There's Something About Fascism...

[Julio Pino <jpino@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

   The thread on Fight Club and The Matrix and their latent/blatant
political message has provoked me to want explore further fascist ideology
and how it grabbed control over so many. (BTW, comrades, don't be like Mr.
Erectile Dysfunction Bob Dole and curse films you haven't seen. RENT THE
DAMN MOVIES!)

May the spirits of Wilhelm Reich and Walter Benjamin guide me.
   Some on this list have commented on the aesthetics of fascism as one
clue to understanding its mass appeal, with "Triumph of the Will" submitted
for evidence. No one can deny that Riefenstal and Speer created great
beauty at the Nuremberg ally of 1935.Fascism, quite frankly, is (or
was)aesthetically fascinating, its iconography the most original of the
first half of the XX century. Stalinism, by contrast, was dull and drab,
like the Moscow Subway the Father of the Peoples had built in the
1930s.(Consult Sheila Fitzpatrick's recent book, "Ordinary Stalinism". I
think that's the reason why Soviet Communism ultimately fell; it wasn't
just brutal and corrupt, worse than that, it was boring.
   The attraction of fascism goes much deeper than politics or aesthetics,
touching something profound in the human heart.Saul Friedlander, author of
"Nazi Germany and the Jews" (and an old colleague of mine at UCLA) has
called fascism "a footprint, an echo of lost worlds, haunting an
imagination invaded by excessive rationality and thus becoming the
crystalization point for thrusts of the archaic and the irrational."
(Reflections on Nazism, 1993)Umberto Eco has written a chilling essay on
"Ur-Fascism", which he defines as a spirit that has haunted humanity from
the very beginning. Eco gives one controversial example: the God of the Old
Testament can be labeled a fascist, because he divides mankind into ethnic
groups and on occassion calls on his children to slay entire tribes. George
Steiner, on the other hand, sees in fascism a countermyth to monotheism.
The ethical demands of Judeo-Christianity were so high that some people
chose to revert to paganism and sacrifice other humans to the pantheon of
gods.(Interestingly, in his novel, "The Passage to San Cristobal of AH,
Steiner has Hitler say to his Israeli captors, " I learned the idea of a
master race from you!").
    Myth forms the core of fascist ideology, and many left philosophers
have made the argument that humankind cannot live without some kind of
myth. Let me mention a few examples. George Sorel, in his "Myth of the
General Strike", posited that the working class could never come to power
without some utopia to follow. Would you go to the barricades to bring the
price of bread down? Revolutions are made by dreamers, not practical men
and women, and when the imagination fails the revolution (or the will to
have one) dies. Significantly, Sorel admired both Lenin and Mussolini;
regardless of their different economic policies(to which he was
indifferent) he saw both leaders as dreamweavers. Influenced by Sorel, the
great Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui (whose height of productivity
was in the 1920s-1930s)acknowledged that fascism had become victorious in
Italy by forging new myths for the working class, something the Italian
Communist Party failed at miserably. He urged Latin American Marxists to go
back to Sorel and sow their own myths, based on the continent's
Indo-American past.Finally, I allude to Franz Fanon. The famous opening
chapter of "Wretched of the Earth", "Concerning Violence", is a call to
national and self-liberation  through armed force. But for Fanon the
occurrence of violence is not as important as the myth it perpetuates: we
of the Third World can cleanse ourselves of the pollution of
Europeanization only by shedding blood, our own and that of our
enemies.Around the same time Louis Althusser was writing that, pace Marx
and Engels, ideology would never disappear, not even under communism; some
type of supra-natural project would be necessary if we all didn't want to
go bonkers. (Curious, isn't it, how all these thinkers came from the Latin
world?)
   What I'm trying to say (and I don't like long posts any more than you
do)is that for Marxism to be reborn it will take more than an
economic/political program that will superced capitalism.It necessitates
imagination and myth-building, and horrific as it may sound, fascism offers
some object lessons on how to go about doing that.

Now here's my threat: as soon as I receive some feedback I will write
another post on mytth and identity politics in the age of globalization.
Julio Cesar