“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

Roque Dalton - ¡ayayayay!

A few nights ago, when an anxiety attack (something to do with money, and Bush's war on democracy, and so on) was keeping me awake, I reached for my Virtual Prozac. I keep it in many varieties and flavors on the poetry shelf above my desk. It usually works. But on this occasion, I made the stupid error -- I should have known better, but was too groggy to keep some devil from guiding my hand -- of pulling out Poesía escogida of Roque Dalton.

For those of you who never knew -- which has been most of the world, even when he was alive -- and for those who have forgotten -- which is almost everybody else -- Roque Dalton (b. 1935) was a Salvadoran law student driven by the crude lawlessness of his country to commit poetry. He committed quite a lot of it, and survived two firing squads, gangs of murderous thugs, torture, animal attacks and outraged husbands while scrambling from one revolutionary posture to the next, in Central America and then Eastern Europe and back to Central America. Ultimately he was executed on May 17, 1975 by his supposed comrades in El Salvador's Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional, acting out the roles that Bertolt Brecht decades earlier had assigned to Chinese revolutionaries in "The Measures Taken" (Die Massnahme).

He's sometimes funny, in a sick kind of way. Mainly the poetry is painful. And it brings back memories of the horrible torment of those years in Central America. Not the sort of thing to calm your anxieties.

But worst of all: He was a terrible poet. Irritating, complaining, unmusical. Maybe that was why they shot him (the story has always been murky -- some of those involved rose to be powerful figures in the FMLN, and didn't want to talk about it). Still, he fascinates me. I think that Roque Dalton's poetry was not in his poetry, but in his life. One could use that life as the thread to draw through the bright-colored, tear-stained tejidos of a whole era of Central America.

For a photo and links to his poetry and biography (if you read Spanish), go to La página de Roque Dalton.

Becoming Kate Hepburn

I was going to say something about Katherine Hepburn, but Verlyn Klinkenborg has said it better: "...a perfectly selfless egotism, a person so ravished with self-confidence that she had the capacity to illuminate everyone around her." Anthony Hopkins recalled, in an interview on All Things Considered yesterday, that when as a very young actor he was playing her son in "The Lion in Winter," Hepburn told him, "Don't act." Meaning, I suppose, Just do the part as yourself, without trying to be anybody else. That was the thing about Hepburn: she didn't act. Even when she was playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, she was always Hepburn.

Hopkins of course does act; his "Titus Andronicus" is nothing like his "Hannibal Lecter." But he comes from a different tradition. Anyway, I was planning to spend the rest of the morning being Kate Hepburn, practicing self-confidence -- but wait, that's a contradiction! I think instead I should just try to take her advice: Don't act. So if you run into me today, you'll just find me.

A historical note

I just came across this old file -- written in January 1991.
Gulf War I, Bush I

"SCUDS" SADDAM, AMERICAN-STYLE HERO
by Geoffrey Fox

America loves a bad guy, the tougher the better. A guy who knows how to keep cool until the moment to unleash his deadly violence. A guy who betrays no fear when surrounded by vastly superior forces, and who combines shrewdness, courage and malice to damage his enemies even when it appears that all is lost. "Hombre," by Elmore Leonard, besieged by Mexicans. Butch Cassidy in Bolivia, John Wayne in the Alamo, Eddie Murphy in Korea, Rambo in Southeast Asia. Even non-whites may apply: the half-breed Billy Jack against the forces of law and order in the southwestern desert. Or Jimmy Cagney. Whose haberdashery gets more publicity than John Gotti's? Whose smirks, mumbles and rampages than the many movie "Godfathers'"? The American paragon is insolent, intransigent, and dangerous.

Maybe we've been misreading Saddam Hussein. Maybe he isn't so all-fired hot on Islam. Maybe he doesn't give a damn (to be polite) about the Palestinians, or even about Iraqi sovereignty in Kuwait. Maybe he's just seen too many American movies. Or maybe--and this too is possible--the values he learned scrapping on the dusty streets of Tikrit weren't too different from our own. Which means that to prevail, you've got to act tough, whatever the consequences. And prevailing is the only game worth the candle.

So, if this is the script, where does that leave our guys? All those airmen and sailors and soldiers and marines, from 28 nations, with tons of bombs to drop and thousands of missiles and many times more airplanes than Saddam ever had--if this is the script, then our guys are the cops, or the federales, the hordes of lawmen fought off by the heroic renegade.

Some people have been comparing him to Hitler. But that was a different movie, more like the evil Ming against Flash Gordon. This guy may be evil, a scourge of society--his own and those of his neighbors. The poison gas against his citizens, the horridly costly war against Iran, the invasion and pillage of Kuwait, and probably lots more crimes we're only dimly aware of. But as any American movie-goer knows, what counts is coolness under fire. He'll probably go down in flames at the end, and people in this country aren't likely to forgive him, and hardly anybody outside of Iraq loves him, but everybody, from our president on down, respects him.

And if Arabs have been as deeply influenced as we have by American movies, long after he is gone, his exploits will be sung in the souks and coffehouses as the people wait for the rise of a new Scuds Saddam.

Geoffrey Fox has no special knowledge of the Middle East, but he's seen a lot of movies.

Mahfouz & me

"... most people don't like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them," writes biographer Blake Baley, to explain the lack of success of novelist Richard Yates. (A Tragic Honesty. Picador, 2003) This is clearly not a problem for A. K. Rowling, whose wizard is anything but mediocre. But since I'm no longer 13, and my peer group is a little different, I haven't yet sought out the latest Harry Potter book. Instead, my peer group, an on-line readers circle coordinated by Lale Eskioglu, is reading Svevo and Mahfouz.

June's reading was supposed to be Naguib Mahfouz's The Beggar. I haven't located it yet (it was out from my local branch of the New York Public Library), so I picked out another of his books to tell you about.

The Day the Leader Was Killed (Anchor Books, 2000; originally published in Arabic, 1985) takes place in Cairo not on a single day, but over an unspecified span of weeks culminating October 6, 1981. On that day a young low-level government clerk named Elwan Fawwaz Muhtashim explodes in rage at the bourgeois frustrations of his bourgeois love aspirations, and commits a folly that redeems his honor but will certainly destroy his career. On that day also, the symbol and partical cause of the frustrations of the urban middle class, President Anwar al-Sadat, is assassinated.

This is a slight book of limited ambition, a piece -- barely more than a chapter -- in Mahfouz's life-time oeuvre of huge ambition, to retell the whole modern Arab experience. He tells the story in alternate chapters from three first-person points of view: Elwan; his grandfather -- as old as the century, a retired school teacher who remembers his youthful participation in the 1919 "National Movement" and who sees Elwan's dilemma in that long historical perspective; and Randa, Elwan's long-time girlfriend and fiancée, who works in the same government office. She loses much of her respect but none of her affection for Elwan when, bowing to economic and parental pressure, he declares their engagement to be at an end.

It's slight, but masterful. I'm intrigued by the technique. I've done something similar -- a story from multiple points of view -- but not in first person. That approach poses different challenges (no author's voice to set the scene), while enhancing the subjectivity (each voice is unreliable in its own peculiar way). I may try that aproach soon. If you look at my collection Welcome to My Contri, you'll see that I've deliberately tried out different narrative devices (1st person, one narrator; 3rd person limited; 3rd person omniscient; dialogue; a story perceived by someone who understands everything but words, etc.). There are still new things to try.

Check out Lale Eskioglu's website.

Back on line

Apologies to my loyal readers (both of you). We had home networking connection difficulties, so that only one computer in this busy idea workshop could connect, and my confederate had a more urgent need (deadline for New York's 9/11 memorial competition). The replacement for our old home portal has arrived, so now everybody can get on line whenever. And now this is my first test of the new posting template (just revised) in Blogger. I'll be back in a few minutes, after seeing how this looks.

Affirmative action for the deserving only

Did you see Orlando Patterson's bizarre argument in the Sunday NYT (op-ed)? Affirmative action should be available only for "African-Americans, Native Americans and most Latinos" (which ones?) because they (and not later immigrants) deserve it. I guess he thinks that Chinese railroad workers and Japanese WW II internees, among others, never suffered serious discrimination. Patterson writes in Harvard-ese, which is a language designed to lull you into thinking it maybe makes sense until the incantation takes effect. He seems to think of himself as a Wise Elder for African American politicos, but I doubt that they are listening.

Waiting for the Tooth Fairy

It finally happened last night. The last fragment of one of my baby teeth wobbled free. Now, I've had that tooth for a certain number of decades -- fewer than ten, but more than two. Therefore its value has to be far greater than if I had put it under my pillow when I was kid, like most people do. I started calculating, 25 cents (the old rate, in my boyhood) at, say, 5% compounded over all those years ... But then I lost it! It was such a tiny thing, no bigger than a crumb, and we must have inadvertently swept it up and thrown it out. I'm heartbroken. But I'll get other chances to collect from the tooth fairy. Get your checkbook ready, lady, I still have three more baby teeth hanging on by their tiny roots.

The necessity of European anti-Semitism

Rudolph Giuliani, the man with a simple solution for every complicated problem, tells Europe how it can Stop the Hate of Jews in a NYT op-ed that appeared just a week after An Oxymoron: Europe Without Christianity by Kenneth L. Woodward. If Rudy read his hometown paper before submitting to it, he might see how much more complicated this problem is. I've been researching the Spanish conquest of America (for a book on the history of Latin American architecture and urbanism), and recently completed a novel about the rise of the Ottomans and the last days of Christian Constantinople, so I've been thinking a lot about these relationships. It is clear to me that Europe could not have become "Europe" without Christianity, and anti-Semitism was an inevitable by-product.

Before there was Europe, the Roman Empire had held together the lands all around the Mediterranean by military and commercial might, governing by Roman law but more or less indifferent to the multiplicity of religions. "Europe," without that overwhelming superpower, was able to bring itself together (more or less) by the shared religion. Danes and Irishmen only recently Christianized and older Christians like Spaniards and Italians needed enemies of their faith to remind themselves of their common values. Hence, the ideological urgency of Crusades and pogroms, and in Spain, the Inquisition (with so many languages in the Iberian peninsula, how else could Spain hold itself together?). Europe is past that stage now, one hopes, but until it developed mighty industries and commerce to achieve the same purpose, the common religion was essential to Europe's identity and power.

It should be obvious then that anti-Semitism is a very different, and much weaker, phenomenon in America. It was never essential to our identity. For most of us, the Atlantic Ocean was enough of a barrier between us and the non-Americans. Anti-Semitism here is an import, not as deeply rooted and therefore more susceptible to Giuliani's law-and-order remedies. Here we massacred "Indians" and lynched blacks, but that's another story.

Martin Waldseemüller

He's back in the news, the guy who invented the name "America." The last known surviving copy of the 1507 map he drew, inspired by Amerigo ("Americus") Vespucci's account of explorations, has been sold by Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million to the U.S. Library of Congress.

Don't you love these names? The cartographer's is even better than the prince's, although "Wolfegg" has a certain charm. ("Egge" means "harrow," but that probably has nothing to do with it. Ever seen a wolf farming? I didn't think so.) "Waldseemüller" names both the ancestral occupation, and the approximate address. I may start signing myself Gottfried Dorfschreiber because I live in a village (Greenwich Village), or maybe Grossapfelschreiber or even Großapfelschreiber. What do you think?