> The book could have said more about the curious time-warping involved
> in fascism - the way in which it is archaic and avant-garde,
> mythological and technological, at the same time. In this, it
> resembles the cultural modernism with which it had intimate (if
> ambiguous) relations. The Holocaust was both barbarism and the triumph
> of a "scientific", full-bloodedly modern rationality. If it was a
> revolt against Enlightenment reason for some thinkers, it was the
> consummation of it for others. Old-fashioned pogroms, Paxton points
> out, would have taken 200 years to complete what the Nazis' more
> advanced technology achieved in three years.
The "archaic", "mythological" "barbarism" and "revolt against Enlightenment reason" constitutes the "essential truth and greatness" of National Socialism from the perspective of the starting point of much so-called "postmodern" thought, doesn't it?
On the other hand, the Holocaust is the "consummation" of "Enlightenment reason"; it expresses the essence of the "avant-garde", the "technological, "the triumph of a 'scientific', full-bloodedly modern rationality" for that same starting point, doesn't it?
From this perspective, the "revolt against Enlightenment reason" is the baby and "Enlightenment reason" is the bath water.
The "carnival of unreason" is "violent transgression" as an end in itself. "Truth is whatever works to inspire the Volk and unite the nation." So the "carnival of unreason" as "violent transgression" can prove popular - "democratic." The Nazis and Stalin "slaughtered ... without much popular disapproval, as with the crimes of other fascist states. 'Most citizens of fascist regimes,' Paxton comments, 'accepted things as they were.'"
From this and other things of his posted here and from what I heard him say recently in Toronto, I take it Eagleton has concluded that it's this idea of human "authenticity" as a "carnival of unreason" that is the bath water and that "Enlightenment reason" is the baby, though in the form it takes in "modernity," e.g the misidentification of "reason" with scholastic taxonomy and formal logic, it has aspects of "the essential truth" of fascism that are themselves bath water i.e. it requires "sublation."
It's true that the Ukrainian peasants Stalin slaughtered weren't Jews. I'm not sure though that it's this aspect of what Eagleton is claiming that deserves most discussion. Nor is it clear to me in what sense the ideas I've just pointed to are those of a "perfumed skunk." The word "skunk" is itself too "perfumed" to describe what is being pointed to, but it would seem more accurate to describe him as pointing to a "perfumed skunk" rather than as being one.
Ted