New pub on Poland

We've been traveling — Milan, Venice, Turin — so I'll have much to share with you when my new, redesigned website is up. For now I just want to let you know of my article 

End of a Saga: Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope

just published in Film International. About a great director and a powerful history.

Happy 3 Kings Day!

Apologies for my long absence. Been busy, here in Madrid for Old Year Night (Noche Vieja) and New Year's, with shows, friends, and a splendid New Year's Eve dinner at the Café de la Ópera, four course meal with wine, champagne and arias -- a joy to hear such strong sopranos, tenors and two baritones singing right next to your table. And last night with a good Madrid friend, we watched (as well as we could, over the heads of the big crowd) Madrid's spectacular Cabalgata de los Reyes, the Three Kings' Parade. Melchor, Gaspar and Baltasar (the three Reyes Magos, or magician kings) steal into the houses at night, with their camels (they're magicians, after all) to leave toys in the shoes of good girls and boys, or lumps of coal for those who have been bad. We grownups just get a virtual hug and a virtual lick from the rough tongue of a royal camel.

But as my gift for you, I leave you Two Stories from Naples: Italica, by Geoffrey Fox. I hope you enjoy them. They're at least better than lumps of coal. Or a camel-lick either, for that matter. See you later, and have a great year! I'll be back soon, later today I hope, to share with you my New Year's resolutions.

Gender in Spain and Italy

Here's a very good BBC article by Danny Wood contrasting Spain's and Italy's gender policies: Diverging paths on gender equality.

One quibble, though, with the phrase, “Spain - the land that coined the word "macho" -”. The Spanish word macho (from Latin masculus, masculine) has always meant a male animal, usually a mule. It's application to overbearing male humans seems to have started in Mexico, and has only in recent years become widespread in Spain. Its introduction is a sign of moral progress: if people earlier didn't have a specific word for this behavior, it was because they didn't see it as a problem.

Deadly farcism

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” God is reported to have said to Nietzsche, years after reading Also sprach Zarathustra. (He was of course plagiarizing Mark Twain, who was plagiarizing himself.)

Lately, Fascism (now called “neo-”) appears to be shouting the same thing from the balconies and stairways of Rome. “It never died!" cry the excited Alemanno supporters with their stiff-armed salute. But I think it's an illusion. Fascism, at least in its classic Mussolini sense, did indeed die, even before the Republic of Salo (1943 -- Benito Mussolini's last stand after he'd been dismissed, arrested, and then rescued by German forces). Fascism as a revolutionary force expired almost as soon as it was born, when its egalitarian pretensions were overtaken by its Blackshirt thugs in 1918 and 1919. Fascism as a “corporatist” system of government remained a fantasy even after the Fascisti came to power in 1922. But as a populist and popular movement, imposing its slogan Credere, obedere, pugnare -- “Believe, obey, fight” -- it lasted for more than 20 years before it exhausted itself.

Then, as now, Fascism presented itself as a simple and direct solution to overwhelming social problems. And as usual with such, it was simple, neat and wrong. Today, it's not even plausible: How is a coalition of the Liga del Norte, Alemanno's neofascism, and Berlusconi's media empire going to get the garbage picked up in Naples? Or stem the wasteful gush of public resources in corruption and bureaucracy? Or provide living wages? Oh, I get it: By beating up on Rumanian Gypsies. It's all their fault! Credere, obedere, pugnare.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past," says a character in William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. But its ghosts come back as players in farce, to plagiarize another 19th century author.

See my 2003 blog, “Flirting with fascism”; also recommended:

What Have We Learned, If Anything? by Tony Judt

Venice album, cont.

Two views from atop the Campanile, and finally, farewell from the dock before boarding the Allilaguna ferry for the airport.

Venice album, 1

From our last day in the city. Canal, St. Mark's Place and the Basilica, and the Basilica again with the Campanile.

Horses

These are the real, original bronze ones, stolen from Constantinople by the Venetians when they conquered the city in 1204. They were probably taken from the Hippodrome in Constantinople (there's some doubt, though, as to where they had been placed). The Venetians put them up on their Basilica. Napoleon stole them again, but after Napoleon's downfall the Venetians (not the Constantinopolitans) recovered them. But they were suffering from the elements in their perch on the Basilica, and now they are kept inside the Basilica museum.


Just a few paces away from the originals are these copies, placed where the Venetians displayed them in the days of their vast commercial empire. (Ignore the guy in dark glasses who looks like he's about to be clobbered by a hoof.)

Vittorio and the Venice monster

Vittorio il gondoliere is worried. As he poled us along the back canals, he got excited and voluble in response to Susana's questions, delighted to have found a passenger who could understand his rapid Italian and was interested in his problems. He like most Venetians was torn by the debate over the huge flood-gate project, the modulo sperimentale elettromeccanico or MoSE, and its likely ecological consequences. Mostly though, he was worried about spills from the petroleum tankers that are, unpardonably in his view, allowed into the Venetian lagoon.

Anybody visiting Venice knows that the city is sinking. On one day last week, the narrow pedestrian "streets" to the places we wanted to visit were flooded up to our knees. We saw other tourists sloshing along in gaudy, flimsy plastic knee-high boots (€12 a pair from your nearest edicola) or sturdier rubber boots (€25), but we chose to sit out the wait till low-tide in a little restaurant. By about 3 p.m., the paths were dry enough for walking. This kind of thing, the flooding of St. Mark's Square and other low areas of the city, is now occurring as many as 250 times a year, according to a big sign at the edge of the Grand Canal explaining the problem. Several times we passed store-front offices of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (still using the hammer and sickle emblem on a red background) with posters denouncing the MoSE Monster eating up Venice. It's a complicated issue, not only technically and environmentally but also politically, as are many big projects in Italy. Here's the clearest explanation I've found: Flood barriers | Saving Venice | Economist.com

“Flirting with Fascism”

A friend just sent me this article (see link below) by John Laughland, on Michael Ledeen's enthusiasm for what he describes as the revolutionary Fascist "movement" in Italy, as distinct from Mussolini's authoritiarian "regime."

I found it fascinating. I had read and reviewed (for some obscure leftish academic journal edited by Alvin Gouldner) the interview of Renzo de Felice (mentioned in the article) when it came out. I think Ledeen is right about many things, especially the revolutionary character of the Italian Fascist movement in its early days. Quite similar to the romantic revolutionary ideas of the early Falange in Spain -- Primo de Rivera and his followers. There were also revolutionaries among the early Nazis (the Strasser brothers, notably).

"Revolution" here does not imply anything like equal justice and opportunity, which is what socialists usually have in mind. Fascist, Falangist and National Socialist revolutions were allied with romantic notions of nation and "race." Fascist, etc. "revolution" does share with Marx's, Lenin's and other "left" concepts of revolution a faith in creative destruction to be achieved by mobilization of the masses.

The fatal flaw in Ledeen's argument, I think, is the fantasy that "movement" can be separated from "regime" in actual practice. As soon as D'Annunzio actually had to govern Fiume, he had to stop mobilizing people -- because people in motion are likely to turn you out of power. And as soon as Franco or Mussolini or Hitler were able to consolidate power, each rapidly eliminated (or in the case of Franco, marginalized) the "revolutionaries" in his ranks.

And the fatal flaw in the revolutionary fascists' thinking and practice is the love of chaos for its own sake, which leads to such aberrations as the Falangist slogan "¡Viva la muerte!" There is no thought, or even tolerance, of a plan to mobilize the masses to create new institutions where their participation can become regularized. That is, they are not tearing down autocracy in order to build social democracy (which is what I think Hugo Chávez believes he is doing). Chaos is the antithesis of government, so whoever ends up as the strongest in the chaotic war of all against all will have to impose some kind of order. If routinized democracy is not permissible, then it has to be authoritarian and top-down from the boss. In Italy the slogan was "Credere, obedere, pugnare". In Germany, "das Führerprinzip".

Flirting with Fascism, by John Laughland