[A much larger and politically challenging version has appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, 14 July, 2018]
Ur-fascism: Eco, Chomsky, Nandy
Badiou’s paranoia about global rise
of fascism is shared, in a variety of forms, by other influential authors. A
full review of this problematic literature is beyond the scope of this short,
polemical essay. Yet, at least a quick mention must be made of Umberto Eco’s
celebrated piece on what he called ‘Ur-Fascism’ (Eco 1995). It is possible that
Badiou and other ‘continental’ authors possibly draw their inspiration from
Eco. In this very problematic yet manifestly absorbing piece, Eco readily
agrees that Nazism and the attendant form of fascism was a unique historical
phenomenon. Even the historical context of Italian ‘fascism’—his topic—did not
really qualify as fascism by Nazi standards. Eco warns that historically
incorrect use of the concept of fascism might actually pave the way for
ambiguous, even opportunistic, ascriptions:
It is worth
asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined
throughout the world as a struggle against fascism … for FDR, “The victory of
the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the
dead hand of despotism it represents.”
The conjunction of ‘fascism’ with the ‘dead hand of despotism’
enabled America and its allies to continue the ‘struggle’ for freedom and
democracy across the world; apparently, the struggle included the nuclear
bombing of Hiroshima and Ngasaki against fascist Japan. Chomsky throws furtherlight on FDR’s concern about fascism and the dead hand of despotism it
represented: in 1937 when FDR was the president of
US, ‘the State Department described Hitler as a kind of a moderate who was
holding off the dangerous forces of the left, meaning the Bolsheviks and the
labor movement’. Thus, Eco is fully justified in
opposing the use of the notion of fascism beyond its original context.
Nonetheless, Eco’s
otherwise salutary and deeply human essay begins to get problematic with his
suggestion that, when he was growing up as a boy in Mussolini’s Italy, his personal experiences reflected that
unique historical moment. Thus, his aim in the essay is to form a literary
record of the experience of fascism.
In that sense, Eco’s aim is not really to engage with the actual social history
of Nazism. His goal is artistic, in the literary mode. According to Eco,
fascism, like any other ruling order, can be so experienced, because
behind a regime and its ideology there is
always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure
instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe
(not to speak of other parts of the world)? Ionesco once said that ‘only words
count and the rest is mere chattering.’ Linguistic habits are frequently
important symptoms of underlying feelings.
Thus, even if Eco warned us earlier
about not venturing beyond the original example of fascism, his experience of
linguistic and cultural habits during the fascist period suggests to him, after
over half a century, that the ‘ghost’ may still be ‘stalking’ the globe. This
is not the place to examine these loaded remarks for their empirical and
conceptual validity. I just wish to point out a few incongruities.
First, as Eco
himself narrates the story of Italian fascism, it was not a well-organized
ideology at all with a master text and the like. The rule of Mussolini, for
Eco, was basically aggressive corporatism, and had little resemblance to
Hitler’s rule of Germany. According to Eco, much of what was articulated in the
name of fascism, including Mussolini’s own writings (such as ‘Doctrine of
Fascism’), was not meant to be taken seriously. So, which ‘feelings and
thoughts’ are to be identified to suggest the specific form of the Italian
regime rather than the obscene reactionary behaviour of, say, British skinheads
or the Bajrang Dal in India? How is reactionary behaviour related to specific
forms of fascism?
Second, and more
fundamentally, even if some cultural habits etc. were displayed prominently
during a certain rule, how do we link these habits to the historical basis of
the regime itself? Suppose that Mussolini was fond of humming Brahms because
his mother did so; assume further that followers of Mussolini started humming
Brahms too. Will the musical habit of humming Brahms, or even the cultural
habit of imitating the leader, signal the onset of fascism? For a real example,
Eco emphasizes the fact that Mussolini’s goons wore black shirts. Does the mass
cultural habit of wearing black shirts signify advent of fascism? In that case,
does it follow that the Ku Klux Klan in US fails to qualify as fascist because
its members wear white robes instead?
Third—the reason
why I mentioned Eco’s piece in the context of my detailed criticism of Badiou—fascism
is essentially a very specific economic phenomenon accompanied by a certain
form of class-war; it is just facile to think that such material bases of a
social order are causally reflected in the linguistic and cultural habits of
the society. After all, Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler basically spoke the same
German language. Cultural and linguistic habits of a community typically have a
much larger historical—in fact, evolutionary—spread than the emergence and
disappearance of specific political regimes. For example, it is often said that
fascism is associated with subjugation of women. Following our descent from
chimpanzees, rather than from bonobos, it is hard to find a social form where
such an association is missing. So, the relation, if at all, between the actual
power-plays of the regime and the deep-rooted cultural practices of a community
can only be tenuous. In India, for example, classical Oxford-style liberals,
Parisian postmodernists, and Hindu fundamentalists, all flaunt the greatness of
ancient Indian culture.
Apart from cultural and linguistic
habits, Eco also mentioned ‘obscure instincts and unfathomable drives’ as sure
manifestations of fascism. Such features usually belong to an individual and
are thus studied in individual clinical psychology. In an influential essay,
Ashish Nandy (2002) applied these disciplinary tools to portray an individual
called Narendra Modi. Nandy pointed out that
Modi appeared to be a ‘classic, clinical case
of a fascist.’ On the basis of a prolonged, ‘rambling’ interview with Modi in
the early 1990s Nandy elaborated on the ‘clinical case’ as follows in an
oft-cited passage.
He had the same mix of puritanical
rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of
projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of
violence—all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality
traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a
theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as
a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview
shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a
fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.
It is important to note that Nandy
made these highly technical remarks—‘puritanical
rigidity,’ ‘ego defence of projection,’ ‘paranoid and obsessive personality
traits’—in 2002, more than a decade after the said interview took place, after the world was made to witness the
pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat when Modi was its chief minister. In that sense,
Nandy’s remarks have at best a post-facto ‘predictive’ value, speaking
empirically.
When Nandy interviewed Modi, Modi was just a pedestrian,
mid-level, right-wing activist among hundreds of others. Setting aside the
issue of why Modi in particular was picked, from among a large number of
qualified candidates sharing similar beliefs and attitudes with Modi, it is
reasonable to assume that the ‘textbook case’ could well apply to hundreds of
fellow sanghchalaks in the RSS,
unless the disciplinary methods championed by Nandy are able to relate such
dark traits to very selective individuals ostensively picked by such clinical
psychology. Indeed, even a casual inquiry in the labyrinths of urban dungeons
teeming with contract killers, drug mafia, prostitution rackets, gangsters,
addicts, and the like, could well reveal hundreds of thousands of ravaged
individuals with such personality traits. From such psychological studies, will
Nandy make a forecast of an entire army of mass murderers waiting in the wings?
Why aren’t they showing up periodically? Why is it that only Narendra Modi
turned out to be the preordained one?
I must hasten to add that I am not trivializing the
monstrous killings conducted under Modi’s rule and the danger to democracy
posed by his advent to power. Just the opposite in fact (Mukherji 2014). The
historical gravity and the political meaning of the genocide are in fact trivialized
if we are asked to focus instead on the eye movement, the tone of voice and the
linguistic habits of an individual, no matter how intimidating his behaviour.
In any case, to return to the topic in hand, tracing the source of a calamitous
historical phenomenon like the emergence of fascism to some ‘paranoid and
obsessive personality traits’ of an individual is at best politically suspect
in that it misses out on the tumultuous material events that gave rise to
fascism with its catastrophic consequences. I return to Modi and his rule
briefly in the next section.
It is interesting that, from a very different direction,
some of Noam Chomsky’s recent views are also problematic in the perspective on
fascism I am trying to develop. In a discussion some years ago (Hedges 2010),
Chomsky observed that the general politico-economic situation in the US ‘is
very similar to late Weimar Germany; the parallels are striking.’ He gave two
basic and related reasons: economic deprivation of large masses of people and
loss of faith in the parliamentary system.
As with many liberal observers, Chomsky reports that the
‘American dream,’ that fostered much faith and hope in the American political
system in the 1950s and 1960s, has progressively eroded for vast number of
people. This is specially the case with white blue-collar workers whose
post-war prosperity was the driving force behind the earlier boom. With much
recent damage and closure of US-based classical industrial structure, wages and
standards of living have fallen rapidly since the 1980s. The situation has been
aggravated with astronomical rise in the wealth of the top 1% as American
capital moved abroad to off-shore domains of cheap labour. Naturally, as low
turn-outs in national elections show, large sections of wage-earners have lost
faith in the political system that is viewed as serving only the rich.
These are well-known facts for several decades by now
despite much effort in the mainstream media to conceal them. In fact, the
general spread of these facts is not restricted to the US alone as the
phenomenon has progressively affected much of the rest of the world, especially
the earlier rich countries in Europe and Asia. The current scene in the US
reminds Chomsky of the last days of the Weimar republic because
not [only] that
the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that
the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and
disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently
managed to take over.
Similarly,
for the US, Chomsky predicts darkly that
There it was the
Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told
that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend
ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People
will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force … I don’t think all
this is very far away.
From this grim vision of an imminent future, Chomsky
concludes, ‘it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the
crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.’
However, Chomsky notes that the ‘United States is the
world power.’ The US continues to be not only the most powerful economy in the
world, it has an absolute military control over the planet. Consequently, the
ruling classes of US will not want any drastic change in the reigning political
order even if sections of the relatively impoverished people express some
resentment. This is the basic difference with the late Weimar republic. The
other big difference is that there is not even a remote threat of communist
take-over; in fact, there is not even the prospect of classical European social
democracy in US. As Chomsky himself observed in another discussion, the
recently popular democrat Bernie Sanders can at best be viewed as a ‘new deal
democrat’; as subsequent events proved, Sanders is very much a friend of
corporate America. Even then the establishment preferred Clinton over Sanders.
The recent election results validate the preceding
picture. No doubt, a somewhat deviant character Donald Trump won the elections
with electoral college majority, even if he lost the popular vote. The entire
military-industrial complex aggressively backed Hilary Clinton who won the
popular vote. As for Trump, he is at best a republican outsider, not the
‘crazy’ insider Chomsky had in mind in 2010. Finally, with some irony, Chomsky
remarked in his 2010 discussion that ‘The United States is extremely lucky that
no honest, charismatic figure has arisen … Every charismatic figure is such an
obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the
evangelist preachers.’ Fortunately, as a well-known real estate tycoon and an
accomplished crook, Trump doesn’t qualify either; Trump will have to perform on
the model of earlier distinguished crooks. Speaking literally, the only
political leader of stature in US today who meets Chomsky’s conception of a
fascist as an ‘honest, charismatic figure’ is Bernie Sanders.
(To be continued)
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