Ur-Fascism

[Doug Millison]

"Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much
easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to
reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the 
Italian squares." Life
is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent 
of disguises.
Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new 
instances -- every
day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of 
November 4, 1938, are
worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a 
living force,
seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our 
citizens, fascism will
grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task."
--from:
Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
By Umberto Eco
Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995 (as excerpted in Utne
Reader, November-December 1995).
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

Thanks Dave for that pointer.  The article is probably in the NYRB 
archives, too.

It's not difficult at all to see Pynchon's work as part of this 
project "to uncover" facism "and to point our finger at any of its 
new instances".  One of the standard responses to Vineland was how 
plainly Pynchon put his anti-fascist cards on the table, lacking, 
some said, the nuance of his presentation in his earlier works.

Which is not to say, as rj has often charged, that Pynchon is to be 
seen as some sort of simple-minded, macho American Nazi-hunter.  GR 
makes clear that multinational corporations with allegience only to 
profits cross all borders and serve both Axis and Allies, nurturing 
the War that keeps the companies alive; the Nazis and their 
supporters number among many entitites that serve the corporate 
cause. As Dave Monroe and others, myself included, have noted in this 
discussion often enough, Pynchon also offers a sophisticated 
exploration of the way that "we" become complicit in "Their" projects 
-- but that doesn't stop Pynchon from also (both/and) going ahead and 
naming names and uncovering connections between specific actors and 
specific crimes:  suffering and death of the Dora slave laborers as a 
result of decisions taken by specific individuals in specific 
corporations and government offices to use them as expendable 
production factors, and seeing their suffering exploited by Americans 
and Soviets in their race to continue what the Nazis started; rape of 
the earth in the name of corporate profits, with specific links to IG 
Farben, Shell, Standard Oil, etc.; Hollywood Blacklist victims of 
McCarthyism and a "culture of blame" that might be seen to 
incorporate some of the features of the Nazi "culture of blame" that 
rj would attribute to historians and journalists who expose Nazi 
admirers and supporters for what they are and for their contribution 
to Nazi crimes; Herero victims of German genocide in V., their 
seduction into suicide by the sickness of the Nazi embodiment of 
Enlightment values in GR; & etc. Indeed, it takes a pretty massive 
rewriting of Pynchon to remove his anti-fascist politics.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>