberalism seeks a form of governance...’ Liberalism is focused on government. Its central historical problem was the nature of ruling. How can one rule fairly, how can one rule legitimately, how one can rule effectively? Via wise governance, Liberal thought saw and continues sees the possibility of progress, of historical mechanisms driving towards a better world. Whilst the details of the 'end' are generally vague and the determination to overcome 'obstacles' varies, there is a clear dialectical relationship, a temporal and an implicitly futorial one, between action over and within governance and the improvement of humanity. When Locke or Smith saw the stirrings of revolutionary social changes, they attributed them to the forms of governance most informed by basic liberal tenets.

‘....that strikes a balance....’ Here is a core, indeed key element in Liberalism. Locke and others pondered the absolutist Leviathan and had to concede, after the bloody chaos of the 17th century, that some supra-individual overarching power was needed for order to survive. They were no anarchists, as Liberals today remain. Yet they dissented from Hobbes monarchical arbiter. Rather they conceived of an abstract state, directed not by the will of one deity anointed ruler, but by an aggregate of interests, a public will.

‘....between social stability and solidarity....’ Long before Marx, Durkheim, Tonnes or Simmel considered the centrifugal nature of an entirely ‘free’ society, Liberal thought had been painfully troubled by it. Liberals were no Levellers and sought to destroy idols, not out of sheer ecstasy of demolition, but to further human improvement within their own prejudices. A heat death society, one driven solely by individual passions was as abhorrent to the Liberal as a choreographed Tyranny.

As such, Liberals have attempt to find some suitable 'glue' for their societies. The principle of Nationality was an early candidate as witnessed in Defoe's popular francophobia and the Gironde's 'pure' hearted concern for those beyond the pale. American Nationalism is an undoubtably a child of Liberalism, both as a form of exceptionism and a sacred motive to reform/help/rule the rest of the world. In time, basically a-liberal sectarianism, racism or ‘Third Estatism’ (a vertical cleavage between producers and idlers) has also been synthesised.

‘…and defending against arbitrary rule...’ Liberalism, as a child of the enlightenment, carries within it a rejection of despotism and its historical characterisation of the absolutism regimes it sought to oust. While this may be partial and one-eyed, it is an important tenant. Resisting a form of tyranny, made akin to that faced by the pantheon of Liberal heroes, is an essential part of the Liberal makeup. One can still see the rhetoric and policy of the Third estate over the idlers and petty despots today. Be it Islamist regimes by pro-war Libs, or ‘plutocratic corporations’ by American Democrats or the perfidious nature of institutionalised poverty by Social Libs. Even the Neo-Liberals use such bombast when attacking the over-arching State. Arbitary rule, as in rule sans law, is abhorrent.

‘…via maximising individual liberty in a multitude of forms …’ As such, the defence against the despots/tyrants/idlers the maximum possible level of liberty within society. How much is changeable, as Liberals sought to change their societies without breaking them. For American Liberals, the dangers inherent in manifesting this aim for the Black chattel vital to the basis of American agriculture demanded a considerable and painful amount of circumspection and polluting compromise. Mills might well have been ahead of his time when he said ‘Over one's mind and over one's body the individual is sovereign’ but as a philosopher, his words had to be taken, at best, as something for later generations, or at worse, pious nonsense. Maximising Liberty, not perfect liberty was the Liberal creed.

The forms in which this was done varied as the ‘tyranny’ changed faces. Emancipation from the devilish travails of priesthood and sceptre might be replaced by those of peasant obscurism and idleness. Breaking the chains of Plutocracy and corruption might be replaced by the defeating the bane of racist laws or smiting nefarious red tape. Over-blown rhetoric aside, anything that seems to upset the balance, tilting into Hobbesian heat death or stony Leviathan, is to be conquered

‘... The natures of both sides of this equation are informed by legalistic means almost to the point of fetish…’ For the Liberal, the law cut both against anarchy and despotism. The law, when justly conceived and carried out (again greatly variable concepts….consider the long heritage of the torturable and non-torturable classes), is king. As a Lawyers’ creed, Liberalism is wedded to the law and legalistic methodology. The law provides both a rational and a-arbitrary route to gain consensus and punish as well as a in-built capacity to circumvent itself if the need arises. Robespierre, when he conceived of a situation too dangerous and fast moving for ‘normal’ legality, created a new class of legal norms, faster and more ruthless. Yet, he could not dispense with it. Consider the somewhat chicken-headed attempts to get or deny UN authority during the invasion of Iraq.

‘…It is essentially a materialistic creed …’ Which is not to say it is anti-spiritual. Rather, its dialectic is material. Progress is a matter of more, quicker, further and better. The liberal century, 1777-1914 was a parade of plenty for the ‘civilised’, the ‘enlightened’, the Liberal. More railway track, more yards of cotton, more boxes of matches, more science explored, more miles mapped. Whilst, the next fifty years somewhat contradicted this seemly endless momentum, material progress remained within Liberalism.

‘…that links self-worth and self-esteem directly to property…’ And the height of progress was universal or nearly so property ownership. Mass materialism was a primary defence against the serf owning divine lord, the centralised state, the communist collective, dehumanising poverty. For the Liberal, property became a rite of passage for the young or the self-made man. Before property, how could an individual be, how could they be worthy of the fullest extent of liberty? This absolute line has been modified, so rights are dealt out on the understanding property will eventually follow or at least be fervently sought. The property less freak or the society that cannot provide such opportunities is to be pitied.

‘….but seeks to counter the alienating consequences of this reductionism by a collective nomos’ Yet this property fetish must be countered by the aforementioned collective understandings. The anarchy of the rich must be tempered to a benevolent patriarchy. Liberalism demands of the rich only they be willing to forgo some of the maximum extent of their liberties to keep social peace. Much of this is material i.e. welfare, progressive taxation, much is mythos.

I too am Seismic Shock....

2010-01-24T05:00:00.001Z

....tho hairier, far less work ethic and with questionable personal hygiene

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/anglican-vicar-uses-police-to-intimidate-blogger

(H/t Mod)

Silence slayed

2009-12-06T18:17:00.000Z

There is a new king

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpEGBgHxNTQ&feature=player_embedded

The man speaks!

2009-10-11T05:20:00.002+01:00

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/

Really Lazy Now - Old essays pt 5

2009-10-09T07:57:00.000+01:00

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

Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 4

2009-10-02T16:10:00.001+01:00

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

The Republic reviews...Der Baader-Meinhof Complex

2009-10-02T14:40:00.005+01:00

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

Democracy and the Fallarovous

2009-09-22T17:21:00.003+01:00

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!!!!!!!!!

David Lindsey News!!!!!!

2009-09-16T15:55:00.003+01:00

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

Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 3

2009-09-14T10:31:00.001+01:00

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

Dramatically interrupted Hiatus!

2009-09-09T15:51:00.001+01:00

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)

Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 2

2009-08-18T03:18:00.000+01:00

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’

My Francophilia explained

2009-08-12T22:52:00.000+01:00

'In 1960, by signing the "Manifesto of the 121" protesting the brutal war in Algeria and urging French troops to desert, Sartre openly flouted French political authority. When President Charles de Gaulle was urged by his advisers to summarily place the gadfly philosopher under arrest, he responded emphatically: "One does not arrest Voltaire!" '

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060220/wolin

Lazy, Moi?? - Old essays pt 1

2009-08-04T20:43:00.001+01:00

Creating two nations – the fascist conception of society.

‘For me, the issue is clear and precise, intelligent or not, parasites or not, moral or immoral, this people (The Jews) are enemies here on our country’s territory’[1] Codreanu, speaking in Parliament, 3rdDecember 1931

‘Flee, curs, across the Drina!’[2] Mile Budak

As idolaters of national or ethnic identity, fascists viewed their societies in terms of conflicting identities and vertical cleavages. This contest between various forms of collective belonging and loyalty was sharpened by the Manichean terms of in which each category of identification was described. Inversely, the possibility of ‘false identification’ created a multiplicity of national identities between the two extremes of inherently good and intrinsically evil. N Bartulin produces a compelling model of such a multiplicity in his thesis of Ustaša race theory which has wider application with other fascist movements[3]. At root, there was a conflict as ‘Modernization implied centralisation, and this in turn implied cultural uniformity’[4]. Within such a multi-polar conception of society, fascists were involved in a reductionist Janus faced creation of an ideal type, the epitome of the Nation and its counter-type, the source of decadence and decay.

One of the thinkers who most informed the intellectual roots of fascism, Georges Sorel, had seen the vital need for this Manichean division as a mythic mode of mobilisation[5]. Social Scission, which is the entrenchment and increasing hostility between the two extremes of society, would bring forth an accelerating dynamic of conflict and violence. Within this ‘descent’, battle lines would be sharpened, the revolutionary spirit would be engendered throughout the group seeking power and an enforced unity of identity and purpose augmented. As common ground was washed away and compromise became treason, the myth of scission provided a psychological catalyst for action and the needed determination and discipline to bring about revolution. Indeed, the coalescing of society round the extremes was the primary step towards a solution. The grey had to be rubbed out, two nations must be created, the good and the evil.

These dynamics of division and a linking hierarchy of worth allow a better look at fascist social critique and the place violence has in it. Fascist violence was an attempt to change this multi-polar society into a uni-polar national community, cathartically shedding the sources of dissonant identity and ‘disunity’, via the destruction of flesh, tissue and bone. This is a hyper-active form of a ‘gardening state’[6], a term used by both Zygmunt Baumen[7] and Roger Griffin to describe this imposition of an ideological vision of a mono-ethnic society onto an untidy reality. To uses Gumz’s term, the Ustaša were involved in a ‘nationalizing war’[8] of a destructive/creative nature. In ideological terms, fascists saw their societies as divided, fragmented by positions of national virtue and alien vice. Thus the question of how to ‘save’ society becomes a matter of who to save and who to jettison. This explains the intense nature of the literature in both the Ustaša and the Legion on what truly constituted the ‘real’ Romanian/Croat and inversely its Counter type.

Even worst in the eyes of the fascist than division was the corruption that this multi-polar society creates, it poisons those who might be saved, it corrupts the essential national character in the unwary. The removal of such a source is classified by medical analogies, tumour, cancer, parasite, toxin. The evil cannot be contained as it is infectious, aggressive. Only ‘removal’, ‘subtraction’, ‘inoculation’, ‘purification’ would halt this march. Once the society in which you live is defined by conflicting and warring poles of absolute moral worth, the danger becomes clear as does the solution.

The terms by which such ideal types were created are informative too. To both movements, the peasant was the basis of national life and rebirth. Principle twelve of the founding Ustaša program makes clear that ‘...the peasantry is not only ‘the base and also the source of all life, rather it itself constitutes the Croatian nation’[9]. Outside of that was inherently foreign. Looking to racial anthropology, the Ustaša defined the Croat nation as separate from the Serbs because of their specifically Dinaric character and based in the most immutable demographic. Weather Iranian or Gothic influence distinguished them from the ‘Vlachs[10]’ is beside the point. The peasant was the ideal regardless. Calls to Pilar, Šufflay, Filip Lukas and Kerubin Šegvić were in support of a base aim, to support ‘...an overarching idea of Croatian uniqueness and distinction vis-à-vis the Serbs’[11]. The peasant was the prime example of what a Croat should be, the least corrupted element, being ‘virile, energetic and violent, the avenger and the source of the mystical values of the race’[12]. The peasant alone retained the essence of Croatia as seen through the eyes of the Ustaša.

Much the same applies to the Legion. The work on racial anthropology and serology by eugenicists Făcăoaru and Rȃmneanţu were used by Legionnaire ideologues as backing for their contentions of Romanian identity. Primarily this was that Romanian/Dacian blood and thus the eternal national characteristics were still unpolluted by ‘Phanariot and Gypsy blood, and recently by Jewish blood’[13] in the peasantry. This bio-national identity was ‘our biological patrimony’[14] in the words of Făcăoaru, to be protected and nourished. The virtue of the ‘saintly[15]’ peasants of Moldavia and Transylvania was incarnate and inherent to their ethnicity. In both cases, the origins of the ‘virtuous savage’[16], the source of national culture was deposited as the least compromised element in society in regards the malignant Counter type. In Zeev Barbu’s words, ‘The village and the peasant became symbols of honesty, sanity and primeval purity, the strong holds of national life’[17]. The Ideal was bound timelessly to the soil of the land, to the essence of the nation, he was a ‘new man’ in waiting. The Ideal type was, to these movements, the sole route personified or the intrepid path-finder out of crisis via the creation of the volkgemienschaft. In Griffin-ite terms, the realisation of a pure and unified volk was the fruit of the mazeway resynthesis[18], the Ideal was the escapee from decay.

Religion provided a valuable marker of national identity in both movements. Orthodoxy to the Legion was a source of peasant authenticity, of collective ritual and spirituality. Via the symbolic vernacular of the Orthodox faith, of suffering and redemption, of warrior angels and transformative struggle, the Legion conceived Romania’s rebirth. The ritual and ‘village’ manifestation of this faith became a link for the individual legionnaire to the heart of the ’true’ national character. In a similar dynamic, Catholicism was a part of Croat peasant identity, of what being a Croat was about. Via the Catholic rituals, it was possible to expiate ‘false’ nationality, as Budak made clear with regards to conversion, ‘...the remaining part [of the Serbian population] we shall convert to the Catholic faith and thereby melt into Croats’[19]. Though the liturgy of the Church and its adoptive peasant form, the absolutes of the ages and of national mission were sacralised. Religion infused national palengenesis with the certainties and mysticism of faith; ‘Our religion is the Independent State of Croatia!’[20]and ‘God is a fascist!’[21] were the cries. It was ‘not dogma or ritual, but religious experience or religiosity’[22] that these movements wish to summon. In both cases, Religion also helped refine and elaborated on the dichotomous make up of the Ideal and Counter types.

The Counter-type also had such eternal values and temporal meaning, as the mirror image and negation of the ideal. From and within their social milieus, the Ustaša and the Legion detected the Counter-type by looking at the threat to the nature and pretences of their identity. To the Ustasha, the Serbian identity, be it in the guise of ‘Yugoslavianism’ or Pan-Slavic ethnicity, was an ideology of ethnic annihilation ‘aimed at assimilating the ‘inferior’ Croats’[23]. This Serb/Vlach threat was combined with fears of Jewish and Communist ‘denial of Croat identity and characterised as an ‘overall counter-type of the ‘Bolshevik-Asiatic’[24]. The Croatian nation thus faced a tripartite existential threat to its separate identity. In addition, as “Roma and Jew shared the image of “’the stranger’, ‘the outsider’, ‘the eternal other’ and ‘the symbol of foreignness, of dark and evil forces’”[25], the ‘Black’ Gypsies, incapable of a ‘sense’ of Croat feeling were brought into this construct[26]. This conglomerate was labelled as the ‘šuma’[27], the antithesis of Croatian-ness, being made up of Serbs, Communists, Gypsies and Jews, ‘...yokes...’ on ‘...the back of the Croatian people’.[28]

To the Ustaša, the crisis of modernity was expressed as a denial of their identity as Croats. All they thought as simultaneously essentially Croatian and virtuous was threatened by the political and social situation between the wars. The first Yugoslavia might be described as a deeply liminiod period of dis-embedding and nomic terror for Ultra-nationalists in Croatia, ‘a morally contaminated Babylon’[29]. Under the perceived weight of Serbian belligerence, Jewish corruption and Bolshevik Internationalism, only extreme acts of ‘repristination...’ or ‘...cleansing’[30] would allow a national revolution. Faced with being assimilation into a ‘Yugoslavic’ or Pan-Serb identity or internationalist denial, Ultra-nationalists sought to define aggressively their reality of what it meant to be Croatian. In the words of Aleksa Djilas, ‘...By provoking Serbs into rebellion and sometimes even into reprisals against Croats, the Ustasha wanted to compel the Croatian nation to choose between subjugation by the Serbs or support for the Ustasha as masters of Croatia’[31], a classic dynamic of social scission. At root, this need to define and defend a seemly fragile identity via an integral nation state specified the landscape of this particular ‘social scission’ of the Ustasha.

In comparison, the Romanian ultra-nationalists defined the crisis of modernity of losing the control over their state to foreign elements. This fear of the erosion of ethnic Romanian control of state power would hang heavy over much of the Nationalist discourse in the inner-War period. Livezeanu sees this conflation of elements as the result of the conflict between the organic pretensions of Romanian monopolies over power and the realities of a multi-ethnic and ethnically stratified society. Given the ethnic heterodoxy of Greater Romania, there was ‘a perceived need to wholly redefine the nation’[32]. This conflict was over the very nature of national identity and societal meaning, thus it possessed powerful energies towards nomic recreation or remaking Romania. Thus the Legion was ‘faced’ with the challenge of changing a multi-polar society into one united by Romanian identity and heritage.

The Legion, following a long tradition within the Romanian Nationalist heritage, saw the Peasant as the root of Romanian identity and diametrically opposed to this organic class to the ‘foreignness’ of the cities. Here were collected the Kikes[33], the rascals[34], the Lupists[35], the traitors[36], the very negation of the peasant. This was reinforced by personal perception amongst the Legionnaires. In Ion Moţa’s words, these country boys and indeed the nature of Romania itself was divided between ‘”the Old World” of the idyllic village life and “the New World, alienated from ancient mores and invaded by pagans”’.[37] To break out of this ‘social schizophrenia’, the two worlds must be separated, the division made clear, there must be ‘cultural purification’[38]. Consider one example of the circles of violence that engulfed the Legion. In 1923, the failure of the Brȃtianu government to repeal Jewish citizenship so enraged Codreanu that he forced his way into the Prime Minister’s office. After that intimidation did not work he formed a group of six students who would assassinate key figures in the change in Jewish legislation, in a ‘purification’[39] of national politics. Legionary propaganda and violence was aimed towards this forceful separation, further evidence of social scission.

Thus to both movements, the way out of crisis, of identity and state control was via an act of division and fortifying national identity. This homogenisation of identity was enacted on both sides of the social division. The Ideal type and its Counter type made this chasm clearer and increasingly energising. Violence played a central role, re-enforcing the mythology of social conflict and destroying cross-division dialogue and social contact. This violence was facilitated, if not encouraged by the Manichean nature of the Ideal/counter dichotomy. The base evil of the Counter type and the ‘urgency’ of crisis lead Ustasha and Legionnaire alike to follow the logic of their ideological position. The Counter was malignant, poisonous, threatened the very future of the ‘volk’. To Codreanu, their crime was meta-physical too, in their ‘attempts to destroy [our] ties with eternity[40]. In a time of crisis and violent upheaval (which the movements themselves willingly contributed to), the Counter was placed ‘outside the universe of obligation’[41] in Fein’s term and its destruction or expulsion became expedient and ideological justified.

The fascist Weltanschauung is inherently Manichean, The intrinsic nature of the others’ decadence and threat to the rebirth of society went beyond social or political conditions. To the Totalitarians of the 20th century, the root of the others’ ‘a-national’ or ‘a-revolutionary’ character was physical and mental, only through the destruction of these elements could society be purified. The terms of the fascist division, rootedness versus cosmopolitan, Spiritual versus materialistic, Vital versus mediocrity, defined both the lines of that division between healthy and decadent and the route of any cathartic resolution. Within such a (self created) bipolar world, fascists believed they had to look beyond the usual acts of political routine and ritual, towards a magical act of will, one that completely remade society. This revolutionary act would transform the world from bipolar to ‘uni-polar’, regardless of the bodies that fell.
[1] As quoted in CZ Codreanu, 2001, Legion: The Nest Leader’s Handbook, (London, The Rising Press, 2001)
[2] I. Goldstein, 2006, ibid, pg 227
[3] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid
[4] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 9
[5] G. Sorel, 1941, ibid
[6] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 331
[7] Z Bauman, 1993, ibid
[8] J Gumz, 2001, ibid, pg 1038
[9] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 165
[10] Ivo Pilar on the Vlachs/Serbs: ‘its innate racial appetite for usurpation, its anti-social tendencies, its mania for destruction’, N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 181
[11] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 185
[12] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid, pg 692
[13] Traian Herseni as quoted in M Turda, 2007, ibid, pg 438
[14] M Turda, 2007, ibid, pg 439
[15] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 79
[16] The ‘savage’ of Rousseau was taken over by many nationalists in the mid to late 19th century. Rather than being a transcendental life full of the common spirituality of mankind, the new peasant ‘savage’ was gifted with the essential elements of what it meant to be Czech, Hungarian, Romanian or Croatian. See A Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871, (London, Phoenix Press, 2001)
[17] Z Barbu, ‘Psycho-Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Iron Guard, the Fascist Movement of Romania’ SU Larson eds., Who are the Fascists (Stockholm, Global Book Resources, 1980), pg 381
[18] The Mazeway Resynthesis is the particular ludic recombination or ‘new canopy’ of a revitalisation movement, Griffin’s anthropological template in describing generic fascism and temporal crisis. The term was coined by Anthony Wallace, See R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 106
[19] D Mirković, ‘Ethnic Conflict and Genocide: Reflections on Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 548, 1996, pg 197
[20] R. Yeomans, Cults of Death and fantasies of annihilation: the Croatian Ustasha movement in power, 1941–45, Central Europe, 3/ 2, 2005, pg 124
[21] R Ioanid, 1990, ibid , pg 140
[22] B Weisbrod, ‘Fundamentalist Violence: Political Violence and Political Religion in Modern Conflict’, International Social Science Journal, 54 /174, 2002, pg 501
[23] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 188
[24] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 223
[25] D Reinhartz, ‘Unmarked Graves: the Destruction of the Yugoslav Roma in the Balkans Holocaust, 1941-45’, Journal of Genocide Research, 1/1, 1999, pg 81
[26] White Gypsies, being either Muslim or Catholic were not under the agency of the ‘nationalizing’ Serbian Orthodox Church and thus were ‘capable’ of being part of the Gemienschaft.
[27] Lit. the Forest, N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 370
[28] Danijel Crljen, 1942 as quoted in N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 368
[29] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 127
[30] S Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005, (Washington, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006), pg 83
[31] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 397
[32] I Livezeanu, 1995, ibid, pg 307
[33] From a poem by Radu Barda in R Ioanid, 1990, ibid, pg 126
[34] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 67
[35] Lupist, derived from Helen Lupecsu, the life-long Jewish paramour of Carol II, she was commonly thought to be considerable involved in the making and breaking of Governments. CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 86
[36] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 66
[37] C Iordachi, 2003, ibid, pg 25
[38] C Iordachi, 2003, ibid, pg 19
[39] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 262
[40] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 260
[41] H Fein, Accounting for Genocide (New York: Free Press, 1979), pg 197

A Great Man

2009-07-31T13:09:00.002+01:00

http://www.true-faith.co.uk/tf/features.nsf/0/82CAA705304A7B5A80257604003A2106?OpenDocument

Rain delayed thought

2009-07-30T16:23:00.000+01:00

Whilst I’m waiting for the Cricket to start (Swinish rain-shy swines), more John Hodgman:-

On being Bruce Campbell’s literary agent (30 mins)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=190

On mentally redrafting the Phantom Menace to be good (47 mins)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=232

On Death, Gambling and Theme park rides as metaphors (47 mins)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=243
Now, back to the matter at hand. Vicariously worrying about Ian Bell

Blogger block be gone!!!!

2009-07-29T16:32:00.003+01:00

Bob from Brockley has kindly allowed me to join in with the five words meme.

See here abouts –

http://brockley.blogspot.com/2009/07/five-word-meme.html

and so.....

Toon - Which always means that gaping wound in my mental balance, Newcastle United. Having not been born of the greatness that is the North East, excluding the red and white bits, I was bewitched by the pure audacity of the 92-93 side. Coming off possibly slipping into the third tier of footballing competition, such pacy wing play and central midfield brilliance from Peter Beardsley was instantly addictive. I found my (spherical) drug. One might call me a John Hall fan, only there for the fireworks. But how I have continued to suffer for the glory days. For every 5-0 thrashing of Man Utd, there is Birmingham thrashing us in the cup. For every Tino goal against Barcelona, there is Kieran Dyer and Beast Bowyer's public disagreement, those fucking accursed twelve points and Jermaine Jenus deciding to be fancy with penalties.

The great periods of Newcastle as a footballing side during the seventeen years of my addiction, the Keegan sides of 93-97 and Sir Bobby's of 2000-2004 seemed to be borrowed on credit, on the never never. How I marvelled at the joyous skill, revelled in 'Andrew' Cole in his pomp, the much under appreciated Lee Clark, Albert's lob, Sir Les, Ginola, Fox, Beresford's unlikely brace in Kiev, Sainted and holy Alan's conveyor belt of gravity defying volleys, Robert's rockets, Woodgate off the injury table, Kieran Dyer and Craig Bellemy being, not just good, but great. The memories are many. And one can see now that they were karmically brought. We paid up with Gullit's 'sexy' football and Silvio Maric, the sourness of Souness and the beginnings of the endlessly humiliating Owen saga, the flashes of hope with Roeder and stability and Keegan's return. In Fat Sam serving up tripe and calling it progress and Fat Ashley....oh, the vile corners to be yet reached. We paid and it seems continue to pay. I wish now I was a fair weather fan, I wish I could walk away. Too late now, damn it, much too late. PS. Fuck off Ashley.....just fuck off

Freedom - I consider freedom as a Janus faced concept. There is a freedom to kill anyone you fancy or to raped the shit out of them or burn their house down. The formulations created by Liberal thought about the limits of freedoms has been mostly correct. But the choice of which are inviolate is, of course, partial. Negative and Positive types of freedom seemed to be a false dilettante division. Freedom is at its most essential when it involves the lifting of chains, chains of bondage, of legal discrimination and state control, of stigma over choice, of hunger and squalor. What freedom means is thus: to be as full as human being as possible, untempered by the reductionism of materialist constraints and the cod-meaning and super temporality of Idealist schemas. If a human being can be the happy consuming shitting fucking machine that they are and then realise and freely appreciate the thunderous cosmoplastic qualities they are gifted with, at peace and at will, there is a certain and precious freedom within that.

Chartism - One has to be awe of the millions who marched, organised and campaigned for the Charter. They did so in times of great and cruel distress, in a time before telegrams or mass railways, when the main traditional bases of such a cause were in near terminal decline. The General Unions had been broken in the most part, the old clubs of the Radicals were dying. You have to remember too that the Political Unions of the 1830s, seeking a similar political solution, had been a cynical con, carried on the masses who had given them a power to threaten the system.

One under researched element of the movement, only touched upon by the culturalists, is that the Whig reforming state had erupted into areas of life untouched by the previous 'Old Corruption'. Be it the poorhouse, exclusion from borough and parish government or the moves against popular 'messy' festivals, these 'innovations' aligned with a general and crippling crisis in the economy created a nomic crisis for the poor. As the church failed to keep up with the explosion in urban population and relief without the gulag conditions of the workhouse disappeared, the Charter was transformed.

In its political demands were a longing for a more equitable and less ruthless past and a brighter and 'progressive' future. Within the carnival of the movement, the realisation of the moral power of the crowd and the rhetoric, we can detect a attempt to break out of a time of misery into a meaningful time of hope and change. The movement that pushed self-education and self awareness, probably doing more for mass literacy that anything till the public schools of 1870, could create experiments in collective living, in ground upwards politics. Blessed with the belief in the moral case for the charter, the movement was able to become a transformative revitalisation movement. As a reaction to the crisis of modernity, such a formation is common. However, this mass movement, unlike Fascism or Bolshevik Communism, had no cult of struggle, of dying or killing. It's internal discussions over Moral versus Physical power showed a remarkable maure level of understanding on the dangers of volence to the cause and the subsequent corruption of their ends.

This maturity, noted by Marx, combined with its moral power and willingness to openly discuss and challenge show a sparkling precedent for the left. How one could see Hamas or the CCP 'progressive' after learning of the ragged millions joyfully declaring their liberty and their rights is beyond my fuzzy headed imagination.

Anti-Stalinism - Anti-Stalinism is a misnomer. Whilst Stalin might have slightly changed the mantras of Lenin, his theory of government and the structures he adapted come directly from Lenin's revision of Marx and the ideological chaos that came from the October seizure of power. The Vanguard model creates the cult of personality, it is a coy version of the Fuhrerprinzip. Lenin's clear heritage to the 'Burn it all down' Nihilism of the original 'What is to be done?'. In Rakhmetov, the glacial upturner of worlds, Lenin found his model. Stalin merely added some extra Nietzsche to the mix.

Similarly Lenin's confusion after the seizure of power lead him and Trotsky to seek to emulate the military dictatorship of Hindenburg in Germany. Trotsky by the end of the civil war believe that the entire population should be placed into the military, a vast army commanded to 'socialism'. Stalin was to continue this tradition after the NEP, hurling 'brigades of labour' into crash industrialisation. Stalin never ceased to be a Leninist.
As such, anti-Stalinism is the refutation of the Leninist revision of Marx and indeed its root, Necheavian volunteerism. It could well be Marxist or non-Marxist (Odd that it has to be said but Marxism is merely a subset of socialism), it could be anarchist, radical, liberal, nationalist or Tory. Like anti-fascism, it is the realisation that there is a variable element of terrifying instability, the sheer threat of a descent, past the everyday inhumanity to something yet bloodier. Just as anti-fascism has created the oddest of bed-fellows, so too with anti-Stalinism.

Stalinism, out and out five years plans and such seems like Carlism and Saint-Simonism to be dead. The more canny and evasive Vanguardism remains. In the UK, barely able to bother with the mundane ins and outs of actually representing and struggling for the poorest, instead it moves to the moralistic cases of 'anti-imperialism'. Here the clear cut is in abundance, here sexy resistance is readily available in high-def and well out of range of possible stray rounds. Here is the toxin that poisons the left, in that vicarious 'Burn it all down'. We can do without it.

anti-Americanism - America, as in the United states of America as in the (other) Great Republic is the most successful democracy ever seen full stop. Even during an existential crisis in 1864, it still held an bitterly contested election. That record of 43 peaceful transfers of power based on a increasingly widening franchise deserves credit as does being the leading though flawed exponents of free-speech, to the people and the founders. America demonstrates the constant possibility of democratic advance, the slow movement of progress. It is, no doubt, a maddening and hypocritical place. The pure idiocy of the debates over Healthcare recently and the snideness of American exceptionalism, a proto-form of moral relativity , for example, might cause gagging when consumed in excessive amounts. Yet, America remains a historic example of a democracy, experimenting, evolving and questioning itself.

Further yet, America is damned. Damned above and beyond its multitude of sins, of commission, omission or otherwise. This damning goes further, to its citizens, beyond the mild xeno-bigotry of loose stereotypes, to a vicious hatred. Americans are not just stupid, they revel in their stupidity, they are barely sentient. Not only are they fat, they attain hogarthian levels of decadent corpulence. They are not just religious, they are fanatics, would be crusaders, coy theocrats, all of them. Culturally, they are Pygmies, wallowing in a pseud-atmosphere of guns, neon and trainers. They are not just racists, but the very worst, loathsome bigots, only waiting to whip out the white sheets.

I smell catharsis, displacement and realising that this is one xenophobia target free of condemnation. One might understand the root of the bitterness if it was political i.e. America is super bad capitalist or if it came from disappointment i.e. 'but, but, but....you said you were a shining city on a hill....yet quite clearly you're in a valley'. But no. The fury of the ol' imperial Tories or the most cynical of rhetoric rejecters joins the choir. The reason is that the US cannot really be bother with such opinions. They simply don't show up of their radar. It is a tremendous insult to the Ushaters. They are condemned by and actually reinforce the insularity of America. Its the Chinese finger trap of discourse.

I will add that the few truthers over here that I have had the unpleasure to meet are convinced that it is the bovine like stupidity of the American public that allowed the 'conspiracy' to occur. The paradox of the loud and uncensored voices of America's own brand of nutter having given the truther narrative its shape is lost on them.

Who wants words!

The Republic reviews...Terror - Robespierre and the French Revolution

2009-07-14T05:06:00.003+01:00

There was a program on recently. I shan't link to it. It was a horrendous mess, the nadir of televised history.....and I've see a David Starkey program. Insulting, edited like fucking Pride and Prejudice, devoid of either an engaged proposition, putting forward a case or a objective sense of balance, examining various schools. Filled with a crap series of mind blowingly incorrect 'recreations' and a dirty pompous sense of itself as somehow 'mind blowing' rather than a sad and patronising retread of Furet II.

How do the producers of such tripe sleep at night?

I might, if the fury dies down, point out why it is so bad. However my teeth ache from the grinding as I waded through such swill

Happy now!!!!

2009-07-12T15:56:00.002+01:00

Having searched the entire spectrum of light and thus scolded the eyes of regular readers, I have finally renounced the Saint-Simonist pretensions of terracotta and decided on subverting the white and black chromatic industrial complex from within. Now to uncover my innate Stakhanovite tendencies and increase production by arbitrary number percent. Oh and proof read the bastards too....

You're welcome.

Toilets, Culture and Sarah Palin

2009-07-10T10:44:00.002+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x0eyNkNpL0

Hard work but very interesting

ps. His point about Marx at the end chimed with my own take on the worst father of the 19th century

We do not forget comrades.....

2009-07-01T05:02:00.003+01:00

.....and what has been done to them.

http://www.unitetheunion.com/news__events/events/iran_justice_for_iranian_work.aspx

As we do not forget Lovemore Matombo & Wellington Chibebe

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3045&art_id=nw20080519175523908C300643

News gathering AKA Treason

2009-06-28T09:58:00.003+01:00

'Iran's intelligence minister, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, has warned the press that the government regards newsgathering as an arrestable offence. "Whoever, under any name or title, collects information in Iran will be arrested, and so far a foreign journalist has been arrested," he said. He did not identify the journalist'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/25/british-arrests-iran-protests

'"Some people with British passports were involved in recent riots," said Mohseni-Ejei, according to Fars.'

'"Those law breakers who invited people to the streets with their statements are responsible for the bloodshed," the minister said'

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE55N1Q920090624?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=11559

Lights are going out.....

2009-06-26T13:38:00.003+01:00

As clerics demand and sanctify death

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/06/26/execute-protestors-without-mercy-ahmad-khatami/

As protesters win small battles at great cost

http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.com/2009/06/26/from-tehran/

and Iranian blogs fall silent

Update: With regards to my pervious post on the geo-politics of the struggle in Iran, Russia decides for outright hypocracy

'While the US and the UK have criticised Iran's crackdown on the opposition, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said at a G8 foreign ministers' meeting in Italy that no one was willing to condemn Iran over its disputed presidential election, which he called "an exercise in democracy".'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/25/mousavi-presidential-election-ayatollah-iran

Fragment #2 or Association Football in the Land of the Free

2009-06-26T11:20:00.004+01:00

I haven't been writting much about football because being a Newcastle fan at the moment makes the entire game a prolonged torturous reminder of how shite we are. However I could not past by without commenting on this recent result:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/8114585.stm

'The United States caused one of the biggest upsets in world football by beating European champions Spain in the semi-finals of the Confederations Cup'

The two nil victory is probably the most impressive result the States have had in the world's most popular game since the one nil victory over England in 1950. Just as then, the US beat a pre-eminent force within the game. Spain's short passing game had savaged some of the best sides in the world and with victory over the Americans would have beaten the international record for going undefeated and consecutive wins. Spain up until this point had been firm favourites for the 2010 World Cup and, with players like Villa, Torres, Xavi, Iniesta, Alonso, Fabregas, Puyot, Ramos and the peerless Casillas, had a fearsome strength in depth.

Whilst some might argue that is only the Confederations Cup (for those un-initiated into the labyrinthine world of FIFA competitions, a money making hook up, feeding off the base international tournaments), the possibility for Spain to break such records should have easily been ample motivation. Thus to the United States Football Team, well done Sirs. And for citizens of the (other) Great Republic, please show your appreciation to one of the foremost sporting achievement of your recent past.

The victory over England in 1950 was an even greater upset. The English, who had up until that point distained the World Cup as some foreign innovation, were the 'Kings of Football'. Their record since the resumption of full internationals in 1945 was impressive. With only 4 losses and 3 draws in thirty games, England came to Brazil and their first World Cup as 3-1 favourites. The USA's odd were 500-1. Whilst the English side included some of leading players in the world and legendary figures such as Alf Ramsey, Billy Wright, Wilf Mannion, Tom Finney and Stan Mortensen, the American team was made up of virtulally unknown part-timers. The US were battered in the first half but came away with a one-nil lead thanks to Joe Gaetjens throwing himself at the ball and putting it past Bert Williams in the 37th minute. Despite a penalty appeal, the English failed to score in the second half and so was born one of the biggest shocks in international sports.

For the English, the shock was dealt with by quasi-denial. There is a folk tale that English sport journalists at first presumed the wire services had made a clerical mistake and the result was actually 10-0 to England. After the defeat, voices were raised that the US team consisted of 'imported talent' and thus defeat came through underhand means. Such hubris was demonstrated in the arrangements that meant Stanley Mathews, the foremost English player of the post war period, had been touring Canada with another group of England players before Brazil and only arrived in time to sit and watch the game. Defeat to Spain in the next game and exit from the competition was taken, not as a sign that English Football was sliding into obsolescence, but as proof of the 'questionable' nature of international tournaments over the test system.

Such Mrs Havisham like arrogance was not finally dismissed till the 1953 massacre by the great Hungarian side of Puskas and Hidegkuti at Wembley. The 1950 defeat had been a clear marker that not only was the traditional tactics of England dying, but to prosper in the new age of world cups and rising powers like Brazil, Spain, the USSR, Hungary and Italy, a new professionalism was needed in organisation and management. The English right back that night in Belo Horizonte, a veteran of the epoch marking defeat in 1953 as well as the 'Miracle on Grass', was to take these lessons and create England's only world conquering team of the modern age; Alf Ramsey.

For the US, the victory did not herald the sport's triumphant march in the Nation's consciousness. Football 's organisation and structures remained stunted despite the heroic efforts of the national team and its rising popularity. While the seventies and early eighties brought the unsustainable spending and glamour of the NASL, Football was consigned to be the sport of immigrants and girls. One hopes that the brilliant efforts of today's team might make it a truly national sport.

The goal scorer that night back in 1953, Joe Gaetjens, was Haitian born, having gone to New York to study. Although he had declared his intention to become an American citizen, he never did so. After a brief stay in France, where he played for Troyes, he returned to Haiti. As it was common to be able to play for multiple national sides then, he went on to play for Haiti in a 1953 qualifier against Mexico. Becoming a businessman and a supporter of local football, he disappeared in 1964, taken by the Tontons macoutes acting under François Duvalier. He, like thousands of others, was presumed killed.

Geo-politics, memory and Iran

2009-06-25T14:02:00.006+01:00

If we're honest, there is only two ways regimes collapse. Firstly though external means i.e. military defeat and invasion or secondly the regime itself begins to doubt its 'mandate from Heaven' and seeks to reacquire it. In the latter case, it either exits the stage like the Tsarist regime, or indeed the Shah, or it seeks to reform itself or co-opt the opposition within power, like the monarchy of Louis XVI or the Philippines post Marcos. Long term decay of both societal legitimacy and the self-perception of the 'right' to rule amongst the regime sapped away at the required strength of will to crush ongoing dissent. Yet that will is buttressed by eternal forces too. No state can be truly isolated.

Even during the more isolated point of the Soviet Union's post civil war history 1921-the early thirties, it was still in diplomatic and contact with a host of nominally anti-communist powers, including many of the losers of the Versailles Treaty. These secret contacts and treaties allowed it to materially survive and reinforced its sense of being the 'go to' power over its own territory, a prime goal of any state. By 1991, with its satellites vanishing, China and the eastern branch of the Comintern paralysed by recent strife and former clients moving sideways, its isolation was palpable. Quarantined alone with growing and crippling social problems and nose diving legitimacy, the elites had no other place to turn but inept coups and then ignominious exit. Onwards to the dustbin et al.

It was Carter's refusal to continue to support the 'Great King' that saw off the Pahlavis. Similarly Marcos and Suharto did not last much beyond the removal of the US 'mandate'. I very much doubt if China decided North Korea did not have a geo-political function anymore, it wouldn't last much more than a year.

Whilst the situation in Iran does not seem to approach the total existential crisis of the Soviet regime, the multiplicity of elites that make up the regime would fear real isolation. Of course, I don't mean isolation from the west. Western powers since the fall of the Shah and the rise of the intrinsically 'anti-Imperialist' Islamic Republic have had few cards to play. With a structurally imposed thirst for oil and gas and little in the way of diplomatic and economic levers over Iran, the west, in terms of governments, kind of doesn't matter, except in a negative way. Believe me, I am no fan of 'engagement', or state sanctioned dictator rim-jobbing, but the fact remains. The power of external support and thus elite self-belief rests on Russia and China.

Whilst China provides a still insatiable market for Iranian raw materials, Russia provides technical backing and support for the military. Without these props, the regular military could not keeps itself armed against Great and various Little Satans and continue to support its proxies. Similarly, Oil revenue is the life blood of the entire state. Take away the thirstiest market and you effect ever arm of the Iranian system. The mandate of continued Chinese and Russian support is the keystone to the ability of the Regime to remain unreformed and repress. Alas, I couldn't think of two powers less likely to take a stance in favour of the people

States are not really design to be moral agents in International affairs and the CCP and the 'managed democracy' of Russia are a-moral agents par excellent. The heirs of Deng Xiaoping are not known for their sympathy towards street protest either. Indeed, China's new economy and society is based of purposely 'forgetting' events such as those in Tehran today. The ghost of June 4th must haunt Beijing's imaginings when looking at those 'tweets', mobile photo shots of blood covered hands, grainy pictures of innocents killed. If technology had allowed such samizdat coverage of Tienanmen, how much more deadly to the regime it might have been, how much harder to erase? For the CCP, failing to back Iran might well be as toxic as Vergennes' support of the colonies. As studious historians of the Great Revolution of 1789, the Politburo of the CCP will undoubtedly see the parallel.

James Fallow has some thoughts on the currently 'muted' Chinese official reaction

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/iran_in_china.php

One of the few pieces to emerge merely regurgitates the theocrats' 'The West did it' narrative

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/GlobalTimesIran.jpg

Russia, whilst it may lack such a painful spectre of crowd power, is well at home with 'extra-democratic' measures. Even before the rise of FSB veteran and Judo fan Vladimir, the illegal dissolution of the Russian Parliament in 1993 and the subsequent deaths of at least 187 people demonstrated an 'ambivalence' towards democratic norms. Indeed, one detects a certain sorrow amongst the 'managers' that the Soviet Union's demise and the birth of the Russian federation were performed on the streets in 1991. Just as blowing the shit out of the Duma with a T72 shows a certain lack of care with protests over popular power, so the continued killing of opponents and journalists address a fundamental lack of sympathy with those resisting oppression.

Whilst the depictions of the struggle in Iran within the mostly state control media have been wider than in China, they have still conformed to the Mullah's take. Arminadinnerjacket was the winner, protests are merely sore losers and next! etc. Bearing in mind the very low standard set by the Russian state for its own 'free and fair' elections, that is hardly a surprise. There have been a few hints of alternative readings, the results being 'shaky' for instance, but it is a minor story, soon to be forgotten and filed away.

More here

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/06/17/what-to-make-of-the-russian-media-s-reaction-to-iran.aspx

Depressing given the key nature of both. However, both regimes would not stand for extended chaos. That would be a vast disruption to Russia's Great Game playing, and China's supply concerns. If the struggle cannot be easily repressed, if the bouts of protest followed by crackdown followed by protests become systemic, like in 1979, then the picture changes. Iran ceases to be a welcome customer of arms and purveyor of oleaginous goodness a bit under the weather and becomes a liability. Such an unpredictable maelstrom would not only be a destabilising element in western assumptions and power politics but a serious threat to both Chinese and Russian geo-politics.

I hope such attrition, or more rightly an awful contest between protesters' bones and slowly eroding batons need not come to past. Cracks in the elites and those who serve within the institutions of state have appeared. IF what John Simpson says is
true here:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8116825.stm

then the internal doubt needed to end any regime may be spreading.

Either way, it will be a contest of will. Truth, justice and plain old boring humanity are on the protesters side. The longer they can heroically hold out (Please let it not be too long), the base nature of geo-politics, that usual arena of the a-moral and merely evil, might well come to their aid too

ps. Lionel Beehner is a cunt, coy cunt as well

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/24/iran-revolution-demonstrations-tehran

Poetry Fruit Corner

2009-06-24T17:27:00.001+01:00

Red-Handed

for a host of martyrs
comes into this surge
sons of sons taken
and daughters of daughters
wed, raped and hungby
hook, shah and Qomish crook
first time as tragedy
second as tragedy heightened

and the blood, as red
as the paint on the frescoes
of each martyr in turn
except them without use,
virtue, a tin of vice
bathes pleading hands
thrown out as columns
measuring Cyrus' people

caught red handed
caught and taken
to be cut into mere grief
relic slipped under earth
speechless, unheard
fading from the instance
of the butcher's slice
embraced by nameless quantity

by Courtney Bernays

Must see freebie

2009-06-23T09:50:00.002+01:00

The Brilliant Errol Morris' brilliant 'Fog of War'

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653788864462752804

Errol Morris' site

http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow.html

Update: Morris' piece 'Mr Death' too, lucky souls you are (hilariously hosted by some holocaust dening retards who singularly and spectacularly fail to get the point)

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=654178281151939378&q=Mr.+Death%3A+The+Rise+and+Fall+of+Fred+A.+Leuchter%2C+Jr

'The worse.......the better'

2009-06-23T08:24:00.004+01:00

I've been wanting to do my ideal type series on Neo-Conservatism for a while. Like Fascism or Neo-Liberalism, it, as a precise descriptive label albeit discursive, has been made almost meaningless in the repeated sloppiness of its use. Anything objectionable is Neo-con, anything the States does (even under Obama) is Neo-con directed, anything other than whole hearted support for 'anti-imperialist' murderers and terrorists is Neo-con.

Briefly, Neo-Conservatism is a constant exploration of the world to find a manichean division between a petrified and homogeneous sense of western/American/'Judeo-Christian' culture and some demonic other. The need for that search was a platonic view of mass society and democracy. By giving a society a sense of historic mission and a narrative of confrontation with evil, atomisation and chronic disunity and tumults might be overcome. The world must be made to be or made to be conceived as binary as to create the unity of the 'good', a useful deception/interpretation/vision beyond. Just as important is the unity of the 'bad' or other. If cracks appear in this monolith, then they must be denied or made meaningless or even threatening.

So to:

Daniel Pipes

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/06/rooting-for-ahmadinejad.html

Max Boot

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/69612

Marty Peretz

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2009/06/14/no-schadenfreude-over-ahmadinejad-s-re-election-but-no-self-deception-either.aspx

(HT. George Packer)

The Iranian students, those workers out in solidarity, those ordinary citizens, those snotty leisure class-ists of John Wight's imagination, are similarly reduced by these stalwarts. They are either merely flotsam, caught up in the Great Game, as bad as the militia beating and killing them or agents whom might just ruin the whole show.

Neither (some of) SU or Commentary

Marg Bar Khomanai!

I wanna lick John Hodgman

2009-06-23T02:21:00.000+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY

Iran

2009-06-22T21:55:00.002+01:00

Here at the Republic, we are not known for our fastidious ongoing coverage of current affairs nor our fastidious grooming habits. Quite frankly, there are comrades far better at it than I.

Here

http://hopinewsfromiran.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/videos-from-the-hopi-emergency-solidarity-meeting-on-june-20/

Here

http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/

And here

http://brockley.blogspot.com/2009/06/iran-links.html

My solidarity is, naturally given my zio-infected mind hole, with the 'Tehran Trendies'. Much of the twentieth century was a competition between totalitarians and theocrats over who could make capitalism look good. The Islamic 'Republic' is a delightful mix of both. Thirty years of being force fed this scrumptious cocktail on top of 25 years of 'enlightened despotism' has left millions of 'Gucci glad covert agents of Bibi' feeling worse for wear. Having lived through hypocritical repression, the attritional warfare of the Iran-Iraq war and having been materialistically failed completely, the 'twitter-archy' ceased to take an election stolen so insultingly obviously on the chin.

Yes, none of the candidates are Lincoln. Yes, twitter is hardly the samizdat of the poorest of the poor and Yes, Iran remains a country deeply rooted to religion. None of this changes there is only one 'side' here worthy of support. Those much derided students and the assorted vanguardist capitalist infidel nokia charged cat pigs have taken to the streets to protest. They have been beaten, imprisoned and killed. The Trade Unions have come out in their support. They have organised and attended demos far beyond the evil that is North Tehran. If members of SWSS, a proper fully non-bourgeois student sect (hardy sons of the soil ona and all) had a hundredth of the bravery of those effete troublemakers, then you might actually have get somewhere.

Short Order Cook said it best

'About 0.6% of Twitter’s users are in Iran, which is about on a par with other 3rd world countries like Ireland, France, Russia and South Korea.

On Facebook, Iran contains 1.3% of the world’s users, which is the same amount as other countries filled with backwards peasants such as Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela.

This is only to be expected, as like these other countries, a huge majority of the population (30%) live outside cities and only a tiny proportion (30%) are educated to A level standard or higher. Plus, there are only a handful of university students in the country (3.5 million), and these are the ones who usually cause trouble in these kinds of situations.

Unemployment stands at only 20% and inflation is low at 24%, having reached a peak of only 30% a couple of months ago. With figures like these it’s not surprising that the Iranian people are happy with the sterling job that Ahmadinejad is doing!'

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/06/18/stwc-twit-ers-on-iran/

Also see here

http://www.slate.com/id/2220520/

"Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui. Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of the black-robed state"

Such naughty children!

One thing that has surprised me, even more than the bravery and courage of the 'neo-liberal traitors to the mighty anti-Imperialist meta-narrative', has been the increasing unease of the usual anti-Imperialists over weather to excuse this 'internal affair'. Whilst the professional schills have been hard at work, the part-timers have been either supportive (at times superbly so) of the protests, silenced by confusion or driven insane bridging the gaps. Turning point or no, interesting methinks.

Fragment

2009-06-17T07:03:00.005+01:00

Flitting about on intertubes, I happen apon this petrified tragedy from that century just gone, a hundred years crammed with such example. Here is just one.

"Born Dorothea Gerson in Berlin.....Gerson began her career as a touring singer and actress in the Holtorf Tournee Truppe alongside actor Mathias Wieman.....where she met and married her first husband, film director Veit. The couple married in 1922 and divorced in 1924. Harlan would eventually direct the highly anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (1940) by request of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.

In 1920, Dora Gerson was cast to appear in the successful film adaptation of the Karl May penned novel Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses (On the Brink of Paradise) and later followed that same year in another May adaptation entitled Die Todeskarawane (Caravan of Death). Both films included Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi in the cast. However, both films are now considered lost films.

Gerson continued to perform as a popular cabaret singer throughout the 1920s as well as acting in films. By 1933 however, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, the German-Jewish population was systematically stripped of rights and Gerson's career slowed dramatically. Blacklisted from performing in "Aryan" films, Gerson began recording music for a small Jewish record company. Dora Gerson also began recording in the Yiddish language during this time, and the 1936 song "Der Rebe Hot Geheysn Freylekh Zayn" became highly regarded by the Jews of Europe in the 1930s. Her best remembered recordings from this era were the songs "Backbord und Steuerbord" and "Vorbei" (Beyond Recall), which was an emotional ballad, subtlety memorializing a Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party.

In 1936 Dora Gerson relocated with relatives to the Netherlands fleeing Nazi persecution. On May 10, 1940, however, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Soon, the Jews of the Netherlands were subject to the same anti-Semitic laws and restrictions as in Germany. After several years of living under oppressive Nazi occupation, the Gerson family began to plan to escape. In 1942 Gerson and her family were seized trying to flee to Switzerland....The family were sent by railroad car to transit camp Westerbork bound for the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. Dora Gerson was murdered at Auschwitz on February 14, 1943 at the age of 43."

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Dora_Gerson

For some reason, these fragments evoke in me the memory of reading the brutal calvary of Sofya in Life and Fate. A child of the century, destroyed by a cruelty, seemly woven into every second

O as in Oh then M as in My (as in me) followed by G (as in a non-existant deity)

2009-06-16T20:50:00.001+01:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00l0xxg/Im_Sorry_I_Havent_A_Clue_Series_51_Episode_1/

Anti-Semitism of the Left

2009-06-15T03:19:00.005+01:00

After reading a few posts recently on Marx's anti-Semitism:-

Here

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/05/12/karl-marx-radical-antisemitism/

and here

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/05/marx-and-antisemitism.html

I wanted add a few thoughts. Whilst I agree entirely that Marx and indeed much of the left, in the past have held and today do hold prejudiced and bigotted views on Jews and Judaism, I suggest that theirs is a quantatively different kind of anti-Semitism than that of either the Christian, Islamic or Nationalist kinds. This makes it no more obnoxious or harmful but rather it places it more firmly within the weltanschuanng of the left. This then raises issues that those who wish the left to truely leave this malignant tradition behind and how best to avoid similar fallacies.

Christian anti-Semitism is based on the particular collective accusation of deicide and the failure of the Jews to heed the new order of things brought about by Jesus. Islamic Juduophobia is founded similarly on Jewish rejection of the new 'truth' and their role as the early enemies of the prophet. Nationalist bigotry against the nefarious mythical 'Jude' comes from the Jews' seemly inherent 'alien' and a-national nature and their again innate 'decadence'. The similarities are clear, but the differences are vital too. One can see many synthesis of these narratives and these accusations. The original examples of the Blood libels in the Islamic world conjoined Christian and Nationalist versions of Jew hatred with Koranic sectarianism. Codreanu's passionate hatred of the Jews came from both a Christian 'Christ-killer' perspective and a Nationalist 'Cancer' one.

The leftist (i.e. Liberal, Radical/Jacobin, Socialist, Anarchist, Bolshevik Communist, anti-Imperialist) form of anti-Semitism is based on two levels, economic and philosophic. Economically, the Jews' position within Islamic and Christian pre-industrial society as being barred from land ownership placed them outside the whole economic basis of society. The opening up and 'rationalisation' of the Professions in the 19th century further isolated prominent Jews from the 'moral' and good economy. Jew had, pre-industrialisation, became a catch-all for the 'usurer', the proto-capitalist, those not bound by the various forms of contractual and tradition that governed feudal economic and property. Further, as the feudal system became to croak under the strains, the vast expansion of litigation involved placed the Lawyer, the 'schister' as arbiter. Jews thus were doubly damned by social circumstances. They represented a violent innovation in economics and a caste now in command of the revolutionised means of legal restitution. The Jew, as a clinched villain and demon in theocratic vernacular, was now clad additionally in the clothes of the quintessential capitalist iconoclast. Judaism was depicted as a strategy of cabal-esque exploitation, one directed by the 'diabolical' Talmud against naive Gentiles.

This exploitative meme is key. Rather than corruption or heresy, exploitation, to the bigot, seemly inherent to their religion, culture and upbringing, was the Jew's crime. Like all capitalists, they were a-social, part of the parasites on the producers. But their 'innate' will to enslave their fellow man came, not from their class or from their individual 'inhumanity' but from their creed or 'race'. As an aside that I shall have to pick up on in another post, race in the 19th century was an extremely contested and ill-defined term. Race was a knot of various ideas about kinship, language, culture and descent, only given its 'modernist' meaning by quack genetics later in the century. But to return, exploitation, unwarranted profit and thus alienation and poverty to 'the hindmost' was part and parcel of the Jewish identity according to those 'foolish socialists' including Marx.

Thus branded with the stamp of inherent exploiters and apologists of the system, Jews were further marked by their commitment to their faith. By refusing to shake off their 'Talmudic Devilishness' upon emancipation and step out into the light of reason etc etc, Jews were further transformed into inherent enemies. This time not just of the working man, but of the march of progress itself. The fact that Jews had suffered years of violence and oppression from theocracy and belief made their continued attachment to their faith seem perverse. Jews, as followers of a ancient 'unenlightened' faith, like those uppity Hebs in seventh century Arabia or first century Judea, 'failed' to succumb to the inevitable. From a philosophical point, Jews, as Berman pointed out sometime ago, give utopias indigestion.

Take away this hatred, this concoction of lies, deceit, bigotry and hatred and the left is none the poorer. The game of much anti-Zionism, of the singular evil of Israeli nationalism, is not a mainstay, it is a growth, albeit one that feeds off many of the tenets of Socialism.

Update: BFB was kind enough to link to me along with this fine (and concise) piece.

http://contested-terrain.net/anti-racist-antisemitism-ii/

Fanon-ism is in many ways a updated, a-materialistic moral version of the philosophical element to Left a-s. I shall have to have a closer look and get back to you

The Mirage of Unity?

2009-06-15T00:35:00.002+01:00

Dave Osler has a wee bit of news.

http://www.davidosler.com/2009/06/swp_and_no2eu_prospects_for_le.html#comments

The SWPpies offer open palms to the menagerie of far left grouplets and seek unity/temporary alliance/cardboard front.....again. The proclaimed ignition is the BNP breakthrough, though I suspect the relative financial clout of the CPGB/SP/RMT hook up, the insultingly named No 2 EU, may have something to do with it. The SWP have been the forefront (or vanguard) far left group for much of my political life. Far better for the arch-entryists to get in now to any emergent organisation from the wreckage than be late for the bus.

Frankly, trusting the SWP CC is quite an audacious starting point. Their record on alliance building, fucking over 'fellow' socialists, passionately carnal about Islamists, Communitarians and corrupt Hypocrites, managing to drive a mass movement numbered in the millions into the dust in barely three years, is......erm......poor/fucking amazing. Yet with the deep desperation on the left over the future 'beyond Labour', however, they have been greeted fraternally.

These are a few ideas that will never ever be taken up, but I believe they might help avoid both the mistakes of shack ups past and offer a better run at a society and an electorate much changed since far leftist doctrine was anything other than ossified dogma.

1-Get a Name and stick with it. Brand recognition et al. Why should a movement that changes names more than it changes program be taken more seriously that the provisional Natural Law Party (Militant Yogic faction) or Witch Hunting God Botherers R Us. And try not to fall for some quasi-LOLz slogan. Just because its easy to text, don't make it any good. No 2 EU indeed.

2-Never mention Marx, Engels, Gramsci's breakfast or that mass murderer Lenin. Add to historical materialism or the classic critique, but merely mentioning the holy names long since past on is part secular magical litany part passive aggressive nonsense. There is a case for Socialism, let us and our words, not Charlie's, make it.

3-Make your program possible. Unless you can demonstrate how via real life political action, the cash nexus will disappear and thus make everybody both well fed, hooked up to broadband and Fishing Philsophers, why mention a pipe dream? There are thousands of possible small and inherently socialistic reforms and measures that can produce massive relief for the poorest and most vunerable in society. The 'Socialism of Small things' if you will; making sure that poor kids get a healthy school dinner, that local 'parish level' democracy has a real and meaningful say in planning issues or policing, providing first class in and out of job training. This connect our ideology of collective action and emancipation with the everyday and the urgent requirements of non-politicos.

4-Cost your policies. One might say 'but that's just playing the capitalist's game'. Well until some genius demonstrates how to get from here to free association, it is the game we have to play. Refried Bernstein, I know, but between the choice of doing something within the game or waiting all saintly on the sidelines of real politics and policy, the need for reform, relief and change is too desperate for 'objective conditions to align. Political action is limited by those factors, not precluded or inherent 'reactionary'. By demonstrating a costed set of policies, a workers' party demonstrates that it is serious in it's intent and it's will to carry them out. It would be a clear sign that it is not still a bunch of dreamers.

TINAs fuck me off no end, with their arrogant a-historic presumption that there can be no improvement. It is insulting to the potential of those unborn and their problems and solutions. However, one cannot ignore there is no socialist equivalent to the truely explosive power of the capitalist system (yet). By which I mean, a system of economics that can so effectively and rapidly respond to preceived need. On this matter, my problem with Capitalism is that its preception of need is linked to an insulting picture of human nature and thus devoid of a motive beyond elementary want. By putting forward a case for a human-centric management of capitalism and exploring and experimenting with ways to transcend it, a Workers' party would again demonstrate it is at 'peace' with today and looking forward to new solutions

5-Balance the budget. I have never understood why balancing the expenses of government with its revenues is somehow unsocialistic. In the spirit of the greatest economists to walk the earth, the countless mothers and housewives of the poor, counting every farthing and every ounce of bread, a socialist government needs to live within its means. As a party of the poorest, that means prioritising the policies that benefit those at the bottom over others. It is no cop out, rather a massive realignment within what we have. Again, if someone is keeping the secret of 5 percent growth outside the cash nexus and without the need for fiscal responsibility, please share and I shall welcome withdrawing this missive.

6-Decentralise, decentralise and just for the sheer fun, some more decentralisation. Labour lost its mandate from heaven' because it's centralised solutions were either clumsy, corrupt or aggravated the problem yet more. By making these things a local concern, the emphasise to solve solutions is placed at the foot of the citizenry themselves. No calls for five year plannage. The centre, more often than not, is blind and as a result arrogant and ignorant. If council or parish level democracy are left to find solutions, then those solutions can either remain particular or if they have the legs, general. Yet the responsibility is taken out of the hands of politicos and returned rightly to those who it effects most.

7-The flipside. Take constitutional reform seriously. If we have yet to find how to transcend the Liberal state in practical rather than wide eyed fantasy terms, then we can still make it live up to its promises. The Liberal state declares itself representative, humane, fair and responsive. Where it fails, a serious Socialist movement must, like the Chartists, seek to uphold it to its rhetoric. The failures might be systemic, but by providing socialistic answer, maximising citizen power, placing the state, even in legalistic terms at their behest. If the failures are truely systemic, then a socialist party passionate about the rights denied will again and again be proved right. If there is a possible evolutionary path, the same party is taking the first steps towards their telos. Rights are far to important to leave to the sons of de Robespierre, the black corps of Lawyers. Socialist rights now!

8-Change the rhetoric on class. The popular perception of class has evolved, almost into something unrecognisable. Yet within this new framework, there remains the possibility of communicating the very real nature of class struggle and conflict. Let's use it. Few areas of lift are so fused with class bitterness and division than the service industry, yet within it, the left can only use the old tired responses and thus has be near invisible. Ditch Proletariat, it means nothing today for the majority of the poor in the west. Ditch worker as well, as few of the poor are left in the traditional work place attached that label. Mockingly use the slave names given to those toilers in service, 'Server', 'Team member', 'Sales Executive', 'Account Manager', empty them of their nauseating faux unity. Make them into what they are, other words for Robota, the Drudge, the Serf renumerated to be dehumanised. This, the sheer atomisation, the stark alienation, the constant metaphorical spiting into the faces of the poor. What could be more 'energising'. More relevant than terms build along side HMS Dreadnought

There is a tagline to the original Clerks, 'Just because I serve you, doesn't mean I like you'. I don't propose a manifesto for rudeness. Rather a wider realisation of the nature of the service industry and indeed the cleaning industry, by both the servitors themselves and those they serve, mostly fellow Robota.

9-Tell the theocrats and sky pixie fetishists plus their corrupt enablers to fuck right off

10-Disband the SWP, have other groups bid for members who have been hard working clear headed comrades, send the rest to work in ASDA :)

Even if, and that is an if going on defo, I'm wrong on all counts, a practical, mature socialism, one that reacts to the conflicts of base and nature of superstructure on the poorest is needed. Weather this is another rectal roar form the SWPpies or the first steps in something important, we shall see. There is an urgent need

The Republic (eventually) reviews.....Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

2009-06-08T16:29:00.003+01:00

Before I start, I will warn youse. This is going to be over long. A breach of blogging rulez and such but bugger it

Liberal Fascism lays out its thesis into a highly contentious and contested arena. The nature of extremist politics, its dynamics and its causes, conceptions and its brutality have been a constantly urgent debate since the end of the First World War. Born from the Smolny Institute’s crowded offices and out of Mussolini's train carriage on its way to Rome, this debate has been underwritten by a multiplicity of ideas.

Goldberg enters thus a contested field where the debate has a history of its own. Whilst the lineage of the Bolsheviks and later the Communists as well as the non or part Marxist SRs had a clear and direct line to older forms of political ideology, fascism does not. Generic fascism has no great books (Mein Kampf was a vanity piece, much less read than displayed, as was For my Legionnaires). Its roots are syncretic, a true and faithful child of the intellectual melting pot of the fin de Siecle period. As the work of Juan Linz makes clear, Fascism in all its forms entered a crowded political and ideological space in Europe and beyond. It's status as a newcomer marked out its doctrine, its 'tone' and its opportunities for both political growth and ideological autonomy. These factors, the intense atmosphere of synthesis at it's birth and the existing state of the political and philosophical arena should be foremost on the mind of an good analyst on the genus.

As I have little in the way of expertise on American politics, I shall concentrate rather on his exploration of fascism as a genus and its historical manifestations, along with a few note on methodology and his historical model

I will be using the 2007 Penguin paperback edition for references

His definition is thus:- 'Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It take responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, weather by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy' (pg. 23). He then adds 'I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism'

His proposition is thus. Generic fascism is Statism with a leader cult that seeks a blanket uniformity of no particular orientation. He then highlights that Mussolini had been a leading light in the Italian Socialist movement and that Hitler had described his platform as Socialists and inherently anti-capitalist. Thus Fascism is left wing.
He quotes Roger Griffin, Roger Eatwell, Emilio Gentile and Ernst Nolte, all leading Historians and theorists on the nature of Fascism. It is thus very noticeable that his definition is entirely at odds with Griffin's palengentic ultra nationalism, Eatwell's holisitic national radical third way and Gentile's mass movement of national regeneration. He sums up his take as 'primarily a secular religion' (pg. 3). Note, no mention of nationalism as a political ideology. National is merely a contingent term within his definition.

This is hardly surprising. He quotes but does not engage with Stanley Payne, the leading anglophone expert of Generic fascism as Payne describes fascism as anti-Liberal, anti-Socialist and anti-Conservative, prefering to use the discredited Nolte's similar fascist minimum as straw man. All these scholars, people who have analysed thousands of pieces of primary evidence and know the history inside and out, are merely pandering 'convoluted' (pg. 3) models. Only Goldberg, and he find no academic to support his theory, sees clearly.

His 'minimum' fails on three grounds. Firstly, it does not realise the central nature of the nation to fascism. Without the nation, fascism has neither form nor substance. It becomes as he hypocritically laments, quoting Orwell, 'something undesirable' (pg. 4). Griffin, Eatwell, Gentile and Payne all believe (and have written masterful accounts to back up their claim) that fascism is concerned entirely with national rebirth and regeneration. Whilst the regenerative culturalist element is controversial amongst academics, particularly materialists, Nationalism's key place within fascist ideology is the only unifying element in serious work on the genus. Goldberg barely mentions it or the nationalist traditions within Italy and Germany (his two case studies).

The second failure comes from the real focus of his definition, Statism. He is determined to make fascism entirely a statist doctrine. Rather than their particular nations, fascists were thus solely focused on the 'a-national' state. State worship is in no way a particular mark of fascism as I have mentioned earlier here.

http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/04/making-italians.html

Neither, just as importantly, is it purely 'left' wing. Again, I have mentioned this before on both this blog and in comments on others. That Statism is the use of the modern state to affect political and social change, generally supported by rhetoric reasoning why this is necessary and indeed virtuous, is my 'maximalist' definition. The state is a entity that is implicitly well placed to achieve and pursue ideological goals. This 'promise' has been taken up by groups and 'actors' from across any meaningful political spectrum.

The founder of the modern welfare state, a form of 'Staatsocialismus', informed by teleological ideologies. - Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg, Prince of Bismarck, (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898). This rabid 'left' 'winger' of repute installed the world's first state sponsored workers' insurance schemes, under the banner of 'Practical Christianity'. He, like Hitler, suppressed his 'fellow' 'left' 'wingers'. Is Bismarck the world greatest socialist sleeper agent? No, rather he was a conservative, deeply committed to the stability of the core elements of the Imperial throne. He thus used the state to co-opt the burgeoning and increasingly militant working class and to propose an explicitly anti-'creative destruction' form of social stability, a modernist paternalism, if you will. A form of Conservative social contract

Wilhelm the Second of Germany believed that Petr Stoylpin was an even greater leader than Bismarck, much to the chagrin of 'little Nicky'. Under Goldberg's interpretation, we can only see this as a 'far' 'left' talent spotter picking another possible. Stoylpin's conservative reforms were meant to allow the Autocracy to survive in the modern age, to protect his quasi-imbecile monarch from the onrushing challenges of the 20th century. In much conservative intellectual history, Stoylpin is the man who could have averted the Bloody revolution and brought Russia though until he was gunned down in a theatre by a 'intellectual' assassin. He planned to do this by increasing the range of state led welfare beyond Bismarck's model, including a whole raft of factory acts and new government bodies and overseeing the biggest property transfer outside of a revolution, his solution to the land question. He too framed his schema as enlightened autocracy. Is this now a 'left' 'wing' phenomena.

Lest we forget, the great model for Lenin, Stalin and indeed Hitler's command economies. It's another German who would perch on top of it, but not from Trier. Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was to graze down on a vast state which ran everything from food supplies, industrial organisation and ownership, the Press, the Judiciary and would impose virtually slave labour conditions on millions of Poles and Slavs. This is the birth of the total state, a grand experiment in state power and reach.

While I've heard cases made why the authoritarian dictatorships of central and eastern Europe during the thirties were fascist, I have yet to hear one made that Carol II, Eldest son of Ferdinand I, King of Romania, and his wife, Queen Marie, a daughter of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second eldest son of Queen Victoria was a socialist. He carried out a parliamentary coup, making the Arch-Patriarch, Prime Minister, he created a single political party, The National Renaissance Front, and banned the largest anti-government movement, a 'fellow' 'left' 'wing' organisation called the Iron Guard. He had a compulsory youth movement to commemorate him and ceded power to various (dare I say, right) radicals to pursue anti-Semitic policies. His 'socialism', his conservative statism was seek the seemly effervescent nature of the fascist and National Socialist regimes (ignoring the bodies underneath, although Carol had one or two of his own) and thus transport Romania beyond a threatening future. For him and his in-house ideologues, only by using totalitarian tools could they 'conserve', only by state action, on a massive and unprecedented size, could Romania's 'essence' be preserved.

We see these tactics and political strategies as well as the rhetoric in Franco's Spain, the 'Estado Nuvo' of Salazar, Alexander of Yugoslavia's dictatorship, the twenty five year reign of the landlocked Admiral Horthy, even the empty hot air spouted by the ROI. This conservative statism was experimental in it's totalitarian sense and as brutal and intrusive as anything perpetrated by the Italian fascists or the Kun regime. Micro-management of morality, both public and private via censorship and political persecution was a common aim of these regimes as they 'nurtured' their ideological well spring.

'Innovations' in state function and the extension of its power and reach are long standing Conservative accomplishments. Pitt's abandonment of Habeas Corpus and the introduction of an income tax are surely right wing 'innovations' as are the forced purchase of the Suez canal by the Disraeli government or the prestigious use of force and provocation by local and federal government in industrial relationships in 19th century America. Consider who was pushing All the vices of statism were used by these regimes in order to preserve stability and protect an particular essence, a basic precept of the right.

The third error is remove Fascism from its time, culturally, materially and ideologically. Rather Goldberg places property and religion as markers, not nationalism, not the inter-war period and the circumstances of the period on the movement today, not its rhetoric, not its self conception. In making fascism a perfectly a-historical label, he is doing exactly what those on the left who he rightly condemns are doing. It is with the oft hand remarks of George Carlin that he does battle and with then his own cathartic take. Fascism is your particular bete noire, the anus of ideology. He can, as it is pre-moulded, apply it to the Social Liberalism of 20th century America and go 'There! Told you'. Frankly, does this make it fascistic to be concerned with public health, or as he mentions as proof of the Nazis' inherent 'left' 'winginess', 'the abolition of child labor (sic)' (pg. 69). He has accidentally bundled onto a truth and mistaken it for a weapon.

Frankly, by making his definition both insipidly bland and just honed enough to catch up 'em lib'rahs, he is being functionally mendacious. State solutions, i.e. using the state for political goals, for experimentation and doing so for an ideological reason are not part of a wing of the political spectrum. Rather they belong to the modern age. This is certainly not to say as such, I find statism somehow 'progressive' in itself. Rather like Modernity and indeed Modernism, it is a Janus faced creature. This modern and visionaire Leviathan is a dazzling repository of power and for those who sought, and continue to seek, political action a siren-like temptation and a stringent panacea.

So we are left with a definition that fails to identify the centre of generic fascism, that makes fascism a sculpted husk and plonks it on the mantle of Social Liberalism.

His case studies of Mussolini and Hitler are lazy. With quite a will, he fails to either come to terms with the time and place nor the political cultures and circumstances at the time. By concentrating on the major figures (neo-big man theory), he removes much of the complexities within Fascism and National Socialism.

In the Italian case, he mentioned the fact that Mussolini, as a socialist agitator and leading ideologue of the party was very well read and had a remarkable recall for leftist writings. He notes that he read Nietzsche, Sorel and Schopenhauer (pg. 34) thus he was inevitably left wing. Schopenhauer, who might be called a father to modern conservatism, Sorel, a thinker who was feted from across the political spectrum and Frederick Nietzsche might have been found on many a conservative or right radical's bedside table. Charles Maurras, the leader of a crypto-Monarchist Jew baiting organisation dedicated to preserving France was a fan of both of these writers. If Maurras is a father of modern Social Liberalism, and not of organic nationalism or proto-fascism, then make the case without exception. You must explain the universal and the particular and where they met

Whilst Goldberg never mentions Papini or the ANI or Corrandini or Voce or D'Annunzio , he concentrates on Sorel's syndicalism....badly. Syndicalism is, according to Goldberg, essential for fascism. Thus one must argue, where are the Hungarian, German and Romania syndicalists? There were none and no reason given for these unique ideological roots of the Italian case. The quote he give from Joshua Maravchik raise yet more conflicts. Syndicalism is a socialism that is 'simultaneously elitist and anti-statist' (Pg. 36). Yes, anti-statists gave birth to a state worshiping ideology.

He then mutters about Sorel. Sorel's social scission, Goldberg's key totem, was not purely about left wing revolutions, rather it was an analytical tools to understand and thus implement mobilising myth. Sorel's case was based on looking at the early Church and its use of myth and struggle and although he was a believer in proletariat revolution, he sought that to rupture and destroy what he conceived of a decadent and weak LIBERAL France, one created by Jacobins and proto-social Liberals. Goldberg uses an example, the use of the Tawana Brawley fake to create social scission by Black leaders (Pg. 37), but fails to use the literally hundreds of similar cases from various political traditions of social scission, the Southern Strategy of Nixonland or the Bismarckean Kulturkampf or even the Dolschstosslegende used by the NVP and the Vaterland Party before the founding of the DAP. He is constantly confusing the universal with particular, barely able to conceive of a comparative case if it dropped in his oatsmeal.

He then produces one of the soiled gems of the piece. 'The French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi and Russian Communist revolutions' (pg. 38). Now there is a relationship between totalitarianism and the 'Divine Republic' but not one as clear cut as he pronounces and filled with far more subtleties and nuances make his analysis seem quite idiotic. Whilst there is a clear lineage between the architects of the 10 August revolution and those a hundred and twenty five years later, the fascists and the great revolution have barely 'seen eye to eye'. More here

http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/02/tennis-courts-say-much.html

Generic Fascism loathed and still loathes the traditions of Liberal, Radical and Socialist narrative that sprung from the Great Revolution. He produces this to link Sorel and thus Mussolini to Rousseau, now the father figure of all the twentieth century's horrors in rightest historical imagination. I will only add briefly that this centrality of Rousseau given to the actions of the 'Divine Republic' is rarely put to bed, Rousseau was very popular but for Emile and his work on education rather then the Social Contract. Whilst he made a been one of the ideological forebears of the revolution, he shares this with other figures, closer to Goldberg's own ideological front door step. Locke, Smith and de Montesquieu are mentioned more in the debates of the Convention and in the letters of even the top of the Montagne (Gould)

He weaves his pygmy version of a 'political religion' take on fascism into Rousseau's 'civil religion'. Again he fails to notice the case that could be made that American Nationalism created a civil religion around the political system and the nation in the late 19th century. If civil religions are so hideous, then surely forcing the oath of allegiance on minors unable to sign legal contracts and the sacralising of the founding fathers is Goldberg's next target.

Fascism, as a syncretic movement, had been applauded by the pacifism of the wider Italian Socialist movement during the intervention crisis and indeed during the first decade of the century. Mussolini found himself outside the Bernsteinian reformists, the Kautsky-ie traditionalists, the Luxembourg-ist and Leninist parts of the 2I and the Austro-Marxists. For all his Leninist like volunteerism, Mussolini could not continue to understand Lenin's internationalism. He was a revolutionary who no longer believed in his cause. In the myth of the cleansing war and the struggles over Italian nationality in Austrian Tyrol and the Intervention crisis, he found his revolution. A revolution and a telos now transformed from the Social Republics or Workers States of Socialism at the time.

Italianism gave him another narrative, one that both appealed to his conceptions of Italy, Historical direction and his own role. He became the propheta and leader for a new Italy. The revolution was not emanciptory, it was transformative. Italy could become the modernist nation par excellent, revitalising its essential nature. Mussolini thought the modern form of nationhood made Socialism impossible and he thought the social Liberalism of Giolitti corrupting and poisonous. His cultural pessimism, his love of Nietszchean distain for the 'Age of Progress' brought him towards a regenerative conception of society. Given his own quasi-poetic depiction of the power of war and struggle to transform, it was redemptive too. And I would argue, using any meaningful definition, right wing.

Goldberg's work on Hitler is also quite breathtaking. He notes neither the influence of that renown and highly regarded bastion of the revolutionary movement , the German High Command or its creation, the Vaterland Partei, on the early DAP/NSDAP. Hitler early political role wasn't primarily to monitor the politics of the troops in 1918/19 for 'dangerous ideas' (pg. 67), rather he was meant to push the dolschstosslengende and reclaim the troops from revolutionary ideas as a public speaker. Drexler's party was merely one group of disperate and marginal figures who came from across the political spectrum, one Hitler belived he could dominate and then transform. As Goldberg's Hitler existed in a vacuum, he fails to note that a 'national' socialist party existed at the time as well as an internationalist one.

The SPD had been a loyal crutch of support to the Imperial German throne thoughout the wars (Ebert had lost two sons) and would expel its internationalist fringe by 1916. It then thundered against the inequities of the Versallies treaty and directed the Freikorps against the early KPD and Polish nationalists. Much SPD invective during the revolutionary period had been filled with nationalist rhetoric, bordering on anti-Slav in opposition to ‘Muscovite’ Bolshevikism. As Hobsbawm notes, one of the most ‘terrible’ cruelties committed by the conservatives onto a SPD member was to question their loyalty to Germany. It was, if one is merely using national socialist as a conglomerate term, a national socialist party. If the Nazis were merely offering a patriotic form of Socialism, how would they be different to the SPD? They were and marked the gulf in blood.

Goldberg highlights the young Hitler's admiration for the Christain Social Party of Fin de Siecle Vienna. Because Franz Josep annuled the election of its leader , Karl Lueger, twice, it must thus be a left wing varient of Popularism. If it was, it also had the backing of the Austrian Church and much of the Christian ruling classes of the city and elsewhere. Odd left wing, you've got there, Jonah.

National Socialism was a nationalism that based its nation worship of pseud race 'science' and on a myhtical unity that it sought to return to or recreate in a modern environment. The socialist in the equation was to simultaneously drive out the atomising, anomic a-social effects of oure capitalism and to destroy the base of class interest and self-preception for a 'classless' neeclass stable society. That type of socialism is in no way leftist, rather it is of the tradition of statsocialismus, socialism as cementing social stability and unity via state action and the destruction of organisations built for class struggle.

Yet National Socialism grew into a pre-formed political space. Its anti-Semitism had been largely made mainstream by much of the political right in the last twenty years of Imperial Germany and when challenged by the Nazis' rhetoric to go further, they did so. The Conservative Revolution of Junger, Jung, Spengler and Schmitt developed a series of ideas, paralel to the Nazis about social trasformation via totalitarian tools, extreme militarism and 'cleansing'. Theirs was a totalising movement based not on the re-creating mission of the fascist but the conservative regenerative one. By seeking to co-opt the power of the Nazi Party State, they planned to bring about a society which both conserved its 'eternal' being whilst modernity-proofing it. These were the bright young things of the German right, the William Buckleys' of their day, if you will forgive me the mischief. They were dedicated to the possibilities of the totalitarian experiment, as surely as any fascist or Bolshevik ever was.

Goldberg's model is severely flawed by the assumption that the right has always and forever consisted solely of small government conservatives and the left, statist 'librahs' and socialists. This might have a limited truth to it in the case of late twentieth century America (that binary of Conservative/Liberal is still pretty reductive even then), it fails anywhere else. Fascism took the terminlogy and narratives of Socialism (like Bismarck or Chamberlain or Disraeli or Stolypin) and used them to seek a legitimacy amongst those at the bottom of society as well as giving a economic template to their essential cultural struggle. Anti-Capitalism (as in unfettered markets and Manchesterismus) is as much a part of Metternich or Maurras or Spengler or Dollfuss as it is with Marx or Debs or Bakunin. It has never been an eternal of the left right dichotomy, regardless of the lazy generalisation of polemists of either aisle. We can add Goldberg to that list

Fascists believed society, under the influence of Liberal policy and socialist agitation, was becoming socially dividing and morally decadent; it was reaching a nadir. They sought revolutionary rather than 'evolutionary' means to regenerate this fallen state. But how exactly is this cultural pessimism and wish to act politicaly different that much of the right from the last two hundred years. This dreamers of the day went outside the traditional right because they thought traditional conservatism and radicalism had failed or would fail the challenge of Marxist or Trade Union Socialism and had accomadated the worst 'atomising' aspect of Liberalism. Fascists might well term Conservatives CINOs for all the conserving they had done.

The undoubted 'futurismo' of Fascism was essentially to destroy the crumbling political and social traditions that had not only failed to surmount the storm of modernity but betrayed the national essense and unity by coming to terms with atomising 'cosmopolitan' capitalism, It is noticably that after the elite coup against Mussolini in 1943 and the establishment of the Italian Social Republic (the total neagtion of all the words 'Social Republic' stands for), the rhetoric became hysterical anti-Conservative as well as anti-Communist and anti-Semitic.

The first Fascist state was still a monarchical society, one where many of the major levers of power were held by monarchic conservatives and traditional 'Savoyean' nationalists. It was in alliance that the Fascists ruled Italy, an alliance of both tactics and a shared conception, a shared frame of narrative and fears. The technocrats of the ANI and the modernisers around the throne saw in the fascist project, an opportunity to 'rearm' and reforge Italy for the modern age. Between the fascists and the right was a constant struggle, but one limited to the means and priorities of national regeneration. In Romania, in Hungary, in Austria, Spain, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, the Baltic States, Finland, Portugal as well as Germany and Italy, many Conservatives aligned with the fascist program of social transformation. They offering funds, electoral pacts, government jobs and protection, favourable media coverage and spoke out for political prisoners of the fascist movements and praised their martyrs. These alliances were fractious and at times violent, but in aisle

By no means is the conservative tradition inseparable from those of the ultra-nationalists. Conservatives and Fascist are not the same thing. They have clear differences, clear tensions, post 1945, they had clear memories of mutual bloodletting to send them separate ways. Yet, Conservatism and Fascism, as well as Right Radicals, Corporatists, Neo-traditionalists, Neo-Liberals, Libertarians, one can see a regenerative and re-creating impulse:- Political action as a method of retooling the essential nature of each society to overcome social change.

I am a Socialist, though quite a weird one. I believe in the myth of progress, I believe in progressing emancipation. I hold little regard to much of the institutions and systems of today apart from they normally work better than much of what came before. I don't see this as a reason to hold these things as sacrosanct. I share these broad opinions with the worst monsters in history. This is not a moral point I'm trying to make. Rather extremist politics, the type gleefully willing to take life for the greater good or some other abstract babble exists throughout the political spectrum. Every political tradition that deals seriously with power has the possibility of that bloodletting. One of the most depressing instances is the continued state of denial over the true horror of the Leninist system of governance on the Left. One motif is, of course, that the Soviet Union was state capitalist aka a right wing phenomena with nothing at all to do with Socialism.

Disgusting.

A rubbish book

If you think I'm being unfair or complete wrong headed, please bring them up in the comments

The Devilish Travails and Conflicts of the Gentleman Fellow Traveller by JR von Hartley

2009-06-08T11:46:00.004+01:00

Hoorah! Hail! Huzzah! The decadents are trampled, by that somewhat ambivalent innovation, the ballot box, no less. They who so ruthlessly bound the toilers and their literate betters from the holy language of Mr Men-esque 'difference' like taff, scottie, paki, nig-nog, shit-stabber and the merry like. They who did pollute this green (white) and pleasant volk. If only the tramplers looked good in a suit and had nice pedigrees. Such sons of council estate (and minor grammar school) soil are lacking in basic command, of both the Queen's English and over their baser instincts, but never mind.

Their policies, well, they are a mixed bag. Lets forget all this staatsocialismus, your forebears did, in a jolly instances too. On the 'other' problem, your solution merely sounds too drastic. No need to say expulsion, rather control. Cohesion, after all, is our bread and butter, saving the gemienschaft from coyly unspecified threats, though amply hinted at. So as much as we share with those national internationalist socialist socialist beating liberal liberal hating truth tellers, we cannot abide by their directness or even their clumsy untempered attempts to be subtle. One must have be more practiced in euphemising. Indigenous is good but how about 'Good hearted', 'hard working', 'success seeking', 'non-moaning', 'law abiding', John Bull in a Mondeo.

Islam. That is the key. Everything, every particle in the cosmos, every thought in every head comes down to the Mahometodanns. They hate everything that makes us great,

our personal freedoms (though they are right about the puerile promiscuity of the slags and the drunken louts plus the Sodomites, the sheer decadence of it all),

our democracy (although one has to admire the ruthlessness that they crush your fellow non-national double plus internationalist Socialists and Liberals, a possible lesson to be learn with regards to techniques),

our freedom of expression (though I would gladly place many a loud mouth in the stocks, or whatever passes these days, note to self-see what ISI are using)

our respect for women (even the ones who virtually invite rape and then run oft giggling to the abortionist, another one who deserves some jihad, I grant you)

our respect for religion (given the supreme truth of the the Christian Church.....no....not that one, full of paedos and one worldist scum....the other one)

So, as a fellow fellow after a pure and wholesome land, filled with the laughter of innocence 'hard working, common sense' children, lets us rightly rejoice in your historic victory and please don't be alarmed if you should find my light fingers in your rhetoric bag. It is the warm hearted fraternity of the national internationalist socialist socialist beating liberal liberal hating truth tellers with us humble common sensers, pessimists of the world unite and dissemble.

ps. NEVER SPEAK OF THIS IN PUBLIC

Bloody Hell

2009-06-03T03:40:00.001+01:00

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1087976.html

Hat tip - Judy over at HP

An idea.......

2009-05-26T05:34:00.002+01:00

As I'm sure you know, over at Sainted Norm's, there is a regular feature where various bloggers answer questions and do a bit of promo. The fine fellow Mod had one recently

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/05/the-normblog-profile-296-modernity.html

Whilst I've enjoyed the series, I always pondered what a lot of the non-blogging commentators (Commenters?, Commeters?) might answer to a similar list. They, who unlike the great unwashed masses of the bloggeratii, have real jobs to go to and social activities to attend but still, they are as much a part of this as the bloggers themselves. I think it would be fun, interesting and a very easy for me to fill blog space to do a series on such fine people's answers. Though I may disagree violently with them and there are many of who I have insulted and libelled over the years but always (and not always) in the best of spirits, all are welcome. Those with blogs, if a particular commentatorat is worthy, then please forward them.

Speculative questions (after a self composed summary) and my own starters for ten

Why do you comment?

Preening self-regard for my own opinion, really. And cos I think I'm funny

Where?

HP, Shiraz, Crooked Timber, Tendance, Modblog, Cafe Turco, Dave's Part

Who are those commentators you always enjoy reading?

Metta from HP, a wit, an intellect and a dispositories of many an amazing story

Which was the best thread you took part in?

At HP, a thread about the BPA, never laughed so much on a blog

Are blogs important and why?

A forum in its classic sense is vital, essentially as tradition forms of it seemed to doomed to demise or depolitisation. Good blogs educate by both their own content as well as the subsequent debate on top of being an arena for polemic, screed and heavy heavy sarcasm

Which rhetorical device in argument do you hate the mostest?

Essentialism, though clumsy whatabouttery comes a close second

Long post Bad, Short post Good?

A long post has to be good, the patience of the reader must be rewarded

Policy on trolls?

Ignore once you realise they are beyond arguing. They have literally nothing to say anyway

Policy on Benjy?

Listen on China, fuck off on all else

Have you ever been banned from a site and why?

Not yet

Greatest evil facing humanity and greatest humanity facing evil?

Utopia as a destination rather then a unreachable goal and the women fighting for their rights in Afghanistan

Best novel ever?

Cancer Ward

Best documentary ever?

Confessions of a Superhero, beautiful

Worst song ever inflicted onto air and human ears

California Love by Tupak

If you had to give a political label to yourself, what would it be? (clumsy mash-ups of terminlogy welcome)

Larkin cum Herzen

So Hasan Pristina, Metta, Israelinurse, Sue R, John Palmer, John Meredith, John P, Richard Harris, OP, Alcuin, Jako, Alan Ji, Graham, Nick (Ex-SA), YossiUk, Josh Scholar, Dan, various Marks, Shmuel, Fabian, even Flanker and NO. Come along fellows

A gem

2009-05-15T07:48:00.001+01:00

'Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle' - Solzhenitsyn

The Republic does Weber - An ideal type for....Socialism

2009-05-08T08:31:00.011+01:00

Conservatism here:- http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2008/07/conservatism-mit-added-weber.html

Libertarianism here:- http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/05/republic-does-weber-ideal-type.html

Before I start, there are a few housekeeping issues. Unlike Conservatism that has a fairly clear starting point (Between Burke's reflections and the Peel ministry), Socialism might well be seen as an eternal. Were the agitators for the Roman agrarian laws not socialistic or the Peasant revolt or the Levellers or Diggers? Was Babuef and the Equals not socialist before it had a name? I would say that the Socialism that gave birth to Social democracy, Bolshevik Communism, New Left, the Third way etc is a modern phenomena i.e. a child of the Liberal struggle and victory over the feudal state and 'old corruption'.

Before 1830, 'Levelling' had merely contingent forms, no continuity of ideological tradition, it was the initial gut reaction, the social urge for relief from poverty and powerlessness. After 1830, Socialism increasingly became a evolving and independent movement of ideas. It exists only as modern capitalism began to revolutionise human life. It is born of the age of the railroads and steam and the pressure therein.

'An attempt to seek human emancipation from oppression of hierarchy and capital via collective action of those at the bottom of society and to transcend Liberal societies with a utopia of collective ownership and mass political action'

Let the unpacking commence

'An attempt to seek human emancipation....' - Emancipation is key to Socialism. Socialism conceives the current human condition as one bound by chains. The nature of these chains is variable and particular but the general concept holds. Thus Socialists seek a redemptive breaking of these bounds and to begin again human society without the weight of these restraints.

Here we meet the first fallacy, that human society has a binary oppressed/free nature and there will (inevitably) be a dawn when it switches. This is very bad sociology and meaningless anthropology. Human societies do not have oppression externally thrust upon them, rather they create their norms and structures. These are a negotiation with their past state, contingency and the agency of the individuals involved. As a Socialist, I have ideas around these impasse, but they are for elsewhere. I am seeking the contradictions, not solving them.

'...from oppression of hierarchy and capital...' - Here is the generalised nature of the 'chains'. The Socialist movement were born into a world where the struggle with the old estate society and Liberalism was still ongoing.

The Socialist conception of oppression has a dual nature. The first is that passed down by Liberal radicalism, that of a ruling elite of non-producers, a despotic and tyrannical parasitic group. This 'old corruption' of worthless Barons and Dukes represented a plain and blatant inequality in wealth buttressed by political power. Their wealth was 'excessive', 'amoral', glorified thievery. This and their power over the political system were seen as a repugnant imposition. Socialists took this critique and made it their own. Power via wealth was an a-social evil, it denied those without it their humanity. It is thus no surprise that Socialists were at the forefront of the battle over legal and political equality

Socialism then swung the charge back at Liberalism and revolutionary Capitalism. They accused these 'innovators' of replacing a hierarchy of birth and privilege with one of wealth and luck, where success was due to the ruthlessness that one might render your fellow man. Liberalism, by such a switch, was a ideology of hypocrisy, seeking a formal equality whilst desperately undermining it, again omitting the poor majority. Capital raised up a new power, one just a determined to extract the labour of the have-nots for as little as it could get away with.

It should be noted that over the nature of the capitalist revolution, there is a considerable divide in opinion within Socialism. The modern industrial society was considered the devil by some Owenites and the Mutualists, whilst the Saint Simonists and the Marxists were enraptured by its dynamism and power. This divide continues today (I, myself, am in awe of the industrial revolution)

I will also add that after the mid 19th century, the old radical conception of hierarchy had little to say beyond providing a vocabulary of demonologies to be cast at the 'assuming men' of the rising bourgeoisie and their nouveau riche usurpations. Where such autocracy remained, it placed Socialists with a uncomfortable choice. How, in the age of steam and steal and Vanderbilts and Standards Oils, could Tsars and Kaisers anointed by God and hordes of Boyers and Ritters survive. Some Marxists adapted their analysis to lengthen the historical process of Bourgeois-ification, to await the finality of a French style Liberal revolution (Mensheviks, Ebertian Reformists, Labour Socialism). Others saw an opportunity, where willed political action could force society past both feudal and capitalist stages. This essentially Nihilist outlook provided the left with a program of romantic heroism, social scission, action and making history. It burnt out humanism and left pity for a never never time, literally for the utopia.

Surely the deviances from a model are a chance to re-examine, find the limits and to think anew. For years, much of Socialist dogma has seemly failed to come to terms with the world today. Only by monkish retreat ala SPGB or by seeking bloody leaps could the gap be surmounted. Between the Ostrich and the Piranha....

'...via collective action...' - Socialists hold a basically Aristotelian view of man as an inherently political and social animal. Only by combination with others could change be both effective and virtuous. The manner of this collective or combination is again particular. It is argued that the Vanguard is collective, which is true in its widest and most meaningless sense. Most Socialists however would see collective action as internally democratic (again a contentious debated term) and externally united. Here we see the possibilities and all too common pitfalls/dangers of the interaction between a individual and the collective. An ethics of collectives awaits its author, methinks.

'...of those at the bottom of society...' - Socialism conceives of itself as a movement of the poor (how poor and what the word means is again a deeply contested point). The poor are denied political power by hierarchy and exploited and made robota by capital, thus the poor have no material interest in the chains on human society. Here, yet again, we swim in a sea of arguable terms. At base, the Socialist lies between idealism (the possibility and promise of change and the utopia to come) and materialism (the nature of poverty). The poor have been reluctant numerous times to push too hard for material benefits or at all for a new world. There is thus a conflict between the ideal and the material at the heart of Socialism that is rarely addressed. Further Socialism still has not be able to conceive convincingly of why the poor are so 'unreliable'.

Asking why this reluctance, when Socialists can only promise the moon and not a extra slice of bread is vital, no matter how painful.

The nature of class, which has numerous concoctions across the genus, also raised a series of dilemmas. Is the movement to be shorn of all of the not poor enoughs? Is the aim to merely put the poor in the place of the Barons and the 'Innovators', swapping tyranny for tyranny? Or is the concept of class the enemy itself, to be subsumed and made meaningless? This central problem has been addressed by a consensus within the tradition is lacking. Socialism might well be inherently schismatic.

And what to do, post class, with those who were one the powerful. Lampposts? Camps for their re-education and 'reforging'? Plain murder or systemic neglect and prejudice? Again space thus exists within the ideology for a manichean division, the terms of which have degenerated at times to 'sins of the father' or even race. Again, are the poor to mimic the fury of those 16th century Ritters flogging and torturing peasants or make calls for capitalist politics a capital crime in tribute to Robespierre and the Agrarian Law?

'...and to transcend Liberal societies...' - While Marx placed political change within a Hegelian dialectic mechanism, as mentioned, all Socialists sought to overcome the Liberal state of the 19th century. What was involved in that transcendence, what would by part of the coming synthesis and what would be discarded are again a source of either intense debate or icy silence. The lack of, heaven forbid, an ethical and constitutional program for a post Liberal world and how to get there created the space for the . The one binding hope, or myth if you wish, of the various canons of Socialism is that there is better than the Liberal society and state. There can be. Something more just and more humane. That dream is not just possibly but inevitable. It is up to Socialists to conjure it, to argue for it and to make it more humane and more just.

'...with a utopia...' - There is a defence for having a utopian vision. It means excepting that you will never, can never and should never get there. The journey must be contested every day but arrival at perfection is disappointing for the believer and an unending horror for even the uncommitted. Revolutionary change is still inches, tiny incremental steps that can be undone in minutes. Utopia is the secular version of heaven, albeit one we'll never get to for being good girls and boys. It is the hope that endures because it is unattainable. It should guide us without ever letting us assume it is around the corner. In cloying cliche, it is the journey, never the destination.

'....of collective ownership...' - Does collective mean state controlled, worker control, simple free controlled by part time weaver/philosopher/fishermen? Again, whilst collective ownership is a mainstay of the Socialist tenet, its specifics are so tantalisingly vague. What are the limits of ownership? Merely commanding heights or every penny, kopeck and smear of butter? How are things like investment, innovation, management, purchase to be solved. Like it or not, the cash nexus is remarkably efficient at purchase and investment. Innovation, especially with attending high capital costs cannot to be relied apon to spring fully formed from Garden sheds.

The state is, in the kindest of lights, an imperfect and unresponsive manager of anything. Whilst it excels at somethings, one can hardy place the command economies of the Bolshevik states as more efficient in the Fabian sense that those of capitalist societies, in either material or human terms. Socialism's conception of the state and of the very nature of ownership need to move way beyond the statism paradigms of Beverage, FDR, War communism and x year plans.

'...And mass political action...' - Here Socialism has to face the abuse of the term democracy by many of its thinkers and activists. Mass political action could well mean a boisterous level of community democracy, where citizens seek through debate and experimentation to bring change and solutions to their lives. Or it could mean a host of un-speaking extras in a Potemkin civil society, responding pavlov-like to the glorious announcements of the great leader, or the dictates of the dialecticians, extras in their own lives and societies, without even an equity wage to thank them. Such disgusting treatment to the populace, as mass tools for a mass age, as fodder to be feed into the ongoing cogs of whatever transformation is 'progressive' is still mass political action. And it is the wider cancer of a Socialist state with the humanity boiled out of it. Our ideology promises better and should be able to deliver.

It is time for Socialists to stop dreaming or doing for the sake of doing and romantic days on the barricades.

Again, this is discursive, comments welcome and as you can probably tell from the rambling tone, needed. Next, I'll chance my arm at Liberalism

No, No, No.....My sky pixie is much better than yours

2009-05-07T21:15:00.005+01:00

One of the standards in debates over religion and Islam in particular is the connection between dogma and the actions of the acolytes. If religion A extols 'bad things' and then acolytes of A do 'bad things', the relationship is clear enough. Thus the brutally sectarian verses in the Koran are thus intrinsically linked to suicide bombers on London buses or Taliban theocrats throwing acid into the face of Afghan school girls.

Conversely, this argument holds, if religion B extols 'good things' and limits 'bad things' to acts of the deity themselves or via proxy, when acolytes of B who do bad things are in schism or heretical. Thus A is irredeemably foul and B is the source of light in the world.

This is bullshit

I have read this argument trotted out by Christians and especially Catholics to separate their delusion of a great peeping tom in the sky from that of Muslims. Their prophet is not only a great clean cut all round good guy, but the SON OF GOD too. Mohammad was a genocidal paedo-bandit instead and could not possibly have been given any divine wisdom at all, ever. So there.....

Thus their delusion is clean and all suited to the modern world and Islam is inevitably backwards. Again this is bullshit

But what Christians who enter into this argument and their agnostic kulkur loving fellow travellers forget is this. The link between dogma and action is not so reductionist and that 'actual existing' Christianity, by their slight of hand, was for virtual all of its history, heretical.

The butchery of dissenting sects or rivals for the mantle of Imperial monopoly might well have been at odds with the teachings of Christ, but without them, would there be a christian faith? The complicity with wealth and power and the bitter sweet sops to slaves and the hungry might made a mockery of the Messiah's fetish for poverty, but how else might the 'word' be spread. Christianity as a phenomena was spread as much by its willingness to sanctify the politik and meet with elites on their terms as any intrinsic 'transcendence' in its doctrines. And all this compromise was still to be regarded as following that simple carpenter from Galilee

Did the Knights Orders realise their heretical nature as they cleaved infidel flesh from unbelieving bone? Did Inquisitors understand they were not actual Christians as they burn away Jewish sins and trespasses? Did Luther comprehend that he was in schism from Christ when he called for God's vengeance and subsequent agony to fall on humble peasant rebels? Of course not. They believed, they interpreted and they acted. The centre of this was their own agency and the social situation in which they inflicted pain for the Lord. Doctrine gave them enough clauses and leeway to carry out what they considered was right.

It was pressure from a changed society, from the laity and an increasing secularised world that forced, and it was forced, bitching and whining, Christianity to stop excusing such brutality. Still, we continue to find plenty of examples where 'heretics' can hack away for the light of the world. Codreanu or Miroslav Filipović believed they were doing God's work, so did Joseph Kony or Paul Jennings Hill, just as much as al-Zawahiri or Ismail Haniyeh believe they are doing that of Allah. Weather or not they are doctrinally true to their creed is immaterial, literally. It is to engage in the respective merits of delusions. It is to excuse them the responsibility. It is the theological equivalence of ' I was only following orders', weather or not that is true is beside the point and a mockery of meaningful justice.

If the outcome of religion A and B is the same, mass inhumanity at times of social stress, sandwiched between periods of sanctified bigotry, then the fairy tales themselves are a matter for footnotes. If religion B suddenly finds it cannot get away with such outrages due to outside conditions and pressures and cleans up its act, returns to the narrative, redefines itself a bit, then well done. But forgive me if i don't forget what it took to get it here, that this fairy tale still can kill and that one cannot claim moral superiority over such begrudging transformation.

The Republic does Weber - An ideal type for....Libertarianism

2009-05-07T01:40:00.003+01:00

'Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your pick' Ayn Rand

When I began this blog, I had an idea for an ongoing series of posts looking at political ideologies and trying to present speculative and discursive ideal types for each of them. I am a fan of the ideal type, considering its heuristic use and its conciseness. And given the contested nature of the terminology of politics, I believe that giving clear but reflective meanings to such terms allow debate to move on. Thus we can see the continuities of such ideas over history and thus their essence and just as importantly, see the breaks, the changes, the evolution of ideas.

Part 1 on Conservatism to be found here
http://thesocialrepublic.blogspot.com/2008/07/conservatism-mit-added-weber.html

Whilst in fallen, decadent Old Europe, loud and proud Libertarianism is now a minority pastime, east of the Elbe and west of the Azores, this ideology of maximum liberty is a current and vibrant strand of political thought. One might class it as true or classic Liberalism updated for 21st century Richmond, VA. or Gdansk or some sub set of the New right or Conservatism in general or even anarchism in pin stripe. I certainly would not argue that Libertarianism (or to save my ash speckled keyboard, LB) is unconnected to these other bodies of thought. Rather, LB has become self contained, whilst remaining inter-connected with older and more established ideas. It is a synthesis, like much of 20th century political schemas, conjoining bits and pieces and creating a new logic, narrative and coda from the fragments.

Here goes:-

'A utopian attempt to revolutionise society and mankind itself by investing self interest with cultural particular virtue and removing any barriers on either macro or micro scale to the pursuit of that interest and replacing social interaction with litigation. This, paradoxically, recreates a caricature like gemienschaft of early Liberal societies'

'A Utopian attempt' - LBs seek a utopia albeit one dressed up as the natural state of things. Theirs, as will be mentioned at greater length later, is a world that harks back to a time were state was minimal. Yet this is utopian for their past idyll was a place were the state was increasingly required to intervene and grow. The great period of British Liberalism, the 1850-60s, when Laissez Faire was doctrinal, the state was bigger and more invasive that it had been ever before. Calls to regulate weights and measures, prisons, the behaviour of the poor, the nature of local politics, public carnivals and norms fell on the state. This was no halcyon steady state. In post civil war America, during its great period of breakneck industrialisation, of maximum liberty, a large part of the nation was under military occupation and nationalistic public ritual was introduced en masse from above. If LB claims, as it does, that post some golden age the state suddenly became malignant, it is utopia to believe that via return similar advances of their nemesis might not arise again. If the market can fix almost anything, why did it not the first time round? Why was the state needed at all?

'....to revolutionise society....' - Lest we forget, a society as complex and messy as ours must be revolutionised to become one driven solely by rational self interest. Institutions that do so, such as PLCs, have been labeled by better men that I as systemically sociopathic. Sociopathic is a fairly good definition of most revolutionary movements. Indeed one might call it their common characteristic.

'...and mankind itself....' - If society has to change and become an arena of pure and rational self interest, then its componants need to as well. Mankind is ill suited to such ruthless game theory, being too sloppy, lazy, fat, too kindly to sloth and sob stories. Mankind must be steeled, made hardy and hard. To master a LB modernity, LB man and woman mustact like that ruthless rational actor, no flabby softness.

'...by investing self interest with culturally particular virtue....' - Libertarians are united by the partiality of their individual version of liberties. Some seek an atheistic paradise, others a new realm of piety, some seek an ethnic inclusiveness or soft soaped racism, whilst other maintain a hankering for institutions directly born out of the state as some precious exception. Localism too is a common lens through which to consider liberty. Few have the strength of conviction in holy liberty to leave these pre-conditions or prejudices aside. It is one of the major differences between LB and anarcho-capitalism, that celebration of a Hobbesian freedom. LB seek liberty as a route towards their preconceived utopias, one that must be managed to ensure that there is no diversions.

'...removing any barriers on either macro or micro scale to the pursuit of that interest and replacing social interaction with litigation...' - LBs makes out the state or a coy mythical version of it, is the source of all and every evil. Not only that. Human foibles that get in the way of maximising liberty must be eradicated too, either in the journey to liberty of in the process of dog eat dog.There is a telling contradiction here as well. Having abandoned coercion via regulation and a variable degree of criminal law, the social guarantee against pure anarchy becomes the flaming sword of litigation.

Every social interaction is defined by the possibility of legal action. Be it residents suing the local paper mill over pollution or impurities in your tomato sauce or employers swindling you on your wages, all can only be rectified by legal means. No a priori regulation and thus no coercive agency as a short cut, no arbiting body. No, each case must start from basics, mus be personally actioned from papers to judgement. The coercive state thus is replaced by a truly vast legal frameworks of 24 hour courts which have to shape every single human action time and again. Social life ceases to exist ambiently but must be acted out on the courtroom floor. This legalistic extremism would give birth to a monstrous invasive apparatus, one where money and thus legal expertise is central.

Some LBs have realised this impasse and seek a replacement form of social mediation and arbitration, but then they are on a course out of LB altogether. Rather then embrace the Randian solution of money as the key to human interaction or pure anarchy, the litigation mania allows LBs to protect their virtuous 'no-place' from the pure uncertaincy of hobbesian chaos

'This, paradoxically, recreates the caricature like gemienschaft of early Liberal societies....' - Here the contradictions, the partial prejudices and the inevitable legal leviathan, and the rose tinted glasses quack history of LB come together. They seek a past that never existed. Further the societies that this myth is based swiftly moved away from the tenets of their creed. They seek no understanding of why the ideal of Manchesterismus begat the Nation state economy, with welfare, regulation of trade and central government and why it did so willingly. They seek a static pastishe of a society that was by its very nature hurtling towards their bete noire with open arms

Ta, And please discuss, disagree, call me a liar and a cad etc.

Next time, the Big Red, Socialism

Making Italians....

2009-04-08T15:36:00.002+01:00

Looking at various nationalism, themselves bundles of traditions at times deeply at odds, the perceived 'need' is foremost. What i mean is what is the condition, the crisis, the requirement that a modern nationalism must match? The elites and the ideologues of their nationhood propagate that the primacy of national identity, national loyalty and national power will resolve an existential problem. A fatal national 'flaw' if you will.

An example. French nationalism of the left, the Jacobins and the radical republicans conceived of a national faith as countering the power of the Church, their bete noire. The 'irrational' would be defeated by utter faith in France as 'le Grande Nation', the new Rome, the font of all that was rational and wise. In addition, nationalism seemed to square the circle of their Rousseau-ian (Rousseao-ite, Rousseau-o-ist) brand of liberalism. The patriotic were the virtuous, those worthy of liberty.

On the right, nationalism evolved around the old organic ideal of the Good King's patrimony, of a unified and inherently French macro-family. The love of estates, guilds, corporations, beautified hierarchy, ending Balzac's swirling world of money and decadence. Only by replacing a materialist world of cheque books, atheistic social 'lowers' and corruption, would France be saved. By making hierarchy, cohesion and that patrimony the nation's (instead of the property of a King) central, could this decadence be subsumed.

In the Italian case, one of the major and ongoing wounds on the nationalist body politic is the seemly insoluble disconnect from the state and the nation it proclaims to serve. The production of citizens loyalty to the new political entity, created for the first time in 1860, was one of the most urgent tasks the Italian political classes gave themselves. The rise of 'Italianism', the fore father of Fascism was fueled by these aims, whilst berating those in power for failing to do achieve that vital requirement of national 'greatness'. The liberal state seemed incapable of convincing their citizens to believe and behave like they were Italians or that the state was their legitimate focus of loyalty .

Within Italianism, was born the idea that revolutionising the state and its role was the keystone to national regeneration. The state must be holy, a sacred sword of the nation's will and a blessed curate to the 'needy, it and it alone would solve the crisis. The state must become the 'nation state' or both would be destroyed. The result was a mass of plans for various forms of totalising society with the aim of giving Italians a state they could give a legitimacy to.

This primacy of the state is not a common denominator of fascism. Movements like the Legion or the Scythe Cross were almost anarchistic in their hatred for state solutions. ''I've have no need of programs' Codreanu said, nor did he have need of cabinets, ministers, bureaucrats, even the Police (he had murdered a Police Captain before becoming a MP).

The Reich can be classified from an organisational viewpoint as a slowly corroding state, increasingly eaten up by the movement. I am not talking about party membership amongst bureaucrats (which was very high up to middle management by 1933). Rather, functions such as central planning in both war and peace, security and internal repression, resource and ration allocation, even planning permission on homes were stripped from the state to the party. There was no esteem for the state, no holding up the state as god. It was the movement, that was the font of action, the priesthood of the holy volk, that would revolutionise society and solve their 'crisis narrative' to paraphrase Paul Blokker.

In Italy today, there is still that seeming disconnect from citizen and state. Again there i a form of nationalism looking to the state to resolve this and a 'great and terrible' identity crisis. 'Go! Italy!' I personally doubt Berlusconi's fascist pedigree (though undoubtedly he is happy to lay down with them in electoral carnality :) but he plays on a current, one that predates and then saturates fascism. Italians deserve a state that can claim legitimacy to their loyalties, one, just as importantly, that is worthy of that claim. The left shouldn't leave that desire to either 'dreamers of the day' or orange snake oil salesmen.

Please read Sarah's post here http://cafeturco.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/italy-sliding-into-fascism/

ps. Just wanted to say to Sarah - hope you enjoy your break from the iron blog and chain, but (selfishly) please not too long

He obviously ain't doing it right.....

2009-04-08T14:42:00.003+01:00

Wow.

Stroppy blog covers the ground with panache

http://stroppyblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Friday%20Fuckwit

God in the Machine

2009-04-07T13:20:00.001+01:00

Good article by Brian Whitaker on the conflict between the sacred and the secular in middle eastern constitutions

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/apr/06/islam-middleeast

When I grow up, can I be Norm Geras?

2009-03-18T01:11:00.001Z

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/03/low-marx.html

Not enough materialism?..Pah, I say!

The future of Socialism?

2009-03-11T12:11:00.001Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/10/venezuela-chavez-bodies-exhibition

For geeks, members of the Twelve Colonies and any passing Cylon infiltrator

2009-03-10T01:56:00.003Z

I am a geek. I live with it, this tragic terrible affliction and thus readers of this blog must suffer it too. As season 4 of the new BSG reaches its climax and the run ends, I have been reading a bit behind both the conception and its birth.

I stumble across this article by fellow fan-boy and general wit and humourist John Hodgman

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17GALACTICA.html

I am hopeful that I can convince my friend Humpers to do a guest post once the series concludes. I will say this now though. BSG might have used analogies with recent events such as mass terrorism, religious fanaticism, suicide bombing and torture, but it made its points general. No goodies were a valiant administration facing down terror or provoked desperate and heroic freedom fighters. No baddies were agressive imperialist pig-dogs or savage theocratic brutes. No cut outs, no easy points. Rather BSG sought to use the initial logic of its premise, infused with a raw emotional power to produce a insightful look at human complexities.

See, horrid aren't I, even worst with the Wire :)

After the Etonians and after October

2009-03-05T16:49:00.003Z

Please go read Andrew Coates excellent review of 'Waiting for the Etonians' here:-

http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/wating-for-the-etonians-review-of-nick-cohens-latest-book/

I was particularly taken by the last paragraph. After agreeing with Cohen's attacks on much of the 'actually existing' left, Coatsy adds

'But there is a left that it emerging. It is one the spans the distance between radical social democracy, Compass, the unions, the small independent socialist publications, such as Labour Left Briefing, Chartist, and many others on the democratic socialist left, a gamut of groups, feminist, gay, anti-racist, green, and which extends to many on the ‘far left’ who are fiercely democratic. Ideas are now being developed, on welfare, public ownership and working conditions, that connect with the legacy of the socialist and labour movement. A left that never had any time for tyrants and dictatorships of whatever ilk, Stalinist, Nationalist, or Religious. Or so I think – because I come from this movement. As do many. It’s a shame that other than offering some warmed over diatribes, and a few real insights on class and culture, wrapped in well-written prose, that Nick Cohen doesn’t seriously engage with us. Perhaps the East Wind has frozen his frowning face.'

A left that is proud of and devoted to democracy and removing the inherent hypocrisies from the classic rights of Liberalism. That despises tyrants of every ilk, that has a moral compass with more points on it than howling fascist or uncritical worship, that thinks. That is the left we must build, one that both see today as what it is and is equipped with the tools and passion of hundreds of years of democratic struggle. One that realises the horror done in the name of it's ideals and that 1914 was not some new dawn, but a trauma that we have yet to recover

Both H/T and hats off Tendance Coatsy

The Republic reviews...or The Demon as human

2009-02-27T16:25:00.002Z

For us on the British left, there are no one, not one, historical personages that so united us in scorn and hatred that that young Chemist from Finchley. It is irrational in its intensity and quite remarkably vicious still. I do not excuse myself from this. I really do hate her with a passion. I recognise that she has become totemic and representative of not just what I view as a malicious, hypocritical and corrupt government but also of two other burning concerns of the left in general.

Firstly, her ideology, and it should go without saying she is probably the most ideologically driven leader of any major political party in British history, is a perverse and degrading view on mankind as a social actor and political creature. The extremity of the property fetish, as some materialist ersatz for a soul, is to make humanity as limited and sociopathic a creature as the vulgar self-interested automatons of Bolshevik Marxism or the Blud und Kultur containers of Volkisch and quasi-Volkisch pseud-science.

Secondly, her triumphs, and they were total and crushing, demonstrate how hopeless the left as a power house of ideas and action had become. After 1979 and 1983, her revolution, and I do mean that, made pre-existing socialism an alien niche property in Britain.

Thus, Mrs Thatcher, daughter of a Grocer and local politician, wife of a successful business man, mother to two children, wilful employee and local Tory activist, took on monsterous proportions. From the Milk Snatcher (an almost Fagin like clinche) to the warmonger to the Union breaker and the harbinger of mass soul destroying unemployment, riots and upheaval, the actual woman has been subsumed.

Given her status as the last great dominating politician of ideas and policy, it is unsurprising that dramatists have taken to her so much. On the early efforts, The Falklands Play was the most ambitious at getting close to the actual woman and the actual politics, the weltanschuuang of the time. In comparison, the Comic Strip farce on the GLC, a hilarious mixture of agit-prop and Rambo, gave a mocking clarity to the hyperbola of both sides.

In the last year or two, two dramas have been appear on our screens. Both seek to look at the actual, rather than the demon. The first, 'The Long Walk to Finchley' starring the mind renderingly beautiful Andrea Riseborough as the lady herself was a quite stylistic, character driven affair. It mostly revolved around Thatcher's early struggles to be taken seriously as a potential MP. Whilst it tried hard to capture some essence of the drive, it was light on what made the woman so formidable, her ideas, her conception of society and her political morality.

In contrast, the sequel 'Margaret' is a far more political animal indeed. A huge ensemble cast including the great Roger Allam surround a electrical performance by Lindsey Duncan as a real breathing, passionate ideologue and acolyte of 'doing'. The personal is lightly done with skill and the politics is never dumbed down. It manages that most difficult of balancing acts in historical drama, highlighting the eventually important and maintaining a tension of uncertainty over the end. It also captures a human mania, for power, ideas and virtue.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hy18h/Margaret/

As mentioned, the ideologue, the driven 'man of the moment' is authentically portrayed. It also encompasses the ruthlessness and the fury of those around her, most impressively by Michael Maloney playing an almost chilling John Major (I know, most unlikely coupling eva!) and a finely foul-mouthed Alan Clark. But just as impressive is the way it expands on one of the recent revelations about Thatcher. Her remarkable humourlessness. Now one might say this is minor, but it actually is sturdily handled and an very insightful point. Thatcher could not understand fun, laughter and humour, it was beyond her capacities as a human being. The well known antidotes of her script writers struggles to get her to time her delivery and understand their jokes testify to this.

Rather then suggest this is an underlying cause of her own will to power and lack of compassion, I suggest something more cathartic to us haters of the left. Humourlessness and holding ideas as holy and sacred does not go together. One might mention Danton or Heydrich or Bukharin. I am merely reassured that a figure as divisive and at times vicious as Thatcher was denied the transcendental relief of humour, of the joke, the giggle and the pun. When much in the world is unjust, brutal and violent, the gallows humour of the flock provides an escape more innocent and yet just as transporting as the most religious of epiphanic episodes. There is a small justice in that. And I prefer that to wishing another human being dead. Life is funny like that.

In conclusion, I say watch 'Margaret', one might not like such elite drama/big man history, but this is one of the very best

Tennis Courts say much

2009-02-25T18:13:00.004Z

One of my favourite sayings, possible made, is by a Chinese diplomat in response to the question 'What were the consequences of the French Revolution?. His answer was 'It is too early to tell'. What I love is the succinct way it conveys the absolute and continued primacy of those earth shaking events of the revolutionary decade. Just as the Industrial revolution still effects the way people eat, sleep, work and organise societies, so the political revolution of 1789 still forms the base 'genetics' of political live, theory and conceptions. Whilst it was fashionable on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille to question, let us consider a incomplete list of ideas, issues, paradoxes and policies that those revolutionaires not only considered but also acted on.

Capital Punishment

Slavery

The nature of Crime

Gender and Power

Nationalism in it's modern form

Imperialism

Democracy and Republics

The Citizen in a Pluralistic society

The nature of Property

The extent of the modern state

Rights as a living breathing concern

Civilian-Military balance

Press freedom and responsibility

Social welfare and moral economy

The limits of free trade and the free market

Centralisation

Jewish and Sectarian emacipation

Church and State

Mass killing for ideological goals

The legitimacy of Revolution

Mass Mobalisation

And for the purposes of this post, the political spectrum. Yes, I am defending that most maligned of political heuristic tools, the Left Right divide (henceforth LRD). While some have suggested, post end of history, that it is a dead conceit, I suggest otherwise. The LRD has a remarkable ability to get under the skin of political ideas and political policy in a way that few other metaphoric devices can. In 1789 as now, there is a divide in political thought that remains along a clear continuity from the debates of the National assembly and the wider reaction to the works of the revolution. The matter at hand is the direct of political action. On the left of the NA were assembled a very divergent group of believers who sought to create a new society, one more important than the pretensions of the monarch of the time. On the right were a similarly mixed bag of politicians who sought to preserve or regenerate the state as it was, that is as recognisably the same place that they had sprung.

Now I do not ascribe morality to these differing conceptions. Far too much blood has been shed by my side of the aisle to pretend that. Rather, there is a ongoing divide between what might be term emacipitory thought and that of a conserving/regenerative kind. This for me, is the essense of the LRD, not good and bad, state or non, futorial or anti-modern. Rather, just as those lawmakers and law givers struggled with this duality of soultions and preceptions, so we carry on today.

Why bring it up? Well as the great huntsmen Leo X said about the upstart Luther in 1520, 'A wild boar has invaded Thy vineyard'. Fascism, my academic passion and a kind of speciality has cropped up most persistantly on the blogosphere and in certain quarters of the media recently. The question at hands is where on the LRB it lies. Ian Dale and John Redwood, as noted by Dave Osler a few weeks back, have joined a wee host of commentators who have reset the phenomena on the political left. The grand daddy of them all is the NR's resident Jonah Goldberg's book 'Liberal Fascism', a hatchet job of unerring wrongheadedness that is now quoted regularly as some authority on fascism. Goldberg takes an outdated and heuristically dry definition of totalitarian theory, and drabs various left of centre American politicians with its contentions. Totalisers are statist, thus every state solution is totalising. Only the left suggests these solutions so only the left comes from the original totalising i.e. fascist solution. Thus he can adorn the cover with a smiley face plus Hitler tash and the oxy-moron (and one recognised as such when HG Wells suggested it) 'Liberal Fascism'.

Now I intend to read the bloody thing again to fisk it and Nick Cohen's grovelling review in a few days, but for now let me return to the LRD and the general case. Why is fascism on the political right of the spectrum? Well what is a working definition of Fascism for starters, one that takes its ideas seriously, not as window dressing like in the old Dimitrovite line and that seeks to differentiate it from other political ideologies? I would say the foremost at the moment is what is term, controversially of course, 'the new consensus'. Building on some of the Anglophone's world leader experts on the ideas of fascism, this reading has taken up much of the running with regards to new research and interpretation in the last 15 years. It can be surmised as an ultra-hyper-nationalism that via means of social and political action seeks to bring about a revolution and a rebirth at a national and anthropological level. It is committed entirely and inevitably to a decline-rebirth narrative. Indeed such is the extent to its commitment, it has be described by some as a classic case of a revitalisation movement akin to the Ghost dance or the Cargo Cult.

Now, where do we place this nexus of ideas? Well academically, much of the consensus on this issue reflects the traditional placement on the right. The few dissenters such as Zeev Sternhell have seen it as transcending the LRB all together. I am currently unaware of any serious voices that place it wholly within the left, but I await enlightenment on that matter with interest. My reasons are tripartite:-

Firstly. the major thinkers of early fascism along with proto-fascist groups are mainly of the right. The ANI and the Vocacists in the case of Italy and the PNF, the Vaterland Partei, Spengler, Junger and Schmitt in the case of the NSDAP, the Croatian Party of Right with the Ustasha, the groups around Goga and Cuza with the Iron Guard, Action Française in France. Groups like the Proudhon Circle and the Futurists that are not neatly placed (but can be with care) on the LRD can neither be placed on the left either. Italian Nationalism in the Fin de Siecle, dubbed by its leading historian, the great Emilio Gentile, 'Italianism' which was to find form in the PNF was a clear rejection of both types of Liberal Nationalism in Italy, Cavour's and Mazzini's.

Secondly, after 1919 there is to my knowledge only one real instance of a leftist group in allegiance with a fascist one during the high mark of fascist confidence and intellectual independence. That is a plot against Salazzar's New State in Portugal between some Fascist dreamers and a small anarchist group. The liberal National Peasants party of Iuliu Maniu did form a brief electoral alliance with the Iron Guard in 1932 but broke off contact soon after. That is the sum of left-fascist alliance during the inter-war period. On the other hands, Nationalists and conservatives of the Right in Portugal, Spain, the UK, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, Estonia, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia/Yugoslavia, Greece and Finland had long term relationships with fascist movements and grouplets over a long period of time and proudly exclaimed the cross-pollination of ideas

The Third is to return to the start of this post. That primary importance of the revolution of 1789 and those that sought to emulate it, such as 1798 in Ireland, 1820 and 1868 in Spain, 1794, 1831 and 1846 in Poland, the international events of 1830 and 1848, the Commune of 1871 and those of 1905 and Feburary 1917 in Russia are a chain of narratives, of individual national mythologies and history. To states or would be states such as Romania, Italy, Germany and Hungary, the liberal revolutions were a vital, even existential part of national identity. Yet like its great forebear, these produced a left wing aimed at emancipation and a right aimed at regeneration. For the left, national revolutions like these were steps forwards towards their particular telos, for the right, they were corrupting plots of miscreants gone horribly awry. Despite their uber-nationalism, fascist movements had no place for these revolutions. To take Hungary as an example, Kossuth, the first great modern popular leader of Magyars outside of the political nation, was entirely disdained by the Arrow Cross, his revolution, the work of Jews and rabblerousers. It is no small irony that until recently the FN was unwilling to 'accept' the work of the great revolution, even after much of the right had moved into deeply critical loyalty. This might seem minor, trivial even. But how one conceives of the most important political event of the modern era and how it manifest itself within your own society and the world is no small matter. It is one of the most important bases on which to place your ideology. It is the ultimate litmus test.

Fascism conceives liberal or socialist or anarchic emancipation as a false consciousness, a denial of self-evident and eternal truths, anti-spiritual and anti-national. That is not toi say that there are not violent and considerable tensions between Conservatism or traditional Authoritarianism and Fascism, but like those between Social Liberals or Neo-Jacobins or Social Dems or Trots or Black Flag-ers, they are in house or 'in-aisle'

Thus endth my boring wee rant.

More 'Liberal Fascism' next, you lucky souls

Woe, nash, thud and tears - Revolution postponed

2009-02-13T12:30:00.002Z

Our flag flies at half mast this week. Sad news

The British People's Alliance

a) a new mass party with considerable but covert elite support, with a socially conservative, economically social democratic program. A party perched to gain mass backing and parlimentry representation

b)the comically farcical delusion of a lonely wee man, who has only his sockpuppets for company and the thought of yet another tedious post on HP or Bomber Kamm's site to live for

Is not contesting the Euro elections.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=25656996&postID=179747143746226635

The pain!!!!

Please join some of us mourners in lamentation and shreiks here

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/02/12/terrible-news-from-the-british-peoples-alliance/

Nowt to worry about or Kristallnacht?

2009-02-13T11:40:00.005Z

To be a Jew in Britain today. Is it all dandy, all happiness and light, with just a few spiteful voices raises in hyperbolic fear-mongering? Or is it time for the Jews to flee, to abandon Britain and indeed Europe to safer shores, to escape an inevitable repeat of demonisation and pogrom?

The events of the last few months have made the first opinion look absurd and the second, increasingly relevant.

Two examples

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/08/police-patrols-antisemitism-jewish-community

and

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/4564216/Foreign-Office-diplomat-arrested-over-anti-Semitic-rant.html

One might, and many have, argue that it is merely a blind and stupid reaction to the wrongs of Israel. Truly the Socialism of Fools, but understandable given the situation in Gaza. This is bullshit.

The events of 'Cast Lead' and the media's reporting of them might have given judeophobia wide traction, 'beclaiming' many, but the narrative is unchanged. Jews because they are Jews and thus represent some modernist Satyr of downfall and evil are being targeted. World control, brutal use of violence, conspiracy, hatred of the gentile and Jewish supremacy, each laughable and quite clearly fallacious paranoid fantasies, together are being recited.

One might ask is anti-semitism part of the experience modernity, existing in places where there are no Jews but a surplus of anxieties and disruption and change. I would suggest alas yes. But does this mean Jews should run, flee, ahead of being purged or worst? I think not. Maybe I am overly optimistic but people I know have been appalled by anti-Jewish hysteria that gripped part of the Gaza demos, disgusted at the Gaza-Warsaw ghetto analogies. A sub-culture where Palestinian solidarity, anti-Zionism and anti-semitism have become entangled has existed on the margins, out of plain sight, using disguise and visage to extend its discourse. Now it is in the full light of day. And it cannot hide. And it will be judged.

The Jewish diaspora has, despite suffering violence and genocide, been one of the most important and creative phenomena in human history. They might not realise it yet, but the expulsion of the Arab Jews was a catastrophe for the Arab nations. We need to crush this hatred now

Iran

2009-02-12T19:44:00.002Z

The Beeb are running a series on Iran's relationship with the west at the moment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hmrvt/b00hmrv1/Iran_and_the_West_The_Man_who_Changed_the_World/

So far, excellent.

One line, however, jumped out at me. When they were questioning Ibrahim Asgharzadeh about the planning behind the capture of the embassy, he said of Ahmadinejad's worries over the operation that they were primarily concerned helping the left, ‘The real threat to the revolution is Russia and the Marxists’ (32.44). A timely point for the left to remember