What is Dhimmi Fascism? We'll see a great deazl of it in action in the coming few days when the dust over London settles.
***
The traditional distinction between Left and Right has been Rationalism and Irrationalism. The Left, and today it is still true, believe themselves to be, over-all, intellectuals; the right think in terms of irrationalities, of mysticism, intuition, feelings, and activities as opposed to critical analysis, nit-picking, doing nothing but reading. There are a dozen main precepts of fascism, those things that make one fascistic or not; and below we'll take a look at some of them, though not in any great depth yet, this being a short introduction to fascism. What we will see is the tips of the icebergs of fascism in the Left ideology visible in a cursory look at Leftism today. We will do what fascists generally, and Leftist in particular to day do not do: we'll analyse fascism.
Our first peek at fascism comes from a book review by one of the better authors on the nature and history of fascism. Even so, Mosse doesn't cover all the ground he could have. Fascism is far wider than he allows. For a start he'll do well enough. In further posts we'll look more closely at the specifics of fascism so that when we correctly identify Left dhimmi fascism as exactly fascist, no one will be able to weasel out of accepting our true statements.
***
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0005/reviews/anderson.html
Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 103 (May 2000): 59-62.
The Cultural Revolution of Fascism
The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism. By George L. Mosse. Howard Fertig. 230 pp. $35.
Reviewed by Brian C. Anderson
"Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." So Benito Mussolini trumpeted the ideal of fascism, the wild–eyed political movement that he rode to power in Italy in 1922 and that died with Adolf Hitler's defeat in 1945.
Mussolini's infamous quote captures the remarkable hubris of fascism, its frightening impulse to rule over every dimension of life (the word is from the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods sporting an axe–head that symbolized the unchallenged state authority of Rome). In varying degrees, that hubris characterized fascism in all its historical forms: the Rexist movement in Belgium, the Spanish Falange, the Romanian Iron Guard, the French Fascists surrounding Jacques Doriot, and of course Mussolini's Italian thugs and Hitler's monstrous National Socialists.
But despite the bluntness of Mussolini's definition, fascism remains disturbingly enigmatic. What, exactly, were its central tenets? Unlike its equally murderous counterpart, Marxian socialism, fascism won power in the heart of Europe; it succeeded in gaining the uncoerced allegiance of ordinary men and women in a way Marxism never did. What was the source of its appeal? And is it historically obsolete?
Historian George L. Mosse, who died in January 1999, wrote extensively on fascism during his long and illustrious career; among his most important books on the subject were The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich and Toward the Final Solution. The present book collects ten of Mosse's essays on the subject, published over a period dating back to 1961. The essays, on everything from Fascist homoeroticism to Nazi political theater, are uneven, often turgidly written, and tend to leave promising suggestions frustratingly undeveloped, but at their best they help provide provisional answers to the three questions posed above. Most helpful of all is Mosse's method, which is to get inside the Fascist mind, to see fascism as it saw itself—a kind of phenomenology of politics that I believe is the most fruitful way to illumine the political world.
What were the main tenets of fascism? Though Mosse doesn't come close to a "general theory" of fascism, he correctly stresses the crucial role of nationalism—the "bedrock" upon which all Fascist movements built themselves. Fascism promised a "third way" between Marxism and capitalism that would celebrate the organic national community. To be German, Italian, or French, the Fascists asserted, meant something more than just inhabiting a piece of geography; it meant something outsiders could not really enter into, something beyond reasoned argument.
Mosse carefully distinguishes German National Socialism—in which a virulent racist ideology, drawing on social Darwinism, anti–Semitism, and various nineteenth–century racialist theories, wedded itself to nationalism—from other forms of fascism that downplayed or shunned racism. (In Italy, for example, fascism was nonracist for more than a decade until Mussolini cynically began to stoke anti–Semitism in 1938. The unholy alliance of racism and nationalism is one reason National Socialism proved so much more destructive than Italian fascism.)
But whatever the differences among the various Fascist movements, Mosse rightly underscores how the worthy evocation of national belonging can slide toward nationalism, and how nationalism, becoming aggressively xenophobic, can slide toward the abyss. Unfortunately, in these essays he gives little weight to the intellectual history of nationalism. (For that history one should turn to the recent, posthumously released book by Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, which describes the rise of fascism as growing out of the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment.)
A second major tenet or characteristic of all Fascist movements was the glorification of war and violence. Half–measures and compromises, Mosse notes, were anathema to all Fascists; these were typical of the craven bourgeoisie, Fascists held, not of the virile Fascist "new man." For Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, for example, a true National Socialist would willingly carry out a scorched–earth policy or ruthlessly gun down deserters. Mussolini at one desperate point even threatened to execute schoolchildren who skipped classes. Fascists stressed the greatness of dying for the cause in war, the dignity of a mad heroism, and a willingness to struggle against all odds.
Nationalism and the love of violence and war—these are familiar themes in the copious literature on fascism's attributes. Where Mosse is most interesting is on Fascist irrationalism and on fascism and revolution. In a fascinating chapter, originally published nearly four decades ago, Mosse explores the roots of National Socialism in nineteenth–century mysticism. Recreating the feverish world of such forgotten late–nineteenth century writers as Julias Langbehn, Alfred Schuler, and Paul de Lagarde, Mosse paints a disquieting portrait.
These irrationalists despised the cosmopolitan—and in their view largely Jewish—bourgeois universe of calculation, contract, and money. Instead, they surrendered themselves to "a belief in nature's cosmic life force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science but through the occult." In some of the most vivid pages in The Fascist Revolution, Mosse describes Schuler trying to cure Friedrich Nietzsche of his madness with an ancient Roman spring rite, bizarre seances, theosophical preachments, and much other anti–Christian and anti–Enlightenment nonsense—seemingly harmless until one realizes the culture of irrational barbarism it did its part in conjuring. But the Nazis weren't alone in their irrationalism; Mussolini, too, drank from its well, in his case from the thought of Nietzsche and the theorist of violence George Sorel, though Mosse unfortunately neglects to discuss these intellectual sources of Italian fascism.
It is in Mosse's discussion of fascism and revolution that he makes his most important contribution. In contrast to those analysts, especially Marxists, who interpret fascism as reactionary—a kind of last gasp of bourgeois capitalism—Mosse accents its revolutionary thrust. Mussolini called for a "revolution of the spirit"; Hitler spoke of the "German Revolution." In Mosse's words, "Fascism encouraged activism, the fight against the existing order of things." Like all revolutionary movements, fascism in power had to restore order and prop up its own authority, diminishing revolutionary ardor; but fascism in its main thrust sought to remake the human world, to forge a new future—whether based on futurist ideas, as with Mussolini, or on an imagined pagan past, as with Hitler—that would break decisively with the corrupt and weak present. Though rightists and conservatives, sharing their rejection of the modern world, often supported Fascist movements, fascism was anything but conservative.
In a chapter dating from 1989, Mosse goes beyond the obvious political opposition between the spirit of the French Revolution and that of fascism to see deep commonalties and even subterranean influences that bind them across time. Mosse views both as products of the modern liberation of the will—rival manifestations of "the people worshiping themselves." Both the French Revolution and fascism sought to transcend the mundane complexities of politics and create perfect societies; both rejected the West's biblical heritage; both aestheticized politics in public festivals and songs. Writing of the French Revolution, Mosse observes: "This new politics attempted the politicization of the masses, which, for the first time in modern history, functioned as a pressure group and not just through episodic uprisings or short–lived riots." In fascism, says Mosse, "the age of modern mass politics had begun." The Jacobins' sacred spaces—the Champs–de–Mars or the Tuileries—would find their amplified echoes in Forum Mussolini in Rome and in Nuremberg.
Mosse, a historian and not a philosopher, remains on a somewhat superficial level in his account of fascism as a pathology of democratic modernity—as based, in essence, on a rejection of the West's Jewish and Christian heritage. Major scholars of fascismArendt and Ernst Nolte come immediately to mind—make no appearance in Mosse's book; a pity, since their more philosophically informed thinking would have added needed depth to Mosse's treatment. But his interpretation is essentially correct. National Socialism especially, as the Hungarian Catholic philosopher Aurel Kolnai wrote in 1950, sought to negate "Christian civilization as such," scripting a dark epiphany in which man "wrenched himself free from Christianity and construed the automatic workings of his fallen nature into a mirage of self–made heaven." As with all such self–made heavens, it opened the gates to a netherworld.
These four marks of the Fascist spirit—nationalism and racism, a love of violence and war, irrationalism, and revolutionary presumption—though not exhaustive, help us to understand its appeal during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly where democratic institutions were feckless and resentments bred by World War I festered.
Fascism brought with it a thick set of assumptions about the world's past, present, and future. It was, as Raymond Aron noted during the late 1930s, a "secular religion," a complete vision of life that brooked no pluralist opposition but that, unlike Marxism, crossed class divisions. In Mosse's similar language, fascism wrought a "sacralization of politics" that made it demonic but that also allowed it to sink its hooks deep into the soul.
What of our third question: does fascism have a future? It is fascism's modern genesis that gives one pause in declaring its historical senescence. Although Mosse does not stress this here, fascism shared with communism an antipathy toward the bourgeoisie, which helps explain its attraction for intellectuals like the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the French novelist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. Modern man's revolt against anything constraining the will is a problem that confronts the democratic world, too. For all the unprecedented freedoms and decencies of liberal democratic regimes, certain tendencies within those regimes—aborting unwanted children, euthanizing the old and burdensome, a rising irrationalism—are eerily reminiscent of the mental universe of fascism in their elevation of the untrammeled human will above any constraints of nature, grace, or even reason. Nationalist movements in Europe stand perilously close to fascism at times.
Perhaps fascism represents a permanent temptation of modern politics, the seduction to leave behind the ambiguities and trade–offs of prosaic liberal democracy for a true (and truly destructive) "politics of meaning." If so, we need to be perpetually on guard against it, and George Mosse's intelligent reflections are of much more than historical interest.
***
Fascism is a neologism for the state of Human life for the past 5,000 years to today across most of the world, excluding only the modern West, a creation begun a mere 500 years ago at best. Fascism is the way of the world. It is our modernity that is revolutionary and frightening to the primitives who will not or cannot move from the mire of evil barbarism that is the lot they were born to.
In a sense one might be right to sympathize with the barbarians of the greater world for the accidents of birth that "threw" them into such caves of being as they find themselves in. On the other hand, this world requires that people take responsibility for their own lives even if they refuse to do so right up to the time at which they are annihilated by superior forces. If people are born into states of primitive fascism, then they have to deal with it as either as individuals or as individuals who cling to identies as group members. Regardless, they have to pay the price in the world of the living. Sentimentality won't get anyone further than six feet under a small patch of ground.
The primitives, for the most part, are the least of our concerns. Yes, there are many of them, more all the time as they breed out of control, expanding over the face of the Earth unchecked by anything more than diseases mostly controlled by modern medicine. They are primitive, useless beings who cling to the ages of primitive fascism. We can ignore them for the most part to die out ss a redundant part of the Human population if they cannot or will not adapt. In a sense, then, we argue for social Darwinism, But not our: theirs. The primitives who cannot cope with adaptation will surely die out. We can do what we can to preserve them from becoming toy people in a sand diorama if we choose to, which isn't likely if they continue to turn to rabid violence motivated by hatred, fueled by Islamic poligion. The times come and go when we rightly shrug and think ourselves well rid of the primitives. In momnents of calm we can see them as victims of their own poison. We argue here for Western Modernist colonialism before it's too late to save them at all.
The dhimmi fascists of the West, though, they are a different story. We'll see more of them in the review below:
"The Surprising Roots of Facism" Arnold Beichman,
A. James Gregor, The Two Faces of Janus: Marxism and Facism in the Twentieth Century.
Janus was the Roman god after whom January is named. He was considered the guardian deity of gates and doors and is usually shown as two-faced, since doors face both ways. But there is only a single body to this deity. Berkeley Professor A. James Gregor, in his superbly researched book, has presumably selected Janus to symbolize the twinning of the two ideologies that have so scarred the twentieth century.
Gregor has undertaken a difficult task in his attempt to deal with these two ideologies. I say difficult because while the ultimate consequences of Marxism were dreadful, there was at least a large collection of patristic writings, accessible and debatable, even intellectually respectable. Because Marxism provides a self-styled scientific socio-political analysis as well as a gallimaufry of beliefs and insights, it appealed to intellectuals and, alas, still does.
Not so with fascism, a name derived from the Latin, "fasces," a bundle of sticks, carried by judicial officers in Roman processions as an emblem of authority. (Hitler, of course, had his own emblem — the swastika — and his followers referred to themselves as Nazis, short for National Socialism.) Fascism had its theoreticians, and a distressing number of serious thinkers, the philosopher Martin Heidegger first among them, lent their support. But fascism in actual fact it had no intellectual basis at all, nor did its founders even pretend to have any.
Hitler's ravings in Mein Kampf, Giovanni Gentile's hortatory article in the Italian Encyclopedia, Mussolini's boastful balcony speeches, all of these can be described, in the words of Roger Scruton, as "an amalgam of disparate conceptions." It is about this "amalgam" that Professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr. has written:
Anyone who reads many studies of fascism as a multinational problem cannot but be struck by the frequency with which writers who begin by assuming they are dealing with a unitary phenomenon end up with several more-or-less discrete sub-categories. Regardless of what criteria are applied, it seems very difficult to keep fascism from fragmenting.
In spite of this, there has been a general reluctance to consider what must be regarded as a definite possibility: namely, that fascism as a generic concept has no validity and is without value for serious analytical purposes. . . . The generic term fascism is in origin neither analytical nor descriptive.
That such strictures have significance can be seen in Professor Gregor's confirming remark about the Russian extremist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky: "In what sense Zhirinovsky is a fascist is difficult to say with any intellectual conviction."
Yet Gregor is right to ignore the Turner finding, for one important reason: "Fascism" still has meaning in democratic societies. For a recent illustration of this, consider the fracas over Austria's Jörg Haidar. Labeling somebody you don't like a "fascist" is still a popular polemical sport: Call someone a communist and proof is demanded and even when proof is supplied there is the risk that you will be called a red-baiter; call someone a fascist, that's enough to convict. In the lexicon of the left, there is nothing lower than a "red-baiter" but there is no such thing as a "fascist-baiter." We've all heard about "communist hysteria," especially during the Joe McCarthy years, but there is no such phenomenon as "fascist hysteria." The name-calling got a little ridiculous when during the Sino-Soviet split, the Kremlin and Beijing called each other fascist.
Having combed their literature, Professor Gregor has shown beyond a shadow of doubt the affinities, too long ignored, between fascism and Marxism-Leninism. (It was Don Luigi Sturzo who provided the reductio ad absurdum: Fascism was black communism and communism was red fascism.) Richard Pipes has written that "Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism."
Recalling that Mussolini began his political career as a distinguished Italian socialist, Gregor writes: "Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives' — the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism."
Even Nikolai Bukharin, the leading Soviet ideologist whom Stalin purged, began to have misgivings about the Revolution and began to allude to the fascist features of the emerging system. Gregor writes:
By the early 1930s, the 'convergence' of fascism and Stalinism struck Marxists and non-Marxists alike. . . . By the mid-1930s, even Trotsky could insist that 'Stalinism and fascism, in spite of deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena' . . . .
Fascist theoreticians pointed out that the organization of Soviet society, with its inculcation of an ethic of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded in form to the requirements of Fascist doctrine.
Left liberals have frantically denied the "Janus" notion that Marxism-Leninism and fascism have a common origin. With scholarly skill and an enormous amount of reading has Professor Gregor made such denials as dated as the Communist Manifesto.
http://www.policyreview.org/aug00/beichman_print.html
***
It's been a rule of thumb for some many long years that the difference between Left and Right violence is the determination of targets: The Left murdered individuals; the Right killed indiscriminately. The Left writes justifications; the Right makes phone calls and speeches. The left is articulate; the Right is oral and emotive. Well, look at what we have today: no Left critique since Adorno and Horkheimer, but much mass murder of civilians applauded by the Left agianst Isreali civilians, much apology for fascist Moslems, and so on, as one example of the degeneracy of the Left into full-blown fascism.
None of this is sufficient. We'll look at a two brief pieces on the history of modern fascism before we turn soon to further enquiry into the nature of fascism and how the dhimmi Left has adapted itself to failure by grasping the very enemies it supposedly fought against since 1776-1789 and onward till it quit the struggle and adopted fascist Islam as its bed-mate:
***
From a book review of Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040301fabook83239/robert-o-paxton/the-anatomy-of-fascism.html
The term "fascism" originated with Mussolini in 1919 and has since often been stretched to apply to almost any political group to the right of the person using it. Paxton, a historian, sets out to rescue the term from such sloppy usage, even as he acknowledges that a narrow definition is impossible. In his quest for understanding, Paxton surveys how a broad array of fascist movements has sought out followers, formed alliances, and seized and exercised power. The comparisons show great variety over time and place but also reveal characteristics that distinguish fascism from other kinds of authoritarian rule. Fascists, he concludes, were identifiable most of all by a:
* style of political behavior that emphasized historical grievances;
* worshiped the cult of leadership;
* relied on a mass-based movement of national militants;
* repressed democratic liberties;
* and used violence as a political tool.
***
That is insufficient. Below are more reviews culled from Amazon.com readers:
Whose Reich Is It Anyway?, May 1, 2004
Reviewer: Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) -
The Marquis de Morés, returning to 1890s Paris after his cattle ranching venture in North Dakota failed, recruited a gang of men from the Parisian cattle yards as muscle for his "national socialism" project -- a term Paxton credits Morés' contemporary Maurice Barres, a French nationalist author, with coining. Morés' project was potent and prophetic: his national socialism was a mixture of anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism. He clothed his men in what must have been the first fascist uniform in Europe -- ten-gallon hats and cowboy garb, frontier clothes he'd taken a shine to in the American West. (Author Paxton suggests the first ever fascist get-up was the KKKs white sheet and pointy hat). Morés killed a French Jewish officer in a duel during the Dreyfus affair and later was killed in the Sahara by his guides during his quest to unite France to Islam to Spain. Morés had earlier proclaimed: "Life is valuable only through action. So much the worse if the action is mortal."
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Fascism is both [a] charged and blurry word these days, used by both the left and the right to assail their critics and enemies. The Nazi remains the evildoer par excellence in popular and political culture, invoked for a thrill of fear or the disciplinary scare or emotional incitement.
***
Paxton is concerned with rescuing the term from its present status as a convenient insult. As Paxton points out, all modern democracies contain nascent fascist elements. Given the destructive consequences of successful or even partially successful fascist movements, we should have a good understanding of fascism to be able to recognize fascist threats.
Fascist movements had important differences in ideology, and fascism in general, with its appeal to intense nationalism and exclusionary sense of identity, shouldn't be expected to have a uniform ideology.
Italian fascism, at least in its original form, lacked the virulent anti-semitism and social darwinist preoccupations of Nazism, while the fascist movement in Romania was aggessively Christian in ideological content.
Fascism appears in failed or highly stressed democracies, that fascism involves mass politics, that fascism emerges as a reaction to perceived threats from the socialist threat, that fascism depends on charismatic leadership, and that fascism always contains a cult of violent action. [T]he successful fascist movements, Italian Fascism and Nazism, were invited into power by traditional conservative elites seeking to coopt fascist mass mobilization in support of their own ends. In authoritarian societies where the conservative elites were more powerful or confident, such as Spain, Romania, or Hungary, fascist movements were consigned to the sidelines or actually suppressed.
***
Rather than test the patience of our readers we'll leave off here until next time to return to this look at fascism. We will see that the Left is fascist and in collusion with fascist Islam. As always, we welcome your comments.
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Thursday, July 07, 2005
London's Burning
Our opponents will be out in force raining down a shit-storm of nonsense on us, claiming that the murders in London today are our fault for (take your pick.)
We're not helpless here. Terrorists themselves are a police matter. Islam and dhimmi collaboration is something we can organize ourselves to fight.
It's up to us. It's up to you.
We're not helpless here. Terrorists themselves are a police matter. Islam and dhimmi collaboration is something we can organize ourselves to fight.
It's up to us. It's up to you.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Counter-Enlightenment Leftism
We of the Western world do not live in a world like the rest, like most people today, and like those for the past 5,000 years before us. Our time, our circumstances, our lives are so revolutionary, becoming moreso daily, that each year our lives are more different from the year before than they have been from century to century in centuries past. The good of it, not simply the change for the sake of recognizing change, is the fact of progress, not merely material but social and psychological, becomes clear in the 18th century, during the period of the Enlightenment, a European phenomenon. The Enlightenment is under attack by the fascist world of Islam. More: Modernity is under attack by the enemies of the Enlightenment, not merely from primitives outside the world of Western modernity but worse, from our own intellectual classes, our very own Left-wing dhimmis allied with the old-guard fascists of the Counter-Enlightenment, the anti-democratic, the anti-women's rights, the anti-rationalists, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-everything they can think of if it resmebles other than the world of divinely appointed kings, corrupt bishops, and efficient executioners. Our Left is in league with our Right, and the two are fighting a rear-guard action to destroy Modernity, the values of the Enlightenment, the very course of progress. We modern, progressive, Enlightenment revolutionaries, we are under attack by the losers of Human history, and they are winning.
Who are we fighting and what do they want? Not just Moslems who want to impose their idiot shari'a tribal customs on the world, we are fighting the traitors of the West, the dhimmis of the Left. The West fascist Right is so absurd that it barely merits criticism, but the Left is powerful; in fact, being the leaders of the social discourse that originates in the Enlightenment itself, we have no other choice than to use the language of the Left to discuss the Left's hatred of Modernity and the Enlightenment.
Our modernity is a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, but not that alone. Industrialization alone has occured in numerous places without the socio-political advances and benefits the West achieved in its French and American Revolutions, i.e. material progress with human progress, industry in conjunction with Enlightenment philosophies. But these advances are not assumed by all to be of benefit to all. Right from the beginning of the era of Enlightenment the reactionary privilege of feudalism has fought with all there force against the masses in struggle for Modernity as we make it by the day. Below, Bronner discusses some of the history and critique of the forces of reaction, Left and Right. Our problem is with the Left philobarbarism of counter-revolutionary dhimmitude, less so with the forces of Right reaction.
Our first problems arise from Horkheimer and Adorno's Left critique of Modernism in light of post-industrial alienation in terms of concentration camps as the final out-come of capitalism, a look at Modernism as having run its natural course right to the gates of Auschwitz; but more importantly the Left's reactionary stance is inherent in its communitarianism and agrarian entrenchment, forgetting Horkheimer and Adorno as irrelevant to our purposes: starting from reaction per se, rather than from a position of Enlightenment Reason, the Left is only able to deepen the hole it's in, adding nothing to the discourse but more of the same, which is, unfortunately, agreeable to the modern masses. Bronner critiques both stances in excerpts below from his essay:
Interpreting the Enlightenment: Metaphysics, Critique, and Politics
Stephen Eric Bronner
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, amid the intellectual retrenchment consonant with the unending “war against terror,” the Enlightenment legacy has become—more than ever before—a contested terrain. Western “values,” [t]he best of them—political liberty, social justice, and cosmopolitanism—are rooted in the Enlightenment, and they retain their radical character.
Enlightenment values are still not hegemonic or establishmentarian. Authoritarianism is still rampant, most inhabitants of the world still suffer under the strictures of traditionalism, and earn less than $2 per day. The Enlightenment was always a movement of protest against the exercise of arbitrary power, the force of custom and ingrained prejudices, and the justification of social misery. Its spirit was the expression of a bourgeois class on the rise against the hegemonic feudal values of the established society and its political ideals are still subordinate to those of traditionalism and authoritarianism in most of the world. There should be no mistake: though the philosophes were responding primarily to the world associated with “throne and altar,” the ideals of these thinkers remain relevant for even for nations without a feudal past like the United States. Western nations still carry the scars of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and class inequality.
But not only the right is distorting them. These values have also come under assault from important intellectual representatives of the left: anarchists, communitarians, postmodernists, half-hearted liberals, and authoritarian socialists. Intellectual and political disorientation has been the result. Ideas long associated with reactionary movements—the privileging of experience over reason, national or ethnic identity over internationalism and cosmopolitanism, the community over the individual, custom over innovation, myth over science—have entered the thinking of the American left. Its partisans have thus become increasingly unclear about the tradition into which they fit and the purposes their politics should serve. The collapse of intellectual coherence on the left reflects the collapse of a purposeful politics from the left. Reconstructing such a politics depends upon appropriating the Enlightenment to meet new conditions.
Conservatives have, ironically, been more clear-sighted. In the past, they deplored the “nihilism” of the Enlightenment: its devastating assault on communal life, religious faith, social privilege, and traditional authority. Conservatives, and those even further to the right, consistently rejected Enlightenment concerns with individualism, dissent, secularism, reform, and the primacy of critical reflection. This differentiated them from the left.
Our problem today is that the Left has adopted to itself the stance of the traditional reactionary Right. The Left alliance with the forces of Islam, for example, is destroying the ground of Enlightenment by implementing Stalinist codes of public socio-political attitudes and behaviours, for example in rigid "Newspeak" in reference to Islam, privilging it at the expense of the rights of the majority of Modernity in the West, and especially by identifying fascist Islamic Force as superior to Modernity. Today, the Left privileges reactionary discourse against Enlightenment values.
The defense of western civilization by conservative intellectuals is, unsurprisingly, mixed with anti-Enlightenment and anti-modern prejudices. Discussion of the Enlightenment has nonetheless become skewed to the right; the radical moment has dropped out. It is no longer treated as the razor that divides “left” and right.” If there is any legitimacy to claims concerning the increasing irrelevance of fundamental political distinctions, indeed, here lies the historical source.
With its emphasis upon autonomy, tolerance, and reason—no less than its attack upon received traditions, popular prejudices, and religious superstitions—the Enlightenment was generally recognized as the foundation for any kind of progressive politics.
What's the problem?
[Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer] turned the accepted notion of progress upside down. The scientific method of the Enlightenment, according to the authors, may have originally intended to serve the ideals of human liberation in an assault upon religious dogma. Yet the power of scientific reason ultimately wound up being directed not merely against the gods, but all metaphysical ideas—including conscience and freedom—as well. “Knowledge” became divorced from “information,” norms from facts, and the scientific method, increasingly freed from any commitment to liberation, transformed nature into an object of domination, and itself into a whore employed by the highest bidder.
That thesis is evidence that from the beginning the German post-war Left has turned directly from opposition to Nazi fascism to what in our day is cheer-leading for dhimmi fascism.
Everything thereby became subject to the calculation of costs and benefits. Instrumental rationality was thus seen as stripping the supposedly “autonomous” individual, envisioned by the philosophes, of both the means and the will to resist manipulation by totalitarian movements. Enlightenment now received two connotations: its historical epoch was grounded in an anthropological understanding of civilization that, from the first, projected the opposite of progress. This gave the book its power: Horkheimer and Adorno offered not simply the critique of some prior historical moment in time, but of all human development. This made it possible to identify enlightenment not with progress, as the philistine bourgeois might like to believe, but rather—unwittingly—with barbarism, Auschwitz, and what is still often called “the totally administered society.”
[Historically,]we need to consider the actual movements with which enlightenment ideals, as against competing ideals, were connected. Highlighting the assault undertaken by the philosophes against the old feudal order and the international battle that was fought—from 1789 until 1939 and into the present-- between liberal and socialist forces imbued with the Enlightenment heritage and those forces of religious reaction, conservative prejudice, and fascist irrationalism whose inspiration derived from what Isaiah Berlin initially termed the “Counter-Enlightenment,” therefore becomes crucial. Without a sense of this battle, or what I elsewhere termed the “great divide” of modern political life, any discussion of the Enlightenment will necessarily take a purely academic form.
The philosophes had their most profound impact on the Left: Locke and Kant influenced all manner of liberals, socialists, and anarchists. Enlightenment philosophers would inspire generations of those languishing under the weight of despotism and dogma. The extent to which their political contribution is forgotten is the extent to which the contemporary left will constantly find itself intellectually reinventing the wheel.
The Enlightenment privileged a critical reflection on society, its traditions, its ideologies, and its institutions. Its spirit was opposed from the beginning, both in terms of style and content, by the type of fanaticism evidenced yesterday by secular totalitarians and today by religious fundamentalists. Just as there is a spirit of the Enlightenment, there is a phenomenology of the anti-Enlightenment.
Understanding the current clash between secularism and religious fundamentalism in the present, no less than the most profound political conflicts of the past, calls for first recognizing that the “Counter-Enlightenment” was not some “dialectical” response to the success of the Enlightenment but an immediate response, born of fear and loathing, against everything associated with its spirit. [My emphasis.]
The Enlightenment is not a trans-historical anthropological dynamic, or a disembodied set of epistemological propositions, but rather a composite of views unified by similar political ideals and social aims. [Which seems to prove exactly what Bronner says it doesn't.]
Again: the political spirit of the Enlightenment crystallized around the principles connected with fostering the accountability of institutions, reciprocity under the law, and a commitment to experiment with social reform. Not in imperialism, or racism, or the manipulation of liberty, but in these ideals lies the basis of Enlightenment universalism. Democracy remains an empty word without it. Enlightenment universalism protects rather than threatens the exercise of subjectivity. It presumes to render institutions accountable, a fundamental principle of democracy, and thereby create the preconditions for expanding individual freedom.
It [Left critique,] should instead be to reinvigorate the present, salvage the Enlightenment legacy, and contest those who would institutionally freeze its radicalism and strip away its protest character. Such an undertaking is important, moreover, since their efforts have been remarkably successful. Enlightenment thinking is seen by many as the inherently western ideology of the bourgeois gentleman....
The idea of reclaiming the Enlightenment views its subject less as a dead historical artifact than as the necessary precondition for developing any form of progressive politics in the present. Understanding the Enlightenment, in this way, calls for opposing current fashions and conceits. Despite the existence of superb classic studies on the Enlightenment, the general trend of scholarship has tended to insist upon eliminating its unifying cosmopolitan spirit—its ethos—in favor of treating diverse national, religious, gender, generational, and regional “enlightenments.” There is indeed always a danger of reifying the “Enlightenment” and ignoring the unique and particular moments of its expression. Nevertheless, what unified them made the cumulative impact of individual thinkers and national intellectual trends far greater than the sum of the parts.
Extraordinary was the way in which the philosophes evidenced a common resistance to parochial beliefs and the arrogance of power. By simply deconstructing the “Enlightenment,” the forest gets lost for the trees. Radical tendencies within it like anti-imperialism thus often come to be seen either as historical anomalies or as simple interests of this or that thinker. It also becomes easy to forget that even before 1789, the anti-philosophes of the Counter-Enlightenment were busy “reconciling and uniting their enemies well beyond their extreme differences, attributing to them common aims and common ends. Tautology aside, there is much truth to the claim that the Counter-Enlightenment invented the Enlightenment.”
If there was no “Enlightenment,” but only discrete forms of intellectual activity falling loosely under its rubric, why should the political enemies of this international trend have been the same? These representatives of church and tradition—who so vigorously opposed democracy and equality, revolution and reform, cosmopolitanism and internationalism, skepticism and science—formed a “Counter-Enlightenment International” even before the French Revolution.
Even the most anticipatory form of philosophy retains residues, reactionary assumptions, and prejudices, from its historical context. Some figures of the Enlightenment look better than others with references to the stupidities of their time. Usually ignored is the question concerning what it was reasonable to expect from these intellectuals in their own historical context. [M]any supposedly progressive historical interrogations of the past actually wind up tossing the historical context by the wayside.
Confronting such biases in progressive terms is furthermore possible only from the standpoint of the Enlightenment with its liberal and socialist inheritance. Forgotten is that the former can be held to their own ethical standards of progress while the latter cannot because they rejected those standards in the first place.
Movements often show their weakness by the way in which they, whether consciously or unconsciously, appropriate the thinking of their adversaries. This is particularly true of the contemporary left. Enough “liberals” now suggest that liberal regimes must rest on a homogeneous national community with shared cultural values; others influenced by postmodern ideology view universal concepts as complicit with domination and as a threat to their particular identities; “western” ideas no less than the philosophies generating them are strenuously contested by self-styled radical anti-imperialists whose “nonwestern” beliefs are associated with indigenous religious traditions and romanticized visions of an organic society.
Democratic society was initially understood as an experiment that developed hand in hand with the liberation of the critical spirit. That various philosophes harbored such beliefs is irrefutable; that the Enlightenment ethos is reducible to them, however, is unsustainable.
Reason is not the enemy of experience. Nothing is more foolish than to confuse a reactionary pseudo-universalism with the genuinely democratic universalism that underpins the liberal rule of law, the constraint of arbitrary power, and the free exercise of subjectivity.
Just as the philosophes saw science not merely as an ordering device but as a self-critical method that could be used in the fight for liberation from outdated prejudices and dogmas, their view of aesthetics called upon individuals to expand the realm of their experience.
***
For the sake of brevity we truncated a nicely reasoned and well-written essay that one might well enjoy reading in its entirety. Bronner points out that the history of the Enlightenment is coherent and valuable to the Left, though the Left is today fascistic in itslef and conflated with fascist Islam after its abandonment of Enlightenment principles and precepts. Thanks in part to Horkheimer and Adorno, thanks to the endless struggle of Counter Enlightenment privilege, thanks to the basic lack of historical understanding of the average Leftist, thanks to the French post-modernist Nazi collabvorators who've destroyed the Enlightenment project within the West as a higher Human achievement that they simply cannot reconcile with their innate fascist authoritarian hierarchies and reactionary irrationalisms, their relativistic attacks on reasoned and universal morality and progress, today we stand with a Left entirely corrupted by fascism, working hand-in-glove with fascist Islam and its own self-imposed dhimmitude.
What do we do? What is to be done?
We must clearly understand our enemies, the fascist dhimmi Left in support of fascist Islam for the sake of the reactionary programme of destroying Modernism and the Enlightenment. Once we know what fascism is, then we can begin to identify its proponents, see what it is that we take for granted, and compare our informed opinions with the reality of the Left doctrine of philobarbarism and fascist collusion with Islam. We will continue this project in coming posts. We wiull see what is to be done, and we will organize to combat the fascist threat to Modernity.
Who are we fighting and what do they want? Not just Moslems who want to impose their idiot shari'a tribal customs on the world, we are fighting the traitors of the West, the dhimmis of the Left. The West fascist Right is so absurd that it barely merits criticism, but the Left is powerful; in fact, being the leaders of the social discourse that originates in the Enlightenment itself, we have no other choice than to use the language of the Left to discuss the Left's hatred of Modernity and the Enlightenment.
Our modernity is a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, but not that alone. Industrialization alone has occured in numerous places without the socio-political advances and benefits the West achieved in its French and American Revolutions, i.e. material progress with human progress, industry in conjunction with Enlightenment philosophies. But these advances are not assumed by all to be of benefit to all. Right from the beginning of the era of Enlightenment the reactionary privilege of feudalism has fought with all there force against the masses in struggle for Modernity as we make it by the day. Below, Bronner discusses some of the history and critique of the forces of reaction, Left and Right. Our problem is with the Left philobarbarism of counter-revolutionary dhimmitude, less so with the forces of Right reaction.
Our first problems arise from Horkheimer and Adorno's Left critique of Modernism in light of post-industrial alienation in terms of concentration camps as the final out-come of capitalism, a look at Modernism as having run its natural course right to the gates of Auschwitz; but more importantly the Left's reactionary stance is inherent in its communitarianism and agrarian entrenchment, forgetting Horkheimer and Adorno as irrelevant to our purposes: starting from reaction per se, rather than from a position of Enlightenment Reason, the Left is only able to deepen the hole it's in, adding nothing to the discourse but more of the same, which is, unfortunately, agreeable to the modern masses. Bronner critiques both stances in excerpts below from his essay:
Interpreting the Enlightenment: Metaphysics, Critique, and Politics
Stephen Eric Bronner
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, amid the intellectual retrenchment consonant with the unending “war against terror,” the Enlightenment legacy has become—more than ever before—a contested terrain. Western “values,” [t]he best of them—political liberty, social justice, and cosmopolitanism—are rooted in the Enlightenment, and they retain their radical character.
Enlightenment values are still not hegemonic or establishmentarian. Authoritarianism is still rampant, most inhabitants of the world still suffer under the strictures of traditionalism, and earn less than $2 per day. The Enlightenment was always a movement of protest against the exercise of arbitrary power, the force of custom and ingrained prejudices, and the justification of social misery. Its spirit was the expression of a bourgeois class on the rise against the hegemonic feudal values of the established society and its political ideals are still subordinate to those of traditionalism and authoritarianism in most of the world. There should be no mistake: though the philosophes were responding primarily to the world associated with “throne and altar,” the ideals of these thinkers remain relevant for even for nations without a feudal past like the United States. Western nations still carry the scars of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and class inequality.
But not only the right is distorting them. These values have also come under assault from important intellectual representatives of the left: anarchists, communitarians, postmodernists, half-hearted liberals, and authoritarian socialists. Intellectual and political disorientation has been the result. Ideas long associated with reactionary movements—the privileging of experience over reason, national or ethnic identity over internationalism and cosmopolitanism, the community over the individual, custom over innovation, myth over science—have entered the thinking of the American left. Its partisans have thus become increasingly unclear about the tradition into which they fit and the purposes their politics should serve. The collapse of intellectual coherence on the left reflects the collapse of a purposeful politics from the left. Reconstructing such a politics depends upon appropriating the Enlightenment to meet new conditions.
Conservatives have, ironically, been more clear-sighted. In the past, they deplored the “nihilism” of the Enlightenment: its devastating assault on communal life, religious faith, social privilege, and traditional authority. Conservatives, and those even further to the right, consistently rejected Enlightenment concerns with individualism, dissent, secularism, reform, and the primacy of critical reflection. This differentiated them from the left.
Our problem today is that the Left has adopted to itself the stance of the traditional reactionary Right. The Left alliance with the forces of Islam, for example, is destroying the ground of Enlightenment by implementing Stalinist codes of public socio-political attitudes and behaviours, for example in rigid "Newspeak" in reference to Islam, privilging it at the expense of the rights of the majority of Modernity in the West, and especially by identifying fascist Islamic Force as superior to Modernity. Today, the Left privileges reactionary discourse against Enlightenment values.
The defense of western civilization by conservative intellectuals is, unsurprisingly, mixed with anti-Enlightenment and anti-modern prejudices. Discussion of the Enlightenment has nonetheless become skewed to the right; the radical moment has dropped out. It is no longer treated as the razor that divides “left” and right.” If there is any legitimacy to claims concerning the increasing irrelevance of fundamental political distinctions, indeed, here lies the historical source.
With its emphasis upon autonomy, tolerance, and reason—no less than its attack upon received traditions, popular prejudices, and religious superstitions—the Enlightenment was generally recognized as the foundation for any kind of progressive politics.
What's the problem?
[Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer] turned the accepted notion of progress upside down. The scientific method of the Enlightenment, according to the authors, may have originally intended to serve the ideals of human liberation in an assault upon religious dogma. Yet the power of scientific reason ultimately wound up being directed not merely against the gods, but all metaphysical ideas—including conscience and freedom—as well. “Knowledge” became divorced from “information,” norms from facts, and the scientific method, increasingly freed from any commitment to liberation, transformed nature into an object of domination, and itself into a whore employed by the highest bidder.
That thesis is evidence that from the beginning the German post-war Left has turned directly from opposition to Nazi fascism to what in our day is cheer-leading for dhimmi fascism.
Everything thereby became subject to the calculation of costs and benefits. Instrumental rationality was thus seen as stripping the supposedly “autonomous” individual, envisioned by the philosophes, of both the means and the will to resist manipulation by totalitarian movements. Enlightenment now received two connotations: its historical epoch was grounded in an anthropological understanding of civilization that, from the first, projected the opposite of progress. This gave the book its power: Horkheimer and Adorno offered not simply the critique of some prior historical moment in time, but of all human development. This made it possible to identify enlightenment not with progress, as the philistine bourgeois might like to believe, but rather—unwittingly—with barbarism, Auschwitz, and what is still often called “the totally administered society.”
[Historically,]we need to consider the actual movements with which enlightenment ideals, as against competing ideals, were connected. Highlighting the assault undertaken by the philosophes against the old feudal order and the international battle that was fought—from 1789 until 1939 and into the present-- between liberal and socialist forces imbued with the Enlightenment heritage and those forces of religious reaction, conservative prejudice, and fascist irrationalism whose inspiration derived from what Isaiah Berlin initially termed the “Counter-Enlightenment,” therefore becomes crucial. Without a sense of this battle, or what I elsewhere termed the “great divide” of modern political life, any discussion of the Enlightenment will necessarily take a purely academic form.
The philosophes had their most profound impact on the Left: Locke and Kant influenced all manner of liberals, socialists, and anarchists. Enlightenment philosophers would inspire generations of those languishing under the weight of despotism and dogma. The extent to which their political contribution is forgotten is the extent to which the contemporary left will constantly find itself intellectually reinventing the wheel.
The Enlightenment privileged a critical reflection on society, its traditions, its ideologies, and its institutions. Its spirit was opposed from the beginning, both in terms of style and content, by the type of fanaticism evidenced yesterday by secular totalitarians and today by religious fundamentalists. Just as there is a spirit of the Enlightenment, there is a phenomenology of the anti-Enlightenment.
Understanding the current clash between secularism and religious fundamentalism in the present, no less than the most profound political conflicts of the past, calls for first recognizing that the “Counter-Enlightenment” was not some “dialectical” response to the success of the Enlightenment but an immediate response, born of fear and loathing, against everything associated with its spirit. [My emphasis.]
The Enlightenment is not a trans-historical anthropological dynamic, or a disembodied set of epistemological propositions, but rather a composite of views unified by similar political ideals and social aims. [Which seems to prove exactly what Bronner says it doesn't.]
Again: the political spirit of the Enlightenment crystallized around the principles connected with fostering the accountability of institutions, reciprocity under the law, and a commitment to experiment with social reform. Not in imperialism, or racism, or the manipulation of liberty, but in these ideals lies the basis of Enlightenment universalism. Democracy remains an empty word without it. Enlightenment universalism protects rather than threatens the exercise of subjectivity. It presumes to render institutions accountable, a fundamental principle of democracy, and thereby create the preconditions for expanding individual freedom.
It [Left critique,] should instead be to reinvigorate the present, salvage the Enlightenment legacy, and contest those who would institutionally freeze its radicalism and strip away its protest character. Such an undertaking is important, moreover, since their efforts have been remarkably successful. Enlightenment thinking is seen by many as the inherently western ideology of the bourgeois gentleman....
The idea of reclaiming the Enlightenment views its subject less as a dead historical artifact than as the necessary precondition for developing any form of progressive politics in the present. Understanding the Enlightenment, in this way, calls for opposing current fashions and conceits. Despite the existence of superb classic studies on the Enlightenment, the general trend of scholarship has tended to insist upon eliminating its unifying cosmopolitan spirit—its ethos—in favor of treating diverse national, religious, gender, generational, and regional “enlightenments.” There is indeed always a danger of reifying the “Enlightenment” and ignoring the unique and particular moments of its expression. Nevertheless, what unified them made the cumulative impact of individual thinkers and national intellectual trends far greater than the sum of the parts.
Extraordinary was the way in which the philosophes evidenced a common resistance to parochial beliefs and the arrogance of power. By simply deconstructing the “Enlightenment,” the forest gets lost for the trees. Radical tendencies within it like anti-imperialism thus often come to be seen either as historical anomalies or as simple interests of this or that thinker. It also becomes easy to forget that even before 1789, the anti-philosophes of the Counter-Enlightenment were busy “reconciling and uniting their enemies well beyond their extreme differences, attributing to them common aims and common ends. Tautology aside, there is much truth to the claim that the Counter-Enlightenment invented the Enlightenment.”
If there was no “Enlightenment,” but only discrete forms of intellectual activity falling loosely under its rubric, why should the political enemies of this international trend have been the same? These representatives of church and tradition—who so vigorously opposed democracy and equality, revolution and reform, cosmopolitanism and internationalism, skepticism and science—formed a “Counter-Enlightenment International” even before the French Revolution.
Even the most anticipatory form of philosophy retains residues, reactionary assumptions, and prejudices, from its historical context. Some figures of the Enlightenment look better than others with references to the stupidities of their time. Usually ignored is the question concerning what it was reasonable to expect from these intellectuals in their own historical context. [M]any supposedly progressive historical interrogations of the past actually wind up tossing the historical context by the wayside.
Confronting such biases in progressive terms is furthermore possible only from the standpoint of the Enlightenment with its liberal and socialist inheritance. Forgotten is that the former can be held to their own ethical standards of progress while the latter cannot because they rejected those standards in the first place.
Movements often show their weakness by the way in which they, whether consciously or unconsciously, appropriate the thinking of their adversaries. This is particularly true of the contemporary left. Enough “liberals” now suggest that liberal regimes must rest on a homogeneous national community with shared cultural values; others influenced by postmodern ideology view universal concepts as complicit with domination and as a threat to their particular identities; “western” ideas no less than the philosophies generating them are strenuously contested by self-styled radical anti-imperialists whose “nonwestern” beliefs are associated with indigenous religious traditions and romanticized visions of an organic society.
Democratic society was initially understood as an experiment that developed hand in hand with the liberation of the critical spirit. That various philosophes harbored such beliefs is irrefutable; that the Enlightenment ethos is reducible to them, however, is unsustainable.
Reason is not the enemy of experience. Nothing is more foolish than to confuse a reactionary pseudo-universalism with the genuinely democratic universalism that underpins the liberal rule of law, the constraint of arbitrary power, and the free exercise of subjectivity.
Just as the philosophes saw science not merely as an ordering device but as a self-critical method that could be used in the fight for liberation from outdated prejudices and dogmas, their view of aesthetics called upon individuals to expand the realm of their experience.
***
For the sake of brevity we truncated a nicely reasoned and well-written essay that one might well enjoy reading in its entirety. Bronner points out that the history of the Enlightenment is coherent and valuable to the Left, though the Left is today fascistic in itslef and conflated with fascist Islam after its abandonment of Enlightenment principles and precepts. Thanks in part to Horkheimer and Adorno, thanks to the endless struggle of Counter Enlightenment privilege, thanks to the basic lack of historical understanding of the average Leftist, thanks to the French post-modernist Nazi collabvorators who've destroyed the Enlightenment project within the West as a higher Human achievement that they simply cannot reconcile with their innate fascist authoritarian hierarchies and reactionary irrationalisms, their relativistic attacks on reasoned and universal morality and progress, today we stand with a Left entirely corrupted by fascism, working hand-in-glove with fascist Islam and its own self-imposed dhimmitude.
What do we do? What is to be done?
We must clearly understand our enemies, the fascist dhimmi Left in support of fascist Islam for the sake of the reactionary programme of destroying Modernism and the Enlightenment. Once we know what fascism is, then we can begin to identify its proponents, see what it is that we take for granted, and compare our informed opinions with the reality of the Left doctrine of philobarbarism and fascist collusion with Islam. We will continue this project in coming posts. We wiull see what is to be done, and we will organize to combat the fascist threat to Modernity.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Counter-Enlightenment
Is the Left fascist? What does it mean to claim that the Left is in fact fascist? Let's find out something more than we might know now. Below we have excerpts from a book review, an interivew, and a magazine feature. Each discusses the Left as fascist. The authors range from a liberal to a socialist to a moderate/Right journalist.
We begin with a look at the Left's infatuation with philobarbarism and the infantalization of the lumpen-proletariat after the disappearence of a traditional industrial working-class. When "the workers' no longer form a coherent base for the socialist intelligensia to lead, where do the intellectuals go? To the mean streets in the West, looking for drug addicts and mental patients, and to the most wretched Third World states of decay they can find for barbarian fodder. We see an abandonment of Left principles of progressivism in favor of reaction, of doing good in favor now of doing nothing good and often of doing evil in the name of some imaginary utopian romance that leads to nothing more than violence, more poverty, more disease, more brutality against women, more of all the evils we have struggled throughout history to stop. Instead, the Left has embraced all the evils it once sought to defeat. The Age of Enlightenment, the true beginning of the greatness of the victories we have today, is abandoned by the Left in favor of self-serving fascism and fascist careerism. These stellar mediocrities use the people to gorge themselves on power, status, and money. The capitalist pigs, the robber barons, the rich banker fat cats, these are nothing today compared to the world-wide power of the dhimmi fascist Left. It is the Left that has control of the majority of the world's population, and it uses them to death. Until we see the nature of fascism at work we will not understand how the Left manages to play this game so successfully. We have to begin by knowing what fascism is, and then, seeing its roots and its history we can see the current lot of Leftists as they truly are.
We see over and again an attempted Leftist power-grab using the world's losers, the primitives, as their constituents as proxies and tools, the useful idiots of Leftism. The Left, being a reactionary force, must find and maintain a pool of surplus proles to feed into their devouring, unsustainable ideological machine. Few rational people would willingly put themselves under the control of officious mediocrities, so there must be in place a system of systems to generate the conditions of need that the Left requires to maintain its power base. Doing a task that can't succeed is a great way of remaining forever employed. Saving the poor by maintaining the poverty generating system is to determine forever ones employment.
The continuing success of the Enlightenment project is a direct threat to the power of the mediocrities, of, for example, the poverty pimps; therefore, to destroy the Enlightenment is to restore the conditions of poverty in which the pimps have ample room for recruitment of the masses to the streets.
The Counter Enlightenment, the origins of Post-Modernism, begins in earnest in the French Revolution of 1789. The Counter Enlightenment is the beginning of modern fascism, a modern revisoinist continuation of the past 5,000 years of the primitive Argricultural Revolution. Many of the thinkers below are Nazi collaborators, many of them respected and even highly prized thinkers of the modern Left. They live in disguise, but they are known and can can be seen for what they are: fascists. And once we know what they are we can know whether we agree with them as they are rather than what we think they are.
We begin our look at the history of the fascism of the modern Left with a book review:
25 October 2004
Are post modernists fascists?
George Crowder, Flinders University
Richard Wolin The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004 (xxii + 375 pp). ISBN 0-691-11464-1 (hardback) RRP $55.95.
One of the marvels of social and political thought over the past twenty years has been the alliance between left-wing politics and postmodernist philosophy, or anti-philosophy. Thinkers like Foucault and Derrida have been enshrined as intellectual authorities in the cause of oppressed groups of many kinds: indigenous and colonised peoples, women, the gay community, refugees, and others. Yet little thought is required to raise serious doubts about how far progressive causes are really assisted by the kind of thinking that these writers have promoted.
***
Notoriously, Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party and, as Rector of Freiburg University, an enthusiastic propagandist for the regime. After the War, he tried to play down his complicity, giving the impression that this was a temporary aberration. But in the 1980s it emerged that he had been far more deeply implicated in Nazi affairs than he claimed, remaining an active informant on friends and colleagues until the end of the War (Farias 1989).
***
Of course, it is one thing to say that certain postmodernists or proto-postmodernists were fascists in a previous life (Paul de Man was another), and something else again to argue that they were fascists because of their postmodernism. To infer that postmodernists must be fascists simply because some postmodernists have been fascists in the past would be as silly as concluding that all liberals must be in favour of slavery because Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owner. Wolin is, indeed, aware of the dangers of simply claiming 'guilt by association' (xiv). His task is to show not just that some forerunners of postmodernism were, as it happens, fascists or fascist sympathisers, but that their politics emerged directly out of, or at least fitted naturally with, their underlying philosophy.
***
The source of that philosophy was Counter-Enlightenment opposition to the liberal and republican ideals of the French revolution. For thinkers like Joseph de Maistre, the upheavals of the revolution demonstrated the evils of the Enlightenment faith in humanism, universal reason, and the possibility of social and political improvement based on the values of liberalism and democracy. The fundamental message of the Counter-Enlightenment was the very opposite of all this: reason and universality should be rejected as social guides, and the claims of instinct and local tradition reasserted. Human nature is flawed and unreliable, needing to be constrained by received institutions exemplified by the unquestioned, mystical authority of the king, the priest and the executioner
***
Carl Jung, the darling of New Agers, flourished under the Third Reich.
***
It may seem a long way from here to the freewheeling relativism of the postmodernists, but Wolin deftly sketches some of the main links. The central point is the rejection of reason, and nowhere was this more enthusiastically embraced than in nineteenth-century Germany. As Wolin puts it, the doctrine of the Counter-Enlightenment became, essentially, 'the German Ideology'. Its most spectacular practitioner was Nietzsche, whose reception by the French and later American postmodernists is the subject of a chapter appropriately entitled 'Zarathustra Goes to Hollywood'. What Foucault, Derrida and others take from Nietzsche is his 'perspectivism', his claim to have unmasked 'reason' and 'morality' as mere vehicles of the will to power. What they conveniently ignore is Nietzsche's reassertion, on this basis, of the aristocratic values of heroic society, and consequently of a 'Great Politics' in which the mass of humanity is a mere instrument for an elite. Reducing Nietzsche to his relativism, cleansed of his substantial moral and political message, postmodernist Nietzscheanism makes possible 'a stance of uncompromising philosophical radicalism while avoiding all questions of direct moral or political commitment' (p. 34).
Subsequent chapters tell a similar story about two more German gurus, whose post-War domestication conceals a less than savoury intellectual background. Carl Jung, the darling of New Agers, flourished under the Third Reich, having created a form of psychoanalysis that, unlike Freud's Enlightenment-oriented view, meshed comfortably with Nazi ideology. For Jung, the key to mental health was liberation from the rational ego and access to the mythic archetypes of the collective unconscious—a process that he believed was easier for Aryans than for Jews. Hans-Georg Gadamer is today celebrated by sensitive communitarians like Charles Taylor as the father of 'hermeneutics', a view that emphasises the local, situated character of all interpretation. But Wolin points out the strong affinity between Gadamer's hermeneutics and that staple of the Counter-Enlightenment, the uncritical acceptance of tradition—in his own words the celebration of 'prejudice'. In the 1930s the tradition Gadamer valued most was that of German cultural superiority. The acceptability of his views enabled him to advance his career at the expense of Jewish colleagues, and during the war he made himself useful to the regime by lecturing on the propaganda circuit. After the war he quietly dropped the theme of German superiority in favour of an apparently more neutral cultural relativism. But his use of relativism to defend the Soviet Union exhibited, as Wolin aptly puts it, 'a failure to learn' (pp. 120-21).
Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot sang the praises of fascism in the 1930s.
***
The Counter-Enlightenment celebrated a different set of values that seemed to have been lost in modern times but might yet be recovered: vitality and manliness, ritual rather than reflection, the mythic or mystical dimension of experience in contrast with the scientific, self-assertion through violent conflict, and above all the rejection of reason in favour of action and instinct. These were the themes of Nietzsche—and they became the themes of fascism. These values attracted Heidegger, appealing to his philosophical emphasis on the authenticity of 'being' in contrast with reason and the pursuit of truth.
Among those French intellectuals who took the same path, Wolin singles out two as especially significant. Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot sang the praises of fascism in the 1930s, retreating into 'inner emigration' during the War only when it became clear what fascism looked like at close quarters. Their significance, for Wolin, lies in their influence on Foucault, Derrida and their supporters. From Bataille the postmodernists take their condemnation of reason as 'homogenising' and suppressive of 'difference', without acknowledging that the difference Bataille is principally concerned to reassert includes anti-democratic authoritarianism and gratuitous ('transgressive') violence. From Blanchot the postmodernists inherit a suspicion of language as an insuperable barrier between thought and reality, ignoring the origins of this view as a rationalisation of Blanchot's prudent wartime 'silence'.
These themes—the 'impossibility' of language, and the homogeneity of reason and democracy—come together in the work of Derrida in particular. For Derrida, language can never generate the stable meaning presupposed by notions of objective truth, and the generality of legal rules necessarily impedes 'justice', which is always peculiar to concrete cases. In short, the notion of objective truth is incoherent, and the rule of law unjust. As Wolin points out, the first of these conclusions is itself incoherent, since it presupposes the objectivity it purports to deny. The second is typical of the postmodernist penchant for ludicrous overstatement and for striking radical postures that have no sane implications for political action. Justice, obviously enough, calls for both particularity and generality: attention to the particularity of cases, and general rules to prevent bias and special pleading. The silliness of Derrida's pronouncements on the injustice of law is nicely brought out by Wolin though the story of the philosopher's arrest in Czechoslovakia in 1981. Suddenly subject to a genuinely arbitrary decision process, Derrida found himself impelled towards the thought that humanist norms like the rule of law might have some value after all. Undaunted and with 'great lucidity', however, he rationalised this odd experience by positing a new philosophical category in which contradictory thoughts confront each other without 'intersecting': 'the intellectual baroque'.
Postmodernism does not entail a thoroughgoing dedication to fascism.
Where does the defining postmodernist hostility towards truth come from? Hatred of the Enlightenment and the modern world is its remote source....
Both extreme right and extreme left looked forward to utopias that either did not materialise or did not last. After that, where is there to go (for the unapologetic) but inward, into a position of extreme cynicism in which all norms are equally spent and all politics equally suspect?
George Crowder is Senior Lecturer in the School of Political and International Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide. He is the author of Classical Anarchism (1991), Liberalism and Value Pluralism (2002), and Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (forthcoming 2004).
ISSN 1832-1526
Australian Review of Public Affairs
© 2000–2005 School of Economics and Political Science, The University of Sydney
***
Below we have an abreviated version of an interview with S.E Bronner speaking on the Enlightenment. Bronner begins his talk about the Enlightenment and the assaults on it by post-modernist reaction; and we conclude with his discussion of Adorno on the concentration of Modernity into death camps:
Enlightenment Now: Stephen Eric Bronner
in conversation with Gregory Zucker
January 2005
Stephen Eric Bronner, senior editor of Logos, an interdisciplinary Internet journal, is Professor of Political Science and a member of the Graduate Faculties of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Rutgers University. His latest book, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, was published this fall by Columbia University Press. The Rail's Gregory Zucker recently sat down with Bronner.
Gregory Zucker (Rail): What is the "Enlightenment"?
Stephen Eric Bronner: [M]aking sense of reality is impossible without history. So let me put it this way: the Enlightenment refers to an international intellectual trend that emerged during the 17th to 18th centuries, whose most important representatives were committed to cosmopolitanism, secularism, scientific experimentation, civil liberties, social reform, and—above all—the constriction of arbitrary power. The Enlightenment can be seen simply as the justification for an emerging capitalist class contemptuous of feudalism, or what was known as l'ancien regime, but I think of it more as the ideological reflection of an age marked by the democratic revolutions in England, the United States, France, and elsewhere. Its great representatives like Isaac Newton, David Hume, and John Locke in England, Spinoza in Holland, Voltaire and Rousseau in France, or Kant and Lessing in Germany, crystallize probably what's best about modernity. Together they constituted what was called a "republic of letters." They read each others' works, supported each other, debated with one another, and created a new international context of discourse. Too many of us, in spite of the Internet, are remarkably provincial in cultural matters. The Enlightenment provided the basis for an international civil society and a new form of cosmopolitan opinion that becomes particularly relevant when talking about the worst aspects of globalization.
Rail: But hasn't the Enlightenment been invalidated, or at least badly tainted, by "Euro-centrism"?
Bronner: The Enlightenment was a European phenomenon. But reformers and radicals in other cultures anticipated its concern with tolerance, scientific experimentation, social reform, cosmopolitanism, and what today we call human rights. It is absurd to suggest that only the West, or western thinkers, dealt with such issues. If Enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Montesquieu and others romanticized China, or Persia, or Native Americans, their naivete was born of good faith. The impact of the European Enlightenment also extended to the great slave rebellion in Haiti led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, as well as to Latin America and figures like Simon Bolivar, the great liberator and democrat. With respect to the present, in fact, the Enlightenment has relevance for all cultures because they are increasingly being faced with similar issues. Today we talk about a "Clash of Civilizations" between the "West and the rest," but that's the wrong way to think about things. Progressives in both western and non-western nations are increasingly being confronted with cultural and political questions concerning the intolerance of fundamentalists, the unthinking acceptance of tradition, the arbitrary power exercised by privileged elites and undemocratic institutions, infringements on human rights, and the fear of scientific progress. We are—right now and right here in the United States—witnessing the emergence of a new counter-enlightenment in the form of neo-conservatism: its unabashed provincialism, its rejection of social reform, its acceptance of privilege, its fear of science, its contempt for international law, and cultural experimentation. These all played a role in the last election.
Rail: Now what about Horkheimer and Adorno?
Bronner: All right: their classic work basically identified the Enlightenment with scientific or, better, mathematical methods of thinking about reality. Their argument is actually very simple. Where scientific rationality was initially used to attack religious, superstitious, and mythical dogma in the name of free inquiry, tolerance, and open society, soon enough—or so Horkheimer and Adorno argued—scientific rationality was unleashed against those ethical values that had inspired its use in the first place. What is seen as resulting from the Enlightenment is therefore a person without a conscience, a bean counter, or a bureaucrat, who fits perfectly into a capitalist system whose production process is based purely on profit and loss. As subjectivity is ever less prized, even while unconscious rage at its loss becomes open to greater manipulation by the "culture industry," society becomes increasingly reduced to what can be mathematically understood and rage is taken out on the other. Not liberation but the concentration camp, whose inmates are defined by the numbers tattooed on their arms, thus becomes the logical extension of the Enlightenment.
***
Above we see some of the origins of the post-modernist fascist claim that the Enlightenment is evil, as it were. If Modernity leads to death camps, then obviously it is wrong, for most of us, to continue with the Modernist project. If, a posteriori, the future is mistaken, then we can only return to the past to correct that mistake. The errors of Modernity have to be corrected by a return to pre-modernity, a reactionary fascism that few on the Left seem willing to express openly, though it is to us obvious.
Below we see a further examination of Modernity and its detractors. It is critical and crucial that we understand the nature of Modernity, of the Enlightenment, of our position vis a vis reaction, so-called post-modernism. Many of our most basic and innocuous assumptions, ranging from enviornmentalism and tarot card readings to baby-sitting our inner children to looking for ufo.s come from fascist assumptions and fascist ideologies. Those assumptions (of innocence of the postions) of ours do not make us fascists per se. But to know what those positions are, where they come from, what they mean, that is the point from which we can assess our future options in terms of what we must do to either reclaim our Modernist project or fight for its reversal.
Crimes of reason
The Economist, March 16, 1996, pp. 85-87
The ideas that shaped western thought on science, morality and politics sprang from the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which flourished in Europe in the 18th century. Are these ideas mankind's finest intellectual achievement - or, as it is once again fashionable to argue, a catastrophic error?
...Their goal was not mainly to gain a greater understanding of the physical world, but to bring reason to bear on man's place within it - that is, among other things, to bring morality and politics wholly within the scope of rational inquiry. On the face of it, these ambitions were realised. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed the world. Their legacy is western modernity.
On this last point, scholars today appear to agree. Where they disagree is on whether the legacy was for good or evil. The debate between these contending views is of more than academic interest. The West's inheritance from the intellectual battles of the 18th century was liberalism and capitalism. These have made the West, for good or ill, what it is. So modern critics of the Enlightenment are not merely picking a fight with Kant about the rational basis of morality, or with Adam Smith about the spontaneous order of the marketplace. Implicitly and explicitly, they are challenging rights (such as equality before the law) and assumptions (such as progress through technology) that have come to be taken for granted throughout the developed world.
Despite their being taken for granted, disaffection with liberal capitalism is all around.
Rather, the power of Newton's great work was that it demonstrated (or appeared to demonstrate) the staggering power of science and the susceptibility of the physical world to human understanding. In that way, Newton inspired later thinkers to demand ever more of reason. If the intellect could comprehend the universe, in its seemingly limitless complexity, then surely it could also comprehend justice, authority, right and wrong. It was in the face of these new demands, rather than in response to Newton's discoveries in their own right, that faith retreated.
The prevailing mode of Enlightenment thinking was scepticism. All ideas must face scrutiny. Only in this way could man be liberated from superstition and irrational fear. Scrutiny in turn required dissent: bad ideas must not be sheltered by intellectual tyranny, or by tyranny of any kind.
A second animating spirit was regard for the individual. Like scepticism and tolerance, individualism followed from the enthroning of reason - for reason is a faculty exercised by the individual mind. Lastly, Enlightenment thought was optimistic: though it might take centuries, the "Enlightenment project" would succeed. Through reason, man would master nature and himself; through reason, men everywhere, regardless of culture or tradition, would discover the universal rules by which they should live their lives.
[F]rom the beginning, [Enlightnment ideas] came under attack.
Broadly speaking, the assaults were (as they continue to be) of two main kinds. One group of critics argued that scientific inquiry (especially when applied to questions of human conduct) was doomed to miss the point.
Knowledge or virtue?
It was a mistake, in Herder's view, to think of human history as an advance to ever higher forms of moral thinking, to suppose that intellectual harmony would one day be achieved without regard to local differences in culture and custom. He regarded such differences as both ineradicable and desirable. Because of them, human nature expressed itself in widely differing systems of values. Herder saw a great danger in Enlightenment thinking: that, in order to hasten "progress" towards the universal system, men would consider it their duty to eradicate supposedly inferior specimens.
Modern counter-Enlightenment thinking has added little to the substance, and has subtracted much from the clarity, of these earlier arguments. Its chief contribution has been to marry the two formerly separate lines of attack.
In "Dialectic of the Enlightenment", published shortly after the second world war, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer asked why mankind, far from advancing to an ever closer harmony, had sunk into an abyss of hitherto unimaginable barbarism; why science, far from serving its Enlightenment purpose of enlarging human understanding, had only served the cause of human cruelty. Their answer was that the Enlightenment had been doomed all along to serve totalitarian goals.
By rejecting all authority but reason, the Enlightenment left wickedness unchecked. By seeking to justify morality exclusively in terms of reason, man divorced ethics from knowledge, and subordinated the one to the other. He worshipped not God but technology, and sacrificed his fellow man to it. Industrial dehumanisation, concentration camps, atomic bombs: these were the fruits of knowledge without morals.
In the name of reason, man sets himself not only against other men, but also against the natural world. In the 18th century, Rousseau and others had contrasted the "noble savage", living free and in harmony with nature, with "civilised" man - shackled by industry and commerce; dependent on technology, which expands wants faster than it can meet them. Again, the argument echoes down the years, this time much amplified: such ideas plainly anticipate modern environmentalism. Many of today's counter-Enlightenment thinkers are distinctly green, just as many greens, knowingly or otherwise, have joined the battle with Voltaire, Hume, Smith and the others that has raged for the past 250 years.
On the rocks
[T]wo arguments put forward by earlier critics remain to be addressed: first (after Herder), that different cultures can support different systems of values; second (after Hegel), that "rationality" (and its offspring, liberal capitalism) militates against human flourishing. From the first it follows that liberal values have no superior claim to legitimacy over the "non-Occidental" ideologies in which Mr Gray sees the possibility of salvation; from the second it follows that the West should urgently seek just such an alternative.
Liberation philosophy
In their responses to these arguments, the Enlightenment's followers divide into many different camps. Most followers of Kant, for instance, would insist that reason does point to a universal moral code. They might further argue that differences among the world's moral systems are more apparent than real; that convergence among systems is, in fact, happening; that, even if differences persist, there is at least a universal minimum morality recognised wherever reason prevails; that the foundations (and perhaps not just the foundations) of liberalism lie inside that minimum; and that societies which deny this are objectively wrong.
[M]odern students of the Enlightenment can be divided with no significant exceptions into admirers and detractors, according to whether they regard western modernity as a marvel (despite its failings) or a disaster (despite its superficial attractions).
But it [Modernity] does not come close to justifying the unwaveringly apocalyptic tone of nearly all anti-liberal writers.
It ought to be obvious but evidently it needs saying: to the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people, western liberalism has brought standards of material and emotional well-being unimagined in earlier times. The daily portion of all but the rich was once ignorance, injustice, fear, pain and want. On every dimension - health, education, physical security, economic opportunity - conditions of life have been utterly transformed, and for the better. As catastrophic failures go, the Enlightenment has served mankind quite well. At a minimum, the burden of proof lies with anti-liberals to propose a better alternative - something they have conspicuously failed to do.
In recent years Isaiah Berlin has done more than anybody else to test the ideas of the great liberal thinkers against the criticisms of their most creative 18th- and 19th-century opponents. Always careful to give those critics their due, he nonetheless offered this as his verdict on the champions of the Enlightenment:
The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage and disinterested love of the most gifted thinkers of the 18th century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.
That seems about right.
***
There's nothing we can add to today's post so we encourage you, dear reader, to make comments.
We begin with a look at the Left's infatuation with philobarbarism and the infantalization of the lumpen-proletariat after the disappearence of a traditional industrial working-class. When "the workers' no longer form a coherent base for the socialist intelligensia to lead, where do the intellectuals go? To the mean streets in the West, looking for drug addicts and mental patients, and to the most wretched Third World states of decay they can find for barbarian fodder. We see an abandonment of Left principles of progressivism in favor of reaction, of doing good in favor now of doing nothing good and often of doing evil in the name of some imaginary utopian romance that leads to nothing more than violence, more poverty, more disease, more brutality against women, more of all the evils we have struggled throughout history to stop. Instead, the Left has embraced all the evils it once sought to defeat. The Age of Enlightenment, the true beginning of the greatness of the victories we have today, is abandoned by the Left in favor of self-serving fascism and fascist careerism. These stellar mediocrities use the people to gorge themselves on power, status, and money. The capitalist pigs, the robber barons, the rich banker fat cats, these are nothing today compared to the world-wide power of the dhimmi fascist Left. It is the Left that has control of the majority of the world's population, and it uses them to death. Until we see the nature of fascism at work we will not understand how the Left manages to play this game so successfully. We have to begin by knowing what fascism is, and then, seeing its roots and its history we can see the current lot of Leftists as they truly are.
We see over and again an attempted Leftist power-grab using the world's losers, the primitives, as their constituents as proxies and tools, the useful idiots of Leftism. The Left, being a reactionary force, must find and maintain a pool of surplus proles to feed into their devouring, unsustainable ideological machine. Few rational people would willingly put themselves under the control of officious mediocrities, so there must be in place a system of systems to generate the conditions of need that the Left requires to maintain its power base. Doing a task that can't succeed is a great way of remaining forever employed. Saving the poor by maintaining the poverty generating system is to determine forever ones employment.
The continuing success of the Enlightenment project is a direct threat to the power of the mediocrities, of, for example, the poverty pimps; therefore, to destroy the Enlightenment is to restore the conditions of poverty in which the pimps have ample room for recruitment of the masses to the streets.
The Counter Enlightenment, the origins of Post-Modernism, begins in earnest in the French Revolution of 1789. The Counter Enlightenment is the beginning of modern fascism, a modern revisoinist continuation of the past 5,000 years of the primitive Argricultural Revolution. Many of the thinkers below are Nazi collaborators, many of them respected and even highly prized thinkers of the modern Left. They live in disguise, but they are known and can can be seen for what they are: fascists. And once we know what they are we can know whether we agree with them as they are rather than what we think they are.
We begin our look at the history of the fascism of the modern Left with a book review:
25 October 2004
Are post modernists fascists?
George Crowder, Flinders University
Richard Wolin The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004 (xxii + 375 pp). ISBN 0-691-11464-1 (hardback) RRP $55.95.
One of the marvels of social and political thought over the past twenty years has been the alliance between left-wing politics and postmodernist philosophy, or anti-philosophy. Thinkers like Foucault and Derrida have been enshrined as intellectual authorities in the cause of oppressed groups of many kinds: indigenous and colonised peoples, women, the gay community, refugees, and others. Yet little thought is required to raise serious doubts about how far progressive causes are really assisted by the kind of thinking that these writers have promoted.
***
Notoriously, Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party and, as Rector of Freiburg University, an enthusiastic propagandist for the regime. After the War, he tried to play down his complicity, giving the impression that this was a temporary aberration. But in the 1980s it emerged that he had been far more deeply implicated in Nazi affairs than he claimed, remaining an active informant on friends and colleagues until the end of the War (Farias 1989).
***
Of course, it is one thing to say that certain postmodernists or proto-postmodernists were fascists in a previous life (Paul de Man was another), and something else again to argue that they were fascists because of their postmodernism. To infer that postmodernists must be fascists simply because some postmodernists have been fascists in the past would be as silly as concluding that all liberals must be in favour of slavery because Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owner. Wolin is, indeed, aware of the dangers of simply claiming 'guilt by association' (xiv). His task is to show not just that some forerunners of postmodernism were, as it happens, fascists or fascist sympathisers, but that their politics emerged directly out of, or at least fitted naturally with, their underlying philosophy.
***
The source of that philosophy was Counter-Enlightenment opposition to the liberal and republican ideals of the French revolution. For thinkers like Joseph de Maistre, the upheavals of the revolution demonstrated the evils of the Enlightenment faith in humanism, universal reason, and the possibility of social and political improvement based on the values of liberalism and democracy. The fundamental message of the Counter-Enlightenment was the very opposite of all this: reason and universality should be rejected as social guides, and the claims of instinct and local tradition reasserted. Human nature is flawed and unreliable, needing to be constrained by received institutions exemplified by the unquestioned, mystical authority of the king, the priest and the executioner
***
Carl Jung, the darling of New Agers, flourished under the Third Reich.
***
It may seem a long way from here to the freewheeling relativism of the postmodernists, but Wolin deftly sketches some of the main links. The central point is the rejection of reason, and nowhere was this more enthusiastically embraced than in nineteenth-century Germany. As Wolin puts it, the doctrine of the Counter-Enlightenment became, essentially, 'the German Ideology'. Its most spectacular practitioner was Nietzsche, whose reception by the French and later American postmodernists is the subject of a chapter appropriately entitled 'Zarathustra Goes to Hollywood'. What Foucault, Derrida and others take from Nietzsche is his 'perspectivism', his claim to have unmasked 'reason' and 'morality' as mere vehicles of the will to power. What they conveniently ignore is Nietzsche's reassertion, on this basis, of the aristocratic values of heroic society, and consequently of a 'Great Politics' in which the mass of humanity is a mere instrument for an elite. Reducing Nietzsche to his relativism, cleansed of his substantial moral and political message, postmodernist Nietzscheanism makes possible 'a stance of uncompromising philosophical radicalism while avoiding all questions of direct moral or political commitment' (p. 34).
Subsequent chapters tell a similar story about two more German gurus, whose post-War domestication conceals a less than savoury intellectual background. Carl Jung, the darling of New Agers, flourished under the Third Reich, having created a form of psychoanalysis that, unlike Freud's Enlightenment-oriented view, meshed comfortably with Nazi ideology. For Jung, the key to mental health was liberation from the rational ego and access to the mythic archetypes of the collective unconscious—a process that he believed was easier for Aryans than for Jews. Hans-Georg Gadamer is today celebrated by sensitive communitarians like Charles Taylor as the father of 'hermeneutics', a view that emphasises the local, situated character of all interpretation. But Wolin points out the strong affinity between Gadamer's hermeneutics and that staple of the Counter-Enlightenment, the uncritical acceptance of tradition—in his own words the celebration of 'prejudice'. In the 1930s the tradition Gadamer valued most was that of German cultural superiority. The acceptability of his views enabled him to advance his career at the expense of Jewish colleagues, and during the war he made himself useful to the regime by lecturing on the propaganda circuit. After the war he quietly dropped the theme of German superiority in favour of an apparently more neutral cultural relativism. But his use of relativism to defend the Soviet Union exhibited, as Wolin aptly puts it, 'a failure to learn' (pp. 120-21).
Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot sang the praises of fascism in the 1930s.
***
The Counter-Enlightenment celebrated a different set of values that seemed to have been lost in modern times but might yet be recovered: vitality and manliness, ritual rather than reflection, the mythic or mystical dimension of experience in contrast with the scientific, self-assertion through violent conflict, and above all the rejection of reason in favour of action and instinct. These were the themes of Nietzsche—and they became the themes of fascism. These values attracted Heidegger, appealing to his philosophical emphasis on the authenticity of 'being' in contrast with reason and the pursuit of truth.
Among those French intellectuals who took the same path, Wolin singles out two as especially significant. Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot sang the praises of fascism in the 1930s, retreating into 'inner emigration' during the War only when it became clear what fascism looked like at close quarters. Their significance, for Wolin, lies in their influence on Foucault, Derrida and their supporters. From Bataille the postmodernists take their condemnation of reason as 'homogenising' and suppressive of 'difference', without acknowledging that the difference Bataille is principally concerned to reassert includes anti-democratic authoritarianism and gratuitous ('transgressive') violence. From Blanchot the postmodernists inherit a suspicion of language as an insuperable barrier between thought and reality, ignoring the origins of this view as a rationalisation of Blanchot's prudent wartime 'silence'.
These themes—the 'impossibility' of language, and the homogeneity of reason and democracy—come together in the work of Derrida in particular. For Derrida, language can never generate the stable meaning presupposed by notions of objective truth, and the generality of legal rules necessarily impedes 'justice', which is always peculiar to concrete cases. In short, the notion of objective truth is incoherent, and the rule of law unjust. As Wolin points out, the first of these conclusions is itself incoherent, since it presupposes the objectivity it purports to deny. The second is typical of the postmodernist penchant for ludicrous overstatement and for striking radical postures that have no sane implications for political action. Justice, obviously enough, calls for both particularity and generality: attention to the particularity of cases, and general rules to prevent bias and special pleading. The silliness of Derrida's pronouncements on the injustice of law is nicely brought out by Wolin though the story of the philosopher's arrest in Czechoslovakia in 1981. Suddenly subject to a genuinely arbitrary decision process, Derrida found himself impelled towards the thought that humanist norms like the rule of law might have some value after all. Undaunted and with 'great lucidity', however, he rationalised this odd experience by positing a new philosophical category in which contradictory thoughts confront each other without 'intersecting': 'the intellectual baroque'.
Postmodernism does not entail a thoroughgoing dedication to fascism.
Where does the defining postmodernist hostility towards truth come from? Hatred of the Enlightenment and the modern world is its remote source....
Both extreme right and extreme left looked forward to utopias that either did not materialise or did not last. After that, where is there to go (for the unapologetic) but inward, into a position of extreme cynicism in which all norms are equally spent and all politics equally suspect?
George Crowder is Senior Lecturer in the School of Political and International Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide. He is the author of Classical Anarchism (1991), Liberalism and Value Pluralism (2002), and Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (forthcoming 2004).
ISSN 1832-1526
Australian Review of Public Affairs
© 2000–2005 School of Economics and Political Science, The University of Sydney
***
Below we have an abreviated version of an interview with S.E Bronner speaking on the Enlightenment. Bronner begins his talk about the Enlightenment and the assaults on it by post-modernist reaction; and we conclude with his discussion of Adorno on the concentration of Modernity into death camps:
Enlightenment Now: Stephen Eric Bronner
in conversation with Gregory Zucker
January 2005
Stephen Eric Bronner, senior editor of Logos, an interdisciplinary Internet journal, is Professor of Political Science and a member of the Graduate Faculties of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Rutgers University. His latest book, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, was published this fall by Columbia University Press. The Rail's Gregory Zucker recently sat down with Bronner.
Gregory Zucker (Rail): What is the "Enlightenment"?
Stephen Eric Bronner: [M]aking sense of reality is impossible without history. So let me put it this way: the Enlightenment refers to an international intellectual trend that emerged during the 17th to 18th centuries, whose most important representatives were committed to cosmopolitanism, secularism, scientific experimentation, civil liberties, social reform, and—above all—the constriction of arbitrary power. The Enlightenment can be seen simply as the justification for an emerging capitalist class contemptuous of feudalism, or what was known as l'ancien regime, but I think of it more as the ideological reflection of an age marked by the democratic revolutions in England, the United States, France, and elsewhere. Its great representatives like Isaac Newton, David Hume, and John Locke in England, Spinoza in Holland, Voltaire and Rousseau in France, or Kant and Lessing in Germany, crystallize probably what's best about modernity. Together they constituted what was called a "republic of letters." They read each others' works, supported each other, debated with one another, and created a new international context of discourse. Too many of us, in spite of the Internet, are remarkably provincial in cultural matters. The Enlightenment provided the basis for an international civil society and a new form of cosmopolitan opinion that becomes particularly relevant when talking about the worst aspects of globalization.
Rail: But hasn't the Enlightenment been invalidated, or at least badly tainted, by "Euro-centrism"?
Bronner: The Enlightenment was a European phenomenon. But reformers and radicals in other cultures anticipated its concern with tolerance, scientific experimentation, social reform, cosmopolitanism, and what today we call human rights. It is absurd to suggest that only the West, or western thinkers, dealt with such issues. If Enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Montesquieu and others romanticized China, or Persia, or Native Americans, their naivete was born of good faith. The impact of the European Enlightenment also extended to the great slave rebellion in Haiti led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, as well as to Latin America and figures like Simon Bolivar, the great liberator and democrat. With respect to the present, in fact, the Enlightenment has relevance for all cultures because they are increasingly being faced with similar issues. Today we talk about a "Clash of Civilizations" between the "West and the rest," but that's the wrong way to think about things. Progressives in both western and non-western nations are increasingly being confronted with cultural and political questions concerning the intolerance of fundamentalists, the unthinking acceptance of tradition, the arbitrary power exercised by privileged elites and undemocratic institutions, infringements on human rights, and the fear of scientific progress. We are—right now and right here in the United States—witnessing the emergence of a new counter-enlightenment in the form of neo-conservatism: its unabashed provincialism, its rejection of social reform, its acceptance of privilege, its fear of science, its contempt for international law, and cultural experimentation. These all played a role in the last election.
Rail: Now what about Horkheimer and Adorno?
Bronner: All right: their classic work basically identified the Enlightenment with scientific or, better, mathematical methods of thinking about reality. Their argument is actually very simple. Where scientific rationality was initially used to attack religious, superstitious, and mythical dogma in the name of free inquiry, tolerance, and open society, soon enough—or so Horkheimer and Adorno argued—scientific rationality was unleashed against those ethical values that had inspired its use in the first place. What is seen as resulting from the Enlightenment is therefore a person without a conscience, a bean counter, or a bureaucrat, who fits perfectly into a capitalist system whose production process is based purely on profit and loss. As subjectivity is ever less prized, even while unconscious rage at its loss becomes open to greater manipulation by the "culture industry," society becomes increasingly reduced to what can be mathematically understood and rage is taken out on the other. Not liberation but the concentration camp, whose inmates are defined by the numbers tattooed on their arms, thus becomes the logical extension of the Enlightenment.
***
Above we see some of the origins of the post-modernist fascist claim that the Enlightenment is evil, as it were. If Modernity leads to death camps, then obviously it is wrong, for most of us, to continue with the Modernist project. If, a posteriori, the future is mistaken, then we can only return to the past to correct that mistake. The errors of Modernity have to be corrected by a return to pre-modernity, a reactionary fascism that few on the Left seem willing to express openly, though it is to us obvious.
Below we see a further examination of Modernity and its detractors. It is critical and crucial that we understand the nature of Modernity, of the Enlightenment, of our position vis a vis reaction, so-called post-modernism. Many of our most basic and innocuous assumptions, ranging from enviornmentalism and tarot card readings to baby-sitting our inner children to looking for ufo.s come from fascist assumptions and fascist ideologies. Those assumptions (of innocence of the postions) of ours do not make us fascists per se. But to know what those positions are, where they come from, what they mean, that is the point from which we can assess our future options in terms of what we must do to either reclaim our Modernist project or fight for its reversal.
Crimes of reason
The Economist, March 16, 1996, pp. 85-87
The ideas that shaped western thought on science, morality and politics sprang from the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which flourished in Europe in the 18th century. Are these ideas mankind's finest intellectual achievement - or, as it is once again fashionable to argue, a catastrophic error?
...Their goal was not mainly to gain a greater understanding of the physical world, but to bring reason to bear on man's place within it - that is, among other things, to bring morality and politics wholly within the scope of rational inquiry. On the face of it, these ambitions were realised. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed the world. Their legacy is western modernity.
On this last point, scholars today appear to agree. Where they disagree is on whether the legacy was for good or evil. The debate between these contending views is of more than academic interest. The West's inheritance from the intellectual battles of the 18th century was liberalism and capitalism. These have made the West, for good or ill, what it is. So modern critics of the Enlightenment are not merely picking a fight with Kant about the rational basis of morality, or with Adam Smith about the spontaneous order of the marketplace. Implicitly and explicitly, they are challenging rights (such as equality before the law) and assumptions (such as progress through technology) that have come to be taken for granted throughout the developed world.
Despite their being taken for granted, disaffection with liberal capitalism is all around.
Rather, the power of Newton's great work was that it demonstrated (or appeared to demonstrate) the staggering power of science and the susceptibility of the physical world to human understanding. In that way, Newton inspired later thinkers to demand ever more of reason. If the intellect could comprehend the universe, in its seemingly limitless complexity, then surely it could also comprehend justice, authority, right and wrong. It was in the face of these new demands, rather than in response to Newton's discoveries in their own right, that faith retreated.
The prevailing mode of Enlightenment thinking was scepticism. All ideas must face scrutiny. Only in this way could man be liberated from superstition and irrational fear. Scrutiny in turn required dissent: bad ideas must not be sheltered by intellectual tyranny, or by tyranny of any kind.
A second animating spirit was regard for the individual. Like scepticism and tolerance, individualism followed from the enthroning of reason - for reason is a faculty exercised by the individual mind. Lastly, Enlightenment thought was optimistic: though it might take centuries, the "Enlightenment project" would succeed. Through reason, man would master nature and himself; through reason, men everywhere, regardless of culture or tradition, would discover the universal rules by which they should live their lives.
[F]rom the beginning, [Enlightnment ideas] came under attack.
Broadly speaking, the assaults were (as they continue to be) of two main kinds. One group of critics argued that scientific inquiry (especially when applied to questions of human conduct) was doomed to miss the point.
Knowledge or virtue?
It was a mistake, in Herder's view, to think of human history as an advance to ever higher forms of moral thinking, to suppose that intellectual harmony would one day be achieved without regard to local differences in culture and custom. He regarded such differences as both ineradicable and desirable. Because of them, human nature expressed itself in widely differing systems of values. Herder saw a great danger in Enlightenment thinking: that, in order to hasten "progress" towards the universal system, men would consider it their duty to eradicate supposedly inferior specimens.
Modern counter-Enlightenment thinking has added little to the substance, and has subtracted much from the clarity, of these earlier arguments. Its chief contribution has been to marry the two formerly separate lines of attack.
In "Dialectic of the Enlightenment", published shortly after the second world war, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer asked why mankind, far from advancing to an ever closer harmony, had sunk into an abyss of hitherto unimaginable barbarism; why science, far from serving its Enlightenment purpose of enlarging human understanding, had only served the cause of human cruelty. Their answer was that the Enlightenment had been doomed all along to serve totalitarian goals.
By rejecting all authority but reason, the Enlightenment left wickedness unchecked. By seeking to justify morality exclusively in terms of reason, man divorced ethics from knowledge, and subordinated the one to the other. He worshipped not God but technology, and sacrificed his fellow man to it. Industrial dehumanisation, concentration camps, atomic bombs: these were the fruits of knowledge without morals.
In the name of reason, man sets himself not only against other men, but also against the natural world. In the 18th century, Rousseau and others had contrasted the "noble savage", living free and in harmony with nature, with "civilised" man - shackled by industry and commerce; dependent on technology, which expands wants faster than it can meet them. Again, the argument echoes down the years, this time much amplified: such ideas plainly anticipate modern environmentalism. Many of today's counter-Enlightenment thinkers are distinctly green, just as many greens, knowingly or otherwise, have joined the battle with Voltaire, Hume, Smith and the others that has raged for the past 250 years.
On the rocks
[T]wo arguments put forward by earlier critics remain to be addressed: first (after Herder), that different cultures can support different systems of values; second (after Hegel), that "rationality" (and its offspring, liberal capitalism) militates against human flourishing. From the first it follows that liberal values have no superior claim to legitimacy over the "non-Occidental" ideologies in which Mr Gray sees the possibility of salvation; from the second it follows that the West should urgently seek just such an alternative.
Liberation philosophy
In their responses to these arguments, the Enlightenment's followers divide into many different camps. Most followers of Kant, for instance, would insist that reason does point to a universal moral code. They might further argue that differences among the world's moral systems are more apparent than real; that convergence among systems is, in fact, happening; that, even if differences persist, there is at least a universal minimum morality recognised wherever reason prevails; that the foundations (and perhaps not just the foundations) of liberalism lie inside that minimum; and that societies which deny this are objectively wrong.
[M]odern students of the Enlightenment can be divided with no significant exceptions into admirers and detractors, according to whether they regard western modernity as a marvel (despite its failings) or a disaster (despite its superficial attractions).
But it [Modernity] does not come close to justifying the unwaveringly apocalyptic tone of nearly all anti-liberal writers.
It ought to be obvious but evidently it needs saying: to the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people, western liberalism has brought standards of material and emotional well-being unimagined in earlier times. The daily portion of all but the rich was once ignorance, injustice, fear, pain and want. On every dimension - health, education, physical security, economic opportunity - conditions of life have been utterly transformed, and for the better. As catastrophic failures go, the Enlightenment has served mankind quite well. At a minimum, the burden of proof lies with anti-liberals to propose a better alternative - something they have conspicuously failed to do.
In recent years Isaiah Berlin has done more than anybody else to test the ideas of the great liberal thinkers against the criticisms of their most creative 18th- and 19th-century opponents. Always careful to give those critics their due, he nonetheless offered this as his verdict on the champions of the Enlightenment:
The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage and disinterested love of the most gifted thinkers of the 18th century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.
That seems about right.
***
There's nothing we can add to today's post so we encourage you, dear reader, to make comments.
Monday, July 04, 2005
Our Colonial Mission
If fascist Islam were simply a sore eating away at the lives of a billion people somewhere else in the world, then maybe the calloused among us could ignore it. The problem is not local, however, and its inherent aggression is directed externally, toward the West as well as at itself. We have multiple states of attitude: We Modernist revolutionaries are responsible for the state of destruction in the Islamic and pre-modern world, i.e. it's our fault that the world is in a state of violent chaos, and we must stop our modernity and regress to a similar state of primitivism like them; we can pay them off; we can ignore them in the faint hope that they'll go away; we can fight those few who actually take up jets to kill us in our homes and offices and c.; we can contain the violent psychotics of Islam in their own lands and let them do whatever they will do among themselves, deporting those among us to their fellows in other lands; we can fight them and beat them when the time comes; or we can take the initiative, fight them now without the benefit of our governments' sanction, and colonize the oppressed, live with them in the general Human state, and become residents of the world-at-large in a universal state of Modernity. That follows from the example of William Walker's example of conquest in Central America. It has been done, and it can be done again. It must be done.
What is to be done? We must follow as well the example of leadership shown by V.I. Lenin, forming ourselves into professional revolutionary groups of dedicated progressivist colonialists determined to conquer and spread the three modern revolutions across the globe to all of Humanity.
Below is a piece on the "Bush Doctrine." It doesn't address our problem rightly. We must be aggressive in our own defense. We must be aggressive in the defense of our revolutions of Modernity. However, what we see is what we have. So far. We must not stop at the idea of even our own defense bvut see further to the end of primitivism and the triumph of Modernity universally.
This Marks the Death of Deterrence
By Richard Norton-Taylor
Guardian
October 9, 2002
Kissinger, a historian by profession, appreciated the significance of the new [Bush] doctrine. Regime change as an aim of military intervention is a direct challenge to the international system established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, he recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times. That treaty established the principle of "state sovereignty": that war is justified only by aggression across a national border. Though he argued that Saddam Hussein presented such a danger as to make pre-emptive action "an imperative", he warned: "It is not in the American national interest to establish pre-emption as a universal principle available to every nation."
As Kissinger suggests, this has always meant defence against an actual attack by another state, though more recently international lawyers have said it could also cover an imminent attack. As the government's law officers have advised, it certainly does not allow for war for regime change.
Bush and his advisers have made no such qualification in their quest for a new, aggressive Pax Americana, something they had wanted from the start but for which they were confident of attracting sufficient US domestic support only after the September 11 attacks.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/future/2002/1009preemptive.htm
***
The following piece is a liberalist attempt to dhimmify the response we must take toward the reactionary world of the primitives. We argue that imperialism is wrong in intent, and in result if successful. There cannot be any longer a division between the world of Modernity and the rest. They will not allow it, and we cannot afford it. One must prevail.
***
Manifest destiny warmed up?
Aug 14th 2003
From The Economist print edition
America, it is said, is the world's latest imperial power. Don't believe it
WHAT is the shelf-life of an idea? Just a few short months ago, the talk, and not just in Washington, DC was of empire, America's that is. Even before the invasion of Iraq, pundits of all stripes were casting aside their coyness to proclaim that America was the latest imperial power to bestride the world. Today, with tribulations besetting the new Romans in both Afghanistan and Iraq, their most recent conquests, the chorus has died down, but the idea is far from dead. Too many people have invested too much in it.
For several years, after all, commentators have been announcing the discovery of an American empire. Books and articles have poured forth, professors and pundits have pondered the implications and a surprising number have welcomed the new role. No need to run away from the label, argues Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: America's destiny is to police the world.
Behind the claim lies a conjunction of circumstances. First is the sheer scale of America's power. While the sole superpower remains more than ready to put its technological prowess to military use, its western allies, wearied by centuries of fighting, have been quick to cash in their post-cold-war peace dividends and turn to more pacific pursuits. Russia is diminished. China still lags behind. America's pre-eminence in the skies, at sea and on land is thus unchallenged. In terms of both brute force and gee-whizz gadgetry, it leaves even its nearest competitors standing, or rather quaking.
Matching this military might, runs the argument, is an unrivalled degree of economic power. Throw together all the output from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street and Tin Pan Alley, and you have a commercial empire that would have been the envy of the British East India Company or Cecil Rhodes. And with "hard" power and "soft" power combined, you have influence on a scale never seen before. The polite term for it is hegemony, but in reality, as Mr Boot says, it is Globocop. What other country divides the world up into five military commands with four-star generals to match, keeps several hundred thousand of its legionaries on active duty in 137 countries—and is now unafraid to use them? For, stung by the events of September 11th, America is no longer shy about spilling blood, even its own. Weren't the Afghan and Iraqi wars largely designed to show just that?
To power and global reach can therefore be added another imperial characteristic: an actual desire to sally forth and act. Even before Americans were attacked on September 11th 2001, influential voices were calling for a more activist foreign policy. Some were what Ivo Daalder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, calls "assertive nationalists", some were "democratic imperialists". Both groups were impatient with the constraints imposed by treaties, multilateral action and America's membership of international clubs like the UN. Both wanted to see America hit back when attacked. Both thought the Clinton administration had been timid, if not craven, in defence of American interests.
If, before September 11th, George Bush belonged to either of these groups, it was to the assertive nationalists—along with men like Dick Cheney, his vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, his secretary of defence. The president's instincts were to take robust action if necessary, but to avoid foreign entanglements. In particular, even as a candidate, he had been hostile to the idea of "nation-building" (correctly, state-building) abroad, an ambition more closely identified with the democratic imperialists, also known as neoconservatives. Later, though, Mr Bush started to come round to that idea. September 11th, he was to say a year after the event, "taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states." Accordingly, "We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent."
So there it is. The American empire passes the duck test: it not only looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it also quacks like a duck. And, unfashionable as the idea may seem, it has been given a remarkably warm reception. Even non-Americans seem well-disposed. Over a year ago Robert Cooper, a British diplomat, called for "a new kind of imperialism", albeit one that would be provided by the "post-modern European Union". Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian now at Harvard, has also been ready to argue that "imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it is politically incorrect," though not for him another European imperium. Doubtful as he is about the enterprise, he can see no alternative to American leadership.
Many like Mr Ignatieff are ready to lend support to the idea of an American empire, moved by a desire to bring people living in failed states out of their disorder and misery, and believing that only America can run such an empire. Others are more concerned to deny terrorists a base from which to launch attacks on what was once the inviolable fortress of the West. All take succour from recent, generally favourable reassessments of the British empire, notably the one offered in a book (and television series) by Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian now at New York University. "What the British empire proved", writes Mr Ferguson, "is that empire is a form of international government that can work—and not just for the benefit of the ruling power." The British empire, he suggests, "though not without blemish", may have been the least bloody path to modernity for its subjects.
Such thoughts are still too controversial for senior members of the Bush administration to utter aloud. "We don't seek an empire," avers Mr Bush himself. "Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others." With equal vigour, Mr Rumsfeld insists: "We're not imperialistic." But after one regime-changing war in Afghanistan and another in Iraq, the administration seems to be gathering the wool of empire, and doing so with a civilising mission that sounds pretty imperial.
If Mr Bush does not state the aims explicitly, the neocons feel no such embarrassment. For them, Afghanistan and Iraq are just the start. The transformation of the entire Middle East—Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the lot—must now ensue. In logic, once that is democratised under American tutelage, other regions will have to follow. The United States has long felt free to intervene in Latin America; even before September 11th it was being drawn into Colombia. The Balkans, after a more direct intervention, are benefiting from even starker American supervision (or indirect rule, to use the imperial term, via the EU and UN). Can parts of Asia and Africa be far behind?
Perhaps they can. It depends, of course, on what is meant by empire, and therefore on what counts as a constituent part. In one sense, America has had an empire for years. In pursuit of its "manifest destiny", which would have been called Lebensraum (room to grow in) in 1930s Germany, 19th-century American expansionists laid claim to most of their continent. Some parts, such as Alaska and the huge swathe of land between the Rockies and the Mississippi that came with the Louisiana Purchase, were bought. Others were acquired more traditionally: California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and parts of Colorado and Wyoming all fell into America's lap at the end of the 1846-48 war that President James Polk had baited Mexico into fighting, chiefly to obtain California.
A second imperial phase came after the Spanish-American war of 1898. This "splendid little war", in the words of the secretary of state, John Hay, delivered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The expansionist impulse continued under Teddy Roosevelt, whose big stick (carry one, while talking softly, he advised) and amendments to the Monroe Doctrine (his corollary proclaimed the United States' right to intervene anywhere in Latin America to prevent the Europeans doing so) have helped to make him a hero in today's Washington. A man of pre-emptive action—grab Hawaii, or see it threaten America's west coast, he argued—Roosevelt is Mr Bush's favourite president, and hugely admired by Mr Rumsfeld too.
But soon America was drawing back, first under Roosevelt himself and then under Woodrow Wilson, whose "14 points" set out an idealistic programme for a just peace after the first world war, based on collective security and national self-determination. Yet by the end of the next world war, America, the only country to emerge unambiguously strengthened, had entered a third imperial phase. It was formally in occupation in West Germany and Japan, and it was the de facto power in a variety of places from Dutch Indonesia to the Belgian Congo, from most of Latin America to much of Indochina.
If these earlier imperiums were empires, then perhaps America has indeed acquired a new one. But if the imperial attribution is to mean anything, an empire has to have at least two characteristics besides those of huge might and a willingness to use it. An empire must also be a hierarchical system, in which ultimate control resides at the centre, in this case Washington, DC, and all the colonies, client states, satrapies, sepoys, slaves and helots must understand that. And it must be enduring. True, territories can be acquired one by one for a series of different reasons, as Britain's first colonies were. But, as Adam Smith said, "every empire aims at immortality." In other words, running colonies collectively as an empire requires the intention of either continuous control or, more likely, some sort of transformation, which is where state-building comes in, ideally laced with a bit of missionary zeal. The thrills of empire are not those of the one-night stand.
In short, the empire now proclaimed in America's name is at best a dull duck, at worst a dead duck, unless it is to be a big strong drake that intends to throw its weight around for quite a while. And this in turn raises two difficulties for the concept of a new American empire. One is that the subjects won't like it. The other is that Americans won't either.
Theory, meet practice
For the truth of the first proposition, take a look at Iraq. Four months after the fall of Baghdad, America still faces what one of its own top generals has called "war, however you describe it". Even at the outset, the happy natives failed to greet their liberators quite as joyfully as some had so obviously hoped. Yes, Saddam Hussein was loathed; no, the Iraqis would not die for him in any numbers; but now, please leave us to get on with our own affairs. No matter that the Iraqis are in no position to run their own affairs. They still do not want their country run for them. Resistance is encouraged by the emperor's failure to fix the plumbing, stop the looting and get the lights back on, never mind the constant indignities that go with running an empire: arrests, roadblocks and house-to-house searches that offend the modesty of devout Muslim women. The combination of cock-up and hostility has not only cost the new administration its first boss, Jay Garner. It has also led America to reverse its plans to start cutting the number of its occupying troops. A constitution and free elections are promised for next year, but the progress towards democracy has been much slower than was at first hoped.
Just a few teething troubles? Up to a point, certainly. But Afghanistan, too, suggests that the imperial role is neither popular nor easy. Nearly two years after a singularly successful toppling of the Taliban, the country is still largely in the hands of warlords of dubious allegiance, each with his own militia (see article). They pay nominal obeisance to the proconsul, President Hamid Karzai, but pay him his dues either grudgingly or not at all, preferring to keep the revenues they collect for their own militias. The 5,000 or so peacekeepers, the emperor's proxy army, scarcely dare leave the capital, Kabul, though they are now under NATO command. In the provinces, meanwhile, anything may be going on. The UN has just said that it is suspending work in the south after a series of attacks, and the Taliban are talking of new offensives in the north.
What price commitment?
All this is grist to the mill of the true believers in America's imperial mission. It just goes to show that an early exit after a quick war solves nothing. If the peace is to endure, if the rule of law is to be established, if democratic institutions are to take root, you had better be prepared for a lengthy undertaking, with men, money and limitless patience. Such has been the lesson of Bosnia, Kosovo and Northern Ireland—a lesson yet to be learnt perhaps in Congo, Sierra Leone and countless other hell-holes less pressing on the western conscience. The neo-imperialists have logic on their side when they argue that regime change alone is not enough, and, to their credit, they say they are ready for the long haul. Mr Boot, one of their foremost advocates, believes America is too. The price is affordable, he argues, and, in its containment of the Soviet Union and other policies, America has shown it can sustain a commitment over long decades.
Sorry for the inconvenience—we'll try not to be too long
It is a beguiling argument. But a contradiction lies at the heart of the imperialists' concept. Imperialism and democracy are at odds with each other. The one implies hierarchy and subordination, the other equality and freedom of choice. People nowadays are not willing to bow down before an emperor, even a benevolent one, in order to be democratised. They will protest, and the ensuing pain will be felt by the imperial power as well as by its subjects. For Americans, the pain will not be just a matter of budget deficits and body bags; it will also be a blow to the very heart of what makes them American—their constitutional belief in freedom. Freedom is in their blood; it is integral to their sense of themselves. It binds them together as nothing else does, neither ethnicity, nor religion, nor language. And it is rooted in hostility to imperialism—the imperial rule of George III. Americans know that empires lack democratic legitimacy. Indeed, they once had a tea party to prove it.
Some imperialists may be untroubled by such thoughts. Throughout their imperial history, the British, a rather steak-and-kidney sort of people, not much interested in constitutional concepts, would generally fight to defend their own freedom but did not feel obliged to introduce it in their colonies so long as democracy was in prospect for their subjects one distant day. They were helped in this happy procrastination by powerful practical interests (they exported both settlers and capital to their colonies), by a degree of racism, and by a sustained sense of semi-religious mission. And despite the many hardships, those who ran it also had fun with their empire (lots of dressing up with funny hats, playing polo and shooting tigers); and it was a commercial enterprise ("Trade follows the flag," noted Rhodes).
Little, if any of this applies to Americans. The neocons may have the missionary zeal, but even this is likely to pall in the face of setbacks. There is certainly no zeal to bear the financial burden: Mr Bush's latest budget was drawn up without any money at all for Afghanistan, and the costs are rising in Iraq (to nearly $4 billion a month, just for the soldiery), even as Mr Rumsfeld says more troops may be needed. Unlike most empires of old, the United States is an importer, these days, both of capital and of migrants.
America has changed since September 11th. The new mood allows for more nationalism, more assertiveness, less patience with allies, a greater readiness to go it alone. But there is no appetite to spend a lifetime in a sweaty country in the service of a noble cause. The memories of Vietnam, where every effort to withdraw or hand over to the locals seemed to lead to further entanglement, have not departed. And though the rhetorical heat may now be turned on Iran and Syria, Mr Rumsfeld and his fellow fire-eaters know full well that Americans are not ready for another invasion. Even if, hallelujah, regime change in such countries could be effected peacefully, would the United States really be prepared to shoulder the white man's burden across the Middle East?
It is unlikely, to say the least; the imperial idea is a big exaggeration, like previous fads. It was fashionable, after all, to declare history at a close not so long ago. The new battlegrounds would be markets, said some pundits. Commerce, ideas and information were the weapons of the modern world; military might was for the pterodactyls. To be sure, America is now going through an imperial phase, but this one has more in common with its earlier imperial phases than with the imperial eras of Britain, Byzantium or Rome. If the assertive nationalists and the democratic imperialists have come together over Iraq, that does not mean the administration has signed up for the entire neocon agenda. And as for the foreign-policy pundits, in time they will move on to a new idea.
That does not mean Mr Bush is wrong to think that democracy is the best hope for the world, though it will surely have to take different forms in different places. He is right. But he is also right in disavowing any imperial intentions. America will have to promote its aims some other way, probably by leading multilateral action. Empire is simply not the American way. If the United States has to intervene in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and then stay on, it will not enjoy the experience. Running the place, it will discover, is nasty and brutish, so it had better also be short. Good or bad, that is not what most people mean by an imperium.
***
The Human population is bifurcating, splitting between the primitives of the world as it has been for the past 5,000 years since the Agricultural Revolution and the Modern world as it is and continues to change since 1750. The primitives are going to die out, and it's our reward and glory to save those who can be saved. If we do nothing but sit and wait for the irreversable rending of our two lives, then the conflict between the old world and the new will require that one must fully die out. Imperialism is not a good answer to this problem. The solution is colonialism, the permanent landing of Americans in other lands till the geographic America of the mind is universal.
What is to be done? We must follow as well the example of leadership shown by V.I. Lenin, forming ourselves into professional revolutionary groups of dedicated progressivist colonialists determined to conquer and spread the three modern revolutions across the globe to all of Humanity.
Below is a piece on the "Bush Doctrine." It doesn't address our problem rightly. We must be aggressive in our own defense. We must be aggressive in the defense of our revolutions of Modernity. However, what we see is what we have. So far. We must not stop at the idea of even our own defense bvut see further to the end of primitivism and the triumph of Modernity universally.
This Marks the Death of Deterrence
By Richard Norton-Taylor
Guardian
October 9, 2002
Kissinger, a historian by profession, appreciated the significance of the new [Bush] doctrine. Regime change as an aim of military intervention is a direct challenge to the international system established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, he recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times. That treaty established the principle of "state sovereignty": that war is justified only by aggression across a national border. Though he argued that Saddam Hussein presented such a danger as to make pre-emptive action "an imperative", he warned: "It is not in the American national interest to establish pre-emption as a universal principle available to every nation."
As Kissinger suggests, this has always meant defence against an actual attack by another state, though more recently international lawyers have said it could also cover an imminent attack. As the government's law officers have advised, it certainly does not allow for war for regime change.
Bush and his advisers have made no such qualification in their quest for a new, aggressive Pax Americana, something they had wanted from the start but for which they were confident of attracting sufficient US domestic support only after the September 11 attacks.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/future/2002/1009preemptive.htm
***
The following piece is a liberalist attempt to dhimmify the response we must take toward the reactionary world of the primitives. We argue that imperialism is wrong in intent, and in result if successful. There cannot be any longer a division between the world of Modernity and the rest. They will not allow it, and we cannot afford it. One must prevail.
***
Manifest destiny warmed up?
Aug 14th 2003
From The Economist print edition
America, it is said, is the world's latest imperial power. Don't believe it
WHAT is the shelf-life of an idea? Just a few short months ago, the talk, and not just in Washington, DC was of empire, America's that is. Even before the invasion of Iraq, pundits of all stripes were casting aside their coyness to proclaim that America was the latest imperial power to bestride the world. Today, with tribulations besetting the new Romans in both Afghanistan and Iraq, their most recent conquests, the chorus has died down, but the idea is far from dead. Too many people have invested too much in it.
For several years, after all, commentators have been announcing the discovery of an American empire. Books and articles have poured forth, professors and pundits have pondered the implications and a surprising number have welcomed the new role. No need to run away from the label, argues Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: America's destiny is to police the world.
Behind the claim lies a conjunction of circumstances. First is the sheer scale of America's power. While the sole superpower remains more than ready to put its technological prowess to military use, its western allies, wearied by centuries of fighting, have been quick to cash in their post-cold-war peace dividends and turn to more pacific pursuits. Russia is diminished. China still lags behind. America's pre-eminence in the skies, at sea and on land is thus unchallenged. In terms of both brute force and gee-whizz gadgetry, it leaves even its nearest competitors standing, or rather quaking.
Matching this military might, runs the argument, is an unrivalled degree of economic power. Throw together all the output from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street and Tin Pan Alley, and you have a commercial empire that would have been the envy of the British East India Company or Cecil Rhodes. And with "hard" power and "soft" power combined, you have influence on a scale never seen before. The polite term for it is hegemony, but in reality, as Mr Boot says, it is Globocop. What other country divides the world up into five military commands with four-star generals to match, keeps several hundred thousand of its legionaries on active duty in 137 countries—and is now unafraid to use them? For, stung by the events of September 11th, America is no longer shy about spilling blood, even its own. Weren't the Afghan and Iraqi wars largely designed to show just that?
To power and global reach can therefore be added another imperial characteristic: an actual desire to sally forth and act. Even before Americans were attacked on September 11th 2001, influential voices were calling for a more activist foreign policy. Some were what Ivo Daalder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, calls "assertive nationalists", some were "democratic imperialists". Both groups were impatient with the constraints imposed by treaties, multilateral action and America's membership of international clubs like the UN. Both wanted to see America hit back when attacked. Both thought the Clinton administration had been timid, if not craven, in defence of American interests.
If, before September 11th, George Bush belonged to either of these groups, it was to the assertive nationalists—along with men like Dick Cheney, his vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, his secretary of defence. The president's instincts were to take robust action if necessary, but to avoid foreign entanglements. In particular, even as a candidate, he had been hostile to the idea of "nation-building" (correctly, state-building) abroad, an ambition more closely identified with the democratic imperialists, also known as neoconservatives. Later, though, Mr Bush started to come round to that idea. September 11th, he was to say a year after the event, "taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states." Accordingly, "We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent."
So there it is. The American empire passes the duck test: it not only looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it also quacks like a duck. And, unfashionable as the idea may seem, it has been given a remarkably warm reception. Even non-Americans seem well-disposed. Over a year ago Robert Cooper, a British diplomat, called for "a new kind of imperialism", albeit one that would be provided by the "post-modern European Union". Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian now at Harvard, has also been ready to argue that "imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it is politically incorrect," though not for him another European imperium. Doubtful as he is about the enterprise, he can see no alternative to American leadership.
Many like Mr Ignatieff are ready to lend support to the idea of an American empire, moved by a desire to bring people living in failed states out of their disorder and misery, and believing that only America can run such an empire. Others are more concerned to deny terrorists a base from which to launch attacks on what was once the inviolable fortress of the West. All take succour from recent, generally favourable reassessments of the British empire, notably the one offered in a book (and television series) by Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian now at New York University. "What the British empire proved", writes Mr Ferguson, "is that empire is a form of international government that can work—and not just for the benefit of the ruling power." The British empire, he suggests, "though not without blemish", may have been the least bloody path to modernity for its subjects.
Such thoughts are still too controversial for senior members of the Bush administration to utter aloud. "We don't seek an empire," avers Mr Bush himself. "Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others." With equal vigour, Mr Rumsfeld insists: "We're not imperialistic." But after one regime-changing war in Afghanistan and another in Iraq, the administration seems to be gathering the wool of empire, and doing so with a civilising mission that sounds pretty imperial.
If Mr Bush does not state the aims explicitly, the neocons feel no such embarrassment. For them, Afghanistan and Iraq are just the start. The transformation of the entire Middle East—Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the lot—must now ensue. In logic, once that is democratised under American tutelage, other regions will have to follow. The United States has long felt free to intervene in Latin America; even before September 11th it was being drawn into Colombia. The Balkans, after a more direct intervention, are benefiting from even starker American supervision (or indirect rule, to use the imperial term, via the EU and UN). Can parts of Asia and Africa be far behind?
Perhaps they can. It depends, of course, on what is meant by empire, and therefore on what counts as a constituent part. In one sense, America has had an empire for years. In pursuit of its "manifest destiny", which would have been called Lebensraum (room to grow in) in 1930s Germany, 19th-century American expansionists laid claim to most of their continent. Some parts, such as Alaska and the huge swathe of land between the Rockies and the Mississippi that came with the Louisiana Purchase, were bought. Others were acquired more traditionally: California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and parts of Colorado and Wyoming all fell into America's lap at the end of the 1846-48 war that President James Polk had baited Mexico into fighting, chiefly to obtain California.
A second imperial phase came after the Spanish-American war of 1898. This "splendid little war", in the words of the secretary of state, John Hay, delivered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The expansionist impulse continued under Teddy Roosevelt, whose big stick (carry one, while talking softly, he advised) and amendments to the Monroe Doctrine (his corollary proclaimed the United States' right to intervene anywhere in Latin America to prevent the Europeans doing so) have helped to make him a hero in today's Washington. A man of pre-emptive action—grab Hawaii, or see it threaten America's west coast, he argued—Roosevelt is Mr Bush's favourite president, and hugely admired by Mr Rumsfeld too.
But soon America was drawing back, first under Roosevelt himself and then under Woodrow Wilson, whose "14 points" set out an idealistic programme for a just peace after the first world war, based on collective security and national self-determination. Yet by the end of the next world war, America, the only country to emerge unambiguously strengthened, had entered a third imperial phase. It was formally in occupation in West Germany and Japan, and it was the de facto power in a variety of places from Dutch Indonesia to the Belgian Congo, from most of Latin America to much of Indochina.
If these earlier imperiums were empires, then perhaps America has indeed acquired a new one. But if the imperial attribution is to mean anything, an empire has to have at least two characteristics besides those of huge might and a willingness to use it. An empire must also be a hierarchical system, in which ultimate control resides at the centre, in this case Washington, DC, and all the colonies, client states, satrapies, sepoys, slaves and helots must understand that. And it must be enduring. True, territories can be acquired one by one for a series of different reasons, as Britain's first colonies were. But, as Adam Smith said, "every empire aims at immortality." In other words, running colonies collectively as an empire requires the intention of either continuous control or, more likely, some sort of transformation, which is where state-building comes in, ideally laced with a bit of missionary zeal. The thrills of empire are not those of the one-night stand.
In short, the empire now proclaimed in America's name is at best a dull duck, at worst a dead duck, unless it is to be a big strong drake that intends to throw its weight around for quite a while. And this in turn raises two difficulties for the concept of a new American empire. One is that the subjects won't like it. The other is that Americans won't either.
Theory, meet practice
For the truth of the first proposition, take a look at Iraq. Four months after the fall of Baghdad, America still faces what one of its own top generals has called "war, however you describe it". Even at the outset, the happy natives failed to greet their liberators quite as joyfully as some had so obviously hoped. Yes, Saddam Hussein was loathed; no, the Iraqis would not die for him in any numbers; but now, please leave us to get on with our own affairs. No matter that the Iraqis are in no position to run their own affairs. They still do not want their country run for them. Resistance is encouraged by the emperor's failure to fix the plumbing, stop the looting and get the lights back on, never mind the constant indignities that go with running an empire: arrests, roadblocks and house-to-house searches that offend the modesty of devout Muslim women. The combination of cock-up and hostility has not only cost the new administration its first boss, Jay Garner. It has also led America to reverse its plans to start cutting the number of its occupying troops. A constitution and free elections are promised for next year, but the progress towards democracy has been much slower than was at first hoped.
Just a few teething troubles? Up to a point, certainly. But Afghanistan, too, suggests that the imperial role is neither popular nor easy. Nearly two years after a singularly successful toppling of the Taliban, the country is still largely in the hands of warlords of dubious allegiance, each with his own militia (see article). They pay nominal obeisance to the proconsul, President Hamid Karzai, but pay him his dues either grudgingly or not at all, preferring to keep the revenues they collect for their own militias. The 5,000 or so peacekeepers, the emperor's proxy army, scarcely dare leave the capital, Kabul, though they are now under NATO command. In the provinces, meanwhile, anything may be going on. The UN has just said that it is suspending work in the south after a series of attacks, and the Taliban are talking of new offensives in the north.
What price commitment?
All this is grist to the mill of the true believers in America's imperial mission. It just goes to show that an early exit after a quick war solves nothing. If the peace is to endure, if the rule of law is to be established, if democratic institutions are to take root, you had better be prepared for a lengthy undertaking, with men, money and limitless patience. Such has been the lesson of Bosnia, Kosovo and Northern Ireland—a lesson yet to be learnt perhaps in Congo, Sierra Leone and countless other hell-holes less pressing on the western conscience. The neo-imperialists have logic on their side when they argue that regime change alone is not enough, and, to their credit, they say they are ready for the long haul. Mr Boot, one of their foremost advocates, believes America is too. The price is affordable, he argues, and, in its containment of the Soviet Union and other policies, America has shown it can sustain a commitment over long decades.
Sorry for the inconvenience—we'll try not to be too long
It is a beguiling argument. But a contradiction lies at the heart of the imperialists' concept. Imperialism and democracy are at odds with each other. The one implies hierarchy and subordination, the other equality and freedom of choice. People nowadays are not willing to bow down before an emperor, even a benevolent one, in order to be democratised. They will protest, and the ensuing pain will be felt by the imperial power as well as by its subjects. For Americans, the pain will not be just a matter of budget deficits and body bags; it will also be a blow to the very heart of what makes them American—their constitutional belief in freedom. Freedom is in their blood; it is integral to their sense of themselves. It binds them together as nothing else does, neither ethnicity, nor religion, nor language. And it is rooted in hostility to imperialism—the imperial rule of George III. Americans know that empires lack democratic legitimacy. Indeed, they once had a tea party to prove it.
Some imperialists may be untroubled by such thoughts. Throughout their imperial history, the British, a rather steak-and-kidney sort of people, not much interested in constitutional concepts, would generally fight to defend their own freedom but did not feel obliged to introduce it in their colonies so long as democracy was in prospect for their subjects one distant day. They were helped in this happy procrastination by powerful practical interests (they exported both settlers and capital to their colonies), by a degree of racism, and by a sustained sense of semi-religious mission. And despite the many hardships, those who ran it also had fun with their empire (lots of dressing up with funny hats, playing polo and shooting tigers); and it was a commercial enterprise ("Trade follows the flag," noted Rhodes).
Little, if any of this applies to Americans. The neocons may have the missionary zeal, but even this is likely to pall in the face of setbacks. There is certainly no zeal to bear the financial burden: Mr Bush's latest budget was drawn up without any money at all for Afghanistan, and the costs are rising in Iraq (to nearly $4 billion a month, just for the soldiery), even as Mr Rumsfeld says more troops may be needed. Unlike most empires of old, the United States is an importer, these days, both of capital and of migrants.
America has changed since September 11th. The new mood allows for more nationalism, more assertiveness, less patience with allies, a greater readiness to go it alone. But there is no appetite to spend a lifetime in a sweaty country in the service of a noble cause. The memories of Vietnam, where every effort to withdraw or hand over to the locals seemed to lead to further entanglement, have not departed. And though the rhetorical heat may now be turned on Iran and Syria, Mr Rumsfeld and his fellow fire-eaters know full well that Americans are not ready for another invasion. Even if, hallelujah, regime change in such countries could be effected peacefully, would the United States really be prepared to shoulder the white man's burden across the Middle East?
It is unlikely, to say the least; the imperial idea is a big exaggeration, like previous fads. It was fashionable, after all, to declare history at a close not so long ago. The new battlegrounds would be markets, said some pundits. Commerce, ideas and information were the weapons of the modern world; military might was for the pterodactyls. To be sure, America is now going through an imperial phase, but this one has more in common with its earlier imperial phases than with the imperial eras of Britain, Byzantium or Rome. If the assertive nationalists and the democratic imperialists have come together over Iraq, that does not mean the administration has signed up for the entire neocon agenda. And as for the foreign-policy pundits, in time they will move on to a new idea.
That does not mean Mr Bush is wrong to think that democracy is the best hope for the world, though it will surely have to take different forms in different places. He is right. But he is also right in disavowing any imperial intentions. America will have to promote its aims some other way, probably by leading multilateral action. Empire is simply not the American way. If the United States has to intervene in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and then stay on, it will not enjoy the experience. Running the place, it will discover, is nasty and brutish, so it had better also be short. Good or bad, that is not what most people mean by an imperium.
***
The Human population is bifurcating, splitting between the primitives of the world as it has been for the past 5,000 years since the Agricultural Revolution and the Modern world as it is and continues to change since 1750. The primitives are going to die out, and it's our reward and glory to save those who can be saved. If we do nothing but sit and wait for the irreversable rending of our two lives, then the conflict between the old world and the new will require that one must fully die out. Imperialism is not a good answer to this problem. The solution is colonialism, the permanent landing of Americans in other lands till the geographic America of the mind is universal.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Treaty of Westphalia
Politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats of all kinds are dead keen on national sovereignty. Rightly so: they gain their lives' meaning and sustenence from such nonsense; but what does it mean to any of the rest of us? The King of England doesn't take our tax dollars to give to the King of Spain. We live in our own land, as it were, and we decide who will represent us in government, more or less, in the system of liberal democracy that we have decided is better than other forms of possible government. If we dislike our elected government representatives, well, we can throw the bastards out. That's our system, and it works o.k. for us. The rest of the world can make their own decisions according to their own needs for governance. Except when they can't. Except when America intervenes in the internal affairs of sovereign states in violation of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Or when the politics of others interfere with the Monroe Doctrine. Or any number of other small and petty details. When ther nations upset our interests we might invade them, sometimes militarily, sometimes economically. Why would we do that unless there's an over-riding good reason for it? We might do so because we're evil and greedy. Maybe we'd do so because we're all racists. Maybe we just like to kill people for fun. Maybe most of the criticism that passes for social critique is just a pose. Maybe we don't intervene enough at all in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and maybe we should.
The greatest benefits to government accrue to those who govern. Maybe we should take back the government for the people who are governed, misgoverned, enslaved by their own rulers, squeezed, bled, and murdered by those dictators who reside within the confines of 'sovereign nations.' Maybe our fellow men are more important than our idiot dhimmi Left fascist poses. And just maybe those we would liberate from their oppressers don't want us to do so. If we try to do so, maybe we'd have to destroy their villages in order to save them, kill lots of people to save others. Now really, is that such a bad thing?
Our "Good Neighbour" policy gets us just about nowhere in terms of good relations with our southern neighbours, and a better policy is to scrap the fiction and simply incorporate Central and South America into the greater United States of the West. But they don't want to be ruled by others. Nor do we. No reasonable adult wants to be ruled by outsiders. Thus, we must be equal citizens united and intermarried. Men and women around the world are much the same at birth, and it is not for us to deny them the rights free men enjoy simply because of the accidents of geography dictate that some must be born into slave-systems. We who are free to choose our governance must also be responsible for those who cannot. We needn't rely on our bureaucrats to decide who shall be free and who shall live in the Cave of Islam. Free men and women can make their own decisions regarding whether they will free their fellow men and women--regardless of the local hegemony and the international bureaucrats. Enough neighbours. It's time to move along and get married. America is not a nation but it is only a place of geography of the mind. Chronos has had his day. It's time for men and women to cut free of that menace to the world, to slay the dictators regardless of their little fiefdoms and satrapies, and to mingle with the world and its people, whether they like us or not. When the world's children are our own children we will not sit back and allow the traditional rulers of sovereign states wage war on our own.
Governers will cry the blues, proclaim the sanctities of international law, cite treaties and amendments, case studies, and even threaten force. Blow hard. Private men and private women must act in privacy to marry and have children with the world's population. All children must be heirs to the revolutions of Modernity. Those with entrenched privilege and those who live in the idiocy of primitivism will obviously resist. The dictators will howl furies, proclaim the sanctiies of culture, cite the Koran and Sira, ahadith, and even threaten force. Blow up yourself.
If our life of Modernity is right for us, it is universally right. If we do not bestow the right of freedom to the children of the future while we can we will gain the undying hatred of Humanity for the foreseeable future. In terms of governance, children are a blank slate. If we allow them to be raised as slaves, they will hate us. For allowing that to remain the case we should hate ourselves.
Below we'll look at the relevant sections of the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, to see where the legal idea of national sovereignty is written. Also, (next day)we'll see how some of our own political history in Henry Kissenger's ideas; and we'll finish with a piece on imperialism, pro/con from the Economist.
***
The Treaty of Westphalia; Oct. 24, 1648:
Peace Treaty between the Holy Roman Emperor and The King of France and their respective Allies.
The treaty was an attempt to put an end to 100 years of intercine war between European rivals. The unintended consequence was the legal beginning of nation-states rather than states based on the rule by kings and squabblers from various places fighting for each others' territory. The plan was like musical chairs: the music stopped, and you sit where you are. You do not hereafter grab someone elses' chair. Nationalism didn't suddenly arise from this treaty, but it does represent the beginnings of whole, sovereign nations as a legal concept. It was a convenience for rulers, not for populations at large who thought of themselves much the way the Moslem umma does today: as united not by race and language and common history but by religion. America is an exception to that rule, being not of one race, religion, or language but of all for all, a universal nation of the mind.
Sovereignty of rulership gives rise to petty local dictators sanctioned by international law. Who benefits by that other than lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, and the petty oligarchs? We argue here that universality of freedom and Modernity are the legitimate rule of nations and people, not artificial boundaries settled by lawyers. Therefore, not recognizing borders and states as legitimate, we argue that to invade another's land in his favor is progressive and legitimate. To spread universal Good and Modernity to those outside our legal bounds is moral. We need a new treaty, one that is based on the Walkerian filibustering of Modernity, i.e. the armed invasion of other places regardless of the legalities and the resistence of the privileged oligarchs therein.
The following excerpts from the Treaty of Westphalia show the current international legal position. The whole treaty is available at the Avalon Project at Yale University Law School as below.
I.
That there shall be a Christian and Universal Peace, and a perpetual, true, and sincere Amity, between his Sacred Imperial Majesty, and his most Christian Majesty; as also, between all and each of the Allies; but chiefly between the Electors, Princes, and States of the Empire on the one side; and all and each of the Allies of his said Christian Majesty, ...on the other part. That this Peace and Amity be observ'd and cultivated with such a Sincerity and Zeal, that each Party shall endeavour to procure the Benefit, Honour and Advantage of the other; that thus on all sides they may see this Peace and Friendship in the Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of France flourish, by entertaining a good and faithful Neighbourhood.
II.
That there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles, in what place, or what manner soever the Hostilitys have been practis'd, in such a manner, that no body, under any pretext whatsoever, shall practice any Acts of Hostility, entertain any Enmity, or cause any Trouble to each other; neither as to Persons, Effects and Securitys, neither of themselves or by others, neither privately nor openly, neither directly nor indirectly, neither under the colour of Right, nor by the way of Deed, either within or without the extent of the Empire, notwithstanding all Covenants made before to the contrary: That they shall not act, or permit to be acted, any wrong or injury to any whatsoever; but that all that has pass'd on the one side, and the other, as well before as during the War, in Words, Writings, and Outrageous Actions, in Violences, Hostilitys, Damages and Expences, without any respect to Persons or Things, shall be entirely abolish'd in such a manner that all that might be demanded of, or pretended to, by each other on that behalf, shall be bury'd in eternal Oblivion.
IV.
...That nevertheless, neither the Emperor, nor any of the States of the Empire, shall meddle with the Wars which are now on foot between them. That if for the future any Dispute arises between these two Kingdoms, the abovesaid reciprocal Obligation of not aiding each others Enemys, shall always continue firm between the Empire and the Kingdom of France, but yet so as that it shall be free for the States to succour; without the bounds of the Empire, such or such Kingdoms, but still according to the Constitutions of the Empire.
LXIV
And to prevent for the future any Differences arising in the Politick State, all and every one of the Electors, Princes and States of the Roman Empire, are so establish'd and confirm'd in their antient Rights, Prerogatives, Libertys, Privileges, free exercise of Territorial Right, as well Ecclesiastick, as Politick Lordships, Regales, by virtue of this present Transaction: that they never can or ought to be molested therein by any whomsoever upon any manner of pretence.
LXV.
They shall enjoy without contradiction, the Right of Suffrage in all Deliberations touching the Affairs of the Empire; but above all, when the Business in hand shall be the making or interpreting of Laws, the declaring of Wars, imposing of Taxes, levying or quartering of Soldiers, erecting new Fortifications in the Territorys of the States, or reinforcing the old Garisons; as also when a Peace of Alliance is to be concluded, and treated about, or the like, none of these, or the like things shall be acted for the future, without the Suffrage and Consent of the Free Assembly of all the States of the Empire: Above all, it shall be free perpetually to each of the States of the Empire, to make Alliances with Strangers for their Preservation and Safety; provided, nevertheless, such Alliances be not against the Emperor, and the Empire, nor against the Publick Peace, and this Treaty, and without prejudice to the Oath by which every one is bound to the Emperor and the Empire.
LXVII.
That as well as general as particular Diets, the free Towns, and other States of the Empire, shall have decisive Votes; they shall, without molestation, keep their Regales, Customs, annual Revenues, Libertys, Privileges to confiscate, to raise Taxes, and other Rights, lawfully obtain'd from the Emperor and Empire, or enjoy'd long before these Commotions, with a full Jurisdiction within the inclosure of their Walls, and their Territorys: making void at the same time, annulling and for the future prohibiting all Things, which by Reprisals, Arrests, stopping of Passages, and other prejudicial Acts, either during the War, under what pretext soever they have been done and attempted hitherto by private Authority, or may hereafter without any preceding formality of Right be enterpris'd. As for the rest, all laudable Customs of the sacred Roman Empire, the fundamental Constitutions and Laws, shall for the future be strictly observ'd, all the Confusions which time of War have, or could introduce, being remov'd and laid aside.
LXX.
The Rights and Privileges of Territorys, water'd by Rivers or otherways, as Customs granted by the Emperor, with the Consent of the Electors, and among others, to the Count of Oldenburg on the Viserg, and introduc'd by a long Usage, shall remain in their Vigour and Execution. There shall be a full Liberty of Commerce, a secure Passage by Sea and Land: and after this manner all and every one of the Vassals, Subjects, Inhabitants and Servants of the Allys, on the one side and the other, shall have full power to go and come, to trade and return back, by Virtue of this present Article....
LXXVI.
...: so that no Emperor, or any Prince of the House of Austria, shall, or ever ought to usurp, nor so much as pretend any Right and Power over the said Countrys, as well on this, as the other side the Rhine.
CXXIV.
...: and it shall not be permitted to any State of the Empire to pursue his Right by Force and Arms; but if any difference has happen'd or happens for the future, every one shall try the means of ordinary Justice, and the Contravener shall be regarded as an Infringer of the Peace....
CXXV.
And that the publick Peace may be so much the better preserv'd intire, the Circles shall be renew'd; and as soon as any Beginnings of Troubles are perceiv'd, that which has been concluded in the Constitutions, of the Empire, touching the Execution and Preservation of the Public Peace, shall be observ'd.
CXXVI.
And as often as any would march Troops thro' the other Territorys, this Passage shall be done at the charge of him whom the Troops belong to, and that without burdening or doing any harm or damage to those whole Countrys they march thro'. In a word, all that the Imperial Constitutions determine and ordain touching the Preservation of the publick Peace, shall be strictly observ'd.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/westphal.htm
***
If you actually read all that and cared I'll give you my sympathies if you feel that you are cheated when I stop here for the day. The whole treaty has roughly 130 articles, and it deserves to be read as a whole work. Our purpose here is not to defend the treaty or its precepts but to deny them validity today. We argue that the above treaty violated the Human spirit of universal rights, not simply the rights of the few to lord it over the masses within the confines of a particular political space; and therefore, we argue that regardless of the international treaties favoring the ruling classes of the the oligarchs that as private citizens we act in pursuit of our own happiness and that of the oppressed everywhere to invade those nations and places of oppression and free the people for the benefit of themselves and the telos of the Modernism of our triune revolutions.
Tomorrow we will conclude this essay on the greatness of Western colonialism. We can move outside the confines of our own thoughts as mental Westerners and bring our modern revolutions to the world masses for the benefit of all. We can ignore the legalities of privilege and take up our own venture as individuals in support of freedom and modernity on behalf of universal Mankind.
The greatest benefits to government accrue to those who govern. Maybe we should take back the government for the people who are governed, misgoverned, enslaved by their own rulers, squeezed, bled, and murdered by those dictators who reside within the confines of 'sovereign nations.' Maybe our fellow men are more important than our idiot dhimmi Left fascist poses. And just maybe those we would liberate from their oppressers don't want us to do so. If we try to do so, maybe we'd have to destroy their villages in order to save them, kill lots of people to save others. Now really, is that such a bad thing?
Our "Good Neighbour" policy gets us just about nowhere in terms of good relations with our southern neighbours, and a better policy is to scrap the fiction and simply incorporate Central and South America into the greater United States of the West. But they don't want to be ruled by others. Nor do we. No reasonable adult wants to be ruled by outsiders. Thus, we must be equal citizens united and intermarried. Men and women around the world are much the same at birth, and it is not for us to deny them the rights free men enjoy simply because of the accidents of geography dictate that some must be born into slave-systems. We who are free to choose our governance must also be responsible for those who cannot. We needn't rely on our bureaucrats to decide who shall be free and who shall live in the Cave of Islam. Free men and women can make their own decisions regarding whether they will free their fellow men and women--regardless of the local hegemony and the international bureaucrats. Enough neighbours. It's time to move along and get married. America is not a nation but it is only a place of geography of the mind. Chronos has had his day. It's time for men and women to cut free of that menace to the world, to slay the dictators regardless of their little fiefdoms and satrapies, and to mingle with the world and its people, whether they like us or not. When the world's children are our own children we will not sit back and allow the traditional rulers of sovereign states wage war on our own.
Governers will cry the blues, proclaim the sanctities of international law, cite treaties and amendments, case studies, and even threaten force. Blow hard. Private men and private women must act in privacy to marry and have children with the world's population. All children must be heirs to the revolutions of Modernity. Those with entrenched privilege and those who live in the idiocy of primitivism will obviously resist. The dictators will howl furies, proclaim the sanctiies of culture, cite the Koran and Sira, ahadith, and even threaten force. Blow up yourself.
If our life of Modernity is right for us, it is universally right. If we do not bestow the right of freedom to the children of the future while we can we will gain the undying hatred of Humanity for the foreseeable future. In terms of governance, children are a blank slate. If we allow them to be raised as slaves, they will hate us. For allowing that to remain the case we should hate ourselves.
Below we'll look at the relevant sections of the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, to see where the legal idea of national sovereignty is written. Also, (next day)we'll see how some of our own political history in Henry Kissenger's ideas; and we'll finish with a piece on imperialism, pro/con from the Economist.
***
The Treaty of Westphalia; Oct. 24, 1648:
Peace Treaty between the Holy Roman Emperor and The King of France and their respective Allies.
The treaty was an attempt to put an end to 100 years of intercine war between European rivals. The unintended consequence was the legal beginning of nation-states rather than states based on the rule by kings and squabblers from various places fighting for each others' territory. The plan was like musical chairs: the music stopped, and you sit where you are. You do not hereafter grab someone elses' chair. Nationalism didn't suddenly arise from this treaty, but it does represent the beginnings of whole, sovereign nations as a legal concept. It was a convenience for rulers, not for populations at large who thought of themselves much the way the Moslem umma does today: as united not by race and language and common history but by religion. America is an exception to that rule, being not of one race, religion, or language but of all for all, a universal nation of the mind.
Sovereignty of rulership gives rise to petty local dictators sanctioned by international law. Who benefits by that other than lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, and the petty oligarchs? We argue here that universality of freedom and Modernity are the legitimate rule of nations and people, not artificial boundaries settled by lawyers. Therefore, not recognizing borders and states as legitimate, we argue that to invade another's land in his favor is progressive and legitimate. To spread universal Good and Modernity to those outside our legal bounds is moral. We need a new treaty, one that is based on the Walkerian filibustering of Modernity, i.e. the armed invasion of other places regardless of the legalities and the resistence of the privileged oligarchs therein.
The following excerpts from the Treaty of Westphalia show the current international legal position. The whole treaty is available at the Avalon Project at Yale University Law School as below.
I.
That there shall be a Christian and Universal Peace, and a perpetual, true, and sincere Amity, between his Sacred Imperial Majesty, and his most Christian Majesty; as also, between all and each of the Allies; but chiefly between the Electors, Princes, and States of the Empire on the one side; and all and each of the Allies of his said Christian Majesty, ...on the other part. That this Peace and Amity be observ'd and cultivated with such a Sincerity and Zeal, that each Party shall endeavour to procure the Benefit, Honour and Advantage of the other; that thus on all sides they may see this Peace and Friendship in the Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of France flourish, by entertaining a good and faithful Neighbourhood.
II.
That there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles, in what place, or what manner soever the Hostilitys have been practis'd, in such a manner, that no body, under any pretext whatsoever, shall practice any Acts of Hostility, entertain any Enmity, or cause any Trouble to each other; neither as to Persons, Effects and Securitys, neither of themselves or by others, neither privately nor openly, neither directly nor indirectly, neither under the colour of Right, nor by the way of Deed, either within or without the extent of the Empire, notwithstanding all Covenants made before to the contrary: That they shall not act, or permit to be acted, any wrong or injury to any whatsoever; but that all that has pass'd on the one side, and the other, as well before as during the War, in Words, Writings, and Outrageous Actions, in Violences, Hostilitys, Damages and Expences, without any respect to Persons or Things, shall be entirely abolish'd in such a manner that all that might be demanded of, or pretended to, by each other on that behalf, shall be bury'd in eternal Oblivion.
IV.
...That nevertheless, neither the Emperor, nor any of the States of the Empire, shall meddle with the Wars which are now on foot between them. That if for the future any Dispute arises between these two Kingdoms, the abovesaid reciprocal Obligation of not aiding each others Enemys, shall always continue firm between the Empire and the Kingdom of France, but yet so as that it shall be free for the States to succour; without the bounds of the Empire, such or such Kingdoms, but still according to the Constitutions of the Empire.
LXIV
And to prevent for the future any Differences arising in the Politick State, all and every one of the Electors, Princes and States of the Roman Empire, are so establish'd and confirm'd in their antient Rights, Prerogatives, Libertys, Privileges, free exercise of Territorial Right, as well Ecclesiastick, as Politick Lordships, Regales, by virtue of this present Transaction: that they never can or ought to be molested therein by any whomsoever upon any manner of pretence.
LXV.
They shall enjoy without contradiction, the Right of Suffrage in all Deliberations touching the Affairs of the Empire; but above all, when the Business in hand shall be the making or interpreting of Laws, the declaring of Wars, imposing of Taxes, levying or quartering of Soldiers, erecting new Fortifications in the Territorys of the States, or reinforcing the old Garisons; as also when a Peace of Alliance is to be concluded, and treated about, or the like, none of these, or the like things shall be acted for the future, without the Suffrage and Consent of the Free Assembly of all the States of the Empire: Above all, it shall be free perpetually to each of the States of the Empire, to make Alliances with Strangers for their Preservation and Safety; provided, nevertheless, such Alliances be not against the Emperor, and the Empire, nor against the Publick Peace, and this Treaty, and without prejudice to the Oath by which every one is bound to the Emperor and the Empire.
LXVII.
That as well as general as particular Diets, the free Towns, and other States of the Empire, shall have decisive Votes; they shall, without molestation, keep their Regales, Customs, annual Revenues, Libertys, Privileges to confiscate, to raise Taxes, and other Rights, lawfully obtain'd from the Emperor and Empire, or enjoy'd long before these Commotions, with a full Jurisdiction within the inclosure of their Walls, and their Territorys: making void at the same time, annulling and for the future prohibiting all Things, which by Reprisals, Arrests, stopping of Passages, and other prejudicial Acts, either during the War, under what pretext soever they have been done and attempted hitherto by private Authority, or may hereafter without any preceding formality of Right be enterpris'd. As for the rest, all laudable Customs of the sacred Roman Empire, the fundamental Constitutions and Laws, shall for the future be strictly observ'd, all the Confusions which time of War have, or could introduce, being remov'd and laid aside.
LXX.
The Rights and Privileges of Territorys, water'd by Rivers or otherways, as Customs granted by the Emperor, with the Consent of the Electors, and among others, to the Count of Oldenburg on the Viserg, and introduc'd by a long Usage, shall remain in their Vigour and Execution. There shall be a full Liberty of Commerce, a secure Passage by Sea and Land: and after this manner all and every one of the Vassals, Subjects, Inhabitants and Servants of the Allys, on the one side and the other, shall have full power to go and come, to trade and return back, by Virtue of this present Article....
LXXVI.
...: so that no Emperor, or any Prince of the House of Austria, shall, or ever ought to usurp, nor so much as pretend any Right and Power over the said Countrys, as well on this, as the other side the Rhine.
CXXIV.
...: and it shall not be permitted to any State of the Empire to pursue his Right by Force and Arms; but if any difference has happen'd or happens for the future, every one shall try the means of ordinary Justice, and the Contravener shall be regarded as an Infringer of the Peace....
CXXV.
And that the publick Peace may be so much the better preserv'd intire, the Circles shall be renew'd; and as soon as any Beginnings of Troubles are perceiv'd, that which has been concluded in the Constitutions, of the Empire, touching the Execution and Preservation of the Public Peace, shall be observ'd.
CXXVI.
And as often as any would march Troops thro' the other Territorys, this Passage shall be done at the charge of him whom the Troops belong to, and that without burdening or doing any harm or damage to those whole Countrys they march thro'. In a word, all that the Imperial Constitutions determine and ordain touching the Preservation of the publick Peace, shall be strictly observ'd.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/westphal.htm
***
If you actually read all that and cared I'll give you my sympathies if you feel that you are cheated when I stop here for the day. The whole treaty has roughly 130 articles, and it deserves to be read as a whole work. Our purpose here is not to defend the treaty or its precepts but to deny them validity today. We argue that the above treaty violated the Human spirit of universal rights, not simply the rights of the few to lord it over the masses within the confines of a particular political space; and therefore, we argue that regardless of the international treaties favoring the ruling classes of the the oligarchs that as private citizens we act in pursuit of our own happiness and that of the oppressed everywhere to invade those nations and places of oppression and free the people for the benefit of themselves and the telos of the Modernism of our triune revolutions.
Tomorrow we will conclude this essay on the greatness of Western colonialism. We can move outside the confines of our own thoughts as mental Westerners and bring our modern revolutions to the world masses for the benefit of all. We can ignore the legalities of privilege and take up our own venture as individuals in support of freedom and modernity on behalf of universal Mankind.
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