(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 ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com