Everybody Loves a Good Fascist-Part II

[A much larger and politically challenging version has appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, 14 July, 2018]

Original fascism (revised)

The preceding uncharitable exercise was needed to point out that, even with this rather gory record of human political systems, the events between the two world wars stand out as unique in human history. In particular, even though the notion of fascism was first applied to the dictatorial rule of Benito Mussolini in Italy, what transpired in Germany after the first world war continues to be the most significant example of fascism in world history. Put differently, the concept of fascism as a socio-political order gets its primary salience from its original exemplar: the Nazi rule in Germany under the supreme command of Adolf Hitler. Once the Nazi rule is taken to be the core phenomenon of fascism, certain conceptual and political consequences follow.

There were several distinguishing features to the Nazi rule. Germany was a leading center of European thought and culture during the 19^th and the early decades of 20^th century, what Martin Heidegger characterised as the ‘most metaphysical of nations’ (cited in Chomsky 2005). Its catastrophic defeat in the first world war brought the entire nation to its knees. The humiliating Treaty of Versailles compelled the German state to disarm and pay astronomical reparations. The value of mark, the German currency, plummeted to several million marks per american dollar, much of the famed German industry became non-functional leading to widespread hunger and destitution of the people. With the defeat of Russian monarchy and the emergence of Soviet Union almost next door, there was a real possibility of either a disintegration or communist takeover of Germany which no traditional bourgeois political forum was capable of preventing.

            It was of utmost importance for the remnants of German capital and aristocracy to find a popular alternative to the existing political order for the rehabilitation of Germany. The charismatic, working-class image of Adolf Hitler with his committed band of stormtroopers fit the bill almost to the last detail. While the communist and the working class movements were rapidly smashed, the major mainstream political parties capitulated to Hitler. Eventually, after rousing electoral victories by Hitler’s party, the parliament was shut down, and a single-party Nazi rule under the supreme command of Hitler was installed.

The entire big business vigorously supported Hitler’s agenda of not paying the reparations, defying the Versaille treaty, and introducing large-scale forced labour to gear Germany towards a war economy. In addition, massive forced labour of Jews, followed by their mass extermination, helped sustain the most aggressive form of German nationalism preparing itself for global war. The resulting slaughter of millions of people across the world, and the scale of destruction that turned much of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa into ruins, were unprecedented even in the dismal political history of the world.

            Needless to say, such a catastrophic historical phenomenon carried a large number of distinguishing features, as listed above, which peaked individually and then coalesced into one organic form after the collapse of the Weimar republic. Many of the critical features—failed economy with mass unemployment, collapse of the democratic order, and popularity of aggressive cultural nationalism—were present in Italy as well, explaining the fascist rule under Benito Mussolini. Thus, despite the difference in scale in these features and the absence of some of the other features in Italy, such as nation-wide racism and xenophobia, it is appropriate to use the generic notion of fascism to cover both the German and the Italian cases, albeit somewhat tentatively in the latter case as Umberto Eco (1995) also pointed out (see below).

For the same reason, it is not advisable to use the notion beyond its unique historical application unless most of the critical features cluster again in an unlikely grim repeat of history. It is ‘unlikely’ because, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction, and colossal and irreversible damage to the ecology of the planet already, the species might well become extinct before fascism-inducing conditions get a chance to mature (Mukherji 2016).

The extreme specificity of the original fascism in Germany and Italy casts doubt on Georgi Dimitrov’s well-known observation:

No general characterization of fascism, however correct in itself, can relieve us of the need to study and take into account the special features of the development of fascism and the various forms of fascist dictatorship in the individual countries and at its various stages. It is necessary in each country to investigate, study and ascertain the national peculiar ties, the specific national features of fascism and to map out accordingly effective methods and forms of struggle against fascism (Dimitrov 1935/1972).

Dimitrov is suggesting that fascism can take different forms in different countries depending on ‘peculiar ties’ and ‘national features.’ In a sense, the suggestion is valid for countries falling within a very specific historical space and time such as Germany and Italy as we saw, but not beyond. It is hard to see the original form of fascism reappearing in a distant space and time. However, to be fair, Dimitrov’s concern seems eminently valid for the period under review by him in the cited lecture. He was speaking to his comrades in 1935 when original fascism had already manifested itself in parts of Western Europe, as noted. To illustrate his thesis, Dimitrov reported on the situation in adjacent France in some detail because, even without the glaring forms of German xenophobia and Italian nationalism, a new menacing form of authoritarianism was rapidly developing in France.  

Recall the core features for the rise of fascism: proximity of Russian revolution, economic collapse due to WW1 followed by the great global depression, massive social unrest and fragmentation of democratic polity. Although the response to these core features resulted in the most aggressive form of fascism in Germany and Italy, its presence was clearly visible in the adjacent territories in that dark phase in history. Thus, Dimitrov directed the attention of his colleagues to the conditions in France where ‘the economic crisis, which began later than in other capitalist countries, continues to become deeper and more acute, and that this greatly encourages the orgy of fascist demagogy.’ Moreover, ‘the development of fascism is furthered by the French bourgeoisie's keen fear of losing its political and military hegemony in Europe.’ In this connection, he also mentioned the rise of fascistic features in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Finland.

However, in agreement with Rajani Palme Dutt, he warned against ‘erroneously classifying all reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie as fascism and going so far as calling the entire non-Communist camp fascist.’ I emphasise that Dimitrov strongly opposed the tendency of erroneous classification even during the turbulent period in Europe when conditions were ripe for fascism to spread like wildfire. In this important sense, even though Dimitrov warned against restricting attention too narrowly only to the German form of fascism, his caution about erroneous classification also sets a severe limit to the historical boundary of fascism.

Ever since its origin in Europe in the 1930s, the specter of fascism has haunted political thinking across the world even though the original form of fascism was decisively defeated within a decade. The mention of fascism has almost become routine political vocabulary in recent years. In this light, let us consider some recent remarks of some influential scholars.

(To be continued)

Everybody Loves a Good Fascist-Part I

[A much larger and politically challenging version has appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, 14 July, 2018]

The Naked Ape

According to the primatologist Frans De Waal, bonobo—also misleadingly known as ‘pigmy chimpanzee’—is a rare species of primates. Bonobos have a pacifist, egalitarian, and non-dominating social structure under female patronage. They lead remarkably peaceful lives organized around complex forms of cooperation and sex. When conflicts on resources such as food arise, bonobos, irrespective of gender, age and social identity, engage in sexual gratification before they settle down to share the resource. However, bonobos are only distantly related to the hominid section of the general primate line (De Waal 2005).

Chimpanzees are our nearest living ancestors. As De Waal points out elsewhere, chimpanzee colonies are brutally dominated by the largest, most muscular and aggressive male. Usually the rule is enforced with the assistance of other, slightly less-endowed males who are willing to co-operate with the leader with a combination of guile, servitude, and mutual benefit. The chimpanzee society teems with violence, jealousy, conspiracies, cunning, cheating, and subterfuge, with females and juniors the worst sufferers (De Waal 2016, 218-22).

With such direct evolutionary lineage, it is no wonder that, in recorded history, most human societies have been structured around exploitation and undemocratic authority, often headed by despotic figures. In their semi-fictional mode, misty-eyed historians sometimes report some exceptions to this rule. But even these rare cases do not seem to stand up to scrutiny. H. G. Wells wrote of the emperor Ashoka in his book The Outline of History ‘Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Ashoka shines, and shines, almost alone, a star’ (cited in Das 1991).

Ashoka is accorded such an elevated status because he marshaled a fine-tuned propaganda machinery. According to the legends spread by powerful Buddhist pundits and by Ashoka’s own carefully scripted edicts planted across the country, Ashoka changed into a saintly emperor after he witnessed the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people by his own army in the Kalinga war. Incidentally, Ashoka killed his way to the throne itself by eliminating all his competing relatives: the estimates of people so killed varies in number between six and ninetynine. Before his alleged moral transformation, he was one of the most ruthless, war-mongering rulers the ancient world ever witnessed.

In any case, even after giving up direct warfare and adopting Buddhism as the religion of his vast empire, he neither renounced his monarchy nor disbanded the huge, ferocious army. Ashoka’s empire was in effect a vast police state with a strict watch over other religious sects. The army was used to enforce his absolute rule and unconditional compliance to Buddhism. For example, while Ashoka’s father Bindusara was said to be a follower of Jainism, Ashoka himself took stern steps to weed out Jaina sects, such as the Ajivikas. In one case, he issued order to kill all the Ajivikas in Pundravardhana. Around 18,000 followers of the Ajivika sect were executed as a result of this order. Such narratives abound. Needless to say, he retained his large and opulent harem, sometimes ordering execution of an inconvenient inmate to find room for another one. (Strong 1989, Popovski et al. 2009)

So much for the lonely star among the tens of thousands of monarchs that crowd the columns of history. The general scene didn’t seem to have changed significantly even after the gradual disappearance of monarchies and emergence of various forms of formal democracy, not to mention a wide array of dictatorships, oligarchies and military rule. The brief history of formal democracy in the West and the rise of communism across the world is replete with imposition of extreme forms of autocracy, aggressive militarism, frequent mass slaughter of people and brutal plunder of the planet. Since the history of the East and the West converge on this count, Gandhi’s trenchant remark on the idea of civilisation applies everywhere, including his own.

Keeping to the post-war scene in US, Noam Chomsky concludes, after a careful survey of every US president from Truman to George Bush I, ‘if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged’ (Chomsky 1990). Chomsky made these remarks in 1990. If asked to do so now, he will certainly include Bill Clinton, George Bush II, and Barak Obama. To recall, Nuremberg trials were conducted to bring Nazi war-criminals to justice, and many were hanged. For now, it is important to note that Chomsky is treating all presidents of US on par with Nazi operators in the context of war-crimes, the subject of Nuremburg and Tokyo trials. He is not saying that US presidents are fascists. I return to Chomsky’s more recent thoughts below in the context of this significant caveat.

(To be continued) 

Chicken coming home to roost: Letter to a friend from France

Hi,

Sorry about the slight delay. Good to hear from you. Thanks for mentioning Pankaj Mishra's piece. I don't think Mishra's piece captures the deeper phenomenon beyond his usual sighs and complaints from a very elitist location.

But I agree with your concern about the familiar civil order falling apart. What is happening in Europe, specially France, Belgium and other sites under terrorist attack, is not very different from happenings in US and UK. India is a somewhat different case with its own tortuous history.

This is a very large topic, yet the really telling feature, as you note, is that very learned and enlightened people are totally caught by surprise. Given the lack of understanding, it is natural, though naive, to fall back on what we partially understand, such as Hitler and Mussolini. Even people of the calibre of Noam Chomsky are falling into such fallacies. 

The classical examples enable us to disassociate ourselves from the phenomenon and assign it to the 'other': xenophobia, racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, communalism, militarism, neoliberalism, etc. In my view that seems to be the biggest epistemic problem. Perhaps we do not realise that Le Pen, Trump, Nigel Farage, Narendra Modi, are just extreme forms of elite privilege itself which only a handful--including you, I and Mishra--can enjoy within the finite resources of the planet.

There are of course subtle distinctions within the elites in liberal discourse: say, between Obama and Trump, Nehru and Modi, Amartya Sen and Allan Greenspan, etc. But we cannot expect the vast majority of the world's deprived people to be interested in making those distinctions. In this context, I find this short video by a young woman very educative.

While scholarly understanding of these things unfolds, some measures of political correction are immediately needed. After Trump's victory, I came up with a 10-point action plan for people in America. Obviously, it is both globally-intended and self-directed. The planet is in danger, not just familiar 'civil society' in US. The planet still has a dim chance if concerned liberal intellectuals are prepared to join the masses in the streets, not just sign internet petitions. 

Let americans fill the streets of America

1. Despite reports about the billionaire Soros and other foundations triggering the anti-Trump protests, I fully support these elite protests because Trump is a shithead.

2. I will also support street protests by Trump-supporters demanding arrest of Hillary and Bill Clinton and judicial proceedings against Barak Obama for crimes against US and humanity.

3. I will support militant street protest by blacks to counter the white supremacist upsurge backed by KKK. I will support black demonstrations for enhanced welfare of black neighbourhoods, release of black prisoners, exemplary punishment for white police killing blacks.

4. I will support street protests by civil rights and hispanic organisations against Trump's reactionary immigration policy.

5. I will support aggressive protests by unemployed mostly white workers demanding enlarged social security and health insurance by federal funding. I will support every protest demanding radical upward revision of wages across the board.

6. I will support sustained street protest by all the impoverished sections of US demanding fulfilment of Trump's election promises including heavy taxation of US corporate setups abroad.

7. I will support all anti-war movements demanding withdrawal of american troops and weapons from across the world, and stoppage of all weapon sales.

8. I will support all protests demanding 90% cut of military expenses to divert the money for protecting the environment.

9. I will support all protests, especially by women's groups, demanding that Trump publicly apologize for his racist and misogynist remarks.

10. I will support all street demonstrations demanding that Bernie Sanders be given the supreme leadership of Dems.

Let these happen first. Others will follow.

Very best

Inaugural Post: Ramkinkar Baij

Ramkinkar Baij

On my Facebook page, I recently posted photographs of two sculptures by Ramkinkar Baij. A sculpture of Gandhi in his Dandi march, and a sculpture of Buddha in meditation.  Apart from the majestic beauty of these sculptures, I posted them in the context of recent 'scholarly' attacks on Gandhi and his humanist legacy. I asked if Ramkinkar would have changed his mind if he knew about these 'scholarly' discoveries from Gandhi's (remote) past. Curiously, the topic of tarnishing an image touches the great artist himself. We need to understand how to evaluate otherwise uplifting legacies.

These sculptures are located in the sprawling campus of Tagore’s university in Santiniketan, Visva-Bharati. Perhaps the greatest Indian sculptor in the 20^th Century, Baij was born in a very low caste family of poor peasants in a remote village of Bengal. As a child, he used to make clay models of folk deities and other stuff. While Tagore was building up the institution in the early 20^th century, he invited many eminent scholars from India and abroad to stay and teach in his impoverished village school. He also looked around for talent in rural Bengal. One of his ‘scout’s spotted the phenomenal talent of young Baij and brought him over to Tagore. Baij spent the rest of his life there.

After learning some basic techniques from senior artists, he started teaching in Visva-Bharati's art school, Kala Bhavana, and ended up as a professor of sculpture. I attended Tagore's school in the 1960s. In those days, the school blended seamlessly with the rest of the university. So, while in class 8 or so, we took our sculpture lessons in the studios of Kala-Bhavana itself. Ramkinkar and other great artists supervised our work. I remember Kinkarda, as we called him, walking over to my pedestal where I was trying to put together a clay model of a head. Looking at the neck, he said that I needed a human neck, not a pig's. With one deft touch, he straightened the neck up and left. I knew it wasn't my vocation.

He didn’t know much about his ‘academic’ career. At the beginning of the month, he would go to the accounts office, stand in line, and pick up his salary. After many decades of this routine, he was picking up his salary one day when the accountant told him that he need not come from the next month since he was retiring, and the pension would be sent to the bank. He didn’t understand any of this, and rushed to the vice chancellor complaining that the accountant had stopped his salary.

His biographer Somendranath Banerji recounted that, on one rainy evening, he saw Ramkinkar, the internationally renowned artist, a Padma Bhushan, lying on his stomach in his tattered clothes, obviously under local spirits, staring at the poodles of water by the side of the road, waiting for the clouds to clear, for the moon to cast its reflection on the water through the trees.

He lived with his life-companion Radharani in a thatched hut at the outskirts of the campus, and worked all the time while singing Tagore and folk songs, and drinking local stuff. Late in his life, his hut washed away during one heavy monsoon. The university almost physically dragged him to a university quarter. He was miserable and died soon after. Another artist of kindred spirit, Ritwik Ghatak, started making a film on Ramkinkar. The film remained incomplete as Ghatak died. 

Recently, there's been some narratives, including apparently a published memoir, that suggest that Ramkinkar was quite a philanderer. Allegedly, he sometimes so troubled young women in the campus--the expression sexual harassment could be used today--that they were compelled to give up their studies. Today, if such allegations are found to be true, they will attract the Visakha guidelines formulated by the Supreme Court of India; the accused may even lose his job if found guilty. Rightly.

Yet the tall statues of Gandhi, Buddha, Sujata, Santhal Family, and many many others, will continue to reach for the sky as generations of parched souls stand still in wonder.