January - March 2020: The Rise of the Far Right in the 21st Century

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January - March 2020: The Rise of the Far Right in the 21st Century

1LolaWalser
gen. 3, 2020, 1:33 pm

The past decade has seen a rise in far right parties' accession to power and a concomitant revival of fascist ideologies around the globe on a scale comparable only to the 1930s/40s of the 20th century. At the time of posting, the majority of countries in Europe are led or significantly influenced by right-wing to far right parties whose rhetoric openly invokes fascist ideas. Europe's history as the source of two paradigmatic fascisms, the Italian and the German, and as the region where fascist-like systems survived well into the 1970s the ideology's supposed WWII defeat, inevitably reflects on the current political situation.

Elsewhere too, from the United States to the Philippines, the far right, whether established as the ruling party or a significant power, has brought fascist ideology into the "mainstream", normalizing many of its tenets.

In this thread we aim to look at how this political moment is reflected in literature--predominantly fiction, and if possible, contemporary.

Given how vast and complex are the debates even about what IS fascism, I thought it better to sketch some possible themes and viewpoints rather than set rigid guidelines to choosing topics.

Cross-referencing discussions from Roger Griffin's The nature of fascism, Enzo Traverso's The new faces of fascism: populism and the far right, Kevin Passmore's Fascism: a very short introduction and others, I offer tentatively and in layman's terms the following as the key themes pertaining to fascist ideologies:

--ultra-nationalism/chauvinism/jingoism/militarism; ethnic and/or religious expansionist views

--xenophobia and racism; racial supremacist views

--misogyny and anti-feminism; male supremacist views

Every single fascist system has endorsed ideas under those three rubrics; however, those ideas are not necessarily limited to fascist systems. It's primarily their occurring in clusters that helps to define a system of social organisation or political thought as fascist.

In order to distinguish the interest of this thread from those of, say, nationalism, racism, misogyny etc. in general, I suggest that we try to look for that "clustering", investigate how those ideas sit within specific political movements, how they appear in our everyday lives today.

That said, if someone wishes to explore the history of fascist ideas through older literature, I would say they are very welcome to do so, as we can always--and really ought to--look at and reflect on the connections with the past. That's where the most important lessons lie.

2LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 3, 2020, 2:54 pm

As an illustration of some possible reading approaches, here's what sort of thing I think is a likely choice, at least in my mind and, of necessity, for what is available in my given circumstances (i.e. mostly English-language, North American/Euro-centric material)...

For example, Ali Smith's "seasonal" quartet (projected, there are three books so far) gives us a picture of Brexit(ing) UK, of people's lives in turmoil from a confluence of private and social factors. It doesn't hammer you over the head with political lectures but you do get a sense of economic troubles, general malaise and discontent, rising anxieties etc. all of which were important in priming the country for the ascendance of the xenophobic right wing, and who knows what else.

Francine Prose wrote about an American white supremacist and his wrestling with his conscience already back in 2005, in A changed man. I read it at the time but failed to see it as a harbinger of things to come, in fact I remember it struck me a little as an oddity. If anyone had told me that ten years or so later there'd be, in public, hundreds of "cleancut" white college-age men chanting "Jews will not replace us" and that the need to rehabilitate young men from neo-Nazi backgrounds would be part of the mainstream discussion--no, I could not have believed it.

I searched my library database for the newest books with pertinent keywords. I have, or am waiting for, Tomb of the unknown racist, The captain and the glory: an entertainment, Dave Eggers' satire of Trump, Miss Laila, armed and dangerous by Manu Joseph, a story from India in which Hindu nationalism is increasingly jeopardising the well-being of her Muslim citizens, The cockroach, by Ian McEwan, and so on.

Personally I'd like to make an effort to read especially contemporary literature because I rarely do so. That's my goal, I'm looking forward to hearing what is yours, expanding my horizons, and learning from you.

This thread is open for business!

3lriley
gen. 3, 2020, 3:17 pm

Finished Daniele Ganser's NATO's Secret Armies yesterday. Ganser is a Swiss academic. His book is about the stay behind armies organized and bankrolled by the CIA, MI6 and NATO post-WWII. One object of these armies was to box in the communist threat from the U.S.S.R. and its satellite states--another was to make certain that any kind of left government would never come to power in a NATO country. These armies recruited their agents exclusively from people with hard right ideologies--the Italian and German components drawing pretty much from Mussolini's fascists and former hardline Nazi's--the German commander Reinhard Gehlen. Also of particular note are the Greek and Turkish stay behind armies both of which brought about fascist coups of their respective governments. Ganser points as well to a number of false flag operations in which agents of these groups committed terrorist attacks and successfully (at least for a time) were able to lay the blame on left wing groups--such as the assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 or the Bologna railway station bombing in 1980 that killed 85 people. The Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme who was assassinated in the 80's was also certainly murdered by someone associated with one of these hard right wing groups.

That is to say that the rise of fascism in Europe can be traced back to hard line right wing cold warriors of the United States and Britain post WWII and the entities they set up to enable this network.

The book is not an easy read and not just because of the subject matter. I get the idea that Ganser speaks English fairly well but there is no translator noted and I also get the sense that the book was never proofed. There are a lot of misspellings and numerous grammatical issues that slowed me down anyway. That's not to take away from the fact that Ganser put a lot of research into this and has a sharp mind. It's very much worth reading IMO.

4rocketjk
Editat: gen. 5, 2020, 7:02 pm

>3 lriley: Taking one short historical step back from the Ganser book (and away from the 21st century intent of the theme, I'm afraid), I just completed The Secret History of the War, Volume 2 by Waverly Root. Root was a journalist who lived in France right up the German invasion and retained his multiple contacts within Europe. In this book, he illuminates and details the ways in which the U.S. State Department felt much more comfortable dealing with and legitimizing the French fascists of Vichy, marginalizing along the way De Gaulle, with his sincere interest in restoring the French Republic, despite the fact that De Gaulle's armies were actually fighting alongside the Allies.

5lriley
gen. 4, 2020, 2:42 pm

#4--from Ganser's book De Gaulle is the one and only who expels the Gladio network from his country and exposes it for meddling in its internal affairs. I have no particular love for De Gaulle by the way but De Gaulle did not want us running France's foreign policy.

6Dilara86
Editat: gen. 5, 2020, 12:05 pm

Mon cousin le fasciste by Philippe Pujol





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: France, Spain
Published in 2017


« Viens que je te présente. Voilà Pierre Sidos, le fondateur de l’Œuvre française et de Jeune Nation. Pierre… C’est Philippe Pujol, mon cousin, un journaliste. C’est un bolch*, il est à La Marseillaise, mais ils sont comme nous, ils ont une politique sociale. »

« On répète souvent que le FN spécule sur la peur, sur l’ignorance. Je me rends compte que son meilleur terreau reste la frustration. Un sentiment accentué par l’incessante et universelle peur du déclassement, vivre moins bien que ses parents, que les derniers immigrés arrivés ne nous rattrappent. Pire ! Qu’ils nous doublent. Le dernier arrivé ferme la porte ! Parmi mes connaissances, des Arabes votent Front National – « parce qu’on est français » - et même des gitans – « parce qu’on ne veut pas être pris pour des Roms ». Pire encore ; certains bien blancs comme moi ont été soudain pris de bigoterie**. Pas au point d’aller à la messe le dimanche, mais la civilisation chrétienne leur est tout à coup apparue importante. Leurs parents militaient pour la plupart au PCF, à la CGT ou à la CFDT***. Eux désormais se prennent pour les croisés du XXIe siècle et voient le progressisme dans le passé. »

« Paradoxalement, c’est dans l’idéologie sociale-libérale de gauche que se sont infiltrées les prémisses de la pensée réactionnaire contemporaine. Bien malgré eux, les penseurs du social-libéralisme ont ouvert la voie au populisme. »

« Cette fin de l’approche du monde sous l’angle exploitation-domination favorise étonnamment les regroupements normalement contre-nature autour de ce fameux antipolitiquement correct. La description du complexe (qui n’a rien d’un spectacle médiatique) est perçue comme une pensée unique. Lui est donc préférée une succession de visions simplistes qui s’opposent ou s’unissent ; Le résultat est une étrange coalition des réactionnaires au nom d’une identité nationale dont personne ne partage la même définition. Antisémitisme, islamophobie, machisme et homophobie se côtoient, certains prennent le tout, d’autres une partie seulement. On ne s’unit plus pour des idées communes, mais contre des ennemis communs. L’ennemi du Français de souche. »


* short for “bolchévique”
** bigoterie is a false friend: it means ostensible religiosity in French, not prejudice. Think of Jacques Brel’s song Les bigotes, for example.
*** PCF= French communist party, CGT = a union on the hard left, CFDT = a union that tends to be more sympathetic to some right-wing policies



This was a chance find on my local library’s Fascism shelf. There were other, thicker, more academic, tomes, but I thought I’d start with something easy, plus I’d like to read more non-fiction in common with the rest of you.

Award-winning journalist Pierre Pujol is a lefty. His cousin Yvan Benedetti is a politician and activist on the far right. They hate each other’s politics but they love one another and are in regular contact, meaning that Pujol has been able to follow the far right’s progress almost from the inside. In this book, he analyses the rise of the far right, describes their roots, the way they function and find their way in every area of French society, and in parallel tells us about himself and his relationship with his cousin. I cannot understand how they can be as close as they are. Benedetti is a violent thug and a puppet-master to more violent thugs, as far as I’m concerned. Still, this book is short, enlightening and to the point. The quotes above speak for themselves, I think.



Having read my first book on this theme, I think I'm going to look for books on antifascism as well as fascism, or I might not make it to the end with my sanity intact. The Sardines movement seems interesting.

7lriley
gen. 5, 2020, 2:52 pm

#2--I remember reading a review of Prose's book in the Sunday NYTimes book review section and I think I looked it up to buy a copy but for some reason or another I didn't but it seemed very interesting at the time. I think I'm going to have to find it for real this time.

8LolaWalser
gen. 5, 2020, 4:13 pm

>7 lriley:

If you are able, maybe check it out of a library first--Prose is a reliably good writer but as I recall this one didn't exactly wow me. Then again, as I said, I was puzzled by the theme and probably missed what she was driving at--it might, in any case, be interesting to compare the context then with what is going on today.

>6 Dilara86:

Believe it or not, I just had a SPOOKY synchronicity event--as I was reading exactly the words "Le dernier arrivé ferme la porte !" the CD I had playing broke out with "NO ROOM! NO ROOM!" (this song, this singer: Vera Ward Hall: No Room at the Inn.)

They hate each other’s politics but they love one another

I have to admit this... is mostly beyond me. I've estranged family and friends over politics and the worse things get the more inevitable it seems to me. If it were just a matter of words and debates, I wouldn't care, but surely politics means engagement, voting, activism, acts. And surely that counts. But maybe it depends on how close is one's experience of politics leading to war, politics expressing itself in war.

Speaking of which, for once there are some moderately good instead of the usual craptacular news from Croatia--today's presidential elections saw the victory of a social democrat over the hard right that has ruinously ruled the country for the past almost 30 years. The good of it is mostly symbolic, and there's a horrifying-comical background to it all--the incumbent saw her support in the first round seriously dented by the competition of a Trumpoesque neo-folk singer who chose all-out open fascism as his platform--earning more than 25% of the votes! In short, the beasts ate each other and, miraculously, for once this didn't mean the victory of the last beast standing but of someone promising a "normal" politics.

Of course, no one gives a fig about Croatia until the next Balkan war, but I expect there'll be more than usual in the news about it in the next six months, with its first term of EU presidency.

>4 rocketjk:, >3 lriley:

Interesting and still very perplexing, with so much we don't know yet.

9lriley
gen. 5, 2020, 5:25 pm

#8--often at least for me my memory goes a bit hazy after a while trying to remember what I read years ago. I do keep a notebook of everything I read though. For a long time I had a library card--never changed---and it got so old that it eventually disintegrated. The other thing that happens in smaller cities--particularly more conservative ones is they don't keep up libraries.....and one way that libraries are able to fund themselves are book sales--another way is to cut jobs and depend on volunteers. This has been an issue where I live for about 20 years.

Anyway I already ordered a copy from Abebooks.

10thorold
Editat: gen. 7, 2020, 2:55 am

I’m looking forward to this thread, particularly because I’m also someone who tends to avoid recent fiction and airport-bookstall-type non-fiction, so I expect this topic will take me into new territory. (But perhaps not exactly into that covered by the airport bookstall...)

Things I have read in the past that seem sort-of relevant, although they are mostly about the hardening of attitudes in society rather than right-wing populism itself:
- Ali Smith’s ongoing Seasonal Quartet, already mentioned
- Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, Middle England, which looks at the way British society is being fractured by the Brexit debacle
- Drive your plow over the bones of the dead — Olga Tokarczuk is well-known as a critic of the far right in Poland, but this book really only deals with that rather indirectly
- The good immigrant, a collection of essays that looks at various aspects of immigration and racism in modern Britain
- Gehen, ging, gegangen, Jenny Erpenbeck’s brilliant novel about refugees in Germany
- Er ist wieder da (Look who’s back), a satirical novel in the worst possible taste, but with pertinent things to say about the way clowning crosses over into politics
- Arab Jazz by Karim Miské, a smart French crime-story set against a background of religious fundamentalism in a multi-culti neighbourhood of Paris
- Jonathan Fenby’s The history of modern France has a lot to say about how the Le Pens have been harvesting the fears and resentments of people who feel excluded from the political process (it only goes up to 2015, but even the youngest among us can probably remember the rest...)

Just before the holidays I saw a film by German-Polish director Alexandra Wesolowski, Impreza — the celebration (2017), a home-video style documentary in which she gets her relatives in Poland to talk about their reasons for supporting the PiS government. Instructive in a lot of ways, to see people “just like us” spouting complete rubbish with absolute conviction in the comfort of their very ordinary middle-class homes. And to realise what it means, even in the internet age, when the bad guys get control of pulpits, TV and newspapers.

I’m still thinking about what I’m going to read...

The Tagmash for “fiction, populism” isn’t much help, I think Mrs Humphrey Ward and Sinclair Lewis fall rather outside the timeframe we’re meant to be looking at, excellent though they are in their own way: https://www.librarything.com/tag/fiction,+populism

I think I’ll start by digging around a bit in my local library, where a search on “populism” comes up with an alarming number of hits. https://abl.bibliotheekdenhaag.nl/?q=Populisme

11Dilara86
gen. 7, 2020, 4:05 am

I looked for the titles mentioned upthread on Scribd and on my library's website, and managed to order or save:
Er ist wieder da (Il est de retour) by Timur Vermes
The new faces of fascism: populism and the far right by Enzo Traverso
A Changed Man: A Novel by Francine Prose
Miss Laila, armed and dangerous by Manu Joseph
If only Scribd was less US-centric. They don't have Ali Smith's quartet (I've just read Autumn) or The Cockroach, which I've been wanting to read for ages...

Arab Jazz is easily available where I live, but I'll wait until I've read Thorold's review before deciding whether I want to read it or not.

>8 LolaWalser: About Croatia (but really, it's more more of a reflection on human nature). One thing that I find difficult to get my head round is how people can switch back and forth, voting for someone who has repulsive, anti-human views one year, and then for someone who doesn't another year. The corollary to this is that they're fundamentally OK with fucking some people over, and that to them, this is never a red line. It is making me distrust everyone, as I wonder what they really think when I'm not in front of them.

12Dilara86
gen. 7, 2020, 8:35 am

13thorold
gen. 7, 2020, 10:40 am

>12 Dilara86: Nice! Harnessing the energy of your critics is something they teach on management courses, and a classic classroom manoeuvre (and it does work, sometimes...), but it must take a lot of nerve to apply the principle in that sort of situation.

I came back from the library with an unfeasibly large pile of books that barely scrapes the surface of what they had on offer, but it did strike me how almost everything reflects the viewpoint I went in there with, that extreme right-wing views are something that other people have and that "we" need to know about to meet their threat. What do the people who believe in a liberal conspiracy think when they see that? I can't imagine that there are many who conclude that they must be wrong if so many intelligent writers disagree with their views. (OTOH I know I'd have trouble reacting in a liberal, free-speech mode if I saw the library was filling shelf after shelf with hateful propaganda bought with taxpayers' money...)

14Dilara86
gen. 7, 2020, 11:04 am

>13 thorold: Well, it's not taxpayer money, but typing "fascism" in Scribd's search box turned up all sorts of Fox News-friendly stuff. I was surprised. I can see the point of reading the other side's arguments, but I don't have the stomach for it, to be honest. Reading other people's analyses of it is less painful.

15thorold
Editat: gen. 8, 2020, 12:56 am

Starting gently with a novella-length essay about a very unattractive figure who, to my embarrassment, lives only a few streets away from me (his police escort regularly delayed my bus in the mornings when I was still going to work). It looks as though his moment may have passed since this was written, but only because yet another dreadful populist has emerged with yet another new party:

Koning Wilders: een wintersprookje (2017) by Hans Maarten van den Brink (Netherlands, 1956- )

  

Novelist and broadcaster van den Brink wrote this extended essay during the run-up to the Dutch general election of March 2017, in which Geert Wilders and his right-wing populist PVV party were expecting to do well, surfing the same wave as Trump and Brexit. In the event the PVV was the second-largest party, but this placing was mostly an artefact due to the extreme fragmentation of traditional parties: it only obtained 13.1% of the vote. The election led to a record 225 days of negotiation before a coalition (not including the PVV) could be formed under the premiership of Mark Rutte.

Van den Brink uses Wilders’s well-known passion for visiting the fairy-tale theme park, De Efteling, as a hook to explore the way the new populism appeals to its supporters through storytelling rather than an objective discourse of facts and policies. In the process he reminds us that the idea of a canon of “traditional” folk-tales was largely a creation of nineteenth-century nationalists seeking to create a unifying culture for new nation-states like Germany, and that De Efteling, which carefully nurtures its own special commercial brand of folk-tale magic largely based on the work of Dutch illustrator Anton Pieck (1895-1987), was a mid-20th-century job-creation project for an impoverished part of North Brabant. The idealised version of national identity and social relations that Wilders and his colleagues promise to “restore” for the disenchanted people who vote for them is just as illusory, van den Brink argues, and the problem we face is not so much in the lies that the populists are telling, but more in the way that otherwise intelligent adults have suddenly started believing in fairy tales as though they could be literally true. And the only logical conclusion if they persist in that illusion is that we are going to end up with a King Wilders sitting in his fantasy palace in De Efteling with a gold-plated plastic crown on his implausible hair...

16LolaWalser
gen. 8, 2020, 1:45 pm

>11 Dilara86:

It's not down to the same people switching votes, the condition of political terror and poor choices the regime has imposed on the country masks continually the sizeable left-leaning portion of the population. If Croatia existed in normal circumstances, was truly a civilised democracy in which people could claim leftist political views freely, without dire repercussions for life and limb, I expect we'd see a ratio of 50-50 between the right and the left.

This time the right-wing vote got split between the stone-cold blackshirted thugs and those "merely" hardline conservative. The resurgence of the former pushed the campaign of the latter even farther to the right, resulting in one of the most vicious, dirty, pro-fascist campaigns in recent history--thus opening the space for the leftist candidate to vault over the 50% in the second round. That percentage victory, 52-53%, almost certainly reflects that much of the Croatian electorate would normally vote left, not some huge seizure of the right-wing votes. If any right-wingers were disgusted by where their party ended in this campaign under pressure from the open Ustashe, I'd much sooner expect them to abstain in the next round, not flock to the side of the hereditary "enemy" (can't think of any example when the latter happened).

This point reminds me of something Michael Moore said recently about the white female vote for Trump in 2016. He said that for that statistic to have happened (the 53% of white female vote going to Trump), a whole lot of poor/working class white women had NOT to have voted (he was talking about the reasons so many people, working class and poor, of any race, were and are demotivated to vote).

This is important, especially in the US where so few people vote in the first place that the country isn't even technically a democracy i.e. only a small portion of the electorate takes part in the elections--and that's BEFORE the electoral college scam rubbishes even that participation.

17LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 9, 2020, 7:37 pm

>15 thorold:

That sounds similar to the two (short and slight) satires I've read.



Huh, something strange occurs already with the cover--the library copy I read (published by Knopf Canada) has the cover above, where the cockroach displays the Union Jack, but apparently there are other editions without the flag (presumably the UK edition, as the message needn't be telegraphed...?)

The Cockroach (2019) opens with a reverse-Kafka: an honest self-regarding shit-loving bug wakes up in the body of a white male British Prime Minister and proceeds to oversee the country's adoption of Reversalism. You can probably write the rest out yourselves, the end point is where we're at, and frankly not much more to be learned than what we already know. From the final words of the PM, returned to his real body:

For the mighty engines of our industry, finance and trade to go into reverse, they must first slow and stop. There will be hardship. It might be punishing in the extreme. I don't doubt that enduring it will harden the people of this great country. But that is no longer our concern. Now that we have cast off our temporary, uncongenial forms, there are deeper truths that we may permit ourselves to celebrate. {...} we kept to our principles, and very slowly at first, but with gathering momentum, our ideas have taken hold. Our core belief remains steadfast: we always acted in our own best interests. {...} we have lived alongside humans and have learned their particular taste for that darkness, to which they are not as fully committed as we are. But whenever it is predominant in them, so we have flourished. Where they have embraced poverty, filth, squalor, we have grown in strength. And by tortuous means, and much experiment and failure, we have come to know the preconditions of such human ruin. War and global warming certainly and, in peacetime, immoveable hierarchies, concentrations of wealth, deep superstition, rumour, division, distrust of science, of intellect, of strangers and of social cooperation.




The Captain and the Glory (2019) by Dave Eggers is funnier and better sustained, but not more substantial:

After eating his cheeseburger made by teenagers and wrapped in paper, the Captain and his daughter and her doll then went about filling the roles of all the crew members they had fired. But because the Captain was suspicious of anyone who had done a job before, he chose carefully, to ensure that no one he hired to handle any part of the ship had ever seen that part of the ship before.

In the role of chief engineer, he put a man he'd met by the pool one day and who said he liked the captain's feather. In the role of first officer, he placed one of his daughter's friends, who had long legs and had many times allowed the Capain to stare at her while she ate salad. In the role of chief electrician, he put Eddie the Whack. In the place of chief navigator, he put Pete the Pipe. In fact, he found spots for all his old friends. Fingers handled the money. Sweetie handled the food, Patsy the Murderer took over the infirmary, and Paul the Manafort oversaw the ship's office of ethics and accountability. The ship's pet shelter was replaced by an abattoir. The ship's teachers were replaced by cops. The ship's theater group was replaced by a television. The ship's librarian was replaced by a television. The ship's historian was replaced by a television. The ship's symphony was replaced by a television playing patriotic songs, and to head up the agency that supported small businesses, the Captain appointed the wife of the guy who ran the World Wrestling Federation.


Good for some chuckles, but what can a poor writer do in the face of reality like this, self-parodying and caricatural in the extreme.

18thorold
gen. 9, 2020, 5:41 am

>17 LolaWalser: what can a poor writer do in the face of reality like this — Yes, that was what I was rather afraid of with this theme, that there's going to be a lot of kicking-in of open doors.

I picked this one because it seems to be written from a position of, if not exactly sympathy with the far right, at least a sincere desire to find out where they are coming from.

The authors are both professors of politics at UK universities who have written extensively about right-wing political organisations. Goodwin is apparently famous for having promised to eat one of his books if a prediction he had made about the 2017 election was wrong: he did eat the page in question on live TV afterwards...

National populism : the revolt against liberal democracy (2018) by Roger Eatwell (UK, 1949- ) & Matthew J Goodwin (UK, 1981- )

   

With the success of Trump and Brexit, and with right-wing parties from outside the political mainstream getting significant chunks of the popular vote in many European countries, it's becoming obvious that we can't go on dismissing the "national populism" of the new far right as something that attracts only extremist criminals, deranged cranks, and the stupid and gullible. There are clearly millions of otherwise well-adjusted, intelligent and responsible members of society who are voting for these people.

Yet, from where I'm sitting, Trump and Boris are bumbling oafs without a coherent achievable policy between them, Brexit is economic suicide for the UK and the abandonment of the system that defines my identity and rights as a European citizen, Wilders is a hateful racist, and so on. It's impossible to imagine myself or anyone I know wanting to listen to any of them for five minutes, let alone vote for them. Somewhere, there is a huge disconnection going on, and until we've worked out what's driving that we're clearly not going to be able to have any meaningful attempt at putting the political system back on the rails again.

This is the question Eatwell and Goodwin are trying to dig into in this book: rather than explore in detail how populist politicians operate and what policies they are promoting, they look at the "demand side": what are the factors that are pushing voters in the US and Europe towards populism, and which groups in society are providing those votes?

In a classic social-science rhetorical flourish, they come up with "the four D's":
- distrust: a feeling of estrangement from a "political elite" that is no longer drawn from your part of society/your part of the country, and doesn't pay any attention to your views; meanwhile, important decisions are increasingly perceived as being taken by distant entities outside direct democratic control (IMF, EU, etc.)
- destruction: worrying and apparently irreversible social changes, in particular immigration, but also things like women's and minority rights, that seem to be threatening treasured national and cultural identities
- deprivation: the sense that you are losing out economically or in terms of opportunities/jobs/housing, etc. compared to other groups in society; inequality seems to be much more important here than absolute prosperity
- de-alignment: (*) the general loosening of traditional (inherited) party loyalties caused by a succession of ideological shifts over the past thirty or forty years

What's clearly important in the data they present, and the point I found hardest to come to terms with, is that these factors are all based on perceptions that are subjectively true for the people concerned, and play a big part in their experience of life, quite irrespective of whether or not they reflect any kind of objective reality. (This is obviously why you get such blank stares when you try to explain the democratic accountability of EU institutions to someone who has been conditioned to think that a contradiction in terms.) It's also striking that the standard assumption that votes are mostly driven by economic self-interest is clearly way off in the current climate. And bizarre how wealthy, privileged figures like Trump, Boris and Farage can get away with making the claim not to be part of "the elite"!

What I missed in this discussion was any sense of how these attitudes are affected by political rhetoric — do people become more opposed to immigration if they hear speeches by anti-immigration populists? Can their minds be changed in the other direction by a different kind of campaign strategy...?

Eatwell and Goodwin also caution against oversimplifying the social stratification of the populist vote. Profiles are very different in different countries: the US pattern is not the same as that in Western Europe, and that is different again from Poland and Hungary, with Germany, for obvious historical reasons, somewhere between the two. Age, gender and income group play a part, to different extents in different places, but they tend to be fairly weak indicators. The authors don't trust the "generational correction" theory, that support for populism will be wiped out as older voters are replaced by millennials, pointing out that there is already a significant chunk of right-wing support in the younger generation in most countries, and that people tend to shift to more right-wing positions as they get older anyway. The one reasonably strong and reliable indicator for potential populist voters seems to be education: very few people with university degrees vote for populist parties anywhere.

Since they don't discuss populist programmes in detail, they also don't have much to say about how support for populists is affected by their actual performance in government (they probably don't want to get into another book-eating scenario by predicting whether or not Trump will be re-relected). It might have been instructive to look at — for example — the way attitudes have or have not been changed by Australia's anti-immigration policies. But they do point out the way mainstream conservative parties in a number of places have recaptured part of the populist vote by embracing populist rhetoric, as in Rutte's last-minute lurch to the right in 2017 and the British Conservatives' reinvention of themselves as a more extreme (and less organised) version of UKIP.

A depressing book, on the whole, but quite illuminating. If the authors are right, it's difficult to see how the educated, liberal, voting-with-its-rational-mind part of society can ever get back together with the rest, when our political attitudes are so far apart.

---
(*) sic. — Rhetorical flourishes don't always have to respect the traditional rules of language, it seems

19LolaWalser
gen. 9, 2020, 12:58 pm

>18 thorold:

Heh, isn't that gimmicky "4 Ds" scheme merely descriptive of what has been happening? I should note though that I'm allergic to and sceptical about the worth of liberal analyses in any case.

It's also striking that the standard assumption that votes are mostly driven by economic self-interest is clearly way off in the current climate. And bizarre how wealthy, privileged figures like Trump, Boris and Farage can get away with making the claim not to be part of "the elite"!

No one is going to like what I'm about to say, but the appeal of these three and others like them is the appeal of fascism. Let me unpack that--there isn't a lot.

All three fascist/fascistoid figures are promising, as fascism does, a return to a closed society. THIS is what their supporters want, and only this--a good life as they see it, for a homogeneous group of "our" people ruled by hierarchies from supposedly simpler times, with jobs, security, self-governance and self-sustenance, and all enclosed in a safe and impenetrable fortress.

That Trump is rich, Johnson upper class, Farage... a clown from outer space; simply doesn't matter because they are making certain kind of noises that the other rich and privileged people are not making. It's the noises they are making, the songs they are singing, that their supporters want to hear.

Have you watched a Trump rally? Who can fail to notice that he can say anything to ecstatic cheers?

It's the tone, the attitude, the massage of the message that counts, not the amount of rational content or what the liberals have decided is "logical".

If I want X, I'm going to follow the guy promising me X. Someone else may tell me he's a known liar and I may even see that he lies, often or all the time. But so what? As long as he is the only one offering me X, he computes as my one chance of getting to it.

20thorold
Editat: gen. 9, 2020, 3:39 pm

>19 LolaWalser: Not sure about "liberal analyses" — it's probably my reading of their book that's liberal, I get the feeling that the authors are leaning a bit to the populist side of the fence. I didn't discuss it in the review, but they also had a chapter in which they go to some lengths to distinguish populism from fascism and argue that none of the current crop of populist parties in the US or Western Europe displays the characteristics of fascism. Apologetics if I ever saw it... I'd be inclined to wonder whether the good behaviour of the ones in the west is simply because unlike the ones in Eastern Europe they've not actually had the means to overturn the rule of law yet.

This next one turned out to be all about exactly that point, the difference between what populists say explicitly and what they want to communicate to their supporters.

It's a novel this time. Hans Münstermann is known mainly for his series of novels featuring the character Andreas Klein, especially De Bekoring (2006).

De populist (2019) by Hans Münstermann (Netherlands, 1947- )

  

This is a rather dark novel about the rise of a populist politician. The blurb calls it a satire, but Münstermann never quite makes it clear whether it's the central character he's satirising, or the way that society reacts to him, in particular the media and political establishment.

The novel is narrated by Anita, a writer who arranges to spend an election campaign shadowing Harrie Honthorst, an eccentric and outspoken elderly barrister who by some fluke won a seat for his one-man party in the previous election and is now widely expected to disappear from the political scene. It looks as though the campaign is already over a couple of days in, when Honthorst has a row with a party worker and sacks him on stage during a live TV debate.

But then a new figure turns up to replace the sacked man, the suave, intelligent and very young James Moreau. Within a matter of days, Moreau has started to attract the attention of the media in a big way, and has quietly taken over the leadership of the party from Honthorst. He's a clean-cut, house-trained populist-with-a-PhD in the style of Pim Fortuyn and Thierry Baudet (significantly, these two are just about the only names from recent Dutch political life that are never mentioned in this very name-droppy book), who renames the party "Geweldig Oud" (Fabulously Old) and markets himself almost exclusively to elderly voters. His policies are somewhat nebulous — he's going to give old people back the right to hold their heads up high and be proud of their country's achievements, he's going to give them a voice again, and so on, although he never seems to say how. All we know for sure is that he's against immigration and the EU. And that the oldies all love him when they meet him. But he does keep telling everyone that he isn't a racist, and that — like Baudet and Fortuyn — he considers women's rights and LGBT rights as inalienable parts of Dutch culture. But, also like Baudet, he is mysteriously stumped when someone asks him whether he believes black people are less intelligent than whites.

Meanwhile, Honthorst is allowed to roam freely through the press jungle saying totally unacceptable things about black people, euthanasia, and whatever else comes into his head, all of which Moreau can distance himself from as required. Death threats against Moreau increase as the press coverage mounts in the Netherlands and abroad, and his security man Ron achieves whole new levels of paranoia (he would like to live in a world where everyone is covered by facial recognition cameras 24 hours a day).

Right up to polling day, neither we nor Anita are allowed to be quite sure whether Moreau is the sincere champion of the elderly he makes himself out to be, the sinister crypto-fascist-with-a-hidden-agenda the liberal press and his mainstream opponents believe him to be, or as Anita half suspects, just an opportunistic con-man with no convictions at all. There's plenty of evidence for all three possibilities.

A bit predictable, and more in-jokes about Dutch media figures and politicians than really fit into a book of this length, but quite fun in parts.

21LolaWalser
gen. 9, 2020, 5:28 pm

>20 thorold:

I'd be inclined to wonder whether the good behaviour of the ones in the west is simply because unlike the ones in Eastern Europe they've not actually had the means to overturn the rule of law yet.

Can you elaborate, I don't see the differences? How are Trumpists/Brexiteers, Cinque Stelle or Front National "good" in comparison to the Hungarians or the Poles? People have been murdered in both the US and the UK directly due to the populist takeover, racist, xenophobic, hate attacks are on the rise and more are threatened, war(s) may be imminent... just running down the checklist for comparison. As for overturning the law, that's not what happened in Eastern Europe, is it? People have voted in these horrible people who then proceed to make horrible laws.

What do you make of this apparent vogue for satire? I'm beginning positively to dislike it. Satire is powerful where there is no free speech. But where people have free speech, it comes across as weak, whether as criticism or antidote to the right-wing propaganda... smartassy pose-striking.

I'm reminded of the enormous satirical output of the left in the Weimar period. I can't remember who it was who remarked sarcastically how amazing it is that cabaret didn't put an end to Hitler. Sarcasm comes cheap now. But they have a point--satire isn't enough.

22thorold
gen. 11, 2020, 5:55 am

>21 LolaWalser: Their argument seems to be that fascism has certain necessary ideological elements that are not present in current forms of national populism: the idea of a “holistic nation” (closed, ethnically pure, and loyal to a single authority); national rebirth through the creation of a “new man” to oppose the decadence of current society; the removal of democratic barriers to allow the imposition of “rational” and “benevolent” total control of society and economy. They see the gangsterism, racial violence, and expansionism as secondary effects of putting those policies into practice.

But I think what it really boils down to is their argument that we should distinguish between racism and xenophobia. The populists in Poland and Hungary talk about ethnic purity of the nation and persecute minorities in their countries, but E&G argue that no-one in the “respectable” (i.e. electable) populist movements elsewhere openly advocates any kind of policy of ethnic purification: they are only against “people outside the frontiers” and “traditions incompatible with our society”. As you say, airing that sort of rhetoric at the very least gives comfort and support to the people on the fringe who do the nasty stuff, and we are probably entitled to suspect that at least some of the time that was what the “respectable” populists really meant in the first place.

Re satire: it’s difficult. Satire mainly seems to work by reinforcing ideas we already have, or making us re-examine things we never thought about before. I don’t think it ever stands a chance of overturning a deeply-held belief. But when you’re in a situation where we only seem to look at the source of an argument and not at its content before judging it, it’s hard to know what could be effective, apart from a speaker with the same rhetorical trickery as the ones we’re trying to oppose. And all the good rhetorical tricksters are setting up their own parties these days...

23LolaWalser
gen. 13, 2020, 3:02 pm

>22 thorold:

!!!!! That's just breath-takingly disingenuous. I have no patience for that right-wing bullshit (obvs don't mean you Mark!--those people). Horrible. Well, you suffered so we don't have to. ;) However--I'll come back to this as an example of how right-wing bullshit machine sells authoritarianism and racism (at the same time as it is exercising it against Eastern Europeans, very neat, that).

I read Selahattin Demirtaş's collection of stories, Dawn. Demirtaş was (is) a progressive Kurdish-Turkish politician Erdoğan jailed in 2016 alongside tens of thousands of other political opponents, and remains in jail as of this time. Nevertheless, he not only managed to publish this book (and is writing more) while in jail, he also ran a campaign for president in recent elections, getting 8% of the vote.

The collection is shot through with references to Turkey's current (but also traditional) political and social problems: dictatorship, poverty, the eternal combat between the progressive secular and reactionary religious forces, structural misogyny and violence against women (Demirtaş's party centres gender equality and women's rights in a way that's unusual even in the West, and the book is dedicated to "all women who have been murdered or victims of violence).

In his preface Demirtaş explicitly claims a transformative role for literature, the will and intention to engage it in the fight for justice and equality. I'd say this first attempt of his portends well for the future ones.

Simultaneously I was reading Ece Temelkuran's How to lose a country: the 7 steps from democracy to dictatorship. Temelkuran's not in jail (at the moment) but possibly only because she left Turkey after the failed coup.

Temelkuran, like every non-Westerner, has to contend with being patronised and disbelieved by the "well-meaning" Westerners who, whatever their politics, find it impossible to imagine that they and their countries can be, let alone are, as bad as the unwashed Easterners/Southerners. As we can also note from the book Mark read--Western populism is construed as something better and different to the Eastern one, which actually the right-wing authors don't hesitate to label as pure fascism.

Why the right-wingers would do this is obvious enough--because it gives them an alibi, because as long as we can pretend somewhere else is where the real horror and danger lie, we distract from what is going on chez nous.

But what is not obvious and what makes for so much of wasted time and effort is the unwillingness of the so-called left to take lessons from the East (or South) as something that applies to it, to the situation in the West.

Yes, the West can learn from Turkey, as it could have and should have learned from the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Latin America. The West should learn from Africa.

But the West is racist to the bone and believes, however secretly, however hiddenly, that whatever happens to Turkish, Balkan, Eastern European or African savages does not and cannot apply to itself. It's Turkish, Balkan etc. savages who suffer ridiculous dictatorships of ridiculous men, who exercise cruelty as a political sport, who are racist--the West is "only" xenophobic--who are fascist--the West is only going through a little "populist" problem--and please don't bring up the West's history!

A well-meaning white Western lady asked Temelkuran compassionately "What can we do to help you?" and Temelkuran paused a second, because everything she had been saying for hours went over that well-meaning white leftist western lady's head... instead of repeating everything she had been saying for hours, Temelkuran opted for the "Zen stick" approach, smiled, and asked the lady:

"What can *I* do for you?"

The bell tolls for thee, my well-meaning leftist Western white (non-Turkish, non-Balkan, non-Eastern European, non-dark/foreign/stupid/uneducated etc.-savage) friend.

Well, I went on too long about this point. But the gall of picturing Trump or Johnson or Farage as "better" than Orbán or Putin or whoever.

Hmm, sorry for multiple posting about one book but as this is already long, I'll put other remarks on Temelkuran in another post.

24LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 13, 2020, 3:09 pm

So vis-à-vis the West Temelkuran is just another Cassandra, exotic particular others ask about "there" when she is telling them about "here".

HERE, for example:

The aim of this book is to convince its readers to spare themselves the time and the torture by fast-forwarding the horror movie they have recently found themselves in, and showing them how to spot the recurring patterns of populism, so that maybe they can be better prepared for it than we were in Turkey.

It doesn't matter if Trump or Erdogan is brought down tomorrow, or if Nigel Farage had never become a leader of public opinion. The millions of people fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure. {...} It is better to acknowledge--and sooner rather than later-- that this is not merely something imposed on societies by their often absurd leaders, or limited to digital covert operations by the Kremlin; it also arises from the grassroots. {...}

The horrifying ethics that have risen to the upper echelons of politics will trickle down and multiply, come to your town and even penetrate your gated community. It's a new zeitgeist in the making. This is a historic trend, and it is turning the banality of evil into the evil of banality.


On that point, and just as one emergent detail of possibly thousands, I notice today a headline on The Guardian about how we will soon become inured to the pictures of the world burning, as in Australia right now.

That exactly is what the right wants, where it is driving us, that is exactly the goal of books like the one Mark described. It is training us, it is conditioning us, to accept the abnormal as the normal, the bad as not so bad, and soon, as good.

This is how the Germans ended up burning millions of people industrially, like a cookie factory makes cookies. This made sense. Even this made sense, on this planet, to some people. It was imaginable as good, it was doable, and it was done.

Think of the evil we will do. Think of it while we still have consciences.

I marked too many other bits to copy them here. I don't always agree with Temelkuran--she tried to be "fair" and write about "left" populism as well, dubiously labelling Chavez as such, but in my opinion this is another of those tempting but false parallels liberals draw to bolster some "middle of the road" notion.

There is no middle of the road when it comes to justice and equality. Either we are all human beings deserving of the same rights, or none of us are. "Left populism" is an oxymoron--to a real left ideology there is nothing else but people--"we" the people are ALL the people--or there is no "we". That is why a leftist calls everyone a comrade, a citizen, a companion, a friend.

Populism is an inherently right-wing mode of address and expression because, as Temelkuran points out in examples from Turkey to Hungary to the UK and the US, it is based on discrimination between a mass of so-called (in a phrase really occurring on the right repeatedly from one country to another) real people vs. the not-real people. The populist "we", far from being ALL people, is a homogeneous and homogenisable mass that defines itself sharply AGAINST some other mass.

Oops, digressing again... maybe...

Well, this one last bit to quote, itself a quotation from Trump and a book he "wrote", The Art of the Deal. I quote Temelkuran quoting Trump because, while I personally would never have touched anything bearing the name of that creature, it turns out the joke is on us. Because listen to this:

I play to people's fantasies. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It is an innocent form of exaggeration--and a very effective form of promotion.


I say the joke is on us because if more had bothered to read Trump's book, perhaps they'd have understood the threat he posed. How much time was wasted exclaiming over and ridiculing Trump's infantile, inarticulate, stupid utterances, his "bigly"s and superlatives and all the rest of verbal chest-thumping? It wasn't a bug, it's a feature--and it worked--and it's still working.

Another headline sighted on The Guardian today: "He drives me crazy but he'll get my vote".

25LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 13, 2020, 3:43 pm

Ah, right, one more small thing... a coincidence, I was going to say "amazing" but it's really not all that, considering... Temelkuran brings up Hitler and the cabaret!!--the role of comedy, satire etc. in dealing with the events.

In 2015, jobless and "surrounded by genius jobless artists"--all dissidents out of work--she writes a cabaret script.

Joy is becoming grotesque, I kept saying. And for the first time we realised why cabaret had been such a big thing in Germany when Hitler was on the rise. We were learning how only those who were angry at themselves for retreating and feeling helpless would perform such a circus-like spectacle. A certain kind of deep bitterness had crept into the humour... (...)

Please be careful with this laughter. Pay close attention to why you laugh and how you laugh.

... and I feel like a killjoy. It is April 2017, four months after Donald Turmp took over the presidency, and an audience of three thousand women have been laughing whenever a joke about the first orange president of the USA is cracked on stage. {...}

I am stammering out things about how much time we wasted in Turkey by reacting to right-wing populism with humour and sarcasm, trying to laugh away our fears, and how it took our political culture down a cul-de-sac, bringing about a new type of fatalism, one that always has a smiley at the end. 'This is the first stage', I blabber. 'The next ones are not funny at all. You will just imitate your first laughter over and over again, until it becomes too narrow a shell to shelter your fears.'

26librorumamans
gen. 13, 2020, 7:34 pm

I'm currently reading Lost children archive by Valeria Luiselli. While not specifically about the far right, its focus on the fates of child migrants crossing into the southern States certainly looks at nativism and its tragic results.

I'd like to read Owen Jones' Chavs : the demonization of the working class. I expect one would find good background there, for the UK at least.

27LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 13, 2020, 9:22 pm

>26 librorumamans:

Going by jcbrunner 's review I'd say you're right.

...The working class which still accounts for over 50 percent of all jobs has answered by not voting at all (the so-called sofa option) or voting for protest candidates (who usually are ineffective and do not last long in politics). Owen's description of the English political landscape is smart and the absence of a nutty left to balance the nutty right a misfortune for sound governance. Between Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour, English voters are offered three flavors that may taste a bit different but contain much the same ingredients and perform whatever the City of London demands. No wonder that the areas that profit least from such politics such as Wales and Scotland increasingly seek to go their own way. ...
(note: dates from 2013; the book is from 2011)

I avoided entering into a discussion about definitions from the get-go, but I expect we will keep coming back to that subject--and I will probably keep reminding us all of the fluidity of the concept "fascism" and the reasons it is so... un-mathematical. ;)

Rather than dissolve into particularities (unmoored from specific contexts, that is), here is another scheme of fascism, by Umberto Eco. In 1995 he gave a speech at the Columbia University about "Eternal Fascism" or "Ur-fascism"--as far as I can tell, this speech was reworked and reprinted in The New York Review of Books (presumably also in collections of his essays), but is not available free online.

There is a condensation of the NYRB article here: http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-fea...

Eco's 14 features common to all instances of fascism (I am comparing and adding or expanding quotations from another source--of Eco's speech, that is):

1. The cult of tradition.

Truth has already been spelled out once and for all and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.


2. The rejection of modernism.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense {Eternal Fascism} can be defined as irrationalism.


3. The cult of action for action’s sake.

Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Mistrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism.


4. Disagreement is treason.

The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.


5. Fear of difference.

Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or early-phase fascist movement is an appeal against intruders. Thus, Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.


6. Appeal to social frustration.

One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.


7. The obsession with a conspiracy.

The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the conspiracy is to appeal to xenophobia.


8. The enemy is both strong and weak.

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.

For Ur-Fascism, there is no struggle for life but rather life is lived to struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.


10. Contempt for the weak.

Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. {My note, for "aristocratic" substitute plutocratic where more applicable.} Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world; the members of the party are the best among the citizens; every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party.


11. Everybody is educated to become a hero.

In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.


12. Machismo and weaponry.

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo...


{I'm tempted to riff on this at length, but suffice it to say that feminists have observed often enough that asserting one's will and power over women--which is cheap enough in patriarchal societies that hobble women and extoll men--is the easiest and therefore most common "fascist" practice of a wannabe "boss", inside or outside some specific political context.}

13. Selective populism.

There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.


14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

28lriley
gen. 14, 2020, 7:40 am

#19--the tea party movement is certainly proto-fascist. It coalesced around the birther movement (Trump) meant to delegitimize Obama's (who just happened to have the wrong pigmentation in their eyes) presidency and which also breathed air into Alt-Right pro-Nazi White rights groups. The tea party got it's own oxygen from conservative white evangelicals and pro-gun groups in particular the NRA and its initial financing from billionaires like the Koch brothers. Police are often involved here too. The decked out riot cop is the poster child for those who want to be tough on crime. Basically the idea is always to divide the worthy from the unworthy and basically those involved in these right wing groups think they are the ones who should decide. So yes it is pretty much all about a closed society and if you don't happen to belong to one of the favored groupings your persona non grata. Another hallmark of all this is the billionaire class almost always gets a pass--at least if you're not George Soros. Many tea partiers don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of either but their resentment targets those who have even less.....because they're lackeys for rich capitalists who by the way quite often have their hands out for government subsidizing--believing in socialism when it helps them personally but not for others.

We might also take a look at Sen. John McCain who gets too much of a free ride. He's the one though who gave us Sarah Palin and if we go back and listen to some of her speeches they sound creepily like a lot of speeches we've heard from the Orange one for the past 4-5 years. He's borrowed her shtick lock, stock and barrel.

29librorumamans
Editat: gen. 14, 2020, 9:03 pm

Following a breadcrumb trail of links led me to Corey Robin's Fear : the history of a political idea. OUP, 2004.

From Choice reviews:
This book is about fear and its political utility as an instrument of governance. In part 1, Robin (Brooklyn College, CUNY) presents a unique historical account of fear and its formative impact on the politics and culture of Western societies. . . . In part 2 Robin argues that politically repressive fear and its evasion is far more evident in the US than people like to believe. . . . The author concludes with a call to combat "Fear, American Style" by returning to the principles of freedom and equality, which should replace fear as the moral foundation of US politics.
Robin has also published The reactionary mind : conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. OUP, 2018.

30lriley
gen. 15, 2020, 10:55 am

Probably somewhat tangential to this thread I started the anarcho-anthropologist David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs which speaks to the resentments of workers today. He cites a UK study in which 37% of the working population believe their means of employment is entirely pointless/meaningless and to the differences between the market and social values of work. In Denmark a similar study came in at 40%. Graeber also distinguishes meaningless work from 'shit' work. Just having a job that's not good but serves a real purpose in the worker's mind. When there is that much day to day frustration around it's going to filter into society as a whole. I'm not far into this though. From just randomly opening a page before I started reading I did note his comment on people who wear uniforms in their employment---that they tend to be harrassed and sped up more than those who are not. So far I would say it would make a great companion piece for Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and dimed.

I'd also note from my own working life in USPS that I lost the thread along the way. Just the blur of the everyday same thing over and over again. For some postal jobs (the sorting and carrying) there is no relief from that blur--it's all day long every day non stop--sometimes with forced overtime but for some others there is plenty of time to fuck around all day long if you wanted to. Before my 29 years were up I saw it from a multiplicity of angles because I was always bidding from one job to another. Any case I'm glad I'm done with it---it was like on my last day I put it into the rear view mirror and went on to a better place and I promised myself I'd never work for anyone again.

31LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 15, 2020, 4:57 pm

I've been seeing lately more frequently some shy pieces on the theme that we might all be better off if we worked less, and the trends for lowering pension age, shortening the work week, as of course shortening the hours of work back in socialism's prehistory, all point to the need and benefits of that.

But there are so many obstacles to that, let alone to adopting the ideal of working only at what and as much as one desires.

Ivan Illich published on the topic back in the seventies: The right to useful unemployment.

There are aspects to the UK situation that puzzle me, not sure whether it's my ignorance or if there is some real difference. For example, I noticed just the other day, when I was looking up election data on YouGov, that they have a breakdown described as "Social Order"--lower class, middle etc. A freaking caste system by any other name.

Does any other country refer to its "working class" people with a derogatory slur? (I'm assuming Owen's equation of "working class" and "chavs".)

I can't think of a term I'd translate it into in any of the languages I speak, not correctly. Of course the notion of some "upper" classes looking down on the "lower" classes is universal and there are derogatory terms the former may apply to the latter, but nowhere is to so bound to the notion of labour, of the working class.

Maybe it's silly of me to still be getting surprised by the UK's feudalism. Wasn't it recently reported how practically all of its land is in the pockets of assorted lordships if not rich foreigners? And their whole monarchical circus and charades... All of that, the circus and the contempt for the working class, becomes understandable in the light of a rigid caste system.

32lriley
gen. 15, 2020, 5:33 pm

#31--From my experience--lots of people are always looking down on others they think of as lesser than them--it could be over race or gender but quite oftens it's how much money they make and if it turns out that you factor multiples of things like that together---like a female hispanic undocumented immigrant making minimum or maybe even less--it gets worse. It's almost baked into some people's DNA to think that way.

Graeber thinks that in a well organized society people would work many less hours and in things they did find meaningful. He thinks at least partly why things are as they are now is the need by those who have the most power to exert control over populations.

I did read the part about uniforms He mentioned UPS and Fedex drivers having 'backbreaking schedules designed with scientific efficiency' and that in the upper echelons of these same companies things aren't like that at all. Also a hotel laundry where the workers wore uniforms but were hardly ever seen by the public as a means of saying 'you should think of yourself as being under military discipline'.

33LolaWalser
gen. 15, 2020, 8:35 pm

Yes, treating workers as cogs in the machine--Chaplin had a comment or two on that...

34thorold
gen. 16, 2020, 11:27 am

>31 LolaWalser:, >32 lriley: All you need to know about the English class system (John Cleese and the Two Ronnies in 1966): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tXBC-71aZs

---

This Irish view of the Brexit referendum is mostly arguing that Brexit is different from Trump, etc., in that Trump really does want to kick immigrants out, build walls, erect trade barriers, burn fossil fuels, etc. (even if he doesn't achieve it), whilst Johnson always knew he wouldn't be able to give the British people back the right to buy bent bananas or feed their children prawn cocktail flavoured crisps, because the EU never took those rights away in the first place.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) by Fintan O'Toole (Ireland, 1958- )

  

Fintan O'Toole is a well-known journalist, with a regular column in the Irish Times, author of many books criticising the Irish, British and US political establishments (and a couple about Shakespeare...).

This book was published towards the end of 2018; the Brexit nonsense has moved on since then and O'Toole published another book about English nationalism in 2019.

This is primarily a book about the rhetoric that was used in the referendum campaign by the proponents of "Leave", looking at the background and origin of the tropes used and the ways they worked with voters, as well as the reasons why the success of the campaign has been such an embarrassment to the Brexiteers, and why they can't possibly deliver whatever it was that the people voting for them were hoping for.

O'Toole writes from the point of view of a critical outsider with a sharp eye for literary and cultural subtexts and a long experience of the newspaper world. He lays into Boris Johnson's lies with gusto and obvious enjoyment (but still manages to underestimate Johnson's capacity for bouncing back from deep disgrace into public life...), whilst drawing interesting parallels between Johnson's style and that of Enoch Powell.

Whilst O'Toole is no enthusiast for the EU (he hasn't forgiven it for what it did to Greece, Ireland and Portugal after the financial crisis), he is clear that leaving it can be nothing other than a major act of self-harm for the UK. But intentional self-harm can be a very attractive thing in certain situations — he's at least half-serious when he draws a parallel with the popularity of Fifty shades of grey, and very serious when he argues that Brexit is the same kind of self-defeating rebellion as punk. When you feel powerless to change things, an act of self-harm puts you in a position to make yourself the centre of attention.

And of course this links into the English cult of heroic failure, which he sees as a way for a dominant, colonising nation to appropriate the moral high-ground of the colonial victims — the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott of the Antarctic, Sir John Franklin and the North-West Passage, Michael Caine and the Zulus, etc. Johnson opportunistically took up "Leave" in the certainty that it would be a glorious flop and that his "selfless" engagement with it would earn him credit with a large section of the party. O'Toole quotes Sarah Vine's famous comment to her husband Michael Gove on the morning after the referendum: ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ — a line from The Italian job, a film whose relevance to Brexit O'Toole also has a lot of fun deconstructing.

The book concludes with a warning that the Leave vote overwhelmingly came from people who self-identify as "English" rather than "British", and who feel the current political system in the UK doesn't take any account of that identity. O'Toole urges politicians on the left and centre to find a way to talk to those people and take English nationalism away from the exclusive province of the far right before it's too late. Presumably his next book will be about how Jeremy Corbyn failed to do that...

35LolaWalser
gen. 16, 2020, 12:25 pm

>34 thorold:

Ha, someone posted that the other day too, I'd never seen it before, very funny.

It's that "I know my place" (which is of course satirised in the sketch) that seems so strange--so very British (or English). You don't get that elsewhere, that acute consciousness of being, not of a certain class, but so class-bound. Locked into it, passing it on hereditarily... I can't describe it very well, but "caste" appears most apt.

Do you find a parallel in Holland or elsewhere to the British/English instrumentalisation of accent as marker of class? IME, the distinctions other people make are mostly between the well- and badly/un-educated, and regional stereotypes.

36thorold
gen. 16, 2020, 3:01 pm

>35 LolaWalser: In all fairness, that sketch was satirising a way of thinking about class that was largely obsolete even at the time they made it, even if it was still represented that way in a lot of popular culture. “I know my place” went out in real life at the latest with the Attlee government and the Butler education act, except in the imaginations of a few dinosaurs of the upper classes.

Hereditary caste only applies literally to a tiny group of landowning families, and probably only to one or two generations in those families; for everyone else class identification has more to do with the kind of education you followed and what job you do, which is strongly related to how well off your parents were, but not bound to it. And accents (and other class-markers, like arrogance and dress codes) are also far more fluid than they used to be, and seem to be defined more at school and college than at home. My father (working-class Lancashire upbringing) was at Oxford in the fifties and has kept his regional accent but can switch at will to RP; I lost mine at secondary school, my niece and nephew lost theirs at university.

And that seems to be quite similar in the Netherlands, France, Italy, and elsewhere. People who studied at ENA/Oxford/Leiden walk and talk as though they studied there, just as Ivy League graduates do. Maybe not quite as much in Germany, where regional accents are still prized in many areas and there is less obvious difference between elite and non-elite universities.

I think the point of those gradations on YouGov was to give people an intelligible way of self-assessing class. Most professional survey-takers in the UK seem to work with something called NRS Social Grade (ABC1 and so on), which is based on the job the “head of the household” does. But you’d have to ask a social scientist — the only surveys I worked with were taken within a single professional group, we didn’t need to ask about class.

37LolaWalser
gen. 16, 2020, 4:26 pm

>36 thorold:

that sketch was satirising a way of thinking about class that was largely obsolete even at the time they made it, even if it was still represented that way in a lot of popular culture.

I take the point about fluidity and change, of course. "Class", though, is still a major preoccupation of British/English literature, media, pop culture in a way that I just don't see in other places. Maybe it's that other places are running a deficit of lords and have been for a while whereas the UK eschewed a bloody revolution but at a cost of internalizing class prejudice across the board? At least to this outsider, it seems there is still much "looking up" to the "lords" in one way or another. The queen & co. aren't there really just for the tourists, no? And in what other European country could one title a book with a single word connoting "vulgar lower class people with no or bad education who must work or leech on welfare to support themselves" and have it understood he's writing about the working class?

People who studied at ENA/Oxford/Leiden walk and talk as though they studied there, just as Ivy League graduates do.

True, but that's something different, education does not equal class--as I said, recognising from speech who is well-educated and who isn't happens likely universally. However, the "coarse uneducated nincompoop proud of his ignorance is a lord as one can hear" is, in contrast, very much an Anglo thing IME. As is looking down on professions. I can't think of an instance in German or French literature etc. where some "lord" would scoff at a "university man" as if it were obvious that knowledge, talent, intellectual achievement are worth nothing and might even be shameful. Whereas that sort of attitude is all over in English lit...

I think the point of those gradations on YouGov was to give people an intelligible way of self-assessing class.

It's labelling it "Social Order" that made me blink. Makes it sound so very... firm.

38thorold
Editat: gen. 17, 2020, 7:37 am

>37 LolaWalser: Obviously it's all very subjective, and I'm something of an outsider with a strange perspective, but I'd say that the Queen & co. and the aristocracy play about as much real part in British life as cowboys and mafia dons do in the US, however important they are in imaginative life. Deference/condescension in social interactions has far more to do with visible roles than with our assumptions about who someone's parents were. And the profession of "arrogant aristocrat" simply isn't viable in modern life, anyway, once you stop being a drunken student: if you're running a stately home business you have to learn to treat your staff and customers with respect, just like any other manager.

looking down on professions — Yes, that's an English (but never a Scottish...) thing, I grant, although it's been attenuated a lot over the years. Boris Johnson would be the classic example — the son of a cosmopolitan, bureaucrat family who happens to have had an elite but non-specialised English education, encouraged by his tutors to value cleverness, rhetoric and improvisation over actual knowledge and hard work. Nothing to do with hereditary class.

And in what other European country could one title a book with a single word connoting "vulgar lower class people with no or bad education who must work or leech on welfare to support themselves" and have it understood he's writing about the working class?

— Belgium, apparently! ... well, not quite, but the title of this book could be translated literally as "The unrespectables". Antonissen himself suggests "white trash" as a rough equivalent. If you look hard enough, most social groups, whatever the language, probably have more or less unfavourable terms for people who "aren't like us". After all, it was the very middle-class Karl Marx who invented the word "Lumpenproletariat"...

De onfatsoenlijken: een reis door populistisch Europa (2018) by Jan Antonissen (Belgium, 1964- )

  

Flemish journalist Jan Antonissen travels through the rust-belts of the former European Coal and Steel Community, plus the UK, to meet the sort of people who vote for populist parties, whose voices "we" (i.e. the middle-class political mainstream) normally don't get to listen to, precisely because we write them off as people who vote for populist parties. The book is laid out as a series of nineteen interviews, framed by a prologue and epilogue in which Antonissen talks about his grandmother and her experience of social change in the Antwerp neighbourhood of Borgerhout — a friendly working-class district when the family moved there, depressed and mostly immigrant by the end of her life (but currently being marketed as "vibrant and multi-culti"). It's a little bit reminiscent of Geert Mak's monumental survey In Europa, but on a much more manageable scale.

The people Antonissen talks to are a mixture. A few are individuals who have been involved in recent news stories, like Alessandra Verni in Rome whose daughter was murdered, apparently by Nigerian drug dealers; Jörg Sartor, director of an Essen food-bank which got into the headlines when it temporarily stopped accepting new non-German clients; Michel Catalano, the printer taken hostage by the Kouachi brothers after the Charlie Hebdo attack; and Jayne Senior, the whistleblower in the Rotherham child-abuse scandal. But others seem to be "just" ordinary people he happens to have met — unemployed men in Bergamo and Gelsenkirchen, a truck-driving couple in Hasselt, a former call-centre worker in Enschede, a candidate for the local council in Sittard, and a retired farmer on the French-Flemish border. In Wallonia, just for a change, the people he talks to are all supporters of far-left parties — a couple of former shop-stewards and a communist radio journalist.

The interviews are short, and don't always explore as far as we might like, but they do bring out a lot of interesting material about the ways that life is treating working-class people in Europe and the sort of difficulties they face. In particular, the difficulty of earning enough money to be able to do anything other than stand still in life. For a lot of them, getting back to where they were after something like a health setback is simply not achievable, and they don't have the sort of employers who support them through difficulties. Although most could have grounds to resent immigrants, Antonissen rarely finds them using explicitly racist language. Most seem to have sympathy and understanding for their immigrant/refugee neighbours as individuals, but complain about the social problems caused by the arrival of so many in so short a time.

Another book about the importance of talking to each other!

39thorold
gen. 17, 2020, 12:33 pm

>34 thorold: By coincidence, a new piece by O’Toole in the Guardian revisiting some of the same topics: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/17/nul-points-eu-revision-con...

Revolutions unleash euphoria because they create tangible images of change and inaugurate, at least in the fevered minds of their supporters, a new epoch. Brexit can’t do either of these things. The problem with a revolt against imaginary oppression is that you end up with imaginary freedom. How do you actually show that the yoke of Brussels has been lifted? You can’t bring prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps back into the shops, or release stout British fishermen from the humiliation of having to wear hair nets at work on the high seas, or unban donkey rides on beaches, or right any of the other great wrongs that fuelled anti-EU sentiment – because all of it was make-believe.

40LolaWalser
gen. 17, 2020, 1:12 pm

>38 thorold:

After all, it was the very middle-class Karl Marx who invented the word "Lumpenproletariat"...

As a description of the alarming pauperization of the working class, the result of rural emigration to the cities and unscrupulous exploitation of unskilled labour by industrialised capitalism, not in order "to look down on them".

The topic of the differences between the UK and elsewhere regarding attitudes to class seems to run the danger of getting into attenuating digressions so, since I don't seem to be successful in conveying what I mean, I'll drop it. Until the next time!

librorumamans, any comments? Have you read Owen's book?

Although most could have grounds to resent immigrants

This is intriguing, could you say more about those grounds?

41LolaWalser
gen. 17, 2020, 1:23 pm

>39 thorold:

Excellent article.

42thorold
gen. 18, 2020, 6:42 am

>40 LolaWalser: There’s a review in the current LRB of three recent books by experts on social mobility in the UK that all come to quite different conclusions, based on detailed research, as to how much of it there is, so there probably isn’t much point us trying to discuss it empirically here, even if it were more relevant to the topic.

Resenting immigrants: for the people Antonissen is talking to, “immigrants” generally means recently-arrived refugees, and what they are most concerned about (whether or not it’s objectively true) is competition for housing, welfare benefits, health care and education. Often they feel that public services where they live have been overloaded by the arrival of a lot of people with more urgent needs than their own in a short space of time. Some also have concerns about unfair job competition, e.g. the Belgian truck drivers who are undercut by contract workers from Eastern Europe who manage to live on lower wages and apparently have less strictly enforced rules to comply with. A couple of interviews mention concerns about criminality, especially in Italy where there are perceived to be a lot of “illegals” who fall into crime because they aren’t allowed to work. Obviously that’s skewed even further by Antonissen choosing to interview Verni, who is in a situation where no-one would expect her to be objective about migrants.

I was struck by the interview with Catalano— you wouldn’t expect someone who’s gone through an experience like that to be objective either, but he makes a point of not blaming Islam or migrants (other than the Kouachis themselves) for what happened to him: he sees the fault in the way French governments have failed to tackle the concentration of social problems in the banlieus and prisons.

43librorumamans
gen. 19, 2020, 12:37 am

>40 LolaWalser:

I signed Chavs out on Friday but haven't looked at it yet. I'm deep in Washington Black right now.

44LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 19, 2020, 1:55 pm

Just noticed the mindslip above where I kept referring to Owen Jones as "Owen" as if that were his last name, sorry.

This is on topic and ties in with the latest book I read:

Man found guilty of aggravated assault against Owen Jones

Quick recap: Jones was physically attacked last year on leaving a pub where he was celebrating his birthday with some friends. The attacker(s) recognised him when some other people greeted him by name. It was seen from the start as a homophobic attack, and because of Jones' prominence as a leftist journalist possibly/likely politically motivated. Now we learn that at least one attacker, the man who first hit Jones--from the back, sending him to the ground--is a far-right white supremacist and Nazi fan.

One item of memorabilia found in Healy’s home featured a “sun cross” – a white supremacist symbol – used by White Pride Worldwide with the “whatever it takes” motto of Combat 18 and “lead the way” used by the banned Loyalist Volunteer Force. Another said “Chelsea FC, no asylum seekers” .

The collection also included a black flag, bearing a “totenkopf” deaths head symbol, used by the Nazi SS, and the letters CYF, standing for Chelsea Youth Firm, a hooligan group associated with the west London football club. Healy had a tattoo associated with the group on his right arm, the court also heard.


Thugs like that abound and are becoming more openly aggressive every day.

What about their organisations, the networks that produce and "feed" them, directly or indirectly? It would seem that the "mainstream" prefers to ignore them--in-between outbursts of violence, that is. Then there is a flurry of articles about this or that curious group, as often as not in thrall to some odd character--all very extreme and appalling, but also fringe-y, easy to isolate as some incomputable, ungeneralisable idiosyncrasy.

But that view of things may distort the understanding of the problem. The extremists who hoard Nazi memorabilia, those who beat up and those who end up murdering people, are not that simply severed from the society at large. And if we can't bear to look at them for long, perhaps we ought to begin by looking at their matrix.

Blanche McCrary Boyd's Tomb of the unknown racist offers an opportunity to become acquainted with some of those hair-raisingly horrific ideas held by a surprisingly large number of people in the US. The "militants" may be relatively few, but remember that hundreds of white militias exist and that a few individuals can and have caused mass death. The most upsetting aspect, though, is the presence of white supremacist beliefs in populations at large. In practical terms--one might neutralise a wannabe bomber by imprisonment, but it is not clear how to stop supremacist preaching, how to eradicate the poison that seems to leach into people from the very ground and air.

Boyd's heroine Ellen Burns is a flamboyant fifty-something lesbian radical feminist and "sober alcoholic" (there are many references to the philosophy and practice of the Alcoholics Anonymous) who recognises on the news a young mother of kidnapped children as her long-unseen niece Ruby. Ruby is living on a Nogalu reservation with her Native American husband. Ellen decides to go to her, to help her, to find out what happened--with the children, with Ruby, but also, as a constant refrain in her mind, to Ellen's brother Royce, who started life as a privileged, promising, gifted, attractive person, and died an (in)famous white supremacist.

We get some hints but no full explanation of what changed Royce; it's up to us to imagine the psychological calculus that churned in him and finally set the balance on the side of evil, the bombers of black churches, the mutilators of Jews, the sterilizers of children of "mixed" race.

Lily Magnus Biggers was so undone by her brother's phone call that she sat down in my black leather barber's chair and babbled that she had never believed that "nigras" bore the mark of Cain or that the world was only six thousand years old. Her despair at speaking these heresies was visible. She said that she loved Jesus and that intermarriage was wrong, but killing people had to be wrong too, and she'd seen the picture of that little girl, that sweetheart.

45lriley
Editat: gen. 19, 2020, 2:52 pm

#44--a lot of European football hooligan gangs have far right links--particularly British and Eastern European. John King's novel The football factory is about a Chelsea supporter but it's not really political in that sense. He's more a young man just burning off adrenaline getting into brawls with supporters of other teams. King followed that up with England Away---same character--more European locales. I liked the books and King identifies as left. There is kind of a James Kelman--ish vibe going on. The cultural idea of the skinhead in Britain has changed quite a lot since the 50's--back then it was a white and black and male and female thing and their music of choice came from the shores of Jamaica. Things in that regard got turned on its head in the early 80's but there are British skinheads (not all by any means) still who see themselves as left and are not racist.

Another book by an American Bill Buford Among the Thugs gets more into the nastier--seedier stuff. Buford wanted to know what it was like to run with a hooligan club and he really does run into Nazi types. That's a really good book for this topic I think. Towards the end he lengthily describes a riot that takes place in Italy in pretty stark terms. Buford is something of a journalist--something of a chef and Salman Rushdie dedicated one of his books to him.

On Combat 18--the number is important--first letter of the alphabet is A--8th letter is H. Initials of Adolph Hitler.

Owen Jones has the cover blurb to the Graeber Bullshit Jobs book I'm reading. 'Spectacular and terrifyingly true'--he says.

46rocketjk
gen. 19, 2020, 2:57 pm

>45 lriley: The book, How Soccer Explains the World: an Unlikely Theory of Globalization, by Franklin Foer, gives a lot of background into the ties between individual soccer teams around the world and politics (quite often right wing) in some cases and industrialists in others, with rare exceptions about teams linked to progressive movements. Foer does not make his thematic case about Soccer "explaining" globalization, but I found the individual chapters about some of the teams to be extremely interesting.

My somewhat longer review is on the book's work page, for anyone interested.

47lriley
gen. 19, 2020, 3:47 pm

#46--that sounds interesting. I'll look that up.

I haven't entered Dawn by Demirtas or A changed man by Prose yet but they've both arrived recently.

48thorold
gen. 20, 2020, 6:01 am

>44 LolaWalser: Ah! Now I remember who Owen Jones is... I've bookmarked Chavs on Scribd, and will probably get to it soon.

Meanwhile, two more books that would perhaps stand a chance of changing the world, if only they somehow fell into the hands of the people least likely to hear about them:

Als dit zo doorgaat: let's make literature great again, with all the best words! (2017) edited by Auke Hulst (Netherlands, 1975- )

  

In early 2017, in the run-up to a Dutch general election in which it was feared that Geert Wilders would end up in power, Auke Hulst recruited twenty-three fellow writers who shared his anger and frustration with the way things were going in the world to contribute to this short story collection inspired by the title of Robert A. Heinlein's 1940 story "If this goes on..." The idea was to demonstrate how engaged literature can still contribute to political debate in the 21st century.

Obviously, it was a rush job, and many of the contributors didn't get much further than rehashing the ideas of all the over-familiar giants of dystopian fiction, usually with a Wilders-like figure pasted-in over the picture of Stalin, and Muslims or Moroccans standing in for Jews. The general theme seems to be "something bad is happening and there's nothing we can do about it" — a position depressingly summed up in Wytske Versteeg's "Ervaringsmachine", in which the narrator's diagnosis with a progressive, incurable disease parallels the collapse of liberal democratic values around him. Only a few of these dystopias really seemed to do something original: Mohammed Benzakour's deceptively simple Panchatantra-style animal fable "De knorrige koningin" is one that will certainly stick in my mind. Jamal Ouariachi's story, in which the narrator goes to Casablanca to report on the Eichmann-style trial of a fallen ex-dictator with more than a passing resemblance to Wilders, also struck me as an interesting shift of viewpoint.

A few stories struck out in different directions: Frank Westerman's "Animal farm 2.0" sounded as though it was going to be another animal fable, but it turns out to be about the way that the discourse of ecology and zoology, with their emphasis on restoring "unspoilt" environments, rooting out invasive species and back-breeding "pure" lost species, actually propagates ideas that originated under the Third Reich (Hitler would have loved the idea that wolves were returning to Western Europe) and provides a hidden ideological foothold for racist ideas that we otherwise wouldn't feel comfortable expressing. Alma Mathijsen also forces us to stop and think by imagining "a world without men" in which it is women who are the ones exercising fascist power, and men, apart from the occasional specimen retained as a captive sperm donor, are rooted out from their hiding places and mercilessly eliminated.

Fascism: a warning (2018) by Madeleine Albright (USA, 1937- )

  

Albright takes us through the history of anti-democratic political movements in the twentieth century, trying to isolate the things they have in common, and then explores the ways in which those elements can and can't be mapped onto the rhetoric and actions of the current crop of (would-be) authoritarian leaders. Obviously, her main goal is to alert her US readers to the possible danger to democracy posed by Trump's rants against judges, legislators and journalists, but there's also a lot here that can help us understand some of the things going on in Europe and elsewhere.

The book is written for readers who are assumed to know nothing about world history outside the US, which is probably a good thing, but makes it a bit frustrating for the rest of us as we go at what often feels like a snail's pace through the familiar stories of how Mussolini, Hitler, Franco et al. came to power. It gets much more interesting as she advances to the late 20th century and to leaders she dealt with face to face in her own long career in international relations, including Milosevic, Putin, Chavez and Kim Jong-Il.

But we have to pay attention throughout, because she is picking up a lot of crucial points along the way: how most authoritarian leaders come to power in the first place by constitutional means (but often without majority support); how power is entrenched by "necessary reforms" to constitutions and by control of the media; the "Mussolini-model" where the leader refuses to delegate and increasingly overrates his own competence until everything collapses around him, versus the "Hitler-model" where the leader delegates as much as possible to competing subordinates and distances himself from unpopular decisions ("If the Führer only knew").

Albright — despite the title of this book — is very wary about how she uses words like nationalism, populism and fascism. She maintains that the first two are positive qualities, to be admired in liberal democracies. Politicians who don't have the interests of the nation at heart or who don't seek popular support for what they do are clearly going wrong somewhere. And fascism is a term she only wants to apply to leaders who claim to speak for the people without giving the people the chance to comment or contradict, who disregard the rights of minorities, and who impose their ideas inside and outside their country by violence without democratic or judicial controls. The only current fascist state, by her definition, is North Korea. On the other hand, she sees plenty of other leaders who appear to have some of the characteristics of fascism and give reason to fear that they might go further, especially with the examples of impunity Trump and Putin give them.

Obviously the chief interest of the book is that it is written by someone with exceptional practical and theoretical knowledge of how relations between countries work (and personal experience of being a refugee from first Hitler and then Stalin). And a communicator who is very good at making us feel that we can understand very complex questions, even whilst she warns us that the ability to reduce complex questions to simple answers is a strong indicator of anti-democratic rhetoric. Needless to say, there are no simple recipes provided for cooking up democracy at home, other than a warning to stay vigilant.

49thorold
Editat: gen. 21, 2020, 9:31 am

Two more short ones:

Niet te moeilijk graag : de verkleutering van het publieke debat (2012) edited by Simon Knepper (Netherlands, 1955- ) and Johan Kortenray (Netherlands - )

  

The editors, both working in the communications department of the university hospital (AMC) in Amsterdam, got a wide range of Dutch public intellectuals to put forward their views on the infantilisation of public debate (read: “dumbing down”). Philosophers, sociologists, historians, political commentators, even a linguist and a psychiatrist, contributed essays. Which already answers the first questions: yes, there are still public intellectuals, and yes, there is (or was, in 2012) still work for them to do. And at least two people (judging by the fact that there were already pencil annotations in the copy I got from the city library) have read the book, so we can also conclude that, yes, their views still matter...

As you would expect, the contributors disagree on whether there is such a thing as “dumbing down”. Several remind us that cultural pessimism and the conviction that the “youth of today” are lazier and less intelligent than previous generations goes back at least to the time of the ancient Greeks. Reality TV and professional sport may be stultifyingly mindless, but at least they are less reprehensible than bear-baiting, gladiatorial combats and public executions. There has always been a high culture reserved for the elite and a low culture enjoyed by the masses, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that high culture is now accessible to a greater part of the population than it ever has been.

Very few of the contributors agree with Frank Furedi that there has been any real decline in cultural values. Nozick’s Experience Machine is invoked a few times, most interestingly by psychiatrist Damiaan Denys, who warns us that we are hard-wired always to select physical pleasure over intellectual stimulation, whatever we might think we would do in the abstract. Brecht was right to say “Erst kommt das Fressen,” but we shouldn’t count on “dann kommt die Moral”. Meanwhile, philosopher and novelist Désanne van Brederode turns the question round and asks us whether our talk of “infantilising” really exposes our inability to recognise children as the future adults they are, and talk to them as such.

Similar arguments apply to political debate, although the contributors have a harder time staying positive here. Politicians aren’t meant to be evidence-based decision machines, it’s their job to weigh scientific facts against emotional, traditional, economic and other arguments and come up with the best solution for the people they are representing. Democracy is the best tool we have for appointing the right people to do this job and changing them when we get fed up with them: at the moment it seems to be hiccuping a bit, the electorate are losing trust in the political class, and some contributors think that needs to be addressed by fine-tuning the democratic process, e.g. by making more posts directly elected.

Quite a few contributors see causes for concern in technological change, the growth of social media, globalisation and the fragmentation of communities along new lines, but none seems to see any reason to despair. Human society is pretty good at adapting to change, seems to be the take-home message. I wonder if they would have come up with the same answers five or six years later...?

---

And, less reflective, but perhaps a bit more to the point — One of the earlier reviews of sums it up, I think: For those inside their respective silos, there is no point reading this book. You already know that you either love it or hate it.

The death of truth : notes on falsehood in the age of Trump (2018) by Michiko Kakutani (USA, 1955- )

  

Does exactly what it says on the cover. A short, clear, hard-hitting summary of the violence that Trump and his supporters do to truth, facts, and objective debate, and the dangers that that brings for liberal democracy around the world. There won't be much that is new here for anyone who reads a newspaper from time to time, but Kakutani does join up a few dots here and there to help us understand what's going on, particularly the surprising ways that both the far-right nationalists in the US and their self-invited guests from Moscow are using propaganda techniques that owe as much to Lenin as they do to Goebbels. Kakutani warns us that we can save democracy only by resisting the nihilism and resignation the propagandists are trying to push us into, and suggests that engaging in collective action instead of clicking on endless depressing news stories is the best way to retain a sense of what democracy actually means.

50LolaWalser
gen. 21, 2020, 1:39 pm

Ah, that stultifying liberal bias... it will be the end of us all yet.

both the far-right nationalists in the US and their self-invited guests from Moscow

Observe the forced contrast here that implies that "the guests from Moscow" are something other than far-right nationalists. That Putin is, to cut to the chase, I've seen this film many times, a Communist--a lie that shamelessly aims to exploit American atavistic cultural conditioning about the Red Scare. And it's the liberals (what passes for the "left" in the US) doing this.

Or the implication that Lenin was no better than Goebbels, or that it's the two of them who "invented" propaganda. Nothing to do with the practices of capitalist advertisers and media magnates, nothing at all? I say it's all to do with it--and mass manipulation and crowd psychology were no political newcomers either, not even to the ancients.

Let's also remember it's the "scientification" of the gilded age American factories, F. W. Taylor, Henry Ford and IBM, Madison Avenue and Hollywood that impressed and inspired the Nazis, not vice versa (well, not then).

It's the American "Communazi" rhetoric and mindset still going strong--and THIS is the side that's supposed to be better than the one dog-whistling to the blackshirts with "cultural Marxism" and "the antifascists are the real fascists" memes?

As for worrying about "liberal democracy"--why didn't they worry before, when the pattern of low to no voter turnout was getting established in the US? Why didn't they campaign to remove electoral college and punish voter suppression? Why were they then content to live in a "liberal democracy" that was the result of a political engagement of a minority of the population?

Sorry, I don't give a damn that people like Kakutani and Albright are suddenly discovering dangers for their "liberal democracy". The notion of their "liberal democracy" as a good system was a figment of their imagination, a complete lie. That liberal democracy of theirs accommodated the entrenchement of a plutocracy, a growing exploitation of the working class, and growing inequality in everything from income to health care that finally broke the camel's back. That liberal democracy allowed American imperialist wars to go on--even started them, over and over. That liberal democracy deliberately, calculatedly kept the structures created through slavery that ensured the black underclass will remain the underclass--because "liberal democracies", utopias for the comfy classes, absolutely require an underclass.

Because there is no profit like a large profit, and the largest profits are made where the greatest number of people can be reduced closest to the state of slaves.

There is no point in ignoring, disguising, minimising this fact because it's the genetic programme of capitalism: to make money for few at the expense of the many. "Liberal democracy", as we have seen for over a century now, is a system devised to protect capitalism, nothing more, nothing less. The propaganda invested in whitewashing and praising it is no less calculated, self-interested, biased, devious, toxic and lying than that used by the "Communazi" scarescrow.

My, this has turned into a huge rant. Sorry but not sorry? :) basically... Basically, we're in deep shit and sinking apace. We have ALREADY lost time, lost opportunities to alleviate if not to prevent the social catastrophes we're facing. And the funny thing with losing time, as with procrastination in general, is that the more one resists making changes early on because of a fear of them, of unwillingness to lose the grip on some perceived comfort and privilege, the more likely and inevitable a drastic change and loss of comfort becomes. Don't like revolution?--start reforming on time, then. But do we have time for liberal reforms left?

Do we have time for liberal reforms left?

I feel silly just posing the question, with fascists swarming out of the woodwork everywhere. Half the world is poised to sink and the other to burn, and Bolsonaro and Trump are doing their best to hasten the environments demise--and I'm supposed to nod approval at some aggrieved comfy liberal's cherished illusion of "middle-road" self-rightousness, because Stalin, because Hitler, because gulag and bread lines and all the rest of the "it's forever 1935 in the USSR" bullshit.

So what I'm saying is to hell with the narratives that serenade the liberal utopia that never existed. To hell, in fact, with all the past dreams--and nightmares too. Have a new vision of a just and caring, humanist society, and for god's sake make a plan and act on it. Greta Thunberg's doing that. Sanders wants to do that.

51thorold
gen. 22, 2020, 7:45 am

>50 LolaWalser: Splendid ranting! :-) You're perhaps being slightly unfair to Kakutani, attacking her on the strength of my loose wording, but you're probably right about the anti-communist subtext. Not that she's wrong in classing Lenin as a master of propaganda, but her argument didn't really need him to sustain it. And there are only a few very guarded and indirect references to the role of big business in sponsoring Trump and other beasts-of-the-right.

I finished Chavs yesterday, review in my other thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/314548#7042349
Some of what I said above about class in the UK is probably naive and outdated, if Jones is right as he presumably is. What he says doesn't match my experience, but I don't read the Daily Mail or watch trash TV, and I don't live in England apart from the occasional holiday.
Jones's book isn't intended as such, but I should think Boris and Farage must have had people in their teams using it as a playbook for the Brexit referendum and the 2019 election...

52librorumamans
gen. 22, 2020, 12:08 pm

>51 thorold:

Thanks for the review. Since I can only get the first edition, I wonder how Jones updates his views in the preface to the second edition.

53thorold
Editat: gen. 22, 2020, 2:13 pm

>52 librorumamans:
Chavs, written more than five years ago, is a polemic about a society that was unnecessarily unjust, cruel and divided; since its original publication in 2011 Britain has only become more unjust, cruel and divided.

Mostly he’s just summarising the ill effects of Cameron, austerity, bedroom tax, etc., which he considers as “more of the same”. He refers to a couple of new instances where the press has latched onto a lurid criminal case as though it were representative of the whole working class, and he mentions a few egregiously prejudiced shows on BBC3 or Channel Four. The edition I read came out well before the EU referendum, and doesn’t discuss that at all.

54librorumamans
gen. 22, 2020, 4:10 pm

55librorumamans
gen. 22, 2020, 4:28 pm

In one of those Books You Share with ... lists, I was reminded of The shipwrecked mind : on political reaction by Mark Lilla, mostly a collection of his essays in the NYRB. Choice Reviews says in part:
The book does not explore the history of political reaction; rather, it features a selection of 20th-century thinkers and current movements as case studies. Lilla offers "portraits" of Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin, and the Straussians, then the "theoconservatism" of the US Right and scholars of Carl Schmitt on the Left. He concludes with consideration of political Islamism and French nationalist responses to it.

56librorumamans
gen. 23, 2020, 11:39 am

57LolaWalser
gen. 23, 2020, 12:49 pm

>51 thorold:, >52 librorumamans:

Thanks for the comments on Chavs (I'll read your review in a minute, Mark), I did wonder whether he has updated it since Brexit; I'm sure there are some articles or interviews discussing all that.

>56 librorumamans:

Seen that, depressingly pretty much the same old story. Imprisoning like-minded people together, go figure, works to reinforce their mindsets and agendas.

I'm rushing this post because I blanched and syncopated at the mention of Mark Lilla. This is another pathetically blinkered white dude lecturing those not sharing his white dudeness about the perils of "identity politics", "political correctness" etc. The New York Times published a few years ago in T magazine a huge article of his that read like an alt-right misogynist screed. Alain Finkielkraut, the notable misogynist, racist and homophobe, recently had him on his show on France Culture. That show is a cesspit of right-wing representation; Finkielkraut, who has a thing about North American "plague" of "political correctness", enjoys in particular inviting North American guests who will bemoan and attack it--you know, things like women's rights, gay rights, anti-racism, anti-Islamophobia.

In short, I wouldn't waste good spittle on Lilla and his works. You might think this too harsh, that perhaps there is something salvageable intellectually. But, for my part at least (and obviously this is neither normative nor definitive for anyone else), I HAVE judged his lack of intellectual worth on a solid basis--on the basis of things he wrote about the state of American universities, education, politics AND the things he wrote about feminism, anti-racism etc.

He's consistently stupid and wrong aboout all these things--because he's blind, because he's narrow-minded, because his premises suck.

OK, had my say ;), now off to read Mark's review...

58spiphany
gen. 23, 2020, 3:39 pm

I'm way behind on my reading, but popping in here briefly to mention a couple of recent fictional works from Germany that thematize right-wing movements and the social conditions that help fuel them (climate change, the refugee crisis, etc.). Both of them, unsurprisingly, take the form of near-future dystopian scenarios:

- Empty Hearts (Leere Herzen) by Juli Zeh
- The Prepper Room (Macht) by Karen Duve

I haven't read either novel, although the one by Zeh is on my reading list. I've found that Duve's characters are often rather too unsympathetic for my taste, but I give her credit for what she's trying to do as a writer. I feel like there aren't in general so many contemporary German-language writers who are willing to tackle difficult current political and social topics; the novelistic gaze seems to be anchored firmly towards the past.

I haven't been able to decide whether I want to read Look Who's Back (Er ist wieder da) by Timur Vermes. I tend to agree with >10 thorold: that it feels like it's of rather questionable taste. However, the concept (Hitler wakes up in contemporary Germany, becomes a TV celebrity, and uses this popularity to spread his views and embark on a political career) seems oddly prescient in the current Trump era (the book was published in 2012).

I also can't recommend Jenny Erpenbeck enough and want to emphasize that her novel on the refugee crisis Go, Went, Gone (Gehen, ging, gegangen) is available in English translation.

I'll also mention here that there have been some other, more unfortunate overlaps between fiction and politics in Germany in the last couple of years, with several highly lauded authors (e.g. Monika Maron, Uwe Tellkamp) revealing sympathies for right-wing positions. Some of which may be a very German tempest in a teapot based on an unreasonable demand for moral purity -- see: Günter Grass, Christa Wolf -- but it's hard not to feel like there is more behind it. I loved Tellkamp's "The Tower" (Der Turm) and was incredibly disappointed by all of this, even though, on another level, I can understand to a certain extent why the AfD party has managed to gather so much support in former East Germany, and it's perhaps unreasonable to assume that authors would be entirely exempt from this disillusionment.
Akif Pirinçci is another moderately popular German author -- he's written several speculative fiction novels -- whom I've decided I'm not willing to read because of his very active support of anti-feminist and extremist right-wing movements.

59LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 23, 2020, 4:31 pm

>58 spiphany:

I have Er ist wieder da but I haven't decided whether to list it yet, let alone read it, and the reasons for and against are pretty much the ones you mention. If I'm lucky you'll read it first and then between you and Mark I'll feel I've read it. :)

Plus feeling somewhat out-satired in general... although I'll have to get over that as they're all the rage, aren't they.

Gehen, ging, gegangen I found worthy and easy to recommend but... a little, I don't know how to put it, maybe brittle, a little too obvious in its good intentions or "the message", too "on the nose" etc.? This is probably very unfair and I'm just rotten with cynicism. (I had read Visitation before, so that was my standard for her writing--high.)

It's disappointing to hear quality authors are entertaining dodgy politics but that may be just the sort of thing to explore, to try to understand. How and why do people one expects better from, or admires in some way, accommodate disagreeable and deleterious opinions next to the qualities we like them for? Did we judge them well before? Have they changed--or have we...

Otoh, I started and abandoned one of Pirinçci's books (something with cats?) and don't feel the need to pick him up again--thanks for the note.

60thorold
Editat: gen. 23, 2020, 5:21 pm

>58 spiphany: I saw Leere Herzen in a bookshop the other day and came close to bringing it home. Maybe I should have done so! The only one of hers I’ve read is Adler und Engel, and I didn’t feel it was really my sort of book. But she’s written quite a lot since then.

Do you know anything about Maron’s most recent book Munin oder Chaos im Kopf? That sounds as though it should fit in here, but I know she’s been in trouble for criticising Islam.

>59 LolaWalser: I agree with you on Erpenbeck: Gehen, ging, gegangen is the most relevant to this theme, but it’s almost non-fiction. I liked her more historical books better.

I think Grass said something to the effect that writers who are never seen to entertain the wrong sort of political opinions are simply failing in their duty to engage politically. But those stormy German teacups do quite often seem to be coupled to large weather systems over the Atlantic, no doubt thanks to the wonders of chaos theory.

61lriley
gen. 23, 2020, 5:31 pm

#58--Interesting. I favorited Juli Zeh some years ago. I had no idea that this book was out in translation. I will have to check it out.

62spiphany
Editat: gen. 24, 2020, 6:39 am

>60 thorold: I didn't particularly care for Zeh's "Adler und Engel" either, but it's an early work and one of Zeh's strengths as a writer is the variety of topics and forms she's willing to tackle (unlike some authors who seem to essentially tell the same story over and over). I found "Schilf" (translated as "Dark Matter") interesting, and I really liked her recent "Unterleuten".

Munin oder Chaos im Kopf is the novel that has attracted accusations that Maron is open to far-right ideology and Islamophobia. She has also gotten criticism for some public statements she has made, i.e., in this interview: Links bin ich schon lange nicht mehr.
Part of the difficulty with "Munin", I think (I haven't read it), is that it's not clear how much the attitudes of the protagonist are the same as those of the author, or whether she maintains a critical distance from her protagonist.

I was somehow less surprised by the criticism of Maron than of Tellkamp; I feel like her characters often reflect an odd mixture of self-righteousness and self-pity/sense of victimization that makes me vaguely uncomfortable (I have the same reaction to Christa Wolf), and that is something that identitarian movements are quite happy to exploit.

I do think that both Maron and Tellkamp probably still have interesting and worthwhile things to say -- i.e., some questionable political positions are not enough to completely rob their work of any merit, because quality writing is always going to be more complex than mere propaganda. (I do draw the line when an author is willing to openly espouse hate and intolerance, since I can't see how that would not be reflected in their literary output.)

On the topic of ideological messages and literary quality, this is of course also true for writers who are trying to bring about positive social change: as soon as the message becomes the primary concern, the writing and its artistic merits tend to suffer. It's a pity that this seems to be the case for Erpenbeck's "Gehen, Ging, Gegangen". I confess I recommended her mostly on the strength of "Heimsuchung" (Visitation), but I suppose it's not surprising that a work responding so directly to the refugee crisis isn't quite up to the same standard. (I don't think Erpenbeck is likely to produce truly bad writing, but I can see it being a disappointment nonetheless, when you know she is capable of so much more.)

It happens that Timur Vermes also has a recent novel that thematizes the refugee crisis, Die Hungrigen und die Satten, which I'm probably more likely to read than "Er ist wieder da".

63berthirsch
gen. 24, 2020, 6:55 am

NY Times had a disturbing article about white supremacists, a new group The Base which uses similar social media strategies as Al Qaeda to attract followers described as "lone wolves".

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/us/white-supremacy-the-base.html?searchResult...

64thorold
gen. 24, 2020, 9:08 am

>62 spiphany: Thanks! When the author of Pawels Briefe says it’s time to deport “illegal immigrants”, I start to lose my motivation to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I’ll try the Zeh book first.

65LolaWalser
Editat: gen. 24, 2020, 1:50 pm

>62 spiphany:

Thanks for Maron's interview, very interesting. I find it important to try to follow people like her--writers, empathic (so one supposes) thinkers of people's destinies, articulate observers of society--because they seem to me the only possible entry to communication with the other side. Her remarks about Islam and the anxiety she started feeling with the increase of veiled women in her environment reminded me of Oriana Fallaci--there's definitely a theme in there I'd like to explore.

I was also reminded of another topic I tried to find fiction about--ecofascism, the "ecologically" minded fascists who marry concerns with racial purity to visions of pristine "natural" living, as a rule in the countryside. I actually became aware of it years ago through German press so I was wondering, when searching for material for the thread, whether the phenomenon had found echo in fiction yet.

If anyone knows of some examples, of course in any literature, not just German, please share.

>63 berthirsch:

The Guardian has an article on it too:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/23/revealed-the-true-identity-of-the-...

I've been slowed down in my reading while books keep coming in so I'm going to have to skip the nice side-by-side comparisons of some titles I've been planning. For instance, I was reading Tomb of the unknown racist along with two non-fiction books about the American far right to provide background and while I finished one, the other I've decided to take more time with.



Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert was published in 2017 by Verso.

Neiwert is a journalist who has been covering the far right scene in the US for several decades and this book is a chronicle of events involving a wide variety of far right, extremist, supremacist, neo-Nazi groups and militias that preceeded and accompanied the rise of the Tea Party and Trumpism within the US "establishment" right, the Republican Party.

It's meticulously referenced and probably can't be beat as a timeline refresher, but it's not strong on explanations; neither of the ideologies involved, their networking, or their appeal. In the Afterword Neiwert ventures a little further than reportage:

Fascist elements and tendencies have always been part of the nation's political DNA, even though many Americans cannot admit this. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of European fascism were borrowed from America, particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested in the form of genocidal violence toward indigenous peoples and racial and ethnic segregation.
   Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans; for the segregationist Jim Crow regime in the South, on which the Nazis modeled the Nuremberg Race Laws; and for the deployment of mob violence of the Ku Klux Klan {...} Hitler was "passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." {...}
   ...that was a different generation, one that grew up in the shadow of World War II and experienced not only McCarthyism but also the civil rights struggle. Today, it is not uncommon to see Nazi regalia treated as a kind of fashion statement and outrageous genocidal racial sentiments tossed about like popcorn, dismissed as a kind of naughtiness. White nationalism and supremacism, nativism, misogyny, conspiracism, sexual paranoia, and xenophobic hatred, once embodied in German National Socialism, have experienced a revival in twenty-first-century America in the form of the alt-right and Patriot-militia movements.


I've read only the first chapter so far, so I may yet regret talking about Matthew N. Lyons' Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire at this point, but I'm going to do something different with this book and comment along as I read. For that, though, I've made a new group, One Book One Thread, where multiple or lengthy comments on a single title can sit nicely gathered under one umbrella and not dilute multi-themed threads: https://www.librarything.com/topic/315903

(All are of course welcome to make use of it for any book they might like!)

For now I'll just say that Lyons' book seems to offer the socio-politological analysis I was missing in Neiwert, while of course discussing the current events. I had not known of him or Neiwert before and there are more books coming out on alt-right and fascism in general all the time, so these are mentions in large part due to chance and convenience, not some deeply informed choices.

For an example of Lyons' writing--and themes that are taken up in the book as well--this 2017 article of his in The Guardian is apt and timely*: The alt-right hates women as much as it hates people of colour

*Donald Trump has become the first US president to attend the anti-abortion movement's biggest rally.

66lriley
Editat: gen. 30, 2020, 9:49 pm

Reading William Vollmann's Poor People---Chapter 8 headed 'Unwantedness'--a West Bengal--a professor and head of a university department on commerce--starts it off with a screed on immigrants into West Bengal which sounds remarkably a lot like hard core conservatives and their anti-immigration stances in the United States--'to the extent that they provided cheap labor, easy availability for some project, convenient obedience' and kept to low numbers they can be tolerated.

That's the first part. The second part--verbatim:

'Explaining the increased suicide rate during economic downturns, a lecturer (Geoffrey Crowther) remarks: 'A depression is a time...when millions of individuals feel they live in a community which has no use for them, which will not afford them a living, in which they cannot find their niche to work'. This well describes the situation of those Taliban-era widows, not to mention (since we often don't) poor people generally. And there is another aspect to unwantedness: self-loathing. An encyclopedia of the Great Depression remarks that 'during the 1920's, many Americans had begun to equate self-worth with material possessions. Therefore, 'when times turn bad, people felt worthless'. It may not have been that simple. But people do as a rule equate self-worth with, or at least partially measure it by, the degree to which they feel included in society. If they possess a subculture of their own, they will hopefully be insulated from some of unwantedness's effects'.

I don't think that he was looking at it as potentially a negative but that last line of Vollmann's brought to my mind the alt-right as subculture though so I'm not sure that I'd agree altogether. People do find community in their hatreds of others races, religions, genders or gender choices as those in the alt-right have. Generally I think the rest of it though is right on the mark.

67LolaWalser
gen. 30, 2020, 12:58 pm

I'm not sure whether the alt-right is best understood as a subculture if by that is meant some relatively small group, and more or less obscured from and to the side of some larger "mainstream" group. To me it appears rather as the far right, neofascist pole or stream IN the "mainstream". Witness the traffic between the "alt-right" and Trump's White House. Not every Trump supporter is Bannon or Stephen Miller but these figures undoubtedly address themselves to Trump supporters--and that's no "sub"-culture.

I think the designation "alt-right" is period-bound and already of expired value, except of course as a historical marker. It's not some radically "new" fascism, it's just fascism that occurred in the 21st century with and from trappings deriving from our moment--video games, social media networking, cyber harassment, racist backlash to the first black POTUS etc.

But calling them fascist or neofascist, which is what they are, doesn't sit well with people who'd rather just wish the whole thing away with words, and of course for the adherents it has the advantage of vague associations to the "cool" of counterculture, "youthful rebellion" etc. calqued as it is on constructions like "alt-rock" etc.

Speaking of India's conservative politics... I marked this article in December (it's at The New Yorker):

Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi's India

I'd also recommend Arundhati Roy's comments (interviews) on Democracy Now--there are many so lots of choice as you can tell from the titles:

https://www.youtube.com/user/democracynow/search?query=arundhati+roy

68lriley
Editat: gen. 30, 2020, 6:44 pm

#67--it just struck me that way when I read that part. There seems to be a more internet version of the alt-right and a more community version. The internet version is for the loners and the community is groups like the Proud Boys or a lot of the right wing shitbirds that wound up in Charlottesville. It's always been weird and kind of murky.

I do like Vollmann's book. He has photographs of many of the people he talks about and they are from all over the globe and IMO it humanizes the impoverished. He asks people why they are poor?--and he gets different responses but the main thing for me is it gives these people a chance to voice. A chance to be visible again. I do not really see people living off the street where I live but it is a small city and a cold place at least in the winter. When I'm in larger population centers I see a lot of people living on the street--quite often it's overwhelming. This is an area where a government could and should do so much more. A government has a societal responsibility towards its citizens. Those on the upper end do not need more. We need to bring the bottom end up--not the top end. That is how you make a great society. Unfortunately that's not what it seems most people think or at least people of my age--and again younger people don't seem to get this better than older people.

Thank you for the links.

69librorumamans
gen. 30, 2020, 7:59 pm

>66 lriley:

You're linking to Dostoevsky's Poor Folk, not to Vollman's book. Just FYI.

70lriley
gen. 30, 2020, 9:49 pm

#69--thanks. I've corrected.

71thorold
gen. 31, 2020, 12:31 pm

I've read Leere Herzen (suggested by >62 spiphany:) and Owen Jones's other book The establishment: and how they get away with it.
Full reviews in my other thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/314548#7052305

I enjoyed the Zeh book as a thriller with some nice moral twists, but I'm not sure if it tells us a whole lot about the far right — in fact, I think in some ways she gives them a bit too much benefit of the doubt. In her hypothetical near future, the closeness of Trump and Putin has "accidentally" solved the Middle East conflicts, and her imaginary German party "die Besorgten Bürger" has apparently been running Germany efficiently for some ten years without any splits or scandals. I was also astonished that they were only now contemplating closing the borders to foreign beer imports. Surely that would be something that any self-respecting German xenophobe would be expected to do on day one?

The Jones book was good, but maybe a bit strident. And difficult to know whom it is intended for: anyone with a critical interest in British politics would know just about all the stories Jones tells; anyone who's got a vested interest in preserving the status quo isn't going to buy a book with his name on the cover.

72librorumamans
Editat: gen. 31, 2020, 2:34 pm

I'm skimming through Jason Stanley's How fascism works : the politics of us and them (2018), accessible and, at under 200 pp., a quick read.

From the introduction:
I have chosen the label "fascism" for ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf. ... My interest in this book is in fascist politics. Specifically, my interest is in fascist tactics as a mechanism to achieve power. ... Giving a description of fascist politics involves describing the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes "us" from "them" ... using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. (pp. xiv, xvi)

73thorold
Editat: feb. 2, 2020, 7:17 am

I've been reading Kleine anti-geschiedenis van het populisme (2018) by Anton Jäger, which turned out to be an analysis of the history of the term "populism", from the "large-P-populists" of the People's Party of the 1890s through to the Trump/Wilders/Farage generation. Surprisingly readable, given that it started life as an MPhil dissertation. And quite interesting, e.g. for the light it throws on the way Obama and Albright insist that "populism" is a positive thing, to be encouraged (and that Trump is not a populist in their eyes). A lot of stuff about Richard Hofstadter and Ernesto Laclau, neither of whom I know anything about...

74LolaWalser
feb. 3, 2020, 4:40 pm

>68 lriley:

But everyone's online now, it's not separate from some other, "real" space. Society's become, to use an expression from my latest read, "lateralized"--connections sprouting sideways in every direction in the internet's flat, homogenising landscape. No "underground", no hidden nooks and crannies (or ones that can't be breached anyway), no one so isolated, marginalised or extreme they can't be thrown into the spotlight and awareness of masses of others.

And the success of these supposed "loners" on YouTube and Facebook and Reddit--platforms that are truly, massively popular--also belies the notion that they only relate to and affect a small subculture.

There's a quantitative dimension here, a revolution in numbers which I think we still haven't found a good way to describe and grasp. In the late eighties in high school I witnessed a few "edgy" discussions where some cleverdick or other would argue that Hitler was a genius or some such and taunt you to prove him wrong etc. And maybe there'd be a handful of kids chattering ignorantly and overall completely consequence-less for a while before moving to the topic of football or sneakers or which beach to go to. If any of those "edgelords" 1.0 ended up neonazi, the rest of us likely would never know, never even notice.

But today?--instead of four-five of us idly gaping at one "performer" perched on the steps behind the school, it's possible thousands, even hundreds of thousands, even millions are hearing that what if, maybe, for sure "Hitler was a genius" and there was something to what he did etc. And not from one source, but possible dozens or hundreds or thousands. And where before you'd need some serious enterprise, research and action to even, say, find a neonazi group to contact, get on a mailing list etc., today it's all just a click and half-baked thought away. It's a revolutionary change, on a par with how the world was changed between cottage manufacture and mass industry.

There's something about this massive reach and exposure that makes extremity, rarity and inanity irrelevant to their influence. Well, how else did Trump get elected...

>71 thorold:

Another book by Jones whose argument I'd like to hear updated in the light of Brexit (not saying there must be changes, just curious whether there might be).

75lriley
feb. 4, 2020, 9:24 am

#74---there may be a few places online that are at least fairly inaccessible but apart from that I agree with you. As a for instance I have a niece who for a couple/three years was contracted through her employer to work with the FBI ferreting out child porn sites. That was hard to stomach and she eventually left and went on to other things. I imagine the dark web (the 4chan--8chan) shit though is easily accessible for anyone interested and I suspect there are even LT members who bring garbage from there to the Pro and Con group--so your point is taken that they spread their ideas about.

There is a cartoonish comic book quality to a lot of this shit coming out of the right (Q-anon for instance) and plenty who would take all that at face value--and becomes experts in nonsense that would give them credibility within their circles and there is a community of people endlessly recycling hate and resentment---a lot of depressed and a lot of lonely people who feel devalued sucked into it all as well as a lot of would be GI Joes stuffing themselves on steroids---working out for hours at a time in the gym and fantasizing about saving the world and plenty of military grade weapons to go around for anyone who would might want to bring their fantasies out into the public. We've seen those events over and over again and the republican response of not doing anything to stop it---apart from their prayers.

There is no doubt a movement building and it's been empowered by the administration. He's signalled to Neo-Nazi's, Klansmen, White Supremacists of all types his support and they've signalled him back.

76LolaWalser
Editat: feb. 4, 2020, 11:03 am

>75 lriley:

There is a cartoonish comic book quality to a lot of this shit coming out of the right

Totally--they've weaponised humour (ETA: or, a teenage boy's idea of). It attracts and flatters the young (the necessary huge reservoir of potential members), messes with people's minds and also serves as a first-resort defence: "can't you take a joke" etc.

77LolaWalser
feb. 4, 2020, 10:56 am

Ah, speaking of cartoons, I took in Fight Fascism!, World War 3 Illustrated #48, a collection of comics, cartoons, posters etc. "respond(ing) to the emergence of fascism in the US in 2017". The styles, subjects and approaches vary a lot and the quality, imo, ranges from excellent to passable. Overall a heartening anthology, it's nice to see so many people using art and wit against Trumpism--I enjoyed the anger too. One of the things I hadn't known was that Trump had been named a "honorary Cossack" in 2016! (And then got the title stripped away from him in 2018 for strikes on Syria: Trump loses Russian warrior status as Cossacks threaten to burn his effigy). What was it we were saying about cartoonish times?



78lriley
feb. 4, 2020, 11:22 am

#76--all these Marvel Comic Book series being turned into blockbuster movies. Entertainment on vague-ish good vs. evil themes. An evil genius often hiding behind a good guy persona. For people on the right all of Obama, Pelosi and either of the Clinton are evil geniuses. Schumer and Sanders too. I think a lot of people make reads kind of like that.

By the way the guy bankrolling at least many of those is a big Trump supporters. Trump himself kind of fits a comic profile too.

79thorold
Editat: feb. 5, 2020, 4:24 pm

Someone sent me a link to a newly-published report on the Fidesz regime in Hungary by a group of independent academics under the title Hungary turns its back upon Europe . PDF in Hungarian or English is here : http://oktatoihalozat.hu/

The Orbán regime, although it wears the mask of Christianity and surrounds itself with the props of democracy, has turned its back on Europe, on progress, on the values of universal culture and civilisation, through its ethnic‐national exclusivism, its anti‐ Enlightenment stance, its radical anti‐humanism, and its denial of elementary human solidarity with those in need, whether Hungarians or refugees. The present overview of the developments in Hungary may have a significance larger than itself: it may serve as a cautionary tale of the long‐term consequences that can be expected when populism becomes the governing force in a country, dismantling the system of checks and balances, and using cultural institutions to serve its own political goals.

80thorold
feb. 7, 2020, 11:14 am

Trying to get back to fiction, I've been reading 2084: La fin du monde, a 2015 novel by Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. As the title implies, it's a kind of sequel to 1984(!) but with a distorted version of Islam used as the ideological model of the totalitarian state instead of Stalinism.

Comes with the usual reservations about dystopias (and probably only marginally relevant to our theme, as we're really looking at anti-democratic regimes that come to power constitutionally, so post-nuclear doesn't count...), but an interesting idea.

Review here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/314548#7059962

81librorumamans
feb. 9, 2020, 7:46 pm

I mentioned in >72 librorumamans: that I'm reading How fascism works. Stanley's chapter titles provide an outline of his account:
  1. The Mythic Past
  2. Propaganda
  3. Anti-intellectual
  4. Unreality
  5. Hierarchy
  6. Victimhood
  7. Law and Order
  8. Sexual Anxiety
  9. Sodom and Gomorrah
  10. Arbeit Macht Frei
That framework is fleshed out and reinforced by a concurrent read: Dying of whiteness : how the politics of racial resentment is killing America's heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl. Metzl looks at gun suicide in Missouri, health care in Tennessee, and public education in Kansas where in each case public policy supported by white voters is lowering the life expectancy of middle- and lower-income white males. Metzl's subtitle indicates the dynamic at play, and the racial insecurity he uncovers nicely illustrates Stanley's chapters on hierarchy and victimhood.

82LolaWalser
feb. 9, 2020, 8:34 pm

This might interest some: Edoardo Albinati on Masculinity, Italy, and Fascism. The interview was translated on the occasion of the American publication of the book discussed, The Catholic School--I think fiction, but based on a true crime from 1975, when three of Albinati's schoolmates kidnapped two lower class girls and spent several days torturing, raping, and then murdering them (one survived by pretending to be dead).

(EA:) ... As a middle-class Roman male “born in the Fifties,” in point of fact, I share 90 percent of the human and social DNA of the Circeo murderers: same neighborhood, same school, families more or less equivalent, and so on. Not the deeds, but the settings, you see. . . . A world of dangerous similarities, in other words, not of saving differences.

FP: Well, that’s the same neighborhood my father came from. . . which is why I’m so interested in the way you plumb the depths of the Fascism and the violence that to my mind are intrinsic to these well maintained, decorous streets. . . .

83lriley
feb. 9, 2020, 9:40 pm

#82--that looks interesting. I'm going to look that one up. I'm currently reading Juli Zeh's Open Hearts and Franklin Foer's How Soccer explains the world---both picked up out of this thread. I'm getting kind of towards the end of Zeh's book--I like it but I'm not sure it's all that satisfactory as far as this thread goes. It's struck me that the subject matter is almost better suited by non-fiction works though I haven't gotten to the Francine Prose yet. True Crime often walks the edge between fiction and non-fiction.

84LolaWalser
feb. 10, 2020, 12:21 pm

I too put in a request for Albinati's book although I admit I'm sceptical about the point of view of a 60-something Italian guy writing on this topic and at 1300 pages I'm not sure I'll read all (or any) of it. From experience I know how difficult it is to get people to notice things they've been ignoring, unconciously and deliberately, all their lives. But I'm curious to get acquainted, at least (the interviewer's praise of his style intrigues me and luckily the TPL has the original).

I came across this as I entered his book on Afghans displaced by the American war returning to their homes in 2002--perhaps I could get some sense of his horizons from that beforehand, if I find the time...

It's struck me that the subject matter is almost better suited by non-fiction works

Topical non-fiction is certainly easier to pick out, but fiction moves people more. However, we're still "in" the moment, perhaps even in the early stages, if we suspect even greater conflicts await us. The question "how is this renascent fascism being captured in today's fiction", is basically the same as "how was the nascent fascism of the 1920s and 1930s captured in the fiction of the 1920s and 1930s".

And the reason we seem to, in a historical perspective, use fictional works as touchstones of an era, must have to do with fiction's attempt to grasp a "whole" moment. Good non-fiction would tend to be analytical; but good fiction is synthetical.

85spiphany
feb. 10, 2020, 2:31 pm

As far as fiction goes -- when society is so divided it can be difficult to even begin to understand why people on the opposite end of the political spectrum think what they think. Authors are human, and writing good fiction requires a closeness to the characters, an emotional understanding of them, in a way that non-fiction doesn't. If we have trouble getting inside the heads of the far right, it is maybe not so surprising that few authors tackle this, either...

I think sometimes also in periods of crisis fiction writers respond by setting their stories somewhere other than the here and now. Historical fiction was a popular choice in the mid-twentieth century, and science fiction in the communist bloc. Not all of this was the result of not being able to write freely under an oppressive regime.

There are a number of recent works I've read lately where I've wondered whether the author was responding, however indirectly, to the particular malaise of the past few years. It probably goes without saying that the publication of Margaret Atwood's Testaments now, more than 30 years after The Handmaid's Tale is surely not coincidental. John Lanchester's The Wall is also more or less obviously inspired by recent events. (Has anyone read it? This is another book that has been on my list but I haven't yet managed to get around to.)

Some other novels which I feel like capture some of the contemporary angst and bleak melancholy in a very general sense, without necessarily being able to concretely connect them to our current crises:
Emmi Itäranta, The City of Woven Streets
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
Wyl Menmuir, The Many
Jim Crace, Harvest
Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake

I'll also mention a couple of older novels I started recently but quickly gave up on because they felt just a little bit too unpleasantly close to home:
Chingiz Aitmatov, Das Kassandramal (one of his last novels, published in 1994)
and, oddly, an unfinished novel by Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth, because the descriptions of revival preaching reminded me too much of the rhetorical techniques that seem to have become the mainstay of contemporary American (right-wing) politics.

86thorold
Editat: feb. 13, 2020, 9:50 am

>85 spiphany: I've just been reading The Wall, after seeing it mentioned by dchaikin
Not quite sure what to make of it. At the top level the political message is obvious — Great Britain has built a Wall around itself to keep out rising seas and "Others" (migrants). Young British people have to do military service as Defenders on the Wall: they blame their parents for everything and are reluctant to have children themselves. There's an underclass of (presumably) former migrants who are classified as "Help" and essentially function as slaves (...but not to solve the demographic problem: presumably the Canadians would object to that on copyright grounds). So far straightforward Brexit/Climate-change dystopia.

But normally in a dystopia you are looking from the point of view of someone who is rebelling against the system, even if only in a hopeless, ineffective, Winston Smith way. Here, almost everyone in the book, including the narrator, seems to have accepted that there's no future (personally or globally) and nothing much we can do about that. Which is probably realistic, but doesn't make for much of a story, even with the help of shipwrecks-and-pirates.

And it all reminded me rather eerily of the way my father loves to reminisce about his time doing National Service in the 1950s. Presumably Lanchester's father is the same generation...

---

I've also been reading Das dunkle Schiff by Sherko Fatah (as a Kurd from the DDR, he manages the unusual feat of having roots in two non-existent states at the same time...). Odd parallels with Lanchester, as quite a bit of it is about the central character's feeling of solidarity with fellow members of a guerrilla unit fighting for ideals he doesn't quite share. But not directly relevant to this theme.

87rocketjk
feb. 13, 2020, 10:05 am

>86 thorold: For a non-fiction, all-too-true version of The Wall, I highly recommend Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security by Todd Miller.

88LolaWalser
feb. 13, 2020, 11:57 am

>86 thorold:

former migrants who are classified as "Help" and essentially function as slaves (...but not to solve the demographic problem: presumably the Canadians would object to that on copyright grounds)

Umm, hardly Canadians. No other developed/rich country offers such a fast track to citizenship, and access to benefits to landed immigrants regardless of class. It's far from perfect, but regarding the complaint about immigrant "slaves", it's really not ahead of the US, the UK, France, Italy, or any number of oil and Asian nations.



Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, Roland Beiner, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Beiner is a political theorist and in this book outlines the implications of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophy for political philosophy, i.e. the programmes one might set in practice. It can hardly be news to anyone that these two philosophers are in sync with the far right in a major way--Nietzsche inspiring virtually all fascists to this day, Heidegger included; and the latter never really renouncing Nazism (he used to be a "card-carrying member", and published undisguised apologias for German fascism as late as 1946).

That being the case, Beiner's book is a little hard to place, to decide who is it for. It's very readable, vernacular not jargon-y (lots of idioms and exclamation points), shares private stories of being enthralled with Nietzsche as a young man, so I suspect it might be best received by a young person in danger of similar enthrallment... although Beiner does call out his colleagues who, to his mind, have apparently been too welcoming and indulgent to the two proto/fascist thinkers.

I should mention that Beiner's liberal POV didn't sit entirely comfortably with me and if the (favourable) reference to David Brooks, that conservative "pundit" nullity, had come up earlier than the Conclusion I might have ditched the book--this POV, however, could be attractive to the majority here.

And it's not as if I'm disagreeing with his take in broad strokes.

As briefly as possible, and lumping Nietzsche and Heidegger together as Beiner did not, exactly--what both have in common is a rejection of modernity insofar modernity stands for democracy and egalitarian, liberal values. Instead they valorise a model of pre-modern, pre-Socratic (pre-rational) ancient Greece, which to Nietzsche is the site of the sublimely "tragic" life, a heroic life, and to Heidegger (in essence the same), the site where one could abide most closely in the nearness to Being.

Both philosophers yearned for an "ecstatic" existence that would fulfill a destiny.

Beiner asks, what does this mean, in practical terms?

Well, first, it means ushering a stratified, hierarchical society in which some are masters and many are slaves. It means authoritarianism and rule by self-appointed Chosen Ones. It means that the oppression of the "weak"--women, strangers, the dispossessed--is tolerated up to and including their total physical annihilation.

We don't have to speculate on that last bit, that's exactly where Heidegger found himself.

Possibly the most interesting detail, to me, was Beiner's explanation of Heidegger's variant editions. Heidegger taught, wrote and published before, during and after the war. There are multiple editions varying between these periods, and also varying across (some) translations. Long story short, before his death Heidegger approved a re-edition of his works with the "compromising" bits restored. Beiner suggests that Heidegger did so hoping that the future would yet see epigones of his drinking the full measure of the master's wisdom and following in his steps.

Iow, Heidegger never gave up on his private vision of Nazism and bequeathing his restored texts would ensure the possibility of achieving it some day.

Three hundred years from now, people would see that philosophically, Heidegger was right, even if he made some tactical mistakes in the '30s. (Over the span of centuries, who would care what happened in the 1930s?) Gadamer once said (in the context of defending Heidegger!) that Heidegger, "true visionary" that he was, was so preoccupied with modernity's forgetfulness of Being that even the Nazi genocide "appeared to him as something minimal compared to the future that awaits us."


If these be our "wise men", woe to us all.

89thorold
feb. 13, 2020, 12:43 pm

>88 LolaWalser: Umm, hardly Canadians — sorry, meant as a jokey Atwood reference, but over-convoluted as usual. No offence to Canada intended!

“Destiny” and “heroic” are words I keep coming across in what I’ve been reading. Obviously that Nietzsche/ Heidegger thing hasn’t gone away.

90LolaWalser
feb. 13, 2020, 12:46 pm

meant as a jokey Atwood reference

Ahhh, that went completely over my head. Goes to show what a fake Canadian I am. :)

91librorumamans
feb. 13, 2020, 1:51 pm

>90 LolaWalser:

Went over my head as well, and if I'm not Canadian then I don't know what else I could be.

>89 thorold:

A false, reconstructed heroic past and a romantic, impossible future destiny turn up frequently in Stanley's How Fascism Works that I outlined in >72 librorumamans: and >81 librorumamans:.

92LolaWalser
Editat: feb. 13, 2020, 3:49 pm

>89 thorold:, >91 librorumamans:

It's an essentially adolescent fantasy, egotistic and narcissistic--I am special, I have a "destiny" so grand I can sacrifice other people to it...

Malcolm Bull has a good discussion in Anti-Nietzsche about the need to read Nietzsche from "down under" (ETA: he writes, "read like a loser"), and not, as his fans invariably do, as the self-proclaimed Übermenschen. (Reading from "down under" is something that comes naturally to women and other underdogs, no special courses needed, we know where we're at...)

93thorold
Editat: feb. 14, 2020, 2:07 am

Different sort of “reading from down under” in today’s Guardian Long Read:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/14/anti-populism-politics-why-cham...

Australian political scientist Benjamin Moffitt arguing that you can’t block the rise of right-wing populism by defending consensus politics.

It is clear that we are not living in times conducive to consensus politics. Rather, it seems that populists and anti-populists alike are driven by a nostalgia for days gone by.

94lriley
feb. 14, 2020, 7:42 am

On the subject of Nietzsche--Friederich got himself a case of syphilis in his early 20's and back when he lived that was kind of the Aids of the day. There wasn't really a treatment for it. As a result of that as he got older he would go through long periods of massive headaches. He was sick much of his life and eventually went insane. Generally a sorry individual and it shows up in his writings. There are at least suspicions that he was a poop eater. He does the Van Gogh thing in a way--once he succumbs to mental illness or is out of the picture he becomes famous--they're leading him around town on a leash and meanwhile the jet set, the oligarchs and the royalty of the day are suddenly going gaga over his literary output. It's kind of like prosperity theology for them--makes them feel like they're good people hoarding all their power. The other thing is his sister Elisabeth was quite a piece of work--she fights in court for every single piece of literary output--letters to friends, notes on cocktail napkins for instance. She pretty much turns all that material over to Adolph Hitler when he comes to power who puts all his dwarvy scribes to work creating new works out of all that old material.

For Ayn Rand and her elitist objectivist horseshit he is an inspiration. And Heidegger I guess---I've never read anything of his really. The whole story is more pathetic than anything.

95LolaWalser
Editat: feb. 14, 2020, 1:08 pm

There are many apologistic legends about Nietzsche based on little to zero evidence. That he was mentally ill for most of his life seems indisputable, but the idea that he "went mad because syphilis" is mere speculation. In fact, the idea that he ever had sex is a mere supposition too. A boy's hero must needs be a playa and a fucker so of course this likely impotent twerp who had trouble just speaking to people is going to be built into a tragic victim of heroic dick adventures!

What is not a supposition is his lifelong hysterical misogyny and the physical revulsion he exhibited in the company of women. Of course, this could be argued as a consequence of "syphilis"--but that's just another supposition. Most significant, IMO, is that he gave first signs of mental instability in early adolescence and perhaps even earlier.

There is the same misogynistic inflection to the widespread legend that Elisabeth Nietzsche is to blame for the viciousness in his writing. No doubt she wasn't an attractive character, what with falling for Hitler. But long before she fell for Hitler she adored her brother, to the point of idolatry. It's out of THAT worship that came her sympathy for the Nazis. Who's to say that is illogical? Isn't that the whole point of the caution we want to make--that loving Nietzsche can bring one to loving Nazism? And if Elisabeth Nietzsche was a fool in bringing Nietzsche to Hitler--after all, she was a woman and women as we know are stupid as rocks--Heidegger was no fool woman. And what Heidegger found in Nietzsche we can be sure IS in Nietzsche, in all of him, and authentically of him.

Anyway, discussing in detail what it is exactly she was supposed to have done, what she added or subtracted, forged or misinterpreted in his writings (note: obviously only the ones unpublished in his lifetime, mostly private papers--keep in mind the largest part of his philosophical corpus is not "tainted" by her interference) would take a lot of time and resources. I'll just say that her chief preoccupation was with the image of his familial relationships, to herself and their mother. This was important because her marriage had caused a distancing which she found hard to bear. She wanted to leave the impression that he loved her as much as she loved him (something that people agree to have been true, at least prior to her marriage).

The tampering with his unpublished philosophical writing is relatively lesser, although arguably with greater consequences. In any case, the worst is that the kneejerk misogynistic scapegoating of Nietzsche's sister has seriously hindered objective study and restoration of the texts. The notion that everything odious in Nietzsche's writings are her forgeries is laughable, a pathetically transparent bid to exonerate him.

Only recently there have started decent studies and revisions of Elisabeth Nietzsche's life, character and deeds actual and supposed. She's finally to be reckoned with scrupulously and honestly, not just abused and dismissed as a "witch" in pure partisanship. It's not that one expects her to emerge as anyone's hero!--but she served too many too long as Nietzsche's ugly mask. It's time people took in the ugliness behind her own.

ETA: I forgot I meant to mention that, whaddaya know, even Heidegger has an exculpatory legend that puts the blame for his sins on a woman, his wife. It's Elfriede Heidegger who's the big ole Nazi, not Martin. LOL.

Coincidence? Ha!

96LolaWalser
Editat: feb. 14, 2020, 1:00 pm

>93 thorold:

Rather, it seems that populists and anti-populists alike are driven by a nostalgia for days gone by.

Uh, no. It's only liberal "anti-populists" who long for the cozy certainties of 1965--just take a look at the liberals in Pro & Con.

Progressives as ever look ahead--and by "progressive" I simply mean anyone who thinks "we can do better".

97librorumamans
feb. 14, 2020, 2:46 pm

>96 LolaWalser: the cozy certainties of 1965

Part of me can become nostalgic for the introduction of the Maple Leaf flag, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", "Like a Rolling Stone", "Downtown", "Turn, Turn, Turn", "Stop, in the Name of Love".

But really, who could possibly long for more of Selma, Montgomery, Watts, or of the lowest valley of adolescence?

98lriley
feb. 14, 2020, 5:28 pm

#95--FWIW I'm not really interested in defending the likes of Friederich Nietzsche. I read 3 or 4 of his books and some biographical material way back in the 80's when I would have been in my 20's and I haven't touched anything since. It was like what's this 'Thus spake Zarathustra' all about?--or 'The Anti-christ?' (I was very much in an anti-religious frame of mind then) because you'd hear about these things that were supposed to be life altering in some way--not just him Carlos Casteneda was another. None of this stuff ever did anything for me and I can't say I really liked any of it either. Nietzsche had the occasional pithy comment but all in all he was just a wannabe elitist that fell well short of that goal and I don't think the world would necessarily be a worse place if none of his work had ever seen the light of day. It's all too 19th century Teutonic anyway. I don't start liking Germans until Alfred Doblin. So what I'm describing in #94 is just my own personal mental profile of Mr. N. from the things I've read or heard.

99LolaWalser
feb. 14, 2020, 6:26 pm

>98 lriley:

I hope I'm not leaving the impression that I want to defend his sister--I'm just saying she didn't invent out of whole cloth resonances with Nazism in his work, the sympathy really is there from the start, and exaggerating her role may result in at least as much misunderstanding of his work as her tampering.

Zarathustra for example is one of the works published in Nietzsche's lifetime and it contains all the stuff to thrill the fascists, most famously so--and it's not even the first to do so. One might to begin to understand Nietzsche by recalling that he was a disciple of Schopenhauer's and that he in a very real, practical, material, physical sense struggled terribly for mastery, for a realisation of his own enormous "will to power"--the greater the more abjectly deficient at living he proved himself to be.

All that chest-thumping and despising of the "undermen" (a necessary complement to the Übermensch) wasn't wholly or just an intellectual stance, it was a cry of existential despair of a man who was acutely aware of his genius and also very ill, very weak, continually stumped by mundane obstacles and irritated to the highest degree by the humiliating, prosaic demands of his career.

Anyway, sorry to digress further--suffice to say I am all for reading Nietzsche, not least BECAUSE he is such a cornerstone of right-wing ideologies... but I am for reading him at least in a double way--as a "winner", to understand what the fascists get from him (and also, why not, to get what positive emancipatory charge one can get from him), but absolutely ALSO, as Bull says, "read him like a loser"--to understand what devastatingly destructive impact that philosophy holds for anyone who is not of the chosen ones.

Darn, I almost forgot again, Nietzsche distracted me--I meant to quote from A face in the crowd and encourage everyone to watch it (again, probably)--assuming you are not boycotting that weasel Kazan...

Lonesome Rhodes, the forefather of Trump and all that company: "I'm not just an entertainer, I'm an influence, a wielder of opinion... a force! A FORCE!"

100lriley
feb. 14, 2020, 7:10 pm

#99--Zarathustra is very much an elitist piece of work. His work on the Ancient Greeks is too. His friendship with Wagner that eventually went sour. Wagner was a horrific human being. As far as the syphilis goes though that's a disease that often ends up attacking the brain. But this German superiority syndrome was there before Nietzsche's works came into being. He just put his own spin on it and passed it along.....and it was very harmful.

It's been a while since I've watched a lot of movies. The one that's kind of recent I think that made the biggest impression on me was Steve MacQueen's Hunger which was about the IRA hunger strike in the 80's. It's pretty jarring or at least I found it that way. Movie blockbusters---the Star Wars stuff--the Marvel Comics stuff--I never watch. We went to a movie a few months ago set in Australia in the 19th century that I liked a lot. A woman out to get revenge on a British soldier who murdered her husband and baby.

101LolaWalser
Editat: feb. 18, 2020, 1:53 am



Miss Laila, armed and dangerous, Manu Joseph, Myriad, 2018

This is probably very dumb, but I'm going to jot down a few thoughts about this BEFORE looking at any other information, reviews etc. (The title came up on a library search with some keywords suited to this thread, I did not know of the author or the book before.)

As I find myself remarkably divided in liking and disliking it, I prefer to lay out this reaction in as "pristine" a state as possible, as I suspect more information and other people's opinions might easily influence me to lean into either side of the "divide".

Joseph's style, made of drollery and gut punches, perfect little observations and needle-sharp irony, captured me immediately. The story unfolds with a swiftness that's bound to carry one to the end whatever one might think of its politics. I was marking so many bits I hardly know which one to quote...

The sky is clear blue. Far away a giant cruise ship sails across the bay, like a beautiful novel about nothing. ...

Everywhere there are happy little girls in oversized uniforms. The image of girls going to school, or even if they are returning, has something triumphant about it. Whose triumph he does not know, but somebody's triumph. ....

One reason why the Muslim population is growing faster than the Hindu, Damodarbhai would never say it aloud, is that Muslims don't kill their girls in the womb.


There is a lot about women in this book and yet the strongest "subjectivity" that comes across is of a male character, arguably the main character, policeman Mukundan (the last two sentences quoted above are his musings). The title character is seen only through the eyes of other people. Akhila Iyer, doctor and social media prankster, looms large, colourful and perplexing, but gets explained more than she explains herself.

She is the one I have problems with. Daughter of leftist parents, she was raised mostly by her less active father while her mother died fighting for the cause in the jungle. This, presumably, is the underlying reason that Akhila hounds "liberal eggheads", "Marxists", socialists, and communists, playing them like a female version of Ali G. She is not a Hindu nationalist, we are given to understand she is an "equal rights" offender, and in fact a group of "patriots", as they are referred to, even gives her a beating for a video poking fun at them. Akhila takes it in stride, just a bit angry--at herself, for not being more careful.

Her attacks on the left, however, are both more numerous and emphasised in a way to make her seem on a crusade--and not just in the reader's opinion. She attracts the attention of "the Patriarch", one of the leaders of the "patriots" so much he begins to muse about the ways his misogynistic all-male organisation might use her.

Perhaps Joseph believes that the right wing indicts itself sufficiently without special criticism? Whatever the case may be, we are given a narrative in which anti-left voices command all the space to air their opinions, mock and attack the enemy, while "the other side" is entirely muted. Because the two "non-fascist" voices, Mukundan and Aisha (one of Laila's younger sisters), are firmly apolitical. They are good, but they don't claim any politics for themselves (and maybe that is what makes them good?)

One of Akhila's "pranks" has footage of Arundhati Roy criticising the extravagance of a billionaire's mansion--650 rooms, private helipads etc.--in a country as poor as India. Akhila edits this footage by taking a poor woman into Roy's neighbourhood, pointing out the building with Roy's flat, and asking the woman what she thinks about THAT abode. The conclusion of the "prank" is that Roy is no better than the billionaire.

This is the level at which Akhila's "criticism" of the left is pitched--is it also Joseph's? He intervenes in his own voice seemingly preempting objections by noting this is without doubt a cheap shot. But by this time one is well on the way to suspecting there is a lot of wanting to have one cake and eat it here--to insult as many "sacred cows" as possible while being the first to say how trite and unfair are the insults.

Sometimes, though, no excuses are made. Another of Akhila's victims is a well-known man who calls himself a feminist. I'm guessing this character is based on someone real and known to the Indian public, as it's not clear from the narrative alone what is his big sin (presumably hypocrisy?) Akhila clearly despises him and mocks his feminist avowals, but the man himself doesn't say or do anything that would justify her contempt to us (assuming a reader as ignorant as me).

So, to me, this encounter read simply as Akhila (Joseph?) asserting that no man can be feminist. Let's say that's debatable--it's not my opinion, but I'm aware others might argue it.

However, what I found really indefensible was Akhila's (Joseph's?) imputation that he can't be a feminist because he has sex with women and the sex act is inherently degrading to women. The man said something about valuing a woman's intelligence and education and she started mimicking intercourse and asking him what does he discuss with a woman while he's doing that, does he moan about how smart she is etc.

There's a mix of naiveté and cynicism here to take one's breath away. And as with the dig at Roy, the barb is no smarter or more just than, say, the observation "everyone shits".

But it's not the shallowness that bothers me, it's that lurking assumption that sex casts men and women into an essentially unbalanced relationship, that because men lust after women, they can't also respect women (as usual, there is no expectation of reciprocity in this notion).

That this is something that Joseph himself believes, and not just his character Akhila, seems to be confirmed when Mukundan movingly thinks about his young niece, after whose birth he found himself incapable of masturbation for a week--"Sex seemed like such a depraved act of violence."

It's such a terrible sentiment, so wrong-headed and unjust.

Its root is clearly in an essentially puritanical and misogynist view of women and sex, where men impose it, women suffer it, and children are born as scapegoats of the parents' "depravity". Or, more lightly, it's the view of a bloke who never realised what sex might lead to until someone placed a poopy "bundle of joy" in his arms...

I went on so long about this but it's just one small aspect of the confused quilt of "issues" this book brings up. Would be fun to discuss, I'm sure.

In sum, the picture of the current situation in India fills me with dread. Since the book's publication there have been so many more attacks on Muslims, the lockdown in Kashmir, the moves to deny them citizenship, one measure more ominous than the next... how can one face these things "apolitically"? Even the party-less Mukundan engages in resistance. And what is Joseph's feeling for and engagement on behalf of his female characters if not feminist?

102LolaWalser
Editat: feb. 18, 2020, 3:08 pm

A few remarks having scanned the reviews:

---yes, not just the targets of Akhila's pranks but the central event in the book are all based on real people/events (note that only Roy is identified by her real name--no idea what to make of that)

---Joseph's two previous novels sound very interesting, many seem to prefer them to Miss Laila

---others have criticised his levelling of the right and the left. I've listened a little to some of his interviews on YouTube and I'm finding more and more problems with what he is saying but wonder how up-to-date are those opinions today. Briefly, it seems to me the "novelty", the strangeness of his position is that basically alt-right arguments are voiced by someone who once appeared or maybe still appears in some contexts as "left".

For example, he says liberals are synonymous with hypocrites, calling out racism and sexism is virtue-signalling, and activism is liberal "elites" co-opting the "weak" as tools into a "feudal system" in which the "weak" battle the oppressors in the interest of the "elite". No objection there from anyone at Breitbart!

Setting aside discussion about these statements, which anyone should find easy to dismantle, I'd be interested to know how he envisages solutions for social problems. Since the right wing will right wing and the entire left spectrum is nothing but hypocrites and the insane deluding the poor--how do poverty and injustice get addressed?

---depressingly, he confirms directly that he doesn't believe men who say they are feminist--something more revealing of him than of men, and also an alt-right trope used to bash male leftist allies. He actually chooses to read the segment about Akhila and the feminist man I mentioned above, in this interview:

Miss Laila: armed and dangerous. Manu Joseph in conversation with Amrita Tripathi on his new novel

It's jarring to hear an Indian intellectual stating that it is impossible to envisage sex as a reverential act, what with India famously being the home of more than one religion that revered sex. What he really seems to mean is the lack of reverence regarding women, the female sexual partner. But that's his problem and any man's who feels that way.

No, Mr. Joseph, doing it, and doing it doggystyle (as Akhila mocks) or any which way imaginable to us horny monkeys is not degrading. That's your sad baggage.

103thorold
feb. 20, 2020, 5:30 am

>101 LolaWalser: >102 LolaWalser: Ouch!
By coincidence, I've just been re-reading Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata: I'd quite forgotten how he goes from quite reasonable social critique, exposing the evils of the bourgeois marriage-market, the double-standard, and all the rest, to the completely loony position of finding the sole cause of all these evils in sex. Only if we abolish sexual relations and adopt universal chastity (and vegetarianism and ditch-digging) can we have a fair and just society. Until we get to that point it's no use educating women, they will only use their cleverness as an additional asset in the marriage market...

104LolaWalser
Editat: feb. 20, 2020, 10:19 pm

>103 thorold:

Ha, yes, Tolstoy had a bad conscience regarding women...

Speaking of chastity, interesting detail, Joseph makes his character Mukundan, the good policeman, a virgin. Which to me would indicate further that he can't imagine a man acting toward a woman generously, disinterestedly, unless he were an "innocent", "pure".

What's curious is that Joseph calls himself an atheist in that interview, and he's by other evidence a modern secular educated person, and yet his thought (to me at least) reveals the influence of what I'd call religious conservatism--that is, a conservatism deriving from religion (any religion--Hinduism, Islam, Christianity...) At least, it's in sync with the sex-negative teachings of religion more than with the egalitarian liberalism associated with modern atheism. Which is, I think, very common in traditional societies, practically a trademark--even the "freethinkers" tend to carry the social prejudices hammered into people for centuries, especially when it comes to sex. You lose god, but not the idea that sex is dirty, women suffer it more than enjoy it, and men can only be pigs about it.

On topic and in today, The Guardian's Long Read--are we witnessing independent India's greatest crisis in 72 years of its existence?:

How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

105thorold
feb. 22, 2020, 10:08 am

I've also been reading this:

Nervous states : how feeling took over the world (2018) by William Davies (UK, 1976- )

  

With a certain deliberate irony, this is an academic, rational, objective account of why it's no longer possible to have academic, rational, objective accounts of things. Some interesting observations, e.g. about political self-harm and why it isn't just a cynical thing for liberals to accuse Trump-voters of, but something real. (Cf. >34 thorold:, Finton O'Toole). Davies goes into changing attitudes to pain and chronic illness and the opioid crisis as well, and how those things link into low self-esteem and the need to validate yourself by either harming yourself or society as a whole by becoming an alt-right nutter or an internet troll, and voting for populists who at least promise to give you something to feel good about.

Depressing, but interesting.

106LolaWalser
feb. 22, 2020, 4:19 pm

I don't get it. You're being rather terse here so probably I'm missing lots. As it is, this seems wrong both in fact and premise(s). Fact: there are plenty of academic and rational accounts of things, more than ever before in history, more than any one person could absorb and address. But something that's "academic" by definition pertains to a small section of the population belonging to academia or adopting its habitus. Rationality, however, isn't limited to or necessarily more valued in academia than in the general public.

As for the premise, as I read it, that something about the status of "feeling" today is very different to what it was in some undefined past--that's very questionable.

Nor is there anything inherently negative about "feeling", if I'm getting that overtone right, we're long past the artificial dichotomy between reason and emotions that corrupted so much of our philosophy and science.

107thorold
Editat: feb. 23, 2020, 4:06 am

>106 LolaWalser: Yes, sorry, I should just have copy-pasted my review, rather than trying to summarise what I'd written in my CR thread. My mind was obviously on the next thing already...

What Davies is doing is looking at where that dichotomy came from (Descartes, and so on) and why it has broken down (Freud, neurology, AI, the atomic bomb, etc.). He shows how that also undermined the convention that those who have acknowledged scientific/expert knowledge can speak with authority in the wider world, a process that has been exploited and accelerated both by free-market capitalists (the market decides which ideas are best) and by populists. He isn't saying that "feeling" is a bad thing, in fact he welcomes the breaking-down of the dichotomy, but he's also very worried by the way that a lot of our knowledge is being taken outside the academic sphere and privatised (Facebook, Google) and by the Trumpish "I act on the science that suits me" approach, with its obvious dangers for the future of the planet.

108thorold
Editat: feb. 24, 2020, 5:26 am

And some more non-European fascism (with parallels in non-human fascism...):

L'amas ardent (2017) by Yamen Manaï (Tunisia, 1980- )

  

Yamen Manaï grew up in Tunis and now lives in Paris; this is his third novel, which has won a whole string of prizes (but as yet only two copies on LT).

A beekeeper in a small village in the mountains is alarmed when one of his hives is devastated by a ferocious attack of a kind he's never seen before; at the same time, the newly-established democracy in his country is overwhelmed by an authoritarian political-religious movement financed by foreign billionaires who've found that the combination of oil dollars and medieval religion is just what they need to hold on to the political power their grandfathers grabbed from the retreating Ottomans.

It turns out that Asian bees have learnt to defend themselves from hornets by forming a "burning swarm", clustering round the hornet until it is killed by its own body-heat. Can the North African ones be taught this strategy? And can we draw any parallels from that for civil life?

This is an engaging book, despite itself. The Don, the beekeeper, is a wonderful character, and Manaï does a very good job of taking us into the detail of his craft and into the menace of the Asian hornets (you may end up having nightmares about these...). The observation of village life and the author's very genuine anger at the extreme poverty and hardship the villagers have to put up with also comes over very well.

But the higher-level political satire comes over as crude and unsophisticated by comparison, even if its heart is obviously in the right place. It's not helped by a farcical Prologue in which a caricature Arab prince is making caricature deals on his supermodel-filled superyacht with a European media tycoon called Silvio Cannelloni, giving the impression that we're going to get something quite different from the quiet rural fable we actually do get. And there are other big structural faults in the book as well: major new characters are introduced without warning three-quarters of the way through, and then dropped again without their stories ever being resolved.

Worth reading, I think, but it could have done with a bit more work.

109thorold
feb. 24, 2020, 12:24 pm

There’s an interesting essay by Colin Burrow on “Fiction and the age of lies” in the latest LRB. (20 Feb)

Referring to Middle England, which he feels fails to grasp the problem of dealing with the new kind of lying we’re exposed to, he says:
Fiction that recirculates perspectives on the present which correspond closely to a particular strand of print or electronic media isn’t doing the job fiction should do. It knows what its audience wants to hear, and says it. The problem is that it will therefore sound like lies to those who don’t want to believe it. If the main literary consequence of this latest age of lies is to identify the audience for serious fiction with a small group with mutually sustaining and more or less identical political attitudes then we all should be very afraid for the future of fiction.

He sets out a project specification for the novel that will solve the problem
It would need to get into the heads of people who believe lies without suggesting that they are dupes or gulls, and run the dangerous risk of making those lies almost possess the compelling authority of truths. It isn’t a book I could write. Perhaps it isn’t a book anyone could write...

110LolaWalser
Editat: març 1, 2020, 3:46 pm



Old baggage, Lissa Evans, Harper Perennial, 2019

It's London in 1928 and jovial Mattie Simpkin has lost nothing of the fire of her suffragette past, still fuelling the struggle for an array of social justice causes. An encounter with an old comrade who crossed over to the dark side spurs her to start a club for young girls, The Amazons, a resolutely non-conformist, non-marching, horizon-expanding initiative. Everything is well until Mattie is thrown off balance when an indolent, uninspiring and uninspire-able girl joins, in whom Mattie recognizes the illegitimate offspring of her late beloved younger brother. An ill-considered attempt to awaken the girl's spirit during a competition with the fascist youth's club upends everything, especially the lives of Mattie and her faithful companion Florrie AKA "the Flea".

This was a quick, fizzy read that packed surprisingly much about the condition of working class women, police brutality against the suffragettes, female friendship, the iron constraints on women in general, the relentless lack of opportunity and assistance they faced whenever they ventured outside their assigned roles. Not only that, in revisiting the old suffragettes we are introduced to a variety of types and destinies, showing what even a disparate mass of people may achieve in the name of a common cause.

("Jacko" is Jacqueline, an old friend of Mattie's, who became a fascist after marrying Richard.)

'(...) I couldn't have been a teacher, like Mattie was. Did you know that she runs a club for young persons?'
   Yes,' said Jacko. 'As do I. In fact, I rather think that I might have given her the idea in the first place.'
   Mattie thought, with instant ire, of Jacko's dismissal of the Amazons in the Ham & High article. Childish games. Classroom debate.
   'Is that true, Mattie?' asked Aileen, gaily, continuing her impression of a one-woman cocktail party.
   'It certainly arose out of a discussion about introducing young women to a wider world,' said Mattie.
   'Not only young women but also young men, in our case,' said Richard. He had a hoarse edge to his voice, as if he'd been shouting.
   Mattie shook her head. 'I'm afraid that I don't consider militarism an introduction to the wider world.'
   'It's not militarism but discipline. You'll find that very little can be achieved without it.'
   'Discipline need not involve drill and uniforms--good God, every woman here could verify that. Obedience should come from the will, not from the whip.'
   'I'm talking about self-discipline.'
   'The Amazons have plenty of self-discipline.'
   'Yes,' said Jacko. 'We've seen them. Scampering around the Heath.'
   'Rabbits scamper. My girls are hares and foxes, fit, alert and brimming with initiative.'
   Jacko smiled. 'One hardly dares to point out what happens to hares and foxes in real life.'
   'In real life they learn to survive,' said Mattie.'As so many in uniform did not survive, blindly obeying.'
   Aileen was looking from one to another, her mouth pinned into a bright smile.
   'I'm sure both clubs are simply wonderful. What's yours called, Jacko?'
   'The Empire Youth League.'
   'How marvellous!'
   'Marvellissimo would perhaps be more accurate,' said Mattie. 'Given its political tenor. Goose-stepping a speciality.'


111thorold
març 2, 2020, 9:03 am

>110 LolaWalser: That sounds like fun! On the list it goes.

I've been reading a Venezuelan book I came across in the library and picked up in spite of the title:

Patria o muerte (2015; The Last Days of El Comandante) by Alberto Barrera Tyszka (Venezuela, 1960- )

Proper review in my other thread. It doesn't quite belong here, because Hugo Chávez obviously wasn't any sort of fascist, although he was a bona fide dictator who rates a case-study in Albright's book. She classes him with Mussolini as someone who ended up overrating his own abilities and taking on too much of the work of government personally. And, as Barrera also points out, someone who was excessively fond of giving speeches, even by dictator standards.

In this novel, Barrera is mostly interested in how people reacted to the news that Chávez was suffering from cancer, and he has fun contrasting the individual reactions of his diverse characters with the "crowd" reaction as portrayed on television. Since Chávez didn't let anyone look into his private sphere, Barrera pointedly stays outside it, and just writes about Chávez as a public image.

112thorold
març 5, 2020, 11:25 am

I've been listening on audio to this book, mentioned briefly in >1 LolaWalser: above:

Fascism : a very short introduction (2002, 2014) by Kevin Passmore (UK, 1950- )

  

Passmore is professor of history at Cardiff, he's published extensively on the history of facist and far-right movements.

This is clearly a book aimed particularly at students, and seems to achieve its brevity by compressing its contents rather than thinning them out, so it wasn't the easiest thing to listen to as an audiobook whilst busy with other activities. But it overlaps quite heavily with other things I've been reading over the last couple of months, so I think I was able to grasp the essentials...

Passmore spends quite a while dealing with the problem of definitions. The two clear historical examples, Italian Fascism and German Nazism, differed in important ways from each other, and both also changed considerably over the course of time. Other right-wing movements in Europe and elsewhere in the inter-war period often borrowed language, labels and ideas from the successful Italian and German movements, but differed considerably on things like the way they came to power (if they did), the extent to which they worked together with church, army, monarchy and mainstream conservatives, and even on whether or not their ultranationalism was based on racism (and if so, against which groups). Since World War II, the label "fascist" has been so tainted that no serious political movement (except the Italian Neo-fascists) has used it to define itself, whilst the rest of us have been happy to attach it to just about any political movement we didn't like. (Since the book was written in 2002 and only partly updated in 2014, it doesn't have much to say in detail about the current crop of far-right parties.)

Academic political scientists also use the term in conflicting and confusing ways. Passmore urges us to separate this essentially historical problem of definitions from the more important question of what we find morally repugnant in the programmes of far-right/nationalist/populist parties, which seems a helpful way of looking at things.

The other interesting point I took from the book is his identification of the common element between the ways Mussolini and Hitler came to power. In both cases a relatively modest electoral success was backed up by the (perceived) threat of large-scale civil disorder from the party's paramilitary organisations, which was enough to intimidate established parties into putting the extremists in power, and once in power the existing mobilisation of activists allowed the party to eliminate effective opposition very rapidly. None of the other movements of the 20s and 30s achieved this combination, and — so far — most of the modern far-right parties have shown no sign of trying to lock up their opponents and impose a single-party state. As Passmore says, this doesn't make their xenophobic rhetoric any less offensive, but it does mean that it probably isn't helpful to use their perceived similarity to Hitler and Mussolini as the core of our strategy for opposing them.

Probably a good book to read if you want to get the historical background clear in your mind, but rather superficial in its treatment of 21st century movements.

113LolaWalser
març 15, 2020, 12:46 pm

Wow, it feels like MUCH longer than a mere two weeks since I last dropped by here... Anyway, I have the next week off, so that should help to finish some of the reads for the thread.

Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win contains Clara Zetkin's report on fascism delivered in June 1923 at a meeting of the Communist International, and the resolution that was then adopted. Appendix A is an abbreviated version of Zetkin's report on fascism at the Frankfurt conference on fascism held in March 1923 and Appendix B a history of Zetkin's struggle (ultimately failed) for a united antifascist front in the face of Stalin's opposition.

It's bloodcurdling to see what was written in 1923 essentially describing 2020. At least, we do know the nature of the beast threatening humanity (in all its meanings...) Zetkin's terrific analysis of the situation in Italy is almost a point-by-point description of Trumpism and allied movements. I can't recommend it highly enough especially as we are suffocating in liberal gaslighting. People who work for a living can't afford bourgeois ideology.

Zetkin was already in her sixties when Mussolini came to power; she died in 1933 at seventy-four. As the oldest member of the Reichstag in 1932, she had the privilege to open its first session--if she managed to avoid Nazi threats of assault. She had to be smuggled into Berlin and the parliament, where she gave her last speech urging again for a united antifascist struggle. But Germany at least had a left to unite, which is not true for, say, the US today.

114librorumamans
març 15, 2020, 1:23 pm

>113 LolaWalser:

Sounds fascinating! Do you have the TPL copy? Because of the closure (I suppose), the catalogue is not showing the status of items.

115LolaWalser
març 15, 2020, 1:28 pm

>114 librorumamans:

Yes I do! I have a number of TPL items locked with me, I'm sorry/glad to say.

Yes it's fascinating, I'll probably buy this. John Riddell's description of the faction struggles in the USSR and the KPD is valuable in itself. I imagine Zetkin's reports must be available free at least in German--need to check out the whole situation.

116LolaWalser
Editat: març 15, 2020, 1:29 pm

double

117thorold
març 15, 2020, 1:40 pm

>113 LolaWalser: Fascinating! I think I saw a passing mention of Zetkin in one of the books I was reading — maybe it was Passmore.

A lot of her writings seem to be available in English here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/
And in German here: https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/zetkin/index.htm

118LolaWalser
març 15, 2020, 1:45 pm

>117 thorold:

Thanks, that's great.

The book is short but the background the editors discuss, especially Ridell's appendix, is very complicated. Zetkin's reports, however, read very clearly.

119LolaWalser
Editat: març 15, 2020, 2:27 pm

Thanks again to Mark for finding the archives. Here is the full text of Zetkin's report from June 1923:

The Struggle Against Fascism

Note that while she was also the author of the resolution, it was written after the discussion and differs more or less, subtly and not, from the ideas in her original. Mostly it's a matter of emphasis, but telling (especially for subsequent communist infighting which pitted the "ultraleft" against so-called "rightists").

The most important example is the almost exclusive emphasis on economic troubles as sources of fascism as the view favoured by the dominant, Stalinist faction, whereas Zetkin indubitably placed economic reasons first but also wanted the ideological and political reasons recognised and valourised.

120thorold
març 15, 2020, 3:05 pm

>119 LolaWalser: Yes, I was struck by how much perspective she has on the origins of fascism so soon after Mussolini came to power. Especially on the way it brought together diverse groups who all felt damaged by the aftermath of the war, and who were all there for slightly different reasons. She was perhaps more right than she knew when she said that the military defeat of fascism was inevitable but might take some time!

121thorold
Editat: març 16, 2020, 5:48 am

Two books I read in the last few days that turned out not to be more than indirectly relevant here (full reviews on the work pages and in my other thread):

Herkunft (2019) by Saša Stanišić (Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1978- )
- A refugee from the Bosnian war living in Germany reflects on exile, being a refugee, and how that links up to where you come from. Nationalism, both German and Balkan, is there as a menace in the background, and parallels are drawn, but it's not really at the heart of the book.

Licence to be bad : how economics corrupted us (2019) by Jonathan Aldred (UK, - )
- An economist savages his colleagues, which is always nice to watch. The argument comes to more or less the same conclusions as Owen Jones's The Establishment (above), but Aldred is most interested in the way economists have damaged the world by overconfident promotion of misguided (capitalist) theories that don't reflect the real world.

122spiphany
març 18, 2020, 2:47 pm

Drive-by posting to note another novel that may be of interest for this quarter: Le bloc by Jérôme Leroy, about two members of an extreme right party in France.

(Haven't read it, but came across a podcast episode featuring the German translation while I was looking for something to distract me from current pandemic-related doom and gloom.)

123LolaWalser
març 18, 2020, 2:50 pm

Heh--that's funny both ironic and straight. :)

124lriley
Editat: març 19, 2020, 8:09 am

I should have thought of this before:

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/walshopenletterargjunta.html

The story goes that on the day of his murder by officers of the Argentine Navy Walsh (who had been in hiding) was making the rounds of post offices in Buenos Aires sending his letter to journalists around the world. He had vowed never to be taken alive and carried a small caliber handgun with him. He was spotted on the street by a team led by Alfredo Astiz (aka The Blonde Angel--a noted torturer and war criminal) which moved in on him. Walsh wounded one of his assailants but was shot numerous times and his body was thrown into the trunk of a Ford Falcon. It's believed he died of his wounds and his body was cremated in the furnace at ESMA the same day which was a Naval facility that was the dictatorship's most notorious torture center. FWIW if that is accurate it is a better fate than a lot of others.

126lriley
març 30, 2020, 8:39 pm

#125--I seriously doubt Orban has any intention of giving up power. He will be to Hungary what Erdogan is to Turkey or Putin is to Russia. Trump no doubt would be fine with that but assuming a Biden administration what would it do? I'm kind of thinking not much. The world is headed more towards autocrats--Trump here--Boris Johnson in England--Bolsonaro Brazil--Netanyahu or whoever in Israel isn't much different. The Sauds. Then you have the technocrats like Macron.

127thorold
abr. 1, 2020, 4:03 am

Q1 is over, but the topic certainly isn’t exhausted! Please feel free to go on posting relevant stuff here, as with all the other “old” quarterly threads.

In the meantime, many thanks to LolaWalser for agreeing to host this! I’ve been pushed into reading all sorts of things I would probably have steered around otherwise, and I may even have learnt a bit (even if it’s only that stepping over the threshold of the political science section in the library is not all that scary really...).

For those who are burning for more reading about undemocratic governments, you are more than welcome to step across to the Q2 thread on Writing from Southern Africa: https://www.librarything.com/topic/318253

128librorumamans
abr. 1, 2020, 11:40 am

>127 thorold: many thanks to LolaWalser for agreeing to host this! I’ve been pushed into reading all sorts of things I would probably have steered around otherwise

Absolutely! I'm adding my thanks to Lola as well.

129LolaWalser
abr. 2, 2020, 12:26 pm

You're welcome. I still have with me a number of library books I had taken out for this read, not to mention my own, so expect to keep posting here for a while yet.

130spiphany
juny 21, 2020, 5:07 am

Coming back to this thread to note a few titles that may be of interest, since unfortunately the pandemic doesn't seem to have made the topic any less relevant.

First, a few comments on How to Be a Fascist by Michela Murgia. Murgia is an Italian writer probably best known for her novel Accabadora, about a woman in rural Sardinia who helps dying people through their last hours.

This couldn't be more different. Published in 2018 (Eng. translation 2020), the slim volume is a satirical advice "manual" on how to promote a far right political agenda. Recommended techniques include appealing to fear and creating enemies, using online spaces to erase the distinction between fact and fiction and to rewrite history, reminding people of the benefits of a strong leader ("head") and the inefficiency and slowness of democratic decision-making processes.

Where the book especially shines is in its tone: the pithy comment, the acerbic remark. It can't have been easy to translate, and here translator Alex Valente does an excellent job. A few excerpts:

"I write against democracy because it has always been, since its origins, an irredeemably flawed system of government. What Winston Churchhill said was false: democracy isn't the worst form of government except for all others--the truth is that it's the worst, full stop, but it's always hard to say it openly, in public, despite all the clear evidence in our daily experiences. The book you're holding is born from a desire to demonstrate that democracy is not only useless, but in fact toxic to coexistence, and also to prove that its tried and tested opposite--fascism--is a much better system of state administration: less costly, faster and more efficient."

"The obstacle the modernity presents to the development of fascism is that everyone--not only the head--has a way of being heard; the best, fascist solution, then, is to let them speak. Always. All of them. At the same time. About everything. ...We need to undermine any principle of authority between opinions, then, so that true and false are no longer distinguishable, no matter who expresses them."

"Beinag able to dissent may be democratic, but dissent by itself fortunately does not create democracy, if it doesn't effect change."

"People want their fear removed, not to debate possible solutions; fear is for everyone, solutions are for the head."

I found it uncomfortable to read, and only partly because many of the observations are so scarily accurate. Her afterword suggests that the book is meant at least partly as a warning about the insidiousness of fascist ideas: "The things I've written, though not all of them and not always, I have actually thought out loud at some point in my life--the more cold, superficial, angry, ignorant moments--even if just for one second; and I believe everyone else has, too."

And it's at this level--the warning--that I'm not sure it entirely succeeds. The arguments feel too glib at times, too simple stereotypes from the perspective of the left about those who embrace far-right movements, without offering any especially new insights that would help understand on an emotional level why ordinary people end up voting for right-wing parties or believing conspiracy theories. And because the satire feels so close to reality (not exaggerated to the point of absurdity--a difficult task, to be sure, in a reality that seems increasingly absurd), I wonder about its effectiveness in making people stop and think. Most readers are likely to be people who are already concerned about the rise of the far right -- but what about those who don't have such a strong aversion, who maybe aren't ready to support far-right parties but are thoroughly disillusioned by mainstream politics and are somewhat susceptible to their promises?

131spiphany
Editat: juny 21, 2020, 5:40 am

Some recent works of fiction in the German-speaking context that touch on topics connected to the far right:

Elfriede Jelinek: Am Königsweg (play inspired by Trump), Die Schutzbefohlenen. Wut. Unseres (refugees/IS terrorism)
Sibylle Berg: GRM (near-future dystopia thematizing contemporary social issues)
Christoph Poschenrieder: Kind ohne Namen (xenophobia)
Urs Augustburger: Helvetia 2.0 (thriller about digital media and right wing politics)
Ulrike Ulrich: Während wir feiern (Swiss populism and anti-immigrant politics; review at New Books in German)
Jens Wonneberger: Mission Pflaumenbaum (Pegida)

And written in English (although evidently only published in German at present) but set in Berlin:
Thomas Harding: Future History 2050 (climate change/populism)

132LolaWalser
Editat: juny 22, 2020, 11:18 am

Thanks for the references. The Murgia's not for me (shades of previous remarks about what is satire good for today); I'm looking forward to Jelinek and curious about the rest.

133LolaWalser
Editat: juny 26, 2020, 1:58 pm

This is not an easy sell--an unpolished YouTube copy of a television play from 1978: DESTINY, by David Edgar ...but I know it will find its audience. From an online review:

Adapted by David Edgar from his epic RSC stage production (the original draft of which ran to five hours in length), Edgar’s anatomy of the rise of British fascism in the ‘60s and ‘70s takes elements from his early work in agitprop theatre, and expands them into a more complex, epic form of social realism to make a rare, concerted attempt to explore the reasons behind, rather than simply demonise, the fascist mindset. It begins in India during the final moments of the Raj, but centres around a picket by Asian factory workers in the fictional West Midlands borough of Taddley. ...

A labyrinthine, complex work with many things to say about the causes of and contradictions within organised fascism, what it undoubtedly has in scope and moral imagination it rather lacks in terms of rounded characterisation, although a great cast, headed by Colin Jeavons, Nigel Hawthorne, Iain Cuthbertson and Saeed Jaffrey, and touches of humanity and humour (and lashings of Rudyard Kipling – at one pint turned into a right-wing protest song) mean the drama of the piece is never engulfed by the ideas. Attacked at the time for both overdoing the NF/Nazi link and portraying right wing causes in too favourable a light, it is really that rare thing – a partisan drama about racism and race which never lets the sentimentalism of the protagonists seep into the narrator’s voice and undermine an intelligent, thoughtful story.

Although Edgar was (and still is) a firm believer in left-wing egalitarianism, he was no idealist about the power of mass media to transmit complex political ideas (unlike, say, Trevor Griffiths) and maintained that the play’s impact remained greatest among the relative handful who saw the stage production, rather than the four million or so television viewers.


https://www.tvcream.co.uk/telly/play-for-today/destiny/

Touchstone!: Destiny

134spiphany
ag. 13, 2020, 6:32 am

A couple of recent reads that unexpectedly turned out to be somewhat relevant for this topic:

Jens Wonneberger: Gegenüber brennt noch Licht ("Across the Way a Light's Still on", Germany, 2008)
A rather odd novel about a German bureaucrat who works at the state pension office and spends his free time watching his neighbors from his apartment window, taking notes on their habits, and imagining what their lives are like. One of the windows across the street particularly captures his curiousity, because it is covered up and he therefore can't see inside. One day, following an incident in which someone is carried outside one a stretcher, the window is uncovered and the resident, our protagonist suspects, is a neo-Nazi with whom he had an encounter some time previously during a work trip in a nearby town. The man, whom he seems to both fear and admire, had protected him during an incident in a restaurant that threatened to escalate. Meanwhile, alongside his speculations about the man and what he is doing in the neighborhood, the protagonist and a female coworker gradually become closer and begin to strike up a relationship.

The premise of this book seemed particularly relevant during the pandemic and lockdown, where for a time, one's balcony or apartment window became one of the few options for interacting with the outside world. The novel's protagonist, by contrast, is isolated not due to any external factors, but rather, one suspects, by his own lack of self-confidence and social skills. He's aware that his activities are problematic and he goes to great lengths to conceal his spying. Yet somehow he comes across more as pitiable than creepy. Perhaps because he is not capable of actually using any of the information gathered during the obsessive watching to manipulate or control those he watches; his observation of his neighbors is merely a pale substitute for real human interaction.

It's interesting to see a German author -- especially an author from former East Germany -- take this particular approach to the topic, given that spying on and informing on one's neighbors was a tool used by two authoritarian regimes to exert power and carry out oppressive agendas.

I also found the casual presence of neo-Nazis in the novel rather unexpected: the author doesn't examine their ideologies or actions in any detail, since we only see them through the eyes of the protagonist, who mostly feels afraid and threatened by them, though he doesn't otherwise seem to have any particular political convictions and it's not clear -- apart from the incident in the restaurant and his rather un-German-sounding surname Plaschinski -- whether he would be a specific target of their hate. Nor is their appearance shocking to him: rather, they seem to be just one of the more unpleasant aspects of everyday life. In some ways this attitude is more soboring than outrage or a portrayal of acts of hatred would have been.

Sarah Moss: Ghost Wall (UK, 2018)
Silvie and her family are spending their summer vacation together with an archaeology professor and a handful of students in an Iron Age encampment in Northumberland, the goal being to experience what everyday life might have been like in prehistoric Britain. Her father, a bus driver prone to violence against his wife and daughter, is obsessed with the ancient Britons and their rituals, which included human sacrifice, and he punishes failure to properly comply with what he considers the rules of the encampment. His interest in the past seems to be linked to his xenophobia and a yearning for an imagined "purer" past. The students take the project much less seriously, going swimming instead of foraging and sneaking off to the local convenience store for snacks. Overall, it quickly becomes clear that, in spite of the attempt to recreate the material conditions of the past, the participants have brought with them their modern mentalities and problems, and in the isolation of the camp these begin to bubble to the surface unchecked.

This isn't overtly a Brexit novel and thematically the focus is more on the personal rather than the societal, on violence and abuse and how it traps those who are subjected to it. But nonetheless the trends that led to Brexit are a palpable presence in the novel, like a dark cloud lurking in the background, and it's hard not to feel that the novel is at least in part a response to these things: Silvie's sense of feeling trapped and longing to get away, out of Britain, the insularity of the characters who reveal the geographical and class divisions within the UK, Hadrian's Wall and the "ghost wall" of the title, meant to protect from invaders but also wall oneself off and keep outsiders out.

135spiphany
oct. 16, 2020, 11:11 am

For those who understand German, there was a recent feature by the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk Kultur on Neue Nazis in der Literatur. It discusses a number of (mainly German) journalistic and fictional texts from the last few years that grapple with the topic of right-wing radicalism.
Titles include:
Moritz von Uslar, Deutschboden (2010) and a follow-up Nochmal Deutschboden (2020) (Neonazi youth culture in the backwaters of Brandenburg)
Manja Präkels, Als ich mit Hitler Schnapskirschen aß (novel based on the author's youth in the same region)
Lukas Rietzschel, Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen (disillusioned youth/xenophobia/hooliganism in former East Germany)
Jens Wonneberger, Mission Pflaumenbaum (mentioned above)
Cihan Acar, Hawaii (Turkish-German youth clash with Neonazis in a problem district of Heilbronn)
Amanda Lasker-Berlin, Elijas Lied (developmental disabilities, sex work, and identitarian movements make for difficult sisterly relationships)
Ingo Schulze, Die rechtschaffenen Mörder (disillusioned East German antiquarian bookseller has had enough?)
Wolfgang Schorlau, Die schützende Hand (crime novel about the NSU murders and the investigation by the state security agency)
Benedikt Gollhardt, Westwall and Friedrich Ani, All die unbewohnten Zimmer (likewise crime/thriller)
And moving across the border to Austria:
Franzobel, Rechtswalzer (crime story set in a near-future Austria where a right-wing totalitarian party has come to power)
Mercedes Spannagel, Das Palais muss brennen (political satire featuring the rebellious daughter of a right-wing politician)
And from France, a dystopia about digital surveillance and the gradual establishment of a dictatorship: Cécile Wajsbrot, Destruction

The titles by Schulze, Franzobel, and Wajsbrot strike me as likely to be the most interesting from a literary standpoint. Schulze's novel was shortlisted for at least one literary prize and he is well-established as an author; it wouldn't surprise me if it gets translated at some point. Most of the other authors are either newcomers or not especially well known.

It's interesting that most of the books deal with the more visible forms of right-wing populism, i.e., violently radicalized youth from at-risk social milieus. I would have liked to see more fictional works that try to understand the more insidious forms of right-wing ideology (the "ordinary" people with decent lives and opportunities who nonetheless vote AfD and complain about immigrants or go to anti-corona protests).

136LolaWalser
oct. 16, 2020, 1:54 pm

>135 spiphany:

Thanks for the list. Schulze is the only one I recognise and have read before (not that that's saying much).

You make an intriguing point about violent radicals vs. "ordinary" right-wing people as subjects in this literature. Are the former increasingly interesting as there are more acts of such violence in daily life? Would the latter be adequately portrayed in the literature dealing with conservative characters (in which case there would already be tons of it...)

137thorold
oct. 16, 2020, 5:13 pm

>135 spiphany: Thanks! A lot to follow up there!

Leere Herzen (somewhere earlier in this discussion...) is about a world that has been changed by the “ordinary” right-wing voters, perhaps, but they aren’t the main characters in the story.

One of the most striking books about that side of things I can think of, but from the first time round (1937), is Irmgard Keun’s Nach Mitternacht. Watching ordinary people watching Hitler.

138spiphany
oct. 17, 2020, 7:36 am

>136 LolaWalser: I don't know that there's been any dramatic increase in violent Neonazi activities in Germany in the last few years (notwithstanding incidents like the attack here in Halle a year ago) -- what scares me more is the creeping spread of parties like the AfD, which conceal their agendas under a veneer of legitimacy and attract voters who consider themselves "decent people" disillusioned by the status quo.

This is a purely subjective impression, of couse -- I don't know what picture the statistics would paint -- but it is a bit surprising to see German fiction skewing in the other direction. I also don't feel like there is any similar trend in (for example) British or American literature: here there is more interest in looking for the origins of the new right in mainstream societal trends and in "ordinary" people rather than in marginalized groups.

The selection in the report I linked to above may not be representative, of course, but it may also reflect differences in what subject matter is typically considered suitable for fiction. And, tellingly, how Germany's past affects societal debates. There's always been a lot of ambivalence about how Nazism is dealt with -- the understandable desire to see "those other people" as responsible for the crimes, but not oneself or one's family/friends.

There are exceptions, of course (Juli Zeh is definitely one), but this is also part of what made the list above a bit disappointing for me: I find it easier to grasp intellectually and emotionally why someone who is growing up in a milieu that doesn't offer much in the way of future prospects -- whether a poor urban neighborhood, post-industrial ghost town, or depopulated rural settlement -- might be susceptible to becoming radicalized by right-wing groups. I find it much harder to understand what leads people with stable jobs and decent lives to embrace conspiracy theories and politics of hate and intolerance.

There is a recent mini-series from one of the public broadcasters that tries to tackle this question: Deutscher follows the lives of two families in a scenario in which a right-populist party wins an absolute majority in the German parliament. (I'm not sure whether it's successful or not -- I've watched part of the first episode and wasn't entirely convinced.)

>137 thorold: I fear you may be on the right track: that there may be more insight to be gained from accounts of 1920s and 1930s Germany. I have Success by Leon Feuchtwanger sitting on my shelf, which a Munich friend recommended to me for its insights into Hitler's rise to power, though I think it deals more with politics than the attitudes of regular people.

And the other way around, watching the current developments in the US has given me a certain new sympathy for the non-Hitler supporters who had to sit by and watch while democratic processes failed. It's easy to wonder: well, if these people truely didn't like Hitler why didn't they speak out, or join the resistance, or emigrate, why did they stay and continue with their daily lives? Based on what I hear from people back at home: the sense of powerlessness must be enormous. Voting and protesting and writing to representatives and any number of other activities seem to have little effect, and for the vast majority of people leaving isn't a feasible option, so life goes on, somehow.

139AvaHudson0
oct. 17, 2020, 8:02 am

S'ha suprimit aquest usuari en ser considerat brossa.

140LolaWalser
oct. 17, 2020, 5:11 pm

>138 spiphany:

I find it much harder to understand what leads people with stable jobs and decent lives to embrace conspiracy theories and politics of hate and intolerance.

This is a bit oblique as a response, but I happened to glance over the headlines on the NY Times after reading your post and this one popped up with some resonance:

‘White Supremacy’ Once Meant the Klan. Now It Refers to Much More.

Nazism once meant the Nazis. Now it refers to so many more.

But I wonder--now? It's an unpopular opinion, but I suspect that we are not getting the best grasp on these situations when we isolate the "violent" ones from the would-be "ordinary" people--and who we include or exclude from the latter. I'm not saying all are committing the same violent acts, but that all are complicit in an ongoing violence (save those who actively fight it). Perhaps most to the point, I fear that there is no clear and firm border between "decent" people one day and AfD voters the next.

As for motivation... The "ordinary", including supposedly "decent" people tacitly, even unconsciously profit from an unjust situation. As the resistance to the injustice grows, such that lip-service to the values of equality and justice no longer suffice, so they become more aware of their own position within the system. As the calls to sharing grow, so they become more aware that, after all, they prefer having double the next guy. Pox on the next guy.

watching the current developments in the US has given me a certain new sympathy for the non-Hitler supporters who had to sit by and watch while democratic processes failed.

I have a different reaction to the passive "non-supporters", but then I already experienced losing two countries to fascism (and come from a family with a tradition of armed revolt...) However, regarding the failures of American democracy, I'm not saying this by way of consolation, but urging for adopting a different outlook, one which may open up new solutions: the American democracy was constructed to preserve the privilege of the ruling class and nothing else. So of course it does not allow--easily--for a truly democratic process of change.

Iow, I'd place the failure of American democracy at its beginning. Trumpism is the last hurrah of the original blueprint for America.

And there are people who are fighting to build a new America, a real democracy. They are not sitting by, they are not feeling powerless. It's not necessary to give in to passive despair.

141spiphany
oct. 18, 2020, 6:33 am

>140 LolaWalser:
I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to say, or I wasn't being clear.

That's exactly the point I was getting at: the focus on more extreme manifestations of right-wing activity (in literature, in popular discourses) is troubling because, among other things, it makes it possible to cast these people as exceptional cases, as outsiders vis-a-vis the rest of the population. And it thereby looks past the less extreme forms of right-wing populism. Certainly they're not inherently separate; that's why I've been using quotation marks when talking about "ordinary" people who are still prepared to vote for right-wing parties.

And on the other side, I specifically did not mean people who have been doing nothing, but those who have been trying to find ways to take action (voting, writing congresspeople, going to demonstrations, donating to civil society organizations) and are still finding it hasn't done much to stop what is happening. Perhaps there simply still aren't enough of them. Perhaps their efforts simply haven't yet begun to bear obvious fruit.

Perhaps they should be doing more, or taking different actions -- I don't know. Collective action requires knowledge and skills and networks that have to be acquired: it isn't always obvious what action on the ground can be effective at changing the actions of politicians and the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. Many people are learning how to do this for the first time. (And yes, there is privilege here, and I'm not excluding myself from that.)

An individual's resources and energy are finite. Not everybody feels (rightly or wrongly) that they have the same range of options. And this may result in them finding themselves more complicit than they want to be. I can recognize that this creates an unpleasant ethical dilemma (trying to choose what action is "less bad") without seeing it as exonerating or excusing them.

I definitely agree that the roots of what is happeining in the US now can be traced way back to the beginnings of the nation. Not just because the people who wrote the Constitution had a different understanding of democracy and government than we do today, but also slavery and messianism and the myth of individualism and a particularly nasty strain of Calvinism that equates success with divine grace.

142LolaWalser
oct. 18, 2020, 2:28 pm

>141 spiphany:

That's exactly the point I was getting at: the focus on more extreme manifestations of right-wing activity (in literature, in popular discourses) is troubling because, among other things, it makes it possible to cast these people as exceptional cases, as outsiders vis-a-vis the rest of the population. And it thereby looks past the less extreme forms of right-wing populism. Certainly they're not inherently separate...

Right, I know we agree on that they are not inherently separate, but I'm just saying that precisely because there is no separation, I don't see (necessarily) that literature focussing on acts of extreme violence is avoiding commenting on the "ordinary" people--I tend to read it as commentary precisely on them. "This is what X leads to." However, as mentioned, this sort of reading may come easier to some than others--once you've seen and lived what "ordinary" people with their "ordinary" behaviour can lead to, you don't need too many lectures to detect signs of promised violence in what others still may insist is innocuous.

143LolaWalser
oct. 18, 2020, 3:40 pm

Des gens très bien (Very fine people) by Alexandre Jardin, published in 2010 and rewarded by some prize or other, irritated, angered, and even scared me--probably not for the reasons the writer and his fans might suppose. Of the several ways in which this book may be read, I find the one in which it is itself a testament to a certain (more or less "present") moment in France far more compelling, even important, than its actual subject. And it's that "secondary", circumstantial frame, that in my opinion makes the book significant for the thread's topic more than the actual fascists in the author's family that it deals with.

So, first a few words about that subject. Alexandre Jardin (I knew nothing about him before this book), filmmaker and writer of trifling fiction, is the grandson of Jean Jardin, a high functionary in the Vichy regime, chief of staff to Pierre Laval, and a convinced Pétainiste and Vichyist to his death (in Switzerland, where he escaped after the fall of Vichy and from where he nevertheless continued to wield influence in French politics, manipulating many a dirty deal).

Alexandre's father Pascal, also an author, published a book in 1980 about his father Jean, Le nain jaune (Yellow Dwarf, Jean's actual nickname), and Alexandre would later publish a book about Pascal, under HIS nickname, Zubial. The interesting thing is that both these books are apparently warm and loving familial portraits, with Pascal bending over to present his collaborationist daddy in heroic light, and Alexandre doing the same for his collaborationist-glorifying daddy in turn. (As Alexandre has sons of his own, and at least one of them is angry about Very fine people, no doubt we'll see more of this saga of self-important dickheads in future.)

Very fine people is a reaction to these generational attempts to avoid the obvious and presents fifty-something Alexandre's supposedly lifelong grappling with a bad conscience regarding his grandpa's actions against the French Jews who were shipped off to Auschwitz.

Unfortunately I have nothing positive to say about the book as an exploration of memory, generational guilt and self-deception, because Jardin is one of the emptiest, most banal writers ever. He also comes across as either not very bright, or blinded into cluelessness by sheer... vanity? Privilege? I don't know what else explains his lack of tact and proportion, as when, for instance, he boasts about banging Sophie Marceau, or the repeated anecdotes about getting attacks of coughing when someone in his rarefied circles says something antisemitic. Which happens frequently, routinely, so poor Alexandre coughed a lot in his time.

What the book did communicate forcefully to me is how little France had advanced in facing up to its antisemitism, if tripe like this is deemed some hard-hitting reckoning--and in 2010!!

So... disappointing in one way, informative in other way than intended, and depressing and scary in implications.

144spiralsheep
oct. 19, 2020, 1:42 pm

Earlier this year I read The Sound of Language by Amulya Malladi, set in Denmark with an Afghan woman refugee protagonist, which is a somewhat simplistic novel, probably because it wants to remain generally upbeat, but it includes an attempted racist fire-bombing perpetrated by far right young men and their actions are unequivocally presented as enabled by the average Danish people in their families and communities who speak against immigrants (the Other) as a normalised part of their everyday social discourse.

145tallpaul
gen. 26, 2021, 1:55 pm

>45 lriley: Children of the Sun is a novel based around the life of
Nicky Crane told via a fictional contemporary and a character who becomes obsessed with him after his death. Nicky Crane was a notorious, violent, neo-nazi skinhead who founded the Blood and Honour network linked to Combat 18. He lived a double life as a homosexual, in London's gay bars where he drank, socialized and worked as a doorman, during all the time of his involvement in the neo nazi movement. He came out on TV towards the end of his life, a short while before he died of AIDS in 1993, aged 35.