Ken Livingstone don't give a fuck

The furore over Ken Livingstone and his remarks about Hitler and Zionism last year has resurfaced. Finally the verdict is in: Livingstone has not been expelled from the Labour Party for his comments, but he has been suspended for another year. Before all this happened Ken was on the NEC and posed as a key ally to Jeremy Corbyn. Now he is out of the game until the summer of 2018.

The story has been covered as if the Labour Party should have stripped Livingstone of his membership and anything short of this makes them cowards. The Blairites and Brownites have been queuing around the block to hurl dog muck at the Labour leadership. One anonymous MP told the New Statesman: "Years from now, the foul stench of anti-Semitism will become one of the defining characteristics of the Jeremy Corbyn era in the Labour Party. A shameful and totally unforgivable chapter in our history."

Every wing of the British media establishment has taken part in the shit storm around Labour and anti-Semitism – from the BBC and The Guardian to The Telegraph and The Spectator. The Naz Shah scandal, and Ken Livingstone’s unhelpful intervention, is just the latest to be picked up. The British press has manufactured this scandal in a bid to create a crisis and, in turn, undermine the Labour leadership. But this hysteria also represents the high emotional stakes in Israel among the commentariat.

As a critic of the Israeli government, I have defended the Palestinian cause and its supporters against charges of anti-Semitism. And I have defended Ken Livingstone and his loose lips on more than one occasion. Still, I wish Ken had not brought up Hitler and Zionism in the middle of the Shah case. I do not think it was anti-Semitic, though I do think it was reckless and played into the hands of the Blairites.

Ken Livingstone ran into the Shah scandal like a bull into a china shop. Hopefully, we have just  heard the last vase smash against the floor. Plenty of leftists have pointed out the Haavara agreement, the Nazi plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar and elsewhere. However, the facts of Nazi Germany are not really relevant or helpful here. The real controversy is over Livingstone’s use of the term ‘Zionism’ to describe Nazi policy.

Laying out the historical record cannot dispel the outrage (even as much of it phony). The damage is done, sadly. Even before this, Livingstone was rated as an anti-Semite by certain people thanks to the media. Vilification campaigns are successful because it is virtually impossible to resist mudslinging. If you explain yourself, deny the claims or even apologise, you’re screwed. It’s too late. It’s never enough.

In this sense you can understand why Ken Livingstone has not apologise or concede ground, he just fires back against the press and his opponents in the party. Journalists kept asking him: "Do you recognise that you caused offence?" He does not, clearly. Much like the honey badger, Ken Livingstone don't give a fuck.

Is Labour anti-Semitic?

No, the Labour Party is not an association of anti-Semites. Yet the media storm over anti-Semitism and the Labour Party has been building for a long time. The Naz Shah case, and Ken Livingstone’s intervention, is just the latest to be picked up by the media. In fact, the British press has manufactured this scandal in a bid to create a crisis. This hysteria represents the emotional stakes in Israel. It is precisely because of the state of British political discourse that this was possible.

The Anglosphere is culturally and politically invested in Israel in a way which other world powers are not. Make no doubt about it, this is the result of settler colonialism. Israel fits into the imperial ambitions of Western powers. The American intellectual class fell in love with Israel after the 1967 war, which came as a welcome sign that the world was not in total disarray. So the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a coincidental part of our political discourse - it is necessarily a part of the way the conflict is understood in the West.

For these reasons, we might say Ken Livingstone ran into the Shah scandal like a bull into a china shop. We still may not have heard the last vase smash as it hits the floor. Plenty of leftists have pointed out the Haavara agreement, the Nazi plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar and elsewhere. However, the facts of Nazi Germany are not really relevant or helpful here. The real controversy is over Livingstone’s use of the term ‘Zionism’ (an idiotic choice of words) to describe Nazi policy. Laying out the historical record cannot dispel the outrage (much of it phony). The damage is done.

Vilification campaigns are successful because it is virtually impossible to resist mudslinging. If you explain yourself, deny the claims or even apologise, you’re screwed. It’s too late. It’s never enough. There is no way of adequately deflecting, let alone dodging, the mud. You’re always guilty in the eyes of some people. Even before this, Livingstone was rated as an anti-Semite by certain people thanks to the media. But what is the point of all this?

Right now, Jeremy Corbyn is leading the Labour Party and this represents a major challenge to the status quo in Britain. So far, Corbyn has beaten all the odds against him (he has to, there are no half-measures), but the Blairites are desperate to inflict a defeat on the Left. They feel the party has been snatched from them. They want it back. The Blairites already tried to destroy him by branding him an apologist for terrorism, now they're gunning to smear him as sympathetic to xenophobes.

Slavoj Žižek on Fascism.

I very much enjoyed The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and its follow-up The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Žižek uses the movie Jaws of all things to explore Fascism and its essential character and objective. It has become all too fashionable to claim an equivalence between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, as if to imply the US and UK should have sat it out and let the Germans and Russians slaughter one another. There are even those on the Right who try to argue that the Third Reich was identical to Stalin's Russia. Here Žižek drives home the difference:

Long before Solzhenitsyn, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2011, ‘the crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).’ This internal dissent was a natural part of the Communist movement, in clear contrast to fascism. ‘There were no dissidents in the Nazi Party,’ Hitchens went on, ‘risking their lives on the proposition that the Führer had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism.’ Precisely because of this tension at the heart of the Communist movement, the most dangerous place to be at the time of the 1930s purges was at the top of the nomenklatura: in the space of a couple of years, 80 per cent of the Central Committee and the Red Army leadership were shot.

As Žižek points out, in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, the promise of Fascism was always a conservative revolution, to transform the whole of class society and to, ultimately, bring about an alternative modernity devoid of the class antagonism. The aim is a society wherein a traditional hierarchical social order stands in harmony with a highly efficient and innovative economy. The problem resides in the inherent capacity for crisis and class conflict in the capitalist system. To circumvent the class antagonism and leave the class society intact is impossible. Therefore, the assertion of a racial identity is a necessary means of reconciling the working-class to conditions of exploitation and binding them to the ruling-class. It attempts to forge a collaboration of the classes through a shared racial consciousness. The array of social ills inherent to class society are then externalised onto the Other as an infection to be rooted out.

Here I would wheel in the work of Allen on white racial identity. If we look at the Theodore W Allen thesis on white racial consciousness we find that it is not a neutral social construct it is objective and it is a formation of social control. The white race is, ironically, colourless and yet defined as a distinct social category in this way. Perhaps the white race could only be constituted as a multi-class bloc against the Other which would in turn be defined as non-white. In this way the class struggle can be offset against the immediate need to build class collaboration. This is the promise of a harmonious capitalist society. It is conspicuous in its absence from not just the present, but the past as well. As Noel Ignatiev writes "We cannot say it too often: whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else."

Why the Jews?

 

Earlier this year I reproduced Lenin's speech on anti-Jewish pogroms in Tsarist Russia. It has always been my view that the reactionary mind needs racism to bound together the system and externalise its systemic flaws onto an intrusive presence - an infection of sorts - which we are invited to purge. It is no coincidence that the proto-fascists of this world equate anti-racism with leftism, 'political-correctness' with Marxism, and Communism with Jewishness. Of course, there is nothing Jewish about Communism, just as anti-racism is not inherently left-wing. But it is the case that there is nothing progressive in racism. This is understood, at some level, by the majority of Far-Righters. It is their cause to safeguard capitalism by asserting race-consciousness over class-consciousness.

 

In an interview with Worker's Liberty Moishe Postone emphasises what he regards as the unique characteristic of anti-Semitism to other forms of racism. He explains "The way in which anti-Semitism is distinguished, and should be distinguished, from racism, has to do with the sort of imaginary of power, attributed to the Jews, Zionism, and Israel, which is at the heart of anti-Semitism. The Jews are seen as constituting an immensely powerful, abstract, intangible global form of power that dominates the world." We see this underlying a lot of cultural criticism put forward by traditional conservatives. It is surely no surprise that the traditionalists so often verge on and foray into the fields of anti-Semitism harvested in Europe for centuries.

 

Postone is dead clear in his words "Anti-Semitism is a primitive critique of the world, of capitalist modernity. The reason I regard it as being particularly dangerous for the left is precisely because anti-Semitism has a pseudo-emancipatory dimension that other forms of racism rarely have." Everyone should read Postone's article Anti-Semitism and National Socialism for a non-functionalist account of the phenomenon.

The point to be made here, however, is that a careful examination of the modern anti-Semitic worldview reveals that it is a form of thought in which the rapid development of industrial capitalism, with all its social ramifications, is/ /personified and identified as the Jew. It is not merely that the Jews were considered to be the owners of money, as in traditional anti-Semitism, but that they were held responsible for economic crises and identified with the range of social restructuring and dislocation resulting from rapid industrialization: explosive urbanization, the decline of traditional social classes and strata, the emergence of a large, increasingly organized industrial proletariat, and so on. In other words, the abstract domination of capital, which—particularly with rapid industrialization—caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, became perceived as the domination of International Jewry.

The relation between the material base of class society and its overarching superstructure becomes lost easily as it would require a detailed analysis. The impetus for such an analysis was never there for the kind of people who tend towards anti-Jewish hatred. This is more like an ideological filter through which reality can be comprehended. All other possibilities are dismissed from the outset.

According to this interpretation, the Jews were identified not merely with money, with the sphere of circulation, but with capitalism itself. However, because of its fetishized form, capitalism did not appear to include industry and technology. Capitalism appeared to be only its manifest abstract dimension which, in turn, was responsible for the whole range of concrete social and cultural changes associated with the rapid development of modern industrial capitalism.

The Jews were not seen merely as representatives of capital (in which case anti-Semitic attacks would have been much more class-specific). They became the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful, and international domination of capital as an alienated social form.

Certain forms of anticapitalist discontent became directed against the manifest abstract dimension of capital personified in the form of the Jews, not because the Jews were consciously identified with the value dimension, but because, given the antinomy of the abstract and concrete dimensions, capitalism appeared that way. The “anticapitalist” revolt was, consequently, also the revolt against the Jews. The overcoming of capitalism and its negative social effects became associated with the overcoming of the Jews.

This is what Postone rightly calls "pseudo-emancipatory". The fascist mission to defeat the Left is twofold: firstly, the working-class social base has to be stolen away and, secondly, the opposing progressive elements must be stamped out by force.

Shame, Pride & Virtue.

We forget that Churchill was a maverick despised by many in Britain in his day and that he came to power by chance. Once Churchill took over from Chamberlain he had to contend with the faction that had sought to secure the British Empire through 'appeasement', a shallow euphemism for selling Europe to Hitler in a most cowardly manner. The Nazi plans to cleanse Europe of Jews and Slavs did not enter the imperial mind. The crowd aligned with Churchill were looking to preserve British hegemony over the East, especially the Suez Canal and India. The suggestion of a German dominated Europe posed a threat to this in the long-term. These fears later came to fruition with the Fascist invasion of Egypt, where the Italians sought to seize the Suez Canal. By then Mussolini had already seized Malta and Somaliland, the North African campaign was underway. If Mussolini had taken over Egypt then the oil trade through the Suez Canal could have been taken out of British hands entirely. That would have been a huge blow to the British empire.

Before this there was still a significant chunk of the British ruling-class that hoped to secure the Empire through a deal with Hitler. The Halifax faction of 'appeasement' junkies were pushing the government for a deal when the Germans pushed the British back towards Dunkirk. The terms of such a deal would've been a humiliation for Churchill and he was determined to fight on. So Churchill called a meeting at which he faced down his opponents with a speech in which he stated "I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground." Notions of 'virtue' and 'honour' can barely encapsulate the moral weight of the stand Churchill took. The emotive language Churchill used had some members of the cabinet looking away in embarrassment. These same mesmeric tones of heroic rhetoric would inspire the masses during the Battle of Britain.

By the time we invaded Italy in 1943 it was part of the same aim of trying to reinstate British hegemony in the Mediterranean. The Italian resistance had effectively liberated the country, then the Allies came in to destroy hit two birds with one stone: namely destroy what was left of Fascism and to destroy the Italian resistance because it was left-wing. The Partisans in Greece and Yugoslavia experienced the same attitude from the Allies. Churchill had refused to open up a second front in France and left the real fighting for the Russians. It wasn't until 1944 that Churchill pledged with Roosevelt and Stalin to open a second front on the Continent. This wasn't the only instance that Churchill had allowed imperial interests to take priority over the war effort. Around 3 million Indians fought on the side of the Allies, but Churchill refused to grant India independence and was determined to hold onto India. As Russians and Germans were slaughtering each other in Stalingrad there were British troops killing demonstrators in India.

In the 1930s the popular desire for peace converged with the imperial interests of the British ruling-class, the outcome was 'appeasement' for a long time. The British ruling-class were looking for a way to preserve the empire, specifically the power held over the Middle East and India. There was the view that the British empire could be maintained with a Nazi dominated Europe. Hitler called our bluff when he invaded Poland and foresaw an easy victory against the French, with a settlement drawn up with the British promising not to touch the empire. The important pre-condition of this was the decision to sell Czechoslovakia to Hitler and allow Poland to become a German satellite, which had been made by 1938. The British and the French reluctantly struck at Germany after the invasion of Poland and only went as far as to evacuate Polish soldiers. By then the section of the elite aligned with Churchill came to the view that the Third Reich would inevitably threaten the empire as it would expand into the Balkans.

At that time Churchill was not easily budged when it came to matters of anti-Communist pragmatism and had gone as far as to express sympathies with Fascism along those lines. As late as 1937 Churchill said in the House of Commons "I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism." He was not alone in his view in 1935 that "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations." Of course, this isn't to situate Churchill amongst the Germanophilic prime-mover of 'appeasement' known as the Cliveden Set. He was an opponent of 'appeasement' when the rot of Hitlerian sympathies had spread to the Royal Family. But it does demonstrate just how compromised the British ruling-class were. It isn't a pleasant thought just how easy it would have been to set up a Nazi puppet government in Whitehall after a successful German invasion.

This is partly what made Churchill so impressive when he came to view Hitler as a monster with an insatiable "lust for blood and plunder". Perhaps this was best demonstrated when he reacted to Operation Barbarossa with the words "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." In retrospect we can see that Churchill was right about the need to destroy Fascism and wrong that the British Empire could be maintained in this way. But it was probable by then that the Empire would collapse given the inevitability of war with Hitler. There could be no peace with National Socialism as the gang of psychopaths who took power in 1933 were met with enthusiasm from German industrialists. Expansion offered the prospect of new resources to be extracted, such as the goal of Poland and the oil of Romania. It was a last-ditch attempt at a time of enormous crisis to reinvigorate German capitalism.

Only a God can save us.

 

For Heidegger the gods will save us once we welcome them back into our world, when we've gotten past this technological stance which stifles us. You could take this as an expressed acceptance of the futility of all struggle. There can be no way out of the hegemony, all we can do is wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’. Thus ‘only a God can save us.’ Žižek sees this as one of many reactions by the Left to the hegemony of global capitalism and its indestructibility. The capitalist system can't help but tend towards moral relativism and secular pluralism, but this goes further as value is just commodity and purchase the system is totally atheistic and nihilistic. In these terms capitalism is insufficient for Being, it has no real space for it other than as a thing to be commodified and exchanged at a price. All the while capitalism denies our essence and fails to even understand itself. It has to hide behind words like ‘free-enterprise’ and ‘democracy’ for fear of being recognised for what it is.

It was Rosa Luxemburg who predicted that the capitalist system would collapse once expansion and growth ad infinitum had become an impossibility. The only possible limit to the infinite growth paradigm could come in its most thorough dominance in the world. If the world went capitalist then the parasite would soon have to face the real possibility of its own demise. With this in sight, it would take a global push to tip the system over. Today we find, as Bauman put it, capitalism has learned to create “host organisms” and onwards the parasite strives. This is nothing unusual, Karl Marx never foresaw the possibility of the capitalist system buying-off socialism with social democratic reformism. For Heidegger the answer to the technological nightmare, which engulfs us, was to be found in neither capitalism nor socialism. Notoriously Heidegger joined the Nazi Party after Hitler was rushed into power in 1933 and went on to betray his former mentor Edmund Husserl.

In his day Martin Heidegger drew a distinction between National Socialism as it existed at the time as opposed to the idealised vision which had not been realised. Heidegger may have been indulging in the far-right equivalent of ultra-leftist position which retains a certain distance from power and real decisions in its criticism of the established order. The farthest Heidegger went, in later life, to renounce National Socialism was to point to its “failure” to emerge as a genuine Third Position to American capitalism and Russian communism. In an interview for Der Spiegel, Heidegger makes it clear that he regards each of these systems as determined by ‘planetary technology’. The implication being that there has not yet been a thorough attempt to provide an answer to the nihilism of modern man as technological, value-creating and subjectivist. After all Fascism was something of a last-ditch attempt on the part of capitalism to purge itself of immense contradictions.

In Living in the End Times Žižek writes about the poetico-military complex with regard to Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia and the anti-Tutsi writer Hassan Ngeze in Rwanda. These were sincere and terrible poets, not simply corrupt politicos, who held up material to be manipulated as part of the riling up of jingoist sentiments. It this which was so instrumental in Yugloslavia as nationalism first began to appear on the scene in the 70s and 80s. Karadžić as a kind of parallax, homicidal poet from one angle and spiritual healer from another. Dragan Dabić provides the ideological key to Karadžić. Žižek reminds us of Lacan's thesis "truth has the structure of a fiction". The talk of setting free the individual's cosmic energies that link us all to the cosmos leads us to the Pagan conception of life as cosmic and its sanctity - which means that the blood of innocents will soon be flowing in the streets.

To convey the way Karadžić saw Bosnian Muslims, Žižek refers us to a favourite Chinese proverb of Karadžić's "He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them." But this does not adequately capture the postmodern brand of nationalism to which Karadžić subscribed. And so he goes onto include a telling excerpt from a poem Karadžić wrote called 'For Izet Sarajlić'. It features the line "People nothing is forbidden in my faith" and this is the permissive spirit of postmodern nationalism, which seeks to liberate us from political correctness and multiculturalism. In this post-political era, there is no other way to mobilise the masses for a public cause and the only dominate calls are for us to enjoy ourselves. The majority of us are 'moral' in that we cannot slaughter each other out of disgust at such conduct and so a 'sacred' Cause is necessary to render killing acceptable to us.

It is in such poetry and violence that we regress from the Christian love of the neighbour to the Pagan past of putting our tribe before all the others. It may be presented as a defence of Christian values, but it is the greatest threat to the Judeo-Christian legacy in Europe. As Žižek notes it goes against the universalism of the Holy Spirit, to which we each have immediate access to as individuals irrespective of their place in the social order. Who else may we add to this catalogue? There is, of course, the Austrian writer Peter Handke, who gave a speech at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. We might even include DH Lawrence, as he was on the radical Right and moved from Christian theology to Pagan mysticism. Then there's Eduardo Limonov who founded a neo-fascist movement in post-Communist Russia. In the bombardment of Sarajevo, Eduardo Limonov visited with Karadžić and was filmed taking a turn firing into the streets below them with a rifle.

The poet Eduard Limonov had returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union having spent almost 20 years in exile in America. Limonov was appalled to witness the reign of Boris Yeltsin as the Kremlin sought to impose Western-style capitalism with "shock therapy" as the means to this end. This would be a disaster as Limonov was convinced American capitalism was no different than Soviet totalitarianism, it was just more sophisticated in its oppression. He decided to take drastic action and founded a political party to recapture the original aims of the Bolshevik Revolution and integrate it within a modern nationalism. It would be the National Bolshevik Party that is now the embodiment of the resurgent nationalism which have sought to put a stop to the Russian process of 'modernisation' since the 1990s. The drink-sodden Yeltsin and the gang of free-marketeers around him practically destroyed Russia only to give way to Putin in the end.

Then there is Heidegger who had planned to lecture on Nietzsche and Hölderlin in 1944-45 but the trajectory of the war demolished these plans. Before that he had lectured on Hölderlin already at the beginning of the Nazi era when he himself was a member of the Party. The hymns selected were Germania and The Rhine, note the obvious nationalist connotations. For Heidegger the dilemma of Western existence had manifested itself in Germany, the land of the middle. He saw the question of Being and the matter of German identity as entwined. The Germans are the most metaphysical people in these terms and if Europe isn't going to go down the path of annihilation then this decision can only come through the development of new, spiritual forces from the centre. Nietzsche had diagnosed the condition, Hölderlin had the cure for it. The way to open the question of Being and the new and deeper way of being German. This is could very well have been the way Heidegger had wanted to be the philosopher of the Third Reich.

What undermines this neat pattern is that National Socialism may have found Pagan blood myths useful at times Hitler did condemn Pagan cults in 1938. This is because Fascism has few consistent and universal characteristics other than a reactive spirit and a pathological Judeophobia. More generally, this may just be the instances of that Fascist tendency to aestheticise politics. We shouldn't forget that our concerts are modeled on Nazi rallies. This tendency remains alive and well in the National Bolshevik Party that Limonov has led for the last 20 years in Russia. Many of its members came out of the Russian avant-garde music scene which had resisted communism as it scoffed at the West. Originally the avant-garde was on the side of the revolutionaries in 1917 until it was suppressed at the appearance on the scene of socialist realism under Stalin. It only resurfaced in the 1960s during the Khrushchev thawing period, then it became an expression of resistance under Brezhnev and when the Wall fell the artists prescribed Nazism as a positive vision.

In 1917 Rosa Luxemburg reflected that the time of pogroms against Russian Jewry has been brought to a close - principally by the October Revolution - before adding "I can sooner imagine - pogroms against Jews in Germany." At the time of Luxemburg's death, at the hands of the Freikorps, Heidegger was working under Husserl at Freiburg. By then the First World War had ended, with millions slaughtered and Germany left vanquished. Heidegger had served, albeit in a limited capacity, as a soldier and this he shared with the future Fuhrer along with the year of his birth. Luxemburg had been incarcerated for her firm opposition to the imperial bloodbath and amidst the confusion Rosa reached out to Benito Mussolini, who she assumed was still the socialist editor of Avanti! - little did she know that Mussolini had been kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party by then for his support of the war. This is where the defeats of the Left converge with the opening for Fascism.

It would be tempting to go off on a tangent about the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and the politics in which he engaged personally, specifically National Socialism. That would be pushing things as Heidegger at most leaves the door open to fascism, there is nothing inherently fascist about his philosophy. As Robert Solomon notes, it might be more constructive to engage with the world as it is today. There is a sense in which everything is reduced to the same level in consumerism, as with technology and money, whereby human beings are cut-off from the world and each other. Ultimately, this leaves human beings diminished as technology and money reduce the world in its immediacy - a leveling effect which has become the primary source for alienation in the modern world. In a way Heidegger returned to the pessimism of Schopenhauer in his last days.

Heidegger's last writings are dominated by his own particular notion of releasement, which could be seen as a way of thinking and living that has turned away from willing. This comes across as Schopenhauerian, though it may have been the Taoist influences on Heidegger by that point. When it came to the return of the gods, Heidegger found Nietzsche's programme for overcoming nihilism unsatisfactory. Nietzsche wanted to place the Übermensch where God once stood as a central pillar of values. Once the old myths underpinning our superstructure begin to give way, we must find new ideals in order to advance beyond what humanity has been thus far. In this Heidegger sniffed out the Will to Power which has been responsible for the destruction of values in the first place. It was not new forms of domination that can save us, but rather a humbling to power as we await the return of the gods. Maybe what we need is a bit more Nietzsche than Heidegger in this regard.

Umberto Eco on Eternal Fascism.

In the essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco outlines a list of features that are typical of what he calls Eternal Fascism, it is a force which remains in plainclothes today and won't necessarily come out sporting a Swastika for us to spot easily. It could easily take a far more innocent guise. The world is too complex for history to repeat itself and we have to uncover Eternal Fascism for all to see wherever it may hide. He stresses that the features cannot be organised into a single coherent system and there are contradictions between the different features. Eco also notes that the features are typical of other kinds of authoritarianism. Even one of these features is enough for a fascism to coagulate around it, so we find the reason that there are various differences between the Fascist movements which have come and gone. There are differences between the neo-fascist groups of today and the Fascist movements of the 1930s, the English Defence League is not the same as the British Union of Fascists though it shares certain features.

Umberto Eco rightly refers us to the words of FDR in 1938: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." It should be noted that the democratic system was never betrayed in the US, as the liberal critics of George Bush accuse him of the destruction of the Constitution. There is some truth to the claims of a debasement of old-fashioned liberal principles of freedom and rights. But the political system in the US was designed not to be democratic, nor to be autocratic, rather it was constituted as a polyarchy. This is what Alexander Hamilton called "moderate government" as the Golden Mean between dictatorship and democracy. To be more exact, the political parties can take turns running the state in the favour of the particular interests in which they are ensnared. It was James Madison who held that the government "ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." The stagnation of American politics combined with economic turmoil leaves the population angry, fearful and confused - this is ripe territory for Blackshirts!

First comes the cult of tradition. Traditionalism long precedes fascism, it was typical of counter-revolutionary Catholicism in the aftermath of the French Revolution and it first emerged in the Hellenistic era in reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. The revelation had long been concealed in forgotten languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Celtic runes and beyond to Asia. We can only persist in the interpretation of the obscure messages. The primeval truth could be procured from these ancient messages, each with a sliver of wisdom, and help compose a new culture. It would be a syncretistic culture in the sense of a combination of different forms of belief and practice, which would require a tolerance of internal contradictions. This is where the combination of Paganism, Christianity and race myths come together in Fascist states. It's also the reason that Fascism seeks to posit itself as the Third Position between capitalism and socialism.

So there can be no advancement of knowledge as truth has already been spelled out once and for all. Umberto Eco takes the example of Saint Augustine, not a proto-fascist at all, but points out that it would be symptomatic of Eternal Fascism to combine Augustine with Stonehenge. From a Marxist perspective we may note the importance of traditionalism to Fascism as superstructural to the economic conditions which fostered the regimes of the 1930s. As Terry Eagleton argues, Fascism is a last-ditch attempt on the part of monopoly capitalism to abolish the contradictions which have become intolerable. The traditionalist feature may imply a rejection of modernism, but the Fascists did not regard technology as a negation of tradition. Rather the Fascists were focused on the construction of an alternative modernity beyond the class struggle with a narrative of blood and soil. The Third Reich was proud of its industrial achievements, though the praise for modernism was only the surface of an ideology based on blood and soil. The emphasis is really on the master race, the sublimity of death and self-abnegation.

Umberto Eco notes that the Fascist finds action as beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection because thinking is a form of emasculation. Action is placed above thought. To be more precise it is reaction rather than action. One of the principle differences between a socialist and a Fascist is that the former acts whereas the latter can only react. This is where the propensity for political violence comes from, it takes the reactive form and often seeks to justify itself along such lines. The violent reaction is always justifiable to defend and secure the fatherland. This is the logic which remains in the background of the kind of 'protests' that the former football hooligans of the English Defence League hold. Originally the EDL were the violent wing of the British National Party and it remains in line with the tradition of fascist groups since the British Union of Fascists took to the streets and raised havoc. It is out of this irrationalism that culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with academics, critical attitudes and intellectualism in general.

So the entire educational system underwent a Nazification in the Third Reich, with the employment of major academics such as Martin Heidegger to purge Jewish teachers and implement the desired curriculum. This suspicion of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Eternal Fascism. Hermann Goering was fond of a phrase borrowed from Hanns Johst "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun" as well as expressions such as "degenerate intellectuals", "eggheads", "effete snobs" and the description of universities as "nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in an attack on the rampant decadence of modern culture and charge the liberal intelligentsia with the betrayal of traditional values. The point of Fascist propaganda was to tap into the irrational drives of the masses and utilise them against particular groups. The propaganda techniques to do so were picked up from the American public relations industry, which was based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud as applied by his nephew Eddie Bernays.

To make distinctions is a sign of modernism and to give into the current of depravity which began with the Enlightenment. The rejection of the modern world was dressed up as a kind of anti-capitalism, but it is the Enlightenment which is the source of decay in the modern world and Eternal Fascism rejects it on such ground. The Nazi slogan "Think with your blood!" comes to mind. The scientific community praises disagreement as a way to further pursue greater knowledge, but the disagreements we may have are treasonous for Fascists because it is a sign of diversity. We should remember the nationalist emphasis on unity and purity which opposes such liberal pluralism as a subversive or destructive influence on the nation. Thus the strange fixation on Pagan rituals, leader worship and Nordic blood myths. The rejection of the Enlightenment in Fascism is what distinguishes it from Stalinism. By contrast, Stalinism considers itself a part of the Enlightenment tradition comes in the form of the show trials held as part of the purges. The suggestion of shows trials for Jews in the Third Reich is unimaginable because there isn't even a semblance of a just society in Fascism.

Eternal Fascism seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the fear of difference and of the Other. The subversive influence of an alien race or culture becomes the principle target of Fascism. The point is to stamp out the forces which have undermined the nation and unity in society. It is racist by definition. The Nazi schoolbooks founded an impoverished vocabulary as well as an elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments of critical thought and inquiry which could undermine the regime. Even boardgames and children's books were produced to further anti-Semitic attitudes among the population. George Orwell invented Newspeak in 1984 as the official language of English Socialism. The elements of Eternal Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. Newspeak can even take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show today. With the shock jocks of the Right we find that the words 'socialism' and 'National Socialism' have been emptied out so that Obama can be called a socialist and a Nazi. The meaning of words are intentionally blurred and we see the same thing in Fascism.

The most typical feature of Fascism is the appeal to a frustrated middle-class, which had suffered through the crises of capitalism and intense feelings of political humiliation as in the Weimar Republic. The threat of working-class movements such as trade unions and leftist organisations is also a source of agitation in this instance. The possibility of revolution becomes genuine and the capitalist class begins to get desperate. Eco holds that once the proletarians are petty bourgeois and the lumpenproletariat are marginalised totally from politics then fascism will find its audience in a new majority. The audience have to be humiliated in socio-economic terms as well as political terms, it could be a war but not necessarily. The wealth and force of the enemy is defined in such terms. The Fascist is convinced of his ability to overwhelm the enemy through harsh measures, violence is never out of the question. A continuous shift in rhetorical focus maintains that the enemy is at once too strong and too weak. The inability to evaluate the force of the enemy clouds the capacity of Fascism to win wars.

To people who have been deprived of a social identity, Eternal Fascism offers a clear privilege that we were born in this great country. This is where nationalism comes into the picture, which we might be described as palingenetic (as Eco does not recognise) in that Fascist Italy was the reincarnated second Roman Empire and the Third Reich was the First and Second Reich realised as an alternate modernity. The idea of a rebirth is common, it feeds into a self-pitying and disordered view of the imperial past of the European powers. The nation can only define itself through the exclusion of the Other and the same can be said of the national identity. The Fascist mind is obsessed with an international plot which is taking place and must be stopped for the good of the nation. The people have to feel besieged and under attack in order to flock around identity-markers such as religion and nationality. The plot has to appeal to race hate, the most base instincts of hatred and it relies on the gullible cynicism of the individual to buy into a conspiracy theory in the first place. The plot must be insidious and almost invisible, which is why Jews are perfect given that they are inside and outside at the same time.

Permanent warfare is an inevitably given the nature of Fascism. Life is lived for struggle, pacifism is treason. The consequence of this is an Armageddon complex as enemies have to be defeated, so there must be a last battle or final stand to make and then the movement will have total control of the world. This implies an era of peace and unity afterwards, which stands in contradiction to this doctrine and no Fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this problem. This doctrine of perpetual war fits in with the popular elitism of Fascism, as it is fundamentally aristocratic and militaristic to the extent of holding contempt for the weak. Each citizen belongs to the best people in the world, but the members of the Party are the best of the citizens and each citizen should join the Party. There can be no patricians without plebeians. The leader knows that the position he holds was stolen and not given to him through the democratic process (though there are exceptions, Hitler being the most infamous), it was the weakness of the masses which allowed him to seize power - this applies even to cases where the Fascists came to power via the ballot box.

The masses need a ruler in this conception, so the view of people differs greatly from the liberal view of human beings as having rights and freedoms - and by extension the political impact of the citizenry in quantitative terms. So the individual often falls in line with the community, as we see with so-called 'safe seats'. Of course, Eternal Fascism rejects the claim of individuals to such rights and the People are a monolithic entity which expresses the common will. No doubt the liberal protection of individuals and minorities from the whims of the majority feeds into fascistic conspiracy theories. No large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Fascist leader becomes their interpreter. As marginalised from the political process, individuals no longer act as citizens but take on the role of the People as a theatrical fiction. Umberto Eco foresees that the future internet version of this populism may take the emotional response of a selected group of individuals as the accepted Voice of the People. The masses are manipulated under Fascism, not disdained as they are in conservative thought.

Out of a qualitative populism, Fascism takes a stand against the "rotten" Parliamentary model and the governments which have been formed as a result of them. There are hints of Eternal Fascism in the doubts raised by politicians of the Parliament's legitimacy, that the government does not represent the Voice of the People as Umberto Eco puts it. Richard Seymour notes that for the Fascist the political system is vulnerable to viruses. So the problem is not capitalism as such but super-capitalism, as Mussolini noted, which should be contrasted with the heroic capitalism of the 19th Century. Of course, heroic capitalism became super-capitalism eventually as it grew decadent. The explanation for the inherent contradictions and destructive capacities of capitalism can be displaced onto a cabal of some kind. It could be the Jews, the Freemasons, the Communists or even a bit of all three as in most cases. This is a very similar logic to the claim that there is a liberal elite which has poisoned American society.

Everyone is taught to be a hero in a strict sense, as the exceptional being which becomes the norm in Fascist ideology. The cult of heroism is joined at the hip with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was "Viva la Muerte!" which means "Long Live Death!" This motto may have been borrowed from the Iron Guard in Romania led by Corneliu Codreanu who considered Hitler "soft" when it came to the Jews. The view of death maintained by the Fascist is in contrast to the standard views of death, that it is to be faced with dignity and it leads to a better place etc. The Fascist hero craves a heroic death, to the point of impatience, because it is the best reward for having led a heroic life. In this impatience then the Fascist will send other people to die in droves. As a consequence of the impracticality and difficulty of ceaseless war and a heroism based on death the Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

The cult of the masculine leader and the heroic death retreats to the bedroom. This is the origin of chauvinist machismo complete with misogyny, as well as intolerance of sexual habits which do not fit into a certain set of standards (from chastity to homosexuality). Mussolini famously said "War is to man what maternity is to woman." Ultimately, even sex is a difficult game to play - the Fuhrer was a masochist in the bedroom who left behind a string of relationships which ended in suicide - and so the Fascist tends to games with weapons as Eco notes "doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise." Plato maintains that the tyrant lives the life of dreams, where there is no conceivable 'crime' that we can commit and we can follow our desires to their end without consequence. The tyrant becomes what he was in his dreams, eating forbidden fruit and killing at a whim. Nothing is off the table, from incest to mass-murder. Dreams become reality for the tyrant. Perhaps these words were prescient of the indulgences of Fascist dictators.

Confronting Nietzsche.

 "Nietzsche has destroyed me." - Martin Heidegger

It is important to remember that Martin Heidegger had read Nietzsche before the 1930s; it was only after he broke with Being and Time that Heidegger turned to Nietzsche once more. The Heidegger of Being and Time had no interest at all in Nietzschean philosophy when it came to metaphysics and art, but more specifically the critique of nihilism. The ‘confrontation’ with Nietzsche was brought on by the dynamics of Heideggerian thought as well as the demands of the time. According to Hans Sluga, we can safely say that Heidegger learned three major lessons from this ‘confrontation’ with Nietzsche: metaphysics, politics and the situation in the modern world. Heidegger focused mostly on Nietzsche as a metaphysician above all else, though this focus did shift over time it remained largely the same.

For Heidegger the thoughts Nietzsche had on art illuminated the precarious nature of metaphysical thinking. Sluga stresses that Heidegger turned to Nietzsche after he became interested in art, which could not be an extension of Being and Time. Heidegger concludes that the views of art Nietzsche held are an inverted Platonism, as art remains semblance and retains its opposition truth. Art is the supreme configuration of the Will to Power.[1] Art can be understood in relation to the artist, the creative forces undertaken.[2] Metaphysics from Plato onwards leads to a conclusion, which Heidegger thought was imminent and he held up Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the West. Sluga points out that this is quite problematic.

The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is symptomatic of how difficult it is to escape from metaphysics and that there is a valid focus behind the errors of metaphysics. In the work of Nietzsche the search for the nature of beings as a whole, a metaphysics of becoming behind which remains the question of Being – as this question is almost approached through the eternal recurrence of the same.[3] The problem is that the focus on the question of Being is never confronted head-on, as the question is forgotten it haunts the tradition of metaphysics. The task of overcoming of metaphysics ensnares oneself in metaphysics.[4]

Heidegger went as far as to see Nietzsche’s doctrines of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch as part of a metaphysical system.[5] The doctrine of eternal recurrence points to the question of Being, as Nietzsche approximates Being through the eternal recurrence of the same and the Übermensch is important in relation to the recurrence.[6][7] Nietzsche wrote “To impose upon becoming the character of being – that is the supreme will to power… That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being: high point of the meditation”. Heidegger maintained that the eternal recurrence of the same is illusive insofar as it is “wrapped in thick clouds – not for us, but for Nietzsche’s own thinking”. But he insisted that it is to be seen as Nietzsche’s attempt to deal with the being of Being. For Heidegger the fact that the eternal recurrence of the same is difficult to grasp is matched by the difficulty to grasp the being of Being.

Hans Sluga notes that the Heideggerian view of Nietzsche’s politics stands in distinct to Karl Jaspers and Alfred Baeumler. Karl Jaspers portrayed Nietzsche as an opposed German nationalism and anti-Semitism as he was in his lifetime. On the other hand, Alfred Baeumler was out to use Nietzsche as the intellectual harbinger of the Third Reich.[8] By contrast Heidegger saw Nietzsche as “anti-political” as well as a potential source to construct a refined national and social identity for Germans. The ‘confrontation’ with Nietzsche provided a means to attack the existing system safely, on the grounds that it was linked to an empty will to will and, by extension, haste to further technological advancements.[9] This preoccupation with identity came out of the way Heidegger viewed his country.[10]Heidegger saw the question of Being in connection with German identity, with Nietzsche and Hölderlin serving as a guide to what exactly it is to be German.  For Heidegger the future of Germany and the West is “determined” by Nietzsche and Hölderlin, so the philosopher of the godlessness and worldlessness of modern man belongs with the poet of the homecoming. To come home means to face the question of Being.

Martin Heidegger abandoned the project to determine the “essence of being German” through Nietzsche and instead he opted to reiterate his own thinking without nationalism, as Heidegger claimed after the war, as society supplanted the nation. Heidegger saw Nietzsche as diagnostic and symptomatic of the modern pathologies, just as the belief in historical progress became predominant in the world it was Nietzsche who pointed to a prevalent destruction. The metaphysics of becoming was in touch with the spirit of the times, with specific regards to technology where Nietzsche had foresaw man’s domination of the world. For Heidegger there is a sense in which Nietzsche reveals the core of technology which had led to Being as in calculation and the rule of reduced being by mathematically structured technology.

Heidegger went on to designate Nietzsche as the philosopher of “the struggle for the unlimited exploitation of the earth as the sphere of raw materials and fort he realistic utilisation of the ‘human material’, in the service of the unconditional empowering of the will to power”. Sluga points out that this interpretation appears ignorant of the Will to Power as a fundamental aspect of the world and living things. The world as a ‘monster of energy’ which has no beginning nor end, subject to contradictions and concord, while it affirms itself, destructive and self-creating as Dionysus had.[11] This view is lost as Heidegger reflects critically on Nietzsche’s work. But as Nietzsche is the philosopher of technology, for Heidegger, this critique is of the ideas of the modern age. By extension, Sluga argues, we can include the Third Reich, as well as other political conceptions of the time, as subject to this critique. The nihilism of modern man is revealed in the work of Nietzsche.[12] For Heidegger, Nietzsche saw an awful lot more than we can see, but it was never a clear picture and fell far short of capturing all that there is to see.

"I am not a man. I am dynamite." - Friedrich Nietzsche

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[1] The Will to Power has less to do with aristocratic status, militarism and power over people than it does with notions of self-discipline and personal restraint. ‘Power’ is meant in the strict sense of self-mastery and the discipline of the powers of thought, imagination and creativity. It might also be understood in terms of self-esteem, not just feeling good in the superficial sense but being energised by your own ideas and talents. It is about confidence and capability.

Solomon, Robert; Lecture 13, Nietzsche: Übermensch and the Will to Power – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWlV9sP8n0

[2] Nietzsche thought art had to be “grasped in terms of the artist” – no doubt beings had to be understood in terms of “self-creating” as well – the work itself constitutes a countermovement to nihilism and ultimately it is worth more than “truth”. In Nietzsche’s words art is “the most perspicuous and familiar configuration of the will to power”.

Sluga, Hans: Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.110-112

[3] By the early 40s Heidegger found it possible to summarise the core of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of becoming: the Will to Power, nihilism, the eternal recurrence, the Übermensch and justice. He noted importantly that every term “names at the same time what the others say. The naming of each basic word is exhausted only when one also thinks with it what the others say”.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.106-110

[4] This would mean that Heidegger is also a metaphysician insofar as he criticises Nietzsche – for his failure to confront the question of Being – within the terms of another metaphysics. The critique of Nietzsche along these lines relies on the distinction between Being and beings, which could be seen as metaphysical concepts. Ironically, Heidegger became trapped in metaphysical thinking in holding up Nietzsche as bringing metaphysics to an ‘end’.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.110-112

[5] For Heidegger the Übermensch casts Nietzsche’s metaphysics in a new light as Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence of the same became of central importance. Thus Spoke Zarathustra “thinks this thinkers one and only thought: the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same” and “the eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing,” e.g. the Will to Power.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.106-110

[6] The Übermensch is master morality spiritualised by 2,000 of slave morality, he is the master of his powers and abilities, he aspires to excellence and ideals which are very much his own. The Übermensch is free of resentment and regret to the extent that he can say emphatically and without hesitation in the face of eternal recurrence, the notion that he would have to live his life over and over again endlessly, “Yes! Gladly I would accept this!”

Solomon, Robert; Lecture 13, Nietzsche: Übermensch and the Will to Power – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWlV9sP8n0

[7] For Nietzsche a great example of the Übermensch and the Will to Power was Goethe who exercised all of his talents, ‘created’ himself as a unified being through his art and he experimented in life – taking jobs as a civil servant and a lawyer, as well as a playwright and a poet. As a writer he flirted with many styles and his works are voluminous. In Nietzsche’s terms the passion for life is the greatest of passions and Goethe was passionate at a creative and spiritual level. Nietzsche describes Goethe as “not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.”

Nietzsche, Friedrich; Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Hollingdale, RJ; Introduction and commentary | Penguin Books, 1968) pg.102-104

[8] Effectively Baeumler continued on the track which began with the proto-Nazi Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who took over her brother’s works and set out to appropriate these works for the Nazi movement. Baeumler set out to explore Nietzsche as a metaphysician, who laid the groundwork for National Socialism in his metaphysical doctrines. Baeumler dismissed the doctrine of eternal recurrence as “mystical” and saw it incongruous to the Will to Power, whereas Heidegger (who was heavily influenced by Baeumler) insisted that the Will to Power and the eternal recurrence of the same were part of a coherent metaphysical conception. It was because of Baeumler’s political project that the notion of eternal recurrence had to be dismissed, as it clashed with the political Nietzsche.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.106-110

[9] Heidegger distinguished between National Socialism as it existed at the time as opposed to the idealised vision which had not been realised. Heidegger may have been indulging in a far-right parallel of ultra-leftist ‘comfortable resistance’ which retains a certain distance from power and real decisions in its criticism of the established order. The farthest Heidegger went, in later life, to repudiate Nazism was to point to its “failure” to emerge as a genuine Third Position from American capitalism and Soviet communism. In an interview for Der Spiegel, Heidegger makes it clear that he regards each of these systems as determined by ‘planetary technology’. The implication being that there has not yet been a thorough attempt to move beyond technology and establish a genuine alternative. This is where the idealised vision of National Socialism would come in as opposed to the regime established in 1933.

Der Spiegel interview with Martin Heidegger (September 23^rd 1966) - http://lacan.com/heidespie.html

The Philosophy Book (Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2011), Slavoj Zizek, pg.326

[10] In Heidegger’s own words Germany is “the land of the middle” where “Our people, as standing in the centre, suffers the most intense pressure”. He goes on to say “Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of annihilation – precisely then can this decision come about only through the development of new, spiritual forces from the centre”.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.112-116

[11] Nietzsche posits the Apollonian against the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. Dionysian is a frenzied and orgiastic sense in which we feel ourselves as part of life flowing through us. He compared the Dionysian with intoxication as in a euphoria or ecstasy of sorts. It is the means by which one can escape from reality, but not into fantasy as with the Apollonian. Rather the Dionysian is about forgetting yourself, not the world, to experience a more mystical communal union. But the Dionysiac energies are dangerous, grotesque, cruel, sexual and wild. It is difficult to find meaning or beauty in a world of such destructive energies, though it is not on the road to nihilism for Nietzsche. Culture has emerged as attempts to refine this life force in a chaotic world driven by this force.

Dionysian – frenzied and orgiastic sense in which we feel ourselves as part of life flowing through us

Jackson, R; Nietzsche the Key Ideas (Hachette UK, 2008) pg.42-45

[12] This would probably refer to the Last Man, a concept introduced by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in contrast with the Übermensch. Unlike the Übermensch – the point of which was to rouse enthusiasm in the town’s people for the possibility of overcoming themselves – the Last Man is presented to get the town’s people to be disgusted with themselves; to awaken them to the stupidity and philistinism pervasive in their world. Robert Solomon describes the Last Man as “the ultimate bourgeois consumer and coach potato without any aspirations. The Last Man is content, comfortable and satisfied with the way of the world and life as it is.”

Solomon, Robert; Lecture 13, Nietzsche: Übermensch and the Will to Power –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWlV9sP8n0