A response to Peter Hitchens.

Well, it was a pleasant surprise to find my short piece on Peter Hitchens has drawn a response from the man himself. You can read his article below, and I’ll now proceed to respond accordingly.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/left-wing-person-nearly-says-something-interesting.html

 

The main problem, as he sees it, with my observations is the implication that he yearns for a return to halcyon days, and of course these days never existed. To be fair, I was referring more so to the reactionary press in general when I wrote: ‘Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race. The malaise of the reactionary press is really down to this harsh reality.’ In retrospect, I should’ve been sharper on this distinction and avoided the conflation.

On an ironic note, it was the socialist movement which emerged out of the despair of the loss of the non-industrial pre-capitalist world, and in that regard it was backward-looking, while at the same time pushing forwards to a better world. It’s perfectly clear to my side that it’s the future we’re fighting over, and that it requires historical perspective to see this era as transient.

I should make clear that the purpose of my article was to convey the reasons why Peter Hitchens stands out from the commentariat - a herd of independent minds if there ever was one. It wasn’t intending to rehash the standard critique of the Hitchens brand of traditionalist conservatism. He’s right on several key issues: the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; civil liberties and free-speech. But it’s also the case that he’s wrong in much of his prognosis.

As Mr. Hitchens emphasises, in my article I observe: ‘the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. “It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers.”

Mr. Hitchens writes: ‘But he doesn’t say whether he accepts or rejects this, or even what he actually thinks about conscience (can he be against it?) or the other things I list as virtues undermined by the strong modern state.’

On conscience, I think moral values have a necessary role in any human community, as I’m a moral realist; but I wouldn’t say this is inherently ‘conservative’. We can still debate what constitutes right and wrong, though I will say that I do not know of any leftist who embraces moral relativism. It would be completely inconsistent as moral relativism cannot be expected to uphold any values, and certainly not egalitarian values.

As for deferred gratification, it was the liberalisation of credit which inverted this ‘deferral’ and left many people to spend first and work off the debt later. Of course, this wouldn’t be the case if the wage share of GDP for the working-class hadn’t been squeezed for the last 40 years. So this is not a monopoly of the middle-classes, but it has been turned on its head in recent decades. The picture is much more complex.

A great many people living on benefits, particularly those trying to raise children on benefits, practice forms of deferred gratification by effectively fasting. I know this because I come from a single-parent household, and I knew many others in similar circumstances, very often the lone parent will eat less and less to save up for Christmas. I don’t expect the Mail to portray this side of so-called ‘dependency culture’, but it’s revealing that they are so blind to it.

When it comes to monogamy, my own view is that it will outlast its competitors (particularly the fad of polyamory) due to its simplicity and mutuality. I don’t romanticise the institution of marriage, its clear strong relationships and families will be formed whether it exists or not.  I was somewhat sceptical of marriage equality because it was clearly a highly conservative proposal. Civil partnerships were the progressive innovation and offered a secular alternative free of a morally bankrupt and increasingly repressive state.

Understandably, Mr. Hitchens found fault with my dismissive remark: ‘He’s wrong on almost all cultural and social issues’. As I hadn’t set out to critique every one of the positions he’s ever taken I didn’t feel the need to go into specifics. But I’ll be forthright and specific here.

A perfect example of where Hitchens goes wrong: addiction. The claim that there is no objective basis for addiction is simply untrue. As medical professionals will tell you, the liver physically changes in the course of prolonged alcohol consumption and this can run alongside a psychological dependency on the drug’s effects. The answer is abstinence and therapy, but there is a very high recidivism rate. The denial of addiction is not only wrong, it is an unnecessary point to make.

The cases for/against the legalisation of drugs can be made without such a point. Likewise, it is possible to question the prevailing culture of hedonism without the presupposition that it is all a matter of ‘free-choice’ (a manifestly liberal point in itself). The only sensible hedonism was advocated and practiced by Epicurus. As long as it remains almost taboo to turn down a drink it will be likely for functioning alcoholics, let alone non-functioning ones, to emerge. But I doubt this will be put right by silly bans and regressive taxes.

To conclude, it’s only possible to rail against conventional wisdom once it has become convention. Mr. Hitchens is sincere in his wish to reorder society, but if he were to succeed he would not only make his work defunct, he would also provide the basis for it to be torn down all over again. That being said, I don’t see anything ‘radical’ in extolling fashionable hedonism.

Should anyone want to ask me a direct question, you can email me at: cainmosni@hotmail.co.uk

Why I respect Peter Hitchens.

Adversarial politics

Believe it or not, there are honourable conservative voices out there. By 'honourable', I really mean those few figures with integrity. You don't have to agree with someone to respect their point of view. This is easy to forget in a political discourse lacking worthy opponents of the Left.

The fulminating columnist Peter Hitchens is one such case of the honourable rightist. The particular strain of conservatism, to which he adheres, may be summarised as traditional, cultural or socio-moral conservatism. His targets include the Westminster consensus, not only the Labour Party, but the Conservative Party as well. He sees the country threatened from a left-wing cultural putsch against the vestiges of an organic social order. Yet it's clear that he is no friend of the current flavour of right-wing politics.

On an ABC panel with Dan Savage and Germaine Greer, Hitchens was asked what he thinks of Tony Abbott. He immediately laid into the Australian Prime Minister deeming him a 'fake conservative' for his neoliberal economic agenda, pseudo-moralism, and connections with Rupert Murdoch. He has dismissed UKIP as a 'dad's army party', unlike many of his associates in the right-wing press, seeing the party only as a means of annihilating the Conservative Party.

"I also yearn for a truly radical party," he once confessed to the BBC. In the same segment, Hitchens made clear what he really opposes: namely, the centre-ground of the Third Way and 'compassionate' Conservatism. He sees both forces as two sides of the same coin (and he's not wrong) routinely flipped every four or five years. In short, he wants to abolish the fakery of personality politics and return to adversarial politics.

When it comes to the economy Peter Hitchens has said that he is for a robustly social democratic model, which would include a safety-net and universal health-care. It would include what he describes as strong employment rights and social housing. He opposes the right to buy scheme which has wiped out so many council houses and inflated the housing market. On top of this, Hitchens has routinely criticised privatisation and the legacy of Thatcherism.

Years ago on Question Time, Peter Hitchens savaged Iain Duncan Smith and called for the renationalisation of the railways. It's not the only case either. "I think there was a case for nationalising coal, made in the 1920s and accepted by many people for non-dogmatic reasons," he wrote in his column in October 2012. "I have always believed that the electric power grid should be nationalised. I think it should be renationalised  as a prelude to an enormous programme of nuclear power station building, without which we face an appalling energy crisis within 20 years."

In a Chat Politics interview Peter Hitchens was asked whether or not he thought it would be possible to build a right-wing alternative to the Conservative Party. He responded "Who says it'll be right-wing?" Of course, this kind of response is symptomatic of the very view he takes of the prime oscillation of UK politics between Labour and Conservative. He often eschews the label of 'right-wing' for himself, preferring the title of Burkean conservative. It's evident that he sees the left-to-right spectrum as a defunct measure of politics and yet he never strays away from bashing what he calls 'the Left'.

"The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social," he insists in one of his columns. "They lead to a powerful state. This not because they actively set out to achieve one." Not surprisingly, the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. "It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers."

As a former Trotskyite, Peter Hitchens remains within the bootprint of twentieth century leftism, bemoaning the cultural revolution of the 1960s, yearning for a revival of the traditions and social norms it killed. He's wrong on almost all cultural and social issues, but he's right that the problem, for people like him, isn't just the Left - it's Thatcherism too. Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race. The malaise of the reactionary press is really down to this harsh reality.

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."

Yelling 'Stop!'

 In the first issue of National Review William F Buckley, Jr. penned the mission statement of the conservative magazine as 'standing athwart history, yelling stop'. At the time, Buckley was in the sway of a stridently traditionalist conservatism that seems somewhat out of place in America, a Whig republic with no feudal past to draw upon. It's not like in Europe where there is a feudal past of hierarchical orders in the form of royal families, established churches and aristocracies. The preservation of this order has not simply been the agenda of all conservatives, for the politics of Reaction often amount to a rage against the status quo in its failures to confront the challenges of the modern world. When it came to defeating the Left then there wasn't any option that was out of the question. In Spain this led Buckley to lend his support to Franco to stomp out the 'nihilism' of the Left. The willingness to crush revolutionary movements by any means is not inseparate to the broader agenda of reactionnaires. Sometimes the most counter-revolutionary means are themselves appropriated forms of radicalism.

 No wonder a favourite ally and good friend of the Iron Lady was General Pinochet, the right-wing dictator who stopped Chile's democratic lurch towards socialism. The justification of military rule has always been in the past a dubious claim to 'order'. Many right-wing Catholics saw Franco as the bulwark against a destructive force which threatened to tear apart the traditional institutions of society. By contrast, the Pinochet regime suffocated Chile's democratic institutions and left-wing elements to re-order the whole of society and not to reinstate 'order'. Yet the same justification of 'order' remained, Pinochet was a necessary evil to make sure the wheels were well oiled and ensured that the people knew their place. Its radicalism was joined at the back of the head with authoritarian rule. It was a convenient agonism between individualism and authoritarianism that was held in perpetual tension in these years.

 As Thatcherism represented the turning tide of politics in the West, the other side of its assault on civil society at home was the military junta abroad. The same Chilean agonism can be found in Thatcher's Britain. Individualism and authoritarianism sat in constant tension and made the best allies precisely because of that tension. Thatcher promised to sweep away post-war Anglo-socialism from the realm of the Possible to make way for the untrammeled powers of individual freedom. This was popular capitalism, it carried all the weight of classical liberalism and effused all the bluster of nationalism. The radicalism at the core of Thatcherism, its promise of a property-owning democracy based on a market individualism rather than a state collectivism. It meant the liberation of the individual from the mediocrity of the post-war settlement. Out of this understanding JG Ballaard celebrated home ownership in thoroughly Thatcherite terms in 1982:

 

I often think that the most radical thing one can do is to deliberately choose the bourgeois life - get that house in the suburbs, the job with the insurance company or the bank, wear a blue suit and a white shirt and a tie and have one's hair cut short, buy the right fabrics and furnishings, and pick one's friends according to the degree to which they fit into all the bourgeois standards. Actually go for the complete bourgeois life - do it without smiling; do it without ever winking.

 Even though the post-war settlement of a mixed economy complete with welfare provisions and a strong labour movement had been a highly successful model of development. It had become an obstacle that the system had to circumvent, an establishment in dire need of reorientation. To the ends of the accumulation and circulation of capital the Thatcherites represented a battering-ram on the institutional obstructions in the status quo. The liberation of the individual meant economic liberation, the negation of all constraint, the abolition of equity and bonds of solidarity. And yet the Thatcher years merely succeeded in the concentration of greater power in the state, whilst the market left the people more marginalised than liberated. Selling off council properties only left the ground clear for speculators to take hold. Meanwhile, the inner-city poor have been increasingly shoved into the veal flattening pens of the ghetto and the outskirt. Housing is unaffordable for a great many, while being highly profitable for an opulent few. 

 

 It was just the tip of the iceberg as an orgy of privatisation wiped out huge chunks of industry, leaving behind eviscerated communities and welfare wastelands. A financial colossus unconstrained by all the old red-tape became the heart and soul of the British economy. One of Thatcher's economic advisors, Alan Budd confessed to Adam Curtis that he sometimes feared that monetarism was, in effect, a policy of mass-unemployment - the goal of which was to smash the trade unions. The battles waged by the Right were hardly successful by the measures they claimed for themselves. All in all the rate of growth remained at 2.5%, on average, no more than it had been at the stale end of social democracy when Britain was the 'sick man of Europe'. What Thatcher had changed was where where the money ended up. It's clear where she belongs in history.

 In the past it was often the Anglican Tory gentry who sought to defend the lot of the poor from the enclosures fundamental to the establishment of capitalism. The Whig aristocracy were the primary force of the enclosure of common land and the dispossession of the people living on that land. It is no coincidence that one of the leading exponents was John Locke, nor is it coincidental that Locke was an apologist for the expropriation of the Native Americans. By the 19th Century it was Tories like John Ruskin who were most sceptical of the ongoing industrialisation of society, for it was the rise of competition in the market over tradition and custom. The enclosure of common lands had 'cleared' away vast swathes of people from a traditional agrarian existence to work for a subsistence in miserable mills and later factories. These people were left dispossessed in a pauperised state without any independence. Thatcherism was Whiggery par excellence, except it was the ransacking of the public good and not just the common good.

 It was men like William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin who understood and warned against the illth of the markets. The culture and hierarchy of society is always at risk in a rampant capitalist system, where the market functions as a mechanism not just in economic terms but in moral and cultural terms as well. Its tendency is relativist, not realist, as its expansionist pursuits can only swallow up entire chunks of society. The monarchy and church provided such legitimacy with notions of 'order' and 'morality', all the while presiding over an economy running towards greater plurality, freedom, choice, relativism and pragmatism. The standard conservatism has since been a manifestation of this contradiction, torn between socio-cultural traditionalism and economic liberalism. In this way the reactionnaires of today are far from 'standing athwart history, yelling stop'. Instead you can find the rightists at the side-road, in Ballardian spirit, carrying signs which read: dangerous bends up ahead, speed up.

 

Spain's Pain.

Santiago Carrillo just passed at the age of 97, perhaps the last major figure of Spanish leftism to have fought in the Civil War and participate in Spain's transition to democracy. He became a major figure in the rising Eurocommunist movement, which could be understood most fairly as an attempt by the Communist Parties of Europe to take an independent line from the Soviet Union. It took the form of an embrace of the democratic norms and institutions of Western Europe in a bid to differentiate itself from Trotskyism. As the Civil War broke out Carrillo was brought into the orbit of the Soviet Union and he was later complicit in the Paracuellos massacre - in which some 2,000 prisoners were shot. The massacre was taken up as an instance of "red barbarism" by Franco's Nationalists. General Franco claimed that the war he waged on Republicans and the Spanish Left in the 1930s was a crusade for Christian civilisation - and he found common cause with reactionary rightists of all stripes to this end.

Franco's Falangists had finished the Second Republic by 1939 and in its place crafted what would be Europe's longest reigning dictatorship. The anarchist revolutionaries of Spain were crushed by the combined forces of Fascism, Stalinism and Western democracies. For the reactionaries in Spain it meant the end of the social upheaval and rebellious unionism that had threatened the fabric of Spanish society for too long. Francoism in Spain was born out of a negation of radicalism, at first Franco only promised a return to order and an end to the revolution. Yet he endorsed liberty, equality and fraternity in his first proclamation. He was quick to promise the middle-class the reversal of land reform, the banning of trade unions along with the parties of the Popular Front. The General went further to promise the return of the monarchy and defence of Catholicism. Leading conservative intellectual William F Buckley, Jr. described Franco as an 'authentic national hero' and condemned the left-wing government as 'visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists'.

As noted by Richard Seymour, the priority in rural areas of Spain during the Republican era was land reform and the countryside was subject to high unemployment. This helped the Popular Front government to spring up with the promise of quick land reform. The unemployed peasants couldn't wait for the government to deliver and opted to occupy large estates, starting with 3,000 farms in the province of Badajoz. The government legalised the early occupations given the amount of civil unrest and hundreds of thousands of peasants were resettled. The seizures provided not just land and work, a democratic forum was opened up where arguments were waged over the whole future of how the society would develop from then on. It was this which General Franco conquered and destroyed, the peasants and leftist leaders were swiftly done away with. Franco set out to undercut the Left with promise of nationalisations, even the Falange flag was designed to mimmick the flags of the anarchists they intended to annihilate.

Today the very radicalism that the Spanish Fascists had fought to eradicate has resurfaced in the time of austerity and widespread despair. As Fascism collapsed and Spain became a monarchical democracy Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo came to power in Marinaleda in 1979 and, as the rest of the world fell under the spell of neoliberalism, embarked upon the construction of a pocket of what has been described as a 'communist utopia'. There in Marinaleda there is no need for mortgages, while full employment has almost been achieved Sánchez Gordillo has sought to move to a common ownership of land and establish wage equality. Housing is now a right in Marinaleda, taxes are low and the groundwork of a direct democracy laid down. This continues while the rest of Spain suffers an unemployment rate of 25%, even the rest of Andalusia endures a 34% unemployment level. The situation is actually more dire than it is in moribund Greece in this regard. Everywhere there is disaffection and it has taken on living forms in the streets.

The Mayor of Marinaleda has become a prominent figure seen as a surfer on the tall waves of popular anger at the sight of the government handing billions to banks and cutting services to cover the bill. It's obvious he is not a lone-wolf either. The 8 million strong indignados have protested for hundreds of days against the austerity regimes of the established Left and Right of Spain's mainstream politics. The indignados have no faith in the formal institutions of representative democracy anymore. The striking miners of Asturias have taken to firing homemade rocket launchers at riot police and blocking off roads. It was the Asturian miners who were put down by Franco's forces in 1934 only to awaken from their slumber in 1962 and fight valiantly. Franco killed 3,000 miners in 1934 and captured many thousands more, but still they rose up again. Now it's the austerity regime of the Spanish government backed by the Euroconservatives at the heart of the EU that the miners are fighting against.

The egalitarian pocket Marinaleda stands out in Andalusia where around half the arable land is owned by 2% of the land-owners. In the Mayor's own words "The concentration of land ownership in Andalusia is 10% higher than it was in the Second Republic. They tried an agrarian reform. But it was annulled with Franco's coup d'etat... The agrarian reform is still pending." Sánchez Gordillo has been most controversial for orchestrating the looting of supermarkets. It was an act of civil disobedience to grab lentils, oils, beans, chickpeas and milk in order to redistribute the supplies through food banks to the poor. The police have been unable to arrest Sánchez Gordillo given his immunity as the Mayor of Marinaleda. The renegade Mayor has issued calls for other mayors to follow his example and for the occupation of empty buildings owned by the banks. A welcome cry in a country with 800,000 empty homes and millions in need of affordable housing. The death of European social democracy gives many good reason to seek out a more radical solution.

It could've been a shoe.

It is worth noting that the 1960s witnessed the so-called "democratisation" of art, as low-culture and high-culture were rendered relative and the distinction between the two became increasingly blurred. It was the birth of postmodernism, as well as the beginning of entrepreneurial art. Pop Art began as a satire on the burgeoning obsession with image, as soup tins worth pennies in the supermarkets were transformed into prints worth thousands. In a studio known as "the factory" Andy Warhol and his assistants churned out those famous prints, which epitomise the repetitive monotony of consumerism. The psychedelic prints of soup cans and bottles of Coca-Cola were ironic. There was no message, no point at all and it was intended as a joke. But it  was a satirical slant on the rampant consumer culture of Western capitalist societies. The prints later increased in value to obscene amounts of dough, and yet they were famously depictions of banal objects - the sort of thing you throw in the trolley in the supermarket. It was soon absorbed by what it was mocking, the burgeoning commercialism.

It was never the aim to undermine the Establishment and melt down consumer capitalism to unleash the creative capacities of the proletariat. Its satiric reflection of passive consumption and pop culture was sold to the same consumers ensnared in fashion trends. Rather the capitalist system had to exit in order for it be mimmicked cynically with a nudge and a wink. It was a part of the burgeoning commercialisation of cultural forms. Pop Art could be seen as conservative in this way, it would inevitably be subsumed into what it was mimmicking as it subverted the traditional standards of fine art. The radical relativisation of all standards leveled the art scene, but only to become the Establishment. Today it's Tracy Emin as well as Gilbert and George who are the conservatives. What about Warhol? He died a millionaire. Before doing so, he decorated his own home with antiques and fine art which he personally picked over the work he delivered to the world. Ultimately the trajectory is nihilistic, again this is something else capitalism has in common with it. As Warhol remarked when asked why he painted Elvis Presley "No, it could've been a shoe."

However, Warhol was not the first to get rich quick in the art world. It isn't particularly shocking to us today, as we now live in a world where the man who had a shark preserved in formaldehyde has amassed an estimated net worth of £235 million. In 2008 Damien Hirst sold an entire show for £111 million, if we want to know where this began we have Salvador Dalí to thank at a fundamental level. In a sense Dalí was the prototype for the postmodern artist now predominant. You know, the crass kind who revel in commercial success. He would sign his name to hundreds of blank pieces of paper sometimes at $100 a pop, which were then used to produce forgeries of his work and in turn undermined the value of his own paintings. It should be noted that all along Dalí was fixated on commercial success and courted it with great luck thanks to his business manager and wife Gala. A lot of the money went to funding an extravagant lifestyle, of multiple homes and multiple lovers. The commercialism in which Dalí indulged as a whore artiste inevitably drew the ire of his fellow surrealists even before Dalí's shameful complicity in Francoism.

 

In the later works we can detect a fundamental shift to the postmodern Dalí after the Second World War where the works increasingly began to degenerate into high kitsch - with only a few glimpses of exception. In these years Dalí was guilty of the reduction of art's value to an instrumental level, whether the end be the stated aim of reaching a higher plain of consciousness or filling his wallet. He never shirked from offending the aestheticism of the Establishment as well as his fellow surrealists. Ironically, he may have given greater ground in his work to the extreme formulation of aestheticism that "What is useful is ugly!" As the work of Duchamp and Picasso were formerly derided as "ugly" before becoming the Establishment, so too has Dalí and the process began in his lifetime.  The accusation that this particular brand of surrealism exemplifies bourgeois decadence is not entirely undeserved. It could be that the work of the surrealist school, in its bid to empty-out the subconscious onto the canvas, has been symptomatic rather than exemplary.

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.

Male Mythology in Gonzo.

The Americans based in Puerto Rico as journalists, businessmen and soldiers are depicted as a horde of corrupt, perverted and sex-crazed sociopaths. There is Moberg who is obsessed with cannibalism (a twisted form of the unfulfilled longing) and Zimburger who is described as "more beast than human". Then there is the reckless Yeamon and the inexplicably unfuckable Sala, between them we might situate Kemp as a kind of "moderate witness" who is never as passive as Sala nor as rebellious as Yeamon. Paul Kemp participates and observes the mayhem, but manages to pull-back from the edge and gets to walk off towards the sunset as it were. This is a standard lesson of literature, the passive will destroy themselves and the rebel will be destroyed by the system. It is being able to participate and pull back from the edge just in time that makes for a great story. Especially when we're talking about Gonzo journalism, the journalist is a participant in his story in the full subjective sense. With all of this mind we should look at when Paul Kemp finds himself on a beach after a night of festivities with a woman called Lorraine:

We talked for a while, drying off as best we could, and suddenly she reached over and pulled me down on top of her. “Make love to me,” she said urgently.

I laughed and leaned down to bite her on the breast. She began to groan and jerk me around by the hair, and after a few minutes of this I lifted her onto the clothes so we wouldn’t get full of sand. The smell of her body excited me tremendously and I got a savage grip on her buttocks, pounding her up and down. Suddenly she began to howl: at first I thought I was hurting her, then I realised she was having some sort of extreme orgasm. She had several of them, howling each time, before I felt the slow bursting of my own.

We lay there for several hours, going at it again when we felt rested. All in all I don’t think we said fifty words. She seemed to want nothing but the clutch and howl of the orgasm, the rolling grip of two bodies in the sand.

Paul Kemp promised to call Lorraine - the lie we all know so well - and never does, as far as we know, whereas Kemp later returns to the US where Chenault waits for him. She had left Yeamon for Paul soon after she reappeared after the incident at the carnival, in which she was almost certainly gang-raped at a party - a trauma never fully explored or resolved in the book, it just happened. After turning up at Kemp's place Chenault asks Paul Kemp to get in the shower with her and then comes a flash of impure Gonzo "I heard a gong somewhere in the back of my brain, and then a melodramatic voice saying, 'And this concludes The Adventures of Paul Kemp, the Drunken Journalist. He read the signs and saw it coming, but he was too much of a lecher to step out of the way.' Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault." It is clear that our hero did not go celibate between the chapters, but the sex scene with Chenault is significant in its difference to the earlier tryst on the beach.

I felt totally defeated. For a while I paced around the apartment, barely hearing her happy chatter, then I gave up entirely and went over to the bed and took off my clothes. I fell on her with such a violence that her smile quickly disappeared and it became a desperate business.

She kicked her feet in the air and shrieked and arched her back and she was still trying when I exploded inside her and collapsed with exhaustion. Finally she gave up and locked her legs around my hips and her arms around my neck, and started to cry.

I leaned on my elbows and looked down at her 'What's wrong?' I asked.

She kept her eyes closed and shook her head. 'I can't,' she sobbed. 'I get so close, but I can't.'

We might reach for the term 'courtly love' to denote the way in which Chenault was pursued by Paul Kemp simply because she was forbidden to him as Yeamon's girlfriend. It began on the plane over to Puerto Rico where he was desperate to see to it that she could sit next to him and ended up getting into a fight with an elderly man over his seat. Keep in mind that the perpetuation of the 'courtly love' structure hints at the ongoing attempts of man to compensate for his reduction of women to mere vehicles for his fantasy.In turn woman comes to inhabit this fantasy as her 'femininity' and she is deprived of her particularity as a woman. As the pursuit moved beyond 'loving' her (for lack of a better phrase) for something in her more than herself - as an object - to seeing her as a subject of lack. If we continue along this Žižekian line we find that this leads us to the conclusion that sexual difference retains the Real which cannot be symbolised and lovers are fated to settle for a relationship that is a "non-relationship".

Then again we might be tempted here to accept the conclusion that the point of the tryst on the beach with the "dark skinned" Lorraine was to stand as the exotic Other with a certain authenticity in contrast to the anemic and inhibited whiteness of Chenault. A racism turned on its' head where Lorraine was an exotic and wild lay on a beach by comparison with Chenault. So the only point of Lorraine was to point us towards Chenault's deficiency, once she has served her purpose on the beach she can disappear. It is only after Kemp beds Chenault that the narrative can reach a conclusion - the return to home - so we might designate Puerto Rico as a vanishing mediator on it's own. But then what might we read into Chenault's disappearance as she heads onwards to New York? A rendezvous in the Big Apple remains a genuine possibility for Paul with Chenault. It is never fully resolved what happened at the carnival, through Paul's eyes it is as if Chenault was "asking for it" in the standard misogynist contours of rape as in some way the fault of the woman.

As Žižek has pointed out there is a sense in which the excessive desire of female fantasy and male fantasy fails in a bid to overcome such an excess. It poses a threat to male identity and the woman has to be erased as it were. One way to escape from the excessive Real encountered in fantasy is to 'make love', not to reenact the fantasy but to escape from it. Perhaps this is the reason that Chenault has to 'disappear' from the narrative in order for it to be able to reach any conclusion. What might that say about her appearance in the narrative as a whole? Effectively she was only present as her desire for phallic enjoyment. In the note she leaves for him to find Chenault writes "I can't stand it anymore. My plane leaves at six. You love me. We are soul-mates. We will drink rum and dance naked. Come see me in New York. I will have a few surprises for you." This is the only space which opens up for Chenault's subjectivity, yet she can only express what we already know and expect of her. There is no active part to play and in actuality woman "therefore does not exist" in the Lacanian formula.