The Death Wish of Fascism - in Pynchon and other faces of real life

[Joseph Tracy]

Does the bizarre enthusiasm for a nuclear WW3 emerging from prominent members of  team Biden,  of Johnson/Truss/ Sunak , Zelensky, US neo cons and generals,  and right leaning Poland invite comparisons to the death wish of the Axis leaders?  What is a death wish and how do you get one?

 One of the themes explored primarily in Gravity’s Rainbow but in other Pynchon writing is the idea that there is an inherent death wish built into Fascism. The core idea is that fascism is channeling the rage of an increasingly abused, deceived, exploited, population toward a reclamation of an empowering divine order where the state( and its noble leader/s) will become the strong father who will restore the abused and divided people into a great imperial unity where all will know and enjoy their proper inheritance as something great and powerful: the ruling aryans, the white race, The royal British Empire,  the chosen of God, the masters of nature, technology and science.... 
   
To achieve this goal  sacrifice is required. Starting with the enemy within and moving to the external forces who might prevent this grand project. It is a powerful organizing pattern that has models even in non-violent monasticism, and may at its best be a way of ritualizing the deep changes of assuming adult responsibilities, of marriage, choosing a discipline, of renunciation, of facing death by identifying with the larger spiritual and biological patterns one believes to give meaning to life, to community, to one's brief time on earth. This cocoon shedding process can be a natural part of life.   But as a means of socail control this  organizing pattern is all too frequently a political tool for military and economic  organization reliant on armed aggression and exploitation, reliant on scapegoats and enemies, reliant on the loss of empathy and reliant on self righteous exaltation.

    As the enthusiast identifies with party or religion he or she must abandon the self and in many cases offer the self in eternal battle for the greater cause. The reward is a new identity that feels invincible and self evidently right.  Past violence of the nation/ religion/party… becomes heroic and inevitable, and future violence holds the promise of heroic fulfillment. Death is required and becomes eroticized either as direct experience or vicarious thrill *. Warnings and inonvenient truths are shunned, mocked and silenced like a sensitive and obsevant child who questions the brutality of an angry abusive father figure. 
   
    Thus when the empire loses wars,  when large lies are exposed as fantasies,when armies get bogged and beaten and frozen, when inflation or military losses trigger rebellions, when corruption and hypocrisy make a mockery of stated ideals, then the leaders face a choice, a  no-win choice to cut losses and accept a more modest narrative, but  they rarely pull back into a reform process. The taste of great power and the hunger for glory has posessed them deeply and they  tend to double down on the pursuit of no longer achievable power. The losses become inevitable,  and death prevails.  

So back to my original question, until a few days ago when  Biden finally put some mild damper on the growing bipartisan neocon enthusiasm for ww3 with nukes by asserting no nuclear war with Xi Xinping, what in the fuck was that rhetoric all about?... and what does it say about  mainstream western culture? 

    Obviously I think it says plenty and could have more to say about how I see it showing up in Pynchon’s writing from the worship of the mechanical vagina, to the death ray of ATD, to the  time delayed nuclear revenge of GR, to the cyber totalitarianism of Gabriel Ice.  For now, signing off from Vermont, white with our first snowfall after another record breaking hot summer, I bid you adieu. 

P.S. Perhaps the scariest incident so far revealing the insane hair trigger danger of the current mania for nucear war was the AP story citing a top level intelligence source falsely claiming that Russia was responsible for the missiles that struck in Poland.  Within 2 days  the US, Poland, and NATO and others agree that photos show that it was a Ukrainian missile and it was made clear that NATO would not be invoking article 4. Ukraine is still in denial and Zelensky has lost some cred which is good, but holy shit… So far the high level intelligence source has not been named and revealed as an unreliable source despite the extreme world-threatening seriousness of the lie.  

*  on vicarious erotic thrills) When the mafia clown president ordered the massive missile attack in Syria  a great many corporate reporters, even  the TV media hosts that hated him, got spontaeous erections and enthusiastically spilled their seed on the air.  
A truly weird and frightening thing to behold.