From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.industrial
Subject: Why shouldn't *we* be fascists like our pals Laibach, too?
Keywords: Yeah. Why Not?
Date: 13 Nov 92 16:17:05 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

Matthew Sharp is sneaking in this serious stuff again (you angry kids
paying attention?). To wit:

>} What I've regularly spoken out on here is
>} the "deny or excuse" stance of your average rmi junior futurist.

>And why do you think that the "deny or excuse" stance exists?
>Let me first say that, politically, I am inclined to believe that 
>fascism is a positive thing.  Now everyone who disagrees with me
>may either quit reading or continue, but no one may accuse me
>of trying to "trick" anyone into believing something.

I'd be strongly inclined to say that both denial or excuse are simpler
than engaging in precisely what you seem to me to up to in this posting
wrt Fascism. It's much more perilous and difficult to actually confront
some piece of epistemic committment authentically. So it's possible here
that *I've* made an error of omission: not being clear at the outset
that I'm not convinced of Fascism's benefits (that is: one can, I think,
construct a system of committments which has the "benefits" that Fascism
would seem to offer entirely independently of aligning oneself with the
historical collection of behaviour and actions which constitute "Fascism"
as a cultural artifact). Moreover, to practice denial or excuse makes
one easily co-optable (and disposable) by folks I tend to not associate
with. Better blatant than latent, I suppose.
 
>I think that the inability of people on rmi (and elsewhere, for that
>matter) to accept Futurism's nice little mutually benefitial
>relationship with Fascism is based primarily upon their own 
>inability to deal with the "fascist tendency" which is granted
>upon those who receive any sort of power.

Yowzah. Couldn't have said that much better myself (Hannah Arendt
and her Frankfurt School pals *did* say it better in "The Authoritarian
Personality.") And what I argued last time out with Geoff was something
along the lines of, "Yep. They swapped cost (selling out on purpose) for
benefit (power). Was it worth it on the basis of a)the judgement of
history b)the philosophical face of it?"

>To even suggest that the Italian futurist where not 
>fascists, or even that the were fascists by force, is ludicrous.
>They were, perhaps, fascists of opportunity or convenience, but
>their embrace of said form of government, I feel, cannot be
>said to be a move of "survival." It was a conscious, and wise
>decision; one which guaranteed them an almost definite success.

Agreed again. But for me, the more important question involves looking
at their early work dating from the days *before* it meant big money
to court i fascisti in search of the *seeds* of that decision: Was it
there at the start, encoded in that iron dust floating around in the
blood [yipes. essentialism.]? Or would it be possible to construct a
futurism whose love of velocity and the technical doesn't aim with
pinpoint accuracy at the bundle of sticks? For me, that kind of question
about trying to build something authentic for oneself by sifting and
winnowing the histories of what one allies oneself *to* is a decidedly
non-industrial question. Larger actually. It's clear you're sailing
in the same direction, however our conclusions may vary.

>My main argument with this thread is that so far the  term
>fascism has been used in an almost exclusively negative manner.
 
>From the denial or rationalization of accusations of fascism
>pertaining to the Italian Futurists, to the analogy (in my last post)
>between fascism and child molestation, it has been assumed,
>without _any_ discussion that fascism is a widely-accepted evil.
 
Well taken. To be fair, I think that I was trying more to focus on
the sense that one inherits the history of a term, and choosing something
that would allow me to suggest the "dirty little secret" of complicity
with something most folks would disapprove of. Perhaps I could have
suggested that uncle Luigi ran the local agricultural co-op and
regularly cheated his customers (which, of course, was a tremendous
benefit to uncle Luigi).

>I challenge that.  I feel that it is not.  I also feel
>that it is unfair to assume that everyone feels that it is.
>
>For one to attempt to make an apology for the Futurists is to
>accept that definition.
>
>I would imagine that most people have no problem with the
>acceptance of that definition, but I also think that most
>people have not seriously examined fascism without some
>prejudice, which may be very well-founded if one includes
>the history of the Nazis and Benito's excesses.

By making that claim, you're actually winding up aligned with a fair
number of intellectuals in the 20s and 30s who were quite enamored 
with Mussolini. He counted in his train Monarchists, Industrialists,
and so forth; folks who had no trouble with the pillars of fascist 
thought: the primacy of group over self, a centralized system of
authoritarian control, and so forth. We *also* agree, I think, that
that particular portion of the equation is quite attractive (why else
would there have been a really interesting book written during the 
first term of the Reagan presidency called "Friendly Fascism?"). I'd
personally claim that i fascisti and I fall out to some measure on the
places where the topography of accomodation between individual and
group rights is drawn, and I've got considerably more serious problems
with what we might call the "excesses" of fascism - dictatorial control
and the supression of dissent. I simply cannot construct a system which
includes the "desirable stuff" without the jackbooted masses who remove
out logins in the night for the good of the group (who can, happily,
all get back to reading a steady diet of rmi "preaching to the choir"
posts).

I'll go farther: I think that the lure of a thousand regional fascisms
in the face of social problems which intrude on the comfortable existence
of a thousand little nonreflective individualists (and it don't matter
here if their record collections are chock full of Godflesh, Phish,
or Enya) will be one of the defining philosophical conflicts of this
age. The stupid view these days is that the real authoritarian thread
has spent itself into oblivion and collapsed; I'm more persuaded that
the hydra has more heads than one, and that the problem is that some
of the heads look just like our daddy or our third-grade teacher or
even the Rev. Al. I'll stop before I start sounding too much like 
Nat Henthoff.

(Queue that bit about of Yeats: "The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
the center cannot hold, widening gyre, rough beasts slouching towards
Jerusalem etc.....)
--
-The world exhausts everything except my eyes/because it is a long walk to the
world/begun before I was born. In the far corner/the dead woman bows off stage
The television/crumples into a white dot as the last/train of the evening - my
train, is announced/I lived in one place. I want to die in another 608-828-3385
Newsgroups: rec.music.industrial