Several days ago, a man named Richard Spencer was on camera, finding artful ways to respond to questions as to whether he is an advocate of genocidal violence against black people (by the way, he is very much an advocate of genocidal violence against black people.) While he did his shtick, a masked person ran up, punched him in the face, and ran off.
You might think that a minor physical assault on a minor public nuisance would figure in the news as, at most, a single line on the police blotter. Yet people are still talking about it. Today, Freddie deBoer, Rod Dreher, and TheNationmagazine all weighed in on this incident.
I tweeted about it the other day:
If I were a betting man, I'd lay odds that Spencer arranged for that person to punch him as a publicity stunt. https://t.co/jTvwpTNVZO
And pretty healthy odds at that; Spencer’s only job is to get publicity, and with this incident he has gained a tremendous amount of that, as he recently gloated when reached for comment by The Independent.
Since people are still talking about this, I’ll add a bit to that tweet. Street-fighting is one area where Nazis have consistently enjoyed success. To meet them on that ground is to play to their strengths.
That isn’t to say that Spencer commands a street-fighting force; he doesn’t. His followers are guys on the internet, the proverbial fat guy living in his mother’s basement. “Failsons,” as Chapo Trap House calls them. Those guys aren’t likely to be much use in a street fight. Nor can they attract support from people who have not already given up on life.
The threat they pose is like the danger people used to talk about regarding nanotechnology. One tiny machine might impose only a very small ecological cost, but as the number of these in use multiplies, it becomes conceivable that they might collectively cause a very large amount of environmental damage. In a worst case scenario, a vast number of nanobots might coalesce into a “Gray Goo” that would render the surface of the earth uninhabitable. The Failsons at their keyboards have, figuratively speaking, coalesced into blobs of destructive goo.
Failson blobs floating around a bloodthirsty racist like Spencer stink up the comments sections of blogs and other social media platforms. That isn’t such a problem in itself; it’s easy enough to ban commenters, as I have had occasion to demonstrate to some of you. Where Spencer’s following has the most potential to do harm is illustrated by something like Gamergate. A few years ago a Failson blob of gamers set out to harass three or four women who had been making a marginal living writing online about video-games. They succeeded in making their lives miserable, and probably did a great deal to discourage other women from getting into gaming journalism. Spencer’s crowd would certainly be capable of targeting particular members of groups they don’t like (blacks, Jews, women, Muslims, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseam) and doing the same damage to their lives that the gamers did to Zoë Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian, while intimidating other members of the same groups into silence.
To stick with the Gamergate analogy a moment longer, “Gray Goo” isn’t just a pejorative in discussing them. Supporters of the harassment of Quinn, Wu. and Sarkeesian called themselves a variety of names, including “the Grey Rebellion” and, most commonly, “Shitlords.” So if I were talking only about them, I might use the phrase “Gray Shit” rather than “Gray Goo.”
Punching people in the street isn’t going to drive the Failsons into hiding; as the trope about them living in their mothers’ basements indicates, they have been in hiding their entire lives. However, it will give Spencer and people like him an opportunity to recruit guys who like to express their hostilities, not by persecuting people from behind a computer screen, but in physical combat. Once they get a group of street-fighters going, that’s a whole new population from which they can draw support. And while street-fighters are as much a low-status population as are the couch-bound Failsons, physically violent people attract a following in ways that people whose aggressions are electronic do not. That’s why skinheads were a thing thirty years ago, to the point where there were anti-Nazi skinheads who would spend Friday nights fighting pro-Nazi skinheads.
The original Nazis, remember, kept going throughout all their electoral ups and downs in the 1920s as a street-fighting group. When the global economy collapsed at the end of that decade, Germany’s elite found that the only way they could restore public order and keep their positions was to put Hitler in charge. Hitler’s ascent had many pre-conditions; Germany’s defeat in World War War One, the mindlessly vengeful policies the victorious powers inflicted on Germany from November 1918 to January 1933, and the Great Depression were all bigger contributors to his rise than was the fact that he had an effective street-fighting force at his disposal. But that street-fighting force was certainly one of the contributors, and when I see leftists expressing pleasure at an event which, if it to have any consequence at all, can only have the consequence of building a street-fighting force loyal to Richard Spencer, I hope that the Trump years will not bring the kind of misery to the USA that the years of the Weimar Republic brought to Germany.
I’ve recently been rereading Robert Skidelsky’s 1975 biography of Oswald Mosley. Robert Skidelsky* tells a tale the ancient Greeks would have recognized as tragedy in the strictest sense of the term, the story of a man of the rarest gifts brought shockingly low by his own insatiable vanity. To think that a man as talented and as dashing as Mosley should have welcomed Adolf Hitler as the guest of honor at his wedding and should almost single-handedly have conjured up a significant anti-Semitic movement in England is to realize that a man whose capacities are such that he might have become a very great historical figure may in the end make of himself an absolute jackass.
What brought me back to the story of Mosley was a video that I saw on YouTube several weeks ago. It is Mosley’s November 1967 appearance on the David Frost Programme. In Mosley’s time, and indeed until quite recently, the ability to see hecklers off was an essential part of success in British political oratory. Mosley was apparently quite good at this from the beginning of his political career in the early 1920’s. After giving over 200 speeches a year throughout the 1930’s, encountering hecklers on the vast majority of those occasions, he was as good at handling hecklers as anyone could be. It was to Mosley’s advantage, then, that the audience was quite hostile to him (well, what audience wouldn’t have been, by that time?) It was an even greater advantage that the lead heckler, Solly Kaye, had been a frequent antagonist of Mosley’s in the 1930’s, so that Mosley knew exactly what to expect from him. After the showdown between Kaye and Mosley in the first half of the program, one rather has the uneasy feeling that Mosley is going to come out a clear winner. Frost appears to have felt that way, as he resorts to a rather frantic attempt to remind people that the amiable fellow sitting across from him is after all Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and one of the undoubted villains of the century.
In that interview, embedded below, Mosley executes what I think of as “the Mosley Shuffle.” At the 27 minute mark, Frost asks Mosley whether he thinks Hitler, if he had survived the war, ought to have been tried for and convicted of war crimes. Mosley says yes, that the killing of defenseless prisoners is a crime under any system of laws and so the murder of massive numbers of Jews in concentration camps should have brought Hitler and his top men into court. At the 28 minute mark, he throws in a curious aside about that particular mass murder: “while I don’t think nearly so many were killed as were supposed to be killed, that doesn’t matter- that doesn’t matter- because any crime, the killing of any defenseless prisoner, is a crime and everybody must detest it.” At the 33 minute mark, he acknowledges that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, then immediately blames Jews collectively for starting World War Two (“They made the greatest mistake they ever made when they produced that war,”) without which the Holocaust would not have been possible.
I call it the Mosley Shuffle because it does seem like a dance. A step forward (the mass murders of Jews in the Nazi concentration camps were a crime that should have been punished,) a step backward (“I don’t think nearly so many were killed as were supposed to be killed,”) a step to the left (“that doesn’t matter- that doesn’t matter.”) A step forward (it was 6 million after all,) a step backward (world Jewry was to blame for the war,) a step to the right (all of those Jews would still be alive and included within Mosley’s “Europe a Nation” project if Britain and France had listened to Mosley and taken a pro-German line in the 30’s.) Considering Mosley’s association with Hitler, it’s difficult not to think of this:
I think I understand why Mosley would perform this unbecoming rhetorical box-step. He was still trying to revive his political career in 1967; in the previous year’s general election, he and two colleagues from his Union Movement stood for parliament, receiving an average of 3.7% of the vote. Mosley takes great pains in the last minutes of the program to ensure Frost repeats that figure correctly, then tells Frost that it is almost exactly double what the Nazi Party received in the German elections five years before Hitler came to power. That prompts Frost to ask if Mosley still expects someday to come to power, and the program ends before Mosley can finish his answer.
Given his background, any revival of Mosley’s political prospects would have had to begin on the far right, with him consolidating their support, then expanding from that base to reach into the mainstream in a time of crisis. By the late 60’s, many activists on the far right busied themselves with Holocaust denial, so if Mosley were to reemerge as their leader he had to leave some space in his platform for that noxious pastime. On the other hand, people in general resent insults, and Holocaust denial is an aggressive insult to the intelligence of the average or even the quite substantially below-average voter. So it must have been difficult to imagine a movement that allowed itself to be widely identified with Holocaust denial could expand beyond the fringes under any circumstances. Therefore, Mosley could hope to reconnect with the mainstream only if he kept the denialists at arm’s length.
Yesterday I stumbled upon some writings by a spiritual heir of Mosley’s, a man named David Cole. Mr Cole writes for Taki’s Magazine, an always-lively, rarely lovely far right publication. Taki’s is quite undiscriminating in one sense; anyone who can write amusingly is likely to be accepted as a contributor, no matter how scandalous his or her background may be. Mr Cole is a spectacular example of this; in 2013, after 15 years of working in Hollywood making Holocaust-related documentaries and promoting pro-Israel groups under the name “David Stein,” he was dramatically unmasked as a man who spent several years ending in the mid-1990s promoting a theory that the Holocaust ended in 1943, killing 4 million rather than 6 million Jews, none of them in gas chambers at Auschwitz. Mr Cole gives two reasons for his retirement from the field of Holocaust minimization. First, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing made him think twice about the sort of people whose support he was attracting. And second, the Jewish Defense League offered a $25,000 bounty for his assassination. When “David Stein” was exposed as David Cole, Mr Cole said that he still believed the stuff he’d peddled back in the 90’s.
Mr Cole’s article for Taki’s is a very amusing piece making fun of the media for hailing every re-editing and re-release of Holocaust-related footage as “a never before seen film.” Mr Cole says that it was precisely this habit that made it possible for “David Stein” to establish himself in Hollywood as a Holocaust documentarian when he cleaned up some public domain footage of the Nuremberg trials and stamped his copyright on the result. When Mr Cole describes his ability to get in on this racket, one remembers the old joke, “There’s no business like Shoah business…”
On his blog, Counter-Contempt, Mr Cole gives some examples that suggest the kind of thing he put out in the pre-“David Stein” era. I was particularly intrigued by a post titled “My Unintentionally Negative Impact on Holocaust Revisionism,” he attacks one denialist after another, ridiculing their arguments and slamming their personalities, declaring that only an idiot could doubt that the Nazis murdered 4 million Jews. Now 6 million, that he won’t accept. His final paragraph is “Not everything in life has clearly defined, easily identifiable sides. This does. Revisionist or denier. Pick a side.”
The list of “revisionists” Mr Cole presents is “David Irving,** Mark Weber, and your humble author.” This seems to be a complete census of the breed, at least of its living representatives as Mr Cole recognizes them. The various “deniers” Mr Cole describes in this piece he summarizes (evidently with no more than simple justice) as “one man totally uninterested in history, another who forms his opinions based on who accepts or turns down his dinner invitations, another who is a self-described delusional psychotic, and finally a man capable of making the most sweeping statement possible while never bothering to read up on one of the most vital episodes of the period.” Directed to “pick a side” between these alternatives, I feel like the would-be immigrant to the USA who was asked “Do you advocate the overthrow of the US government by violence or by subversion?” He thought about it for a moment, then answered “By subversion.”
If we can identify the motive behind Mosley’s box-step, what motivates Mr Cole to perform his wild tarantella? He doesn’t seem to have any master plan that will culminate in the building of a political force, as Mosley did. Mr Cole seems to be in search of a small-time racket, the equivalent of running a three-card Monte game on a street corner.
Mr Cole seems to trade on the fact that he is Jewish by ethnicity, as this screen cap from his 1994 appearance on the Phil Donahue show would indicate:
Jewish Holocaust denier seems like a small niche, but I doubt there is much competition to fill it.
The passive-aggressive approach of at once conceding, indeed forcefully arguing, that the Nazis murdered millions of Jews, then making rather less impressive arguments to depress the number of millions significantly below the generally accepted figure, may fit the idea that Mr Cole aspires to be a two-bit operator. While a highly ambitious figure like Mosley took care not to alienate any of the people he needed to achieve his [evil!] plan, Mr Cole seems to go out of his way to alienate as many people as he can. He is clearly an intelligent fellow, so presumably this means that his plan does not require the support of any particular person or any particular constituency. A three-card Monte dealer can get by with any two or three confederates to act as lookout and to lure marks in by pretending to be gamblers winning at the game, but a bigger time scam artist needs particular people and a large number of them.
Perhaps that in turn explains why an intelligent man with Mr Cole’s apparent talent for self-promotion wants to become the equivalent of a three-card Monte dealer. He wants the independence they have. At a moment’s notice, the three-card Monte dealer can disappear into the night and set up again in a different location. That Mr Cole dropped out of sight and reinvented himself under an alias, playing another con game built around the same topic that underpinned his original dodge, sounds like something that a man would do who would rather be highly independent than have a broad scope of action.
*Usually on this blog I refer to living people by courtesy titles or professional honorifics, but I find the British aristocracy so preposterous an anachronism that I cannot bring myself to call Robert Skidelsky “Lord Skidelsky.” Nor would I refer to Oswald Mosley by his title as “Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet of Ancoats.” Since Robert Skidelsky does have that title, though, I don’t think I can call him “Mr Skidelsky” or “Professor Skidelsky.” That’s why I’m stuck with his full name.
**To the extent that Mr Cole associates with Mr Irving, he is a bit more than just a spiritual heir of Oswald Mosley. In 1961, as a student at University College London, Mr Irving seconded Oswald Mosley in a public debate about immigration. So Mr Cole appears to have an acquaintance in common with Mosley.
July’s issue of The American Conservativefeatures a piece by Sydney Schanberg arguing that American prisoners of war were left over in Vietnam after direct US involvement in the war there ended in the early 1970s. Several other pieces pick up on Schanberg’s claims, drawing various dire conclusions about the nature of the political leadership in the USA.
In October 2008, The Nation ran an article in which Schanberg made this same case. I noted that article here, remarking that I had never given that idea much credence, but that I was impressed by what Schanberg wrote. Amid the pro-Schanberg pieces in this issue of The American Conservative is a short article by Gareth Porter titled “The evidence doesn’t stack up.” Unlike the readers who wrote The Nation to protest the appearance of Schanberg’s piece there , Porter does not list his credentials as a scholar of the US military involvement in Vietnam. Also unlike them, he does not declare himself to be displeased that the topic is being discussed. Most profoundly unlike them, he looks at Schanberg’s evidence and judges it on its merits. Indeed, the only way in which Porter resembles the outraged letter writers of The Nation is that he finds Schanberg’s case entirely unconvincing. Porter argues that the document to which Schanberg has attached the greatest weight is almost certainly a forgery, and in any case doesn’t say what Schanberg claims it says. Porter goes on to find many other faults with Schanberg’s argument.
Something that is, I think, quite well-founded appears in Andrew Bacevich’s contribution to the discussion:
Like slavery or the Holocaust, Vietnam is part of the past not yet fully consigned to the past.
The practice of publicly displaying the POW/MIA flag testifies to this fact. On the one hand, it represents a lingering communal acknowledgment of loss and more broadly of massive national failure. On the other, it sustains the pretense—utterly illusory—that a proper accounting, not only of the missing but of the entire Vietnam experience, is still forthcoming. “You deserve to be brought home,” the flag implicitly states, “And we deserve to know why you were sent in the first place.”
Yet to undertake a serious accounting would find Americans facing a plethora of discomfiting truths, not only about the knaves and fools who concocted the Vietnam War but about the American way of life and the premises on which it is based. Tell the whole truth about Vietnam and you crack open a door that few Americans wish to peer behind. To do so is to come face-to-face with troubling questions about the meaning of freedom and democracy as actually practiced in the United States.
Few Americans are willing to confront such questions, the answers to which could oblige us to revise the way we live. So we salve our consciences by flying flags, sustaining the pretense that we care when what we desperately want to do is to forget as much as possible.
In the same issue, Paul Gottfried finds it odd that many Americans who stand on the political Right are so fond of calling their opponents “fascists” and of claiming that fascism was a left-wing movement. Gottfried is himself very, very conservative in his politics. Much as he might like to disassociate himself and his fellow Rightists from the taint of fascism, Gottfried also has a scholarly reputation and a lifetime of intellectual integrity, both of which he would like to preserve. Gottfried lists a number of facts which, he says, make it impossible for a serious person of any disposition to see fascism as anything other than a phenomenon of the extreme Right, and ridicules those who disregard these facts.
If the idea of fascism as a leftist movement is so ludicrous, why does it have so much support among American right-wingers? Gottfried gives four possible reasons. First, Leftists who keep their cool when they are accused of being Communists or utopians tend to sputter and look silly when they hear themselves being called fascists. While this might be fun for conmservatives who are frustrated to meet opponents who don’t take their ideas seriously, Gottfried says that “only a cultural illiterate could believe that interwar fascists were intent on pursuing a massive welfare state centered on the achievement of social equality, with special protection for racial minorities, feminists, alternative lifestyles, and whatever else the latter-day Left is about.”
Second, some American right-wingers in the 1930s “had a very limited understanding of the European Right or the European Left” and so “made the unwarranted leap from thinking that all forms of economic planning were unacceptable to believing that all were virtually identical.” Thus they came to believe that the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, the Five-Year Plans of Stalin, and the corporatism of Mussolini were three names for the same thing. Those thinkers started a tradition that is still alive and well in some circles in today’s USA.
Third, the use of “fascism” as an all-purpose term of abuse represents an appeal to the argumentum ad Hitlerem, in which any resemblance between one’s opponent and Adolf Hitler, no matter how superficial or strained, is treated as if it released one from the obligation to answer that opponent’s claims. Fourth, by attempting to brand what Gottfried calls “the latter-day Left” as fascist, the latter-day Right can pretend to be more different than it in fact is from its opposition.
I can think of a fifth possible reason. American economic analyst Lawrence Dennis became notorious in the 1930s and 1940s for a series of books in which he argued that market-driven capitalism was doomed, and that representative democracy would go down with it. The economic system of the future, Dennis decided, was one in which capitalists retained nominal ownership and day-to-day control of the means of production, but government coordinated their activities. The political system that would go along with this corporatist economy might be dressed up to look like a democracy, but would in fact be dominated by an elite that would remain in power regardless of the outcome of any elections that might be held. To keep the public in support of this system and to keep the money supply from contracting, the elite would likely encourage an attitude of militant nationalism and a warlike foreign policy. This system Dennis called fascism.
Dennis consistently said that when fascism came to America, it would not be called by that name. Rather, it would be marketed as a new form of democracy, as the very antidote to fascism. He predicted that he himself would be among the first dissidents prosecuted once the USA had become fascist. Indeed, in 1944 Dennis was put on trial for sedition. The prosecution collapsed, and Dennis wrote a book about it.
In his 1969 book Operational Thinking for Survival, Dennis reviewed the arguments he had made in the 1930s and early 1940s. He concluded that his predictions had been substantially correct. Avoiding the word “fascism,” he wrote that our current political and economic system “is one that has no generally accepted name.”
So, perhaps the reason Left and Right are so eager to fling the word “fascism” at each other is that each is haunted by the fear that it is powerless to keep the country from becoming fascist. For all that Rightists might long to restore the Old Republic and Leftists might long to create a new system “centered on the achievement of social equality, with special protection for racial minorities, feminists, alternative lifestyles,” each looks on helplessly as events make a mockery of these ambitions. Whatever success each side might have in its attempts to promote its vision of freedom, the movement towards fascism goes on relentlessly.
Ramon Fernandez was a French fascist who actively collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation of France. His son, Dominique Fernandez, has written a biography of his father. The Nation‘s review describes this biography as the culmination of Dominique Fernandez’ life’s work, his attempt to comprehend what his father did and why he did it.
Anyone who hoped that the election of Barack Obama as US president heralded a return to the rule of law will be dismayed by the news sections of this issue. An article on “America’s Secret Afghan Prisons” lays out evidence that the Mr O’s administration, so far from ending Bush-Cheney’s policies of torture and disappearance, has intensified those policies. That article’s author, Anand Gopal, gave an interview about the story, which you can listen to here.
Reports suggesting that three men who allegedly hanged themselves at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2006 were in fact murdered move the editors to say that Mr O’s refusal to order investigations into the charges against his predecessor amount, not only to dereliction of his duty as a law-enforcement officer, but to a cover-up of crimes against humanity.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ acknowledgement that the Blackwater Group’s soldiers-for-hire are operating in Pakistan and the Pentagon’s subsequent assertion that the secretary never said the words he was shown on television saying prompts the magazine to quote the Washington adage, “Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.” Any Nation readers unconcerned by Blackwater’s expanding operations might want to look at a web-only piece, “Blackwater’s Youngest Victim.”
Several reports on the Copenhagen summit on climate change draw Alexander Cockburn out with a column trumpeting his dissent from the view that by dumping such great volumes of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere humans are doing enormous harm to the environment. Cockburn never convinces me when he mounts this hobby-horse of his, but I must confess to taking pleasure in the self-righteous sputtering that fills the letters to the editor in the subsequent issues. For every well-reasoned counterargument from someone with a grasp of the science and a solid case to make against Cockburn’s claims, the magazine must receive hundreds of letters from people who are not at all equipped to analyze climate data but who are entirely prepared to denounce a heretic and cast him out. I’m fairly sure that Cockburn is wrong and his detractors are right about climate. At the same time, I’m quite certain that he is doing a public service by luring would-be enforcers of orthodoxy into the open. He’s even doing a favor to them; if the self-appointed Grand Inquisitors have the sense to read their letters and realize that they have made fools of themselves, they might shed their crusading demeanor and adopt a more wholesome attitude.
On The Nation‘s website, there’s a piece about the president of Italy’s parliament, Gianfranco Fini. The piece notes the rather amazing fact that this man whose political career began in the neofascist Italian Social Movement has became “the country’s most responsible right-wing politician.” Several months ago, The Independent praised Fini’s willingness to stand up to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in defense of values like accountable government, a secular state, and openness to immigration, values that liberals and socialists are supposed to care about but that the leaders of Italy’s center-left parties seldom lend their full-throated support. The Independent called Fini “the best leader the Italian Left never had.” This really is an extraordinary transformation; as recently as 1994, Fini described Benito Mussolini as “the greatest statesman of the twentieth century.” How anyone could possibly apply that label to il Duce is beyond me. Before Mussolini came to power he was in some ways an intriguing figure, I grant you. He led an highly colorful life, full of adventure and rich in ideas. As a national leader, however, Mussolini was a disaster by any standard of evaluation. The evil he did (for example, sending 3,000 Italian Jews to die in Hitler’s camps) infinitely outweighed any good with which he could be credited, yet in the end it was his sheer incompetence that triumphed even over his murderous villainy. This is a digression, I suppose; Gianfranco Fini seems to be highly competent, and no more likely to commit murder than the average Western European politician.
Katha Pollitt’s annual list of worthy charities includes, as usual, MADRE, a fund that backs various groups of women in poor countries who have organized themselves to combat their own problems on their own terms. For example:
In Iraq, it supports Yanar Mohammed’s network of secret shelters for women fleeing domestic violence and honor murder. In Kenya, it works on water purification projects that free women from the task of transporting water over long distances. In Bolivia, it helps indigenous women prepare to run for political office. Right now, 100 percent of your gift goes directly to projects.
Barry Schwabsky’s review of some recent retrospectives on abstract painting includes a snippet that may provoke a response. After telling us that he experiences art one work at a time and looks with a skeptical eye on all art history that describes movements and schools, Schwabsky says:
Abstraction arguably should have even less to do with movements than any other art: a movement of abstractionists would be a contradiction in terms, like a church of atheists. Abstractionists, like atheists, are united only in what they reject. Abstraction is not a specific way of doing art–on what basis can Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana and Daniel Buren be considered part of a single movement? Rather, it is a considered effort not to do what Western artists have made it their job to do for hundreds of years: namely, to construct credible depictions of people, places and things. What if anything else goes?
Perhaps that’s why, as Bob Nickas points out in his new book Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting(Phaidon Press; $75), “so many contemporary artists who paint nonrepresentational pictures reject the notion that their work is in fact abstract.” They realize that the name itself, as handy and unavoidable as it undoubtedly may be, conveys a false sense of unity. Other commonalities, even those that would rightly strike us as quite superficial, can be more important.
Tiger Woods crops up. Ever since news started hitting the papers of Woods’ very active extramarital sex life, I’ve been thinking of William Blake. “Tiger, tiger, burning bright,/ in the forests of the night…” Or is it “Tiger, Tiger, burning sensation/ experienced during urination…” Anyway, the item here is all about how Tiger Woods has spent his career promoting sleazy schemes by global bad actors such as Chevron and the Philippine government, all the while pretending that he had nothing to do with politics.
Here’s a picture of Lawrence Dennis and his aunt as they were when they toured England in 1910. In those days he was billed as “the boy evangelist.” Before long Dennis would be sent from his boyhood home in Atlanta to elite schools in the North, schools where he began passing for white. After graduating from Harvard, Dennis would serve as a US Army officer in World War I, a diplomatic agent in Central America in the 1920s, and a banker on Wall Street in the days before the Great Crash. In a series of books published in the 1930s, he would argue that the USA was destined to become a fascist state in which dissent would be greeted with criminal prosecution. For predicting the end of free speech in America, he would be arrested and tried for sedition in 1944. I guess that showed him.
Here‘s a succinct account of the current difficulties big US financial firms are facing. It’s from Nuntii Latini, the Latin-language news service from Finnish radio.
And here is an argument that the bailout the treasury and Federal Reserve have proposed is, in the literal sense of a much-overused term, fascism.
And as usual, Tom Tomorrow has summed it all up quite well.
A special issue on “Nature and Terror.” Tim Luke endeavors to rescue Edward Abbey from his admirers; Dan Edelstein considers the history of the phrase hostis generis humani (“enemy of the human race”,) beginning unfortunately from a misunderstanding of Cicero’s special use of the word hostis; Victoria Fareld, in a piece on “Charles Taylor’s Identity Holism,” argues that neo-Hegelian philosopher Taylor’s attempt to transcend individualism ends in a form of radical individualism. I have a copy of Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition,” I’ve been meaning to read it for several years, this essay should make me likelier to read it. In fact, I fear it will have the opposite effect. Telos‘ current editor, Russell Berman reviews a book which defends, alas, the term “Islamofascism.” All in all a pretty good issue, even though Berman drags his neoconservatism in at the end.
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