Showing posts with label national socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label national socialism. Show all posts

26 Sept 2021

On the Spiritualisation of Politics

(Indiana University Press, 2016)
 
 
When, in the Black Notebooks, Heidegger attempts to distinguish a spiritual national socialism from its more vulgar form [1], I assume he's dreaming of a non-ideological politics founded upon a non-theoretical understanding of being, contra the crude biological fantasy of racial purity adhered to by Party ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg. 
 
But I might be mistaken. For it's tricky - to say the least - to know for sure what Heidegger means when he speaks of Geist (or national socialism) and one invariably falls back on Derrida's brilliant and provocative study, Of Spirit, in search of clues [2]
 
Whether I do or do not fully understand what Heidegger means, I'm reminded that D. H. Lawrence anticipated this spiritualising of national socialism in The Plumed Serpent (1926); i.e., several years before Heidegger made his (infamous) rectoral address in 1933.
 
As Lawrence soon discovered, the problem is that when one attempts to realise one's ontological vision - or substantiate living mystery - within the world of history and politics, one opens up not only new areas of thought, but new (and tragic) possibilities of action. 
 
For even the most spiritual of revolutions requires "manipulative controls and coercive regulations to sustain itself against those who resist or evade its strictures" [3]. And so it is that Ramón's neo-pagan revolution soon collapsed into a black hole:
 
"The whole country was thrilling with a new thing, with a release of new energy. But there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a touch of horror." [4]  
 
Much the same could be said of Hitler's Third Reich; it promised to restore to the world an aura of primordial wonder, but ... Well, we all know what happened in the end [5].   
 
 
Notes
 
[1] See Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations' III, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016). 
 
[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (University of Chicago Press, 1989). 
      Derrida's musing on the shifting role of Geist in Hedegger's work - particularly after 1933 and in relation to the latter's engagement with national socialism - remains fascinating, even if written more than twenty-five years prior to publication of the Schwarze Hefte (which commenced in 2014).        
 
[3] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 66. 
      The problem is, even if a movement is populist in character, it still cannot speak to and for everyone in a modern plural society - and that's why even the most spiritual of revolutionary leaders ends up relying on the army and secret police. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 420. 

[5] Similarly, we all know how things turned out in Iran after the 1979 revolution, which, at the time, was greeted enthusiastically by numerous intellectuals, including Michel Foucault, who believed it promised a welcome new form of political spirituality. See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), p. 309.    


4 Sept 2021

Plutocracy

Plutocracy by Stationjack
 
 
Unfortunately, plutocracy does not involve being governed by an ancient Greek god of the underworld [1], nor the empowering of Mickey Mouse's dog. 
 
It means, rather, living in a society where a super-rich global elite lord it over the rest of us; i.e., where 1% own and control everything and 99% fight over the loose change thrown their way [2]
 
It's not a new word: it's not a new idea: it's not a new phenomenon. But plutocracy is very much the reality of the world we're living in today; a socio-economic and political reality that I would describe as undesirable and, in the long term, unsustainable (as the elite eventually discover to their cost).     

I suspect that most people would agree that the tyranny of wealth is vulgar and objectionable, wherever they are on the political spectrum [3]. Indeed, opposition to plutocracy as socially destructive is one of the few things that unites everyone from Nietzsche to Noam Chomsky [4], including Ursula Brangwen, who declares a preference for an "aristocracy of birth rather than of money" [5] and seems to believe, naively, that only a toff can save us ... 
 
Unfortunately, however, the hereditary model holds out no hope; something that even the Queen's grandson, Prince Harry, has grasped, thus his and Meghan's decision to up sticks and move to California. As Nick Cohen writes, they have "judged the modern world with calculating eyes and placed the ultra-capitalist entertainment industry above old royal privilege" [6]
 
He continues:     
 
"The Sussexes have followed the prophecies of Marx and Engels by concluding that the traditional aristocracy is finished. [...] If you doubt me, ask how many British people can name a duke or an earl [...] The power of inherited wealth is stronger than it has been in a century and the explosion in inequality [...] will make it more powerful still. Yet in terms of the status the Sussexes seek, the old aristocracy of birth counts for next to nothing [...]" [7] 
 
I think that's probably true, though it's not a particularly new insight. For as Cohen indicates, Marx and Engels were announcing that the old world order was dissolving way back in 1848 [8]
 
And when, eighty-years later, D. H. Lawrence published his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, he'd also reached the conclusion that the old aristocracy no longer existed as a distinct social class; they may belong to a super rich 1%, but like the rest of humanity they have become robot [9].
 
Cohen concludes his interesting piece:
 
"The Sussexes present a real threat to the monarchy because they have seen its irrelevance, as many more will once the Queen dies. They have soberly concluded that whatever privileges it brings are as nothing compared with the money and status that belongs to the real aristocracy of the celebrity industry they are so determined to join." [10]
 
 
Notes
 
[1] There is often confusion regarding the etymology of the term plutocracy. It does not derive, as many people mistakenly think, from Ploutōn (Πλούτων) - i.e., the ruler of the underworld in classical mythology. It derives, rather, from the name of the Greek god of wealth, Ploutos (Πλοῦτος). However, Ploutōn was frequently conflated with the latter because, as a chthonic deity, he ruled the deep earth where mineral wealth is located.   
 
[2] In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street Movement popularised the term 1% in reference to America's richest people, who, at that time, controlled at least a third of the country's wealth. We are the 99% quickly became a unifying slogan of the protestors and is now implanted as an idea in the cultural and political imagination. 
      In May of that same year, the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article published in Vanity Fair entitled 'Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%', in which he criticised growing inequality and argued that the United States has become a plutocracy. Click here to read this article online. 
      Finally, it might be noted that another economist, Paul Krugman, has since questioned whether we ought to refer to the 99.9%, as it has been an even smaller group - the top 0.1% (i.e., the richest one-thousandth of the population) - who have made the most outrageous gains in recent years. This is also the argument made by Chrystia Freeland in her book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, (The Penguin Press, 2012).
 
[3] It's interesting to note that both communists and fascists were united in their opposition to capitalism on the grounds that it would eventually lead to a plutocracy. 
      The Nazis, for example, liked to characterise the Third Reich as a People's Community [Volksgemeinschaft] in their propaganda and contrast the life of a typical German worker with that of their British counterpart. Hitler claimed that National Socialism rejected the rule of money and he prided himself publicly on being the only head of state who didn't have a personal bank account. 
      (It should be noted, however, that the German Führer did have several secret accounts in Switzerland in which he deposited the not inconsiderable royalties earned from Mein Kampf and that the NSDAP received financial support from big business and wealthy benefactors from its earliest days. It is often wise to take what the Nazis say with a pinch of salt.) 
 
[4] Noam Chomsky describes America as a plutocracy masquerading as a formal (but dysfunctional) democracy. See, for example, his essay 'Plutonomy and the Precariat: On the History of the U.S. Economy in Decline', The Huffington Post, (May 8, 2012), which can be read by clicking here.
       Nietzsche, like Marx, recognised the increasing dominion that money had acquired over every aspect of modern life and whilst little interested in developing a detailed political critique, he repeatedly voiced his concerns with this trend. Even in his earliest writings, such as 'The Greek State' (1871/72), for example, he makes clear his contempt for the moneyed aristocracy (i.e. the plutocracy) who threaten social cohesion. 
      Readers who are interested can find the above essay in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 164-173. 
 
[5] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 427.
 
[6-7]  Nick Cohen, 'Behind the glitz of the Sussexes lies a simple truth: our aristocracy is dead', The Guardian (28 August 2021): click here.
 
[8] In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels describe how all values are resolved into exchange value and old social structures and modes of existence incorporated into the global market place, as people increasingly look to the latter for answers to questions that are not merely economic, but metaphysical; questions of what is worthwhile, what is ethical, even what is real. In the end, money determines everything and there is no other nexus between people than sheer self-interest.    
 
[9] As Connie informs her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, he is not a genuine master of (or amongst) men: "'You don't rule, don't flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you [...] or threaten them with starvation.'" [9]  
      D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 193.
      
[10] Nick Cohen, op. cit.  


13 Dec 2017

Kissing Hitler 2: Notes on the Führer's Love Life

Heil honey, I'm home!


Hitler's love life has long been subject to critical and clinical analysis, as well as sensational speculation and obscene rumour. We know that he had relationships with a number of young women during his life and seemed to enjoy their company. The most famous and long-lasting of these relationships was with Eva Braun, whom he married in a civil ceremony on April 29, 1945, shortly before they committed suicide. (Is there anything more Romantic than a honeymoon in Hell?)

Although this relationship was kept secret from the public so as to protect Hitler's image as a man dedicated entirely to his political mission and the German people, there is no reason to think it was in any way an abnormal affair and Braun's biographer, the respected historian Heike Görtemaker, notes that the couple enjoyed a normal sex life (whatever that is).

There is also no real evidence that Hitler ever had any homosexual encounters, or desired such. The 1943 report by Walter C. Langer for the American Office of Strategic Services and the separate psychoanalytical study for the OSS by Henry Murray written in the same year that describe Hitler as having repressed homosexual tendencies and speculate that he was a shit-loving, sado-masochist with only one testicle who had trouble getting it up can, I think, be safely dismissed as shameful wartime propaganda that, actually, relies upon homophobia and encourages queer bashing.

Even if true, there's nothing wrong with being a kinky monorchid and coprophile; certainly in Hitler's case, this wasn't the most troubling aspect of his character and doesn't explain the genocidal nature of National Socialism. It's a shame, ultimately, that Hitler wasn't more of a libertine and less of a Nazi. For without wanting to sound like an old hippie, it's always better to make love rather than war, no matter how perversely one may choose to do so - though we shouldn't, of course, mistakenly posit these things as mutually exclusive terms, or binary opposites.


Note: readers interested in the idea of kissing Hitler should go to part one of this post: click here


9 Jun 2013

Why I Love the Poetry of Paul Celan



In his essay 'The Hollow Miracle' (1959), George Steiner argues that the Nazis killed the German language. Or, at any rate, they murdered the poetry of the language. Post-war German, says Steiner, still makes a sound and it still allows for communication, but it creates no sense of communion.

This is a terrible indictment - and, clearly, it's meant to be. But is it strictly fair, or even accurate? For without wishing to dispute that something immensely damaging was done to German during the Nazi period, it might be argued that a process that had been underway for some time was simply taken to its fatal conclusion.

In fact, Steiner concedes that the death of the German language has a long and complicated history. Thus, even during the Second Reich, for example, there were worrying signs that German was in a bad shape, including an over-reliance on fixed metaphors, stock similes, and ready-made slogans. And as words and sentences started growing clumsy and bloated, it became ever more difficult to express new thoughts or feelings in a concise and cheerful manner (even Nietzsche struggles at times).  

It was the Prussians, therefore, not the Nazis, who replaced the genius of the language with cliché, vulgarity, and a fatal taste for sickly romantic pathos beneath which to conceal their own ressentiment; and it was the Prussians who showed a peculiar liking for the loud voice barking threats and commands, rather than that which spoke softly and with good humour.

Thus it was that the voices of Heine, Rilke, Kafka, and others were all drowned out by the those who knew how to turn the German tongue into a weapon of mass destruction and rob human speech of its integrity and tenderness. Steiner writes:

"Let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance."

- 'The Hollow Miracle', essay in Language and Silence, (Penguin Books, 1969), p.140.

Of course, all languages contain toxic reservoirs of hatred, but only in German did they bubble so closely to the surface of legitimate and everyday speech. Thus it was that German supplied evil with a tongue. And if under Bismarck it became the language of the modern state, under Hitler it became the language with which to administer Hell. 

Steiner concludes his essay on a pessimistic note, arguing that when a language has been used to conceive, organize, and justify genocide, then it has been fatally compromised; that something of the malevolence and malignancy sinks into the language and prevents it from ever being able to renew itself. Is there then no hope for German? Was Adorno right to assert there could be no poetry after Auschwitz? 

For me, Paul Celan provides this hope and proves Adorno wrong. Celan knew exactly what was needed of poetry after the Holocaust: first, it had to articulate the silence without breaking it; secondly, it had to find a way to 'bear witness from the inside of death'. Those critics who accused him of aestheticizing genocide were profoundly stupid and shamefully mistaken. Celan is the greatest post-War poet writing in German and those who love the language have him to thank for reinvesting it with Geist and freeing it from its congealment in blood and soil.