Review – Lewis, “Babbitt”

August 6, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Sinclair Lewis, “Babbitt” (1922) – Did Looney Tunes ever make a joke where Elmer Fudd was hunting a “wascally Babbitt?” Sorry, I promise I won’t start all of my subsequent reviews with dumb jokes. In a way, though, commentators on the American cultural scene have been hunting the Babbitt (:continues in extremely Ride of the Valkyries voice:” hunting da Babbitt, hunting da BAAAAAABBITT”) ever since Sinclair Lewis put up the big ol’ “Babbitt Season” sign in 1922.

Ok, end of the Wabbit-Babbitt jokes, I promise. “Babbitt” was the sensation it was in no small part because it created an instant and enduring symbol of what Sinclair Lewis’s pal and supporter H.L. Mencken called the American “booboisie,” the oafish upper-middle-class. The book’s publication launched editorials about the curse of “babbittry” and publicity campaigns by groups like the Rotary Club to fight back against Lewis’s biting depiction of Business Man. Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in no small part due to “Babbitt.” I first heard of the book as a college student reading old essays from “The Baffler,” which especially under Thomas Frank (something of a mark for early 20th century lefty Americana) in the mid-to-late 90’s saw itself as echoing Lewis’s skepticism of an America whose business was business.

We spend over 300 pages almost solely in the headspace of George F. Babbitt, one of the leading real estate salesmen of Zenith, a city assorted midwestern burgs — Cincinnati and Minneapolis being two of the lead candidates — have contended is based on them. Of course, Lewis has his Zenith booboisie spell out for you that Zenith could be any early 20th century American city of the appropriate size run by “solid business ideas” held by “100 per cent Americans” full of “pep,” which is to say, pretty much any American city. Lewis said he was depicting the men who rule America, and I think he has a reasonably good grasp on that, especially for a novelist who was half in the bag most of the time.

Babbitt is in his forties, has a wife, two point five kids, a house, a car, a business, no meaningful money problems, and pretty much no idea in his head other than the received wisdom of his time and place. Lewis seems to have a grand old time riffing on the goofy “swell” booster-talk of Babbitt and his friends and juxtaposing the contradictory ideas — “America’s the greatest place in the world because of its freedom, and we should hang all union agitators” is a typical one — that that kind of deal-maker bullshit patter encourages people to think.

Babbitt does some social climbing; his glib bullshitting, flexible morals, and genuine hatred of people who might upset the applecart, who aren’t “regular fellows,” helps him along into being a major player in Zenith. He also does some rebelling, and it’s unclear whether his rebellion against the conformity that defines him and all of his friends is a genuine movement of what’s left of his soul, just another aspect of his conformity (what’s more white-American-bourgeois-man than deciding that his life is bullshit and he needs to ditch his responsibilities and run away?), or if there’s even a distinction between the two at all. Either way, Babbitt takes up with flappers and flirts with a sort of dippy liberal-radicalism for a few weeks before fleeing back into the bosom of respectable society.

I’ve read that Sinclair Lewis did real research for this book- immersing himself in the world of Booster’s Clubs and car accessories. This is reflected, on the one hand, with the exhaustive range of aspects of the Babbitt-ish lifestyle and mindset he crams into the novel, and on the other, with what reads like a heavy hand. I doubt Lewis was heavy-handed in terms of how boorish or authoritarian middle class WASPs were in his time. I do wonder if they quite so roundly and systematically declared their opinions on the kinds of things Lewis and his readers cared about — socialism, prohibition, the nature of life in America — as Lewis depicts them doing. Babbitt and co are oddly articulate in terms of the things they choose to articulate poorly and when. As the man once said, “people with real lives don’t need to be articulate,” and the whole point of Babbittry is that this — whatever the American upper middle class thinks and feels left to its own devices — is what real life is. Intellectuals often fall down portraying non-intellectuals, but Lewis does pretty well, at least in part because of his own verve and talent, and in part because he’s dealing with the class and milieu that, whether they’ll admit it or not, from which most American intellectuals hail. ****

Review – Ross, “Against the Fascist Creep”

August 3, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Alexander Reid Ross, “Against the Fascist Creep” (2017) – It took a weirdly long time for me to get around to this book, as I have read many (and lousier) examples of writing on our contemporary fascists… I think part of my brain slotted it as “anti-fascism,” which obviously I support but about which I don’t feel the need to go out and keep up with the literature. Memetic association with AK Press, I suppose.

Like most of our books about recent fascism, “Against the Fascist Creep” serves as something of a primer, and also advances a thesis on what should be done. Ross, an anarchist writer, also makes some provocative statements about fascism as a whole, dipping a toe into the perennial intellectual wrangling around defining fascism. Most of the latter turns on the “fascist creep” of the title- not gross haircuts with unwholesome habits saying repugnant things to trigger the libs (though it’s presumably a happy accident), but fascist entryism into and poaching from the left. This is both an interesting subject and an invitation to some fancy footwork around definitions of “fascist,” “radical right,” “populist” (and “left” for that matter) that Ross doesn’t quite carry off- some of his definitional portions get confused and this confusion finds its way to spots throughout the analysis, where you’re not sure whether he’s talking about fascists or mere “radical right-wingers” and what either might mean. This gets especially confused around Ross’s analysis of ideologies like anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism, frequent sites both of entryism and genuine sympathy to fascist ideas from people like von Mises and Rothbard, but that don’t quite fit the categories Ross lays out…

But for the most part, it’s an interesting and informative analysis. Anarchists have, by and large, borne the brunt of fascist attempts to enter the left, from infiltration of the punk scene to “National-Anarchists” trying to get tables at their book fairs. The snob in me wants to say this might have something to do with their lack of theoretical sophistication… but the trying-to-be-better-comrade in me also has to say that it probably has something to do with the ways in which anarchists emphasize going along the grain of people’s lived experience, and that many of them have been alert to these things more consistently than, say, democratic socialists have always been.

Inter-left inside baseball aside, the space of fascist entryism is an interesting one. I go with the Robin definition of left and right- the right is about bolstering (or reinscribing) hierarchy, the left is about distributing power downward and horizontally (liberalism is about rules- I say that in jest, but only partially). But, naturally, not everyone goes with the program. Horseshoe theory is mostly nonsense, but there is a point where people on both sides of the spectrum meet up- undertheorized anti-system sentiment. AFAICT, this is what Ross means when he distinguishes “fascism” from “the radical right”- fascism has an anti-system bias, or anyway rhetoric. This is far too much of a thin reed — most fascists usually wind up liking capitalism, the police, the army et al just fine — for me to place much emphasis on. But it is useful as a heuristic to see who on the far right could try to play entryism with the left. “Radical rightists” like the John Birch Society or the Minutemen would find it tough, given their attachment to both the structures AND the symbols of traditional power. But those who can eschew the symbols — skinheads, “national anarchists,” right-counterculturalists, “national bolsheviks” et al — can make a better try, especially when people’s guards are down. Ross does a good job encapsulating many of these efforts- his narratives are clear, interesting, well-written.

I’m not going to recap them here (just read the book if you want that- there’s so many weird little groups and fashy randos running around). There is a degree to which I was right about my initial impression- in certain respects, the thesis (if not all of the content) is about the left — how it needs to be careful about fascist entryism and vigilant in antifascism — than about the right. I want to illuminate a few interesting points about the stories Ross tells-

First, the dynamic wherein fascists after the end of the war flocked to the proverbial last men standing- who tended to be outsiders and space-takers when the fascist regimes were still in good shape. So you wind up with people flocking around fascist occultist woo-slinger Julius Evola, who Mussolini would barely give the time of day to, and the few remaining Strasserites (Nazis who were a little more mad about bankers than the dominant Hitler wing of the party) or “conservative revolutionaries” in Germany, never-wases like Oswald Mosely, or National-Bolshevism, a small but surprisingly hardy and insidious germ of fascist entryism.

Call it an example of the “cunning of history,” or natural (read- the Russians killed and/or the CIA stashed away everyone more important) selection, but this, in certain ways, helped them in a left-entryist strategy more than if more competent, central fascists had survived. Strasserites and Nat-Bols can pretend to be leftists, if you don’t look too close. Followers of Evola and other cultural fascists can even more more easily infiltrate the arts and various subcultures. Their very marginality under actual existing fascism provides an alibi- they weren’t really fascists, the arguments go, because Hitler/Mussolini/whoever didn’t take them seriously and sometimes vice-versa. Of course, that argument doesn’t hold water — Strasser was also a vicious antisemite, Evola if anything wanted a crueler state than Mussolini wanted, etc etc — but that requires research and argument, and entryists look for spaces where people won’t bother with that… like countercultures, spaces where people go more by feel — the feel of rebellion, of authenticity, whatever — than by thought.

Second, even taking into account Ross’s desire to warn and energize his readership, it really is notable, when you read about them one after another, how widely fascist entryism has extended its tendrils. Not always effectively, mind- I’d say it goes wide, but not notably deep. But especially in the period between the downfall of the global oppositional, anti-capitalist left in the late 1970s and, basically, the alarms that white behavior in the wake of the Obama election in the US began to ring, people really seemed to have their guards down about who fascists are, what they do, and why they should be driven out of anywhere they take a hold. When people lose the ability to name the structures of power — which, then and now, means capitalism and what comes with it — that opens the door to all kinds of silliness, which can turn insidious where it isn’t simply useless.

Anti-system — as opposed to anti-hierarchical-structures (like capitalism and racism) — thinking took hold hard in this time, and a lot of people who should have known better flirted heavily with what amounted to red-brown politics, though it seldom called itself by that name. People knew what Gavin McInnes was, or what Jim Goad was, or what Death In June was singing about, or what the post-Soviet Nat Bols were, in the nineties just as much as today. They just didn’t care, or felt there were bigger fish to fry in the form of “the system,” generally defined more by mundanity than oppressive power… This affected a wide range of actors: European Greens, anti-Zionism, anti-globalization movements, numerous artistic and literary figures who confused edginess with insight and freaking out the squares with a meaningful goal… we’re still shaking off the aftereffects of how badly the global left managed the fin de siecle, in this way as in many others, and some of them still don’t manage this stuff very well. In part, this is because the left for decades failed to articulate a meaningful critique of fascism, either relying on a Trotskyite (or Stalinist) catechetical definition, which doesn’t have much room to develop even where it’s strong, or else basically letting liberalism turn these issues into moralism, which tend to lose their force once, well, people stop taking the moral (or its messengers) seriously. It’s good we’re doing it now. Let’s hope it’s not too late. ****’

Review – Mcdonald, “Fletch”

August 2, 2018August 2, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Gregory Mcdonald, “Fletch” (1974) – The best thing about this book is the way that it illuminates the genuine pleasures of crime fiction, beyond rubber-necking at the low life. The pleasure of ratiocination and exposition, the thrill of the chase, some well-executed action scenes, characters that may fit archetypes (read- cliches) but add their own wrinkles, a bit of local color, some laffs, some spills, and so on. This is what brings us, or me anyway, back to crime fiction.

“Fletch” had me thinking about these pleasures due to their almost complete lack in the book. The title character isn’t a compelling antihero: he’s a rancorous, thinly-drawn asshole. An investigative reporter (this is immediately after Watergate, when they were the coolest dudes around), he conveys that he’s a maverick by radiating hostility towards everyone, which everyone reciprocates in kind. Most of the conversations are a collection of seventies assholes snarling at each other, larded with newly-uncensored cusses. I believe this is meant to convey what “real life” is like in the hungover 1970s. But it’s basically like if you took Joss Whedon (who I don’t like already), lobotomized him, gave him… whatever makes people mean… and asking him to write a mystery. We spend all our time in the book with Fletch: Fletch screwing strung-out underage girls and then having the gall to act persecuted when his ex-wives demand their alimony; Fletch bragging about how great he is at journalism; Fletch playing cruel pranks; Fletch complaining about his female boss, who is described but not meaningfully depicted as incompetent; Fletch having wistful moments with an old man he’s fleecing for information about the Bronze Star Fletch won, proof he didn’t used to be a feckless lout, but which basically builds his character not at all. It’s honestly a drag.

In terms of story structure, “Fletch” is also a mess. Mcdonald solves the exposition problem by having Fletch talk his thoughts on his cases into a tape recorder, so we get even more of this prick just dumping pageloads of exposition on our lap. The B plot — concerning Fletch getting to the bottom of who’s supplying the local beach bums with heroin — is comparatively well put together, and earns this book what esteem I can give it. The A plot — the (relatively) famous bit where some guys asks Fletch to kill him — is a mess. I wanted to like this book. Gregory Mcdonald seems like he was an all right guy. He organized an anti-Klan group in Tennessee (afaict they mostly arranged to vacate town centers where racists marched, which isn’t exactly my idea of bashing the fash, but what can you do). But this book sucks. *’

Review – Levine, “Surveillance Valley”

August 1, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Yasha Levine, “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet” (2018) – Some of the nerds in my life are mad about Yasha Levine, for reasons somewhat opaque to me. Some sort of issue with his issue with Tor or Signal or something. This is not a request for clarification. I’m a low-tech kind of guy. I assume anything put out over any kind of electronic communication can and will be found and read by the authorities if they take a mind to do so. As far as I’m concerned, the way the smarter mob bosses went about it is right- don’t write anything down you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times. Anything that needs to be denied should be kept to verbal communication, or better yet, not communicated at all. I’m sure your crypto math is just wonderful, nerds, but still.

Anyway… here, Levine attempts to invert one of the conventional understandings of the internet is. Many people (I tend to think that number is shrinking, actually, but later for that) see the internet as a tool for the common good — sharing cat pictures, cultural communication, even collective liberation — that has been subverted by mean actors such as the NSA into being a tool of surveillance and oppression instead. In Levine’s telling, this is precisely backwards. While the origins of internet precursor ARPANET as a command and control technology in case of nuclear war are relatively well known, Levine illuminates how many of the technical advances that went into the internet and computing had the other side of the Cold War in mind- proxy war in the developing world.

Figures from the cold war social science world like Ithiel de Sola Pool sought to enhance American capacities to process social information, of the kind useful in counterinsurgency, and sought out computer technology to help them do it. Levine used a somewhat broader definition of counterinsurgency than I do in my dissertation, but the picture he paints of a social science that believed it could scientifically predict and manage human societies provided they had the right kind of data married to a Cold War state looking to prevent a rash of communist revolution in the third world is accurate in broad strokes. I ran across many documents of social scientists from places like RAND and Simulatics discussing how to parse massive amounts of data produced by many studies across Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia, though not any about the technological angle specifically- wasn’t looking for that.

In Levine’s telling, whatever else it was for command and control purposes, the internet was supposed to be an “early warning system” for social revolution, both at home and abroad, made possible by networked computer combing massive databases of social facts. Moreover, people in the sixties and seventies understood it as such. There were protests against the development of ARPANET and other early computer networks, and people generally saw computers, networks, and those who put them together as sinister agents of The Man.

Networked computers only came to be seen as normal, or liberatory, or anything other than a vast surveillance machine, through a decades-long cultural shift. Certain refugees from the collapse of the hippie dream adopted computers as a potential apolitical liberatory technology, like LSD was supposed to be, the culture as a whole got more trusting of corporate power after the hangover of Watergate, marketing got better… Levine is less specific with this, in what is after all a journalistic account and not a deep dive into cultural history. For that, I recommend Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” though that doesn’t cover the counterinsurgency angle of the internet like Levine does.

Either way, just in time for computers to get small and powerful enough to fit in private homes in a way people might want, people let their guards down about what computers and the internet might mean. Personally, I’d put a lot more chits on “people like playing games and looking at porn in the privacy of their own home” than “people came to see the internet as a new frontier of freedom” as the reason why people embraced it the way they did, but Levine, in his long fight with nerds of several stripes, puts a good deal emphasis on the dreams of cyber-libertarians ala Wired, the better to dunk on them. One way or another, they’re everywhere, all linked up on a network essentially handed out for pretty much nothing to private interests after having been built with taxpayer money.

Here’s something I didn’t know, and feel stupid for not knowing- apparently, google, facebook, amazon et al actively scan all the stuff you put in? See, even with my idea about keeping anything truly secret off of the machines, I still thought if they wanted to find something, they’d go look for it. But no- if Levine’s right (and this doesn’t seem controversial afaict), they keep and analyze everything, just as a matter of course. All of it goes in to making profiles of you- the kind of thing the counterinsurgents would have loved to have to, I dunno, suss out the “modern personality types” among the Vietnamese peasantry (and to shoot anyone who was putting aside enough rice to feed a guerrilla), but in this instance, mainly to sell you shit. I always wondered about that, too- do those ads actually work well enough to fund all this? I maybe make one purchase a year based on clicking ads I see… guess it’s the same logic behind naming sports arenas after your brand, which never made much sense to me either… One way in which ideological cyber-libertarianism really has had a broad popular effect is in propogating the idea that the internet would be great if not for the government snooping. But Levine drives home the point that it’s not just the government- it’s private actors, as well, who libertarians either elide or laud.

This is, to say the least, not a hopeful book. Getting offline isn’t really a solution (among other things, I have to figure that’s a huge red flag to the relevant powers that be). “Self-regulation” is more or less what got us here in the first place. As far as I can tell, the main beef the nerds have with Levine is he dismissed popular encrypted message software because it was in some part funded by the same government agencies that they’re supposed to guard against (to say nothing of once you get on google, amazon, or facebook — i.e., the internet — those companies have you, crypto or no). Presumably this came with the usual twitter mudslinging that just sort of seems to happen around our modern-day muckrakers.

I don’t know the rights or wrongs of it — I do not know tech — but I know that I use Signal A. because friends insist and B. because I figure one additional hurdle can’t hurt- and I wouldn’t put anything well and truly secret on there, following the New York Times rule. Either way, I think even with occasional gaps and goofs (I don’t know tech, but I do know Massachusetts geography: Lincoln is ten miles west of Cambridge, not east, and MIT is on the same side of the river as Harvard) it’s a good readable way to get across an important point about one of the basic structures of our world. ****

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. ***’