File spoon-archives/modernism.archive/modernism_2000/modernism.0005, message 31


Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 08:47:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: hating the modern


On Wed, 31 May 2000, T Murphy wrote:

> 
> Bill Everdell has written a very interesting reply, although he runs the 
> risk of confusing ordinary conservatism with fascism.

And a lot more than ordinary conservatism.
> 
> In my opinion, real fascists have an insurrectionary attitude toward state 
> authority which they seek to overthrow through the use of a mass-based party 
> organization. 

Well they have an antipathy towards liberal democratic states. But a state
which expresses the national essence is something else--worthy of dying a
beautiful and heroic death for.

This should not be confused with belief in a strong state. All 
> conservatives would accept the need for a strong, even if minimal, state. To 
> my mind, it makes no sense to suggest that Coleridge (or Hegel, for that 
> matter), had fascist leanings.

There is no scholarly or critical ground for doing so. But the smoke
hadn't cleared over Auschwitz before people were working to disconnect
Nazism from "good" nationalism and "ordinary" conservativsm and a very
widespread and antisemitism which was not unconnected to traditional
Christianity. 

Karl Popper offered the solution popular with American conservatives of
tracing Nazism back to Hegel, whom he apparently couldn't read very well.  

> In my opinion also, holding racist or anti-semitic views does not 
> automatically make you a fascist. Racism and anti-semitism can be found 
> virtually right across the political spectrum in the nineteenth and early 
> twentieth century, including, as Bill notes, among elements of the 
> revolutionary socialist and anarchist left.

I am not sure what Bill's point was introducing antisemitism in the answer
to a question about romanticism's relation to  fascism.
> 
> It seems to me that the end of Bill's reply leans toward the idea that 
> fascism postdates the rise of imperialism. I think this makes a lot of 
> sense. It seems to me that in general it was the actual experience of the 
> domination of other races that gave rise to genuinely fascist ideas and 
> opinions.

That might be an element.

 I also would agree with someone like Norman Geras in thinking that 
> the experience of the carnage of the First World War may have played a 
> significant role in the development of the fascist attitudes of pathological 
> nihilism and acceptance of extreme forms of violence among many ex-army 
> offices and conscripts. It was from among such men that the various fascist 
> organizations found their mass base.

I think this is the much more direct influence on the rise of German 
fascism. Its core members certainly are drawn from the conservative rank
and file of the Army.  Add to this the loss of the war while still holding
enemy territory, the humiliation of Versailles, the chaos of Weimar, etc.  
  
> Actually, I think there is a case for arguing that Hitler was anti-modernist 
> now I think about it some more. After all, the National Socialist party in 
> Germany organized a couple of exhibitions of degenerate art in the 1930s in 
> which they included most of the important modernist painters. 

Why not follow Jeffrey Herf in identifying something called "reactionary
modernism" at work here? Fascists like technological modernity, especially
war toys like airplanes and tanks, but are generally socially and
culturally conservative. It is this shared orientation which links fascism 
to the same cultural and
historical sources out of which the still respectable conservatisms, and
which fuels much of the desire to link fascism to what conservatives don't
like, namely romanticism and in some cases even modernism (think here of
Eksteins).

My hesitation 
> in doing this is related to the idea of not wanting to see fascism as 
> anything other than what it was: an unwelcome but thoroughly twentith 
> century phenomenon.

hh
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