YDS: The Clare Spark Blog

March 19, 2010

Dr. James Pagano on Obamacare

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Hygeia: Roman copy of Greek statue, in Hermitage Museum

[This is a guest blog by my friend, emergency room physician, Dr. James Pagano:]

“The longer this drags on the more obvious it becomes that the bill is a complete disaster and the process of getting it passed is bordering on criminal.  The cost estimates are completely trumped up, the deficit reduction Obama is touting is a fantasy.  The end result if this is passed and allowed to actually go into effect will be a severe erosion of health care in this country for everyone for the alleged benefit of the few–alleged because they will be given the equivalent of Medicaid, which is almost worthless, at the cost of degrading Medicare to a level of near-worthlessness, increased taxes on just about everyone who actually pays taxes, decreased access to physicians, limited choices of therapies, extreme rationing of services to the elderly and ‘non-productive’, and the eventual creation of a single-payor system run entirely by the government, with annual escalations in the cost that will cripple our ability to maintain any sort of leadership role in the world.

 But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?  Obama doesn’t care about our health.  He cares about creating the socialist utopia–the utopia that has never been realized in the past though it has been tried on numerous sad occasions.  He doesn’t want the U.S to play a leadership role, he wants us to succumb to a new world order.  He is so ridiculously naive and ideological it depresses me that so many seemingly intelligent people were fooled by his smooth rhetoric, and that many are still unable to see through his systematic, ‘do whatever it takes’, lies and deception.

 Many physicians understand that this will be the final, fatal blow to their careers.  The trial lawyers, (think John Edwards here), have succeeded in taking the joy out of the profession, and now the socialists will take away our ability to earn the sort of decent living we deserve doing the essential, stressful, time- and education-intensive work we do.

 Our hope lies in the up-coming elections.  To save health care, and our entire way of life, we must get the democrats out of office.  If we can do this, much of what Obama is trying to do can be undone.  There will be a spate of legal challenges to this bill the minute it passes–these, too, offer a measure of hope.  Finally, we have to make certain that this president does not last more than one term.”

[Clare: my father was a physician who always treated poor and lower-middle class patients. He was opposed to socialized medicine in any form. Non-physicians may have little idea of the stress and danger experienced by idealistic doctors.]

March 18, 2010

Charles Sumner guards Harvard University

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Charles Sumner statue, Cambridge Mass.

March 17, 2010

Joyce Appleby on campaign finance reform

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Dr. Joyce Appleby

Joyce Appleby, an historian of great distinction and versatility, has contributed a guest blog. Some of my friends believe that it is impossible to reduce the role that money plays in politics. To me, this suggests that we are doomed to terminal corruption of the political process, and that we are indeed in a crisis of representation. Professor Appleby proposes a constitutional amendment reasserting a right that I would think to be implicit in the notion of a democratic republic. After all the political wars, hot and cold, that have been fought to establish voting rights, it is intolerable for the current situation to prevail indefinitely.  

[Joyce Appleby:] “Television changed American politics in ways that no one could have foreseen.  It’s effectiveness as a campaign medium became obvious right away.  Soon getting volunteers to walk precincts, stuff envelopes, and hand out literature became less important and finding the money to pay for tv spots more – much more.   Money had always played a part in American electoral politics, but the cost of television advertising magnified it greatly.  It takes a lot of small donors to make up for the corporation, union, or political action committee that can write big checks.   The influence of big money is apparent right now in the pharmaceutical industry’s reaction to health care reform and the bankers’ response to reforms of the financial system.  Congress has passed laws to limit the money in electoral campaigns but the reforms have either been ineffective or been knocked down by the Supreme Court which says that dollars are like voices, protected by freedom of speech.  The only sure way to diminish the role of  money in electoral politics is to reassert the people’s power to control elections through a constitutional amendment.  Something like this:  Citizens of the United States have the right to determine the duration, financing, and form of all campaigns for elections to offices established in this Constitution.”

March 10, 2010

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

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Fuseli's precursor to Captain Ahab

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large for the conservative-libertarian National Review Online, wrote a popular intellectual history intended to remedy the common practice on the Left of characterizing Italian Fascism and Nazism as movements primarily of the Right. He tells me that he started formulating a book proposal in 2002, partly in response to his father’s ongoing concerns, partly in response to a talk by Michael Ledeen in the 1990s. It was published with endnotes in 2008 and became a runaway best-seller, a remarkable performance in itself. Perhaps reacting to the growth of the so-called “Tea-Party” movement in 2009, in late January of this year, some professional historians and journalists strongly objected to Goldberg’s thesis that Nazism and Fascism were entirely movements of the Left.

This and subsequent blogs will try to tease out the underlying narrative in JG’s book, one that was not spotted in the symposium mounted by History News Network on January 25, 2010 (with JG’s response January 28): briefly, Liberal Fascism is not only a crusade, a critique of “progressivism” as the eugenics-inspired spur to European“ fascism” and mass death in the twentieth century, but more deeply, LF is an attack on the science and “secularism” that have invaded the cultural space previously furnished with “traditionalism” by which JG means religion and undisputed paternal authority in the family: the consequence in JG’s text is an intrusive nanny-statism TODAY that is fascistically totalitarian and seeks to impose draconian rules on all aspects of everyday life, but most awesomely, will destroy “liberty” with the same resolve as the Jacobin mob and their spawn: Blackshirts, Brownshirts, and Bolshies.

    After reading the book twice, I maintain that the actual social structures and practices of the Third Reich and Italy under Mussolini (partly taken up by Robert Paxton in the HNN symposium) are of less concern to the author than “the smothering love” and feminized “niceness” of any American political faction that considers the national government to be a prospective locus for ameliorative reform and regulation. Like the most reactive Christians in history, but especially those who emerged after the Reign of Terror, JG seems to see “liberty” as the freedom for Everyman to suffer in this world, owing to (sinful) “human nature,” though I doubt that he has consciously taken his argument for “liberty” or the frictionless “pursuit of happiness” to its logical conclusion; he may simply be refuting the social engineering conception that man is infinitely malleable and that proper social organization will eliminate aggression and the will to power. That he blames Rousseau and the Jacobins for “totalitarianism” is everywhere apparent in his book. The Committee Of Public Safety has morphed into the Environmental Protection Agency and the FDA—and that specter and reality is where he has put his authorial energy. He would have stood on firmer ground had he blamed the social theorists of the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries, described so well in Frank E. Manuel’s The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon and others who had no connection to the likes of Robespierre.* (For a related blog see http://clarespark.com/2009/07/04/unfinished-revolutions-and-contested-notions-of-identity/.)

[Added 4-4-10 and 4-6-10: Though I agree with much of what is in Liberal Fascism, it is not a work of history, for he does not reconstruct the historical context in which the various "fascisms" appeared. Ideas (e.g. "Jacobinism") do not give birth to other ideas. JG could have, but did not, specify the class coalition with conservative nationalists that brought Hitler to power. By sticking with a left-wing genealogy for Hitler, he erases traditional right-wing support. Moreover, I have written extensively about "the progressives" and their role in formulating what we take to be mental health. What I found over a period of forty years is as alarming as anything in JG's book. For instance "progressives" (who were really organic conservatives --"corporatist liberals"--adjusting to the growth of mass literacy and an industrial working class), because of their simultaneous support of "liberty" (e.g. dissent) and "community,"  could immobilize persons who sought to make an original contribution to society. Some of that research is elsewhere on this website,  but much of it can be found in my book Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, where I show how Melville identified the double bind in his own family, and how he was labeled insane by some in his family and in the writing of his academic revivers.  (By double bind, I do not concur with Gregory Bateson's definition that rests on the presence of a rejecting Janus-faced mother: rather the incompatible demands to be original in one's discoveries, but not to disturb traditional institutional arrangements; to be both loyal to one's country of origin and a member of an international "community", and more.) 

   JG is on sounder ground when he critiques multiculturalism as derived from Herder. In my own work I trace Herder's impact on German Romanticism and then nazism. JG should have said something about the dubious Herder-derived notions of national character and zeitgeist. He should have contrasted Herder's rooted cosmopolitan and the rootless cosmopolitan of science and urbanity. But the possibly worst part of Liberal Fascism is the notion that some readers may absorb: that the entire Democratic Party is already entirely totalitarian, instead of incoherent, given the clashing elements inside the Democratic coalition. The Dems may be heading in that direction, but as a tactic to mobilize libertarian opposition, JG's bleakness may create more apathy than informed resistance to illegitimate authority. And by constantly combining the word "liberal" with "fascism," all statist activity is stigmatized, which would have amazed Hamilton, Hayek, and the Friedmans. ]

[Added 4-18-2010:] I am reading George E. Mowry’s excellent political and intellectual history of the period 1900-1912: The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America (originally published in 1958). The variability in what was considered to be “progressive” is laid out clearly. By contrast, the polemical and narrow focus of JG’s book becomes apparent. Given that Mowry and the other historians in the series of readers that Harper and Row published are writing within the progressive tradition, he (and probably they) are remarkably objective. Mowry brings the look of the period to life, and you will never read Edith Wharton again without seeing what a fatalist and traditional conservative she was.

[Added 4-23-10:] Mowry’s highly regarded account of the Republican Party contribution to progressivism certainly sees Theodore Roosevelt as a radical statist, but Mowry remains grounded in the period under study, and never calls T.R. style progressivism protofascist. I wish that journalists who write about politics today would be as attentive to detail and primary sources (and as broad in their interests) as did Mowry. This is a great book.

*Earlier critics than JG must have been comparing the welfare state to the various fascisms because Frank Manuel complained about the comparison in his The Prophets of Paris (1962): ” The specter of emotional and moral as well as scientific and industrial control hovers over the Saint-Simonian system, and Rousseau’s censor rears his ugly head. Nevertheless it seems farfetched to relate the Saint-Simonians on these grounds to the monster states of Hitler and Stalin. True, the Saint-Simonian political formulae emphasized emotion rather than reason, plus the hierarchy, an elite, the organic, and in this respect their theories bear superficial resemblance to the lucubrations of twentieth-century fascism. The ecclesiastical nonsense of the cult, however, should not obscure the fact that their image of society was founded first and foremost upon the expectation that there would be an upsurge of Eros in the world, that men would become more loving–a rather dubious assumption, though one that is not to be laughed out of court by the true skeptic. The Saint-Simonian society was founded upon relations of love among members of a hierarchy. This may be ridiculous, unfeasible, nonrational humbug, but it is totalitarian only in the sense that love may be. The Saint-Simonians were committed to the winning of converts solely through preaching and persuasion. To relate all the images of “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism” to these tender failures of the 1830s entails driving their ideas to conclusions they never entertained. Saint-Simonians talked and quarreled far more about love, all sorts of love, than they did about authority. They never spilled a drop of blood in their lives and in middle age became respectable bourgeois. There was something unique about the German experience under the Third Reich. Remembrance of it should not be diluted by the discovery of antecedents that are of a qualitatively different character. The Saint-Simonians may be cast into liberal hell, but there they will probably encounter as many lovers and passionately fixated men as Dante did in the Christian hell.” (p.184)

[Added 4-30-2010: JG has an article on Obama's "neosocialism" in the May issue of Commentary. The phrase "liberal fascism" does not appear there. But he still does not know about the contribution of the organic thinkers of nineteenth-century France (some of whom were reconstructing a more secular Catholicism) to Marxism and twentieth-century political thought, including the creators of the welfare state. These are Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte. Manuel distinguishes their organicism from that of their predecessors Turgot and Condorcet, though the latter were strong advocates of a science-driven progressive future.]

[Added 12-10-11: If JG had written about populism, I would have agreed with him about its protofascist potential. See http://clarespark.com/2011/12/10/before-saul-alinsky-rules-for-democratic-politicians/.]

March 5, 2010

Organic conservatives and Hitler

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Neoclassical Hitler vs. Romantic Ahab

For some organic conservatives, Hitler’s relationship  to the classical ideal changed after the war. As I show in an endnote to Hunting Captain Ahab, opportunistic critics such as Geoffrey Stone could turn a neoclassical Hitler into a figure closer to the American romantic puritan stigmatized by Talcott Parsons during the war. Two related endnotes  follow:

Younger critics may be surprised at the number of New Critics (and related members of the prewar literary establishment mentioned in this book) who published frequently in The American Review (formerly Bookman), edited by Seward Collins and blatantly pro-fascist during its period of publication in the mid-1930s (Apr. 1933-Oct. 1937): these include Cleanth Brooks (vols. 3, 6, 8), Harry Hayden Clark (vols. 2, 4, 5), John Gould Fletcher (vols. 3-6), Norman Foerster (vols.1-5, 9), John Crowe Ransom (vols.1-7), Robert Shafer (vols. 2, 4), Geoffrey Stone (vol. 1, 2, 5-9), Allen Tate (vols. 1-3, 6-8), Mark Van Doren (vol. 8), Austin Warren (vols.3-9), Robert Penn Warren (vols.2, 5, 6, 8), Yvor Winters (vols. 7-9). It was the stated mission of the periodical to bring together the English Distributists (Belloc and Chesterton), New Humanists (Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More), Neo-Thomists, and Southern Agrarians in a neo-classical synthesis to halt the slide toward romantic decadence and socialism (constantly and viciously associated with the inordinate power of international Jewry as either capitalists or communists). A few of the AR writers also published in American Literature: Austin Warren, Yvor Winters, Donald Davidson, and Norman Foerster (who joined the editorial board in the later 1930s). Melville was not mentioned in this journal until May 1936. Yvor Winters wrote in “Jones Very: A New England Mystic,” AR 7: “In the past two decades two major American writers have been rediscovered and established securely in their rightful places in literary history. I refer to Emily Dickinson and to Herman Melville. I am proposing the establishment of a third” (159).

    Of the AR critics I have just mentioned, only the future Melvillean Geoffrey Stone vociferously supported the fascist dictatorships. Most confined their essays to literary subjects. See Stone’s “Left Wings Over Europe,” an admiring review of the Wyndham Lewis book of that name defending the re-armament of Germany, AR 7 (Oct. 1936), 564-585. The following passages by Geoffrey Stone sum up humanism as understood in AR: “[Wyndham Lewis] gives expression, in his amazingly flexible and informal style, to a point of view which is too rarely advanced in England and America. In fact, a leading exponent of the Nazi as a sort of groping Distributist has been Mr. Lewis himself, who, in 1930, gave a thoughtful account of German National Socialism in his book Hitler. At that time Hitler had not yet been chosen by the German people as their ruler and the Nazi movement was still to enjoy the outbursts of vituperative denunciation, variously Marxian, Liberal, and Jewish, which have been hurled at it since its assumption of power. Though Mr. Lewis came forward as the exponent rather than the advocate of the Nazi party, he saw in the movement a resurgence of national vigor and an affirmation of our traditional Western way of life against the corruptions of capitalism and Marxism. He saw in it (and no one who has read his other books can deny Mr. Lewis an eye acute to discern levelling influences) a great popular movement to re-establish individual dignity and to escape the slave-status which collectivism everywhere imposes–whether by machine-guns in Russia or uplift unctuousness in America. He further pointed out that what, to the Anglo-Saxon reader, might seem the nonsense of “Aryan” pride was at least an expedient way of meeting the disintegration brought about by class strife. Pride in race, as he indicated in a still earlier book, Paleface, was far from reprehensible, since it offered one method of lifting the inferiority complex that was being saddled upon the Western white with the purpose of degrading him to the coolie’s level, to the accompaniment of much talk about the equality of races and even the superiority of the darker ones. Fascism–as it exists in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, and as it may exist tomorrow in Belgium under Degrelle’s Rexists and in France under the leadership of Doriot of La Rocque–is not the last embattled stand of capitalism, but, however objectionable some of its features, a truly popular attempt to preserve the ideals of Christian society and to assert, through the classic conception of him, the worth of the individual; and upon recognition of this depends the solution of the problems of our democracies, threatened as they are, by the imminence of the Servile State, whether Marxian or neo-Benthamite. Throughout Left Wings Over Europe Mr. Lewis stresses the need of recognizing the true character of fascism and insists that the attempt being made to prevent such recognition can result only in war and slavery” (570-571, my emph.).

    In the very opening pages of his Melville, directed to general readers and published by Catholic publishers Sheed and Ward in 1949, Stone changed his line, now distancing himself from the European tyrannies (brought about by the Calvinist/Puritan/Romantic sensualist spirit, the cause of Melville’s very American problems), and of course, racism. Whereas [neoclassical] Nazis were essentially preserving the classic conception of the individual in Stone’s prewar essay, now they were all Romantics: “American fiction from the first has been touched by the Romantic vision and given to the Romantic attitude. The essence of Romanticism is revolt; it asserts the superiority of the individual’s impulses over all that is established, organized, and rationally articulated. Every false theory eventually works out to its own negation, because falsehood is of its nature contradictory; and the absolute freedom sought by the first Romantics has resulted in our time in tyrannies, whether or practice or theory, as thoroughgoing as any the world has ever seen. The same course of development is plain in the lives of the chief figures of Romanticism” (1). Stone’s study of Melville’s tormented narcissism and abused family can be seen as a cautionary tale to Catholic readers tempted by modernity to “question the Christian ethic” (26) and lured to political adventurism by Eros (44). Stone identifies with Ungar’s reactionary antimodernism, Plotinus Plinlimmon’s virtuous expediency, and Captain Vere’s justice. Arguing against his contemporaries, Stone claims that Melville was never a democrat and did not fundamentally challenge Christianity (26), though he did overcome his earlier rage by the time he wrote Billy Budd. Cf. the notes of Charles Olson and Henry A. Murray, excerpted below.

This conservative Catholic theme is taken up in another endnote: 

 Ronald Mason was the author of The Spirit Above The Dust (London: John Lehmann, 1951). It is as pure and shocking an example of fascist literary criticism to be found in the Melville Revival, though the reader must be familiar with interwar cultural politics to see it. Mason constantly counterposed Ishmael and Plinlimmon (the detached, flexible, pragmatic Christian stoics) with Ahab and Melville (the rigid puritans/dogmatic sectarian Jews). For Mason, Melville’s high points were found in the Supplement to Battle-Pieces (in which the Lincolnesque Melville nobly calls for reconciliation of the conflicts of (simply different) convictions (217-218); those parts of Clarel where he leans upon Catholicism; and most prominently in Billy Budd, at which point the rootless Jew becomes a moderate man. What makes Mason’s book fascist as opposed to conservative, is his conflation of the unified work of art, the “order of nature,” “ natural justice,” and the lawfulness of the military state as realized in Vere’s pitiless judgment of Billy. Vere/ the authoritarian state does not simply speak for God: it becomes God. (See especially 256-58.) It is Melville’s conversion at the end of his life that makes him, though technically imperfect until that moment, the most important American writer.

   While writing Clarel, Melville’s tragic heroes had moved forward: “Melville is perhaps not so much proclaiming his approval of Catholicism as underlining a new realisation that was only now forcing itself upon his meditations—that no faith can be effective and no philosophy have sanction without a firm discipline to enforce it. Protestantism he regarded as flabby with the lack of it; Judaism as perhaps tyrannical with an overdose of it; but Rome he saw for the time as providing just that necessary blend of regulation and rapture that could illuminate an individual without rendering him either unsuitable for contemporary society or too readily corruptible by its compromises. Rome, I must emphasize, symbolized this discipline only, did not necessarily represent it. Melville did not turn Roman Catholic; merely had the perception to invoke on behalf of his rarest visionaries a discipline that their own hearts could not provide alone, but for which they would be forced to turn to a tradition outside their own contexts. This I believe to be one of the most important stages in his spiritual progress” (241).

    For Mason, all human conflicts are rooted in human nature, in the struggle to overcome base instincts. Historic struggles are subsumed in this eternal warfare between God and the Devil. The concrete facts of the material world feed the symbolic, mythic, spiritualizing imagination of the artist. Most significant, however, is Mason’s typically medieval belief that the study of the material world and of human institutions intended to lead to amelioration of suffering is Satanic in motivation and result. Protestant or Jewish reformism is seen as the expression of deception, hatred and revenge, with Ahab read accordingly. Echoing the Catholic and fascist writers of American Review, Mason viewed human suffering, like force, as a designated part of the natural order of things.

    See also the Melville study by Geoffrey Stone (1949), ideologically identical with Mason’s and described above. The French Melvillean Jean Simon, commenting on the voluminous new Melville scholarship, noted that Mason’s book was to his taste, an example of the “via media” he had always attempted to follow. See his review in Études Anglaises (Feb. 1953), 46. A reprint is located in Jay Leyda’s NYU papers.

March 4, 2010

After Lobotomy, Case 123

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from Walter Freeman's Psychosurgery

Before Lobotomy, Case 123

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from Walter Freeman's Psychosurgery

Picasso’s nursing baby and peasant afterglow

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from Picasso catalogue raisonee, ed. Christian Zervos

February 20, 2010

The Glenn Beck Problem

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Pierrot collage by Clare Spark

[Added 9-1-10: This blog has obviously been evolving as I have tried to place Glenn Beck's views in some recognizable historical narrative. For a liberal account of Beck as demagogue that I find disturbingly distorted see http://hnn.us/articles/130820.html. My search for Beck follows; I should say that Beck does urge his viewers to do their homework and to read primary sources, then challenge him if he is mistaken in his characterization of the Founders, or any other claim he makes. That is not the usual practice of a demagogue (who does not permit, let alone welcome, criticism from the crowd):]

Click onto the illustration and read what German agent George Sylvester Viereck wrote about Hitler in 1923: you will find the line “he storms their reserve with his passion.” Yesterday I posted my objection to Glenn Beck’s obsession with blaming everything wrong with our society on “the progressive movement.”  I also objected to his tendency to equate right-wing social democrats with communists, an error only a person with little knowledge of 20th century European history would make. Given the millions who tune into every program and who think he is a powerful weapon in the campaign against “Big Government,” it is not surprising that one of my Facebook friends immediately objected to my criticism of a man he thinks is a hero, but who, though I often agree with him, sometime suspect to be a power-hungry demagogue, taking advantage of ever-growing dissatisfaction with U.S. domestic and foreign policies to feed his ego and to line his pocket, while playing the earnest clown. Whatever his motives, there is no excuse for indicting “progressivism” as a “cancer….” as he did in his keynote address at CPAC, or his comments today (May 26, 2010) trashing Bernays and Lippmann. Usually  this is an antisemitic jibe from the Left and Chomsky, but Beck was vehement and nasty.  I am disgusted. See my widely circulated essay http://clarespark.com/2009/08/19/noam-chomskys-misrepresentation-of-walter-lippmanns-chief-ideas-on-manufacturing-consent/ [Added, March 19. I have been reading about Edmund Burke and his revival from the 1950s on. Paleoconservative Russell Kirk (a founder of National Review) and his ultraconservative Burkean allies in academe are probably the intellectual sources for Beck. Although on many points, he seems to be a libertarian, he is also opposed to any view that does not regard the Christian God as the source of order and liberty--along with Bill O'Reilly and Newt Gingrich, his opponents are "secularists." Hence his attempt to remake the Founding Fathers into believers in God as the chief lawgiver of "moral natural law"--the source of order, with the state as a usurper insofar as it threatens (upper- or middle-class) property, the ballast for "tradition." This places Beck as a follower of Edmund Burke, as I believe Jonah Goldberg to be, who is as rattled by "the Jacobins" as the source of totalitarian/statist control.)* [Added 6-6-10: I was much mollified and gratified by Beck's support for Israel during the last week. How this fits in with his general ideology, I cannot say. Added 7-18-10: Beck clarified what he means by rights being God-given: he was contrasting this position with the competing notion that rights are gifts from the State, a key Nazi idea.] [Added 10-30-10. I am taken aback by the Harvard UP published book by Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (2002). This book is more helpful in explaining the religious Right and their alarm at secularism than any other history book I have ever read. If intent matters, Hamburger bolsters the case that the writers of the Constitution did not banish religion from the public square, far from it. See http://clarespark.com/2010/11/05/hamburgers-separation-of-church-and-state/.]

This blog is about the danger of allowing any media personalities to do our thinking for us, and I am not speaking about Glenn Beck alone, nor do I wish to insult his viewers or listeners, but they should be on guard. As my long-time friend political scientist Stephen Eric Bronner wrote in one of his first books (this on German Expressionism), making a passionate work of art or viewing it, though valuable in itself, cannot substitute for the thoughtful study, investigating, organizing and other activity that resists illegitimate authority. Professor Bronner wrote enthusiastically about Rosa Luxemburg too, as well as other radical social democrats who were associated with the Second International. These activists were called left-wing social democrats, because they meant to educate the masses in the most advanced industrialized societies and through majority acquiescence (as opposed to bureaucratic centralism) make the transition from capitalism to socialism. Luxemburg herself was an anti-Bolshevik and argued with Lenin about issues that are still red-hot today, such as supporting anti-colonial social movements that were antidemocratic and backward. (I am updating the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin, originally about the nature of imperialism, and about self-determination in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, not about Third World dictatorships of today. (Thanks to Steve Bronner for the correction. But as Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson taught the debate in a session I audited, the issue concerned  left-wing alliances with antidemocratic entities, so I extrapolated to the present, when the hard Left does ally itself with dubious entities. For an entirely negative view of Luxemburg and other “Non-Jewish Jews” see Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews. Johnson has the clearest exposition of twentieth-century politics and diplomacy affecting the future of Jewry that I have ever read. It is especially welcome at a time when a new “peace process” is under way.)

All this is to explain that “right-wing social democrats” like FDR were conservative reformers, similar in their views to those of Edmund Burke, ardent critic of the French Revolution and its threat of popular sovereignty. Bronner, though a prolific author, is not typical of today’s radical (Leninist) Left. And I have shifted my own position, as my Pacifica memoir makes clear. As an historian with a background in science education, my most positive contribution must be to encourage individuals to be skeptical of all pronouncements from politicians and other celebrities, and to withhold their support until they know among other things, who is financing their endeavors: Arab sheiks? Closet Islamic jihadists? Americans remain innocent, characters in a novel by Henry James. We remain child-like in our quickness to trust. We are not experienced in the ways of amoral and jaded Europeans or elites from other societies who would destroy democratic movements in their own countries and who seek to bring down the West tout court, for the West is full of bad examples, such as the American and French Revolutions. Do we know the extent to which their financing of university programs and media corporations such as Rupert Murdoch’s outfit is affecting their programming (Fox) or curriculum (Columbia U.)?

While reading Schiller’s and Goethe’s plays over the last few years, I was struck by the complexities of their plots, for they were writing in a time when court life was full of intrigue. Perhaps that is why I collect masks and images of Pierrot. Artists knew that it was bad, really bad out there.

* On the subject of Edmund Burke as a liberal constitutionalist and not an organicist, see Rod Preece, “Edmund Burke and his European Reception,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation Vol.21, Number 3 (Autumn 1980): 255-273. Preece argues that Burke’s European admirers mistook him for an organicist thinker, and that for Burke, there was a contract between the state and the individual; moreover that he was opposed to Platonic guardians, but preferred practical men of affairs (the moderates) to be running things. But that Burke was horrified by Jacobins and the French Revolution, there is no dispute. If Preece is correct, then Russell Kirk’s name should be added to those who have misunderstood Burke.

February 18, 2010

Nazi sykewar, American style, part four

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"Opossum" by Godeleine de Rosamel

Today, the image of the Nazi has become a boring cliché, moreover the label is thrown around to the point of satiety.  Some appealing to “the right” believe that statist progressives are Nazis or Fascists, while Marxist-Leninists, the democratic left, and social democrats alike pin the label on “fascist Republicans,” “the military-industrial complex,” “Wall Street,” various narcissists, and most recently, “tea-baggers.”

   This is a terrible development, because we may be so bored by the subject of propaganda and its deployment by rival ideologies that we jeopardize our own sense of reality, and it is that firm grip on the real that constitutes a healthy identity in the individual (I am rejecting “identity” as constituted by ethnicity or by some indeterminate, fluid, interaction with the environment–both definitions dominate the academy today). The point of this series on the important though obscure book German Psychological Warfare, now concluding, is to alert my readers to the centrality of military psychiatry for the presumably protofascist masses (“the little man”) from the first world war on through to the present. My research into this subject was a direct result of Major Nidal Hasan’s jihad in Texas. I realized that although I had been studying various types of mental health therapies and their usually invisible ideologies for decades, I knew almost nothing about the U.S. military and its preferred treatment of troubled and traumatized soldiers, sailors, and marines.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered the leadership role of Dr. Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (See http://clarespark.com/2010/02/10/a-brooding-meditation-on-intimacy-and-distance/ for some of psychiatrist Grinker’s chief ideas.)

    Grinker, a “functionalist” to the core, was a follower of the literature professors, sociologists and social psychologists who were major figures in transforming Melville’s character Captain Ahab from a romantic artist or tragic hero into a hyper-individualist, a demagogue, a symbol of Amerika, and an “anticipation” of Hitler and Stalin. And this shift in Melville readings from creative individualism to group-thinking, mind-deadening “adjustment” (the latter seen by such as Grinker as the favorable outcome of vanguard “general systems theory” or “interdisciplinary” studies) happened exactly at the same time that leading “progressive” capitalists were adopting Keynesian economics and supporting the mushrooming state of the New Deal. Which is to say, with great dismay, that the dread “right-wing” neoliberals are more plausible than the various factions of “the left” when they call their rivals “fascists” or “Nazis.” (I personally find the comparison ahistoric and damaging to a rational political discourse. I would rather call these particular progressives and their followers in mental health services and education as authoritarian liberals or scientistic conservative enlighteners, which is both accurate and less incendiary.)

    The purpose of this particular series was not to write tiresomely on Hitler, Goebbels, and their all too familiar abuse of language in the new mass media (as one Facebook friend assumed), but to demonstrate that the “progressive” American defensive posture as world war once again loomed in the late 1930s was disgracefully contemptuous of ordinary citizens. In its zeal to combat midwestern isolationism or potentially subversive ethnics of German Italian, or Japanese ancestry (as one sociologist has advised me), this cohort was in some ways indistinguishable from mind-managing  Nazis. The idea that Harvard professors could appropriate Nazi methods and defuse their content to make it adaptable to democratic practice was hubris of a kind that has not been widely publicized, though I spelled it out in my book Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, and also in an article posted here:  http://clarespark.com/2009/12/13/klara-hitlers-son-and-jewish-blood/.  My published study of the humanities curriculum as managed by “progressives” from the Civil War on (and in their organicism, a.k.a. ‘moderation’, reminiscent of the antebellum South) got many wonderful notices, but no reviewer reported the disturbing content I have just laid out.

    I have also made clear in prior blogs that I am not against appropriate regulatory or stimulatory functions of the federal government because of an ideological commitment to root-and-branch “local control” and “laissez-faire economics.” So I am not attacking all forms of statism in this series, just the ones that are crazy-making and authoritarian while pretending to be sane and emancipating from illegitimate authority. Parts one, two, and three should have made the relinquishing of independent critical thought obvious to the reader, for instance in Kimball Young’s concluding remarks (see part three).

    In this final blog on the content of German Psychological Warfare, edited by Ladislas Farago, and published in several editions by the prestigious Committee For National Morale, I will quote a sampling of the bibliography that suggests convergence between the statism of the Nazis in inculcating the “organic” society and the brand of “democratic traditions” perpetrated by leading social scientists who continue to dominate the mental health profession (though there may be resistance of which I am not aware). As advised by a German author (quoted below), their common aim was to tame the overly curious, overly skeptical, modern urban masses, who had sufficient education to question policies over which they had had no oversight or input.  Just as Grinker stigmatized as deviant the pushy and childish flier who criticized the suicide missions ordered by his superior officer (see http://clarespark.com/2009/12/09/strategic-regression-in-the-greatest-generation/), the social scientists associated with the Committee For National Morale quietly erased the dissenting individual and called such practices appropriate adaptation to democracy in the interest of national defense. But we were definitely not fascists.

   The remainder of this blog lists some of the prominent members of the Committee For National Morale, and copies some of the bibliographic entries that support my argument as laid out above, but mostly in my book:  the little men would be merged emotionally with their comrades and “stable” leaders, leaders who were protecting them from their boastfulness in thinking Everyman should know the truth, and stuffing cotton in their collective (upper-class) ears to shut out her/his hypercritical kibbitzing.

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AUTHORS AND CONSULTANTS TO THE BOOK

The book was edited by Ladislas Farago “with the cooperation of” Harvard professors Gordon W. Allport and Edwin G. Boring, along with other figures associated with Harvard University: Dr. John G. Beebe-Center and Dr.  Stanley S. Stevens;  also Dr. Floyd L. Ruch of USC. “Interpretative Summary” by Prof. Kimball Young of Queens College.  Others prominent in the Committee and quoted in my book Hunting Captain Ahab are Arthur Upham Pope, Gregory Bateson, Gardner Murphy, Henry A. Murray, Goodwin B. Watson, Geoffrey Gorer, and Horace Kallen. Members either of the executive- or of sub-committees whose names will be familiar to students of the period include Gifford Pinchot, Dr. Frank Kingdon, Herbert Bayard Swope, Dr. David M. Levy, George Gallup, Frank M. Stanton, Walter Wanger, Louis Adamic, Eliot Janeway, Margaret Mead, Elmer Davis, Owen Lattimore, Edgar A. Mowrer, and A. Philip Randolph.  The page that lists their membership also lays out the purpose of the Committee: (besides research and “the formulation of controlling principles of Morale)…3. The planning and promotion of practical measures to protect and enhance the country’s Morale in all groups and in every typical activity.”

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MORE SUGGESTIVE EXAMPLES FROM THE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

“43. Spengler, O.  Preussentum und Sozialismus. Muenchen: Beck, 1920.

PRUSSIANISM  AND SOCIALISM. Spengler, a philosopher turned political prophet, ‘discovered’ during the war years the close identity of Prussianism to Socialism. Prussianism and “genuine Socialism”—not of Marx, but of Friedrich Wilhelm I, which was authoritarian, anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary—are consolidated in the old Prussian spirit and are equal to each other because both mean power. This thesis was taken up by the Nazis in what was called ‘Socialism of action.’ Socialism meaning comradeship, service, and duty, not class struggle.” [And what “moderate” would not find this appealing? CS]

“85. Vershofen, W.  Fuerung im Arbeitsleben. Ber. Kongr.dtsch.Ges. Psychol., 1935.

LEADERSHIP IN INDUSTRY AND LABOR: Moral and mental qualities are considered more indispensable for factory management than technical skill. The author deals with his subject from the Nazi leader-principle angle. An extreme interpretation of this principle, as presented in this paper, leads Vershofen to describe the producer as a leader and the consumer as a follower. All conflicts of leadership in industry and labor must be settled by the state.” [So the Americans will find a moderate statism to harmonize conflicts? CS]

“192. Hesse, K. Wandlung des Soldaten. Berlin: Mittler, 1930.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOLDIER: Hesse considers the officer a pedagogue as well as a leader. His relationship with his subordinates should be that of a teacher to his students. He must set himself up as a model soldier and awaken military virtues, spirit of comradeship and a consciousness of ‘military socialism’ in his charges. The training of the professional ‘leader-soldier’ should include motor mechanics, electricity, photography, architecture, gliding, stenography, military geography, a knowledge of foreign languages (French, English, Polish, and Russian), theatrical arts, and singing.”

“249. Bircher, E.  Militaerpsychologie. Schweiz.Milit.Blaetter, 1919….

MILITARY PSYCHOLOGY: Dr. Bircher is a prominent Swiss physician, now serving as a military commander in Switzerland’s citizen army. …He maintains that, regardless of new weapons in the technological sense, the balance between victory and defeat depends on the solution of individual and mass morale problems.”

“329. Pinschovius, K. Die seelische Widerstandskraft im modernen Krieg. Oldenburg: Stalling, 1936.

THE POWER OF MENTAL RESISTANCE IN MODERN WAR: The author, an army psychologist of great reputation and a poet in his own right, states that mechanized wars present new and dangerous psychological problems which “superficial remedies like propaganda” are unable to solve. His book, a courageous and original critique of the mass-psychological approach to these problems, demands the recognition of the ‘rational qualities of modern man whom life in the city and technological skill have accustomed to asking questions before making up his mind.’ The book is a veritable mine of interesting conclusions especially valuable for a democracy where a rational approach to problems raised by mechanized war is still permissible.” [Cf. part one of this series. So did the Committee believe that their approach to Morale was not irrational and propagandistic? What would their psychologists mean by “balance” and “adjustment” and how would that be achieved in the patient/client?]

“446. Schoenemann, F.  Die Kunst der Massenbeeinflussung in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanst, 1924.

THE ART OF INFLUENCING THE MASSES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: The author, a prominent professor at the Berlin University and the Propaganda Ministry’s own Hochschule fuer Politik, is recognized as the Nazi’s foremost expert on the United States. In this book he analyzes the factors and forces influencing public opinion in the United States. In another lecture, he distinctly warned against the prevalent German tendency of underestimating America as a potential world power when he said: ‘America is much more important for us and it has much greater influence on the development of European politics than most of us realize. It would be wrong either to underrate and slight or fail to study the United States just as thoroughly and systematically as other great powers in the world. Such past short-sightedness caused us to make a serious blunder and we simply cannot afford to repeat it.’”

[Schoenemann directed the first German Melville dissertation, by one Karl Sundermann, filed in 1937. Did he think that Herman Melville had revealed the essential (“fissured”) American character? National character was a preoccupation of many of the Germans or Nazis cited. CS]

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