On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 12:38 PM, farmelantj at juno.com <farmelantj at juno.com>wrote:
> Isn't Eagleton just paraphrasing Trotsky
> who in his essay, "What is National
> Socialism?", wrote:
>
> "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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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319