Review – Chapoutot, “The Law of Blood”

July 31, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Johann Chapoutot, “The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi” (2018) (translated from the French by Miranda Richmond Mouillot) – I’m behind on reviews. I finished this one at least a week ago. “‘It was a lot,’ the reviewer said with all the eloquence one has come to expect of millennials.” Johann Chapoutot brings the approach of the new cultural history (well, not that new anymore, but newer than the old cultural history ala Burckhardt) to Nazism. He combs over Nazi novels (acknowledging a major debt to Klaus Theweleit, who did something similar with a gendered reading of Freikorps literature), policy manuals, legal arguments, and so on to reconstruct “the mental universe in which Nazi crimes took place and held meaning.”

Chapoutot locates the source of meaning for Nazi ideology in a succession of bad biological metaphors popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “struggle for existence” is a big one, as is stuff about nature’s balance, purity, the kind of stuff popular in contemporary pop evo-psych, etc. Unlike Enlightenment philosophers who used the concept of the “body politic” to argue for a rationally organized state, the Nazis understood the social body as answering to romantic imperatives of blood, with predictable results. Chapoutot isn’t an intellectual historian- he doesn’t trace these ideas back to a source (though others, like George Mosse, do). Instead he explores their development and application by people like Nazi lawyers, SS bureaucrats, SA memoirists, etc. They have the naivety one sees in the self-justification of doltish men with power. I think there’s a lot to this approach — call it the intellectual history of dullards — and would like to see it more broadly applied.

The worldview and the actions taken to sustain or instantiate it exist in a permanent feedback loop. Trying to suss out which came first is a chicken-egg question, the kind historians spend pointless decades on. Take Nazi legal theory. The Nazis believed in something like “natural law,” not in the sense Aquinas might have meant it but in an altogether dumber way. The law of nature is that which allows the best to thrive; Aryans are the best, the peak of creation; ergo, what is good for Aryans is the law. Thinking of law as an actual set of rules with meaning was just a Jewish mania for dead abstractions that the legal profession needed to guard against. This was both deeply felt and highly expedient for a dictatorship that didn’t want fetters on its behavior, both domestic and foreign. In the typical fashion of ambitious dolts making up rules as they go according to aesthetics, this tended to bite them in the ass. Their ideas about racial conflict dictated they had to be as cruel as possible to the Slavic inhabitants of the places they conquered in their war with the Soviets- by the time they realized they were only multiplying their problems with partisans, it was too late to do anything about it.

Over four hundred pages of this! There’s some interesting tid bits… arguing for the “ideology over function” side, did you know that the Nazis didn’t really pursue non-Germans for homosexuality? They considered it a problem for Germans because it took men away from their breeding responsibilities, but if French or Polish people or whoever did it, they didn’t care- let them weaken the rival races. Nazis also paid little attention to lesbianism, considering it a temporary expedient produced by the loss of men during the war(!) that they’d soon fix. Chapoutot enlivens the proceedings with a little sarcasm here and there, something of a relief- enough for at least one fashy goodreads reviewer I saw to get all huffy about it, worth a laugh on its own…

The picture that emerges here is not the sinister iron men of the Indiana Jones movies or whatever, or even the heel-clicking bureaucrats of popular comedic imagination. The picture of lockstep conformity and control that earlier depictions of Nazism stressed seems increasingly dated. Nazism according to Chapoutot and other recent historians isn’t any kind of fulfillment of western modernist bureaucratic rationality, but an attempt to re-enchant the world by marrying the means and methods of modernity with the (fraudulent, made-up) primeval values of blood and soil. That, in their view, implied giving ultimate power to the Fuhrer and through him his henchmen- that’s not the same thing as subjecting everything to rules, laws, procedures etc., which were specifically eschewed as unnatural and limiting. It was actually crazier than that: rule by vague concepts — blood, race, volk — that Chapoutot argues were meant less to guide and define than to act as incantations, mantras to guide one into a certain frame of mind that was the Nazi end goal. One gets the sneaking suspicion that many of the earlier drafts of interpretations of the Nazis had a lot more to do with what was expedient — for the Cold War, among other things — than what made sense.

Listen… I get that Nazi comparisons are lame and overdone. But I think that at least part of the problem with them is that we use them to distance unpleasant things from a supposedly good normative universe, because we’re using the Nazi as alien-monster-robot paradigm. Even arguments about the “banality of evil” and the “ordinary men” who committed the crimes can be used in this way- anyone can lose their humanity and become Nazis instead if they’re not careful.

But even if we and Chapoutot agree that Nazism was “inhuman” as in “extremely bad,” the picture that emerges from “The Law of Blood” is quite human, in the sense of being a muddle of contingency and misplaced sincerity, self-serving and fanatical by turns, the sort of thing we can easily imagine the sort of dopes who really go in for a certain kind of sentimental, chintzy conceptions of meaning buying into. We see similar arguments from nature all the time- think about the familiar cop spiels about them being “sheepdogs,” guarding us “sheep” from those evil “wolves.” Think about the sheer yearning, always there but which burbles to the surface at certain times, to violently dispense with everything — laws, norms, truth, science, history — that prevents a certain kind of people from living out some fatuous heroic narrative, articulated (if you want to call it that) in uncountable mutually-exclusive personal imaginings, but somehow all converging on the same sort of destruction… that’s where Nazism takes its place, in the long history of reactionary fantasy and efforts to make it reality. These fantasies share elements across modernity, and efforts to make them real share many elements too, regardless of how many people have abused comparison by doing it poorly. *****

Review – Solzhenitsyn, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

July 27, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962) (translated from the Russian by Ron Hingley and Max Hayward) – Has Solzhenitsyn experienced a sales bump from being name-checked by Jordan Peterson, I wonder? Either way, I picked this one up at the usual getting place, the library sale. He’s been enlisted — volunteered, really — to be the literary placeholder for the totalitarianism thesis, the idea that the Gulag was the same as the Holocaust and therefore we need to destroy Vietnam/cut the marginal tax rate/not use trans peoples pronouns. My understanding is that started backfiring a little once the Soviet Union actually fell and he was still around, saying weird shit about the Jews and publishing unreadable novels, but by then the job had been done.

That’s not quite the figure we have here- the Cold War martyr-saint/embarrassing uncle. In “Ivan Denisovich” he’s near the beginning of his career. The novel is exactly what it says it is- a description of one day in the life of a relatively “standard” gulag prisoner. Ivan Denisovich is not notably political- he’s in there because he got captured by the Nazis during WWII, and it was assumed many of the Soviet soldiers who were captured had been turned into spies. The book is short and the prose is brisk.

Politics doesn’t really enter it, not openly, anyway. No one really seems to care about communism- no “re-education,” no lectures from commissars. If anything, that could be the point- what defines “Ivan Denisovich” is power, pure and simple; its use, abuse, and avoidance. Over the course of the day Ivan needs to negotiate several different power structures, from the doctors to the work gangs to the kitchen gangs and the guards and on and on. He’s always cold and usually hungry, with only porridge to look forward to. He’s not a big man in the prison, but he’s not at the bottom of the pecking order either. He’s a capable worker, which helps. Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of work are probably the highlight of the book. Building walls in the middle of nowhere, presumably to house more prisoners to the do the same thing… if Cold War academics didn’t bound up the Gulag, the terror, the famines, and everything else bad the Soviets did (or didn’t) into one big ball of associations, the takeaway of “Ivan Denisovich” would be the meaningless misery, identical to that practiced by numerous other systems, of what was supposed to be a wholly new kind of society. ****

Review- Brin, “Sundiver”

July 17, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

David Brin, “Sundiver” (1980) – I picked this one up at a library sale because it is the first of the Uplift War series, and A. I like to have a crack at many of the big SFF series and B. I’ve heard good things about its sequel, “Startide Rising.” “Sundiver” wasn’t great but does leave some hope that the fans of the sequel is as good as people say.

The premise of the series is interesting- a few centuries from now, Earth develops faster-than-light travel and comes into contact with a highly developed interstellar society made up of many varying civilizations. All of these civilizations were “uplifted” — brought to sentience and guided along all the way from banging rocks together to spaceships by a more advanced species. The oldest and most advanced species, in turn, claim to have been uplifted billions of years ago by the very first interstellar life forms. But humanity, playing the plucky upstart role it often does in this sort of scifi, not only developed space travel on its own but even began “uplifting” species on Earth (chimpanzees, dolphins, etc) without even knowing about the broader galactic social order. And so they mesh fitfully, if peacefully, in the galaxy, and people are still working out what to make of them.

This is all in the background. Mainly, this is a story about a crew of people and aliens investigating energy-beings on the Sun. Some people (and aliens) think these Sun-beings uplifted humans long ago, thereby fitting them into the normal galactic evolutionary scheme, some people… don’t… to be honest, it got kind of foggy (ironic, given that most of the story takes place between Mercury and the Sun!). There’s a sinister teddy-bear alien who wants to knock the earth-men down a few pegs, and a LOT of details about how to make a spaceship that can fly really close to the sun, some schemes, some really interchangeable characters… In the end, science prevails, and the mean aliens are kept from turning the neutral Sun-aliens against people. It’s slow. But it’s a promising setup, and I’m told the latter installments are brisker and take more advantage of the setup, so I’ll grab the sequel when it turns up on a used pile somewhere. **

Review – Sedgwick, “Against the Modern World”

July 13, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Mark Sedgwick, “Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century” (2004) – Historians of esoteric or occult thought generally go around with a chip on their shoulder about the way their field is ignored and, allegedly, ridiculed by historians writ large. There’s some truth to it, and some make a good case for the importance of their field to intellectual history writ large- Earl Fontainelle on his very enjoyable podcast, “The SHWEP” (Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast), for instance. But in some cases the desire to prove that esoteric thought was important, relevant, and like other intellectual movements, with lineages and everything, overwhelms whatever other analytical point a given work might try to make.

In some cases, it looks like a case of a historian being captured by their sources- they begin to sound like the sort of people who insist, not so much that magic is real, but that keep an open mind, and in other cases like the squabbling of the sort of real world occultists they write about, forever going back and forth on who has the legit secret knowledge, etc. They get cute about whether they themselves believe in it or not, as though their personal belief in magic is actually what people care about. Sometimes it’s like “Masters of Atlantis” but not funny.

Historian Mark Sedgwick’s book on the traditionalists is more in the latter camp. Traditionalism is an esoteric philosophy that, as Sedgwick contends, traveled far, especially (well, almost exclusively) in elite circles in the early twentieth century. The basic idea of Traditionalism is this: there is a set of unified spiritual truths that everyone once knew about and that held society — in some far distant prehistoric time — in perfect harmony. Something happened and now we have modernity, which isn’t perfect, unified, or spiritual. Bits of the tradition are scattered amongst the world’s religions and spiritual movements. A spiritual elite should piece together the Tradition for themselves and… well, most of the time, the next step is form clubs and bicker with each other about who’s being properly traditional, but at least some thought about trying to spread the message more broadly. Some of these ideas went into New Age spirituality, though major Traditionalist figures like Guenon, Coomaraswamy or Evola would doubtless sneer mightily at New Agers over… whatever differences they have.

If I already didn’t know about Traditionalism at least a little from prior research, this book would have been borderline incomprehensible. Sedgwick doles out definitions of what they actually believe almost grudgingly. He does very little analysis of the many texts the Traditionalists produced. The bulk of the book is made up of talking about the Traditionalists, how they knew each other, their connections to other belief systems (particularly Sufism, of which Sedgwick is a scholar), etc. etc. This is of little intrinsic interest, especially considering the big claims Sedgwick makes early on of Traditionalism forming a key part of twentieth century intellectual life as proven by the big names who got into it… but the big names basically aren’t there. He goes out of his way to say Carl Jung wasn’t one, appearances to the contrary. That’s about as big as we get, unless Mircea Eliade is an especially big deal to you.

The frustrating thing is, as a peculiar ideology for elites with at least some pull, I could buy an argument for saying that Traditionalism might have had some importance, in much the same way similarly elitist (and basically nonsensical) ideologies like Objectivism have. Sedgwick barely makes it. The closest he comes is the way figures like Eliade and Coomaraswamy helped popularize the idea that all religions have a core of truth (which is the Tradition handed down from olden days) and all are worth studying. That’s interesting, but he doesn’t develop it much.

Similarly, Traditionalism’s connections with fascism and the European far right, as exemplified by the person of Julius Evola, who was in the news recently because Steve Bannon thought to name drop him (if he’s actually gotten through a volume of the Baron’s fatuous oeuvre, I’ll give him… I don’t know, a penny and a shot of Scope to quell the shakes? I’m not giving that guy shit). Sedgwick does the annoying thing New Age people (including Evola’s English translators) do where they try to take Evola’s snobbish disdain for the plebian Mussolini as a sign he wasn’t a fascist. No- if anything, he was just even more violently attached to hierarchy, and put Traditionalism together with racial hierarchies in the most obvious combination since plastic explosives and roofing nails. Sedgwick can’t quite stay away from the story of how Evola-inspired neofascists contributed more than their fair share to the Years of Lead in 1970s Italy- after all, there’s that delicious line about the cops finding an Evola volume in your flat being more damning than if they found C4. But again- it’s stories, anecdotes, connections, no real analysis of the ideas or how they interacted. It’s a shame because Traditionalism and other marginal ideas of that kind have more to tell us if we trace their dynamics than if we try to insist they’re not marginal, or anything else they manifestly are. **

Review- Belew, “Bring the War Home”

July 12, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Kathleen Belew, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” (2018) – This is a very interesting and provocative book, both for the many qualities that have earned it much praise and for some issues it raises in my mind. It is, among other things, an important new sally in the historical profession’s march on the 1980s and 1990s. Belew traces the development and growth of what she calls the White Power movement, an umbrella term for racist groups both old (like the Klan) and new (paramilitaries like the Order), militias, anti-immigrant and anti-government radicals, etc.

“Bring the War Home” advances a few theses worth talking about, and the one that I think works the best is also the one most of the reviews I’ve read emphasize. Belew periodizes the White Power movement as having its origins with the end of the Vietnam War. The end of the war brought together a number of elements: anti-communism; fear and resentment of social movements (especially those led by women and people of color); a sense of shame, defeat, and betrayal, and a number of young men experienced in brutal guerilla war now at home and at loose ends; and angst over the defeat in Vietnam. Between them, a new variation on the old theme of white reactionary violence was born. So instead of mobs of whites burning down black neighborhoods, you had white paramilitaries forming (sometimes people like Louis Beam paramilitarizing preexisting groups like the Klan, sometimes new groups) to pursue a sort of guerrilla war against a wide variety of enemies. Sometimes this meant fighting leftists at home, sometimes this meant signing up to fight leftists abroad in Central America or Southern Africa, which brought the emerging white supremacist paramilitary culture into contact with the American intelligence establishment (not always for the first time).

Eventually, the main target for the White Power paramilitary culture became the US government itself. Belew argues that this was a transition- that the White Power movement before the early 1980s understood itself as helping the government against communism. She’s a little fuzzy as to why — mostly alluding to disappointment in Ronald Reagan — and I’m not sure I buy it. There was a lot of anti-fed sentiment coming out of the sixties, due to the genuine crimes of the FBI and, in the right, the federal governments role in ending formal segregation. I grant that the emphasis of the movements attentions might have changed… or maybe it’s better to say it congealed more into a movement during the eighties, though again, the why is a little unclear. We know what we saw, though- Klansmen and Neonazis burying the hatchet (the former used to regard the latter as unpatriotic) and both making common cause with skinheads, “race realists,” militia types etc.

Belew’s most debatable thesis, for me, is that the White Power movement acts as a body, much more so than most analysis lets on. I want to be careful here. I one hundred percent agree that the movement as a whole is responsible for the supposed “lone wolves” who commit much of its violence. And I agree that there is much more collusion among groups than is commonly understood. Belew does admirable pick and shovel work, especially with the early far-right internet (they were enthusiastic early adopters of BBS systems, etc) and the distribution of cash by the Order, a notorious neonazi gang who mounted a massive armored car robbery in the eighties and who spent years wandering around, giving stacks of greenbacks to every fascist asshole who promised to make trouble with it.

I still think she overstates her case. Not in terms of culpability- as far as I’m concerned, they can all hang together. But I think positing that people like McVeigh or the Order were soldiers acting as part of an army that links the whole white power movement misses important organizational aspects of what makes the far right what it is. It also leads Belew to stretch her reasoning more than she does in most of the book- not out of bounds, but some. But I think there is an altogether different organizational logic to far-right violence… the nongovernmental kind, anyway.

I think of it as milieux- overlapping social circles with varying degrees of institutionalization and porous boundaries with other in-milieu groups. It’s not uncommon to see someone in the klan and in a Nazi group, or a “Proud Boy” and a III percenter for that matter, at the same time. Action is more often motivated by dreams and fantasies — like the omnipresent Turner Diaries, which many of these people are literally trying to act out — than by a political program. When actions are based in concrete logic, they’re usually something local and grubby- terrorizing Vietnamese refugee fisherman for an easy win (didn’t turn out so easy once the SPLC got involved) or knocking over armored cars. Moving forward means walking a fine line between entertaining the fantasies and working with realities. This model works especially well for right-wing militants. Even if they want to destroy an established order (in the name of a better, older one), they don’t generally need to go all the way their own- they can destabilize the social order and let “natural” hierarchy reassert itself, something the left generally can’t do unless they’re going full Khemer Rouge.

I can’t really blame Belew for not getting into this organizational stuff, both because she has her own ideas around which she already wrote a very good book, and because I find it at the edge of my ability to articulate in any event. There’s also the risk of going to the culturalist extreme, analyzing the fantasies at the expense of the concrete realities. But I don’t think it should be insurmountable, and I hope later histories that tackle the same subject give some more thought to the way that political vision, circumstances, and practice inform each other to create many varieties of new forms. ****’

Review – Waugh, “Scoop”

July 3, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Evelyn Waugh, “Scoop” (1938) – So THAT’s where the “Daily Beast” gets its name! I’ll admit I had not exactly been pondering that long into the night, but it is interesting to know, I guess. The combination of sass and self-pity — wallowing in the shallows of the dregs of culture and politics and then sniffling over drinks about how low it makes you feel — you get from your contemporary media people sounds pretty Waugh to me.

Waugh did it better, generally. “Scoop” is one of his earlier novels before he made his lugubrious Catholic turn, and is driven by venal misunderstandings leading to shenanigans amongst “Fleet Street” journalists and those around them. Due to some of these misunderstandings, William Boot, a guy who just wants to write about the voles and other animals outside of his decaying country estate, winds up getting send to cover a civil war in Ishmaelia. Ishmaelia is mostly Ethiopia with a little smattering of Liberia thrown in- Waugh had covered the Italian invasion of Ethiopia for a British newspaper.

The humor at the expense of the Ishmaelians ages about as well as you’d expect. But most of Waugh’s satiric spleen is aimed at journalists themselves. Truth be told, beyond a general picture of venality and incompetence — sketched out reasonably amusingly — a lot of the humor seems to be about dunking on specific journalists of the time. I missed many of these jokes. But the general journalistic milieu seems right, especially where it intersects with foreign policy. Boot stumbles into a story, mostly wrong, because his new local girlfriend (“married” to a German who’s already married to someone else- he sends them off in a canoe) knows people who know people, that suits British foreign policy. A dynastic struggle within the country turns into a red-versus-black ideological clash (shades of the Cold War) which eventually turns into something into which the British can profitably intervene.

Truth be told, I read this about a week ago (I’ve been slacking in posting reviews for various reasons) and don’t remember that much about it. I basically remember enjoying it reasonably well; Waugh’s prose, at least, is always smooth and occasionally vivid, and his plotting works after a draggy streak in the middle where he owns a bunch of 30s journalists I don’t know. One issue is that I think we’ve already taken on the idea that journalism is a cynical exercise to such an extent that someone riffing on it extensively doesn’t really do much. But it’s still a good, quick Waugh read. ***’

Review – Vance, “The Palace of Love”

July 2, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Jack Vance, “The Palace of Love” (1967) – This is the third of the Demon Princes novels, a sort of space-opera-revenge series with western overtones. Kirth Gessen’s village got enslaved by a gang of space pirates led by the five Demon Princes when he was a boy, and he’s spent the rest of his life pursuing revenge, one (book) at a time. By this third book Vance is a bit looser, building more character into Kirth’s quarries. The first two Demon Princes were mostly distinguished by their provenance in a species that mimics mankind and attempts to excel it. Kirth’s target this time is a human- and an incel! Viole Falushe got into the space slavery game as a result of being spurned by the cool girl in high school. Very human self-pity and self-regard fill in for whatever alien-species stuff Vance used as a motivation for his bad guys in the last two books, and it works out.

The thing with Vance villains is that they are generally aware of the absurdity of their situations but are so wrapped up they continue on anyway. There’s no becoming the cool boy with the girl that Viole wanted to be, so he resorts to increasingly high-concept and creepy ways to replicate it, all of which fail. Eventually, it’s these failings that give Viole away, and after hanging out with a feckless poet who influenced the young Viole and doing some detective work, allow Kirth to find his man and give him his just desserts. But more than the plots, which can be somewhat pro forma, the Demon Princes books get their juice from the baroque shapes Vance envisions human societies and personalities taking in response to environments, cultures, personal obsessions, etc. No one comes up with worse hells than Vance — Viole’s last scheme to get what he wants is pretty grotesque stuff, even by my standards — so it’s forgivable if the straight men he puts on them are a little stiff sometimes. ****

Too Much Berard

Month: July 2018