[lbo-talk] In control, yet "oppressed"

[John Costello]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:06:22 -0800 (PST), B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This is a reply to my own post, an email list faux
> pas, I know. It also makes my 4th post of the day.
> Oops! I'm not in Yoshie territory yet, but after
> sharing the comic in the previous post, a friend
> forwarded me a relevant observation from Umberto Eco I
> thought I should share:
> 
> >From Umberto Eco, "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of
> Looking at a Blackshirt"
> 
> "8. The followers must feel humiliated by the
> ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
> 
> When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen
> as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than
> the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help
> each other through a secret web of mutual assistance.
> However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be
> convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus,
> by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the
> enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
> Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because
> they are constitutionally incapable of objectively
> evaluating the force of the enemy."

The fundamental dilemma of the neo-Nazis:  if the Jews are so inferior
and the Aryans so superior, how is it that the Jews own everything and
run every government on the planet while the Aryans are forced to wear
bedsheets and meet in the Louisiana swamps lest they be wiped out?

The fundamental dilemma of neo-conservatism goes the opposite way, but
it still bears the same sharp point.  But the neocons have an enviable
situation (vis-a-vis the neo-Nazis, at least), they've got not only
all three branches of government on their side, but the media as well,
so their story gets unopposed, uncritical airtime.

-- 
John S Costello
joxn.costello at gmail.com
"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on
it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in
the Universe to do." -- Galileo Galilei