Review- Heinlein, “Starship Troopers”

January 29, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

starship-troopers

Robert Heinlein, “Starship Troopers” (1959) – At bottom, science fiction is about exploring possibilities. The corpus of scifi has explored an exhaustive range of facets of existence, playing with everything from consumer technology to the structures of race and gender to the nature of time and space, in the full range of emotional registers. And it’s a project shared across the spectrum of writers, from exalted masters ala Le Guin, Delaney, and Dick to the lowliest fanfic scribbler. It’s genuinely one of the nice things about the twentieth century, warts and all, and one of the few we actually got to keep, in a real, vital way, in to the twenty-first.

So what possibilities does acclaimed science fiction icon Robert Heinlein imagine for us in “Starship Troopers,” then? Where does he go from that established jumping-off point for limitless possibility, humanity’s exploration of the stars? Well, mostly, he imagines boot camp. Endless endless boot camp, described by Heinlein’s impersonation of a happy-go-lucky grunt (Heinlein was an Annapolis grad and a navy officer who never saw combat), an update of Rudyard Kipling’s cockney Tommy ventriloquism. There’s a huge war in space going on — multiple wars, it seems — but none of that matters except as a rationale for boot camp and for a society seemingly organized around boot camp. There’s maybe fifteen pages of battle in the whole book, including maybe ten pages in the beginning. The rest is boot camp, and a lot of that is actually lectures about life and society. This is closer to a pedagogical novel than a war story.

The content of these lectures Heinlein puts in the voice of older authority figures bestowing wisdom unto the perspective-dullard — the primacy of force and the existential validity of its wielders — is less off-putting than the tone and context in which it’s delivered. Heinlein may have seen himself as critiquing late-1950s consumer society but his philosophers of the spartan life speak like they came off the tv of his period; bluff, bouncy schmaltz, scout-master-meets-snake-oil salesman. The society in which Heinlein’s rules have been applied — only veterans can vote, corporal punishment is liberally applied, and most of all, old fucks who think like him are paid and encouraged to babble at length and totally own anyone who challenges them — isn’t really all that different from the society in which Heinlein lived, except people are as a whole happier. Sometimes evil aliens will paste a city but we all know the powersuit boys will paste them right back (not that Heinlein is going to let us enjoy much of it).

What that contrast tells me is that Heinlein means it. He’s not doing a thought experiment, he’s not doing satire, we don’t need to apply “Niven’s Rule” (Niven was another middlebrow fascist slug, anyway) of separating the views of the author from the views of the narrator. If this shit was imaginary for him, he’d try extending his imagination. If anything, the idea of “service-guarantees-citizenship” is much less grotesque than the combination of unimaginativeness, dullness (seriously- just give us some fucking space battles, dude), and chipper banality with which his ideas are expressed.

The militarism is just a vehicle for what Heinlein really cares about in this book- the defense and extension of a world that suits him (1950s America but a little hornier and in space), and the humiliation and extinction of people with ideas that make him uncomfortable. To be honest, I think the dynamic we see here — people smart enough to think about the world around them but deeply scared of the implications of what they think seeking intellectualized schmaltz to form a security blanket — drives an increasing amount of right-wing thought today. It’s a sad irony a lot of those people invest in science fiction, which is supposed to be about impetuous imagination.

I wanted to like this book, or at least like it a little more than I did. I like a lot of work I disagree with much more than the actual content of this book (the boy scout tone really is skin-crawlingly off for me, I’ll admit). Heinlein also helped keep Philip K. Dick solvent, even after PKD made fun of him all the time, so I want to like the guy. He seems like a good sport. And there are a lot of great right-leaning speculative fiction writers: Lovecraft, Tolkien, Herbert, Vance, Wolfe, Simmons, Stephenson. They create imaginative worlds, mount incisive criticisms, weave intricate plots, are compelling writers. None of this applies to “Starship Troopers” (and only applied a little bit more to “Stranger In A Strange Land,” the only other Heinlein I’ve read, which is best described as “‘Starship Troopers’ for horniness instead of the military”).

Paul Verhoeven showed a much greater degree of fealty to what science fiction is supposed to be about when he took this dull book for raw material for an actually great scifi movie, which is a brilliant satire of the fascist undercurrents both in the book (and scifi in general) and in our society. The movie has humor, it has the courage and brio of Verhoeven’s insane choice to make a movie undermining it’s own source material in what’s supposed to be a dumb action movie, and it has actual… space… battles which, I’d like to stress, the novel basically lacked. Having read the source material, I can now definitively say “Starship Troopers” beats out “The Godfather” or “Children of Men” for the ultimate case of a movie being better than the book.

Gotta say… nothing disappoints more than getting boring fascism when you expect the more interesting literary kind. *’

Review- Finchelstein, “From Fascism to Populism in History”

January 17, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

finchelstein2

Federico Finchelstein, “From Fascism to Populism in History” (2017) – My former professor Federico Finchelstein (from back when I was a mere stripling grad student at the New School) does some pretty good global history in a book that makes the bold move of trying to resolve some of the historiographical questions about fascism by throwing in an examination of another knotty topic- populism. Fascism goes part of the way toward explaining our moment, Finchelstein argues, but primarily because of the imprimatur it has made on populism, which he says essentially picked up fascism’s mantle- though with crucial modifications.

On top of all the other complications of making an argument in the already knotty fields of the history of fascism and populism, there’s a terminological aspect here that’s probably tricky for most Americans. When discussing populism, Finchelstein is more talking about Juan Peron than William Jennings Bryan or the People’s Party in the US, which he refers to as “proto-populist.” He breaks down populism to include right-wing variants (like Geert Wilders), left-wing variants (like Hugo Chavez), neoliberal variants (like Fujimori and Berlusconi), and the patient zero, Peronism, which has been tried in all three registers at various points since Peron took power in 1944.

In Finchelstein’s view, a few morphological similarities tie these populisms into a single taxon. Populism posits “the people” of a given nation against a designated other within the country- an “antipeople.” The antipeople aren’t just seen as people with other ideas, or with wrong ideas- they’re the enemy, full stop. Populism does not suspend democratic practices or engage in the sort of widespread, lethal violence that fascism does. But it is, essentially, authoritarian democracy- enshrining the union of people, nation, and leader (that’s one thing the agrarian Populists in the US lacked- no single charismatic leader figure) over and above the legal, institutional framework as the true expression of democracy. Populism does not generally break the state and create a new one in the same way fascism does, even if populists claim that’s their goal (and even if their incompetence severely damages the state). There’s a certain extent where to which the performative aspect of populism becomes its own point, where fascism’s performativity always worked towards the goal of a new man and a new society. People still vote; a populist can even lose power that way, and have done so, though Finchelstein doesn’t really go into what happens to his category the day a populist leader decides, say, the antipeople Deep State rigged his reelection campaign to prevent him from Making (Wherever) Great Again. Alberto Fujimori pulled a presidential coup in Peru, after all (but was run out of office more-or-less peacefully years later, fwiw).

Probably the greatest strength in Finchelstein’s work is the global extent of his analysis. “Global history” is the hot (not so) new thing these days, but while the archival breadth some historians manage is impressive, it’s often at the expense of analytical depth. This isn’t the case in this book- Finchelstein genuinely manages to decenter Europe in a book about fascism in an analytically useful way, a really impressive feat. His attention to African, Asian, and especially Latin American fascisms and populisms provide a chain of evidence for his assertion that populism picked up where fascism left off- as a way for ambitious movement politicians to conceptualize a mass, anti-liberal, anti-communist politics, after fascism proved to be something of a bust for those purposes. Many of the same leaders who dabbled with fascism came to define the populist style — many of the techniques fascists develop to mobilize people on an anti-socialist/liberal platform, without the direct assault on democracy or the massive, open violence — especially in Latin America and most notably in Argentina.

There’s subtleties in this argument which can make it hard to swallow. Finchelstein, an Argentine, is not notably sympathetic with populism, but grants that in many of its forms, it has actually fought dictatorships (including in actual guerrilla action, as the Montoneros did in Argentina) and expanded political participation, as we saw in Venezuela. It’s jarring to read in one book about how a political movement is both the inheritor of fascism and an expander of democracy. Having worked with Finchelstein, I know he is not sympathetic to the totalitarianism school, which lumps much of (sometimes all) popular movement politics, left and right, onto the totalitarian spectrum. He distinguishes populism, in hard and fast lines, from socialism and communism- as do most socialists and communists. But it’s still odd to see the lumping in of left-populists, from left-Peronists like the Kirchners to Syriza and Podemos, as inheritors of fascism, even in a strictly morphological sense. Among other things, it seems like the key watershed for left-populism in our moment isn’t the fall of Berlin in 1945 but the fall of Communism in 1989. If right-populists were faced with the question of how to do mass hierarchical politics after Stalingrad, and that effected this epochal change, surely the 1989 moment was just as much of a watershed for the left? As it happens, I’ve emailed Federico about exactly this question. I’ll keep you readers updated on his response!

Finchelstein places Trump squarely in the right-populist camp. I agree with this assessement, but have less of an issue also calling him a fascist (which I mostly reserve for rallies- no need to be academic at a rally) than Finchelstein does. Even with the modifier “right-” and even being skeptical of populism versus socialism, “populist” is still too decent a term for Trump and his true believers. Finchelstein uses most of the book to very carefully lay out his cases, citing chapter and verse, on both fascism and populism (which, I reiterate, are both fields heavily weighed down with internal disputes- he’s right to be cautious). He does not get much into the differences in how to fight a right-populist versus in dealing with an out-and-out Mussolini/Hitler-style fascist. If anything, a lot of the distinguishing factors he lays out — the way populists work more through mass media and culture (especially gender ideology) than through specific, fight-able policies — almost seem harder to fight than open fascism, given the state of play politically and culturally. But uhh… I guess it’s good to get an exciting new historicization of the precise lineaments of how fucked things are down? For the record? *****

Review- Hawley, “Making Sense of the Alt-Right”

January 4, 2018January 4, 2018 Peter Berard1 Comment

hawley

George Hawley, “Making Sense of the Alt-Right” (2017) – This volume marks the beginnings of the efforts of political science to understand the altright, at least as far as work aimed towards a public goes. Like Dave Neiwert, Hawley is pitching the work towards an audience baffled (and presumably disgusted) by this new thing, so you get a lot of the same explanatory stuff, though from a markedly different angle. Neiwert emphasized continuity between the earlier far right, as well as mainstream conservatism, with the altright. Hawley insists that the altright is a complete negation of mainstream conservatism, with the usual references to William Buckley casting the Birchers out of the temple, etc etc. Nobody seems to ask why it has to be either/or- why can’t there be a certain degree of ideological continuity (white identity politics, which mainstream conservatives absolutely practice just at a softer pitch; worship of authority, hatred of liberalism, etc) as well as institutional bad blood? That seems to be how every other ideology, socialism included, works…

Hawley has what I think of as a polisci habit of shortchanging historical context. Sometimes this takes the form of asking tantalizing contextual questions – “why does mainstream conservatism not integrate the sort of people, like right-leaning college kids, that it used to?” – and then basically just punting to something like “conservative weakness” or “the internet.” True factors, both of them, but he doesn’t get into why these things have taken shape the way they did and what that might mean for his question.

He appears to have taken this subject on because he was the guy in polisci writing about right-wing critics of American conservatism (work I’d like to look at, despite not thinking much of this book). Focus on the way the altright hates mainstream conservatives (and they do, or anyway they hate the leaders and hope to convert the followers- and have a better chance of the latter than any of us would like, even if it’s still unlikely by the Vegas odds) occludes much of the rest of what makes the altright a thing. There’s a real lack of attention paid to gender politics, which just seems baffling to me given how poignantly obvious male insecurity is with these people. And there’s the usual judicious weighing of the altright vs the altlite, as though it makes a difference if you get jumped by an open white nationalist vs by someone too insecure to admit they are basically a white nationalist. There’s some good attributes of this book — it’s a relief to see a professionally-produced, well-written volume on this stuff, given the thrown-together quality of Nagle and Neiwert’s respective works — but viable critical perspective on this question continues to elude the print longform format. **’

Review- Neiwert, “Alt-America”

January 2, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

altamerica

David Neiwert, “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” (2017) – I thought it would be interesting to try to keep up with the literature on the altright as it comes out, which is made a little easier given that few printed books have been written on it yet (and that it’s impossible to do more than try to keep up with the more relevant online pieces on the same subject). One downside of this is all of them, so far, appear to be rather hastily-assembled and not as well thought-out as one would like.

Dave Neiwert is a long-time watcher of the far-right for left-liberal circles, whose earlier work I haven’t gotten around to reading. I know he’s written about militias and about talk radio before, and both take up much of “Alt-America,” which places the altright squarely in a right-populist tradition that goes back… and here, things get vague. Neiwert does a good job going through the actual narrative of the 21st century far right in America, but he is very light on historical or political analysis of why these things happened the way they did. He does little to place the far right and the “Alt-America,” a whole different worldview/culture he posits but does not really flesh out, in any kind of context. Where the other most prominent book on the alt-right, Angela Nagle’s “Kill All Normies,” is thesis-heavy (it’s all vague-left culture warriors fault) and narrative-light, Neiwert’s work is the reverse. Arguably it’s somewhat more useful- it’s nice to have all those dates and events in one book. But it should be possible to have both.

A lot of the analysis he does provide is basically psychological- authoritarian types and social dominaters, etc. I don’t dismiss this as much as I used to but there needs to be something more- if nothing else to explain why these psychological types are so prominent now. And this weakness of analysis extends to what’s always the worst part of any of these types of books (not just ones about the right, either), the “what do now” section. If you’re referencing Harry Potter as a role model for how to deal with pretty much any political issue, and worse yet citing Rowling’s works as great literary examples of empathy, you’re kind of on the wrong track.

I get the feeling that this is where we’re gonna be at for books on the new far right for a while. They’ll suffer from the inevitable weaknesses of books about fast-moving contemporary movements (books about the altright’s more ambitious reactionary cousins in ISIS had the same issues a few years ago) and more from the way that these altright people make any decent type anxious and angry in a way that always comes out in the writing. And so we’ll wind up with very basic narrative explainers (Neiwert) or with inter-left ax-grinding using the altright as a prop (Nagle) or alarmism and often enough simple gawking at the weirdos over on the far right (most internet pieces). It’s a shame, because I think there’s some interesting historical dynamics that this whole thing illuminates, but that can be a hard sell for publishers, I suppose. ***

Review- Mosse, “Fallen Soldiers”

December 23, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

fallensoldiers

George Mosse, “Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars” (1991) – this is a solid but relatively minor work from one of the great historians of the 20th century- and for my money, the greatest intellectual historian, though there’s stiff competition. Wouldn’t that be a fun radio show, like those sports radio shows where they argue who was the best shortstop based on obscure stats and get all heated about it, except about historians? I think it would be fun.

Anyway! In “Fallen Soldiers,” Mosse continued his examination of the cultural and intellectual trends that eventually fed into fascism. He sees these trends as a Europe-wide phenomenon, and talks a fair amount about France and Britain, but in the end, Germany and the way Germans memorialized their war dead, especially those from WWI, are his subjects here. Preexisting modes of prettifying death (Mosse writes a lot about cemetery design in the early chapters), already rife with conservative Christian and pastoral themes, get supercharged by nationalism and revanchism after the war. Again, this is more in Germany than anywhere else, but is also prominent in Italy and elsewhere the war touched.

War memorialization became a way not just to ennoble the chaos and slaughter of war, but a promise of a kind of secular deliverance. The new thing of total war would create the new man prophesied by the fascist right (and, to a lesser extent, the communist left), hard and fearless, shorn of the flabby lies of bourgeois civilization. Even conventional war monuments, Mosse argues, contributed to this gestalt, but nowhere was it more potent than I Germany, with results we all know. Ultimately, these are variations on the themes Mosse established in such earlier works as “The Crisis of the German Ideology,” but it’s a welcome additions to his project. ****

Review: Jankowski, “Communism and Collaboration”

November 25, 2017 Peter BerardLeave a comment

jankowski

Paul Jankowski, “Communism and Collaboration: Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseilles, 1919-1944” (1989) – French fascism is a funny thing, and arguably the most fecund field of study in terms of sheer gratuitous variety of movements, parties, and tendencies it contained (probably part of the reason they never really got that far before the German occupation). Jankowski examines the career of one of its odder specimens, Marseillaise politician Simon Sabiani, one of the leaders of the Parti Populaire Francaise. Sabiani started out a Communist, though it seems more out of general anti-system feeling in 1919 than out of belief in Marx or anything. More than anything, Sabiani was a machine politician, a dispenser of favors and collector of graft, a well-known type in urban politics and certainly well within Marseilles practice (and Boston- he reminds me a little bit of James Curley, but flightier). He built a base of fellow Corsicans, downwardly mobile petty bourgeois, and criminals. He despised the Popular Front as an electoral threat, and that blossomed into a general turn towards the right, as it did for his eventual notional boss in the PPF, Jacques Doriot. During the war, Sabiani oversaw the wholesale turning over of the PPF in Marseilles to the service of the Germans, though some of them stumbled into borderline-resistance activity (smuggling out Jews, etc), basically due to their long ingrained habit of graft. Jankowski depicts Sabiani as something of a throwback, with a few good instincts (betting on petty bourgeois resentment produces returns, then and now), but incapable of really understanding the forces unleashed by movements like communism and fascism, or by the war. He escaped justice and lived out his life under Peron and Franco’s protection, indulging in barstool fascist oratory to the end of his days.

The book has a certain dissertation-y feel to it, and as such assumes the reader knows more about Marseilles and interwar French politics going in than they might. But Jankowski also packs in a lot of fascinating granular description of how the shabby milieux of poverty, crime, and resentment incorporated itself into the fascist regime at the ground level. You get a better idea of how collaboration functioned — the give and take between prewar structures, the demands of the occupier, the ambitions of collaborators — than you often get. Though one is left wondering what the elite in Marseilles was up to all this time… even if the main interlocutor between the occupiers and the people was Sabiani, the populist, you have to figure it wasn’t all sailors and day-laborers carrying Nazi water. Anyway… good fuel for the Wire-style drama on occupation and resistance that my friend Drew and I fantasize about but will never actually make. ****’