Interesting times

It was supposedly a Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." We do.

Curse? Yes, if what you, like most people everywhere, most want is predictability, to have some idea of what's going to happen and what will be the consequences of whatever action you take, "interesting times" are a curse.

Unsettled times are unsettling. And times that are as unsettled as ours, with the globe warming and the sea rising over isles and the rims of continents,  the climate producing heat waves in Moscow and hurricanes of unprecedented intensity, fish disappearing from the oceans, farmlands turning to desert, gigantic engineering projects turning valleys into seas, whole industries collapsing and economies crashing, while communications technology changes so fast that we can only wonder as it whizzes by, are enough to induce panic. Especially in those people most affected by one or several of these unsettlements.

So of course people are killing each other in the Sudan (and many other places), pirating ships in the Gulf of Aden, fleeing starvation or confusion or violence or ethnic or religious persecution or all those together, in short, resorting to any available method, including violence, to acquire or recover resources. It makes things interesting, all right.

And that, I think, is what drives so many people, in so many different societies and social conditions, to the extreme right. When everything else is falling apart or moving so rapidly it throws us off balance, we have to have some psychological stability. Something unchanging. God, for instance. Or the eternal superiority of our race. Some absolute truth to cling to. Sarkozy is re-inventing some absolutist idea of France (without Gypsies), religious nuts are burning one another's holy books or symbols and blowing up institutions, governments are punishing anyone who questions the government's truth, and so on.  We've seen this before, when the huge changes in chemistry, communications, manufacturing and everything else, upsetting class relations and population patterns coming ever faster toward the end of the 19th century made many people see the desirable solution in fascism and its kindred. After two world wars and and two atom bombs, daily life in some parts of the world became at least more predictable. The Cold War, awful as it was, was at least an understandable system. But then everything got moving again, ever faster, and here we are. The Soviet Union disappeared, the Internet appeared, and so on.

Of course a minority of us go in the other direction, to the left, recognizing that everything is changing and trying to prepare not only ourselves but all humanity to take advantage of the good things and avoid the worst of all the possible outcomes. This means the opposite of clinging to any absolute truth, denying that such a thing even exists or is knowable to us, the only absolute being a value, the value of our lives—all our lives, all of humanity.  And it requires us to be probing and watching to anticipate, if only by a microsecond, the next big change and position ourselves to duck or use it. And hoping to stay agile enough to recover if we misjudge and get slammed by something.

The rapid shifts in publishing are just one mix of currents in the maelstrom. None of us can say how things will turn out in, say, 50 years. What people will be reading, or how, or even if. But right now, trying to stay agile and to ride what seem the strongest currents, I'm hitching my novel to p.o.d. (print on demand) and plan also to take it to e-publishing on several platforms. Launch in mid October.

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

“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