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Monday, October 24, 2005

Flirting With Faschism




June 30, 2003 issueCopyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Flirting with Fascism
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Ledeen has gained notoriety in recent months for the following paragraph in his latest book, The War Against the Terror Masters. In what reads like a prophetic approval of the policy of chaos now being visited on Iraq, Ledeen wrote,
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
This is not the first time Ledeen has written eloquently on his love for “the democratic revolution” and “creative destruction.” In 1996, he gave an extended account of his theory of revolution in his book, Freedom Betrayed — the title, one assumes, is a deliberate reference to Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. Ledeen explains that “America is a revolutionary force” because the American Revolution is the only revolution in history that has succeeded, the French and Russian revolutions having quickly collapsed into terror. Consequently, “[O]ur revolutionary values are part of our genetic make-up. … We drive the revolution because of what we represent: the most successful experiment in human freedom. … We are an ideological nation, and our most successful leaders are ideologues.” Denouncing Bill Clinton as a “counter-revolutionary” (!), Ledeen is especially eager to make one point: “Of all the myths that cloud our understanding, and therefore paralyze our will and action, the most pernicious is that only the Left has a legitimate claim to the revolutionary tradition.”
Ledeen’s conviction that the Right is as revolutionary as the Left derives from his youthful interest in Italian fascism. In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a man he greatly admires. It caused a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen later made clear that he relished the ire of the left-wing establishment precisely because “De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement.” What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself argued this very point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972. That work starts with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the support of fascism by millions of Europeans “solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists.” “It seems more plausible,” Ledeen argued, “to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.” For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and practitioner, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism was “the Revolution of the 20th century.”
Ledeen supports de Felice’s distinction between “fascism-movement” and “fascism-regime.” Mussolini’s regime, he says, was “authoritarian and reactionary”; by contrast, within “fascism-movement,” there were many who were animated by “a desire to renew.” These people wanted “something more revolutionary: the old ruling class had to be swept away so that newer, more dynamic elements—capable of effecting fundamental changes—could come to power.” Like his claim that the common ground between Nazism and Italian fascism was “exceedingly minimal”—Ledeen writes, “The fact of the Axis Pact should not be permitted to become the overriding consideration in this analysis”—Ledeen’s careful distinction between fascist “regime” and “movement” makes him a clear apologist for the latter. “While ‘fascism-movement’ was overcome and eventually suppressed by ‘fascism-regime,’” he explains, “fascism nevertheless constituted a political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country.” Indeed, Ledeen criticizes Mussolini precisely for not being revolutionary enough. “He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism.” Ledeen therefore concurs with the fascist intellectual, Camillo Pellizi, who argues—in a book Ledeen calls “a moving and fundamental work”—that Mussolini’s was “a failed revolution.” Pellizzi had hoped that “the new era was to be the era of youthful genius and creativity”: for him, Ledeen says, the fascist state was “a generator of energy and creativity.” The purest ideologues of fascism, in other words, wanted something very similar to that which Ledeen himself wants now, namely a “worldwide mass movement” enabling the peoples of the world, “liberated” by American militarism, to participate in the “greatest experiment in human freedom.” Ledeen wrote in 1996, “The people yearn for the real thing—revolution.”
Ledeen was especially interested in the role played by youth in Italian fascism. It was here that he detected the movement’s most exciting revolutionary potential. The young Ledeen wrote that those who exalted the position of youth in the fascist revolution—like those who argued in favor of his beloved “universal fascism”—were committed to exporting Italian fascism to the whole world, an idea in which Mussolini was initially uninterested. When he was later converted to it, Mussolini said that fascism drew on the universalist heritage of Rome, both ancient and Catholic. No doubt Ledeen thinks that the new Rome in Washington has the same universalist mission. He writes that people around Berto Ricci—the editor of the fascist newspaper L’Universale, and a man he calls “brilliant” and “an example of enthusiasm and independence”— “called for the formation of a new empire, an empire based not on military conquest but rather on Italy’s unique genius for civilization. … They intended to develop the traditions of their country and their civilization in such a manner as to make them the basic tenets of a new world order.” Ledeen adds, in a passage that anticipates his later love of creative destruction, “Clearly the act of destruction which would produce the flowering of the new fascist hegemony would sweep away the present generation of Italians, along with the rest.” And Giuseppe Bottai, to whom Ledeen attributes “considerable energy and autonomy,” was notable for his belief that “the infusion of the creative energies of a new generation was essential” for the fascist revolution. Bottai “implored the young … to found a new order arising from the spontaneous activity of their creation.”
One of the greatest exponents of such youthful vitalism was the high priest of fascism, the poet and adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio, to whom Ledeen devoted an enthusiastic biography in 1977. Years ago, I visited D’Annunzio’s house on the shores of Lake Garda: there is a battleship in the garden and a Brenn gun in the sitting room. D’Annunzio was an eccentric and militaristic Italian Nietzschean who “eulogized rape and acts of savagery” committed by the people he called his spiritual ancestors. The poet was also an early prophet of military intervention and regime change: he invaded the Croatian city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in 1919 and held the city for a year, during which he put into practice his theories of “New Order.” In 1918, moreover, D’Annunzio had dropped propaganda leaflets over Vienna promising to liberate the Austrians from their own government, something Ledeen hails as “a glorious gesture.” D’Annunzio’s watchword was “the liberation of human personality.” “His heroism during the war made it possible,” Ledeen writes, “to bridge the chasm between intellectuals and the masses. … The revolt D’Annunzio led was directed against the old order of Western Europe, and was carried out in the name of youthful creativity and virility.”
As Ledeen shows, the Italian fascists expressed their desire “to tear down the old order” (his words from 2002) in terms that are curiously anticipatory of a famous statement in 2003 by the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. In 1932, Asvero Gravelli also divided Europe into “old” and “new” when he wrote, in Towards the Fascist International, “Either old Europe or young Europe. Fascism is the gravedigger of old Europe. Now the forces of the Fascist International are rising.” It all sounds rather prophetic. ____________________________________________________John Laughland is a London-based writer and lecturer and a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.
June 30, 2003 issueCopyright © 2003 The American Conservative


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Tuesday, October 18, 2005

No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame





09/22/2005
Poet Rebuffs Laura Bush

by SHARON OLDS
[from the October 10, 2005 issue]
For reasons spelled out below, the poet Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington, which, coincidentally or not, takes place September 24, the day of an antiwar mobilization in the capital. Olds, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush to read from their works. Three years ago artist Jules Feiffer declined to attend the festival's White House breakfast as a protest against the Iraq War ("Mr. Feiffer Regrets," November 11, 2002). We suggest that invitees to this year's event consider following their example.
--The Editors
Laura BushFirst LadyThe White House
Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.
In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.
And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.
So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.
I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.
But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.
What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.
So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS
[Original Article]
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Sunday, October 09, 2005

George Bush believes he is on a mission from God


George Bush: 'God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq'

President told Palestinians God also talked to him about Middle East peace

Ewen MacAskill
Friday October 7, 2005
The Guardian


George Bush believes he is on a mission from God, according to the politician Nabil Shaath. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP



George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician in an interview to be broadcast by the BBC later this month.
Mr Bush revealed the extent of his religious fervour when he met a Palestinian delegation during the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egpytian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, four months after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.


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One of the delegates, Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did."
Mr Bush went on: "And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East'. And, by God, I'm gonna do it."

Mr Bush, who became a born-again Christian at 40, is one of the most overtly religious leaders to occupy the White House, a fact which brings him much support in middle America.

Soon after, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz carried a Palestinian transcript of the meeting, containing a version of Mr Bush's remarks. But the Palestinian delegation was reluctant publicly to acknowledge its authenticity.

The BBC persuaded Mr Shaath to go on the record for the first time for a three-part series on Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy: Elusive Peace, which begins on Monday.

Religion also surfaced as an issue when Mr Bush and Tony Blair were reported to have prayed together in 2002 at his ranch at Crawford, Texas - the summit at which the invasion of Iraq was agreed in principle. Mr Blair has consistently refused to admit or deny the claim.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, who was also part of the delegation at Sharm el-Sheikh, told the BBC programme that Mr Bush had said: "I have a moral and religious obligation. I must get you a Palestinian state. And I will."

Mr Shaath's comments came as Mr Bush delivered a speech yesterday aimed at bolstering US support for the Iraq war.

He revealed that the US and its partners had disrupted at least 10 serious al-Qaida plots since September 11, including three planned attacks in the US. "Because of this steady progress, the enemy is wounded - but the enemy is still capable of global operations," he said. He added that Islamic radicals had used a series of excuses to justify their attacks, from conflict with the Israelis to the Crusades 1,000 years ago.

"We're facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world," he said.

He conceded that al-Qaida, led in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and other insurgents had gained ground in Iraq but the US would not leave until security had been established. "Some observers also claim that America would be better off by cutting our losses and leaving Iraq now. This is a dangerous illusion, refuted with a simple question: Would the United States and other free nations be more safe, or less safe, with Zarqawi and Bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people, and its resources?" Mr Bush asked

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Why I'm tearing up my Labour party card


The treatment of Walter Wolfgang, after Iraq, proved too much for one long-time supporter Colin MacCabeSunday October 2, 2005The Observer
Dear Tony,
I'm writing to you as the leader of the party from which I am now resigning. I joined the Labour party in 1964 but this week is the first time I have felt ashamed of my membership. You will say it was an accident that two men were viciously bundled from the conference hall on Wednesday. But then you lie as you breathe. It is impossible that you do not know that when you took power as Labour leader you were determined to stamp out all public dissent and discussion within the party. It is impossible, in a more recent time frame, that you did not know and approve of the decision that there would be no debate on Iraq.
Even as I write this phrase, its absurdity, its grotesqueness hits me again. No debate on Iraq, no debate on the most important foreign policy issue that has confronted Britain since World War Two. No debate on Iraq, which has brought such a fear of violence to London. No debate on Iraq - on the national disaster with which the names of Guantanamo and Britain will be linked in infamy for our generation and probably beyond.
It is unthinkable that the Labour party could not debate the Iraqi war. But, of course, it is equally unthinkable that it could. For the situation there is so dire, the peril in which you have placed the nation is so acute that if even the smallest murmurs of evidence and argument were to be heard they would soon become a gale that would sweep you from office. It was telling that you did not even dare to speak to the old geezer they roughed up. But you had only to take one look at Walter Wolfgang and you could see Old Labour incarnate. An Old Labour that believed in swaying democratic opinion by fact and reason. An Old Labour that believed in debate. Given 60 seconds in front of the television cameras with Wolfgang and you'd have been mincemeat. You presided over a government which suborned its security services to provide false headlines for you to mislead the Commons into voting for the war. Worse, you ignored every lesson of our last imperial disaster in Mesopotamia - a campaign which became a byword for our soldiers being slaughtered to satisfy the vanity of politicians.
Political parties are institutions which allow debate to be turned into action; they allow people from different class backgrounds, from different regions, from different races to debate policy knowing that the conclusion of the debate will be the determination of a particular course of action. There are no debates now because there is no question about what action will be taken. The Chancellor's peculiarly Presbyterian form of neo-liberalism is absolutely not open for debate. If it were, then the scandal of PFI, which represents a continuous tax on the poor by the rich, would be common knowledge. Worse in the short term, this lack of debate has allowed no political dissent from the disastrous economic policy of running deficits to fund unproductive investment.
Old Labour used to run deficits to employ low-paid workers in the unproductive old public sector; New Labour runs deficits to employ highly-paid consultants in the even more unproductive new public sector. In the only industry that I know at first hand, the scale of government handouts is jawdropping. New Labour has created a new film body, the Film Council, whose overheads now exceed the production budgets of the very efficient bodies that it replaced. There is enormously wasteful duplication of government resources. Friends from every sector report the same story.
It is true that your news management is breathtakingly effective but I do not think this is cause for congratulation. You have produced systems of Treasury funding in which there's always a government nark in the room and you have backed it up with a relentless use of patronage which would make an 18th-century Whig blush. No one dares to complain about the Film Council, for example, because they know it will prejudice their next funding application.
Last week a woman broke down in tears at one of the fringe meetings when she recounted how she couldn't talk about Iraq in her constituency. Looking at Wolfgang being manhandled from the hall, I was reminded of that chilling footage when Saddam staged his coup in the Baath party at a meeting of the central committee and pointed out the individuals who were to be frogmarched from the room. This is Britain, so what awaited Walter Wolfgang outside the conference doors was not a bullet in the head. The lady's tears were caused by her fear of expulsion, not of imprisonment. If the method is soft, however, the totalitarian desire to crush debate is hard. If Nazi Germany was fascism by radio, New Labour is the corporate state by television. The determination to control the party's image on television is incompatible with a democratic party and, indeed, with democracy.
I have not been an activist for decades. I live in Islington and watching Margaret Hodge and the Loony Left morph effortlessly into New Labour was not a pretty sight. Networking with power-mad social climbers was not my idea of the good life. I have remained a member of the Labour party, however, because it still seemed to me to be a way of connecting at the national level with people who shared my beliefs in the possibility of a fairer and more equal society. Last week has made clear what I've known but not wanted to admit for at least six years: that you have made it impossible for me to enjoy any such connection.
For well over a century the Labour party has provided a crucial forum where the marginal and the powerless could speak. You have ensured that this is no longer the case. The white working class of this country has lost its most important institutional voice as it undergoes the most brutal economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, it is clear that you yourself have no belief in any goal of real equality - the New Labour aim, Brown as well as Blair, is just to manage the underclass. Of course, there can be no debate.
When I joined the Labour party I was a schoolboy and I remember learning Kipling's poem 'Mesopotamia' by heart. It is a savage attack on the politicians who had sent young men to die pointlessly in what is now Iraq. In a Labour party defined by its opposition to Suez and opposed to all imperial adventure, it seemed a poem about a far distant past. But when I remember it now under a Labour government in the 21st century, it seems directly contemporary. You have told the world, to this country's enduring risk and shame, that Britain will back any American government, no matter how dangerous, in pursuing reckless schemes of military adventure. In so doing, you despise all the Labour party's best traditions. Kipling puts it better than I can:
(Your) lives cannot repay us - (your deaths) could not undo -The shame that (you) have laid upon our race.But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,Shall we leave it unabated in its place?
Yours truly
Colin MacCabe
· A longer version of this letter will be published in Critical Quarterly vol.48. no.1
 
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