aphorism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>  > Echoes of Yeats' "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/are
>>  > full of passionate intensity
>>  >
>>  > Though according to Harold Bloom, this is a fascist sentiment.
>
>Do you happen to remember what his argument was?  Because off hand that
>doesn't seem like an idea a fascist would subscribe to.  Fascists were big
>believers in passionate intensity and they thought it was precisely the
>best who were animated by it.
>
>Michael

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...."

That's not so much a fascist sentiment as a sentiment that disarms 
many intellectuals and leaves them defenseless, when they see a 
movement that claims to restore order by rejecting Capitalism and 
Communism (or British Imperialism and Irish Democracy), opening the 
Third Way with conviction.

That is not to say that Yeats was a fascist -- Cf. "Yeats among the 
Fascists," 
<http://world.std.com/~jorge/jl_pages/school/yeats_frameset.html>.
-- 
Yoshie

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