«We are witnessing today a paradoxical and unsettling phenomenon: the rise of fascist-inspired political movements in the European arena (from France to Italy, from Belgium to Austria), accompanied, in the heart of intellectual circles, by a massive campaign to denigrate the entire anti-fascist tradition. In Italy, the media presents anti-fascism as being responsible for the catastrophic shifts of the «first Republic»; while the main biographer of Mussolini, Renzo De Felice, has led a battle to overcome the «anti-fascist paradigm,» which is, according to him, the major defect of post-war historiography.[1]
In Germany, since the reunification, the appellative «anti-fascist» is used as an insult, in more or less deliberately forgetting all that anti-fascism represented, for the German exile and for the struggle against Hitler’s regime, before it was transformed into the state ideology of the German Democratic Republic.[2]
In France, the campaign against anti-fascism was launched a few years ago by Annie Kriegel’s article inCommentaire.[3] It experienced its lowest moment during the publication of a vile pamphlet that tried to present Jean Moulin as a Soviet spy,[4] and its crowning moment, on a much higher cultural plane, with François Furet’s Le passé d’une illusion, a book in which anti-fascism is reduced to a giant enterprise of mystification that allowed Soviet totalitarianism to extend its influence over Western culture.[5]
What is at stake is important: what remains of the intellectuals’ anti-fascist involvement? Can we, today, call ourselves anti-fascists? Those who are convinced, as I am, of the historical value and of the political relevance of anti-fascism, and thus of the necessity to fight a harmful form of revisionism, cannot allow themselves to answer these questions by hiding behind an apologetic idealization of the past.
One would be tempted to respond that, by ridding oneself of anti-fascism, one risks effacing the only decent face that Italy was able to put on between 1922 and 1945, Germany between 1933 and 1945, France between 1940 and 1944, Spain and Portugal for almost forty years. But, although necessary, this answer is not enough.
To defend anti-fascism as an «exemplary» memory, in the noblest sense of the word, and as a still-living lesson of the past, one must proceed to its critical historization, by grasping the weaknesses and limits that often go hand-in-hand with its greatness. And to understand the intellectuals’ relationship to anti-fascism, one must delve deep into the sources of their involvement.» […] (Enzo Traverso: Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism: For a Critical Historization)
…»manifesto of the fascist intellectuals» (1925, Conference of fascist culture at Bologna) and the Replay by Italian authors…
George Orwell, Writers and Leviathan (1948)
[ Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (1927) – reviews 1928-’29 ]
Walter Benjamin, «The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction» (1935) / «Experience and Poverty» / …»on the concept of history«…
Albert Einstein speaks at the Royal Albert Hall 1933 : youtube.com/watch?v=ZBage5Ff57E
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…M.Foucault – «the subject and power» (outline, J.Protevi)…
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Albert Einstein (collection) [L.B.I.].
…Heisenberg and «Jewish Physics»…
Margit Szollosi-Janze, Science in the Third Reich [2001].
Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution [2007].
Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy [2002].
Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust [2006].
Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language [2005].
James E Goggin, Eileen Brockman, Death of a »Jewish Science» (Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich) [2001].
Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction [2014].
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…Sophie Scholl and the White Rose…
…Faces of Courage, The Edelweiss Pirates…
…German Swing Youth…
…»We Shall Not Be Silent»
«For the sake of future generations, an example must be set after the war, so that no one will ever have the slightest desire to try anything like this ever again. Do not forget the minor scoundrels of this system; note their names, so that no one may escape…We shall not be silent – we are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace…» – The Fourth Leaflet
The Six Pamphlets of the «White Rose Society»…
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Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich [2008].
Richard Bessel, Dirk Schumann (Eds.), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s [2003].
«[…] vast majority of university teachers, anti-liberal, undemocratic, anti-Semitic as they were, had helped to undermine the democratic regime. Most professors were fanatical nationalists who wished the return of a conservative, monarchical Germany…. By 1932 the majority of students appeared to be enthusiastic for Hitler.It was surprising to some how many members of the university faculties knuckled under to the Nazification of higher learning after 1933. (William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich 1950).
…Ernst Friedrich, Krieg dem Kriege!… (To Human Beings in all lands!)
…»φασισμός και δημοκρατία«… : vimeo.com/90919861
Theodor W. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality [1950].
Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler [1989].
Istvan Deak, Essays on Hitler’s Europe [2001].
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…Racism… /»Exposition coloniale internationale» Paris 1931. …/ Counter Exhibition: «La Vérité sur les Colonies«.
…/»Human Zoos» bibliography…
…»peoples show» (Völkerschau)
…»negro villages»…
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Jean-Paul Satre, Preface) [1961].
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism [1967].
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient [1978].
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899].
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory [1998].
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France [2009].
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s [1989].
Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction [2001].
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought [1999].
John Stuart Mill, Considerations On Representative Government [1861].
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire [2009].
Margaret Kohn, Keally McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations [2011].
Gyan Prakash, After Colonialism [1994].
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…»φασισμός και ψυχιατρική» (αφιέρωμα, Τετράδια Ψυχιατρικής, no.47, 1994)
…Ernesto Laclau dead at 78…
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The Deleuze Dictionary [2010].
The Guattari Reader [1996].
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980].
Marc Ngui …drawings (1) : methodical interpretation of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Marc Ngui …drawings (2).
Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control : youtube.com/watch?v=GIus7lm_ZK0
«…We would even say that fascism implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their centralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropohtical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization.
But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.1′ There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the «masses.» Daniel Guerin is correct to say that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the German State administration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal microorganizations giving him «an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society,» in other words, a molecular and supple segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question:
Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they «want» to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microforma-tions already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.
Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a little suppleness is enough to make things better.» But microfascisms are what make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as harmful as the most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual and interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the other. Third, the two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coextensive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the qualitative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between the two, directly or inversely proportional. […]» (G.Deleuze – F.Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, pp.214-215).
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A talented and heretic historian, a pessimist philosopher driven to despair; Foucault attempted suicide several times during his youth. From the early 1960’s until his death he investigated unbearable situations but never suggested a concrete alternative welfare social condition. Distrustful of “social progress” he denounced the dark side of Enlightenment project and attacked the prescriptions which comprise “normality”.
In contrast with Sartre’s convictions Foucault rejected “humanistic existentialism”: man is not “condemned to be free”; rather, s/he is a product of a power network that traverses the entire social body. In a point of view deriving from Nietzsche, human condition is a product of history – not a natural event.
As an archeologist Foucault tried to show that so-called objectivity of “human sciences” is a cover: following a Nietzschean perspectivism, he argued that there is no possibility for neutral, general criteria to be set against “independent truth”, against “right” and “false” in such sciences. As a genealogist, in his second period, Foucault reached nihilism: he concluded that what we count as a statement of order and reason is in fact a product of dominance and subjection. Power is not simply something that is imposed to us with a role of prohibition and restriction: Rather, it is “positive”, crossing through things and producing discourses, bearing pleasure, effecting modes of knowledge and finally, producing individuals. And yet power encompasses the potentiality of its reversal: subject is not the foundation of thought and history but rather their product – without, however being a myth. In his so- called “ethical” (third) period, Foucault turned to “aesthetics of existence”. We must, he argued, create ourselves as a work of art. “Care of the self” is not a process for the discovery of our deeper “real self”, but rather an invention and creation of what someone could be.
Foucault never stopped inquiring into who we are and how we came to be that way. Near the end of his life he reconsidered Enlightenment and agreed with Kant in that we have to exercise a ceaseless criticism, yet he insisted in that our critique must be historical and genealogical.
An identifiable link seems to exist between the political philosophy of anarchism and the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault: there is no single, privileged point for resistance and social transformation for neither. Since power is diffused, a critique against it must also be exercised everywhere: at the level of human race, of teaching relations, in relations between psychiatrists and “mad” people, in the field of sexuality etc.
Foucault wrote for the dark side of our society, for the people who have no political rights, for delinquents, for the confined, for the factory workers, for the poor, for sexually unorthodox individuals, even for the oppressed students of severe schools of former century. He eventually rejected centralized well-disciplined political actions. He chose specialized, local and “partial” battles against microphysics of power rather than economical “class struggle”. He didn’t refuse the revolutionary proletarian movement but preferred the struggles of imprisoned, of women, of institutionalized “insane”, of homosexuals.
Habermas called Foucault an anarchist who keeps up Nietzsche.
Foucault himself argued: “my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous”. So if everything is dangerous, we shall always have to do something. “My position”, he claimed, “leads not to apathy, but in a hyper- and pessimist activism”[1].
[1] “On the genealogy of ethics (An overview of work in progress)”, The Foucault Reader. An introduction to Foucault’s thought, [Ed.] Paul Rabinow, Penguin Social Sciences, page 343.
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Historikerstreit («historians’ quarrel«) : intellectual and political controversy in West Germany about the way the Holocaust should be interpreted in history.
Ford Henry, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem [1920].
David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 [2002].
Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism [1989].
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [2013].
Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities [2004].
Mark Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism [2005].
Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War [2009].
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film [2004].
Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony.
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…Anthropological Society of London…
Michael Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow. The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace [2002].
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought [1944].
Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat [1997].
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity [1985].
Jonathan Hodge, Gregory Radick, Companion to Darwin [2003].
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…organization of the Nazi Party’s propaganda central office…
…Haile Selassie, «Appeal to the League of Nations» June 1936… (Empire of Ethiopia invaded by fascist Italy)
Hannah Vogt, The Burden of Guilt: A Short History of Germany, 1914-1945 [1964].
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Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War [2002].
Vincent Sherry, Literature of the First World War [2005].
Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War [2011].
Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism [2003].
Jay Winter, Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present [2005].
Marc Ferro, The Great War, 1914-1918 [2002].
Spencer Tucker, Great War, 1914-1918 [2002].
Fred Bridgham, The First World War as a Clash of Cultures [2006].
Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel [1920].
[ Ernst Junger ].
Walter Benjamin, Theories of German Fascism (p.120).
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Madison Grant, The passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History [1916].
Charcot, Jean-Martin / Georges Vacher de Lapouge [Old and New Aspects of the Aryan Question] / Hippolyte A. Taine [The Origins of Contemporary France] / Theophile Gautier / Monsieur Bertillon [Identification of Criminals] / Gustave le Bon [The Crowd].
Cesare Lombroso.
Robert Michels [iron law of oligarchy].
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West [1918].
Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism [1911].
Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol [1938].
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Hoffman & Walker [eds.], The German Physical Society in the Third Reich [2012].
Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb [2001].
Klaus Hentschel, Ann M. Hentschel, Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources [2011].
[…] There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it. (A. Einstein, Speech to Lincoln University Students and Faculty, May 3, 1946).
Jerome & Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism [2006].
Siegfried Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers: Science and Politics – Einstein’s Berlin Period with an Appendix on Einstein’s FBI File [2005].
..Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. (Albert Einstein)
…Eduard Drumont (1844-1917)…
…Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) / …das institut…
…Jacques Tardi, C’était la guerre des tranchées, 1914-1918.
Αυτόνομη Πρωτοβουλία
Hieronymus Bosch 1450-1516 