Clearinghouse on American Fascism

The following statement has been misattributed to American writer Sinclair Lewis: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." More likely a similar statement comes from a talk by John Waterman Wise, Jr. in which he called William Randolph Hearst (the FoxNews/Rupert Murdoch of his day) and Charles Coughlin (the Rush Limbaugh/Glen Beck) "the two chief exponents of fascism in America. If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any 'shirt' movement, nor with an 'insignia,' but it will probably be 'wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution." The Christian Century, vol. 53, 2/5/1936 (245).

George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) wrote:

"But what then is Fascism?

"Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and — this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism — generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

"But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognize any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only Nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non-Nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the colored peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery."

Based on his analysis of a number of identifiably fascist regimes, Laurence W. Britt has compiled what he calls the 14 basic characteristics of fascism:

• Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
• Disdain for the importance of human rights
• Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
• The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
• Rampant sexism
• A controlled mass media
• Obsession with national security
• Religion and ruling elite tied together
• Power of corporations protected
• Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
• Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
• Obsession with crime and punishment
• Rampant cronyism and corruption
• Fraudulent elections

In an April 9, 1944, article in The New York Times, "Democracy Reborn," former U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace (1941-45) identified the form a specifically American brand of fascism might take:

"A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.

... The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

... [A]n American fascist [is] one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

... Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.

... The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

... The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. ... They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Strictly speaking, fascism was a particularly 20th Century form of authoritarian totalitarianism. One thinks of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, etc. (By the same token, our representative democracy, our republicanism, if you will, is a particularly 18th Century form of liberal [anti-royalist] government, one which was co-opted in the early 20th Century by the authoritarian totalitarianism of Stalin and Mao among others. Yet, remarkably, it withstood both those challenges.)

Historically, fascism has taken many forms. Contemporary writer, Umberto Eco, identifies the elements of what he calls "Ur-Fascism" in his Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt (1995):

1. The cult of tradition, or syncretism of opinion
2. The rejection of modernism, or irrationalism
3. Action for action's sake, taken without reflection or debate: Culture is suspect
4. Disagreement is treason; the critical spirit is degenerate, emasculate
5. Fear of difference; disagreement is a sign of unwelcome diversity
6. Ur-fascism derives from individual or social frustration, or the cult of victimhood
7. Nationalism, xenophobia
8. Feeling of humiliation by the wealth, size, and force of the enemy
9. Life is permanent warfare, the ongoing struggle; the Armageddon complex
10. Contempt for the weak; Elitism of the military, the celebrity, the athlete
11. The cult of heroism; willingness to send others to death for principles
12. Machismo; sexism; homophobia; idealization of chastity, purity
13. Selective populism; the Leader pretends to act for all
14. Newspeak; elementary syntax, impoverished vocabulary

If you're interested, here's a fairly sober look at the progress and regress of the fascist current in contemporary American political affairs.

My suspicion—no, my worry—is that we are heading toward a much softer version of authoritarianism. Call it authoritarianism by consent. It won't be just like the fascism of the mid- to late 1900s, so that any attempts to saddle it with that label will be laughed out of the common discourse.

I don't know quite what form it might take, but I do believe it will involve corporate control over government: plutocrats buying Congress, the Supreme Court, and even the Presidency and, more importantly, the regulatory apparatus surrounding it; all, I might add, for the purpose of creating inequities in the system which will accrue in greater and greater proportions to those at the top.

It will likewise entail private militaries as well as public and will include all the services and industries (intelligence, weapons, etc.) surrounding them—let's call it the National Security apparatus; all of whom, I might add, require ever increasing portions of the treasury (both public and private) to sustain them. Thus creating an intensely symbiotic relation with the corporatist faction.

I don't think we're there quite yet, and I have some sympathy with Sara Robinson's point above, to wit: the 2000s saw the pendulum swing more toward the fascist side of our polity, and the 2010s have seen us moving—however incrementally and incompletely—back from that extreme. This may simply turn out to have been a hiccup in the inexorable march of democratic societies to some form of authoritarian totalitarianism, something toward which much of our Western political history—from the ancient Greeks and Romans on—has trended. That, of course, remains to be seen, and is dependent on the strength of our democratic institutions to withstand the corruptions of corporatism and our will to maintain an open and relatively equitable society over against the creeping militarism.

It is our job to keep our eyes open and call it out when we see it.
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If you disagree and feel our society's corporatist militarism is heading us irretrievably in the direction of fascism, download and print a hard copy of Gene Sharp's cookbook for democratic revolutionaries before they take your internets away: From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation:

"When one wants to bring down a dictatorship most effectively and with the least cost then one has four immediate tasks:

• One must strengthen the oppressed population themselves in their determination, self-confidence, and resistance skills;

• One must strengthen the independent social groups and in- stitutions of the oppressed people;

• One must create a powerful internal resistance force; and

• One must develop a wise grand strategic plan for liberation and implement it skillfully." (7-8)

The Shiver of Destiny

Umberto Eco's third and final lecture in his Ellman series, "Confessions of a Young Novelist," was entitled: "On the Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death."

The trivial answer to the question implied by the title of his lecture is the exploration of human psychology and the inculcation of moral value. But that is not the direction Eco wants to go. More interestingly, he must answer two separate questions:

• 1) How can a series of propositions that are avowedly untrue instruct us in the ways of life and death?
• 2) How can discourse on possible worlds influence our understanding of life and death?
  

Of fictional characters, Eco says, we can conceivably know more than we do of those human beings we encounter on a day-to-day basis (at school or the office or, tellingly, in our own homes). He claims he knows Leopold Bloom better than he knows his own father. Now that his father is dead, he can never uncover his inner secrets and the motivations behind his actions. Nor can he, other than trivially and by resort to hearsay, discover any more about his father's history. On the other hand, he can always discover more about Bloom each time he re-reads Ulysses.

For Eco qua philosopher, fiction clarifies the notion of truth. From the truth-conditional point of view, fiction should always present what is not. Fictional worlds are always incomplete and unhomogenous, never a complete state of affairs. A fictional world is a doxastic world—one in which the reader voluntarily suspends her disbelief. Fictional worlds are, further, parasitical on the real world. When it comes down to world-matching, we must be flexible. We know, for example, that no real British detective named Sherlock Holmes ever really resided at Baker Street, or that Nero Wolf never occupied a brownstone on West 35th Street in Manhattan. Similarly, in Act III of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, we know there is no Bohemian coast. But we accept these features as true de dicto, not de facto. In this sense, we read a fictional text like a musician reads a musical score.

Eco takes pains to distance his own reading from that of the deconstructionists. It is not the case that there are no facts, only interpretations. For Eco, fictional statements offer, if anything, a stronger form of truth than, say, cultural truths. Cultural truths, including scientific statements, are open to revision as new facts emerge. Fictional truths are at least as ontologically strong as cultural truths. Thus, as Eco would have it, that Hitler died in a Berlin bunker can, conceivably, be revised by the discovery of new facts—for example, a grave filled with his bones in Paraguay. That Nero Wolf lives at West 35th cannot. Truth must be as indisputable and immutable as the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. The theory of rigid designation must hold in fictional worlds. According to Eco, fictional characters also have ontological consistency (merely the valence differentiates them from real persons). Hitler was real; Clark Kent was not: this is consistent.

A narrative agreement is in effect between the author and readers to accept the fictional world as if it were our own. That Emma Bovary committed suicide is true in every possible world (except some rather poor speculative 'fan fiction', apparently). This is as true as that a right angle has 90 degrees—in the Euclidean world. Emma's world is the languaged world. The fate of Little Red Riding Hood, on the other hand, is in a bit of flux. She is not identified with a specific text—in an earlier version she is devoured by the wolf but in the Grimm retelling she is rescued by the woodsman. Sherlock Holmes and the like, because they are identified with a specific set of texts, take on greater significance than other fictional characters. Eco calls them 'cultural habits' or the creation of cultural imagination.

Now, Eco asks, can fictional characters lose their identities? It is possible in certain instances such as group text creation based on great narratives or illicit sequels or so-called fan fiction. But this, he says, is something like playing a Chopin Polonnaise on a ukulele; the timbre of the piano is crucial to the true appreciation of the work.

What we witness in reading fiction is what Eco calls the "shiver of destiny!" He brings up Hugo's depiction of the Battle of Waterloo. It reads like a helicopter shot in a movie. If Napoleon had only known of the sharp decline of the terrain, etc., etc., he might have detoured, delayed, etc. Today, we can create a very realistic Waterloo war game, yet in Hugo (as, coincidentally, in historical fact) Napoleon always loses. Similarly, in Hamlet, the good prince dies. There are many possible outcomes to his situation: he marries Ophelia, banishes the King, forgives his mother, etc. But, in the Shakespearean text, for all time, Hamlet's fate is what it is. Unchangeable.

What's more, neither Hamlet nor Napoleon can know their fates. They have no access to the world of the author (where possible worlds swirl in the imagination and disappear in the shredder of forgotten or discarded drafts). Oedipus cannot know the world of Sophocles, else he wouldn't have married his mother. And here's where fiction is most instructional: Fiction suggests our view of the real world is as limited as a fictional character's is of his own world.

Thus, the function of the unchangeable stories of fiction and the unchangeable nature of fictional characters is to teach us about fate and death, i.e., to show us the limits of our common human condition. This is the principle advantage of fiction for life and death.

Who Controls the Text?

Umberto Eco's second lecture in the Ellmann series was entitled "Author, Text, and Interpreters." It was more tailored to the academic crowd present to hear him lecture than yesterday's, though it drew in part on the groundwork he laid then.

According to Eco, one of the questions he most has to answer as an author when dealing with his books' translators has to do with perceived ambiguities in the text. He has three sorts of response: (1) "keep it in, I meant it to be that way;" (2) "keep it in, I didn't mean it but it's useful;" or (3) "iron it out, I didn't mean it." His position, for the main, is that creative writers should never interpret their own texts. The reader shouldn't appeal to the author's intention, but to the evidence of the text.

Eco borrows the term "unlimited semiosis" from the American logician C.S. Peirce to express his approach to what he calls the "open text." Peirce says: ""The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation ... the interpretant is nothing but another representation ... and as representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite series." The text is susceptible to an infinite number of uses (apparently recursive uses). What, then, are the criteria that limit interpretation? Eco draws on the Augustinian notion that you can check the validity of an interpretation by reference to the text. Any interpretation that is incompatible with the text must be rejected.

Eco also distinguished the semiotic approach to the text from deconstruction. Briefly, semiotics holds that the text is a series of multiple, perhaps infinitely many, signs (as indicated above). Deconstruction, to the contrary, holds that the text is mere signifier. And, as we all know, the sign is comprised of the signifier/signified relation.

Eco cops to being an allusive writer. Indeed, in his first lecture he stated outright that he was explicit in his use of intertextuality, and more specifically, "double codes". He loves to drop clues for the "paranoid reader" to track down. However, there are limits to intertext. Thus, on a personal note, he found his early books The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum opened up a number of chains of associations in their readers. Some of those associations he felt were intended and embodied in the text and, thus, valid. Others, were unintended and unsupported by the text and, accordingly, invalid. There were others, however, which were unintended yet were supported in the text and, reluctantly, valid.

The delight of the lecture (for me) was Eco's anecdotal examples of dealing with his readers. Specifically, he recounted a couple instances of his unconscious inserting references into his text that were unavailable to his conscious creative mind. In particular, after Name came out, he found an old text by Riccoboni (sp?) on a dusty top shelf in his study. It had page corners darkened by Eco's eager fingerprints. In this book, the author had tried to reconstruct from the available evidence the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, i.e., the disappeared "Comedy". Eco had pored over this book as a young man, but had completely forgotten about it when writing Name. In another instance, he unconsciously used the name of a Brazilian singer of the pop song "Guantanamero" as a character in Pendulum. When he discovered this, he remembered having a crush on her at the time.

What was remarkable about this lecture was Eco's ability to maintain a critical detachment from his own creative works, to treat them as textual objects in order help locate the point were meaning must be fixed in the text without violating the text. Yet, he refrained from providing an interpretation of his own works. And he refrained from asserting that the text and its interpretation constituted a perfect system—there must necessarily be a leakage of significance.

In answer to the question we posed above, the text controls both its author and its interpreters. In our own terms, the text not only is battleground in the struggle between the writer and the critic, it is the ultimate proving ground. Intention as well as interpretation find their empirical constraints within its bounds.

How Eco Writes

Umberto Eco's first lecture in the Ellmann series was entitled: "How I Write."

Stately, plump Umberto Eco strode onto the stage in a slightly frumpy navy suit, chewing (like a former smoker) on a fountain pen top. Behind thick glasses and a small mustache, he read his lecture from a typescript, often holding a single sheet of paper up in the air as he stared at it through the bottom lens of his bifocals. Often, he would look up from his prepared remarks and detour for a delightful, wry, personal aside. For example, he had to shave his trademark beard for some research he had been doing in Fiji, he said. It turns out he had trouble keeping suction on his scuba mask. (Of course, if he'd asked me I would have recommended petroleum jelly to fix such annoying leaks.).

Eco warned the audience that his essays and lectures (as did his dissertation) often suffer from a "narrative fallacy." That is to say, they do not proceed from a thesis statement which is supported by a series of proofs and is then contrasted with opposing points of view. Rather, they accumulate meaning, exploring, building, rising to a climax, and concluding. He takes as his model Plato's Parmenides, which, he claimed, was comprised of nine successive hypotheses each of which contradicts the preceeding one and, at the end, you never find out "who did it."

Eco's novels always start with an image, he says. He wanted, he said, to pursue the image of the slow poisoning of a monk reading some sort of illuminated text or to kill off Cardinal Richelieu. His readers will recognize instantly the texts these particular images spawned. The goal of the writer, then, is summarized in the rhetorical term "ekphrasis" where the clarity of the image is replicated in the mind of the writer by the sharpness and accuracy of the descriptive language.

Eco's approach to writing fiction struck me as Nabokovian. To achieve this ekphrasis, he draws maps, lays out architectural plans, sketches faces, constructs models, paints flowers, etc. He calculates time down to the last second and space down to the last millimeter. For research, he visits sites while dictating his thoughts into a tape recorder. He also keeps notebooks of his impressions. For The Name of the Rose, for instance, he visited a number of Romanesque and Gothic monasteries. He timed his walks through these abbeys and then timed the length of his dialogues that took place as his characters walked these same routes. Verisimilitude.

The key point in this approach is that, in the novel, events (or reality) dictate the words in the narrative. It is quite the opposite in poetry, where the words determine the meaning and the reality. The novelist is like the demiurge; he creates and moves about in the world with utmost confidence. Once the writer has clearly detailed the world, the language of the point of view flows from it.

Eco stressed the importance of various sorts of constraints that operate on the writer in his quest to delineate the text's universe and its language. He also pointed to two "post-modern" techniques he relied on in his writing: intertextual irony (and its subspecies "double coding") and metanarrative in which the author directly addresses the reader.

Eco told the audience it only took him two years to write his first novel, The Name of the Rose. It took him between six and eight years for each of his subsequent novels. The reason? He is a medievalist by profession and before Name he had done practically all the research he needed. With the others, much more research was required.

The audience this evening was filled with a lot of scholarly-looking types. The Schwartz center auditorium was filed to the rafters. I wondered, as a writer of fiction myself, how this lecture went over with them.

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco is a multi-disciplinary Italian scholar and a novelist. He is often mentioned in the context of the Nobel Prize for literature. I had the great honor to meet him last night at Emory University. He was here to deliver the ninth in the biennial series of The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. His topic: Confessions of a Young Novelist. The lectures, which spanned three separate sessions, will be published in book form next year by Harvard Press. Last night he gave a reading of an autobiographical snippet from his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum.

The title of his lecture series is wryly ironic. Eco's first and most famous novel, The Name of the Rose (subsequently made into a competent film starring Sean Connery), was published in 1980 when Eco was 49 years old. In his own accounting, he is only a 28 year old novelist. (I guess that makes me a novelist in utero. Indeed, when does life begin?)

He entitled his three lectures as follows: (1) "How I Write;" (2) "Author, Text, and Interpreters;" and (3) "On the Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death." The first lecture (near and dear to my heart) was a subjective account of himself and his processes as novelist. The second was a more objective look at his work from the standpoint of the critical interpreter. The third magically expanded out to an account of the ultimate subject of literature (which, I must say, coincided nicely with our own series of posts on what we called the Ur-Story). The form of the series of lectures was unconventionally narrative, less a thesis statement with proofs than an exploration working toward a grand solution.

Over the next series of posts, I shall try to set out some of Eco's major way-posts on the way toward his conclusion. Stay tuned.

Ur-Story

The inevitable sense of loss that accompanies death: let's accept this as our jumping off point, our Ur-story. All of religion is one elaborate fiction that attempts to explain it, however unsatisfactorily, as a fundamental flaw in our being and our circumstance that some distant god is trying either to correct or somehow redeem or, barring that, at least put a hopeful spin on it which we will come to understand someday if we keep the faith, baby. James Wood complains that Bart Ehrman and, for that matter, the Bible fail to put a happy face on it for him to comprehend. Sorry, Jim.

The thousand-faced hero's quest, central to all mythology (per Joseph Campbell) and pre-modern literature, is, if we read the Gilgamesh aright, likewise a reaction to our grief in the face of this loss. Helen (lately of Troy). (Nearly) Penelope. Oedipus's patrimony and, indeed, his identity; his eyes. We could go on. In the classic formulation, the emotions relevant to this Ur-story were pity and fear: we pity the Loser and fear we ourselves might soon become one. So, the thinking went, the fictional protrayals of this Ur-story should follow certain formal, dramatic rules which would work to elicit these very emotions in us, viscerally introducing us to the appropriate coping mechanisms native to our nature. Tragedy as therapy. A sentimental education.

These two strategies, the religious (hope for something better) and the literary (grapple with them and thus get a grip on those bad feelings) did the trick for a number of centuries. Oh, there have been any number of intellectual attempts to justify or, better yet, explain the problem to the denser of us. But that all feels like mental masturbation, nothing really productive comes out all those gymnastic efforts.

Then along came the modern world—more people, more information, seemingly more evil—and a potentially "new" solution: laughter. James Joyce once told his friend Eugene Jolas that he "was interested in a comic version of Leibniz's essay on theodicy." You can judge for yourself whether his Finnegans Wake succeeded at this; Ulysses is pretty funny. Umberto Eco, in The Name of the Rose, implies there was a vast conspiracy by the early Christian fathers to squelch any hint of the comedic in the works of Aristotle (the patron secular saint of patristics), because if the people learned to laugh at the inevitability of loss they would no longer honor the churchly hierarchy. That's not to say there was no comedy prior to the 20th Century. Au contraire: M. Voltaire takes a pretty sure, satiric shot across Freiherr Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" Theodicy bow in Candide. It's just that comedy, to the 'serious'-minded among us, simply wasn't considered serious enough, especially for such a monumental problem. Besides, Voltaire was French.


[to be continued]