We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.On the one hand, I know that Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" had something to do with Hegel or some shit, and it wasn't supposed to signify the literal conclusion of the accumulation of events or the cessation of the forward movement of time as perceived by human consciousness, but nonetheless I axe you: was ever so infelicitous a phrase so woefully misapplied? I mean, the guy got Hegel as interpreted by Strauss by way of that gloriously reactionary faggot, Allan Bloom, which is really the intellectual equivalent of putting a Cum Dump sign outside of one's private room at the bathhouse. You're certain to catch something, and whatever it is, it's not going to be good. Liberal Democracy has triumphed! Except where it hasn't! And when it hasn't! And it may decline again! But it's still triumphed! Also, something about genetic engineering. This was the sort of utter bullshit that used to have the decency to get passed around with a bong. One of the best things about 9/11 was that it put a modest kibosh on such talk.
-Laibach
Well, he's back, making the same warmed-over argument, with which details I won't bore you. Except:
Today's autocrats can also prove surprisingly weak when it comes to ideas and ideologies. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Mao's China were particularly dangerous because they were built on powerful ideas with potentially universal appeal, which is why we found Soviet arms and advisers showing up in places such as Nicaragua and Angola.At least it's an ethos. But let me just say this about that: the notion that any of those tyrannies was built on some sort of universal ideology is a notion you can only maintain if you don't actually know anything about them. Nazism, to take one example, was an incoherent mixture of pseudo-scientific racialist pan-Germanism, Norse mythology, Christian mysticism, crackpot Wagnerianism, eugenic anti-Semitism, ad inf. Hitler really was looking for the Spear of Destiny; he really dispatched embassies to Tibet to discover the mystical-magical Aryan powers of a gang of decrepit monks. Soviet Communism? Seriously? Maoism? Has Fukuyama ever read the little red book? Goofball ante hoc rationalizations for monstrous crimes make for good horror stories, but the mundane truth is that the scale of 20th century terror and death had far less to do with ideology than it did with mechanization. Thomas Newcomen, Samuel Cold, and Henry Ford as much as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
30 comments:
Yes, National Socialism as an ideology is about as coherent as the story-line of your average superhero comic (and just about as plausible)
But I would really like to know what it is that Mr. Fukuyama sees as the "potentially universal appeal" of National Socialism
They did have sweet leather goods.
Allan Bloom, Ah yes----he did make his Marx on Fire Island.
But I would really like to know what it is that Mr. Fukuyama sees as the "potentially universal appeal" of National Socialism
I think it's a case of "they doth protest too much": people who worry about the ideological appeal of Communism, Fascism, Islamofascism, or whatever, generally seem to worry that the other guy's totalitarian philosophy seems to be attracting more followers than their own. They convince themselves that "my totalitarian philosophy is different, it's the right one, because we won the war," or we seem to be winning the war (in the case of islamofascism), and so therefore, Q.E.D., end-of-history.
...also the obvious scent of "they doth protest too much" explains why IOZ is compelled to discuss them in terms of leather and bathhouses...
The world ended some time in the 1980s.
Since then, people read nonfiction books at their own peril. Better to salvage what's left of partying.
Better to salvage what's left of partying.
I'll drink to that.
Oh, screw you, IOZ. How dare you post a link to that drivel. My Sunday morning is just ruined.
Fucking Fukuyama. He even has the audacity to invoke "facile historical analogies," and then proceeds on some facile historicizing, where he says that today's autocrats really aren't scary, because they aren't the Nazis, and they talk of democracy (which is a laugh, since they always have, the SU being a notable example), and they adopt capitalism (which says a lot more about the West's willingness to accept tyranny than it does about tyrants' belief in freedom, but when economic accumulation is, to you, a good in itself, I guess you'll believe this kind of shit).
Oh, and what a pleasant realization, that China and Russia are motivated, at worst, by common nationalism. Only nationalism! Don't you know that you need an idea to do harm? And his example? Czarist Russia! I guess as long as you don't kill too many white people (outside of Poland), you're not a totalitarian. The Great Game? Manchuria? Apparently, to Fukuyama, these were the acts of "a great power with limited ambitions."
The difficulty is that IOZ seems to believe that the ideologies' absurdity proves that they are irrelevant, whereas Fukuyama believes that their success proves their viability. Neither is true. Ideologies, like party platforms, are different things for different people. Taken as a whole, they may make no sense. But since when have religions, civic or otherwise, needed to make sense? Catholicism is downright laughable if you actually pay attention to the shit, and yet look at the havoc that totalitarian force wrought. Of course: Nazism was cobbled together, but it was effective nonetheless, offering some nonsense for the intellectuals (such as they were, and are) to talk about and, most attractive to them, a program of action, but do you think the common man was in for that? Shit, how many men fighting in the Wehrmacht had fought previously in the Reichswehr? Republic, Third Empire? What's the difference--just sign my check and give me a shirt to wear. And then there was national pride and honor for the aristos, anti-communism for the Slavophiles and the businessmen... As one idea, it was atrocious. But as separate planks, it worked, and unite it did.
Which is not to dismiss the important of industrialization one bit. That point is totally valid. Murderous authoritarianism has existed from time to time, but only mechanization has produced both the culture of alienation and the means of mass control at once. Though I ought to mention that agriculture caused the same thing.
National Socialism "worked and united" because it managed to come to power in a crisis situation, and was able to keep itself in power by murdering and plundering Europe (with special emphasis on Jews and citizens of the Soviet Union) for the benefit of the Herrenrasse
It "worked and united" for as long as it did not because there was something in it for everyone ideologically, but because there was something in it for everyone materially
This is not to say that ideology is unimportant. It is just that without their material successes, all the National Socialism in the world would not have prevented the Nazi regime from falling apart after a couple of months. It was only because they had something to redistribute that they could use their ideological bits and pieces to keep everyone in their place and themselves in the center of all power (that and the ever-present threat of the concentration camp)
A number of American radicals in the 60s read Mao's Little Red Book and thought it made sense, which just goes to show that you should never underestimate stupidity.
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
...
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them.
For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
Mao Tse-Tsung, U.S. Imperialism is a Paper Tiger
What do you mean National Socialism wasn't an ideology? They reprinted thousands of copies of Gobineau, Nietzsche, and Luther's great essay "On the Jews and their Lies." Sounds pretty coherent to me!
Back in the seventies they used to print up copies of the little Red Book in plastic red covers, of which I found one while cleaning out our garage. Good stuff! It sounded a bit like my grandmother's second husband after the Alzheimer's hit (except of course that it wasn't in Yiddish).
two to the fighting, your point is well taken. Material interest smooths over a lot of apparent absurdity. I have a few problems with your "Nazism was only a means of acquisition" premise:
First, it supposes some rationality to political activity, particularly at a time of, as you said, extreme crisis. Maybe the electorate was cynical, but I think that at least some of them went with the rhetoric; Hitler got some real traction with the moralism. So what if it was absurd on its face to accuse the Jews et al. of betrayal in World War One? It felt right, and it sold.
Second, you seem to forget that logical sense and material consequence are popularly held to be identical. From pundit to peasant, I've heard the "Christianity works because look at how powerful Europe became under it" argument. Fuck, I sympathize with your argument that the material ends ought not prove the rational means, but that just isn't the popular view. Hell, most people believe capitalism works because it gives them iPods.
Third, what of Nazism's clear missteps? The Holocaust didn't fund the war machine; it detracted from it. The decision to enter war was actually profitable for about a year and even at the beginning, you see a clear devotion to war for war's sake, since Hitler was getting almost everything he wanted from a pliable Europe. This was a religion, sir, not just a reliable distributor of wealth, and the average person was seeing so little of this wealth, you have to acknowledge the power of the belief.
Would you reduce Catholicism the same way? For yes, there are always those motivated by material interest. The Crusades were an act of lust for gold, land, and power. And yet then you behold the Children's Crusade and other episodes of such stunning stupidity that you are forced to acknowledge that no, we aren't all cynical materialists. Some of us are just fucking crazy.
Cüneyt, if you see political activity that strikes you as not rational, then you should look closer, or/and reassess your premises
The Nazis were not elected. They got a lot of votes (as did the Communists), but never a majority. They came to power because the people who ruled Weimar Germany thought they could use the Nazis for their own purposes, which turned out not to be the case
Not to go all Dialectic-of-Enlighentment on you (bit of a bad book, by the way), but there was an awful lot of rationality in the way the Nazis governed. They used all the methods of the Political Science of their day to assess every aspect of people's attitudes towards the regime. They further expanded the welfare state (lowering taxes, increasing pensions, introducing new benefits, ...), built the Autobahn and introduced the Volkswagen to initiate the mass motorization of Germany, ...
They only really got suicidally crazy with the Jews when they were beginning to lose, putting their last efforts towards getting the job done and exterminating as many of them as possible. Until then, the preferred method was expropriation, forced emigration (one of Eichmann's first jobs was to organize the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung in Vienna), and slavery
Also, it was not (only) the Holocaust that funded the war machine, it was the war that funded the war machine. Two thirds of all war expenses were paid out of the pockets of the occupied countries. The occupied countries also had to provide natural ressources (mostly food) and slave labor to Germany and all regular trade between them and the Reich was done according to a currency regime that caused huge inflation in the occupied territories, whereas inflation within Germany remained low throughout the war
Also, the war had a very concrete aim: the establishment of Nazi Germany as a world power, the destruction of the Soviet Union, and the building of a new order for Europe (and the world) with Germany as its undisputed leader
I can only recommend Götz Aly's books on the subject:
Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (translated as Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State)
Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (together with Susanne Heim, translated as Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction)
Also, I would not analyze Catholicism or Christianity as a whole in this way, because contrary to National Socialism, it did actually last a thousand years (and more)
You say that it was no ideology, and then you explain its rationalism... I think we crossed ourselves at some point.
What is your essential point? I understand that you disagree with me, but beyond that, I'm getting nothing.
Okay, how about this?
National Socialism was Germany's way to cope with a host of problems (Communism could have been another way, but was not). National Socialism was an ideology, but a confusing and selfcontradictory mass of it. Its various aspects appealed to enough people to give the NSDAP a sizable share of the electorate. But, again, they did not have the majority of Germans behind them, they were brought into government by the ruling powers to be slowly and carefully integrated into the conventional political spectrum; a position they used to violently and completely take power
After coming to power, things were different. What the National Socialist state was doing had some points of contact with aspects of this ideology, but mostly the policies had their own life (and were generally rooted in pre-Nazi policies and general developments at the time). During the course of the war, the scope and aim of National Socialism changed and expanded considerably, and finally descended into total madness, but only when it dawned on them that they would lose the war
The people were loyal to the state because it was relatively successful in providing for them, not because all Germans had suddenly turned into Nazis (though there were of course quite a few true believers. especially among young people)
Alright. And how does this clash with what I said? You cite a lot of facts, and cite them accurately, but I'm still not sure what you're driving at?
Christ, how hard is it for someone to call Nazism a civic religion?
I do not want to call National Socialism a civic religion, because it never took root. Only a very small number of people really believed in it. Time was just too short for complete indoctrination. There were a lot of people who (correctly) thought they could just sit it out
True civic religion means that people were brought up within it and do not know anything else besides it, but the first Nazi generation was barely twenty years old when it all fell down (and even their Nazism was not very deeply ingrained). It especially means that its leaders come from deep within its institutions, whereas all Nazi leaders had their formative years outside the Nazi state and outside the Nazi movement
Had Nazism continued, it would surely have become a civic religion (and the world would have become even more horrible than it already is), but as it was, it was a confused and confusing episode of barely twelve years (six if you only count the war) that left millions of people dead, Europe destroyed, the United States and the Soviet Union undisputed superpowers, ...
And all of this is germane to my initial point (that ideology does matter, though IOZ's industrial remark is quite accurate) in some way I have yet to discover.
Look, your statement that Nazism had yet to take root in a generational sense is correct. The difficulty is that it changes nothing. Whether or not it "took root," as you say, it achieved total control of a civilization. Whether or not it "took root," the German people did not reject it effectively; Nazism was only dislodged by foreign intervention. Perhaps we might consider that a result of its failure; I would.
What of its taking root? So what if it was a graft? The transplant took.
The fact is that whether or not it was a civic religion that took root, or a movement that had an elected majority or not (and what a non-statement that is; as if the validity of an election matters one bit, when it is not in selection but in obedience that a people usually takes its stand), it didn't seem to slow it down, from altering culture, from acting within a framework of historical context, of effecting war to success and failure, of deciding the fates of millions. It was more relevant to the Twentieth Century than Christian socialism, a wholly more legitimate movement by your terms--and by mine, incidentally. You see, legitimacy didn't fucking matter; taking root didn't matter, when the grown and the young alike cooperated in its rituals and followed its dictates. Good God, industrialization was a process that no-one decided on, that was never ratified by a popular vote, that enforced its rule through bribery and force, and look at how it's altered everything. Yes, you are correct when you hold up Nazism to some anthropological ideal and find it wanting. And for that, it was still a terror. If it fails your tests, it matters not a damn.
My argument stands. Ideologies don't need to make sense to be believed, for there are always those who will believe--for a wide variety of motivations--especially in times of crisis. IOZ's argument regarding mechanization is accurate, yet he discounts Nazism and other ideologies in error. To do so would be to ignore the role of religion, secular and otherwise, in galvanizing a culture's irrationalities, in making wisdom out of contradiction, and staying the shaky hand of a nervous, short-lived, and selfish ape.
God, that makes it sound like a good thing. Ick.
I don't see anyone claiming that ideology isn't important in a sense, just that to point at it as the only aspect worth looking at is a fool's game. It makes people appear as if they are mindless automatons, which is fantastic if you're looking at dehumanizing other cultures. That seems to be precisely the what IOZ is attempting to point out in the criticism of Fukuyama. After all, what is Hitler but a failed artist if not for the first World War?
Okay, one last round for me, as long as I can still discuss National Socialism without getting overly emotional
Unemployment is over 30%, people turn to political movements promising them radical change. One of these movements takes absolute power, brings down unemployment and initiates severe political repression. The regime is not challenged from within. Bringing ideology into the analysis does not change the picture in any meaningful way.
You only need to bring in ideology if you want to explain why the regime did what it did, but even for that you first take the material situation and then ask in what way it is influenced by ideology, not the other way round (except for the final phase before the downfall, when the regime becomes really desperate and has nothing left but ideology, that is: wishful thinking, to cling to)
And that was my last word on the subject
Mögen diese verdammten Naziarschlöcher alle in der Hölle schmoren
Anon, I'm not sure what IOZ was saying (I am a poor reader), but I believe he was saying that the nonsense of Nazism was less important than the process of industrial mechanization and so-called rationalization.
I do not belittle the effect of industrialization. As one firmly devoted to the theory that agriculture and civilization effected a severe trauma on the human savage, I believe that industrialization was a painful transformation with which we are still coping. However, I must say that even nonsense popularly believed in can be a very important nonsense indeed. IOZ dismissed Nazism for being cobbled-together gobbledygook and yet he ignores that almost all systems of thought and faith have been such gobbledygook. It would have been easy for a Roman to shrug at Christianity as cut-rate Manicheanism with a touch of Herculean demigod theatrics and some Oriental magics thrown in for good measure. And we might still shrug at Christianity for all that. And yet it constitutes a powerful bit of nonsense. Never underestimate the irrational mind.
Which is to say: never underestimate the mind.
IOZ dismissed Nazism for being cobbled-together gobbledygook and yet he ignores that almost all systems of thought and faith have been such gobbledygook.
Why the "and yet ignores"? What I am saying is that the notion that coherent ideologies determine history (Fukuyama's et al. notion) is total bunk, that murderousness and war are steady and prevalent throughout history, and that what made the great slaughter of the 20th century so much greater in scale than in centuries past was a matter of technology, not ideology. Recall Roman imperial policy, and ask yourself what they would've done with aircraft and a mechanized infantry, let alone Zyklon B.
A fair point, and thank you for the clarification. For sure, genocides have occurred throughout history, and most of what occurred during the Twentieth Century was no aberration.
And yet, does culture make no difference? Consider also that the Romans lacked the notion of scientific race. Where were the death camps for the Uticans, then, if Carthage would serve as the Jews to Rome's Nazi Germany? No, they were not racial essentialists, and their sense of nationality was defined at least as much by language and religion as by ethnic traits.
I do not think that all the slaughter can be attributed to industrial technology. Even accounting for population growth and innovation, there is still such a peak in deaths and in manner of deaths that I would point to industrial culture itself, for changes in the means of life can alter so much in the behavior of a culture's inhabitants.
Or are we to look at Rwanda and judge that its genocide was merely the result eternal human hatred and use of radios? Or was there something to the European concept of racial types--in combination with industrial-style economic stratification (though such stratification following conquest is nothing new)--that provoked the genocides?
Fukuyama errs in assuming a top-down, ideology-to-action model, that's for sure. And yet, I think there is a cultural component to genocide, to ethnic nationalism, to alienation and dehumanization. And some of those cultural conditions are prepared or exacerbated by the alienation of the industrial age.
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