(continued from previous post)


>The savage nineteenth-century condemnations of bourgeois society--the
>common
>basis, for a time, of the culturally avant-garde and politically
>radical--stemmed from the conviction that the process, as it was, was
>fraudulent, and that individual liberty was not all it was cracked up to
>be,
>but not from the view, represented only by a few solitary figures, that the
>endeavor was worthless. It was not only Nietzsche and Dostoevsky who feared
>that increasing equality might transform everybody above and under the
>middle
>classes into bourgeois philistines. Progressive revolutionaries, too,
>wanted a
>New Man and a New
>Woman, bereft of the inner demons of repression and domination: a civic
>community that was at the same time the human community needed a new
>morality
>grounded in respect for the hitherto excluded.
>

One of the interesting aspects of this passage is that during the same
period in history of Chinese thought, the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, great thinkers were contemplating NOT THE LIMITATIONS of
democracy, but its successes. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were not figures who
appealed to the Chinese intelligensia at that period in Chinese history.
Rather, the thinkers who had fostered the movement from authoritarian feudal
forms to democratic forms were praised.  They were ---to a man--- almost all
figures who Ezra Pound ignored (or whose ideas, Pound distorted, as in the
case of Jefferson).

>This adventure ended in the debacle of 1914. Fascism offered the most
>determined response to the collapse of the Enlightenment, especially of
>democratic socialism and progressive social reform. Fascism, on the whole,
>was
>not conservative, even if it was counter-revolutionary: it did not
>re-establish
>hereditary aristocracy or the monarchy, despite some romantic-reactionary
>verbiage. But it was able to undo the key regulative (or liminal) notion of
>modern society, that of universal citizenship. By then, governments were
>thought to represent and protect everybody.

This is a point where Chinese and Western thought merge, so to speak,
though, of course, the idea of "universal citizenship" had been current in
the West, at least since the French Revolution.  After 1911, the year of the
advent of the so-called first "Chinese Rebublic", it was understood by
nearly all educated Chinese that each individual was a citizen, with rights
which should be protected by the state.  Unfortunately, this idea, which
still exists in embryonic form, has not come to fruition in any meaningful
form yet.  (So-called "communists", members of Communist Party of China,
still cling to the notion that they have the absolute right to guide
society, and that the people have no real rights, despite what is written in
the legal codes.  To bolster their control, they are attempting a revival,
at least in part, of Confucianism, which is being used to re-inculcate the
respect of hierarchy which has for so long been a part of the Chinese
tradition. Such moves have always been resented by independently minded
people, and large numbers of ordinary people, and members of the
intelligensia who took refuge in Buddhistic and Taoist thought as an
antidote.  Pound would probably have been delighted at the revival of
Confucianism in China, or I should say, at Government attempts to revive
Confucianism, because this is not a popular initiative.  The largest popular
initiative seems to be the revival of Taoism and Buddhism through the Falun
Gong, or Qigong breathing exercise movement, which the authorities are
HARSHLY repressing).

>National or state borders defined
>the difference between friend and foe; foreigners could be foes, fellow
>citizens could not. Pace Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist of fascism and
>the
>political theologian of the Third Reich, the sovereign could not simply
>decide
>by fiat who would be friend and who would be foe. But Schmitt was right on
>one
>fundamental point: the idea of universal citizenship contains an inherent
>contradiction in that the dominant institution of modern society, the
>nation-state, is both a universalistic and a parochial (since territorial)
>institution.

Yes.  And hardly anywhere is this contradiction more evident than in
contemporary China, unless it is in Poundian thought.  In China we often
hear the oxymoronic phrase "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics."  The
original socialistic teaching of "internationalism" is thoroughly
contradicted by the modifiying phrase "with Chinese characteristics."  In
Fascism, we see the evolution from socialism, of an idea which Mussolini,
(and his prime philosopher, Gentile) saw as springing from a universal human
need, and rooted in the commonality.  Fascist revolutions could be spread
everywhere:  Germany, Spain, and Japan.  Croatia, Albania, and Slovenia
could become brother fascist nations.   And yet the alleged universality of
the fascist idea was countered by constant trumpeting of the virtues of the
race.  Pound said again and again that the "Italian race", the "latins" ,
"the inhabitants of this peninsula" were a superior race, who truly knew how
to govern.  He gave the same praise to "Teutonic efficiency".  In his
remarks about the Chinese and the Japanese, he alterately said they were
distinct, they were the same, and that the Chinese were superior, or that
the Japanese were superior, depending on the ideological tide.

The tension between a universally neccessary and nationalistic fervor is a
central contradiction in fascism, and in Pound's thought.


>Liberal nationalism, unlike ethnicism and fascism, is limited--if
>you wish, tempered--universalism. Fascism put an end to this
>shilly-shallying:
>the sovereign was judge of who does and does not belong to the civic
>community,
>and citizenship became a function of his (or its) trenchant decree.
>
>THIS HOSTILITY TO UNIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP IS, I submit, the main
>characteristic
>of fascism.

I have to take issue with this last idea, or at least with this particular
phraseology.  What we find in fascism (and to a large extent in globalistic
capitalism) is not a clear rejection of the notion of "universal
citizenship" as such.  We had in Mussolini's fascism, a different notion of
universal citizenship, than what was current in pre-fascist Europe.
"Universal citizenship" was redefined.  The role of "citizen" was
reformulated in such a way as make him totally universal, and therefore to
erase his identity as a sovereign individual.  This is how it was defined by
Gentile.  I have only this quote at hand to illustrate the point, though I
can get others, if you like.  Gentile explains that his view of history
(based on right-wing Hegelian dialectial analysis:  In its progressive
development the State erases all differentiations in sort of "aufgehoben"
(I believe that is the correct German term), a raising up, transcending, and
cancelling out of all contradictions between the needs of individuals and
the needs of society.

  There are  . . .  two modes of conceiving history.
  One is that of those who see nothing but the
  historical fact in its multiplicity  . . . . The
  other mode is ours, rendered possible by the
  concept of the spatialization of the One, which
  posits the fact as act, and thereby, being
  posited in time, leaves nothing at all
  effectively behind itself.  The chronicler's
  history is history hypostaticized and deprived
  of its dialectic; for dialecticity consists
  precisely in the actuality of the multiplicity as
  unity  . . .
    (Gentile, Theory of Mind, 208).

This may sound like so much giberish, but it is a standard philosophical
formulation of Fascist philosophical thought.  The individual is "left
behind" as part of an illusory manifestation of "multiplicity" which is
raised up into the "ONE."

This is NOT seen by fascist theoreticians as a DENIAL OF UNIVERSAL
CITIZENSHIP, BUT AS ITS REALIZATION.  This is traditional right-Hegelianism
which saw the STATE as the manifestation of God on earth.  (Of course, in
practice, it contains the same or a worse contradiction as previous social
forms, because such a State very quickly relies on traditional
particularity, namely nationalism, to define the members of the collective
relative to the OTHER, i.e., the inferior people (the internal enemy) and
the next group to be conquered (the external enemy), who are particularized
in terms of their differences from the "superior" race inhabiting the
fascist state.  Such a state cannot be universal, since if it ever achieves
its objective, its main raison d'etre--- the sublation of the individual to
the UNIVERSAL-- or the conquest of all non-fascist nations, it will have no
OTHER against which to define itself.  All the internal contradictions will
rise up, and come to the fore, causing the very multiplicity which such a
state rejects to manifest itself.

Pound thought the fascists could eliminate all such multiplicity and
contradiction, as far as class confict was concerned.  Recall he said, in
Germany class conflict ceased to exist, that "the Nazis had erased all bad
manners in Germany."

I think we see something similar today.  It is a common feature of American
ideology, as propagated in the corporate controlled media, to say that class
divisions do not exist, that the US is a classless society (I believe Tories
have fairly said that exact same thing about British society).

Regards,

Wei
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