"Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism."
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] weimar shadows Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2010 11:19:23 -0500
I really like Terry Eagleton's way of approaching Fascism. I particularly like the end of the first sentence, below ("casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future"), which is from Terry Eagleton 2000. Nudge-Winking. London Review of Books 24(18): Sept. 19. It is a review of Jason Harding. 2002. The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain. Oxford University Press. I've summarized it, in my pop culture and political sociology classes, as a reactionary technophilia - none of the nuance of romantic conservatism nor the ambiguity of modern scientism... though I have to set this up with a lot of work explaining romanticism, populism, and progressivism.
Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Modernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. Politically speaking, however, Fascism, like all nationalism, is a thoroughly modern invention. Its aim is to crush beneath its boot the traditions of high civility that Eliot revered, placing an outsized granite model of a spade and sten gun in the spaces where Virgil and Milton once stood.
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