In a response to a comment from Wei, Charles Moyer wrote

"But I do believe Confucius hit upon something when he said that it was
comparatively easier for one to be rich and not be puffed up than it was for
one to be poor and not feel resentment."


Charles

I'd be interested in knowing why you surmise Confucious may have said that (if
indeed, that is how he put it)?

Could it be that the poor person sees the effect of waste and lost opportunity
very keenly?

Could it be that the wealthy believe "all is right" more easily than the poor?

Or, is the interpretation you prefer that the poor are not only poorer in
wealth, but poorer in emotional self-discipline? or poorer in social
objectivity?


In terms of the nature of fascism today, and its relations to democracy, I
strongly suggest an article entitled On Post Fascism, by G. M. Tamás, printed
by the Boston Review and available on their websight at:

http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR25.3/tamas.html

I'd like to  quote part of it, though. And yes, I do think it opens a new
thought on how to approach Pound's relation to fascism.

"For the liberal, social-democratic, and other assorted progressive heirs of
the Enlightenment, then, progress meant universal citizenship--that is, a
virtual equality of political condition, a virtually equal say for all in the
common affairs of any given community--together with a social condition and a
model of rationality that could make it possible. For some, socialism seemed to
be the straightforward continuation and enlargement of the Enlightenment
project; for some, like Karl Marx, the completion of the project required a
revolution (doing away with the appropriation of surplus value and an end to
the social division of labor). But for all of them it appeared fairly obvious
that the merger of the human and the political condition was, simply, moral
necessity.2

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.

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. 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. 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. And the rejection of even a tempered universalism is what we now
see repeated under democratic circumstances (I do not even say under democratic
disguise). Post-totalitarian fascism is thriving under the capacious carapace
of global capitalism, and we should tell it like it is."


Michael