Do we understand it? Otherwise we won't know what we're watching out for.
I was thinking, in regard to the anti-fascist article, that group identity has also been popular on the Left, to the point where we sometimes ridicule it. But I suppose there must be something there, some kind of spirit that asks us to go from feelings of friendship and affiliation to the use of exclusion and force.
Gordon Fitch -----------------
Changes of position under the magic of solidarity. I think of that in a different way.
I certainly changed from non-violent protest on principle to a violent hatred pretty quickly, especially after escaping from a few beatings. I think it was watching the cops wade into people sitting-in and hitting them in the head with night sticks, just in front of me that did it. I got up and ran of course. It was instantly obvious either you take a beating and then get up and run, or you get up and run just before they get to you. If they caught you with a bloody head they arrested you for resisting (obviously CTA).
I realized at the time, that part of the point to non-violent protest was to expose the source of violence (the cops) and the established order. And, then too, to create solidarity through shared experiences in these protests. But knowing all that didn't change the effects. I wanted to get them, the way they got us (make them hurt, bad).
I realize you are referring to something different, the idea of party-line, group identity and its potential to exclude people on principle. For example, I was thrown out of CORE for being white, and that didn't bother me, in a way. I didn't like it, but I understood the reasoning.
I didn't join groups for friendship or reasons of identity, but this was just accidental. After CORE, I didn't join groups because I discovered it wasn't necessary. Just show up for the action. It was sort of bad faith laziness.
But the idea of solidarity brings up another aspect to the process I was considering, which is isolation. My friend Mike F. and Horowitz among others, underwent a period of dropping out of political activity for awhile in their disillusionment. So, in that sense it was a loss of solidarity, and may involve an alienation from group identity. In any event, isolation after having been part of a movement is like exile. I think it can be as critically forming as was the solidarity.
>From Yoshie:
``Transformation (sudden or gradual) from the Left (anarchism, socialism, communism...) to the Right (fascism, fundamentalism,...) has been a constant feature of modern politics, and I don't believe it is easy to develop an overarching theory to explain the phenomenon in question comprehensibly. I'd chalk it up to the fact that the Right has always had more power..., and high-profile defectors from the Left could often count on the Right to bankroll their post-Left careers (e.g., selling conversion stories).
What happens much more often than radical conversions from the Left to the Right, however, is simple demobilization (withdrawal from active political participation)...
`For Singer, as for most academics, leaving the Party was painless. Though some people outside the academy found the break traumatic, academics had no such problems. Since they had never lived in the self-enclosed left-wing world that so many other American Communists inhabited, their lives did not change when their politics did. They had another community to rely on, the academic one, into which they were already fairly well integrated by the time they left the CP. In addition, their separation from the Party was so gradual that few of them could give a specific date on which they stopped being Communists....' [quote from Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, NY: Oxford UP, 1986] ''
Considering academics, of course I wonder at what kind they become---wanton petty tyrants, wealding grades like swords and having their colleagues ice-picked behind close doors? Just joking.
Yoshie's quote reminds me a little bit of Haakon Chevalier's, The Story of a Friendship, which recounts Chevalier's thirties/forties friendship with Robert Oppenheimer, and then Oppenheimer's betrayal and later fall from the AEC. Below is the front piece that Chevalier used: :
[``The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!''
In these words, I imagine, is the key to Hamlet's whole procedure, and to me it is clear that Shakespeare sought to depict a great deed laid upon a soul unequal to the performance of it. In this view I find the piece composed throughout. Here is an oak-tree planted in a costly vase, which should have received into its bosom only lovely flowers; the roots spread out, the vase is shivered to pieces.
A beautiful, pure, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which makes the hero, sinks beneath a burden which it can neither bear nor throw off; every duty is holy to him,---this too hard. The impossible is required of him,---not impossible in itself, but the impossible to him. How he winds, turns, agonizes, advances, and recoils, ever reminded, ever reminding himself, and at last almost loses his purpose from his thoughts, without ever again recovering his peace of mind, ...
It pleases, it flatters us greatly, to see a hero who sets himself, who loves and hates us as his heart prompts, undertaking and executing, thrusting aside all hindrances, and accomplishing a great purpose. Historians and poets would fain persuade us that so proud a lot may fall to man. In Hamlet we are taught otherwise; the hero has no plan, but the piece is full of plan... .
Hamlet is endowed more properly with sentiment than with a character; it is events alone that push him on; and accordingly the piece has somewhat the amplification of a novel. But as it is Fate that draws the plan, as the piece proceeds from a deed of terror, and the hero is steadily driven on to a deed of terror, the work is tragic in its highest sense, and admits of no other than a tragic end.
Goethe, Wilhelm Meister.]
Well, despite the grandiloquent rendition it sure is grand reading, isn't it? Later in Chevalier's book, you find out that Chevalier who had done the English translation of Malraux's Man's Fate, meets Oppenheimer in Paris and takes him to meet Malraux just before Oppenheimer's testimony and betrayal. After the public testimony, Oppenheimer sends Chevalier the transcript. Chevalier cooling his heels in Paris again, goes to see Malraux about it. The betrayal story reminds Malraux of Oscar Wilde's trial for sodomy. What a wild mind for associations!
By the way, Justin Schwarz should find this book really interesting reading, if he doesn't know about it already. Chevalier was drummed out of UCB because he refused to sign the loyalty oath, or he left on his own while refusing, I forget which.
While I was thinking about Horowitz earlier, I was thinking about Picasso's ink drawings and etchings that he worked on prior to Guernica. These drawings show a little girl dressed up in a Scottish kelt holding a candle and looking at a huge hair covered Minotaur. It was Picasso's way of depicting an English or French, possibly by extension, the Enlightenment flirtation with fascism--which was where I got the idea for titling the thread, goldilocks and the minotaur.
Chuck Grimes