Spaghetti Dialectics

Have you heard of a movie called 1900?  If not, it’s a 1976 Italian extravaganza, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  I say it’s Italian but the leading parts are mostly taken by an international cast, chiefly American.  Apart from France's Gerald Depardieu – amazingly young and thin looking – there is Robert de Niro – also amazingly young looking -, Donald Sutherland and Burt Lancaster. 

Was this, I wonder, a time when their careers were in the doldrums?  Perhaps they still had to make a name for themselves?  No, no, that can’t be true.  Lancaster was a cinematic veteran at the time.  Well, maybe he just wasn’t getting the parts anymore.  Better to star in spaghetti dialectics rather than nothing at all!

Yes, that’s what we are dealing with, a lengthy Marxist soap opera, tedious if it wasn’t so risibly ridiculous.  I knew Marxists were dim but I had no idea just how dim.  Watch it if you have the time or the inclination.  I did by invitation and I had such a fun time.  

It’s a side-splitting pastiche of Italian history from 1900 – hence the title – to 1945 and beyond.  As I say, the lead parts are mostly taken by foreigners, but the director has managed to dig up some wonderful grotesques to masquerade as the poor suffering peasants.  Looking at them it’s almost as if, Pygmalion-style, he has managed to bring a lot of gargoyles to life!

This, dear readers, is a tale with a moral, an everyday story of proletarian folk.  It begins with the birth of two boys into entirely different strata of society.  Oh, but not at the same time, you understand; for when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?  First comes the peasant, one Olmo, born into a rather revolting clan known as the Dalcos.  Olmo – eventually to be filled out in adulthood by Depardieu – is destined to be a horny handed son of toil.  Actually, no, he’s destined to be a self-righteous and sanctimonious prig. 

After him into this world is thrown Alfredo Berlinghieri, the grandson of the padrone, the landowner, destined to be padrone himself one day and destined to be Robert de Niro.  1900 is their story, the story of Olmo and Alfredo, a story of an impossible friendship of social unequals, or an impossibly funny friendship.  These two will negotiate in their separate ways through the currents and eddies of twentieth century Italian politics. 

The real excitement comes after the First World War.  Olmo goes to the front, of course, and Alfredo stays behind, of course.  Well, he also serves who only stands and stares.  Into the mix comes a certain Attilia (note the name) Mellanchini, whom Alfredo’s father has employed as a foreman.  Now we have Donald Sutherland measuring up to what must surely be the most bizarre and grotesque part in his whole acting career. 

This Mellanichi, you see, is set to become the community Blackshirt.  Oh, but not just that; he also turns out to be a sadist and a sexual pervert.  Into Marx comes Freud, which I assume is the director’s own particular dialectic, the Bertolucci factor.  The important thing is that he is a bit of an epiphenomena, no more than the creature of the padrone, without a thought or a political instinct of his own.  He is hired, if you like, in 1922 and fired in 1943, hired by the father and discarded by the son, those wicked capitalists who take up fascism when it suits them and discard it when it does not.  Simple!  Oh, I should say that the friendship between Alfredo and Olmo does nothing to stop the former allowing Attila the fascist and his gang giving the latter a good kicking at one point.  You see, it’s the class struggle in action! 

Wait!  I completely forgot to mention Regina (Laura Betti), the poor relation to whom the Berlinghieris extend their condescending charity.  She turns out to be as weird sexually and in every other sense as Attila, with whom she takes up (naturally), proving to one and all that fascism was brought into the world as a vehicle for poor relations and perverts!  Ah, Regina, how I felt for her when Alfredo introduces his glamorous French wife Ada, a touch of exotic chic by Dominique Sanda.  How will she manage, the embittered Regina muses, among the pigs, the shit and the Dalcos?  Yes, well, give me the pigs over the Dalcos any day! 

On we go thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a merry Marxist march.  At this point I’m desperately trying not to identify with the fascists (I’m no sex pervert), especially when Attila and his merry band start shooting peasants for whistling the Italian communist anthem badly out of tune.  Obviously these people are no more than rather sensitive music critics. What a pity Olmo wasn’t around, having previously made good his escape after pelting the unfortunate Attila with horse manure.  Sex pervert, yes; coprophile, no.

He turns up again, unfortunately, in 1945, a partisan and a communist; sorry, he was that all along, a socialist with holes in his pocket.  Now he is back, ready to do justice.  Attila has already been pronged and butchered – serves him right – but not before he shouts to Regina, his wife of some years, that their children will reap what has been sown on this day.  And now I call to mind the recent remark by the Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s comeback kid, that maybe Mussolini wasn’t such a bad chap after all.  A positive saint, I would say, compared with the Dalcos of this life.

Olmo does justice to his old friend the padrone, who is executed...no, not really, only symbolically, by a kangaroo court of peasant grotesques.  Where did the director dig up that munch munch woman – from the local cemetery, perhaps?  The padrone is dead; Alfredo Berlinghieri lives, proving that he is dead.  Confused?  Don’t be, for the padrone is not dead at all.  The struggle goes on, and there is Italy in the last century, after which history came to a full stop, or a Berlusconi, whichever your preference is.  Anything, anything, but a Dalco.   

Incidentally this is not movie review.  I’m just having a spot of fun, Ana’s delicious dialectical dance. :-)

A Frightful Fiend

Look at this picture. Can you guess who or what it is? No? Well I’ll tell you – it’s the new face of Greek democracy! His name is George Germenis, a black metal rocker, although he uses the stage name ‘Kaiadas’, after the chasm where Spartans threw deformed babies.

Germenis or Kaiadas – whose next album, incidentally, is called Long Live Death – was thrown into another chasm - the Greek parliament. He is there along with another twenty members of Golden Dawn, an extreme nationalist movement entering the assembly for the first time ever. It won seven percent of the poll in the election held a week last Sunday, that’s well over 400,000 votes. It’s a remarkable achievement considering that Golden Dawn was long in the murky twilight of Greek politics, securing less than one percent of the vote the last time round.

Kaiadas and Golden Dawn is a sign of the times, said the mayor of Salonika. They certainly are; a sign of the European times, a sign of Greek anger at the austerity programme imposed at the diktat of the European Union, a sign of the madness that has arisen from monetary union. It’s a consequence of the arrogance of the politicians and bureaucrats who govern the destiny of Europe, who believed that national electorates could be ignored and sidestepped with impunity.

Greece, sinking ever deeper into recession, wanted to make a gesture, and it has. In making the gesture, in retreating from the mainstream into the fringe, people were clear what they were voting against; it’s just that they seemed to have no clear idea what they were voting for. Since the election many have said that they were shocked over what they subsequently learned about Golden Dawn.

What have they learned? Why, that it’s racist, violently so, and reactionary, rejecting, in the words of its own manifesto, “the so-called Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.” It is also irredentist, rejecting Greece’s present borders. We are, in short, dealing with a Nazi-style party which has a Nazi-style logo, though it rejects the label, saying that they are inspired by the regime of Ioannis Metaxas. He was dictator of Greece on the threshold of the Second World War, himself inspired by – can you guess? – the Nazis. They had their Third Reich; he had his Third Hellenic Civilization. In time to come – who knows? -there may be a Fourth Hellenic Civilization.

Golden Dawn is led Nikolaos Michaloliakos, once jailed for the possession of explosives. In the best non-fascist style the party’s charter places him in total control. In the best non-fascist style the charter also authorises the straight armed Roman salute, or is that Greek salute? The leader, though, has eschewed such gestures when his people march into parliament. His people, incidentally, include one who was facing trial for allegedly allowing his car to be used for an assault on a left-wing university lecturer. I say ‘was’ because he will be facing trial no longer; he now enjoys parliamentary immunity.

The ascent of Golden Dawn should not be seen in isolation. The door was already held open, ironically, by the socialist Pasok party and New Democracy, the respectable face of Greek politics. In forcing through the austerity package insisted on by the European Central Bank and the IMF, they formed a less than respectable coalition with the Popular Orthodox Rally, another movement on the extremist fringe, closely allied with Golden Dawn. In other words, Greece’s political class, dancing to a tune played from Brussels, effectively made right-wing extremism a respectable choice.

"May God help us. I dread to think that they got in," said Maria Savelona, a 51-year-old widow, who claims not to have voted for the Golden boys. "People voted in anger, without thinking. When they realize what they did, they'll be afraid." They should be. It isn’t just Germenis, his heavy metal makeup, his knives and his fake blood. No; since the election people have been shown images of his party comrades smiling next to an Auschwitz crematorium.

Michaloliakos, in his first public appearance after the election, said that getting into parliament would not turn his "brave boys in black" into moderates. He warned those who "betrayed the motherland" to run scared, banging his clenched fist on the podium, a bodyguard on each side: "We are coming!" They certainly are.

Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

Thoughts of a Sawdust Caesar

Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s last mistress, murdered alongside him by communist partisans in 1945, has come back to life. Not only that but she is also causing something of a sensation. Extracts from the first volume of her diary are presently being published in Italy, with fresh revelations about her relationship with the dictator, revelations about him as a lover and as a man.

The document was seized by the police in 1950, who kept to a strict seventy year rule on restricting access. Even now the later part, covering the wartime years, will not be publishable for another five years. The diary’s apparently massive and obsessive in attention to detail. I’ve not seen anything of the original but Richard Bosworth, a specialist in modern Italian history, gives a decent synopsis in the current issue of the BBC History Magazine.

I have to say I’ve always felt sorry for Claretta. In herself she was totally inoffensive, and did nothing to deserve her death, or the subsequent desecration of her remains. Her only crime was to remain loyal to Mussolini, a lover almost thirty years her senior. She had to put up with a sexual performance that was not exactly fulfilling or tender, as well as the insecurities of a grumpy old man.

In her diary she records his opinions and his fuming, or his fuming opinions. I was amused by his view of the English, a bunch of pigs, so far as he was concerned, who only “thought with their bums.” How one thinks with one’s rear end I have not the least idea! His opinion here was clearly brought on by a personal sense of inferiority, some slight, perhaps, from those who “…detest anyone who rises from the ranks and imposes himself, anyone exceptional.” Seemingly our only great man was Disraeli, and he was an Italian, as well as being the lover of Queen Victoria!

His opinion of the Spanish was not much better, an indolent race contaminated with Arab blood. He describes Francisco Franco as “an idiot”, though in every way he was a far shrewder man than Il Duce. The French were even worse, infected with syphilis and cursed with a free press. Their only great man was Napoleon and – guess what? – he was an Italian!

After the war the novelist Alberto Moravia, no friend of the Fascists, said of Mussolini that he was not a bad man and that “…if he had a foreign policy as clever as his domestic one, me might still be Duce today.” Yes, he might have lasted if he had been a little more “idiotic”, a little more like Franco. His moves in foreign policy were unbelievably stupid, turning from a blustering bully in his early days to Hitler’s hyena in the later.

There were rare points where he could behave with courage and determination, and here I’m thinking specifically of his actions in 1934 to forestall any German moves against Austria after the murder of Engelbert Dollfuss, the chancellor and a personal ally. But he threw it all away in 1938 by agreeing to the Anschluss, thus overturning, as Bosworth says, Italy’s strategic victory in the First World War.

Claretta records details of his relationship with Hitler, observations which seem to me to emphasise just how delusional Mussolini was. More than that, there are all sorts of rationalisations about anti-Semitic policies adopted under the German example, points where he becomes clownish in an artificial racism that had never previously been part of his character or his outlook.

I think it worth emphasising here that until the late 1930s anti-Semitism was never part of Fascist ideology. Among Mussolini’s previous lovers was Margherita Sarfatti, a Jewish intellectual who had aided him in the early days of the regime. In retrospect, in the light of the new anti-Jewish policy, he tells Claretta that he was repelled by Sarfatti’s body odour, and that she was responsible for one of the only three times in his life when he failed to get an erection!

His overwrought anti-Semitic protests and rationalisations go on and on. Beethoven, whom he once described as his favourite composer, is now absurdly dismissed as “Jewish.” On Easter Monday 1938 Claretta records him as saying that “these pigs of Jews are a people who must be cut to pieces”, that they are natural traitors, “Puah! I detest them.” It’s all so much wind, of course. Looking at this with an eye of an amateur psychologist, it seems to me to proceed from for a deeper sense of unease. Hitler did not talk like this, and Mussolini did not act like Hitler. Even in the worst days of the war Jews were safer in zones controlled by the Italians than almost anywhere else.

The diary confirms so many of the dictator’s insecurities. He was forever fretting over how he would be judged by history, fearing, like his mother and father he, too, would die while still relatively young, fearing for the loyalty of Claretta, who, given the difference in their ages, must eventually “betray” him.

But she did not. Instead she continued to act as his muse, recording even his impotent outbursts against his own family, including a particularly revealing one in the spring of 1938: “I am not a dictator. I am a slave. I’m not even master in my own house…I am stuffed with it all, stuffed by this whole old world. I need a new world that I can make.” Clearly he had ceased to recognise that this was the new world that he had made! There are some things, obviously, that even supermen cannot do.

The Munich Conference, which decided the fate of Czechoslovakia, was Mussolini’s ‘finest hour’, as he liked to pride himself, another measure of the depth of his self-deception. He thought himself the man of the moment, the man who had avoided war, whereas in truth he only had a bit part in a drama scripted by Hitler. A wiser man, a shrewder man, would have been sobered by the aftermath. Mussolini was neither wise nor shrewd.

Thereafter his bluster, his threats against the Jews, his declaration that “I’ll make a massacre just like the Turks did”, were also accompanied by outbursts against Catholicism, a religion that was “dying”, and the French – “completely finished, simply nauseating as a people.” Even his fellow Italians did not escape. Four million of them were contaminated with ‘bad blood’: he “would destroy them all, exterminate them.”

Bosworth asks – unnecessarily, in my estimation- if such statements can be taken as evidence that Mussolini intended to move in a more radical direction, before tentatively dismissing such an idea. It seems obvious to me that are no more than the empty posturing of a frustrated an insecure man, growing ever older, ever less relevant by the day. Claretta, in her loyalty, has ironically never done more to make her lover look like the Sawdust Caesar, and the unhappy man, he truly was.

Father of the Age

Late this afternoon I finished reading Molotov’s Magic Lantern, Rachael Plonsky's idiosyncratic and brilliant journey through modern Russian history, taking as her point of departure the books she found in the Moscow apartment of Stalin’s former foreign minister and co-executioner. I intend to write a review over he next few days but I'm adding this, I'm adding what you are about to read, in a kind of intellectual ferment. It's an impression on the same basis as the painting style. Forgive me if it seems a little incoherent. Quite simply, it's raw thought.

Molotov, or Vyacheslav Skryabin, his real name, was a product of an age. Europe has been divided by historians into distinct phases or ages - the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, all quite arbitrary when one thinks about it. For me the last century up to the fall of the Soviet Union is best defined as the Age of Ideology, the age when human destiny was guided by one malevolent idea or another.

Yes, malevolent. How does one understand a man like Adolf Hitler? How does one understand a school drop-out, a man who disgraced and betrayed his family, who sank into the most abject sections of Viennese society? But for the First World War this man would have died in complete obscurity in some common lodging house in Vienna or Munich. But his pathology was Germany's pathology. The war, which really did pull out the roots of European civilization, gave him his opportunity; ideology gave him his opportunity.

But that was not enough, Germany’s defeat and sense of grievance was not enough; there had to be something more; there had to be a Moses, one who brought the commandments of the Age of Ideology down from Mount Sinai. The Moses was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Russian, Kalmyk and Jewish, Lenin, to use his alias, in my estimation the most vile, most malevolent human being who ever lived, and, oddly enough, the apotheosis of mediocrity.

I saw him when I was in Moscow - if it is him and not a wax replica. Inwardly I could feel nothing but contempt. Every evil that you have ever conceived, every evil of the Age of Ideology is his. Hitler is nothing; Hitler was merely an epiphenomena. He, along with Stalin, Trotsky, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of the monsters are simply inconceivable without Lenin. Some of his children may be bastards but they are still his children.

The remarkable thing is that he was crushingly dull, not at all charismatic. His writing is second-rate, hysterically polemical and almost always off target. His oratory, from what I can gather, was even worse. If he is evil his evil is even more banal than that of that stupid apparatchik Adolf Eichmann. I can't understand, I don't understand, why history threw up this bourgeois mediocrity other than as some massive joke.

I remember reading the comment of a Russian after he'd seen him in Red Square for the first time, after it was safe to express an honest opinion. His hope was that Ulyanov would remain like this forever, not buried with his mother as he had wished, that he should remain as an exhibit for the idle and the curious to gawp at as if visiting an exhibition of stuffed animals prepared by a taxidermist. He should remain like this for the sacred soil of Russia would simply refuse to hold him. Amen

Mad Mothers

'Mothers' Movement' was the name for a confederation of anti-war, pro-Nazi, anti-Communist, and anti-Semitic groups: National Legion of Mothers of America formed by Father Charles Coughlin in 1939; National Blue Star Mothers; Crusading Mothers of America; We, the Mothers; and We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America, five or six million members strong at their peak.

The movement was also anti-Roosevelt, viciously so. Agnes Waters argued that FDR wanted to rule the world as a communist dictator in league with the Jews! Her whole world view is so bizarre that it is difficult that any woman, let alone six million, could have been attracted to this movement. Her range of conspiracy theories was even more outlandish than those of the Nazis. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, had, so she said, invited Hitler to attack Britain to allow him to raise taxes. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 this came by Stalin's invitation, because he needed an external threat.

Her political logic gets even worse, and it's difficult to believe that any person could entertain such conflicting views without actually being clinically insane. Roosevelt and the Jews were conspiring to end American independence by returning the country to the rule of the British Empire. This would then be merged with the Soviet Union; Christianity would be outlawed, and a world government would be created, ruled over by Roosevelt and Hitler!!! Hitler, you ask? He hated the Jews, how could he possibly unite with Roosevelt, the Jew lover and Communist? Well, you see, the Nazi leader was secretly a Bolshevik, and would make an open confession to that fact at the end of the war. Where, one has to ask, were the men in white coats?

The ever resourceful Mrs Waters had a 'cunning plan' to thwart this dastardly scheme. First, impeach Roosevelt, before making Henry Ford commander-in-chief. Second, abolish conscription in favour of drafting all of the convicts, and let them do the fighting. And what if there were not enough convicts? Why, that's easy: take Mexico, Central and South America and force all the Latinos do the fighting for you. How one was to achieve this with an under-strength convict army is not quite clear. The indomitable Mrs Waters was ready for the Jews though; "Just let the Jews come in and the pistol-packing mamas will take care of them. There will be nothing left of them." So, no need for the convicts then!

Compared with Waters Elizabeth Dilling appears almost sane, though her malevolence was much more purposeful and to the point. When the Senate debated the Lend-Lease legislation in February 1941 she led a delegation of 500 women from Chicago to Washington, where they picketed the Capitol and harangued senators who were in favour of the measure. For all this she won over only one senator-Dennis Chavez from New Mexico.

Catherine Curtis, a fellow anti-Semite, founded the 'Women's National Committee to Keep the U.S Out of the War' shortly after Hitler invaded Poland. Growing in influence, she later took over the leadership of the larger National League of the Mothers of America. In this capacity she went on a speaking tour, blaming British imperialism for the war. Her friend, the aviator Laura Ingalls, flew over the White House, dropping Curtis' anti-war leaflets on the way. Ingalls was later discovered to be a German agent and a traitor.

Yet another of these 'wild women' of the right was Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, who set up 'We the Mothers Mobilize for America' in February 1941. By the early summer of that year the group was claiming a membership of 150,000 women nationwide. For Hyning Jesus and his disciples were all gentiles, except, of course, for Judas. The Jews had inspired the American Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln, the First World War and the Second, as well as the election of Roosevelt.

This alliance of right-wing groups did not disperse, unlike other non-interventionist groups, after the United States entered the war. If anything, some became even more viciously perverse. One member of the Philadelphia branch of the National Legion of the Mothers of America said that that the attack on Pearl Harbor had really been the work of the English, flying the Japanese flag; another that she would willingly be shot for treason, rather than fight on the same side as the Soviet Union.

But in the end they counted for little, hardly surprising when one considers the delusions and fantasies which filled the minds of those who took on the national leadership. What puzzles me, and the question I would have to ask, is why a national movement of pacifism and non-intervention, reasonable enough positions, whether one agrees with them or not, came to be controlled by the kinds of people normally to be found on the more outrageous fringes of politics and society?

Grand Inquisitor

I’m reading Life and Fate at present, a remarkable book by a remarkable man, Vasily Grossman, best know as a journalist of genius, who reported from the Russian side during the Second World War. I’m only half way through the novel, his magnum opus, so I’m not offering this as a review. Rather I want to draw attention to one particular chapter, half way through the book, a chapter that I have not long just finished reading. I’m just so full of excitement that I simply have to say something.

First, a word or two about the novel and its own fate. During the Battle of Stalingrad Grossman was reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After the war he wrote Life and Fate, whose title invites a comparison with that great Russian novel. For once the comparison is fully justified, as Grossman, in a huge panorama, creates War and Peace for the twentieth century.

As a novel it is also intensely honest, making no allowances for the ideological shibboleths of his day, so honest that the book was ‘arrested’, yes, arrested by the KGB in the early 1960s. Grossman was subsequently summoned to the office of Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, who told him that the book could not be published for another two or three hundred years, an act of extreme censorship coupled with a paradoxical recognition of its lasting importance. Fortunately, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out to the West, where it was published and hailed as a work of genius.

Now let me give you a taste of why it could never have been published in the old Soviet Union. You will find it in Chapter Fourteen of Book Two, a passage that I now think of as the ‘Grand Inquisitor Chapter’, drawing from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In this Mikhail Mostovsky, an old Bolshevik, incarcerated in a German concentration camp, is taken to be interrogated by a senior Gestapo officer named Liss. Mostovsky is ready to be tortured; has prepared himself mentally for torture. Yes, he is tortured alright, just not in the way he imagined. Liss, you see, greets him, greets the Bolsheviks as pathfinders and teachers, as the first National Socialists of the twentieth century;



‘Do you understand me?’ Liss repeated, already too excited even to see Mostovsky. ‘When we strike a blow against your army, it’s ourselves that we hit. Our tanks didn’t only break through your defences- they broke through our own defences at the same time. The tracks of our tanks are crushing German National Socialism. It’s terrible- it’s like committing suicide in one’s sleep…We’re your deadly enemies. Yes, yes…But our victory will be your victory. Do you understand? And if you should conquer, then we shall perish only to live in your victory. It’s paradoxical: through losing the war we shall win the war- and continue our development in a different form.


Mostovsky is in hell, but not the hell he expected. This devil does not torture; he chips away at long cherished illusions. At once he recognises a terrible truth: the practice of communism in Russia, a system built on lies and terror, is in no essential different from the practice of Nazism. To defeat Liss in this game of mental chess he would have to renounce everything: the camps, the Lubyanka the whole apparatus of the secret police, an organisation that spawned a monster like Nikolai Yezhov. More than that he would have to hate Stalin and his dictatorship, have to condemn Lenin himself, the very edge of the abyss. For Lenin, as Liss asserts, while considering himself to be the builder of internationalism while in fact he was creating the great nationalism of the twentieth century.

It’s true, it’s all true; without Lenin there would have been no Mussolini and no Hitler. They are his bastard children, and fascism as much his creature as communism. If one does not grasp this simple truth one simply cannot understand the history of the last century, from the October Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Extremism4UK

What follows was in part inspired by the editorial in the latest issue of The Spectator (A golden age for fascism) and in part by previous pieces I have written here, particularly The Resistible Rise of the BNP and All Votes Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others.

I’m sure it is no revelation to most of you if I say that fascism and hate feed off fascism and hate. The rise of the British National Party, as The Spectator says, now owes little to the anti-coloured vote, rather a thing of the past, and everything to the equivalent rise of Islamofacism. Just as the Nazis needed the Communists in the days of the Weimar Republic, so, too, does the BNP need the likes of Islam4UK and the reaction this movement induces.

Nick Griffin and the equally vile Anjem Choudary are distilled from the same poison; they are brothers from the same womb. If we ever do have fascism in this country then it will be thanks to reactionary Islam, just as Hitler owed thanks to the German Communist Party. We will not ever have Islam4UK, but may we very well have Extermism4UK.

But there is something else; there is the shameful silence over mass immigration by the political class at Westminster; silence by Labour, which created the problem, and silence by the Tories, fearful of the accusation of racism. It’s against this silence that the BNP made its electoral strides, the most successful fascist party this country has ever seen. It was Margaret Thatcher who killed the last fascist wave, that of the National Front, by making fears over immigration mainstream, part of the Conservative agenda. My goodness; if people felt that they were being ‘swamped’ then they are being drowned now.

Still there is only silence from the political establishment as the fascists and the Islamofascists shout louder and louder. But although the Tories might be partially at fault here it is the Labour government that is by far the most culpable in the nurturing extremism, not just by allowing mass migration, but by new forms appeasement and old forms of neglect; appeasement of Islamic radicals and neglect of the Old Labour heartlands. Here is part of what I wrote in ‘The Resistible Rise of the BNP’;

…the ‘outcasts’, for want of a better term, are the traditional working class, once the backbone of Labour and the Labour movement. These are the people who have continually been taken for granted by the corrupt political oligarchy that controls England at the present; the New Labour establishment, created by the Tony Blair, and perpetuated by Gordon Brown; an establishment that concocted ‘marshmallow politics’ out of spin, sound bites, media manipulation and outright lies.

I have more still to add to this mix. Though not generally recognised contempt for certain sections of the lower classes has been a fairly constant feature of the Labour establishment, originating in the likes of such left-liberal icons as Sidney and Beatrice Webb and William Beveridge. One of the principle targets of the 2009 Welfare Reform Act was the ‘undeserving poor’ always to be separated out from those ‘hard working families’, another New Labour mantra. But there are huge areas, Labour areas, old, corrupt Labour rotten boroughs where this approach has induced high levels of insecurity and anxiety, a feeling of abandonment. Add to this the fears over mass emigration and Islamic extremists then a bad situation becomes positively lethal.

Labour is thus the godfather of the new-style of British fascism, however one chooses to define it. Their only refuge and defence is in silence.

Death on the Metro

I’ve not long finished a truly beguiling article in the January issue of History Today, written jointly by Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle. Headed Murder in the Métro, it concerns the mysterious fate of one Laetitia Toureaux, found dying in May 1937 in a first class carriage with a knife through her neck, in what shows every sign of being a professional assassination. The crime caused a sensation at the time because it was the first ever murder in the Métro and because the French press played the crime up in lurid detail thereafter. Although heavily investigated at the time no witness was ever found and no convincing suspect was ever produced. It is a crime that remains unsolved to this day.


The death of Laetitia could so easily have been forgotten like so many others, then and since, as history and events quickly pass over such small and personal tragedies. But it’s a crime that casts a little light into some of the darker corners of pre-war French political life, to a world of violent intrigue, terrorism and counter-revolution.

Laetitia herself, who was twenty-nine years old at the time of her death, was found to have some very shady political associations. Of working-class background and Italian origin, she worked in a glue factory during the day though she clearly ambitious to improve her condition. She was a social climber slightly on the model of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. She also liked to socialise in some of the nightclubs in the more sordid parts of Paris, in places where she was known as ‘Yolande’ by the pimps and prostitutes. It was also in these places that she met men who shared her right-wing politics, the fascism she professed. At some point in 1936 she became the lover of Gabriel Jeantet, a wealthy intellectual with political ambitions and extreme right-wing views. But Laetitia was a dangerous commodity; for she was also a paid police spy, a mouche, to use the contemporary jargon.

In the January after her murder, with the case not that much further forward, the police began to suspect that her death had political overtones, that it was a professional assassination linked with the murder in the same year of Dmitri Navachine, a Russian economist, and Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two Italian anti-fascist exiles. The murders of the Navachie and the Roselli were traced to the extreme-right Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire, better known as the ‘Cagoule’ , the ‘hooded ones’, an orgnaisation violently opposed to the Third Republic and the then Popular Front government of Leon Blum. One of their aims was to overthrow the government by violent terrorist action. Jeantet, Laetitia’s boyfriend, was in charge of arms-smuggling operations.

In 1936 and 1937 the Cagoule was responsible for a series of crimes, including bombings in Paris and at least seven murders. On more than one occasion they attempted to assassinate Blum himself. Throughout France Cagoule militias stockpiled arms with the help and support of Mussolini’s Fascist government in Italy. Jeantet met Mussolini in person on a number of occasions and may have brought Laetitia with him on at least one of these occasions.

After an abortive attempt to start an anti-government rising in November 1937, a number of Cagoulards were arrested. Under interrogation two of them, Rene Locuty and Frenand Jakubiez, swore that the organisation was also responsible for the murder of Laetitia. According to their testimony she was killed by Jean Filliol, the Cagoule’s principal hit-man, because it had been discovered that she was a police spy. Even with such a solid lead the case was still closed, an action which the authors put down to the complex politics of France before, during and after the Second World War. The Cagoule leaders were simply too well connected to pursue for the murder of an Italian immigrant with, as the authors put it, a shady love life and a penchant for espionage.

So, on the face of it looks as if Laetitia was no more than the victim of her circumstances. Doubts remain, though, over the exact circumstances leading to her death. There is reason to suppose, as Finley-Croswhite and Brunelle suggest, that it was not the Cagoule but the Italian Secret Service that was responsible for her death. The Cagoule, as a terrorist organisation, had little in the way of subtlety; its crimes, including its murders were open and excessive. Its victims were stabbed, bludgeoned or blown up.

Laetitia, in contrast, was killed in a highly professional manner by a silent and anonymous assassin, who left barely a trace of blood before the police pulled the knife from the dying woman’s neck. At the time the police investigation discovered that she had fallen foul not just of the Cagoule but of the Italians. She was known to have inside knowledge of the plan to assassinate the Roselli. It was also known not long after that she was a police informer. The suggestion is that rather than trust the Cagoulards with her disposal-there had already been two abortive attacks on her-the Italians brought in their own operative. Again, though this was a reasonable conclusion, it was not pursued because of the sensitive diplomatic implications. Laetitia was a little person caught in big events, of no importance to anyone.

So, this poor women’s personal tragedy was caught up in the history and politics of France and Italy. After the war her story was forgotten at a time when France was going through a collective ‘memory loss’ over so many aspects of its recent past. After all, even people as highly placed and respected as Francois Mitterrand had close ties with many members of the Cagoule in his youth. The story of Laetitia, as the authors conclude, forms part of France’s refusal to come to terms with the interwar era when so many French people sympathised with extreme right wing politics, fascism and anti-Semitism. With the passing of this generation a new willingness has arisen to look afresh at the past.

My Favourite Fascist Writer

Who is your favourite fascist writer? I quite like the work of the madly eccentric French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, particularly Journey to the End of the Night, but my absolute favourite really has to be Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian writer and Nobel laureate. My, oh, my, how could one possibly like fascist writing? But that’s just the point: it’s not fascist writing; it’s a fascist writing and, yes, there is a huge difference between the two. Good writing and good art does not always need good people as creators.

I discovered Hamsun in my mid-teens, working my way through all of his early work with huge enthusiasm; books like Hunger, Pan, Victoria, and Mysteries, all written in a wonderful, taut and economical style, all deeply engaging at a level of simple emotion, full of mood and mystery. I moved on to his later work but found it a little too ponderous for my taste. I did not really like The Growth of the Soil overmuch, with its agrarian mysticism, but it was well enough thought of to win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

So much for the artist; now let’s have a look at the man. I’ve been reading Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter, a warts and all biography by Sletten Kollen. Hamsun wasn’t a good man; he was, rather, a thoroughly nasty human being, an obsessive, egotistical monster in the same way that Céline, or, say, Wagner was an obsessive, egotistical monster.

With people like this one gets the feeling that politics is really only of secondary concern, a way of expressing one’s peculiarities, and Hamsun had more peculiarities than most. He was a reactionary who hated the modern world; who hated and envied Henrik Ibsen as much as he loved and admired Adolf Hitler. He also hated the Anglo-Saxons, or, to express this in another way, he was an ass about AS. :-))

For Hamsun Hitler offered hope for the revival of Nordic culture. He was one of the few to welcome the German invasion of Norway in 1940, championing Vidkun Quisling, the traitor who headed a collaborationist government, and looking forward to the prospect of his country becoming part of Greater Germany. Even the end of the war brought no change of mood. He remained consistent in his support for Hitler, refusing to apologise for his past sympathies. Many of his fellow citizens were so outraged that they sent his books directly to the author as a mark of their displeasure. His local post office found it difficult to cope with the volume of the volumes!

Still, that’s the man and great art will always transcend the messenger. Hamsun is long dead and passions have died away It’s nice to know that the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, which falls this year, is being widely celebrated across his native land.

Futurism and Fascism

I wonder if anyone has every dipped into Filippo Marinetti's wonderful Futurist cookbook? It contains such meal plans as salami immersed in a bath; coffee flavoured with eau-de-Cologne; and for desert, pineapple and sardines! He once suggested to Mussolini that pasta be banned because it made the Italians lazy.

Futurism and Fascism are usually thought of as the terrible twins. But are they? Though he broke with Mussolini politically in 1920 Marinetti went on to support his regime, claiming that it had fulfilled Futurism's minimum programme. In 1929 he even became the secretary of the Fascist Writer's Union, and remained loyal to Mussolini up to his death in 1944. But the link between Futurism as an art form and Fascism as a political style only really holds true at a superficial level. Look at the manifesto of the Futurist party which Marinetti published in early 1918, calling for the eight hour day; equal pay for women; expulsion of the Pope and the King from Italy; nationalisation of land, to be distributed among war veterans; high taxation on wealth; easy divorce and free love. Not much in the way of Fascist ideology there!

Marinetti, a great self-publicist, but not much of a politician, joined Mussolini in the formation of the Fasci italiani di combattimento in March 1919, though, as the movement grew, the Futurists remained a small and isolated element. More than that, some of his clownish antics, like the so-called 'Battle of Via Mercanti', did more harm than good to the emerging movement, which was almost destroyed in the elections of November 1919.

The kind of direct action, the energizing myth favoured by Marinetti was bringing Mussolini no political benefits whatsoever. What did was the emergence in 1920 of rural Squadrismo, a reactionary force that represented everything that Futurism did not. It was this turn towards rural conservatism that caused Marinetti to resign from the party in a mood of disgust. Of this Mussolini said that Marinetti was "an eccentric buffoon who wants to play politics and whom no one in Italy, least of all me, takes seriously." Fascism was carried to power on a wave of brutish reaction, not in a Futurist carnival.

Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera

For me it’s an oversimplification to call Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera a Fascist; but there again it is probably an oversimplification to call anyone a Fascist who was not a member of the Italian National Fascist Party or the British Union of Fascists. The Nazis, for example, almost never referred to themselves as such, and Jose Antonio specifically rejected the label in 1934 as an appropriate descriptive term for his Falange.

The problem is, you see, that the very term Fascism has really no intrinsic meaning, and the various radical and right-wing parties to whom it has been applied have differed from one another in almost every fundamental. There was certainly the common emphasis on the nation; but this kind of ideology was not restricted to parties of the radical right. One might conceivably detect some overlap between the early Fasci italiani di combattimento and the Falange, with the stress on direct action and on forms of National syndicalism; but early Fascism was anti-clerical, whereas the Falange took a stand on Catholicism and other traditional Spanish values.

Mussolini's movement developed in a more reactionary direction by allying itself with the big landlords in northern Italy, whereas Jose Antonio's Falange was just as critical of landlordism as it was of Communism. His political programme, moreover, looked in essence to the recreation of the state headed by Miguel Primo de Rivera, his father, which could not be described in any meaningful sense as Fascist. Jose Antonio was radical; he was conservative; he was Catholic; he was nationalist. Above all, he was Spanish

Fascist Literati

Céline is the first to leap to mind, though his 'Fascism' was anything but systematic; more a collection of petty personal grievances of one kind or another. Castle to Castle is not his best novel, but it gives much insight into the character of his politics. Ernst Jünger is one of those deliciously ambigious figures, though if you really want to discover his views on Fascism his Notebooks are worth examination.

There are some other good examples that should be added to the list, including Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Celine's countryman and fellow novelist, although he is now almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world. From the Anglo-Saxon world we have Percy Wyndham Lewis, painter and author who co-founded the Vorticist movement in poetry. More of a 'fellow traveller' than an outright Fascist, he was, a little like Celine, one of those individuals who has to swim against the tide. His 1937 novel, Revenge for Love, is highly critical of Communist activity on the Spanish Civil War, and dismissive of the political enthusiasims of left-wing English intellectuals.

But the greatest of all the 'Fascist' writers is surely Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. He later became a supporter of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi leader. After a war-time meeting with Josef Goebbels Hamsun sent him his Nobel Prize medal as a gift; and after Hitler's death in 1945 he wrote an obituary describing him as a "warrior for mankind." Even so, the work and the politics are two quite different things. Hunger, Pan, Victoria and Mysteries have a value well beyond the mundane.

Speaking of Drieu, I now have a copy of his 1931 novel, Le Feu Follet, translated into English as Will O' the Wisp. I'll record my impressions here in due course. I will say, though, that he is beginning to exercise a kind of spell over me. :-))

Fascist Style

The chief advantage of the Fasci italiani di combattimento in 1919 was that it was tied to no philosophy and no ideology whatsoever; that it was, in other words, organised opportunism.

This, above all, was the Fascist style. It took the shape of a chameleon, able to change colours in accordance with the political climate. Unlike the socialists, the communists, the liberals and the conservatives the movement carried nothing, no system of beliefs or organisational structure, which would prevent its rapid mutations. Fascism, above all, was a mood, one of discontent, that could combine the arditi, who simple longed for action for the sake of action, and comic-opera revolutionaries like the Futurist Marinetti, who saw politics as an escape from cultural boredom.

This was transformismo politics, one that could, in theory have taken the movement to the left, if that is where the advantage lay. But in the end the advantage, the prospects for growth, advancement and power, were on the right, in the defense of Italy against Bolshevism. The appeal to the working-class, the direction of leftwards Fascism, had failed miserably in the elections of 1919. In the end Mussolini, in alliance with conservative rural Fascists like Roberto Farinacci, took advantage of the fear among the middle-class and the peasantry of a socialist revolution. It was Fascist anti-socialism that created a mass movement, and ensured thereafter that it would always be a philosophy of the right.

Existentialism and Fascism: the Case of Jean Paul Sartre

Sartre's understanding of politics was not just dangerous, it was dangerously incoherent! He simply could never make up his mind over which direction he wished to travel. I think he saw in politics a way of seeking confirmation of himself, a classic example of existential bad-faith! On Fascism itself we have the words that de Beauvoir gave to a resistance leader "...if Fascism were to triumph, that's just what would happen. There would be no more human beings..."

In other words there can be no human beings in the total absence of freedom, understanding humanity as a fluid rather than a static concept. But this statement is just as valid in relation to Communism, not as it existed as a theory, in the minds of the likes of de Beauvoir and Sartre, but as a living practice. On Fascism there is also the observation in Existentialism is a Humanism that if the doctrine prevailed "Fascism will then be the human realty, so much the worse for us." It didn't seem to stop the master publishing in occupied France, though!